Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Review

We are in a much different place in time than we were when Xenoblade Chronicles X came out almost a decade ago. Xenoblade as a series itself is in an extremely different spot — including that there’s even a Xenoblade series at all. When Xenoblade X came out all those years ago, it was a critically acclaimed yet polarizing game for many. I was excited for it when it was revealed, but it never stuck with me when I got it on launch. In a time where a “Xenoblade 2” didn’t exist, this was just too different from what I wanted out of a Xenoblade successor. 

Years of hindsight have done many favors for Xenoblade X, and the new Definitive Edition specifically is a culmination of Monolith Soft’s efforts in making the Xenoblade series fully accessible on the Nintendo Switch. All their time spent learning to optimize games has been building up to this moment to reintroduce the series’ most divisive entry. Perhaps I’m simply older, or maybe the small changes in this modern remaster made that much of a difference, but I truly grew to love my time with Xenoblade X after all these years

While it still bears ‘Xenoblade’ in its title for a reason, it would be best to consider X its own beast. You can definitely draw some story connections with the other games, but you do not need any knowledge or understanding of the main trilogy to understand what is happening here. After the Earth is destroyed in an intergalactic war taking place outside its planetary doorstep, a ship called the White Whale manages to escape. As it travels through space for the remnants of humanity to find a new home for themselves, one of the alien forces that destroyed earth tracks and shoots down the ship down over the planet of Mira. 

After designing your amnesiac avatar in a character creator, you are removed from stasis by a woman named Elma. She takes you back to humanity’s base on this planet, New Los Angeles, or NLA. This city has managed to carve out a spot for itself in this world, but their time is limited. Hidden somewhere on Mira after the crash is something called The Lifehold, which you’re told houses the majority of the people that were traveling on the White Whale. You’re recruited into the organization BLADE to keep the peace in NLA and scour your new home for the Lifehold.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Xenoblade X is an important step in the evolution of the now-cherished Monolith Soft series, laying the groundwork that bridges the gameplay evolution between the first two numbered games. Regardless, it is important for those trying this for the first time to know that the design priorities are in a very different place from the numbered entries. It’s taken me many years to view this game as the successful experiment it attempted to be, instead of the betrayal I perceived it as when it first came out. I suppose I was young and very dramatic. Even now having come around to adore X, it’s still pretty important to set expectations to what kind of game this is.

In short, this is the Gameplay Xenoblade. There is a lot of effort put into its writing, but the priorities of the developers were clearly on making a sprawling open world where traversal and combat were fun first and foremost. In my eyes, this was a massive success. There have always been MMO-like inspirations at play for this series, and I’d argue that this is the closest these games have ever truly felt to one. 

There’s a lot of things to see and do in Xenoblade X, but most of the content on offer relates to exploring the world and doing side missions. There is an enjoyable main story, but character level recommendations for each following mission clearly incentivize you to embrace the side content. The concept of level-gating might be annoying to some, but is a crucial choice to make for a game like X. Outside of 3, where I felt the side content was integrated the best, my playthroughs of the other Xenoblade games involved mainlining the main quests and doing very minimal side content. X’s design explicitly encourages players to look at the side content as a way to strengthen their team, and rewards them with quests that get them out and exploring every inch of the world map. 

Mira, the planet itself, is the true star here – being a massive open world made up of five key regions. Each of these regions is broken down into hexagonal quadrants that you can maintain in an in-game app called Frontier Nav. This is functionally your map, which has been moved out of the Wii-U gamepad and into an easily accessible menu. You’ll expand this map by placing probes in key quadrants across the map, which will then highlight the area around you and tell you what main activity is in each quadrant. Every single quadrant has a specific activity you can do, and this can be anything from fighting a Tyrant (boss monsters roaming the map), doing a quest, finding a hidden item, and more. Doing each will add points towards your completion of Mira and specifically that region. This is a great way to gamify open-world progression that packs the map to the brim with things to do. 

