xemobladechromicles - Tumblr blog

xemobladechromicles · 2 years

Text

Xenoblade Games Ranked by Personal Preference

3 just came out (yay). I feel like ranking the games. I’m not including the Gears or Saga games because I haven’t personally played them (sad). I’m also not considering the DLC for 2 or Future Connected because I have not played either. Xenoblade 1 is being ranked by its Wii version because that’s what I played. 2 is being ranked by its base game, for the same reason. I’ve heard that Torna is really good tho and I’d like to play it some day. FC probably will never get played by me since I don’t really have a reason to justify spending $60 on a game that I already own.

4. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (D+)

D+ is my lowest positive grade. Basically I’m calling the game a disappointment but not necessarily a bad game. Like, I’ve had very mixed opinions about this game basically since completing it and my opinion on the game has really only deteriorated over time, but I do understand why people love this game. I want to make that clear because I’ve played through the game multiple times. It’s just that I can’t really find anything about it that I love that isn’t immediately tainted by something I hate.

The game just felt like it needed way more time in the pre-planning and drafts. Just, across the board. Since a lot of bad and contradictory ideas made it into the finished product that really should have been filtered out during this stage of development. And I mean this on quite literally every element of the game.

I’m trying to generalize as to not rant your ear off with every individual issue I have with the game, but I am someone who struggles with restraining myself. So, I’ll just give a few examples, starting with one that killed the game for me: the locations. I’d say that 2 has the prettiest locations in the series. I love the concept of walking around live titans. I love how you can see Gormott’s neck in the distance as you explore the plains. The inside of Uraya is jaw dropping. It is by far my favorite looking location in the series. I love how it’s colors change depending on the time of day and the weather, but each variant is just as gorgeous as the last. Most locations also nail their atmosphere. The locations and exploration are a huge part of why I love this series so much, so the quality of this is probably the biggest aspect determining how much I like each individual game. I haven’t found another series that sells the scopes of their worlds quite as well as this series is capable of.

Here’s the problem with 2′s locations, they’re underdeveloped. 2 has very few branching paths, optional areas, or particularly varying biomes in its locations, especially as you progress through the game. Besides that, the locations just fall off in quality the further you get through the game. The two main issues I have here are poor scope and lack of optional places to explore. 2 promises to let the player explore a lot of titans, but each titan only has one region and settlement in it, which results in the titans feeling quite small. It also means that the game has very little to center the scope of each location around. The other games tend to use one massive landmark visible from the majority of the map combined with the ability to see previous areas. In 1, for example, you can see the Mechonis at different angles from the Bionis’s Knee and Alcamoth. It’s not much, but it’s enough to ground the scope. The closest thing 2 has is the World Tree, which just doesn’t have the same effect. There’s multiple ways to reach that effect. Like, the Mechonis is shown at the beginning to be the size of Bionis, so even though a good view of the Bionis itself is hard to come by, you can use the imposing view of Mechonis to get a sense of scale for the Bionis. Or in 3, the reason why Uraya’s scale is so much larger than in 2 is because the Titan’s corpse towers over the first two or three massive areas while it’s really just a single big area in 2 where you can’t even see the titan’s exterior, so there’s no real sense of where you are relative to it. 2′s decision to have each Titan individually orbitting the tree without really seeing other titans also worsens its scope. In 1, every location is introduced with some panning shots and a title showing what part of the Titan you’re even on. So, you know that Gaur Plains is really just one of Bionis’s Thighs, Satorl Marsh is a hip, etc. 2 doesn’t really do this. It’s up to the player to figure out what part of the titan you’re on. The amount of each titan you see is also very limited feeling. You only really see Gormott’s right hip. I wanted to explore its back and neck, personally.

Going with the route of having a small handful of Titans which each have their own varied regions would have been a better route to take in terms of selling the game’s scope without significantly increasing the resources poured into it. Altering the lore, I’d say that there were three titans and the Aegis destroyed one of them 500 years ago. Each titan has several nations, which would give them more diverse cultures and would result in them feeling larger. Like, say Gormott and Uraya were the same titan. Scope wise, Uraya is the inside of a titan that we’ve explored some of the exterior of, so rather than assuming this one path is the entire titan, we can assume that this area is a small part of a huge titan. This is pushing 2′s world design to be closer to 1′s, but that’s because 1′s format was really good and could easily be expanded on or repeated without feeling copy+pasted. Since I’m not going to talk about scope again, I’ll just point out that 3 and X take a different route of selling their scope. Their worlds are divided into continents and massive multi-biome regions. The way they manage their scale is that each individual region will have one or two major landmarks that the region is centered around alongside minor landmarks that accomplish the same thing, then they will also allow the player to see hints of other regions from every region available. The regions/continents themselves also have a large variety of large sub-regions boasting different biomes. 3 uses looping as a way to tie its world together while X uses flight. 2 just doesn’t really tie its world together.

The issue of scope undermines how pretty the locations are because the scope problems are tied to the the aesthetic. Part of aesthetic is being able to see the other regions of the world.

My other major issue with locations is that they aren’t nearly as expansive to explore as any other game in the series. There aren’t many optional routes or hidden areas. While the do exist, they’re much less common than in the other games, which killed exploration for me. The aesthetics only matter to an extent and the more important element was missing.

This is sort of the types of issues I have with the game where; it will nail one thing but that thing nailed is undermined by failing at more important stuff. And then some of its elements will outright just undermine each other, such as the game’s gacha existing for replay value but the game is a 60+ hr story-driven JRPG and the tutorials make it take approximately 10 - 20 hrs before the player gets to actually play the game. Like the rest of this series, Xenoblade 2 left me with a lot to think about, but what I had to think about was how exactly the game managed to be worse than the sum of its parts.

3. Xenoblade Chronicles (B)

When I give this game a B, I’m saying that the game genuinely had some good innovations and a really strong execution of what it was trying to accomplish. To be clear, I’m not just calling this game a really good game, I’m saying that the game is genuinely worth playing even if shonun JRPGs aren’t your cup of tea and you definitely should play it if either of them are.

This game mostly just nails every element. It has the most satisfying story in the series. It has a lot of big, cathartic plot twists, larger than life villains, and genuinely good main characters. While the exploration is topped by X and 3, 1 has a strong sense of scale with a very unique setting that is used well, though I feel like more could’ve been done to emphasis which body part each location is meant to represent in the map design, in particular Makna Forest, Valak Mountain, and Satorl Marsh don’t particularly feel like they’re part of a Titan.

Considering that 1 is the first game in the series to use Xenoblade’s unique combat system, it got a lot of things right. I want to talk about this in extension since the combat system is the main reason I gave the game a B rather than a C+. 1′s combat is satisfying because the player is put in a loop of being given a limited amount of time to prevent dangerous attacks while having to manage cooldowns in order to have the proper counters available when said dangerous attacks might come up. Alongside that, you need to manage aggro and play to your specific character’s strengths. Exactly what those strengths are both depends on the character and how the player chooses to build them. While 1 doesn’t have nearly as much customizability as future games, it does focus on giving each party member a distinct playstyle. The game also established certain character archetypes in the series.

Shulk and Dunban in particular establish two types that are distinctly Xenoblade. Shulk is a glass canon who’s attacks are positionally dependent, inflicts Break, and becomes a powerful supportive asset as the game progresses, he is a very straight-forward to understand character who becomes a little more nuanced as the game progresses, but getting the most out of his kit isn’t particularly hard due to him being afforded protagonist privilege. The reason Monolith hasn’t deviated from this type of protagonist (except in X) is that it provides both new players and returning players who aren’t too interested in the game’s mechanics an easy mode. Or at least, that’s how I interpret it. When I say Shulk has protagonist privilege, it’s less overt in 1 than in 2 and 3, but in his case, I mean that the Monado Arts are the most direct answers to anything the game throws at the player. You could fight the mechon by Break>Topple>Daze or you could use Monado Enchant. You could respond to that vision of that AoE enemy Talent Art by doing something creative or you could press Monado Shield and have the problem solved instantly. Low on Talent Gauge? Shulk has an art to fix that. Again, this isn’t me complaining about the character, just me pointing out that he’s designed to be very beginner friendly, so it makes sense that future protagonists are designed very closely to him. I will point out that it took Monolith until 3 to figure out how to make the positional arts feel engaging. In Shulk’s case, repositioning sort of just gives the player something to do while waiting for arts to go off cooldown. Because he can auto attack and run at the same time, there really isn’t a reason not to reposition. In X’s case, there were just so many overpowered abilities that didn’t require positioning that using the positioning abilities wasn’t worth your time while in 2, repositioning wasn’t particularly fun due to slow in-combat move speed, it preventing auto attacks which also charge arts, and the position based bonuses were pretty minor all-in-all. Like, Double Spinning Edge wasn’t Mythra’s best art because of it’s bonus damage from the side, it was her best art because it hit twice and therefore had twice the chance to activate her Art Recharge ability. Shulk’s ability to cut his HP in half to charge his Talent Art also wasn’t very thought out because it’s a situational ability with potentially really high risk the AI will misuse, so I pretty much always have the attack unequipped whenever I’m not directly using him so that his AI doesn’t commit suicide. This archetype of character feels distinctly Xenoblade because it attempts to take full advantage of what the series’ style of combat is capable of. I also like that the protagonists start off as straight-forwards positions-based glass canons but as you learn more about their kits and the game’s systems they become best used as a different class.

Dunban also started the dodge-tanks. I will say that Dunban’s kit design has aged like milk and there were a lot changes made between games to make the squishy dodge-tanks feel good to use. They’re definitely my favorite class of characters in the series. The problem with Dunban’s kit is that his evasion is uninteractive and he has a lot of systemic issues in his design. Basically, he was designed to be a character who could be dps or tank depending on how the character builds him, but between Agility being by far the strongest stat in the game and the way gems work in 1, there’s no reason why Dunban can’t just be an unhittable tank that also deals a ton of damage. Alongside that, his main mechanic, auras, are really poorly designed in this game and Dunban has a fuck-ton of them even though equipping more than, like, 2 of them at a time is usually just a straight up bad idea. Alongside that, half of his kit doesn’t work unless it’s the next art used after Gale Slash, so playing him is just a lot of time waiting for Gale Slash to come off cooldown, which is probably the other main reason why dps Dunban is so much worse than tank Dunban. That said, I would describe the squishy dodge-tank characters as being a series staple and feeling very Xenoblade. It’s not that squishy evasive tank characters don’t exist in other games, but the class of characters feels so Xenoblade because playing them is a fun combination of managing when important abilities are up and quickly reacting to enemy attacks on top of regular tank duties. That said, I can’t give Dunban credit just because I love playing Elma and Mio.

