I just got done watching Chuggaaconroy's Let's Play of the game Xenoblade Chronicles. He's an absolutely great LPer, and the game was very thought-provoking to me. So, I just spent the last hour or so writing the following in the comments section. I feel like it's right at home here on the blog, so I'll also post it here. Don't consider it a review or anything like that - I don't think it's responsible to review a game based on a non-interactive piece of media about it, nor have I subjected it to my usual quality control - but it honestly details my thoughts on the game as glimpsed from the Let's Play. Which, by the way, I heartily recommend.
Here goes:
I know no one will care, but here are my long thoughts on the game, as someone who's only experience with it is this Let's Play. If for some reason you're watching this episode without having experienced the rest of the game's story, beware of spoilers. Also, warning, EXTREMELY LONG. I don't expect anyone will actually read all of this.
I don't know how much I can criticize the gameplay, having not really played it, but here are my thoughts on that: In the exploration and questing aspect, it looks very much like an MMORPG without any players: There's a few areas to explore and grind reputations in, and the majority of sidequests are either "Get X of item Y" or "Kill W of monster Z at location A". There's nothing wrong with that, but I feel like it's not a very interesting way of presenting a game. The combat I can barely comment on, since even after the whole Let's Play (and several re-watches of the episodes where Chuggaa explained this stuff) I can't really understand what's going on. Several times Chuggaa would yell out in either excitement or fear, and I can't point out why unless there's a vision tag there to explain it. I like the idea of implementing aggro and auto--attack mechanics (once again, very MMORPGish) into a single-player game, but I can't be sure how successful this is. Other than that, from what I can see it's still pretty much a traditional MMO combat system, albeit with some allowances for being single-player. I like the idea of chain attacks and the talon art, but they don't really seem to do much beyond speeding up the battle somewhat.
The story, I have to admit, started very disappointingly to me. I've followed Chuggaa for a while now, and I've come to trust him as having really good taste, so I was excited to experience the story aspect of his favourite game along side him (to the point of keeping myself spoiler-free because I expected this LP would come eventually). For a long time, I found myself very much disappointed by the game's story. It wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't brilliant. Pretty much every event seemed like a generic JRPG plot beat (TM), and I found the characters to be way too bare bones, almost like sketches of JRPG archetypes. I found myself not really caring about them for a long time. However, the villains and mystery kept me watching. Xord was a real joy to behold, full of malevolent glee, and once we got to hear Metal Face talk he was much the same way. Chuggaa's constant praise of how beautiful the world was seemed to me to be excessive, and not something that really held my attention through the LP. I'll agree that it had brilliant art design, definitely in the top 3 I've ever seen in a game, but this brilliance was hard to see through how absolutely atrocious the thing looked on a technical level: The texture quality in particular still upsets me, it makes everything look so blurry and unclear and bleh.
Around Makna Forest, I started realizing that I'd began to care about the characters. They'd been slowly growing on me, but something snapped at that time that made me actually want to see more of them, rather than feeling like I'm hanging out with them in hopes of being around Metal Face, the guy I actually wanted to see. However, I still found the plot slow-paced and uninteresting.
Actually liking the characters made the LP a lot easier to follow, and I started watching each update pretty much as soon as it came out. At some point I'd fallen off the update train, and only re-gained interest in the LP during a period of my life where I had nothing to do. This, luckily for me, meant I bridged the gap between where I was in the LP and where the LP itself was right around the time Chuuggaa recovered from his long absence. However, I still found the overall plot to be boring. The reveal that Fiora was alive again really annoyed me, since I'd been impressed at how she'd been seemingly killed off for real, with no possibility of being brought back (which not enough JRPGs/anime do). The way the plot developed just seemed right out of the JRPG Plot Beat Handbook (TM), and it didn't really seem to have anything meaningful to say.
