I’ve put about a day’s worth of play time into Xenoblade Chronicles since its release date, and it never stops amazing me. There are plenty of great things about the game, but the one thing that keeps hitting me over and over is the gigantic world environments.
Exactly why I’m so impressed by these is beyond me; it’s not a new feature to video games. Hell, I think that in February I spent more time in Skyrim than I did in the real world, and that game is all gigantic world.
It might be that I’m just now starting the really appreciate these huge environments. Hitting the wide open Gran Pulse after spending countless hours of being funneled through linear environments in Final Fantasy XIII was an absolutely exhilarating experience, and the effect wasn’t lost on me. When I first stepped out onto the Bionis’ Leg (pictured above), I got really excited and thought to myself “Oh man! This is the Gran Pulse of Xenoblade! Already! It must be huuuuge!” and then I remembered that I’d just spent almost 13 hours playing in the equally humongous environment of the lake and hillsides around Colony 9.
Colony 9, for those who aren’t yet on the Xenoblade wagon (shaaaaame), is the starting area of the game. And it is humongous. Like I said above, I spent roughly 12-13 hours playing around in there alone, doing sidequests, exploring the hillsides, challenging too-strong monsters. How many JRPGs give you such a large place to play around in right off the bat? Not too many. Unlike Skyrim and its cousins, Xenoblade doesn’t give you free access to the entire world right off the hop, but it does give you a big new playground after every few story bits.
The downside is that even though you have these huge environments to play around in, there isn’t a whole lot to do in them. There are truckloads of sidequests if you have the patience to stalk the townsfolk long enough, but most of them are monster-slaying requests or monster-loot fetch-quests. Monsters in any one area come in many shapes and sizes, but can generally be sorted down into two groups: ones you can kill and ones you won’t be able to kill for a long time. In the Colony 9 area, there are monster groups ranging from level 1-10 and then they rocket up to 70+; nothing in between. So unless you want to grind those weak mooks forever, there is sort of a ceiling to character development, at least in the early areas.
There are also no treasures in the field. Sort of. There are little collectible baubles that randomly appear all over the place as blue wips that you can pick up. You can log one of each in your colletopaedia, and when you complete a category of items or location page, you get a special stat-buffing gem. Once you’ve logged one of each type, these doodads are just good for selling and bartering with NPCs. Monsters drop loot too, including armor and weapon, but they mostly seem to be crap compared to the local shop stocks.
The real reward for running around the world is the thrill of adventure, discovering new places, and looking at those beautiful landscapes. The Bionis’ Leg area alone is so majestic and verdant that I don’t think I could ever get bored of running to the top of cliffs and looking down on the scenery. It also helps that the field music tracks are fantastic and I could listen to them forever. This is most likely because the uber-talented Yoko Shimomura is one of the composers of the game’s soundtrack. I desperately want to import a copy of said soundtrack, but with an Amazon price tag of $75, I can’t convince myself to pull the trigger on this one. It would definitely be the crown jewel of my video game soundtrack collection though…
And that’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m not very far into the game yet, so I’m willing to bet you that there will be more thoughts on it in the future.