It’s not just the combat that 1 laid the groundwork for impressively, though I’m not going to go into nearly as much detail for the remaining stuff. It also laid the groundwork for how future entries will handle their stories. I can’t speak for Monolith’s works between Xenosaga Episode III and Xenoblade Chronicles, but it’s clear that Takahashi likes telling stories about the creation and deaths of the universe and the nature of humanity, but Saga/Gears were simply too convoluted to communicate their ideas effectively. The Blade series tends to lean much further in the direction of power fantasy stories with fantastical settings and stories that start simple but get increasingly complex as the story progresses. I wouldn’t consider 1 to be the ultimate example of complex storytelling, but it did do a good job finding its feet in its storytelling, which is something entries pre-dating it struggled with. The other thing that 1 sets up is how the series handles exploration and level design. I don’t know what the level design of previous games looked like and I don’t want to go on a spiel about it here because it’s the main thing I want to talk about with X, but there’s sort of a formula in how levels are conducted in the series that 1 establishes that makes exploring each level very satisfying and fun.

I am giving Xenoblade 1 a lot of points in its rating for being the game that started the series, but that’s because the groundwork it laid for the other games was very strong. Xenoblade 1 established this series as something special. As far as personal preferences go, I prefer the optimizations made in later games. There is stuff that 1 does better than every other game in the series, but that list gets more limited with each new entry. While I don’t think this game really stacks up to a lot of the future games in the series due to the series overall having a really high quality, I do respect this game a lot for trying so many things and sticking the landing.

2. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (A-)

I’m a bit hesitant to put a game that I haven’t solidified my opinion on and over a game that has been my favorite in the series for years, but 3 probably could top X as my favorite Xenoblade. Same thing applies about giving the game an A tier ranking. As you can probably guess with my ranking system, it’s designed so that the majority of media I could give a letter rating to would receive something somewhere between a D and C+, including games that I really enjoy. So, if my rating system is that fucking harsh, what does A- mean? It basically means I’m calling the game high art and a potentially life-changing experience.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a game about moving on and embracing an uncertain future. It says that changing and moving forwards is terrifying, which makes it easy to just want to stand still because that’s comfortable and feels safer. But by standing still and refusing to move forwards, you lose a part of yourself in the process. When stuck in a shitty world, it’s easy to try to protect your loved ones and hope the world somehow changes, but by giving up and acting selfishly out of hopelessness, you contribute to the problem. While I have criticisms about the game’s antagonists and there are a number of contrivances in the setting, stories with strong themes have always stood out to me. 3′s ending in particular really got to me because the protagonists chose an uncertain but ever-evolving world where they’d likely never see each other again over a world where they could live in a comfortable stasis. But even with that decision, the desire to go back, to pick comfort and stability over growth even when that comfortable stability is toxic or unsustainable exists in everyone... and that’s okay. These sorts of themes are present in every Xenoblade game, but they’re communicated so fucking well in this one that it actually brings really strong emotions. Part of it is that this game just happened to come out in the right time of my life, but another part is just that the game understands how to work in its genre so much better than every other entry in the series thus far. Like, the themes are clearly communicated but set-up a gotcha so well. The viewer wants these characters to stay together forever, but the game says that this desire is what the antagonists represent, though carried to a logical extreme. It’s just all very well done.

I also have to comment on the gameplay. The combat system feels like a perfection of what the series has been leading up to. 3′s combat is both complex and has a lot of depth. I remember feeling overwhelmed by it because it entails learning how to use 6 characters at once and learning how to swap between them appropriately, then there so many classes to learn. So, it feels like every time I wipe in this game, it’s because there’s something I could improve at. Even now, it feels like there’s still a lot I could learn and improve on. I really enjoy how the game took heavily exploited mechanics in previous games and integrated it into the game’s main combat system. I’m relatively certain that there are certain post-game builds that would be able to break the game, but that doesn’t really matter when the main game’s combat has so much depth. I also really like the new addition of fields and the emphasis the game puts on positional arts. The ability to dash for repositioning also just feels really good. Positioning in previous games felt very optional, but that doesn’t feel like it’s the case here. The combat system just manages to juggle a lot of balls and playing the game on hard mode was a lot of fun.

The other thing I want to point out is how the game handles its exploration. 3 takes quite a few queues from metroidvanias. It’s nowhere near the point where I’d actually call the game one, but its exploration felt a lot closer to exploration in a metroidvania than any other Xenoblade game. The maps have the signature big areas of the series, but they also have a lot of optional sub-regions with their own biomes that the player is meant to explore later. These sub-regions will then loop back to old areas, which results in maps being more interconnected and larger than the player may initially assume. In particular, learning how the plains area and valley area in the first region are connected was particularly memorable to me. Besides that, this game makes use of traversal abilities, which some areas are hidden behind. These are a minor part of exploration rather than the main way of unlocking progression, which is the primary reason why I’d consider Xenoblade 3′s exploration to take notes from metroidvanias rather than flat out calling it one, but I really like this direction and I hope future games expand on it.

I’m not going to call Xenoblade 3 a flawless game, like, even regarding the game’s strong-suits, I have stuff to criticize. But they feel more like minor flaws to be ironed out in future entries rather than fatal flaws that ruin the game. The two biggest issues I have with the game are that I don’t think the metroidvania influence was done optimally and that the antagonists fucking suck. Like, I don’t really like that they gated some areas with invisible walls and there were a few instances where the world design of twisty linear paths that open up into other twisty linear paths felt a bit too obviously that. In particular the Satorl Marsh looking place and the Urayan Tunnels felt a little too linear while the Makna Forest looking place did this area design very well. The traversal power-ups were used a bit sparsely. I personally would guess that this decision was made because the devs were worried that they might not be received well or so that they’d be out if the way in the event that they were badly implemented, so I’m hoping this idea gets expanded on in the future since I did like its implementation. I do kinda wish the mechs were implemented into the exploration somehow, especially since there were a few areas that were large enough that I wish I had the option to increase my run speed by a significant amount. I personally wish there was an option to turn off the menu music and for said music to only start once you’re a bit deeper into the menu. I liked listening to it when customizing my characters’ classes, but I didn’t appreciate its presence when I was trying to quickly change while side quest I’m doing or for quick travel. The game’s amount of optional content felt overwhelming. It’s a weird criticism, but I was legitimately interested in the side quests until I got overwhelmed by their sheer amount, which resulted in my not doing the sidequests even though the ones I have done were pretty good. Even though I do really like the protagonists and some of the main themes of the story, I really dislike the way the antagonists were written. I just can’t take it seriously when literally every single remotely important character is an antagonist at some point. Especially since a lot of these instances are handled so poorly. I’ll use Joran as an example, him becoming a Moebius is a stupid decision because he’s designed to represent how good people constantly die in this world for no real reason. Lanz being so torn up about Joran’s death even years later because he knows he was a dick to Joran but then Joran died saving his life anyways was legitimately good stuff, but it got crapped on once Joran shows up as an Alphabet Soup Flesh-Mech Soul-Eating Evil Power Ranger. Especially since Joran cannot fulfill his initial role in the story while also fulfilling the role that the Moebius fill of pure evil antagonists. They were meant to get more thematically complex, but their character writing is so inconsistent that it doesn’t feel genuine.

Still even taking its issues into account, 3 felt like the most meaningful work of art out of the four Xenoblade games. And being aware of the story’s of gears and saga, I really like how 3 adapts the themes and stories those games attempt to tell in a more readable way. As a result, it’s the most meaningful game in the series in my opinion.

1. Xenoblade Chronicles X (B-)

If you’ve been following along with my grading system, you’re probably like “wait why is X listed as number 1 when it has the second worst grade wtf?” Yeah, that’s more a thing with how my ratings work. Like I said when talking about 2, anything rated D+ or higher is a positive grade, effectively meaning that I think it’s reasonable for someone to dearly love that game. But the reasoning for X’s B- grade is that while it is a heavily flawed game, it’s also a genuinely innovative open world game. X is my second favorite game of all time and it’s my favorite open world, beating out Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild.

I’ll go over its Achilles Heel first since I believe it’s the reason this game never picked up much traction. The tutorials fucking suck. As in, I think they actively ruined the game for a lot of people. Generally, there are three tasks a tutorial needs to fulfill to be good: they need to avoid wasting the players time, they need to teach the player the game’s mechanics, and they need to condition the player on how the game is meant to be played. X’s tutorials manage to fail spectacularly on all three of these. Like, it’s a good example of everything not to do when making a tutorial. So, first thing, wasting time. X’s tutorials will have cutscenes upwards of 10 minutes explaining useless mechanics to the player. These scenes are dull and waste a lot of time. But they also cut into the other two issues. First is that these cutscenes implicitly say that X is a movie game, or that the player will be spending a lot of time progressing the main story. This is false. The majority of the player’s time ideally will be spent on sidequests and exploring the giant world. The way the game is structured is that the Story Missions represent big events, the Normal Missions are where the majority of the writing effort actually went into, and the Affinity Missions are where a lot of important character work happens. This is a completely different format from what every other Xenoblade game uses, so the tutorial really needed to get that across. Personally, the way I’d do this is to not give the player information on how to unlock the Story Missions and instead have a pop up telling the player that Story Missions may unlock as the player explores the world and does side content. But really, anything to condition the player to prioritize sidequests was necessary here. The way the tutorial mechanically fails is that it heavily focuses on explaining the least important aspects of the gameplay while also failing to explicitly state anything really important. Like, the average person gets through Xenoblade X without knowing at least one major mechanic. For me, I beat the game not knowing that I could change Cross’s class or realizing that there were Augments I could have been applying to weapons and armor, similar to gems from the first game. Other people have gone through and not realized fashion gear exists or about the existence of party commands. I’m pretty sure that most players don’t know that the game has consumable items in it. In case anyone’s curious, the consumable items are stuff like restore HP, TP, or repair Skell appendages. I don’t think there’s an efficient way to grind for consumable items. Or if there is, I haven’t figured that out.

