The BLADE Level feature has been entirely removed, letting you access most of the treasures in the world right away. What follows is a twisting, hard sci-fi story exploring themes of survival, colonialism, and even the nature of the human soul, but unlike the rest of the Xenoblade Chronicles series, there’s no central character to hang it all on. Xenoblade Chronicles X instead has players controlling a user-created avatar, one built and tailored to supporting preferred play styles.
It feels good to be so wholly engaged with what’s happening onscreen, and speaking generously, I’d say it feels more akin to Xenoblade 2 and 3’s Arts Cancelling techniques than outright cheating. Your mileage may vary on that assessment, but when I finally got to my first mech battles and found they didn’t benefit from the new cooldown bar, that waiting period suddenly felt like an actual eternity. That’s when I realised just how much more fun I was having with this new system, even though I was fully aware that all the bite had been taken from it in the process.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Review
These are seamless additions that feel like natural parts of the story — there’s no way to know they’re new unless you’ve played the original. Xenoblade games normally drop you into massive environments — the leg of a giant, for example, or the belly of a giant fish — but they all have walls, barriers, and ways of keeping you penned in. Xenoblade Chronicles X is the series’ only proper open world, a massive planet with four biodiverse continents and dozens of wildlife species that want to hurt you.
Though opinions of Final Fantasy 12 are mixed, it’s hard to deny how impressive the game was when it was first released. In an attempt to revitalize the turn-based combat system from previous entries, it introduced the Gambit system, a unique mode of combat that allowed players to alter the fighting style of each playable character. This feature allowed for endless possibilities regarding combat and rewarded players for trying out new things. Final Fantasy 12 is also home to some of the best optional content to ever appear in a Final Fantasy title, which has made it especially timeless for completionists.
Finally, you can hardly talk about a Final Fantasy game without mentioning the story and music, and the lack of changes to those deserves a collective sigh of relief. Often regarded as one of the strongest narratives in the series, the story of X doesn’t need much reworking, and there’s something to be said for letting a classic speak for itself. While some changes do arise with the addition of Last Mission and the new audio segments, they are bonuses that leave the source largely untouched. Yes, the infamous laughing scene still exists, and Tidus is still fairly whiny near the story’s start, but the games’ most impactful moments have also gone unchanged, which is definitely good news. Couple that with the remastered musical stylings of Nobuo Uematsu, composer of some of the series’ best music, and the experience is just as good now as it was back then.
While the effort does stumble in a few places, with some awkward visuals and carried-over issues from the originals, the integrity of these two classics totally holds up. Remaster strikes just the right balance between modernizing a classic series for new fans and honoring the experience of old-timers. For ten years, Xenoblade Chronicles X has lived as the black sheep of Monolith Soft’s grand RPG series.
Stellar Combat and Leveling System
Xenoblade Chronicles X has an online multiplayer component, which Definitive Edition brought back. While I’d love to go into specifics on how the multiplayer runs or how enjoyable that content is, I did not have access to this feature during the review period. Xenoblade X has a surprising amount of added story elements, from an hours-long epilogue to brand new party members.
While we’re on the subject of mech battles, they do still feel massively overpowered at times, and can regularly turn some side and even main missions into absolute cakewalks. Of course, it’s not entirely smooth sailing once you get your mech – the bigger the imprint you have on this world, the bigger the enemies are who are waiting to take a bite out of you. Not all monsters will instantly stampede to have you for dinner, but the underlying threat that some of them will is just enough to maintain that frisson of necessary tension to keep X’s enjoyable sense of progression in check.
Xenoblade Chronicles X starts off with the human race boarding spaceships in an attempt to escape Earth after it gets caught in the crossfire of an alien war. Your ship, the White Whale, eventually crash-lands on Mira, and it falls on you to find its scattered remnants from the freshly settled city of New Los Angeles. It’s a passable story in a vacuum, but it’s also the weakest of the Xenoblade games overall.
‘Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition’ review: A forgotten classic is back with a vengeance
Through the hex system and probes, Xenoblade X liberally rewards you for exploration — it’s the entire game’s loop. As you complete pieces of the hex-grid you contribute to your survey rate of Mira, as well as the survey rate of that specific area — and as those survey rates get higher you’ll get better rewards. All of this means that Xenoblade X is very much an experience where you get out of it the more you put in. A good comparison is Dragon’s Dogma or even Breath of the Wild, where final fantasy so much of the reward and satisfaction hinges on exploration, uncovering secrets, and seeing the narrative play out in subtle, unconventional ways.
Each class has a different set of weapons and abilities, and a different focus in combat. For example, the Shield Trooper focuses on drawing enemy attention and pumping up defense and healing. Meanwhile, the Winged Viper focuses on quick attacks that take advantage of positions and status buffs.
This is the best Xenoblade Chronicles X has ever been, and I’m extremely thrilled that people who are curious can finally check it out without digging out a Wii U. Last but certainly not least, a majority of the fonts have been updated to the admittedly kinda sterile sans serif font Nintendo uses for everything now. On top of that, just about every menu has been updated to efficiently communicate as much information as possible, when possible.