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Two years ago NASA announced a plan to deliver a container filled with seeds to the moon. It will be the first in a range of experiments to test the viability of humans colonising nearby moons and planets when we're finally done ruining this one. It's a gallant goal and yet, if the seeds do take root and flower, it will take a visionary chef to cook a sustaining meal from the harvest: a fistful of herbs and clutch of turnips. As the world thaws around us, NASA's vision for a lunar garden is something of a beautiful lie, an ecological lullaby sung above deck to soothe souls while our Titanic planet tilts and glugs. Truth be told, if we have to depart terra firma in a hurry, the question of whether we have enough basil to garnish our turnips will be, you might say, of secondary concern. 'A beautiful lie' is exactly how one of Xenoblade Chronicle X's characters describes New Los Angeles, a flat pack city that the last remaining humans managed to fold and load before they fled a devastated Earth. NLA (as you and its other residents refer to it with somewhat forced familiarity) with its aluminium streets, pop-up shops and shrink-wrapped palm trees would be more accurately described as a beautiful distraction. The truth is that Mira, the planet on which you have crash-landed, is entirely alien and mostly hostile. NLA provides both psychic and physical refuge. It's a little oasis of urban familiarity in a vast desert of peril. Resources are dwindling within. Predators are circling without. There's not enough basil to go around. Easier to hunker down in a jack-in-the-box Starbucks and sip a vacuum-packed cappuccino than reckon with the new, horrifying reality of existence.
You, however, are made of sterner stuff. Rather than sit around faking normality you've joined BLADE, a volunteer peacekeeping force committed to scout the planet, hunt for resources, fight off predators and find a way to make Mira feel more like home. The first time you descend the studded ramp leading out of NLA, and head out onto its sun-licked meadows, you realise, happily, this might not be so hard. There are worse places than Mira for a galactic crash-landing. Immediately the elemental panic to survive is overtaken by other emotions.
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