FrontierNav is pretty crucial to your experience, mostly because of Xenoblade X’s economy. You have the option to both craft and buy equipment for your entire party. When you unlock Skells, the pilotable robots in the game, things can get expensive fast. You’ll need to buy the Skell Frames themselves, including the equipment and weapons, for you and anyone else you want to take into battle. It’s overwhelming if you’re not being attentive to FrontierNav. Data probes can be placed and re-arranged around, with many varieties to choose from and even more to unlock. The key ones are mining probes, research probes, and storage probes, and each will allow you to passively collect resources, money, and Miranium (a separate currency you can use to make items or invest in NLA’s economy) respectively. Exploring more will allow you to make more money, which allows you to buy better gear which will allow you to make it to new places on the map. It’s an incredibly satisfying loop, especially by the end where I was able to fly around the map knocking out quadrants with ease. 

Before this playthrough, the furthest I’d ever gotten in Xenoblade X was finishing Chapter 3. I wish I had kept going, because after Chapter 4 the game opens itself up to a game with an overwhelming amount of depth. A lot of this is in the battle system, which I can try my best to explain. There are three main class branches you can choose between for your avatar, and six types of different weapon type loadouts. Each loadout style has a different weapon and gun, and by mastering that weapons set of classes allows you to use it in any other class. Every class can acquire a series of passive skills, and those skills can be used in every class. Going through a weapon’s full class tree will allow you to unlock more battle arts for those weapons. Both skills and arts can be upgraded with battle points, which can also be gained by exploration.

The combat has the same bones as the rest of the series, where combat progresses in real time, but has every character’s actions work on a cooldown system. Without any special weapon like the Monado to give you a massive advantage, you’re out there living and dying by how you build your characters. You do have some advantages, however. Limbs can be targeted individually, and now feature easy to see health bars. Destroying them will lock an enemy out of specifics arts. You also have Overdrive, which speeds up all your arts and allows you to deal out devastating combos. This was originally criticized for being too confusing, but thanks to UI improvements the system just felt natural.

There are some specific aspects of this battle system that elude me to this day, but I think it all comes together wonderfully. Soul Voices, additional abilities, to name a few I dabbled in but didn’t feel were crucial to beat the game. In terms of gamefeel though, being able to sprint and jump around the battlefield to change positioning on the fly adds a lot of frantic energy to the core Xenoblade combat. Definitive Edition cleans up the battle UI substantially, and with a redesigned tutorial system that doesn’t obscure the specifics of how the game works under the hood, the play experience has only improved.

The biggest change to combat is the new Quick Art system, which is represented by a bar at the bottom of the battle UI. As long as you have this meter, you can press the Y button to essentially negate the cooldown of arts while in ground combat. I’m a bit conflicted on this, since it kind of breaks a lot of the intended balance by allowing you to spam some of your most powerful arts repeatedly. Having said that, it undoubtedly speeds up battles for the early game. This was appreciated in the introductory hours as I tried to catch back up to my initial playthrough attempt. I’m just not sure if over relying on it will have new players unprepared for the various difficulty spikes hidden throughout the game. It also makes on foot combat feel much faster than Skell combat, since they don’t have access to this mechanic. 

Despite that (or maybe even because of that), Skell battles offer an indescribable high. As soon as you get your Skell license, you’ll likely never want to battle on foot ever again. Skells are how you’ll likely be spending your time fighting the larger monsters across Mira, and you should look into getting one as soon as the option becomes available. There’s enough shared DNA with normal combat to have them not feel out of place. You’ll just need to maintain flow and keep your equipment up to date. Every weapon or part equipped on a Skell’s body part is associated with an Art on your bar, so there are a lot of reasons here to invest heavily in buying new skells and weapons for them regularly to maintain a pace with the world around you. Getting to challenge powerful Tyrants that destroyed me before, or crushing small enemies with a massive mech sword? Skells never got old.

There’s a natural risk/reward element to Skells that give the inclusion some weight. Your carelessness can get them destroyed, requiring you to go all the way back to the BLADE Barracks and either replenish one with your insurance or spend a lot of money to replace it. That makes it even more exhilarating to take risks in battle and have them pay off. There were so many split-second moments where I was just barely able to pop an Overdrive before my Skell exploded, then chaining my attacks in with the thrilling Cockpit camera mode that will randomly change the POV to inside your mech while also restoring all your art cooldowns. 