However, after a long time of liking these characters and not really liking the story, Egil was introduced. At first, he seemed like the typical JRPG decoy villain, but he got real character development. He was interesting, he was almost likeable in his intentions, yet he was an absolute monster in what he was trying to achieve. At about the same time I felt that character development for the party members started really kicking in, and that's where I came to love them as absolutely fantastic characters. It was actually at the Fallen Arm, with the fish scene between Dunban, Riki and Melia. I realized just how much sense that particular moment made, and started thinking about all of the characters, and just how perfectly the puzzle of their relationships and what they'd been doing fell together, and how much they'd changed since they were first introduced.
The game went on, and so did the Egil storyline. That part of the game was pretty much perfect. I loved Egil as an ideological opposite to Shulk, I loved the themes that were being explored, I loved the story behind the world. On Mechonis, in Central Factory and Agniratha in particular, were the only two areas where I thought the game really looked good, managing to somehow not be ruined by its technical limitations, despite the art design not being quite as good as elsewhere.
However, all good things must come to an end, and so they did. Eventually, the Egil storyline came to an end: An extremely satisfying end, I must say. But this led into the Zanza part of the storyline, and here's where the game started falling apart for me again. The characters were there, as strong as ever, but the story returned into Generic JRPG Plot Beat Territory (TM), including the traditional We Must Kill A God (TM). Dickson being up to something had been pretty obvious for a while now, and so was that Alvis was up to something on a higher level than even Dickson. Admittedly, I didn't get it quite right: I expected Dickson to have some kind of knowledge of Zanza that would allow him to concoct a master plan with Shulk & Co to beat him, only for this plan to be foiled by Alvis, who I thought was Zanza's right-hand man.
The Zanza storyline went about as expected, and actually felt rather rushed, even though it lasted for a decent amount of time. It was uninteresting, and even worse, thematically uninspired, especially compared to the Egil storyline. It seemed to always be either re-treading old points or dishing out ones we've seen millions of times at the end of every other JRPG. What impressed me is that they managed to make the main cast even better during this period of time, I felt even stronger about them than before.
And finally, the story ended. I can't say I saw the origin of the game's world coming, but I'm also not a huge fan of the idea: It feels like this universe being created by a science experiment in our own somehow diminishes its value as a place. The characterization of Zanza as "wanting a friend" came out of absolutely nowhere and made no sense, and of course Shulk wins the battle through an uber cliche piece of nonsense like every other JRPG. I do really like the closing cinematic (the one at Colony 9): It lets us see these people we've become so emotionally attached to being in their natural state one last time before the game ends.
Finally, a few short comments on the characters:
Shulk: By far the most cliche of the party members, but done really well. Cliche is so overused for a reason, and when it's pulled off it still works. Whilst I have issues with overuse of really familiar plot beats in the story, this is because they're not executed as well as they could. Shulk is a cliche character going through a cliche character arc, but damn if it isn't pulled off fantastically.
Reyn: My favourite character. I see a lot of myself in him, and I hope to shrug off my weaknesses and hone my strengths as well as he does. He goes through a change that's both really subtle and really huge, which is not something that can be pulled off without an absolutely brilliant writing team.
Sharla: Meh. Whilst Chuggaa dislikes her for being less than ideal in combat, I just find her to not really have much going on as a character. She's pretty much defined by her relationships with Gadolt and Reyn, neither of which I found particularly interesting (though I will admit the way she interacts with Reyn is extremely cute).
Dunban: Similar to Shulk in how cliche his character is, and in just how well it's executed. However, he's also an interesting twist on the "older mentor hero" figure, which would make him stand out even without the execution being as great as it is.
Melia: I might get lynched for this, but I wouldn't say she's as great as she's made out to be. She goes through a lot of tragedy, which does make me feel sorry for her, but she doesn't really seem to change that much as a person. The only really interesting thing about her was the way she handles the love-triangle with Shulk, but that kind of feels like the writers introduced a character point that they couldn't handle and then came up with a hasty, if effective, excuse. However, even as static as she is, I can't help but admire her strength and resolve to keep going where most would break down. She's not an interesting person, but she's an admirable one.
