More than meets the eye
The awaited sequel to Xenoblade Chronicles (which I loved when I got into it) and I was gonna skip this game due to not feeling it. Giant mech-suits? Earth humans on a foreign planet and no sign of the Monado or any other Xenoblade connection than the nopon? But then I fell in the Bayonetta trap of thinking, is the game gonna be hard as hell to get in the future? Maybe and since it's a JRPG why not give it a chance? 150+ hours later after the main story is over I can say it was a really fun and interesting game. And I still have much to do before I might say I'm oversaturated with this game, but since I write this the week before the newest Zelda and Nintendo console is upon us I might just have one week left until my focus is shifted away from this and I'm glad I finished the main game at least. Although it isn't that reassuring when the game ends with "this game never truly ends!".
Somethings evil watching over you, coming down from the sky above, and there's nothing you can do!
Game starts in space as the White Whale, a ship sent from earth is fighting for its survival as one of the last remnants of earth that was destroyed by the Ganglions, an alien race/crime syndicate (?). Mechs fly across the space as they fight the enemy, but still the ship comes crashing down splintering across several parts of the planet Mira and the main hull makes an emergency landing and from that wreckage New LA is formed, populated by the crew of the white whale and other survivors the rescue teams can find. That was 3 months earlier. The real game starts when colonel Elma rescues you from a stasis pod that was thrown out during the emergency landing and contains your customised body (male or female and don't worry, you can change later after the right side quests). You suffers of course from amnesia and are brought back to the city and pretty much enlisted into one of the 8 different divisions of BLADE, the main military force/engineer corps/resource scavenger that enables the city to exist. So you join Team Elma and pretty much take in Lin Lee Koo, a mechanic/engineer specialist at 16 years old to round up the power trio of the game with pretty much a rotating fourth member. So out and explore, avoid the dangerous wild life and explore this foreign planet. Main mission is to find the Lifehold core which contains 20 millions humans in stasis and through that resurrect the human race.
You got the touch! You got the power!
During the course you will find other aliens that are friendly like the nopon and Ma-Nons or dangerous like the Ganglions that still hunts you. You will also help alien races under the thumb of the ganglions like the Prone (the main fighter alien), Z... I can't write out their names, but they are pretty much sanitising the world around them, Wrothians the cat-aliens and the Orphes, some bug like Vulcan like race. You have five main continents to explore and it's huge especially in the beginning as you run around and if you are skilled enough can find a completely new area by scaling a mountain way before you are supposed to and pretty much die by running right into the first enemy you didn't see. And death is pretty much a slap on the wrist. Just back to the last landmark, exp intact together with everything else. As the original Xenoblade, it push for exploration and maybe even just run past enemies to reach a new landmark to get even further. As I praised the old game for this growth in levels I see it happily back here. And speaking of, one of my complaints was item management that forced me to constantly sell stuff to get new stuff. Haven't had this problem here. Weapons, armours, skell-armor, skell-weapons and different types of items are divided with 999 slots for each. Thank god! Another problem I had was the damn item rewards spawned from monsters that you needed to progress Colony 6 and they solved a similar issues here... by being able to use reward tickets to buy the items directly. Reward tickets you get by doing squad missions that appear randomly and is connected to the online functions of this game. So you get them as long as someone is doing them and everyone can help finishing the missions. It's really nice and is a good way to handle it... but when the online functionality disappears or when no one is playing it's just back to grinding.
Metroplex looks a bit different from Earth 2005.
So the story pretty much starts when you are sent to rescue Nelson and his team, a character never mentioned before that's gone missing and you have to find them. Turns out they have been killed by the Prone that shows no mercy and just wants to fight. After the battle you find the nopon Tatsu that will be the comic relief in the game as he is constantly being threatened to be turned to lunch for the humans... now, while they are funny, I wonder why humans would like to eat a talking person? And don't say it is a joke, I saw how Lin put him in a stew and put spices on him. Still, after that you get to Oblivia where you try to save the Ma-Non from the Prone, but during the final fight against the Prone skells (skells are pretty much these giant mechs that can fly and turn to cars... transformers basically) Tatsu ends up in the line of fire, your avatar runs up and pushes him out of the way and gets hit by the blast sending him/her of. And the first twist of the game is shown. The humans aren't humans, but mimeosomes, a robot avatar that is controlled from the stasis pods of the humans in the lifehold. We know this now since my arm was blasted of gushing with robotic fluids as my character screams in shock until Lin sedates you and brings you back to NLA. They hand wave it as my character having amnesia, which is a fair assumption and you can explain the cycle of death and rebirth as well as jumping and running over across a whole mountain. And another plot point is announced since the lifehold gets a new meaning. Everyone that dies in the game can be reborn by awaken the body in the lifehold. And the core is running out of power and if it dies everyone dies, all of humanity. And they display it on the tower in the middle of the city. Talking about a doomsday clock.
Need a hand?