What you do outside of battles also has depth and meaning. This might sound kind of strange to many people out there, but I love video games that simulate working a satisfying job. Hear me out, but in a way this game is a bit of an employment simulator. Your 9 to 5 just happens to be incredibly fun. As a member of BLADE, there are four types of missions: Story Missions, Affinity Missions, Normal Missions, and Basic Missions. Most of the quests you’ll be doing are Normal and Basic. The latter are selected on a board and are typical quests where you gather materials or kill X amount of enemies. These are great for making some quick cash, and some can even point you in the direction of Normal Quests.

The normal quests are your traditional RPG Side Quests. An NPC will need a hand with some kind of problem in their life, and you’ll go out to take care of it for them. To be quite honest, the gameplay of each of these are your standard MMO affair just like Basic Quests. Talk to people, go get someone materials, fight a boss, and so on. There’s a fair criticism to be made about gameplay variety in side quests lacking, but I never found myself bored of what was on offer. I’ve never minded RPG quests doing this as long as I enjoy the main gameplay loop, and it’s fantastic here. What elevates these quests to being special is the writing and their effect on the world around you. 

Imagine my surprise when I found my first side quest with multiple outcomes based on my choices. Imagine my further surprise when I found out that was how most of Xenoblade X’s Normal Missions work. As in any good sci-fi where a group of humans are out of their element in a galaxy far larger than themselves, this game is full of moral dilemmas. Despite being ‘side content’, these normal quests are where, in my opinion, the best writing of the entire game is. You’ll find yourself running all over doing things from resolving grudges, helping time travelers, solving horrific alien infections, dealing with literal xenophobic extremists, delivering pizzas, or encouraging a young woman to get out there and explore Mira. There are a lot of scenarios, and it seems like they tapped into just as much as you could get out of this kind of sci-fi premise.

I happened to be unlucky enough to get extremely sick during the review period of this game. It wasn’t life-threatening, just some kind of local flu, but I was stuck in bed basically only able to play Xenoblade X for a whole week. Having nothing better to do with that time, I decided to dive head first into the amount of side content I had started to let build up. The reality of the matter is that I was stuck on a different planet, and had no money to buy a bigger gun. Those days I spent exploring Mira, helping NPCs in need, upgrading my equipment, fighting bigger and badder foes? It truly felt magical, as if I was in a trance as the gameplay loop washed over me. There were entire eight-hour long sessions where I didn’t touch a single story mission. 

In that effort of doing every single Normal Mission I came across, I got to see how this was actually helping NLA flourish. New alien species started to move in and cohabitate with the initially isolated human survivors. The streets started to be filled with so many new friends of all different kinds of species. This would unlock even more side quests, as conflicts that have divided humanity played out all over again. It creates a very strong parallel to our real world. This is where your input comes in.

The ideal endings to side quests don’t feel as if humans need to condescendingly correct all the behaviors of their new neighbors. Instead, you feel as if you’re building bridges and helping all these people make genuine connections. But in the same way, your actions can get people killed. Not every story has a happy ending, and some of humanity’s worst traits made it into the White Whale as it escaped Earth. There’s clearly a lot of progress to be made, and Xenoblade X respects your agency in how much you wish to be part of it. That framing is some of the most rewarding motivation I’ve had to engage with a game’s world. 

For something a bit more personally intimate, there are Affinity Missions. While the gameplay will often be similar to the other quest types, these so often feel like the brief moments in which you get a drink at a bar with some coworkers after a long shift. Your party exists entirely of BLADE members, all of who are out there risking their lives every day. It’s deeply satisfying to get to know your party members in this way, as it’s up to you to make the effort to learn more about the people around you. They’re voice acted as well, which really makes have a similar weight to many of the main story missions presentation-wise. 

