Welcome to my new and hopefully long running series called: Games You Need to Play, or GUN2P for short. In this series I'll be talking about overlooked games that you really need to check out, for various reasons. I've always felt like when you have an amazing game that people are hesitant to try, it's like having the knowledge of what sex is like and you desperately need to try to fill your friends in on it. I'll get into the main criteria of games; story, gameplay, sound, graphics, and replay (the pentagon of awesome as it would be) and then probably man-gasm over other parts. Grab your tissues.
So......
For Volume 1 of Games You Need to Play, or The one that's making Square look retarded, is:
Xenoblade Chronicles. No matter what I say, 90% of people who read this will NEVER play this game. Not just because it's a rare game that can only be bought from Nintendo's website or an extremely lucky Gamestop, but also because it's on the Wii. Fucking Nintendo. I'm actually butt hurt that this game isn't on an HD console, as the only real thing holding it back is the kinda feel that it's graphically equivalent to FF12.
This game is a masterpiece of epic proportions, and I owe many thanks to Project Rainfall (an online community responsible for bugging Nintendo enough into bringing it over here) for allowing me the pleasure of playing the #3 RPG of all time IMO. Let's get into the basics:
Xenoblade is an action-RPG about this universe in which 2 titans serve as the only 2 living planets/continents. The organic based titan, Bionis, and the machine based Mechonis fight until they incapacitate each other, which after sometime the story picks up centering around Shulk, his friend Reyn and a lot more. Shulk's hometown is attacked by the Mechonis early on, which is the basis for the journey; where the group sets out to stop the attacks.
Story: The story....the story of Xenoblade.....beats the ever loving shit out of anything in gaming. When I talk about games, I try to be unbiased....I try. I want you to play the game because I know you will like it, I don't want you to just think I'm recommending something personal that you might not get down with. That said, I stand by the first statement. You seriously can't fathom how deep this story is. It's so unbelievably deep and detailed that I cannot say anything about it at all in fear of spoiling the slightest detail. This fucking game has more twists and turns than an M. Night Shamalan movie going down a spiral water slide with The Usual Suspects in the back part of the tube....during a hurricane. There's specifically a part in there that makes me so fucking happy with the story that it just made the game for me. Out of the fucking park.
The story does a great job of keeping you emotionally invested. The very beginning of the game had my jaw hit the ground and had me burning up to beat the shit out of some Mechons. That pace never stops. Every time you think it's gonna drop off, it throws another thing in to piss you off (in a good way, at the baddies), almost make you cry, or feel motivated to save the world. With a first playthrough that can easily take 100+ hours, that's quite a damn feat to never get boring the entire time. I think Rocco from Mega64 said it best when he said something along the lines of 'I keep waiting for this game to slip up, but it just doesn't'. It's a weird world and that might be kind of weird to get into at first, but the game will suck you in faster than [Insert That's What She Said Joke].
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| Contemplating how awesome to be. |
Xeno sports HUGE open world environments, some in scope bigger than zones in World of Warcraft, and keep in mind, there is no mount. While this is amazing for exploration, it makes traveling between areas a pain. OH WAIT NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T. Xenoblade has an awesome fast travel system where once you have discovered a landmark, you can warp there any time. It's design choices like these that really make me smile in a technical sense; you know they were trying to eliminate the annoying parts of the game while maintaining freedom and exploration.
Xeno uses a quest hub system, identical to World of Warcraft. Main towns have most of the quest givers, you go to the field to complete them and come back to get more. There are so many quests it's mind boggling. As a completionist I did almost all of them for every area, but doing that hyper levels your characters and makes the next area very easy, so be careful if you do decide to scour the world for quests.
