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There have been big games on small screens before, of course. Think of the epic scope of a Pokémon adventure, entire regions charted as you gather together your own vast menagerie, or the toytown bestiary of Animal Crossing New Leaf, as your own village ticks on while hungrily consuming endless hours of your life. Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, the handheld port of Monolith Soft's grandiose 2011 Wii RPG, is different. This was always a game imagined on the most epic of scales - an RPG adventure laid out in IMAX, where impossible rocky crevices and green fields stretch out to far horizons, and where even subterranean lift-shafts instil a giddy sense of vertigo as they plummet down into the darkness. Part of that has been lost for this handheld port, even if what has been achieved in getting the original running on a New 3DS (the only member of Nintendo's portable family capable of running Xenoblade Chronicles 3D) is commendable, indeed impressive.
Monster Games, previously responsible for porting Donkey Kong Country Returns, provides a conversion for the New 3DS that is as faithful as you could hope for. There's hardly a frame dropped or a texture smeared - although the grass on Gaur Plain seems to have been freshly mowed for the porting process, and some of the rougher edges of the original are plainer to see when they're placed a mere half metre in front of your face.
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