The world of JRPGs is one that I had yet to venture for most of my waking existence, to my great shame as a lifelong enjoyer of video games. Only recently by experiencing some of the more high-profile releases of the past few years, such as FFVII Remake, the Persona series and Fire Emblem Three Houses, have I come to realise the depth of unique and compelling stories available from a subgenre I may have once wrongfully turned my nose up at. I’ve been making my way through them bit by bit, dabbling between golden oldies like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, or more modern darlings like Tales of Arise and Dragon Quest 11, but a series that’s always eluded me despite all the acclaim was Xenoblade.

Unfortunately, as I’m now living with someone who lives and breathes the Xenoblade Chronicles games, it has become virtually impossible to ignore (love u James mwah mwah). Absorbing them through general presence around Xenoblade 3 showed me a game that I could tell I would love, were I to just commit to it. Despite this, I’ve kept putting it off, typically distracted by the various new releases in the year as well as my biweekly playthrough of the first few bosses of Bloodborne before I get annoyed and stop. Needless to say I’ve been very busy with very important business. However, I can proudly report that the day has finally arrived: I have played *some* of Xenoblade Chronicles!!

I thought that since it’ll likely take me about 3 millennia to finish this game, I thought it might be fun to try a new post format and see how it feels. I’m calling it Initial Vibes, and the premise of it is one which I have nicked from a YouTube channel I quite like called First Five. The idea is that I’ll play a game for a decent amount of time and give my immediate impressions on it; an opening vibe check, you could say. I’m hoping that this idea will encourage me to spend more time on games that I’m liable to drop before they actually get good. I’ll generally aim for around five hours per game, though the length of time will depend on the type of game, or simply how long it takes for me to formulate thoughts on it which I feel are worth putting pen to paper about. Anyways, with all that preamble out of the way, please enjoy my Initial Vibe on Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition!

So right from the starting gun, let me say that I am loving this experience so far, for a variety of reasons. For one, I am adoring the world of this game, and especially the ways in which it communicate information about it to the player. Mainly, that it communicates astonishingly little for a subgenre famed for its exhaustive expository dialogue. The game isn’t afraid at all to leave much of the backstory for the game quite vague, which speaks to a confidence in its storytelling capabilities that I deeply appreciate. I can’t help but compare it to a game like Tales of Arise, which regularly halts the action to handhold you through the various concepts and ideas at play in the game with little in the way of subtlety. That can work sometimes, depending on the story being told, but it’s a style of writing which requires a lot of faith in the power of one’s own message. It’s why someone like Kojima can get away with outright stating the themes of his games within them; his perspective on whatever he talks about is so interesting on its own that it doesn’t require the initial buildup to the grand reveal that many other games prefer.

Xenoblade Chronicles‘s world has this almost post-apocalyptic vibe to it that I adore. I get the sense that an entire world, long since forgotten, is now being occupied by a new set of lifeforms, taking advantage of the technology left for them whilst barely knowing what it’s capable of. It feels like a story of humans (or homs, as this game calls us) picking up the pieces of a lost civilisation, and just about getting by on that. There doesn’t seem to be an overarching authority or state figure, though the towns are still designated by number (you start in Colony 9, and there also exists a Colony 6 to my knowledge). They appear to be self-governed, but also regimented, each fitted with a militia and weaponry which is similarly self-reliant. It feels like there’s a greater power at play here, though I can’t say for now what that might be, if there’s any at all. It reminds me a lot of the worlds of Breath of the Wild or Princess Mononoke; areas aware of one another, but decidedly self-contained, rarely coming into contact unless necessitated by the plot. It’s certainly mysterious enough to have me hooked. I want to know why the world works this way, how each place differs, and most importantly, why it is that everything in the game appears to take place upon the body of a incomprehensibly large, dead robot. It is perhaps operating on unprecedented levels of cool, provided the game is capable of maintaining this intrigue.

Which I am confident it will, since the Xenoblade trilogy is widely regarded as some of the best games ever made, let alone of this generation. I have been assured that the narratives of these games go to some fucking *places*, so I’m really excited to find out more. Something I was a bit more worried about, however, was the combat. I have attempted to play JRPGs before which fail to engage me primarily because I find playing them absolutely exhausting.

