As much as I’m enjoying Xenoblade Chronicles X, I’ve got to admit that it has one massive, glaring fault: the online multiplayer mode.

To be fair, it’s more that the feature that doesn’t quite work the way I expected, rather than it being outright broken or something. The online component is strung throughout all facets of the game, but in a way that you could ignore it completely if you so choose. To be so tightly woven into the game and remain unobtrusive, most of the multiplayer aspects are asynchronous.

Oh. Yeah, that’s already disappointing.

Let’s dial it back a bit and start with what I was expecting. I had been under the impression that the online multiplayer component was like Monster Hunter, where you team up with a few other people to go out on missions to slay gigantic beasts. This mode does exist in some capacity within the game, but it’s very limited and buried under a pile of other, less interesting features.

After you get so far in the story, the game will ask you if you want to join an Online or Offline squad. As far as I can tell, the game doesn’t really care which option you choose. Everything seemed to be exactly the same when I tried each one out. I think it’s just that if you join an online squad, it’s implied that you’ll be participating in the multiplayer aspects, instead of just ignoring them.

XCX has a few online features similar to those in Dragon’s Dogma. For one, the world will be populated with avatars of other players, who you can recruit into your party if you get tired of palling around with the stock allies. This is a neat feature, and I like it, but it’s not enough.

The other concept it shares with DragDog is the Global Nemesis. One big, scary monster is popped into an online arena, and then player teams from around the world throw themselves at it until it dies. Or at least I assume that this is how the feature works. I’ve never actually been able to face off against the Global Nemesis because… well, I’m still not totally sure. XCX doesn’t do a great job of explaining any of its features. Hooray!

When it comes to actual multiplayer shenanigans, it’s just as confusing and complicated. Every squad is handed out a palette of five Squad Tasks to complete within 45 minutes. I don’t know how often these are distributed, but that 45 minutes is your only window to play online. The squad tasks are simple: kill a certain number of monsters or find a certain number of collectables. Sometimes you can skate by easily because it only wants a certain type of monster/item, but other times it wants very specific things. Most of the time, it asks for stuff what I don’t even know what it is yet. But that problem should solve itself over time.

Completing a Squad Task will allow your squad to attempt a Squad Mission. Missions are exactly what I wanted from the online multiplayer: you and up to three other players go out and hunt a group of monsters or one really big one. But you have to earn these, which is dumb. Also, a squad can only complete a Mission once. So if four other players get to it before you, you’re SOL. Needless to say, it can actually be very difficult to play with others.

And then your unlocked Missions go away once the 45 minutes are up, and you have to start from scratch when the next bunch of Squad Tasks appears.

Argle. Bargle.

It really is a shame, because a) I seldom get excited about online multiplayer modes and b) XCX is a lot of fun to play with others. I don’t know why Monolith Soft took so many pains to make sure it’s as hard as possible to play online, but that’s the way she goes. There may even be some other online things that I don’t know about because the game is so obtuse when it comes to explaining its features. For example, I know that you can trade items with people somehow, but I have no idea how it’s done.

At the end of the day, though, the multiplayer aspects are just extra bits grafted onto a game that was designed primarily as a single-player experience, so I suppose that I ought not to gripe about it too loudly. I am really loving the game otherwise, after all.

I think that, for the next few months at least, that I am set for video games.

And by that, I mean that I have been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and that it’s going to take me a good long while to get my fill of it.

Over the weekend I squeezed in a whopping 20 hours of play. It’s essentially the only thing I did on Sunday (and the only thing I will be doing for many a Sunday to come). During that time, I did a lot of exploring, a lot of collecting, and a lot of dying, but weirdly enough I didn’t actually “accomplish” all that much.

I played through the story up until the end of chapter 3, at which point I said “that’s enough of that; I’mma go muck around on my own now.” And muck about I did. Here are a few highlights and notes from my first weekend on Mira:

