 |
| To vistas. |
Tall Tale
Xenoblade Chronicles was directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, a JRPG veteran who worked on classics like Chrono Trigger before helming original games like Xenogears and Xenosaga. Xenoblade is not a sequel to those games any more than the latest Final Fantasy is a sequel to the one before it, but they share a breadth of creative vision that is undeniably interesting. The narrative idea at the core of Xenoblade is sort of brilliant: a long time ago there were two titans, the Bionis and the Mechonis, who fought against each other in an epic battle. In the millennia since their fight, civilizations have sprung up to live on their corpses. The Bionis has cities on its head, marshes on its thigh, and jungles on its chest. It’s an intoxicating notion and a pretty effective expression of the well-worn idea that the world is a living thing.
The level designers take this idea and make the most of it. An early area located just above the Bionis’ knee shows off what they have in store: it’s a vast plain complete with swooping valleys, craggy mountainsides, intricate cave systems, and more, all of it seamlessly connected with zero loading times. Monsters, not all of them hostile, dot the landscape, and in the distance there is always the Mechonis rising menacingly above the horizon. Add in weather effects, a day-night cycle, haunting music, and a draw distance that has to be seen to be believed, and the world of Xenoblade approaches something like beauty.
I just wish the game gave players more reasons to explore its painstakingly detailed geography. Those who take it upon themselves to traipse off the beaten path are rewarded with crystals, implements that can be used to upgrade equipment by way of a mind-numbingly dull mini-game so boring I actually resisted exploration for fear that I would eventually have to engage in it. Players can also take advantage of the game’s quest system by talking to certain NPCs (conveniently marked with exclamation points hovering over their heads) who will send them off on a variety of undercooked, uninvolving errands that feel more like taking out the Sunday trash than embarking on a grand adventure. In the end, the best reason to explore the game’s environments is to see what beautiful sight the developers have queued up next. That’s a great compliment to the art team, but it leaves the game world feeling strangely sterile despite all the love that clearly went into building it.
Luckily, the central story is strong enough so that players can more or less afford to ignore the piteous extras. The main characters fall into recognizable types familiar to anyone who’s ever played an RPG. There’s Shulk, the fair-faced, soft-spoken hero. His friend Reyn is the boorish tank. There’s also a couple of ingénues, a taciturn swordsman, and a roly-poly, two-foot tall woodland critter who would be outlandish in any other game but who fits into a distinct JRPG mold as old as the genre itself. The group doesn’t break any new ground, but they’re still a likable lot drawn with just enough specificity to set them apart from their long line of forebears. They’re also well-acted by a cast of mostly British actors, and after spending upwards of sixty hours with them I admit I grew attached.
The story itself isn’t half bad, either. For as long as Shulk has been alive, his home on Bionis has been under periodic attack by the Mechon, malevolent robots from Mechonis. After a particularly brutal assault on his home town, he sets out on a quest for revenge that slowly builds into something bigger. The tale is well-paced, with few cut-scenes lasting longer than a couple of minutes and a healthy stock of interesting ancillary characters. There are a few baffling twists along the way (what JRPG would be complete without them?), but the story rights itself by the home stretch and barrels ahead to a satisfying, if safe, conclusion.
Turn-Based Battles and Other Dirty Words
Takahashi, whose Xenosaga titles often felt like a sci-fi miniseries occasionally interrupted by gameplay, shows admirable restraint in cutting down on the number of obtrusive cut-scenes. For the first time in his solo career, the emphasis is on the part of the game you actually play, so it’s unfortunate that the best I can say about Xenoblade’s gameplay is that it could have been a lot worse. In another much-lauded move, Xenoblade’s combat unfolds in real time. First, players approach monsters in the field. Before beginning a battle, they choose one party member to control while the game’s AI takes over for the others. When not auto-attacking, each character can choose from their own list of special skills, each of which have their own effects, cool-down times, and tricks to using properly. The battle system is fast-paced, clean, reasonably deep, and I kind of hate it.
Look, I don’t know exactly when the RPG developers of the world got together and banished turn-based battles to the deep dark pit currently occupied by save points and auto-aim, but this shit has got to stop. The Xenoblade team actually does a lot to make their real-time fights more involving. Some moves work best when deployed from a certain angle, periodic glimpses into the future allow you to stop particularly deadly assaults before they happen, and chain attacks allow players to string together complimentary techniques from different party members. But even with these updates the combat too often feels rote, like playing an MMORPG without all the social interaction that make MMORPGs worth playing. There may come a day when some enterprising developer effectively marries the kinetic satisfaction of real-time combat to the mental massage provided by turn-based battles, but today is not that day. Today is just Friday.
Outside of combat, the menu-based character building is satisfyingly rich, perhaps too much so. There’s a lot to do. AP earned in battle lets you update techniques, passive skills are learned and even shared over time, and a relationship system affects how well characters work together in battle. Generally, the game introduces these and other factors gradually enough so as not to overwhelm the player. The exception is the inventory management system, which is simply too dense to be any fun. Each character can be outfitted with a weapon, armor, leggings, helmet, shoes, and armguards. Each of these can then be bedazzled with a limited number of attribute-enhancing gems (the product of our mind-numbingly dull crystal mini-game from before), which can then be rearranged to achieve different effects. The end result of all this complexity is that whenever I saw a new shop, I cried a little. Equipping your party takes a depressingly large amount of time, and while I grant that many less obsessive players may not have a problem with this, I think the better solution would have just been to simply the process. Who wears armguards, anyway?
As tedious as parts of the Xenoblade gameplay experience could be, I appreciate that they came mostly from a desire to overachieve. So the battle system never quite takes off into the stratosphere. It gets the job done and it introduces new ideas that can be expanded upon in future titles. So the story never quite lives up to the potency of that initial image. It’s still a good yarn told with breathless earnestness in classic JRPG fashion. So it doesn’t reinvent the JRPG. Who said it needed reinventing? All the genre needs is games of vision and caliber, and despite its shortcomings Xenoblade possesses these two things in earnest.
No comments:
Post a Comment