There are also just entire systems in the game that just go unexplained. Like, appendage damage in particular never really gets explained beyond you can target appendages and break them, which I don’t know if that’s so much explained rather than the player realizing that the lock-on targets different appendages. I know what isn’t explained is that you can click the right stick to stay onto that appendage, telling your party to focus fire will make everyone target the appendage that you are locked onto, destroying an appendage will inflict a debuff on the enemy, certain items can only be dropped if certain appendages are destroyed in combat, your Skells have appendages that can be destroyed by enemies (if you’re ever in Skell combat and one art just is unusable for the rest of combat and you have no idea why, it’s because the appendage that the art was assigned to got destroyed), destroying some appendages prevents certain enemies from using certain arts, some appendages can only be targetted afted other appendages have been destroyed, and different appendages sometimes have different defense and resistance stats. I still don’t really know how the game calculates appendage damage, which is a problem considering that certain materials that you need to grind for require destroying some appendages. If there’s a way to protect certain Skell appendages, also never explained. The appendage system isn’t the only one like this. Skell combat and Overdrive are two other huge offenders. Overdrive in particular tends to either be useless or grossly overpowered depending on whether the player has a vague idea how to quickly obtain TP. It also doesn’t help that Overdrive is both very overpowered and overly complicated, but it’s so overpowered that you really don’t need to know the specifics of how it works for it to break the game. Skell combat also isn’t very well explained. Like, I’m not sure if the fact that Skells don’t scale with the player’s level is ever explicitly stated and the way the game communicates enemy power level gets really fucky after their introduction, especially post-game, where certain level 90 enemies can be significantly less dangerous than certain level 45 enemies.

Basically, the game is overly complicated and the tutorials pretty much fail on every level, which results in players just naturally playing the game completely wrong. Like, going from 1 to X, my first playthrough of the game was quite disappointing. The sidequests in 1 range from a waste of time to okay, so it’s not like I was going to be inclined to do them in X without a good reason. Typically when playing these games for the first time, I’ll go through the story beats and explore a bunch of the map while ignoring sidequests entirely. 3′s the exception where I tried to keep up with sidequests until about halfway through the game where their quantity just got overwhelming and I proceeded to ignore everything but the hero quests (tho I did a decent number of City sidequests because I needed an excuse to listen to its music). But the reason that happened in 3 rather than the other games was because 3 actually gave me a good reason to do its optional content. It front-loaded its best sidequests. Like, you get a voiced sidequest that unlocks a new class and hero, then you can do a bunch of extra quests where you learn more about that hero. 3′s sidequests also tend to have more meaningful dialogue from the protagonists because everyone is out at all times and therefore scripting that part is easier (and it works really well with the campfire system, which I think was borrowed from FF16? I’ve never touched that game so I don’t really know). Plus a lot of 3′s voiced quests are unlocked by just exploring the region, so I kept accidentally running into them and was like “I should complete this.” Compare that to how X presents its sidequests. With very few exceptions, side quests are always found in NLA (and the ones that aren’t are usually in one of the Nopon Caravans, which are static locations). Considering that the game tells you “unlock X amount of a continent to progress the story,” I spent very little time in NLA on my first playthrough and never accidentally ran into a cool sidequest that got me interested in the idea. The Normal Missions the story forces the player to do are also some of the weakest Normal Missions in the game, so the main story never really steps aside to advertise its sidequests, which it probably should have. Like, you know how Elma finds the player in a pod? Maybe some of the important sidequest NPCs should be found in pods during exploration, as a way to prompt the player to go check on them in NLA and then do their sidequests. Maybe there should have been more interesting quests the player can just run into accidentally outside of NLA. Like, give Professor B a sidequest where the player finds him randomly in Oblivia after Chapter 5 and convinces him to come to NLA (which would lead up to the rest of his quest line). Stuff like this would probably be enough to prompt the player to at least check out some of the side quest chains started in NLA. But I don’t think the devs realized that players wouldn’t naturally try to do majority of Normal Missions, which is probably why the game has a reputation of having weak writing.

Xenoblade X has a lot of misconceptions or misrepresentation about its qualities that I’d say are born from how shit its tutorials are. It’s a major issue that frankly takes the game down with it. So I wanted to address it. I should probably make my own tutorial type thing for the game. But my best advise for now is don’t be afraid to look up stuff online, make sure to set aside some time to thoroughly explore the game’s menus, which includes attempting every prompt at least once. The game’s best content is in its sidequests and exploration. Think of the game’s main story as its bones while the Normal Missions are its meat, the affinity missions are basically normal missions but with more meaningful gameplay rewards. Also the game has Heart-to-Heart conversations, if a character ever goes missing when you’re trying to find them, that’s why. Either just look up the location online or change the time of day and they’ll be back (unless their name is Phog, that little bastard got wiped off the face of Mira for, like, an irl month because I couldn’t find his H2H where he ponders about ants in the most fuck you location and its only condition was affinity level, so he would not leave his fuck you corner until that H2H was completed, which also applies to multiple of his H2Hs). Also, if you want to 100% the game, make sure to do Lao’s H2Hs before doing Chapter 9. It’s the only content in the game (to my knowledge) that can become permanently unavailable from story progression. Also, the most interesting part of the gameplay is probably the customization of the Self-insert character’s class. You want to get started on that as soon the game lets you, which would be after the game shows you getting Rank 10 in your current class. Look up what status effects do. There are certain buffs in the game that are central to the combat. Even if the name sounds self-explanatory, looking it up is still probably a good idea. Anyways, after that rant I do want to talk about why I actually love this game.

It’s a common misconception that X has poor writing compared to the rest of the series. This is false. There are two reasons why this idea exists. The first is that the main story really only covers what I assume is about a third of the overarching plot. The series’ stories are generally speaking at their best during the second half of the plot since Monolith is very good at building up and executing on a satisfying climax. Since X never reaches its climax, the game’s main story has a lot of build-up that will likely never be paid off. The second reason people undercredit the writing is that the majority of the writing effort appears to have gone into the game’s Normal Missions, which I just explained in detail why the audience would have been prone to ignoring. Personally, I really like X’s writing. Before 3 was released, X had the strongest sense of theming in the series. I think I mentioned that 3 feels a lot like a second attempt to tell X’s story. Part of the reason is that 3′s plot mirrors a lot of theories I have about where X was trying to go with its story, but the other, more measurable reason is the overlap in themes, especially near the beginning of 3. These are themes about reclaiming what it means to be human and building a world where people don’t have to be constantly fighting for the right of survival. Or about two opposing sides setting aside their differences to create a peaceful outcome. How that isn’t easy because of personal grudges and misinformation. The way 3 expresses these ideas is to include it during downtime in the main story. The earlier parts of 3′s story also have a lot of downtime to work with. X expresses these ideas by repeatedly and consistently displaying them during the plotlines of its Normal Missions. There’s other parallels, but I figured that one in particular was worth highlighting.

One thing that X’s writing really excels at is the idea of multiple perspectives. Every NPC feels like a character rather than just an NPC, with quite a few being well developed. One thing in particular that I really liked was how no two characters had the same reaction to earth’s destruction. There were always subtle differences even if those reactions can be roughly grouped into categories. Alongside that, these NPCs also all have their own thoughts and reactions to major plot events. Once the mimeosome twist happens, it becomes relevant to so many side quests and NPC character arcs. And yeah, quite a few NPCs actually do go through character arcs. Alex in particular has always been an interesting villain to me because he hates the Ma-non and Nopon because aliens blew up the earth, so he goes on a tirade killing a bunch of the only two alien species in the game that had literally nothing to do with Earth’s destruction and eventually ends up working with the Ganglion, a faction that gloats over its involvement in that event. It’s generally interesting noticing patterns, of how a lot of the hate and resentment over Earth’s destruction gets targeted at the Nopon and Ma-non even after the introduction of races who were actually a part of it. It’s also very interesting seeing humans learning to accommodate these new occupants, as well the handful of people who proceed to exploit them. Cultural differences between the humans and Ma-non are also explored this way. It feels like the sidequests take the major events from the main story and try to examine them under every lens possible. Even more interestingly, there are quite a few major plot twists hidden behind sidequests. The most well known of these is probably the ending to Yelv’s sidequest, but there are quite a few Normal Mission chains that end with similarly scaled major plot twists. Alongside that, these quests actually take advantage of the self-insert avatar. The player can choose to make morally bankrupt decisions and those decisions will have consequences. Because there’s no morality system, those decisions feel impactful more impactful. Like, going back to Alex, there’s this scene at the end of his first quest where he executes a bunch of aliens. The player is given several instances where they can choose to “look away” or “interfere.” If they choose to interfere, there will be a boss fight. But what’s more interesting is what happens if the player chooses the look away. In this event, Alex will execute the surviving aliens one at a time as they beg for mercy. After each execution, the prompt returns. Look away or interfere. If the player repeatedly chooses to do nothing, he will kill everyone and there will be no boss fight. Alex will then commend the player for supporting him. Choosing this route is genuinely uncomfortable to behold because you’re just watching a guy murdering multiple innocent people for no reason and then he thanks you for enabling him, because through your inaction, that’s exactly what you did. Choosing not to save these NPCs doesn’t impact the direction of the sidequest chain or the rewards to any meaningful way. It’s just a really good scene about the consequences of inaction. This was from a Normal Mission. A noninsignificant number of Normal Missions ask the player to make moral decisions like this. With minimal mechanical consequences to these choices, all that’s really left is for the player to witness the logical outcome of their choices. That shit is impactful. I also like how certain decisions that seem arbitrary or innocuous sometimes affect whether a character lives or dies. These types of consequences and choices are extremely rare, but their inclusion in the game is extremely memorable for that. I remember my first encounter with one of these decisions had me arbitrarily pick the option that saved the character, only to in hindsight go “oh shit” because what I assumed was the nice option would have gotten that NPC killed. In a future playthrough, I decided to see what would happen if I got the NPC killed. The sidequest starts with this one character being kind of a bitch, and the game gives you the option to mock them after explaining that everyone died. Which gave some more insight into that NPC, who thought everyone was being an asshole rather than suspecting something more sinister going on. This is all really good writing. And there are enough sidequests like this that I was actually playing through a lot of them specifically because I wanted to know where their stories would go.