Riki: I didn't like him at first, mostly because I didn't like the Nopon. They seemed like the cute mascot animal de jour, like Final Fantasy's Moogles. Whilst I never really grew into liking the Nopon (one could say I merely grew into not-disliking them), I did grow into liking Riki. When I realize how old he is, I realize that so many of his actions are a goof to cheer everyone up. His role is to be the thing that keeps everyone going, and the subtle way in which he does that is both really cleverly written and really admirable. If Sharla's the team mom, Riki's the team's wise, cheery old grandpa, always there with a sweet and a smile to make his grandson's day that little bit brighter. I can't forget that, after all, it was a moment centred around him that was my turning point in appreciating the game.
Fiora: She's not particularly interesting. She isn't around much, and just seems to be there to be a vessel to Meyneth. After that's over she grows into a cliche-spouting machine. Still, I do like her personality well enough, and didn't mind her being in the party. I don't feel I can judge her by the same standards as everyone else because I feel she doesn't really get that much screentime. Still, probably the weakest party member.
And a few honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:
Egil: Who made the game great.
Zanza: Who killed all the interest I had in the story.
Mumkhar and Xord: Who were absolutely fantastic villains.
Kallian: For being an extremely charismatic side character.
The Words "The Monado": For being said way too goddamn much.
Chuggaaconroy: For providing us with years of top-notch Let's Plays. Thanks so much.
Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles is great. I don't want to call it the best game of all time, or even one of the best. The story has too many flaws, and the gameplay, from just watching it, doesn't appear to be all that great. However, it has one of the best rosters of characters ever put in a videogame. One of the things that upsets me the most is how much better the game deserved in terms of visuals. It should, by all means, be one of if not the best looking game ever created. Instead, the Wii's limitations didn't let this happen, and we got low texture quality, poor anti-aliasing, really bad looking character models (especially up close) and shudders 720p resolution. Still, this doesn't hold it back due to how fantastic it is when it really works. It may not be on my top 10 games ever made, but I'm sure it's a game that will be remembered for a long time to come. And, if it's not, that'll be truly tragic.
tl,dr: Egil's great, Zanza sucks. Love the characters, story has its (really high) ups and (fairly mediocre) downs. Can't judge the gameplay, but it seems a bit iffy. Maybe I should've written something as short and snappy as this. If you made it through all that, thanks. You have way too much patience.
Here goes:
I know no one will care, but here are my long thoughts on the game, as someone who's only experience with it is this Let's Play. If for some reason you're watching this episode without having experienced the rest of the game's story, beware of spoilers. Also, warning, EXTREMELY LONG. I don't expect anyone will actually read all of this.
I don't know how much I can criticize the gameplay, having not really played it, but here are my thoughts on that: In the exploration and questing aspect, it looks very much like an MMORPG without any players: There's a few areas to explore and grind reputations in, and the majority of sidequests are either "Get X of item Y" or "Kill W of monster Z at location A". There's nothing wrong with that, but I feel like it's not a very interesting way of presenting a game. The combat I can barely comment on, since even after the whole Let's Play (and several re-watches of the episodes where Chuggaa explained this stuff) I can't really understand what's going on. Several times Chuggaa would yell out in either excitement or fear, and I can't point out why unless there's a vision tag there to explain it. I like the idea of implementing aggro and auto--attack mechanics (once again, very MMORPGish) into a single-player game, but I can't be sure how successful this is. Other than that, from what I can see it's still pretty much a traditional MMO combat system, albeit with some allowances for being single-player. I like the idea of chain attacks and the talon art, but they don't really seem to do much beyond speeding up the battle somewhat.