Take Final Fantasy 7 for example. After playing through and adoring Remake, I found myself deeply curious about what had inspired it, so I went out of my comfort zone and played an old game for a change. Sad to report, I completely bounced off, and it was entirely due to the gameplay. Exploration was a bust because I found the clashing of blocky 3D models against pre-rendered backgrounds to be pretty jarring. I can understand the charm of such a presentation – and I even like it in games like Resident Evil – it didn’t do it for me at all and made exploring the area annoying and sort of unfun. And then there’s the random encounters, a mainstay in RPGs of the era and one which I’m happy to see less of these days. In FF7 especially, however, they became so grating due to the aggressive stop-and-go effect of it. When it happens, the camera zooms in with a blur effect, then you wait a beat for the battle scene to load in, then each attack takes what feels like forever to wind up, and I tended to rely on the same series of attacks to get me through it, which I found deeply boring to sit through. It felt like such a chore to play it and I truly wish it wasn’t this way because I genuinely wanted to like it so much. Ultimately, it feels like an issue of not growing up on that kind of game as a child, so not having the same tolerance for that gameplay style as I do with, for example, third-person shooters or sports games.

Anyway, tangent aside, I was deeply afraid of Xenoblade providing a similar cognitive block for me. I knew it was a Wii game initially, and while I’ve been playing it on the Switch, I was wary of a possibly awkward transition for my modern gamer brain. Thankfully, however, this hasn’t been the case at all. It’s still quite different to combat I’ve played before, but where FF7 felt like a time waste, Xenoblade’s fighting is fast, fluid, and quite strategic at times. It feels like a beautiful blend of traditional turn-based mechanics and modern reactive action game sensibilities, akin to FF7 Remake actually. It has an identity of its own which I appreciate.

Furthermore, I love how easy it is to actually enter combat as well. More often than not, doing so is an active choice by the player, and one you’ll want to do so you’re not going into boss fights woefully underlevelled. Once you initiate a fight, it doesn’t stop them for a few moments too long to set up a battle-specific environment; it just goes, and I like the organic feel of that. It also allows for the potentially chaotic scenario of other enemies wandering into the radius of battle and involving itself as well, leading to some quite tense encounters if you’re not mindful of that. There’s a deceptive depth to Xenoblade’s encounters that’s providing a fun and engaging challenge, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that develops. Also, I like how affinity between party members is affected by their actions in combat, such as shouting words of encouragement, reviving a downed ally, or initiating a chain attack. Fire Emblem Three Houses did the same kind of thing and I like seeing these different systems which would ordinarily exist independent of one another become interlinked. It makes the game feel a lot more whole. It’s cool!

But what’s the most important part of a party-based JPRG? The party! The characters of Xenoblade Chronicles have thus far been a treat to witness. Bear in mind I haven’t met an awful lot of them, but I am a big fan of the ones I have. Shulk is a very likeable protagonist with what appears to be a deceptively complex inner life that’s yet to be revealed. Reyn is his best friend and similarly so lovable, in a friendly labrador kind of way. I really like Shulk and Reyn’s dynamic as inseparable companions who clearly have a lot of history behind them, which has been left mostly unexplored by the narrative aside from some references to past events. It’s clear that the two of them have gone through thick and thin, sometimes butted heads, but eventually realised that in this little colony they live in, they really only have each other to look out for. I bet the fanfictions are peak.

I also really like Fiora. The game does a lot with her character in quite a short period of time, establishing her as a potential romantic interest for Shulk (assuming the latter isn’t already taken by Reyn of course), but also the foil for Shulk and Reyn’s various antics, keeping them from throwing themselves into too much danger. It’s a classic childhood friends trio you’ll see across all of fiction, but Xenoblade does a uniquely compelling job of communicating much of their intertwining relationships without direct reference to them. Their dynamics are very situational, and almost wordlessly, the game is able to demonstrate that these three have grown up together and rely on one another, complimenting one another’s strengths and flaws perfectly. This will likely be later complicated by other people joining the party with their own stories to tell, but I’m excited to see how the rest of Xenoblade’s world reacts to the Colony 9ers at the game’s heart.

To be honest, I think I ended up having a lot more to say about this game than I’d expected, but I suppose that’s a good thing. It means I’m engaging with the material, which should make actually finishing the story a lot easier. The next time I talk about Xenoblade Chronicles will likely be when I complete it, which will hopefully happen in the next few months. Then I suppose it’s onto 2 and 3, assuming this game sticks the landing. As you can probably tell based on my many words of enthusiasm here, I have faith that it will.