Though, I really can’t talk about X without talking about the main thing everyone who’s played it knows the game did well, which is the exploration. X has a massive open world. It was the first open world game with vertical scaling. When I say that, think of how in Breath of the Wild you could climb everything path or no path. It’s the same deal here except with flying mechs instead of climbing. Alongside that, Xenoblade X has the most alive feeling world I’ve seen in any video game. Enemies actually feel like wild animals who live in this world. Each enemy will be given a similar level to care in their placement and routine that the original game gave to each NPC. The exact behavior patterns isn’t directly species dependent either. Some enemies will even have routines that cause them to change behavior depending on the weather and time of day. This also correlates with X’s level design where sneaking past and avoiding overlevelled enemies becomes a regular part of gameplay. All of this forces the player to pay attention to what the enemies are doing and the surrounding area. The game mechanically incentivizes you to look at the pretty scenery. Sneaking through these areas is also both possible and satisfying in this game because the average enemy size is massive, especially the high levelled ones and the game provides information on each enemy’s detection type. Alongside that, getting caught can usually result in an exciting chase sequence where you’re trying to get away as fast as possible without aggroing more enemies. I’m not exactly sure how the enemy AI works, but it appears to be designed around making these instances exciting, even if it’s not entirely in the player’s control whether or not they survive. The way getting aggroed by an overlevelled enemy typically works is that the loud music starts, where the player needs to quickly turn around and figure out whether this is a fight they can actually take. Assuming that it isn’t, the player can then sprint away. X has a fast run where characters appear to go full sprint, so it’s a bit different of a vibe from other games where running away from combat just looks like your character is taking a light job while their life is being threatened. While you’re running, depending on where you are exactly, you then need to quickly navigate the terrain (which is pretty dense in this game) while trying not to aggro more enemies. The way levels are designed makes it so that the more likely the player is to accidentally aggro something, the more possible it is to run away. So many of the big AoE projectile attacks are often reserved for flying enemies, mimic enemies, and docile enemies. So, basically the types of enemies that are hard to accidentally aggro one a frequent basis. So, when the player is running away, it often looks like the enemy is picking off the party by one-shotting them one at a time until they reach you or they one-shot the player first because I reacted too slow, I’ve rarely had an instance where my character was the second or third person to die. This also feels like the intended way to play the game as escaping encounters works more times than it fails. Most of the time when an escape fails it’s because I aggroed something while running and that killed me, the enemy had a particularly large aggro range, the enemy one-shot me at the start of the encounter, the enemy in question was one of those heavily telegraphed encounters and I just wasn’t paying attention to it, the enemy showed up mid-battle and I didn’t realize the reason everyone was dropping like flies until it was too late (which very rarely happens without me at least being aware of the possibility of that happening, especially when that enemy in question isn’t a unique monster), and I got cornered while running away. None of these reasons ever particularly made the game feel like bullshit or unfun, especially compared to how thrilling successfully escaping these enemies often feels. The variety in out of combat behaviors for enemies of all sorts of levels just results in extremely varied level design. One area may have enemies that you can fight but then there’s this one giant overlevelled monstrosity patrolling the area in a linear fashion. Another area might have a lot of sight type enemies just lying around in place during the afternoon but they’re somewhere else (either on the map or off the map) during the morning. Some areas are very low tension because all the enemies are either passive or too low levelled to aggro you. Other areas might be very tense because you have to sneak around a bunch of high levelled enemies (and there are sidequests that put you in this situation). Maybe there are a lot of mimic type enemies nearby that you want to avoid. And all of this stuff is dynamic. Impacted by time of day, weather, player level, whether the player’s on foot or in mech, terrain. Because of this, I could list a ton of memorable gameplay encounters I’ve had in this game, even from 5 years ago. Alongside that, it isn’t until halfway through the game where death can have a potential consequence. I really like this approach because by that point, the player should have a better grasp on how to manage the fuck-you enemies everywhere. So, having a consequence early in the game would have been too punishing, while adding a consequence halfway through the game lets there be stakes, even to party members dying (tho that will take a bit to reach). This consequence is the respawn mechanics for the game’s mechs. If a mech gets destroyed, the party member in that mech will be ejected. The mech doesn’t respawn with the player. Instead, you have to go to the Barracks in NLA and manually fix it. If the mech breaks enough times the game starts charging you insurance, which is honestly very funny. Just to be clear, the amount of money a mech costs and is needed to repair the mech is actually quite significant, especially if the player hasn’t been paying attention to the probe system. But this additional consequence for dying, first of all, feels more like a upgrade than a punishment, and secondly, prevents the player from getting complacent about death. It’s also the main thing balancing the mechs, since obtaining and destroying mechs is quite expensive, so using them recklessly isn’t a very good idea. Also I found that the threshold for the game charging insurance for mechs wasn’t so strict that I felt discouraged from using them. Just that the threat of its existence did hold weight over how I haphazardly I used them.

Properties of the mechs do influence how the player can interact with running away, which added another dynamic to that backed up by the threat of being charged insurance. You start out with one mech that the player character will probably be using. Because of how expensive getting a second mech is, there will be a period of time where you only have one mech in the party (maybe 2 if you’ve, like, been preparing ahead of time). That’s enough time to get used to the idea of saving the mech. As in, ejecting yourself from the mech before it dies so that even if the player doesn’t survive combat, the mech will. But, the mechs are extremely powerful, including for escaping combat. If the player wants to enter their mech, they have to walk up to wherever the mech was left in the world (or there’s a teleport to the mech option), but there’s no way to just toggle between being on foot or in mech. So, that on top of the faster move speed of the mechs and higher jump means that using the mechs is more a question of “why not” rather than “why.” Even when running away, you usually want to stay in your mech for as long as possible because the mechs have a higher chance of escaping and can usually take at least one hit. So now while running away, you’re even faster, usually running away from something way bigger than you (still that, X has by far the largest average enemy size in the series). So, the player should get a decent idea of how to protect the mech by the time the AI gets involved. X has combat prompts the player can use to tell certain party members to exit or enter their mech, which is how the player can protect the AI’s mech (though it’s inconsistent, X really would have benefitted from the ability to swap between party members mid-battle).

Another increase to punishment for failure comes once you unlock the ability to fly. There’s two reasons for this. The first is that the player cannot exit their mech while it is flying. So, protecting mechs by exiting them before they die becomes a lot harder and sometimes impossible. The second reason it’s more punishing is that flying enemies tend to be the most dangerous ones in the game to get jumped by due to their high average size and level and their tendency for AoE Ranged attacks. Also, while you’re flying, you have to pay attention to what’s directly above and below you on top of the more usual angles. Before you get access to flight, it was very uncommon for the player to even be able to target these enemies or intentionally engage them in combat. But with flight, being caught out by them is sometimes possible. Tho it is rare, I do have to say that there’s certainly a feeling to being one-shot by a flying fortress that you just somehow didn’t notice and then plummeting all the way down to the ground, since the mech being destroyed isn’t insta-death, even if you’re unreasonably high in the air (there is no fall damage in this game either). So after getting over getting ambushed by... that, I’m just left on the ground going “...well shit.” It’s pretty funny.

Then there’s the world design itself. The Xenoblade series in general has this interesting trait where it makes its world look and feel larger than it actually is while still having said world actually be quite large. This also applies to X. Generally the way X does this is by having huge landmarks that define its regions, so everything the player does feels relative to that. Within each region, there are quite a few biomes, so it the player is measuring themselves to this landmark, they’ll notice all the biomes connecting to it. The rings in Oblivia are a good example of this as they can be seen as far out as Primordia. The other thing these games like to do are include secret areas that reward the player with a panning view of the environment they explored reaching that area. X tends to be quite dense with its biomes. For example, the poison swamp at the beginning of Noctilum isn’t really that long because it leads to a river that leads elsewhere, but it doesn’t really need to be large to convey the sense of scale because the player is going to go through multiple different biomes to reach their destination and that variety in environments conveys the game’s sense of scope better than the scale of the environments themselves. This constant change in biomes that feel reasonably connected also prevents the act of just processing everything in the environment from getting dull, which I’d say that other open world games can really struggle with. Xenoblade X is the only game I can think of where I can just autopilot run around for an hour accomplishing literally nothing and still have a good time. Or where running from one edge of the map to the other without fighting or discovering a single thing still feels good. Exploration is satisfying because aimless wandering is satisfying.

Really, I could go on about how much I love Xenoblade X’s world design and gameplay. Ironically, I really dislike the game’s combat yet that really doesn’t change my opinion that I will be long time until Monolith tops Xenoblade X’s gameplay. Though I’m honestly optimistic about the possibility in a potential Xenoblade 4 or X2 since 3 has such a good combat system and a very strong basis for its map design that could definitely be improved and expanded upon in the future, the inclusion of metroidvania elements just really fit the series. It’s just that no other game in the series has consistently had as many moments that really stuck with me as Xenoblade X has. I also think it had a lot of really good ideas for its level design within the realms of an open world game that I could really feel the absence of when I’ve played other games in the genre. To the point where X feels like an open world while a lot of other open world games felt more like an open hub in comparison. This game has its issues, but everything the game does well just gets me, which is why it’s my favorite.

#tho 3 really could contest that title of favorite xenoblade #i just haven't had enough time with the game to conclusively say one way or the other #i really like themes in storytelling and 3 definitely has those #like i just like it when a story leaves me with something to think about and i'm a slut for analysis #also 3 does have really good gameplay #while its world design isn't on par with X it's definitely the second strongest world design so far #and it *does* have the best combat in the series #like playing through it on hard mode I always felt like there was something I could be improving at #but i don't want to call it my favorite now because I really haven't had time to see the extent of what the game has to offer #or time to really reflect on its shortcomings #xenoblade chronicles #xenoblade chronicles x #xenoblade chronicles 2 #xenoblade chronicles 3 #xenoblade series

0 notes

xemobladechromicles · 2 years

Text

Thoughts on Certain Xenoblade 3 Heroes So Far

I don’t want to rank them until I’ve both unlocked all of them and completed everyone’s quests. So this is just a ranking based on the impressions they’ve given me, I think there are 5 heroes I haven’t gotten: Nia & Melia, Cammuravi, Machine Assasin Person (her sillhouette looks cool I’m excited to know wtf is going on there), the hacker class, and the seraph class, so I’m not gonna talk about these guys even though admittedly I’m very excited to obtain all of them.

Anyways these are my current impressions of everyone.