The story, I have to admit, started very disappointingly to me. I've followed Chuggaa for a while now, and I've come to trust him as having really good taste, so I was excited to experience the story aspect of his favourite game along side him (to the point of keeping myself spoiler-free because I expected this LP would come eventually). For a long time, I found myself very much disappointed by the game's story. It wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't brilliant. Pretty much every event seemed like a generic JRPG plot beat (TM), and I found the characters to be way too bare bones, almost like sketches of JRPG archetypes. I found myself not really caring about them for a long time. However, the villains and mystery kept me watching. Xord was a real joy to behold, full of malevolent glee, and once we got to hear Metal Face talk he was much the same way. Chuggaa's constant praise of how beautiful the world was seemed to me to be excessive, and not something that really held my attention through the LP. I'll agree that it had brilliant art design, definitely in the top 3 I've ever seen in a game, but this brilliance was hard to see through how absolutely atrocious the thing looked on a technical level: The texture quality in particular still upsets me, it makes everything look so blurry and unclear and bleh.
Around Makna Forest, I started realizing that I'd began to care about the characters. They'd been slowly growing on me, but something snapped at that time that made me actually want to see more of them, rather than feeling like I'm hanging out with them in hopes of being around Metal Face, the guy I actually wanted to see. However, I still found the plot slow-paced and uninteresting.
Actually liking the characters made the LP a lot easier to follow, and I started watching each update pretty much as soon as it came out. At some point I'd fallen off the update train, and only re-gained interest in the LP during a period of my life where I had nothing to do. This, luckily for me, meant I bridged the gap between where I was in the LP and where the LP itself was right around the time Chuuggaa recovered from his long absence. However, I still found the overall plot to be boring. The reveal that Fiora was alive again really annoyed me, since I'd been impressed at how she'd been seemingly killed off for real, with no possibility of being brought back (which not enough JRPGs/anime do). The way the plot developed just seemed right out of the JRPG Plot Beat Handbook (TM), and it didn't really seem to have anything meaningful to say.
However, after a long time of liking these characters and not really liking the story, Egil was introduced. At first, he seemed like the typical JRPG decoy villain, but he got real character development. He was interesting, he was almost likeable in his intentions, yet he was an absolute monster in what he was trying to achieve. At about the same time I felt that character development for the party members started really kicking in, and that's where I came to love them as absolutely fantastic characters. It was actually at the Fallen Arm, with the fish scene between Dunban, Riki and Melia. I realized just how much sense that particular moment made, and started thinking about all of the characters, and just how perfectly the puzzle of their relationships and what they'd been doing fell together, and how much they'd changed since they were first introduced.
The game went on, and so did the Egil storyline. That part of the game was pretty much perfect. I loved Egil as an ideological opposite to Shulk, I loved the themes that were being explored, I loved the story behind the world. On Mechonis, in Central Factory and Agniratha in particular, were the only two areas where I thought the game really looked good, managing to somehow not be ruined by its technical limitations, despite the art design not being quite as good as elsewhere.
However, all good things must come to an end, and so they did. Eventually, the Egil storyline came to an end: An extremely satisfying end, I must say. But this led into the Zanza part of the storyline, and here's where the game started falling apart for me again. The characters were there, as strong as ever, but the story returned into Generic JRPG Plot Beat Territory (TM), including the traditional We Must Kill A God (TM). Dickson being up to something had been pretty obvious for a while now, and so was that Alvis was up to something on a higher level than even Dickson. Admittedly, I didn't get it quite right: I expected Dickson to have some kind of knowledge of Zanza that would allow him to concoct a master plan with Shulk & Co to beat him, only for this plan to be foiled by Alvis, who I thought was Zanza's right-hand man.
The Zanza storyline went about as expected, and actually felt rather rushed, even though it lasted for a decent amount of time. It was uninteresting, and even worse, thematically uninspired, especially compared to the Egil storyline. It seemed to always be either re-treading old points or dishing out ones we've seen millions of times at the end of every other JRPG. What impressed me is that they managed to make the main cast even better during this period of time, I felt even stronger about them than before.
And finally, the story ended. I can't say I saw the origin of the game's world coming, but I'm also not a huge fan of the idea: It feels like this universe being created by a science experiment in our own somehow diminishes its value as a place. The characterization of Zanza as "wanting a friend" came out of absolutely nowhere and made no sense, and of course Shulk wins the battle through an uber cliche piece of nonsense like every other JRPG. I do really like the closing cinematic (the one at Colony 9): It lets us see these people we've become so emotionally attached to being in their natural state one last time before the game ends.