• Five minutes into the game, I met a large dinosaur with a leech face and elastic legs. It killed me over and over again. So I levelled up by slaughtering a family of massive boars and still got killed by the elasti-saurus a few more times.
• Near the start of the game, there is a wrecked robot on a small plateau across a wide gap, many feet above the ocean below. I took a running leap and just barely made it across. I felt like a superhero. And then my level was too low to examine the wreckage.
• There are no invisible walls anywhere. I spent a good twenty minutes climbing the crystals and mountains surrounding New LA just to see if I could.
• There is a force field around the edges of the map though. It’s a solid fifteen-minute swim to hit said barrier. I learned the hard way so that you don’t have to.
• I found a small, completely unmarked island populated by super-powered crabs out in the middle of the ocean. So maybe it’s worth swimming around in the empty space for a while.
• Some dork asked me to find his lost cell phone. Somehow it had ended up on a hill populated by vicious four-armed apes. He did not pay me enough for retrieving it.
• My party was being chased and killed one-by-one by a way-too-strong Grex. I tried to escape by jumping into a lake and swimming away, but it just followed me in and killed me just as I reached the shore. I should have known, as Grexes look like a cross between a wolf and a shark..
• I climbed up to the highest peaks that I could manage, and jumped off. No matter how high up you jump from, there is no fall damage.
• Jumping off a cliff is a great way to escape a pursuing monster. I have been saved many times by leaping to what would be my doom in any other game. Except for that one time that I accidentally jumped into a pack of even stronger monsters.
• One time I was slaughtering a pack of sheep when a titanic spider-thing strolled in and then smooshed my party because a stray laser dinged one of its legs.
• There is a gigantic waterfall In Primordia. It is exceptionally beautiful, but also disappointing because there are no hidden caves behind the falls (there is one that goes in the side, but it’s not the same).
• I could not figure out for the life of me how the online multiplayer is supposed to work. Which is a pain, because I was actually really looking forward to the multiplayer component.

It’s a pretty place. Prettier than Boston, that’s for sure.

Well, I meant that the planet itself is pretty. The creatures that live there are another story.

I have spent hours and hours (days, even!) researching and pondering it, and I believe that I have finally discovered all three things that are wrong with Yoshi’s Woolly World.

1. Too Many Costumes

Yarn Yoshi is damn near the cutest thing ever conceived (the crown goes to Yarn Poochy), so you already get that joy of watching cuddly little Yoshi waddle around as you play. But then, there are the costumes. Dozens and dozens of patterns to dress up Yoshi in, each more adorable than the last. Having to choose one to play as at any given time is an impossible task, and trying to select a costume has siphoned away hours of my life.

Granted, you have to earn them all, so if you aren’t collecting those smiling yarn skeins obsessively, you’ll only ever have to choose from the standard green and red Yoshis (which is still a struggle). The amiibo costumes can only be unlocked by scanning the corresponding amiibo, so that’s another saving grace, I guess. Buying them all is a massive hurdle in itself, and the monotony of scanning each one individually could kill a man.

Still, how am I supposed to get any levels played when I have to actively make a choice between Citrus Yoshi and Duck Hunt Yoshi? The game should really have included a random pattern spinner at the beginning of each stage.

2. The Appeal of the Woolly World

All I can think about when I stop playing Yoshi’s Woollly World is how much the real world sucks. I want to live in a world where everything is made out of craft materials, where any type of terrain is soft and plushy, and even the fiercest creatures are cute and huggable.

I have often said that I would love to live in a house made of pillows, and here Nintendo has realized that to some degree. Stages are built from knitted grasslands with yarn ball trees and bushes, mountains made of stacked cushions with scarves and doilies laid on top of them, and literal pillow forts. Sequins line the waters to make them sparkle. On the world map, there is a volcano that is a propped-up toque with a red and orange striped scarf draped over it as an approximation of a lava flow.

After visiting Yoshi’s Woolly World, reality just looks that much more awful.

3. The Start-up Screen

Every Wii U game has a little splash screen that shows up when you launch it. It sits there for a bit, and some of them are more complex than others. Some are a static screen, some have little animations, and some segue very smoothly into the actual title screen of the game.

The start-up screen for Yoshi’s Woolly world is actually three screens. First, an adorable image of Yoshi and Poochy. Second, a page with the logo and the three yarn Yoshi amiibos. Lastly, a chart of all the controllers that are compatible with this game. The actual images are not the issue.

No, the problem is the music. There’s a jolly little tune that plays on the loading screen, albeit very strangely. When the first picture changes to the second, the tune fades out and then restarts, which is a little jarring. And then when it’s showing the control options, the music just stops. That image tends to be the one that stays on-screen the longest, so you’re sitting there in silence for a good five-to-eight seconds. It’s really weird.

Oh, wait, that was almost an actual knock at the game in this post that was supposed to be humorously suggesting that Yoshi’s Woolly World actually has no faults. Opps!