Ghondor

She’s too powerful for the censors. Someone stop her. I love her, she’s so funny. Like, her accent is so thick. She’s too powerful. I’m intimidated. I’m in love. Ghondor is epique. You fucking try meeting her to save the world and she just calls you a loser and wants to fight. Yas girl, slay (the party). The phrase Bitchqueen is glorious. I mostly love her because she swears a lot and that’s funny. Like, Eunie may say “bitch” and “arse” occasionally but ultimately says “queen’s knees” and shit, but Ghondor is above censorship. She is too powerful. If she didn’t dub Monica as the Bitchqueen, I’d be calling Ghondor that (affectionate). She just makes me happy lmao.

Gray

I think it’s hilarious that he acts like a teenage edgelord with a dark and mysterious past but then I go into his affinity chart and learn that he’s fucking 60. He pulled a Riki. He’s not allowed to do that. Also his dynamic with Eunie during his recruitment sidequest is hilarious. I like how Eunie just insults him the entire time and he’s just like “im batman bro” “who tf is batman you edgy bitch??” Also his class is super fun. Like, you simply explode everything with guns that shoot lasers. I have criminally not used him much, mostly because if I need a Full Metal Jaguar, I’ll employ Eunie or occasionally someone else. It’s mostly that I was grinding everyone to class level 10 on his class, so there wasn’t room for him in the party when I already had 3 Jaguars. But I love his class and I love his dynamic with Eunie. He’s a funny man.

Theory crafting time. I’m actually kinda curious if this class could be used as a dodge-tank, especially if you’re given post-game gear to work with and stick the class onto a naturally evasive character like Mio. Due to being mostly AoE and dealing so much fucking damage that aggro management is necessary here, the class wouldn’t really struggle with drawing aggro. When using tank classes, especially Zephyr, I often combine their primary aggro drawing ability with Quickdraw due to QD both providing evasion for the art and it’s bonus damage from the front being a very useful tool for drawing and maintaining aggro quickly due to the ridiculous amount of damage it deals from the front, which is where tanks are going to be positioned most of the time. So I imagine the inverse of using QD with an aggro drawing ability supplementing it would be quite good. Alongside that, I want to draw attention to Demolition. When using the FMJ class, I like to either pair Demolition with an evasion art or another piercing art. I assume the piercing stacks (otherwise rip). But Demolition is so good with an evasion art because the attack animation is so long. In the context of a DPS character, this is usually long enough for tanks to draw the aggro back while you’re hiding in evasion frames, in the context of a tank, I imagine this ability would be great for dodging one to two key abilities (depending on how art-spammy the boss is). Side note, as FMJ, combining Dead Set with an evasion art can also be nice because it guarantees safety while you fully remove aggro, this class is super squishy normally and needs to remain alive to get the most out of its dps. The other thing I think FMJ would be able to do as a tank that other tanks can’t is kiting enemies. Since the class is ranged, it probably would be able to auto attack certain enemies outside of their auto range and if it does this while maintaining aggro, that would help get around squishiness, especially since FMJ uses timed cooldowns.

Since this is a dps class rather than a tank class, a tanky FMJ build would pretty much allow everyone to run Protector’s Pride and the accessory with the same effect, maybe combine that with someone on the Troubadour class and that would create a recipe for art spam. Since the mechanic is meant as an “oh shit” mechanic rather than something you’d have constantly active, especially if you get the level 15 version, which I don’t know what the amount is at rank 15, but with the rank 10 version, it’s a 40% increase, combine that with my current best recharge speed, that’s another 40%, which I’m assuming would result is an 80% arts cooldown reduction that I could theoretically attach to everybody. In FMJ’s case, Demolition has a 26s cooldown at Rank 10 (dunno if cooldown will decrease at Rank 15), so that with an 80% cooldown would be a 5.2 second cooldown, which isn’t that much longer than the art’s cast time. Tho, I imagine there would be some difficulties with the evasion art it’s attached to being auto recharge, especially since 3 doesn’t have Pouch Items like what existed in 2. Quickdraw has an 11s cooldown at rank 10, so an 80% cooldown reduction would result in the art having a 2.2s cooldown. The art itself lasts approximately half a second, so just using QD, you’d probably be in evasion for at least a quarter of the fight just by spamming that ability alone. Third ability would kinda have to be Superstorm since I don’t believe Fatal Barrage has a long enough animation to justify losing out on its back attack damage and deadset wouldn’t be particularly useful to this build for obvious reasons. If you combine this with the Dance of Barrages ability, which at rank 10 gives an 11% chance to keep the recharge when using an art, that would also be valuable to maintaining uptime, even considering its low procc rate. I’d probably combine tank FMJ with a troubadour anyways due to that class being designed around cooldown reduction alongside its passive 15% boost to ally accuracy and evasion (at rank 10, I don’t know what the rank 15 boost looks like). Since that class can also spread Ring’o Roses, I imagine that could be part of the build too, potentially even as the art that superstorm is tied to. Also, keep in mind that all of this cooldown bullshit would apply to your allies too. Which could result in something like, say, a War Medic with healing constantly up, or an Ogre being able to spam their hard-hitting arts, DPS classes in particular would be able to combine this with a crit build and Frenzied Combo. Unfortunately FMJ doesn’t have the best base crit, but considering how many multi-hit arts the class has, crit FMJ with Frenzied Combo could be quite strong, whether it’s attack or tank.

The main thing holding this class back as a tank is how naturally squishy it is, but I feel like with the right build that can be worked around. I just think this would be dedicated to the post-game because running tank FMJ would require an art-spam build that requires combining skills from multiple classes at high ranks in order to properly function due to how squishy this class is. I just feel like it would work as a tank if you’re post-game and building your team around a hyper offensive playstyle. I’m unsure whether Violent Streak of Gemini Strike would be the better choice of Talent Arts in this build. Violent Streak lasts longer and deals more damage but Gemini Strike has a shorter cooldown and also draws aggro. The biggest weakness I can think of that I don’t think there’s any getting around is that the player would basically have to glue themselves to the FMJ character since I sincerely doubt in the AI’s ability to not instantly die the moment you try to mess around with a different character for 2 seconds.

I also just realized that FMJ has weirdly high base healing power. In fact, it appears to be the highest healing power given to a non-healer class. It’s not enough to be used as a direct healer, but I wonder if combining some of its arts with stuff like Hornet (a heals nearby allies on hit ability) could result in the FMJ be used as the party’s source of healing, which would leave room for more buff-oriented healer classes like Signifier and Troubador taking up the party’s healer slot.

Idk, I just really like the FMJ class. It feels good to play and I just have an instinctive feeling that it has the potential to be used in some fucking disgusting builds. As a dps class, it synergizes really well with Eunie due to her role in chain attacks including ether penetration. As a tank, I’d probably elect Mio or Eunie. Mio has good natural evasion and Eunie is just generally very good with this class and I don’t have faith in tank FMJ’s ability to take a hit anyways. Noah on a tank class is usually really nice because of the Monado Arts giving him invincibility, but he wouldn’t be getting access to that in this case because he doesn’t get invincibility when playing a dps class. Overall, I love this class, I haven’t really done much with the character tho, but he left a good first impression.

Valdi

Mixed opinions gameplay wise. On one hand, he’s an automatic addition to any team where I have to fight mech bosses. His chain attack special is ridiculous for racking up damage multipliers and having a heal bot is really nice since it opens up room for me to spec the rest of my party into damage, but most of the major and sidequest bosses, especially after getting Valdi, are against either human enemies or Moebius. So, I rarely get to actually use him, but he’s a welcome addition whenever I can get away with it.

Personality wise? Irrelevant. Gun healers are hilarious. I like how there are four heroes with guns (if you count Isurd and Riku), two of them are healers, one of them is a damage class that synergizes with healer abilities, and the other one is the most utility-focused attack class in the game. Also, there’s a specific energy to, like, Taion pointing a gun to N’s edgy bastard face and unloading, like, 50 bullets while making a I:| expression. This class is fucking glorious and I love it. I have no strong opinions about Valdi’s personality. I do like how he’s one of the two small children healers who Lanz inherits the class from.

Fiona

Can we just take a moment to talk about how funny her weapon is? She literally beats you to death cutely with a flag. And the flag has a laser on it. I haven’t figured out how to properly use her class yet since I got her right next to several other heroes, haven’t gotten the characters I want with high ranks on this class, and I don’t really understand the value of giving everyone random buffs without having much in the way of direct heals. I do like sticking her spread buff ability on Yumsmith since I can spread crit and power-within fields both to give the other attackers higher DPS that’s less positionally dependent and to give the tanks better tankiness since most of the fields end up looking like 10 circles overlapping each other while (probably) Mio stands in the middle.

I play this game using the English dub. I like her accent, but I didn’t really care for how her VA delivered some of her lines. I also just didn’t have a strong opinion on her first quest and haven’t yet done any of the following sidequests. I imagine there’s a lot of potential for them to be good because there’s just a strong premise here, I just haven’t really gotten into the meat of her yet. Which kinda also describes my gameplay experience with her.

As a side note, I also think her character design is cute, but it doesn’t translate great into 3D and it doesn’t really match Agnus’s aesthetic or any other pre-established Aesthetics in the game. Her design is actually a pretty good example of many of the primary issues with Saito’s character designs even when barring how the horniness ruined so many designs in 2. This is still a massive improvement over what happened in 2, I just felt like it was worth pointing out in specifically this character design.

I’ve been wonder which heroes have the best and worst chain attack since it seems that they’re balanced by sacrificing player control, customizability, and being able to mix and match classes in favor of having ridiculously powerful chain attack effects. Like with most of this character, I haven’t really figured out how she’s best used in chain attacks, but she seems potentially really good due to her ability to artificially elongate regular chain attacks.

Ashera

I love characters who have problems with the concept of self-preservation. Ashera is so funny. Like, she decides “I’m going to storm my own base as an ego trip.” Since whether she succeeds or fails, it is an ego trip. Also I think her reason to want to be free from the flame clock is fucking hilarious. She’s not doing it to be free from fighting, she just wants to become enemies of Moebius so she can fight them. I also really liked Eunie in this sidequest. I really liked seeing Eunie get genuinely pissed off at Ashera’s antics and then they have some sort of understanding at the end of it. I honestly wasn’t expecting Eunie to have such good character work here of all places. It was a pleasant surprise. I haven’t really done any of her follow-up quests, but I should. It’s just that there’s so much to do in the game and there was a lot of plot stuff to do immediately after recruiting her, that I kinda forgot to go back to the town and now I’m overlevelled. I kinda want to do most of the overlevelled crap once I’m in the post-game since I do actually care about the sidequests, it’s just that doing side content for these games is difficult for me, mostly because my desire to progress the story or fuck around exploring the world is way stronger than my desire to slowly build up relationships with the NPCs and see everything come together. Something something instant gratification. Ashera slaps my ass and balls (even tho I don’t have balls to slap, sad day for her).