Included in Definitive Edition’s main story are new party members with their own Affinity Mission quest chains. The two ones to highlight are Neilnail and Liesel. Neilnail is there to offer up more lore behind the mysterious Qlurians, and Liesel has a more down-to-earth campaign as she works on getting an experimental new Skell out to market. While Neilnail was a fun character, I think Liesel had the more engaging story and better rewards overall. This mech, called the Hraesvelg, loses the ability to customize parts in exchange for ease of use. Also exclusive to these Skells is Cruise Mode, a modification to their flight module that sees it turn into a plane and travel the map quicker. I find this pretty pointless, but I’m sure someone more impatient might find use in it.

With how much love and care is put into the “optional” missions, I feel this makes a very clear statement about the creative team’s intent. You are not inherently special, and there are a lot of people in this world simply trying to live their lives. They might all be not be going out there and doing extraordinary things like fighting large monsters or leaping off massive cliffs without taking fall damage, but they’re going through their own struggles. Their issues are important to them, just as the main story might be important to you. Getting a chance to make an effort to connect to regular people and help them through their problems is a brilliantly compelling story told directly through gameplay. 

Monolith Soft are wizards when it comes to making Nintendo hardware sing. Xenoblade Chronicles X was already an impressive game when it initially released for the Wii U, considering the ridiculous scale of Mira. The game is not wholly devoid of load screens, but if you started in NLA, you could hop into a Skell and fly around the entire map without ever seeing one. Your first moment after unlocking the flight module where you fly over the barrier of your home and see the entire map around you had my jaw drop. The other games in the series have their large-scale maps broken into zones, so to have one continuous open world? For a 2015 game on the Wii U? I can’t get over how ambitious this game was.

The upgrade to the Nintendo Switch for the game’s Definitive Edition has helped X in many ways. Alongside the improved model quality and the redone faces for human characters, the game is presented at a much higher internal resolution than the Wii U version. If you’re familiar with my work, I play a lot of games on Switch. I adore my Switch a lot, but there are definitely tech limitations that make a lot of games not look as good as they could. I don’t have a way to count pixels on both handheld and docked play, but both modes seem to offer a native resolution image. If there is any kind of upscaling going on, it certainly wasn’t apparent. Regardless of the exact resolution numbers, this is the most crisp Xenoblade game on Switch. It was a treat to be able to play a game this expansive without any major visual setbacks. 

Performance targets 30 FPS, and for the first half of my playthrough, I’d say it mostly stayed locked at that with only occasional dips. For those not aware, the world of Xenoblade X gets a bit more complicated the more you play it. Specifically, New LA expands the more you play the game, with more and more models that need to load in as you play. As of the launch version of the game, 1.0.1, these hitches are the only real performance issue of note. I might have a moderate tolerance for frame rate drops in my games, but this was more than playable for my entire 93-hour playthrough. I can only hope either future patches or the hardware improvements of the Switch 2 make this a complete non-issue.

There are several under-the-hood improvements peppered throughout the experience, but some of these might be a tad divisive. BLADE levels are gone, and so are the field skills that would keep you from opening chests on the overworld. You can now change your party anywhere, instead of finding the character’s hanging out in NLA. Every party member now levels up regardless of if they’re in your active party. The time of day can now be changed wherever you are, right in the system menu. In total, there are a lot of small sharp edges sanded off, but ultimately I think these changes only helped me finally engage in a way that didn’t overwhelm me to the point of pushing me away from the game.

In terms of things I wish were just a bit better, I have a handful of minor ones. FrontierNav being converted to a whole on-screen menu is great, but I do wish the game let you zoom out further. When taking a bunch of new basic or normal missions in NLA it can be a bit tedious to scroll through the whole map to find them. The most zoomed-out option is still just a bit too zoomed-in for my liking. 

There’s also the draw distance, which is on the shorter side. I wouldn’t typically mind this, as Xenoblade Chronicles X is clearly not striving for anything close to AAA realism (and it's better off for it). important parts of the map will always load in rather efficiently, but objects in any particular dense part of that will have aggressive pop-in. I did have a handful of occasions near the end though where my Skell was going too fast and a large Tyrant loaded in right in front of me to initiate a fight. Or alternatively, missions where you need to listen for NPC gossip in a certain vicinity can be hard to pinpoint when the icons don’t always load in until you’re right in front of them.