Next episodes are a bit here and there. One mission is to retrieve an ancient skell that the Ganglions tries to get, the next to defend the city from an invasion by the ganglions that wants to take it back. During these missions you start to suspect there is a traitor in your ranks. You blow up a warship, break up the Ganglions hold on the wrothians and your suspicions are correct when Lao, another BLADE that helped you and even joined you at times, steals the prototype skell and takes it to the ganglions together with the data on where the core is hidden. After tracking him to the stronghold of the ganglions on the furthest continent you defeat Lao and forces him to surrender and give back the data. His reason is the way the 20 million people were selected for the colonisation project. He was forced to leave wife and child behind while the rich and well-connected got a free pass. Only the crew was handpicked for their skills, you know, like every sci-fi escape from earth story ever. Anyway, with the coordinates for the core you head out to sea with a squadron of skells piloted by the different playable characters and Team Elma acts as the strike team together with... I believe the original characters since I think the other characters were originally dlc characters for the japanese... but I'm not sure (looking it up it was the DLC characters to give them some extra lines for the finale). Entering the core forces the leader of the ganglions, Lexxar to use the ancient skell, the vita, and strike through the shield and fight agains your characters. And here I had to restart and grind first for levels to reach 59, 56, 56, 55 on the team I had and then to get credits to get lvl 50 skells. Took me a whole day, but then the battle could start. first phase no skell destroyed, second phase one skell lost and another plot twist is revealed. There is no cryochamber for the bodies since everything been digitalised into the cores super computer. The plan was to create new bodies with the genetic material in the core that can instagrowth and transfer over the conscious from the computers into the bodies. But Lexxar isn't finished and starts to hit the computer with some green lightning bolts which activates the defence mechanisms. It begins to create chimeras. And you got to fight 10 of them. And yet another skell bites the dust. Meanwhile Lexxar is skewered by Lao that have arrived at the scene and they fall into the genetic fluid all around them, which binds Lao and Lexxars DNA together and forms a giant demonic looking chimera. And now my skell gets busted. And the thing is I was a class lvl 1 at the time on the bottom ladder with a raygun and knife as the weapons I had. And the knife was the better weapon. So too recap, I'm running around fighting the end boss with a knife... and I F***ING BEAT HIM!!! WITH A KNIFE!!! BEST GAME EVER!!!
I'm getting Resident Evil Revelations flashbacks
It dies and the system restarts saving the human race. And another plot twist is unfolded and that it was one person actually put in stasis in the ship, which I half-guessed as a clichéd sic-fi plot. I thought it was the leader of NLA, but it turns out it was Elma... that also was an alien explaining some comments from the Ganglions about the technological leap mankind had done. Celebration and end credits showing civilian life for the BLADES in service after their victory in NLA and then a post-credit scene. Elma and Yelv (one of the playable characters) together with some other BLADES are looking through the Lifehold in search of the main data centre... which I thought was in the computer we fought the end boss in, but apparently I was wrong. And it turns out that the room is flooded and been so since the White Whale crashed on Mira, meaning the mimeosomes should be dead already. The leaders of NLA wonders what this means and cut to a shore where Lao in a new mimeosome body is approached by a shadow and then wakes up. Now I gotta find the super-secret real ending that continues the story.
I really like this game when you get past the tutorial. And the growth of your character is amazing although that the amnesia is never addressed or that we even can't find the original body is kinda disappointing, but it is Elma's story in reality as she is the one pushing the plot forward. Great music. It looks fantastic and it has interesting themes. The mimeosomes gives a really interesting religious view on this, since it feels like they go for the day of judgement when the dead shall awaken. That means that death really has no consequences. And they address this in game with different cults and suicidal people appearing that can't grasp this very idea. In the end we have a small snippet of the clone dilemma if saving the 20 million by cloning and transferring the digital conscious, is it the same person? As standard we have xenophobia, revenge and so on. Getting the skell and then later the flight module is amazing as you soar through the air to a cheesy love song or rides past the enemies in your morphed car. Maybe there is to many playable characters to keep track on, but the biggest problem is that I don't always know where they are cause I need to see them at their physical place and the map doesn't have an indicator where that is (why couldn't there face have been there instead of the golden shield like every other area?) or even yet, in the menu active members actually list every playable character and switch them in and out instead for me having to hunt them down in the wrong time slot where they are out wandering NLA and sometimes that is a permanent functions until I find them. And I should probably mention that you can't new game + it either, sadly. Especially since actions can have consequences on people dying and so on. But the scope of the game makes it so I won't replay it that much (maybe if they rerelease it in the future on another Nintendo consoles). All in all a good game.
Update: So I checked up on the ending to see if there was something else beyond this and... nothing. Just do quest and grind for things to enhance your equipments for the skell. And my interest fell to zero, especially when Zelda: Breath of the Wild happened. And now I'm really curious for Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
So is it a sequel to 1 or X?