She was my go-to hero, especially during the mid-game because of her ability to instantly fill the chain attack meter to 200%, damage multiplication, and access to launch, which resulted in my mid-game chain attacks consistently taking out approximately half of a boss’s health bar whenever I used her. This is really helpful since I’ve been playing the game on hard mode and she effectively let me skip the second phases of several difficult boss fights. I mostly pulled her out for boss fights and used someone else when running around the world since I pretty much got everyone except Eunie and Taion to level 10 on this class because a universal launch art is just really useful, and her spread ability of damage reduction at low health is an amazing defensive ability, especially to slap onto squishy classes and other tank classes with bonus effects at low HP. Though it does sometimes suffer from opportunity cost, which wasn’t as big of an issue in the mid-game.

But she’s fallen off late game. I feel like her class is likely going to be very strong post-game because the long attack animations pair with evasion arts, resulting in you getting a lot of dodge-frames, especially since post-game you’ll be able to pair these abilities with evasion arts taken from DPS classes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if running a Lone Exile Crit Build would be viable, especially since this is a DPS tank class. Especially if the player eventually gets access to life-steal either from one of the classes I haven’t unlocked or from an accessory I haven’t gotten a hold of. The class feels like it was designed to be a somewhat squishy drain-tank with an emphasis on evasion, but the class doesn’t naturally come with life-steal effects or evasion arts, so it needs supplements from other classes in order to function, otherwise you’re left with a squishy tank that doesn’t really accomplish dps.

At the moment, I’m near the end-game. Got stuck on a boss and, after 8 hours of bashing my face against him, I’ve decided I want to do some sidequests rather than using my bonus EXP storage to do some side content that I’ve been procrastinating on. Mostly just to replenish my Nopon Coins and level some people up in some classes. The problem with Ashera right now is that I need to be able to have control over my tank characters to get through the late-game bosses otherwise they might not dodge key abilities and won’t draw aggro properly. Alongside that, her ability to start a chain attack with 200% has fallen off in power due to competition from other heroes, such as Ghondor instantly recharging herself, Alexandria’s crit modifier, and Fiona’s ability to recharge the chain attack gauge. Alongside that, enemies have much high break resistances now, so I can no longer consistently topple enemies during the first round of chain attack, which results in Ashera’s actual turn being inconsistent with its ability to combo. She’s now better with Ouroboros chain attacks due to them being shorter while a ton of late-game heroes are better than her in standard chain attacks due to their more consistent application during the attack. Her class also isn’t being very helpful due to just not being able to tank enough hits and me not having access to the stuff I said would make the class hypothetically one of the strongest classes in the game.

This class is pretty nice for grinding tho. Since I’m fighting low-threat enemies and just wanna be quick about it, an offensive tank is convenient for that.

I really like this character. I also really like the class conceptually, I’m just a bit disappointed that it’s fallen off end-game, especially since I have quite literally every character except for Eunie and Taion at rank 10 on her class (and Eunie is rank 6, Taion is literally the only character I haven’t used the class on, and I probably should get him there since I’ve been using him on utility-dps classes recently).

Riku and Manana

I love them. Riku has a gun. Manana has a laser cooking pot. Riku is my god. I’ve always wanted a Nopon party member with a gun, and Riku has fulfilled my wishes. I think the characters are a bit shallow for main characters, especially when placed next to the party members, but as side characters, I love them, and by them, I mean Riku (Manana’s okay, but Riku’s gloriousness elevates them). Riku just has military clothes and what I assumed was an afro. Execuse me sir, he is an egg. Why is his voice sexy? I’m so intimidated. He’s the one character to have experienced puberty. And his eyes are so soulful and hot, but again they’re attached to a fucking egg. I feel sexually threatened by a man who does not know what sex is. Also his gun, as far as I can tell, is a melee weapon?? Beautiful. I love him. I stan him. I fear him. Also the Hero Quest where Manana just spins and destroys those arachno is hilarious. Manana went brr. She is amazing and deserves good things for that moment and that moment alone.

As far as their class is concerned, it’s really interesting. It’s the only class in the game where I’ve gotten literally every party member to rank 10 on. Sappy-Sappy drain is a really useful ability, having a universal break art is really good, especially with Incursor’s universal break art of the opposite type. I think the class has really come into its own late game where the high break resistances on bosses means I pretty much need a dedicated break person. Since this is a dps/healer hybrid, I’ve been leaning into the class’s supportive capability and attaching my one memory locket to whoever I give this class to. I’m thinking Taion might be the best suited for this class because it lets him make use of his chain attack ability while still being able to make use of stuff from classes that I’ve already levelled him in. I kinda wish there was an easy way to check what everyone’s unmodified stats are so I could quickly tell what each person’s natural stats are best suited towards, since that would help me best decide who to stick this class on.

My guess is that this class will fall off post game once I have access to resources that let me build classes more wildly, especially since this class’s strongest abilities are shared abilities and its playstyle of stacking debuffs will most likely get harder the more enemies gain resistances and immunities to their debuffs. That said, the class probably would then be moved to a buff-oriented attacker, since Crit+ and the power within fields art isn’t shared, which means this class’s use post-game probably would turn more aggressive. Especially once I can swap out the Talent Art. Atm, I use the class more defensively than anything.

I really like the Nopon. I haven’t used them in my party much because I pretty much always had at least one person as Yumsmith when off bosses and I haven’t really been equipping them for bosses due to not remembering what their chain attack effects were.

Isurd

He just really failed to leave an impression on me. His voice acting kinda sucks. I like using his class on Eunie since he’s a more damage-oriented healer, which synergizes nicely with her combination of good ether damage and high heal power. I found the character to be kinda boring tho.

His story boss wasn’t very good. It looked like the devs might have been trying to riff on the Zu Pharg fight in Xenoblade X, but the fight against Isurde sort of failed because it had the stuff drawing away from the Zu Pharg’s spectacle without really any of the things that made the boss work. Like, it was a giant quadruped machine that summoned minions and you can climb around its wreckage after the fight. It shares the issue with the Zu Pharg where the camera is just not able to zoom out enough to really get a full view of it. But what made the Zu Pharg such a good spectacle fight where this one failed has to do with X’s scope as a whole, which was much bigger than 3′s. Basically the Zu Pharg fight had you chasing a mech that was quite literally the size of a mountain across an entire continent that you’ve explored up to this point while (most likely) flying in mechs. The fight had a series of fighting the boss, fighting its minions, and running past the minions to get back to the boss. This gave the player a good view of something other than the boss’s legs in the air, and on the ground it gave a good sense of the boss’s sheer scale because while you could not see the entire boss, you could get a leg into frame, which was fucking massive. The Zu Pharg was also by far the largest enemy in the game, which already had some gigantic enemies. This was also emphasized by the mech transforming from a gigantic flying fortress in Phase 1 into a literal fucking mech in phase 2. And yeah, the mech was the size of a fucking fortress more or less. So, the fight was memorable because it overwhelmed you with its sheer scale in a game that already had an emphasis on it. The fight against Isurde doesn’t really accomplish any of this. For one, the mech isn’t towering over the landscape like the Zu Pharg was, and two, you really can’t fly around and chase it like the Zu Pharg did, which was due to differences in 3′s and X’s mechanics. As a result, the mech’s size in 3 worked more against it than anything in terms of spectacle. The enemy summoning didn’t really do it any favors either. In the Zu Pharg, the summons were very good at selling its scale since you’re pairing enemies that are roughly the size of the player’s mechs with the mech itself, while in 3, the mechs the boss summons are larger than the player and Ouroboros isn’t as permanent of a mechanic as Skells were in X. There also isn’t the surprise of leaning that this massive space you’ve been exploring for hours is actually a gigantic boss arena. The differences in music for each boss was also a big deal. The Zu Pharg had a unique theme that was very stompy and crunchy while Isurd used the general boss theme (if I remember correctly). Idk, the Isurd fight just isn’t very good spectacle wise, especially compared to the boss it was clearly based on. And the surrounding story wasn’t very good since Joran is a pretty shit antagonist so “it was Joran making mud-puppets” didn’t really help.

Overall, the character is just very nothing to me. I like his class. I think his boss fight was bad. It wasn’t frustrating, but it just fails to capture what made the fight it was clearly based on so good spectacle wise. That’s probably why I never use him in the party. The other reason is that I don’t like his chain art. First of all, some characters in the party can get early Bravos, so him getting that turn one isn’t special, especially since he’s not combining this with him not being a damage character, so he kinda just hogs the momentum from them for no reason. He might be decent mid-game, but I found his chain attack ability to be outclassed by Ashera’s at that point in the game.

Zeon

I kinda assumed he was meant to be that one bully character from the intro cutscene, so I thought it was weird that the kid grew up to be this noble-natured man with no explanation from how he got from points a to b, but it turns out he wasn’t that kid, so I’m mostly wondering what the point of this guy is since the one interesting part of his character to me was a misconception. As far as his class is concerned, I also haven’t really figured out how it’s supposed to work. I have characters with rank 10 on him just for the topple art, I regularly use his taunt on tanks, and I’ll probably go for rank 20 on some characters in his class just because his talent art is useful, but I really just am not feeling him or his class.

Miyabi

I swear there’s an NPC in the City with her name. But I was kinda disappointed with her recruitment quest conceptually since it kinda just revived three dead characters with no real strings attached. Her ability to buff Mio up during chain attacks is interesting but odd. Which I’d probably describe her class as. I still don’t confidently understand how to use if effectively. I currently have it on Lanz because w i d e. Her class being centered primarily around regeneration and cooldown reduction seems like it’s designed specifically to buff dodge tanks and ability spamming damage dealers, so I imagine that quality makes her at her most useful during post-game where both the need for her stuff and the access to accessories and high impact arts will be at its highest.