Xenoblade Chronicles X has an online multiplayer component, which Definitive Edition brought back. While I’d love to go into specifics on how the multiplayer runs or how enjoyable that content is, I did not have access to this feature during the review period. 

I have completed all of the main story in Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition. All of it. There’s a lot I’m not allowed to talk about, but overall it’s pretty good. The characterization of cast can be a bit simple on the surface, but the moral discussions the cast often finds itself in are compelling. For every Tatsu, there’s a guy like Lao who can provide intriguing commentary on relevant issues like classism. It’s ultimately not my favorite Xenoblade story, but the specific ways in which it weaves its themes into the game design as a whole is downright incredible. While I truly think the side content is where this game shines the most, the main story does still hit hard when it needs to deliver an impact, and I was really satisfied by the direction it went.

There’s a lot of attention brought to the idea that conflict is so often caused by fear and an inability to understand those who are different from us. The only way we’re going to continue existing is if we find a common ground. These are all simple ideas that I obviously agree with, but why it feels so novel anyway is just how much this is integrated into the play experience. I don’t find the story to be a masterpiece, but so few games feel like they fully utilize the unique interactive medium the way X does. This is the platonic ideal an open-world game should strive for in regards to themes. Going out there and exploring the world around you, goes hand in hand with trying to make that world a better place.

I can’t deny that one of the surface-level reasons for me being more welcoming to X is becoming a massive fan of Mobile Suit Gundam in recent. I’ve always loved robots, and the Skell in the reveal trailer was the whole reason I bought a Wii U all those years ago. I’m a massive mecha fanatic, but Gundam specifically is one of those things I could talk to someone for hours about. For example: I only just now found out that the designer for the NLA mechs was Takayuki Yanase, who did the robot design for Gundam 00. This probably explains a lot of why I think all the Skells look so amazing. There’s so much brilliant inspiration peppered throughout the game.

Having said that, I don’t think it was a coincidence that Hiroyuki Sawano was asked to compose the original game right after finishing up work on the Gundam Unicorn OVAs. To me, Sawano’s music is Xenoblade Chronicles X. Familiar yet distinctly otherworldly. Stylized and in your face. They both wear their hearts on their sleeves, and I’ve been going back to these songs for years even before I gave the game another proper chance. I was all for new Xenoblade X music, or even re-orchestrations. This guy had Gundam Narrative and Hathaway under his belt now to say the least, with VIGILANTE and TRACER (from those two movies, respectively) feeling like a distant evolution of this game’s battle themes. Specifically, the Tyrant theme Uncontrollable. I was really hoping we’d get an exhilarating new battle theme that lived up to that pedigree. 

If you were as overeager as I was in this regard, I’d rein in those expectations. Outside of a very small number of tracks, there hasn’t been any re-orchestrations. I can only assume Sawano’s rise in popularity means he could only return in a supervisor role for the new music in this game. There is no way to know how much of a hand he actually had in the new songs for DE until some kind of soundtrack releases, but we do know he worked with fellow composer Misaki Umase on the new tracks. I don’t think any of the new songs are bad by any means, but it was a missed opportunity to not have him make a couple of new vocal tracks for this new game. There were far fewer than I would like.

While there might be some people unhappy at certain mechanics being simplified, I feel like Definitive Edition largely plays to Xenoblade X’s strengths. This game truly felt ahead of its time in regards to open-world design, and there’s an unbelievable amount of customization on offer to players who love obsessing over character builds. I wish some of the simplified mechanics could be toggles for players looking for parts of the original experience to return

There’s also a lot to be said about how impressive it is to play such a sprawling and complex open-world game on what is essentially a portable device. This feels like the Switch’s swan song as Nintendo prepares to enter their next era. It’s hard to not wish there was just a bit more new content here, but in all fairness the base game is overflowing with things to do. Despite some gripes, Definitive Edition was a great way to play one of my new favorite open world games. I’m excited to dive in to clean my plate of all the remaining side content out there, and even play the multiplayer when it unlocks. There is truly no game like Xenoblade Chronicles X.