Tweet
There's always been a strand of defiance in Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno series, projects that have never let circumstance get in the way of their ambition. Xenogears and Xenosaga were deep, complex cinematic epics that were famously compromised, while Xenoblade Chronicles was obstinate proof that Japanese role-playing games still had the ability to surprise and delight, and that Nintendo's notoriously underpowered Wii could still deliver such a grandiose vision. Xenoblade Chronicles X, the Wii U-exclusive spiritual successor to that 2010 game, is at it again. In a year in which we've hardly been short of sensational open worlds, Takahashi's Monolith Soft has quietly come along and trumped them all in terms of scale, ambition and sheer spectacle on that most unfancied of consoles. For all the stealth excellence to be found in The Phantom Pain's Afghanistan and Africa, for all the intrigue held within The Witcher 3's Northern Kingdoms, there's really nothing that's a match for the sheer beauty to be found in Xenoblade Chronicle X's .
It's almost guaranteed nothing can match it in terms of size. There's no established metric for how we measure open worlds - whether it's the time it takes to walk from one border to the other, or how many times over we could fit a Skyrim or a Los Santos into one of these virtual landmasses - so I prefer to quantify the vastness of Xenoblade Chronicles X's Mira by how many times it's caught my breath across the two dozen hours I've spent with it so far.
Read more…
More...