Alexandria

I like her class. I also like her chain attack effects. I don’t really have an opinion on her personality one way or the other. She’s gives me similar energy as Lin from X, but with a more cunning attitude. I like that she’s a trickster who manipulates the economy, which I would like to point out, canonically does not exist. She’s conceptually a very funny woman. Extreme stonks. Her voice acting is kinda dry. Her class seems like a class that only gets stronger the later into the game you get because of her power mostly lying in her arts, crit rate, and counter attacks while needing to be kept alive in order to remain effective. She’s solid but I feel like I have very little to say about her beyond that.

Teach

His voice acting sucks. He sounds like a robot. I thought his sidequest was okay, but his role in Mio’s past confuses me. He’s one of the characters presented as a wisdom gained by age mentor, but Mio is older than him. If she wasn’t, he would be dead. He wouldn’t be the only mentor figure Mio has who’s younger than her, but the idea he’s supposed to represent really doesn’t mesh with the setting. Again, he’s, at most, 9 years old. He can’t be a wisdom through age character while also being 9. It kinda just breaks any other thoughts I have about the character. He is a child. They are all children. I am, like, three older than the average person in this universe because as far as I can tell, the average human being is, like, seven.

As far as his class is concerned, it’s really useful in the mid-game, but it hasn’t been very helpful lately. It’s a physical damage healer hybrid. I just don’t think it heals enough. The strongest art in the class is probably the bind, but every enemy dangerous enough for me to bother either has a really high resistance to the status effect or is immune, either way, it never proccs. Both the damage and healing are underwhelming too due to most of the class’s attacks being single-strike. The debuff removal and divine protection aren’t bad, but I don’t really want my burst art to be on the Talent Art of a healer if I can avoid it. Talent Arts generally take forever to build up and I’d rather have burst/smash on a damage character than a tank or healer since it’s a high damage effect. His burst talent art does have the usage of being the first burst ability the player is likely to get access to, and you can access Teach before you get access to a consistent launch, especially since his talent art and the Sword Class talent art both deal extra damage against stunned enemies. He’s also a good healer to put characters who you’ve levelled into the Ogre Class into because it will result in this class doing a ton of damage, especially since attack classes that use crit aren’t going to at best be looking at around a 30% crit rate. So, his class is a very good damage dealing class that has healing on the side in the mid game, but late-game, most physical damage dealing classes can be built with consistent crits, so his damage gets grossly outclassed, which is the main thing making up for his okay utility. I still use the class in late-game for its debuff resistance and Divine Protect being useful, but it’s not nearly as powerful as it was in the mid-game and I don’t really see it jumping back up in the post-game.

Juniper

I didn’t realize that the nonbinary character I’ve heard people talking about was Juniper, making them, like, the fifth or something nonbinary character I mistook for being a girl. I don’t really have a strong opinion on their character. They’re character arc kinda rings familiar to my personal life, and I mean the part about them just wanting to let the flame clock run and hesitating to accept the solution the protagonists offer. But then they realize that letting things just get progressively worse is not a good solution to their problems so they decide to be more proactive about it. Usually being like “oh I relate to this” is a benefit to people, but for me, I, like, just dealt with shit like this, so the character going through that arc registered as old hat even though it probably isn’t. Kinda unfortunate circumstances there.

Regarding their class, it took a bit for me to warm up to it, but I think by the time I grew to actually like the class, I was at the point where high bleed and break resistances or immunities started getting so common that the class’s value started dropping off. I don’t see this class being good post-game either due to its focus being on using high power auto attacks boosted by bleed bonus damage as its main source of damage. While post-game, maximizing art use and chain attacks seems more effective. This class is still decent in chain attacks if you can launch an enemy during the attack, but that’s getting progressively less reliable to do, which results in this class becoming less effective. I actually found Lanz to be one of the better users of this class because his high attack stat works well with this class’s playstyle of chilling and auto attacking. If nothing else, it’s not a bad class to just leave the AI on while you micromanage everyone else, which is also a mid-game benefit. Personally, I think this class would be at its strongest at the beginning of the game but the player just gets access to it too late. Like, if Juniper was unlocked around the same time you unlock Ethel, I think their class would have a good chance to shine before falling off.

Monica

Monica has my favorite damage sponge tank class in the game. I love tanks who make their allies tankier by existing and Monica’s class does this best.

3 notes · View notes

xemobladechromicles · 2 years

Text

Top 5 Best Villains

5. Ramsus (Xenogears)

I’m going to admit to not entirely remembering Xenogears’s story, but Ramsus was my favorite antagonist there. The problem with most villains in the game are that their most important content happens in disc 2, which is too abbreviated and difficult to follow to properly sell their impact. Overall, Xenogears is a game heavily bogged down by its complexity. It was ultimately both too ambitious for the skill and resources of its creators, which results in a story that presents interesting ideas but is also clumsy and difficult to follow.

Like, many characters, he is a strong concept with a difficult to follow execution. He is a general of Solaris, which are functionally Nazis, while still trying to follow his ideals. He spent his childhood being groomed by the people running Solaris to hate Fei because of lore reasons. So, he’s conceptually meant to be a good person who was raised from birth to be a commander in a fascist government. In practice, Rammus is primarily a Disc 1 antagonist, who starts off intimidating but the player learns about his past over time and starts to sympathize with him. Ultimately, the execution is clumsy and difficult to follow, but his concept always stuck with me.

He also acts as a counterpart to Elly, who is also a soldier from Solaris who ultimately defects. I honestly don’t remember if this idea is even explored because Rammus’s backstory is mostly revealed in Disc 2, which summarizes and skips over a lot of stuff.

Overall, you can probably tell from this that I don’t have the same respect for Xenogears as a lot of its fans, but the main thing that elevated Ramsus over other major antagonists was that I was able to understand the major story beats of his character before consulting the wiki. The only other antagonist to accomplish this was Id, but I wanted to talk about Ramsus because Id barely has the chance to do anything because he’s primarily a disc 2 character.

4. Dickson (Xenoblade Chronicles)

Dickson is a really well done twist villain. He’s primarily a scumbag with shallow motives, but he makes up for it by his plot presence. His VA does an amazing job selling him as enjoying himself but not completely off from the Dickson we knew before that point. He treats the affair of betraying the party like a business as usual ordeal where he just enjoys his job.

He does a lot of heavy lifting in setting the game’s final act, beginning it by killing the game’s protagonist and talking about how he only raised Shulk because he was Zanza’s vessel. Before this point in the game, Dickson was a secondary character who was somewhere between a dad, a jokester, and a cheesy action hero. He effectively goes from being a fun side character to being a fun fuck-you villain. Out of the Zanza-aligned antagonists, Dickson is the only one with an established personality, so leading this act with him shooting Shulk kicks off the final quadrant which is defined by fighting former friends and loved ones, betrayal, and everything the characters knew about the world coming crashing down.

As an antagonist, Dickson is pure evil. No redemption, no mind control, nothing; he does what he does because he does. This hurts because he’s a likeable character, therefore you want him to be redeemable, but he simply isn’t. As a side note, while I don’t think Dickson did the most subtle job at foreshadowing his eventual betrayal, I do think he did a good job at ensuring that this act didn’t come out of literally nowhere, which is the most important thing. Xenoblade chronicles has a lot of foreshadowing in the form of off-handed dialogue, especially placed in the earlier parts of the game, which works for Dickson because even if the player catches on that Dickson is deceiving the party in some way in Satorl Marsh, his betrayal is so much later in the game that there’s a high chance of the player forgetting it. The moment before he shoots Shulk is also great. There’s just enough timing for dread and anticipation to crop up right before he shoots on second viewing.

Dickson’s death was also perfect for the character. He isn’t redeemable, he’s been lying to you this entire time. Despite it all, he did watch the protagonists grow strong enough to beat him. So, his send-off is bitter-sweet. I like how Shulk cries while walking into the portal to fight Zanza. I also like how Dickson calls off the fight when he’s dying and goes to die in a corner and take a smoke. Even though he’s ultimately a piece on Zanza’s chess set, he still got to choose how he wanted to die, a right afforded to him by Shulk, who is fighting to end everyone’s predetermined destinies.

He’s a simple antagonist that could have benefitted from more complications, especially from Shulk’s or Dunban’s part, but he fills his role in the story well for what he is.

3. Kevin (Xenosaga)

Warning: abuse mention

Kevin is interesting to me because he’s such a shitbag. Like, holy shit the amount he emotionally manipulates Shion is ridiculous. I think the Xenosaga series has issues with the concept of restraint, but it really works here. He also acts as a foil to Allen, where Kevin is trying to save Shion from her fate but does so by emotionally scarring her, Allen cares a lot about Shion and wants to protect her but cannot.

He’s first introduced in Xenosaga Episode I as the primary motivator for her to complete KOS-MOS. She was their project and even though KOS-MOS killed him due to a malfunction, Kevin would have wanted her to finish their project. Shion treats KOS-MOS almost like her child because of it. The player doesn’t learn that he faked his own death until Episode III, where its first primary conflict is KOS-MOS being scrapped in favor of T-ELOS, an android created from KOS-MOS with significantly higher output, which is secretly run by Kevin. By this point in the series, KOS-MOS has established herself as somewhere between a person and a weapon, effectively having a soul, so killing her isn’t going to fly. This also reflects on how Kevin is more than happy to take Shion’s feelings and throw them into the garbage dispenser just to advance his own goals. Which is contrasted by how much Shion obviously loves him. She was willing to complete and defend his legacy in spite of her own mixed feelings because of how much she loves him.

The protagonists of Xenosaga can be defined as being weak but human, while Kevin made the decision to give up his humanity to become strong. This weak but human dynamic is most represented in Allen, who is literally just some guy, but he cares a lot about Shion and even though he’s so nothing, he’ll always try to stay by her side. Allen cannot save Shion from her death, he cannot save the universe from collapsing in on itself, he can’t protect Shion from her trauma, but he’s still there doing every limited thing that he humanly can. Kevin can save Shion from her death, he’s working to prevent the universe from destroying itself, he can do so many things that a human like Allen could never hope to do, yet he’s still a self-serving bastard. He isn’t trying to save Shion because she wanted to be saved, he’s doing so because he wants to save her. And his methods are a major source of trauma for her. Watching him, it becomes unclear whether he even truly cares about her.