Combat is also a tweaked version of WoW. It's real time, and there are auto attacks, but that's where the 'meh' parts stop. You have an action bar with up to 8 moves to put on it, which work on a Cooldown system with no mana involved. The moves are VERY strategic and interesting. The main character, Shulk, is a damage dealer while Reyn is the tank. Shulk's moves are almost all location based, meaning you get bonus damage from the sides or behind, while Reyn has moves that increase aggro and reduce damage. My favorite part of the combat system is the Daze effect. Basically you can daze enemies by combo'ing them up with specific moves, and each character has a piece of the combo, so you have to strategize how to knock them into daze (Flowchart would be A->B->C = Daze, so Shulk would use move A, Reyn use B, then Shulk land C). The more characters you get the more hybrid styles you can form, and it's worth it to spend at least a few hours playing with every character to see if you like their playstyles (I found controlling the mage character myself I could create amazing combos and skyrocket my damage).
Xeno also has augmenting styles. Throw special gems in your equipment to boost stats, spec into talent trees, level up specific abilities, create said gems from finding them, etc. It's fucking great having so much to tweak to your own preference, but it can also mean a solid hour of setting up equipment once you hit a new vendor....
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| Look at this guy, how could he not have an English accent? |
Sound:
I think this may be the one hitch that may weird people out. The game never got localized because either the dev or Nintendo were cheap bastards, so get ready to deal with the story told through the eyes of the UK. It threw me off for a bit, all of the voices sounding like they were from various parts of Europe, but honestly you start to acclimate pretty quickly. There's a Japanese option that I thought was awesome that they put in, but I stuck with the English. In battle you have no idea what they're saying in Japanese, and I feel that the cast for the English voices actually did a pretty good job. Shulk's voice actor kicked ass, and hits a ton of vocal ranges.
The main soundtrack of the game though is pretty similar to Mr Uematsu. It feels like a Final Fantasy with the music, but with something slightly different. It's hard to describe sound with text, so just take it from someone who's played almost every Final Fantasy, the music is awesome, well timed with cutscenes, and does a great job of catching the moods with the current zones.
Graphics:
The graphics are the only real bad part of the game. Don't get me wrong, there are times when the scope of the zones are still amazing, but you can't help but feel like you're cheated out of HD graphics when you see the very obvious limitations of the Wii. You'll be begging for HD after just a few hours. Watching the characters mouth do that weird flash animation stretching thing makes you want to have the camera back up a bit. Still, it's not really fair to compare it to something like FF13, for the Wii they are VERY impressive, especially with the size of the zones.
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| That stuff in the distance is actual part of the zone, not background. The stuff in the sky is the other titan, not background. Once you see it in game it's breathtaking and almost unbelievable. |
The thing that gives this game it's longevity is not replayability, but it's main playthrough. I played about 3 or 4 regular RPG's worth of content, still had about another at least 20-30 hours of end game content I could've done, and just decided to finish it at 99 hours. At times, the content of this game can be EXTREMELY overwhelming, but that's hardly a bad thing. Oh no I got too good of a value for my game waaaaah. It is simply a game jam packed with content wherever it can possibly fit. It feels like the devs had a ton of polish time to just throw in all tons of extras.
Replayabilty though, there is a new game plus option, but there's really no point to it. There are no seperate story paths like Mass Effect to take advantage of, and the monsters don't level for the 2nd playthrough, meaning you'll tear through everything. The only way I think I could ever use NG+ is if I wanted to relive the story again and not have to deal with all the random quests to level up.
Why you need to play this game:
Because they make Square look retarded. Playing this makes me wonder why the hell Square can't do anything right at all anymore besides Kingdom Hearts. They do everything right in an RPG. You get that classic JRPG feel, you get the exploration of a Elder Scrolls, the combat is fun and engaging, the fact that you absolutely will be blown away by the story that you can't predict, and so much more.
If you're an old school gamer like me, or a collector, this game is a MUST HAVE. This game will be rare one day, like Chrono and Earthbound, and just owning it tingles my giney. It makes you miss Squaresoft (not Square-Enix) and the glory days of amazing RPG's on the SNES and PSX. Just like future games on this list, it's not just a game, it's an experience. No other game shoots so high and stays on target.
And don't forget, IT'S REYN TIME!!!1
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| And yes I actually own this shirt. |
Xenoblade Metacritic Score - 92/100.
Xenoblade video review by Gametrailers - 9.3/10
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