Hey, look! It’s a game that’s already been on one of my Game of the Year lists! Whoops!
- Release Year: 2025
- Developer: MonolithSoft
- Platform: Switch
So I guess it’s no surprise that I’ve played this before then, eh? I won’t bother hooking up the Wii U to pull the exact amount of time I put into the original release, but I can guarantee it was well over 100 hours. Xenoblade X is one of my favourite games of all time, and I’ve basically been obsessed with it since even before it came out. What of the Definitive Edition then? Well, it’s been a busy year, so I’ve only played just over 80 hours of it. I haven’t even finished the final chapter yet, if I’m honest, so I can’t even tell you if the new content is worth playing!
What I can tell you about, however, is the plot of the game. Xenoblade Chronicles X starts off with a wicked cutscene where people are fleeing from Earth as alien forces are locked in an epic battle all around it. The planet gets blown up, and one of the escaping vessels, the White Whale, is inexplicably sucked into a wormhole of sorts. The ship is expelled from the wormhole and crash lands on a mysterious planet called Mira, where life is abundant and especially hungry for Earthlings. You and your crewmates set out to establish a colony and a new life on Mira, while also investigating the many secrets of the planet.
This is somewhere in the realm of an action RPG, where you run around freely, exploring the world at your leisure, finding treasures, completing quests, and battling hundreds of thousands of local animals along the way. Combat is both active and menu based, so you have free control of your dude, but have a palette of special moves called “arts” to choose from. Each art has a cooldown timer, and many have special effects depending on where you’re standing in relation to the enemy or if you use them in combination with certain others. I imagine that this is very similar to how a typical MMORPG plays.
What’s really special about Xenoblade X are the skells. Maybe about halfway through the game, you’re given your very own mech suit to roll around in. This not only gives you a huge leg up in battles, allowing you to fight ever-stronger enemies and mow down the weaker ones with ease, but skells also transform into vehicles, so you get to zip around the world way faster than ever. It’s a monumental shift after having spent so many hours playing entirely on-foot, and I don’t think any upgrade in any other video game has ever been nearly as satisfying and life-changing. And then –and then– a few chapters later, just as you’re getting used to rocking around in your skell, you’ll be given the ability to fly. This completely upends how you play the game again, and I don’t even have the words to describe how awesome it is. Skells do have some drawbacks like needing to be refueled and being hella expensive to replace if you break them, but overall they are the best feature in any open world video game ever.
And yeah, that’s the short version of what I have to say about Xenoblade X. I could probably go on about this one forever, given half the chance, but I’ll spare you that fate. This is an RPG that felt just as good to play the second time as it did the first time around, and that’s something that I find is all too rare. Yes, maybe a lot of the surprise and mystery were lost, but I think that just goes to show that there’s a rock-solid foundation below the glittering surface appeal of the lore. Again, I haven’t even seen most of what’s new in this version of the game, so I will definitely be playing it more in 2026, and I’m going to savour this one for as long as I possibly can. Or at least until the next Xenoblade game happens.