Kevin’s also an extension of the themes KOS-MOS vs T-ELOS represents between materiality and spirit. KOS-MOS was created by Shion in memory of a dead loved one and holds Mary Magdalen's soul, while T-ELOS was created by Kevin for the sole purpose of housing Mary Magdalen’s body. Which is reflected in how the two characters see the world. Shion is a very emotional character. She sees the life and value in what exists around her. Kevin, on the other hand is a very material heavy character, he sees the world only in terms of what does and does not exist. So of course Shion’s creation would house a soul while Kevin’s would only house a body. This theme of soul vs material is extremely common in Monolith’s writing and it’s very present here as well.

What I like about Kevin’s story is how messy it is. The story is told almost entirely from Shion’s perspective. Her rose-tinted lens of the man. As the player, it’s hard to know whether he’s a genuinely good person making bad decisions or the biggest pile of dicks to exist ever. But ultimately, through all the feelings of love or any of his stated intentions, he abused Shion. At the end of the series, he sacrifices himself. Whether he did so to protect Shion or for redemption, it’s up to interpretation. I honestly cannot tell whether or not he’s meant to be sympathetic, and I like that because it just adds to the mixed feelings the character leaves you with.

The character being so difficult to get a read on works because that’s how abuse works. Victims of abuse will have a hard time realizing that they’re being abused until it’s too late, they’ll side with their abusers, they’ll see them as good people and make excuses for them, even when they act inexcusably because on some level, abusers are human beings and their victims know this. A lot of stories that cover abuse struggle to really get this aspect of it correct. Usually them being an abuser will be signposted to the audience way before the characters, which makes the character’s sticking with them look like poor judgement rather than what it actually is. Kevin is unique because his hands are never fully revealed, so even after his true death, the player is left without a clear direction on him.

2. Lao (Xenoblade Chronicles X)

Warning: Suicide Mention

Lao starts off as a party member, who then betrays the party for the Ganglion. He is the main focus of the game’s strongest story beat. Lao is a hero villain. He is also the first in a series of villains in the series who is beaten down by despair and opposes the party out of a suicidal desire rather than a malicious one. I personally am not a fan of the villains who want to kill the world because they are suicidal because that explanation doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Generally when someone wants to kill themselves, it comes from a sense of deep hopelessness and wanting a way out. I’m not saying that it’s always the case, but these villains are typically presented as destroying the world out of a sense of hopelessness. So, I’m left confused on why these antagonists chose to kill the world rather than just themselves. Ultimately, characters like Jin and N feel like they’re trying to imitate Lao without truly understanding why he worked.

As an antagonist, Lao’s value is derived almost entirely from his motives. In Xenoblade X, you should be playing the sidequests experience the full story, so you have likely already encountered evil human characters or characters colluding with the Ganglion, especially if you’ve completed Hope’s second affinity mission. What makes these characters different from Lao lies in their motives and thematic purpose. The human NPCs in X are complex as a whole, each having their own subtly different takes on the events of the game. Earth’s destruction, mimeosomes, etc. They exist to show the complexities of humanity. How some people will do everything they can for the greater good while others will act selfishly, even when it’s to the detriment of both their own and everyone’s survival. Which are how these side-quest antagonists typically fit into X’s themes. As a suicidal character, Lao is not unique either. Throughout affinity missions and NPC dialogue, you learn that many human characters feel disassociated in their mimeosome bodies. Either seeing themselves as not real or expendable. Which is only compounded with by witnessing their friends and loved ones die with the earth.

Lao exists as a combination of ideas already presented in side-stories. He wants to die and he knows that dying can’t be permanent because of the stasis created by the mimeosomes. Even if he took his own life, he’d just be brought back in another mimeosome. It would be an endless cycle. Thus, it would easier to just tear everything to the ground than to go on living in these empty bodies dying over and over again just to protect the parts of humanity least worth saving. All he has to do is steal a piece of data, run, and wait for the clock to go out. His motives become more thematically appropriate upon learning the context of Chapter 12.

On his own, Lao provides an interesting perspective on everything. So much of X is about how humanity intends to survive after losing everything. Elma is the character most representative of this. Her sole focus is the survival of humanity. Lao asks if humanity is worth saving. After all, it would be easier to just accept death than fight this uphill battle. Which is what the conflict between him and Elma is fundamentally about. You could say during this fight, the protagonists represent fighting for humanity’s survival while Lao is fighting for humanity’s soul. That’s also why he gives up on his goal upon seeing Lin stopping Elma from shooting him. Because she proves that humanity still has a soul. It is also why he acts the way he does during Chapter 12, if humanity is worth protecting, he will protect it. The final fight with Lao isn’t about the opposition between humanity’s survival and, well, humanity, it’s about overcoming the ugliest parts of humankind to pave a way towards the future; a sweltering uncontrolled amalgamation that just wants to survive and die and aimlessly destroy where one consciousness has no hope of ever directing the mass of disfigured beings.

The fight against Lao during Chapter 11 is one of the most thematically dense moments in the series, especially among the more recent games. I’ve already talked about how Elma represents survival no matter the cost while Lao represents the cost itself. But the actual details of their debate says a lot about both Lao’s and Elma’s characters. To Elma, there is no such thing as a soul, rather the human experience can be surmised as a collection of one’s memories. There is very little variance between human to human, after all, the DNA of two people on opposite sides of the Earth are functionally identical. Thus, factors like race, class, age, etc. weren’t things she saw as important to consider when it came to archiving the human experience and, in more practical terms, who was worth saving. Lao argued that because she ignored those things, only the worst of humanity escaped Earth’s annihilation. It doesn’t matter if those issues aren’t logical, humans will still do it anyways. The only survivors from Earth were the ultra wealthy and the military. What about the people who were neither rich nor useful? The homeless, the poor, the disabled, the young, the elderly, his family. This isn’t humanity. Lao challenges the very reason you’re trying to save the human race from extinction.

Then there is Lin, the sole child to survive human extinction. She represents everything humanity is meant to protect. Though she was only brough aboard the White Whale because of her engineering talents, she is humanity’s future. Lao recognizes this. While Elma treats Lin as an adult, entrusting her with a world of responsibilities, Lao sees her as the kid she is. For her, he puts aside his depression and takes care of her in whatever capacity he can. He takes her out for tea, he jokes with her like an uncle, he keeps an eye out for her wellbeing. Even when he’s seeking to destroy the human race, he’s still trying to protect her from his hopelessness.

Lao is the climax to Xenoblade X’s themes. An interesting villain with easily understood motives hiding a lot of depth. He acts as a foil to the two protagonists, giving them a lot more depth. Elma in particular really shines during the Lao fight because he challenges everything she stands for.

1. Metal Face (Xenoblade Chronicles)

Metal Face is a pure fuckboy villain, and he leaves a glorious first impression. He has the perfect combination of amusing and terrifying, ending his run as pathetic. He establishes the Faced Mechon and the mechon as a whole as malicious and threatening, which sets the scene perfectly for every mechon-related villain after him.

The reason he’s able to establish himself as a threat so quickly and effectively is that his first two encounters consist of him taking the protagonists down a notch. During his first encounter, you just got the Monado and just obtained some way to fight the mechon, only for this one mechon to appear that cannot be damaged by the Monado and then said mechon proceeds to kill an established party member. Metal Face’s decision to leave doesn’t appear to be caused by the protagonist’s actions either. In all of Shulk’s rage and Fiora’s desperate final stand, they were only able to scratch him. The second time Metal Face shows up, he doesn’t even fight you, he only taunts you. This time, he appears right after Xord’s death, which establishes that the Faced Mechon are not invincible. Metal Face uses this time to reestablish the Faced Mechon’s threat and to undermine any growth the protagonists might have undergone between his first and second encounter. Even resident badasses and heroes Dunban and Dickson showing up only proceeds to amuse him. Xenoblade Chronicles is a shounun, which uses strength as a metaphor for growth. By having the protagonists unable to even shut him up, it’s a reminder that they are still weak and powerless. But the fact that he is forced out of the encounter by a Telethia piloted by some unknown man says that seriously threatening Metal Face, and, by extension, the mechon as a whole, is possible and the protagonists will get there. As a side bonus, it also puts the Telethia above the mechon in hierarchy early in the story, which helps elevate Zanza’s threat during the final quarter of the story.

Metal Face’s role in the story changes during Prison Island. While his first two encounters consisted of him knocking the protagonists down a peg by showing up at the worst times possible and being a dick, you are prepared for him this encounter, and you destroy him. Shulk rips his arm off and could have killed him easily if not for the revelation that the Faced Mechon were once homs. Now that the protagonists can annihilate the mechon, which is represented by Shulk chopping Metal Fuck in half, the story begins to shift towards should he do so. Metal Face goes from representing the image of all mechon to representing the evil of the mechon. If Metal Face didn’t exist to ask the question of “can Shulk destroy the mechon,” it would have diminished the tension of “should Shulk destroy Egil,” which is the primary question that follows Metal Face’s death.

During Metal Face’s encounter during Valak Mountain, he attempts to pull the same stunt as his second encounter where he appears out of nowhere to put down the protagonist’s goals of making progress, but he ultimately fails at that mission as the goal has begun changing from “defeat the mechon” to “understand the mechon.” Thus, introducing Egil here as the leader of Mechonis progresses that goal while phasing out Metal Face’s importance. As Mumkhar, he is presented as a pathetic man using the power given to him as a mechon to incite petty revenge against Dunban. Mumkhar is not an interesting character and the story doesn’t try to make him one either.

I will say that the story stuff surrounding Mumkhar is weak. Most of the details are left to the imagination. Was Mumkhar corrupted by the Monado? The mechon? Was he always a dickbag? He’s established as a coward in the prologue, but does that translate to him being a murderer? These questions at best create some uncertainty around Face Nemesis, but are undermined by her trying to have a conversation with the party before he interrupted. Mumkhar’s death was also quite weak. The party spares him, but he ultimately gets himself killed in a last ditch effort to kill the party. This could be meant to set up the idea that no everyone can or deserves to be spared, which could have lead nicely into the decision not to spare Zanza or his disciples, but this is never properly reflected on by the party, which results in Metal Face’s death feeling like a cop-out.

Overall, Metal Face does an amazing job establishing the groundwork for Xenoblade Chronicles. He gives the mechon a face before that torch can be passed to Egil. He also sets the scene of the conflict of the Homs and Mechon as being a simple conflict, which will be subverted later in the game. On his own, Metal Face strikes a strong balance between fun and threatening. His existence enhances the presence of many other villains that follow him.

17 notes · View notes