Finally, a few short comments on the characters:
Shulk: By far the most cliche of the party members, but done really well. Cliche is so overused for a reason, and when it's pulled off it still works. Whilst I have issues with overuse of really familiar plot beats in the story, this is because they're not executed as well as they could. Shulk is a cliche character going through a cliche character arc, but damn if it isn't pulled off fantastically.
Reyn: My favourite character. I see a lot of myself in him, and I hope to shrug off my weaknesses and hone my strengths as well as he does. He goes through a change that's both really subtle and really huge, which is not something that can be pulled off without an absolutely brilliant writing team.
Sharla: Meh. Whilst Chuggaa dislikes her for being less than ideal in combat, I just find her to not really have much going on as a character. She's pretty much defined by her relationships with Gadolt and Reyn, neither of which I found particularly interesting (though I will admit the way she interacts with Reyn is extremely cute).
Dunban: Similar to Shulk in how cliche his character is, and in just how well it's executed. However, he's also an interesting twist on the "older mentor hero" figure, which would make him stand out even without the execution being as great as it is.
Melia: I might get lynched for this, but I wouldn't say she's as great as she's made out to be. She goes through a lot of tragedy, which does make me feel sorry for her, but she doesn't really seem to change that much as a person. The only really interesting thing about her was the way she handles the love-triangle with Shulk, but that kind of feels like the writers introduced a character point that they couldn't handle and then came up with a hasty, if effective, excuse. However, even as static as she is, I can't help but admire her strength and resolve to keep going where most would break down. She's not an interesting person, but she's an admirable one.
Riki: I didn't like him at first, mostly because I didn't like the Nopon. They seemed like the cute mascot animal de jour, like Final Fantasy's Moogles. Whilst I never really grew into liking the Nopon (one could say I merely grew into not-disliking them), I did grow into liking Riki. When I realize how old he is, I realize that so many of his actions are a goof to cheer everyone up. His role is to be the thing that keeps everyone going, and the subtle way in which he does that is both really cleverly written and really admirable. If Sharla's the team mom, Riki's the team's wise, cheery old grandpa, always there with a sweet and a smile to make his grandson's day that little bit brighter. I can't forget that, after all, it was a moment centred around him that was my turning point in appreciating the game.
Fiora: She's not particularly interesting. She isn't around much, and just seems to be there to be a vessel to Meyneth. After that's over she grows into a cliche-spouting machine. Still, I do like her personality well enough, and didn't mind her being in the party. I don't feel I can judge her by the same standards as everyone else because I feel she doesn't really get that much screentime. Still, probably the weakest party member.
And a few honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:
Egil: Who made the game great.
Zanza: Who killed all the interest I had in the story.
Mumkhar and Xord: Who were absolutely fantastic villains.
Kallian: For being an extremely charismatic side character.
The Words "The Monado": For being said way too goddamn much.
Chuggaaconroy: For providing us with years of top-notch Let's Plays. Thanks so much.
Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles is great. I don't want to call it the best game of all time, or even one of the best. The story has too many flaws, and the gameplay, from just watching it, doesn't appear to be all that great. However, it has one of the best rosters of characters ever put in a videogame. One of the things that upsets me the most is how much better the game deserved in terms of visuals. It should, by all means, be one of if not the best looking game ever created. Instead, the Wii's limitations didn't let this happen, and we got low texture quality, poor anti-aliasing, really bad looking character models (especially up close) and shudders 720p resolution. Still, this doesn't hold it back due to how fantastic it is when it really works. It may not be on my top 10 games ever made, but I'm sure it's a game that will be remembered for a long time to come. And, if it's not, that'll be truly tragic.
tl,dr: Egil's great, Zanza sucks. Love the characters, story has its (really high) ups and (fairly mediocre) downs. Can't judge the gameplay, but it seems a bit iffy. Maybe I should've written something as short and snappy as this. If you made it through all that, thanks. You have way too much patience.
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