First off, the game plays out like a modern JRPG. And thats awesome because it dumps all of those stupid conventions that make no sense. For example:
- At any time, you can warp anywhere you visited around the world without having to really backtrack. You can also change the time of day at anywhere and anytime. Same thing with saving. That way if you are looking for a certain character you can just change the time.
- Instead of characters leveling up individually, all characters level up at the same time even if you are not using them or they are gone because of story missions they are still leveling up.
- The world is huge and it beckons to be explored.
- Your armor changes when you equip new stuff
"Xenoblade Chronicles has a real-time action-based battle system, where party members will "auto-attack" when enemies enter their attack radius. However, manually activated special attacks, called "Arts", each have their own "cooldown" time after being used; "Talent Arts", on the other hand, only become available for use again after using enough auto-attacks. Arts for each character must be set on a "Battle Palette" at the bottom of the screen, which can be modified outside of battle. Movement of the character in play is also executed manually with the analog stick. Another feature of battle is the "aggro ring", which appears around party members who are targeted by enemies. The bigger the ring, the more focused an enemy's rage against that member will be. This gives Shulk and other members the chance to attack the enemy from the side or rear"
All characters are really balanced and actually pretty different when compared to traditional RPGs. Sure you still have a healer and a mage and fighters but they are done in a more mainstream way. For example, the closest thing to a mage is a summoner and everytime you summon something it buffs your party and then when you release it, it does damage. The healer on the other hand is actually a gun person and is still capable of dishing damage. Not only that, you can instantly change characters and have a different playing experience and not have it become unbalanced. There are some other quirks and stuff thrown in there such as the ability to see an attack kill you ahead of time so that you can defend against it. It does enough to feel fresh.
One of my only gripes is that sidequests are basically kill a certain amount of monster or find this much type of loot. Its not terrible because you just go to the town and you can gather pretty much all of the quests and then you can go around the map killing monsters. They are more like an extra reward incentive over and actually quest. And for most quests you don't have to return to where you originally got it. Once you kill all of the monsters you get the reward right then and there. You don't have to do them they are just there and if you want to do them you can and if you don't want to you don't have to. Its cool how you can gain reputation with different cities depending on how many quests you do, its just that the quests are all fetch based.
The setting is pretty fucking sweet. It takes place on two giant robots locked in time how cool is that. You can explore everything to. You pretty much can climb every mountain and swim in every ocean. Not only that everything is like high sci-fi its just overall neat. And the maps are super huge and you encounter different enemies in different places. And enemies can be like a super high level so you have to go back to certain places to beat certain optional things. There is also a night and day system so like different monsters appear at different times of the day. And there are special monsters that are scattered throughout the world that are stronger. Seriously its one of the best settings ive played in a game its pretty nifty. The faces of characters look kind of wonky and disproportionate. Idg why they stuck giant anime eyes on everything but its not unbearable.
I haven't beaten the game but the story is actually fine. Its not like Mass Effect or anything, but its a lot more interesting than a lot of other games of the same genre. The characters are interesting enough to actually want to use characters. The plot isn't perfect and I don't feel like its super interesting enough to run through it but it isn't bad. Its actually gotten more interesting half way through and there has been some neat plot twists here and there. The game isn't afraid to kill people off. And when it does it doesn't drag it on into some corny cutscene either.
The absolute best thing about the game though is the score. The music is superb especially the world tracks.
There is not much to say. Its just sweet and its something i noticed. Music isn't something you notice about a game usually so i think its pretty cool that time was taken to make the score really nice.
Overall the game is pretty sweet I would recommend it. What do you think? Any questions? Any concerns? Any opinions? Go post them. Right now. At this very minute. You better. I just spent an hour on this.
