Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition review: Monolith Soft’s Wii U entry gets a solid mech-over

With the release of Xenoblade Chronicles X on Switch, Monolith Soft’s RPG series joins a rather exclusive club, something not even Mario or Zelda have been able to achieve yet.

This new port means that every game in the Xenoblade Chronicles series is now available to play on Switch, meaning fans can catch up on entries they missed, or newcomers can play through the entire series on a single system.

Not that there’s a real need to, of course. Originally released a decade ago on Wii U, Xenoblade Chronicles X may have technically been the second game in the series but in terms of story and characters it’s completely unrelated, so it’s as good a place to start as any.

The game is set 30 years from now. Following an attack from alien forces, Earth is left devastated and so – as is the case in countless other RPGs with ‘Earth is ruined’ plots – the remaining survivors leave in search of a new habitable planet. The White Whale, an ‘ark’ ship carrying some of these Earth colonists, is damaged in a battle and crashes on the planet Mira.

A few months later the protagonist – who you can name and choose their appearance – is woken from their escape pod and asked to join BLADE, an organisation tasked with finding the remaining humans located across the planet among other things. So begins an adventure that can easily span 60 hours, or far more than that if you insist on taking on every side mission available to you.

Mira is an enormous region to explore, filled with wildlife wandering around. As in the other Xenoblade games, some of this wildlife will attack you when you get too close, while others will happily mind their own business until you land the first hit. Either way, the level for each creature appears above it when you look at it, allowing you to choose which ones to engage with and which to avoid at your current level.

For those new to the series, this is one of numerous methods Monolith Soft employs to ensure that the game continues to move at a brisk pace, despite its epic nature. Many aspects of the open-world exploration have been designed to keep things moving along as quickly as possible.

When combat is triggered the battles take place there and there on the field, rather than transitioning to a separate battle screen. The player’s sprinting speed is very fast and their jump is quite high, allowing them to navigate the sprawling environment with reasonable comfort. This, combined with the generous fast travel mechanic, means exploring the enormous map isn’t quite the intimidating prospect it initially appears to be.

What’s more, just as you feel like you’re getting into your rhythm about 20 to 30 hours in, the game upends everything by introducing Skells, large mechs which can be piloted. These completely transform the way the game is played, enabling faster travel across the landscape and battles with some of the land’s largest creatures.

It’s rare that a game will change in such a stark way, especially after so many hours, where many other adventures would be starting to wind up. Instead, the introduction of Skells shows that you’re barely at the halfway mark and kicks things into another gear.

The ground-based combat will be familiar to those who’ve played other Xenoblade games, and though it has its own unique mechanics (not to mention the Skells, obviously), for the most part it’s the same halfway house between real time and turn-based battling, with players positioning themselves near enemies and performing attacks automatically at timed intervals.

It’s not just a case of standing there and waiting for your enemy’s health bar to run out, however. There are also a special set of special techniques called Battle Arts which can be activated on the fly. These can be deployed at strategic moments for extra effect, and can also be combined with the abilities of your AI-controlled teammates to create powerful combination attacks. Harmonious battling is key to delivering the highest possible damage to enemies, then.

This combat system makes battling more active than you would get with standard turn-based fights, and as a result grinding feels like less of a chore, especially given how easy it is to jump into another fight simply by running up to some random animal and squaring up to it.

“It’s rare that a game will change in such a stark way, especially after so many hours, where many other adventures would be starting to wind up. Instead, the introduction of Skells shows that you’re barely at the halfway mark and kicks things into another gear.”

The game’s size would become quite easily overwhelming were it not for the fact that Xenoblade Chronicles X does a great job of ensuring the player is always fully clued up on what they have to do. By pushing in the right stick at any time during exploration, the player is shown a prompt reminding them of their current mission, while the detailed map screen allows them to bring up any side quest they like and activate it on the map, with an improved Follow Ball mechanic guiding you to your next destination if needed. It’s difficult to get stuck in this game.

The Definitive Edition moniker refers to the features and improvements that have been added to the game. The Switch version has been given a visual upgrade compared to the original Wii U release, but in truth it’s not night and day. If you played the Wii U game back in the day you’d be hard pressed to notice a difference unless you place both side-by-side, at which point you’d see the Switch version is a bit sharper and the lighting’s a bit better.

New story elements have been added to the game (because sure, it definitely wasn’t already long enough), the DLC that was made available for the Wii U version is available here as part of the standard package, and the game’s UI has been given a complete overhaul to make everything look clearer and easier to understand. The Wii U version was quite tricky for newcomers to penetrate and that’s less the case here.

As entertaining as Xenoblade Chronicles X is, however, it’s certainly not without its faults. The game’s plot is let down by rather dull cutscenes, which generally fail to deliver much dynamism, be that in how they look or how they sound. Performances are generally okay across the board but some characters can be quite irritating and we never really found ourselves becoming emotionally attached to anyone in the game, which is particularly problematic when you consider how long you have to spend with some of these characters.

The game also throws items at you like confetti at a wedding, meaning it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with an inventory full of various scraps you’ve gathered along your journey. The fact that it’s so easy to collect things on the field is undoubtedly a nice thing to have from a quality of life perspective but it does also mean you’ll very quickly find yourself swamped with junk in your pockets that you don’t know what to do with. While we appreciate the game’s scale we wonder if a bit more restraint would have resulted in a tighter experience.

“The game also throws items at you like confetti at a wedding, meaning it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with an inventory full of various scraps you’ve gathered along your journey.”

The music is also a mixed bag – for the most part it offers perfectly acceptable audio accompaniment while you explore, but any time a track with lyrics kicks in – most notably when you’re at the central town hub area, there are some truly awful tracks to be found.

Ultimately, however, these drawbacks aren’t dealbreakers and there’s still a lengthy, engaging adventure to be found here, especially for those who didn’t play the Wii U version the first time around – which, judging by how well that console sold, is almost everyone.

X holds its own among the rest of the Xenoblade Chronicles series and as the game with the most distinct plot of the four entries, if its pseudo-futuristic environments appeal to you more than those of the other Xenoblade games this is the ideal entry point into the series with no prior knowledge needed.

We’re curious to see what the extra power of the Switch 2 will bring to this series, because it really does feel like this is pushing the Switch to its limits on occasion, but for now there’s more than enough here to keep you occupied for a long time.