An absolutely huge game in every sense. Which is not always for the best.

User Rating: 8 | Xenoblade Chronicles X WIIU

I'd like to provide a brief opinion as a huge fan of the first XC game. Hopefully I manage to avoid spoilers, but be warned. Mostly I'll do comparisons with XC.

I'm about 50h into the game, and will try to write a proper review later, but as that might take many more hours, I'm writing this short review now.

First of all I must say I love the game. I've never watched or read any reviews. Ever since the game was announced I knew I'd be getting it. And it doesn't disappoint. It was a huge task to live up to my expectations as a follow-up to one of my most favorite games ever.

There are just a few dislikes I'd like to point out:

Story - so far doesn't feel as personal as XC. The first dislike is that I'm able to create my own character. XC's protagonist was a real boy with a real name, most of the party members were his childhood friends etc. In XCX I create my own hero, give him/her a gender, even a name... That means: the protagonist is silent, which is a huge disappointment. Also NPCs never call him by name in spoken dialogue, only in subtitles (no chance doing it like Mass Effect?). Also the story is told in "story missions". Early into the game the hero joins this military-esque unit BLADE, and he/she completes missions - story missions or side missions. It just doesn't flow as naturally as the story in XC.

Music / Sound design - I'm disappointed that there is no "music volume" slider in the settings. It would come really handy because the sound designer chose to put really loud songs during important story cut-scenes. Sometimes there's even something like a rap song in the background. So it mingles with the spoken conversation and makes it really difficult to understand what they're talking about. I ended up switching on the subtitles for this reason. The music is just really distracting and sometimes completely unnecessary. At least a simple volume slider would do the trick. Also the soundtrack is sometimes great, sometimes quite bad - I especially dislike the daytime New LA song, which is pretty much the most often visited environment.

Nopon - I'm just not a big fan of the goofy side of Japanese games. I hated the Chuchu in Xenogears, Cait Sith in FF7, Nopon in XC... aaand they had to put those irritating Nopon in XCX, oh well. At least there aren't as many of them or as often as in XC, so I guess that's a plus.

That's about it so far. I'm inclining towards a 9/10 score as these are quite minor disappointments. Although it baffles me that no one on the dev team has noticed the sound issue. The world is gorgeous and huge, monster design is really creative, gameplay and battle system is fantastic. And I'm very curious to see where the story will go, so maybe that will end up just fine.

[UPDATE] After finishing the game, I must say the story didn't turn up for the better. Some JRPG-esque twists revealed later, which were so confusing that they were hard to care about. There is no NewGame+, but after finishing the main story you can spent some time getting some rare materials, building rare skells.... which was quite fun for a while. But it doesn't feel important, since it doesn't move the story anywhere. I'm lowering the overall score to 8/10 [END OF UPDATE]

Whoever has played XC, this game is a must. And whoever hasn't played XC and is reading this: XC is a must. :-)