Beyond the hype, beyond the petitions, Xenoblade stands as a shining example of what a JRPG should be.
Though something happened last year. An uprising of sorts that led to these popular, albeit incorrect, assumptions about JRPGs being questioned. With petitions being signed and twitter accounts being made, the men and women behind Operation Rainfall proved that regardless of what the gaming media tells you, the JRPG is neither dead nor unwanted....
..and Xenoblade was the game they chose to prove this claim with.
My own fanboy blathering aside, Xenoblade is without any doubt the very best example to show someone who is skeptical towards the worth of the modern JRPG. While its sales numbers may never surpass even a half of what BioWare's Mass Effect has done or gain the widespread critical praise that Fallout 3 was given, Xenoblade nonetheless manages to eclipse both games in depth as well as style. While these are big claims to make about a simple Wii game it's not so hard to believe once you look back at the developer's industry pedigree. With Monolithsoft having been behind the Xenosaga series and their co-founder Tetsuya Takahashi having been the lead writer for the Playstation One hit RPG Xenogears, it's easy to see why Xenoblade received so much pre-release hype from the genre's diehard followers.
So with that out of the way, how good is it, really?
Xenoblade starts off in much the same fashion as every other JRPG you've ever played begins. Your hero is a young boy who is timid and somewhat in love with the town's most beautiful young woman...then monsters attack and he mysteriously rises to the occasion. If anything helped reinforce the JRPG cliche in this game it was the first hour of its story. While it does take a fair amount of time until you begin seeing Monolithsoft's all-too familiar religious overtones and questions regarding humanity's existence, the setting of the game goes a long way towards making up for the story's slow start.
Your characters live, fight and die on the derelict remains of what appears to be a giant robot that eons ago fought a battle with a similar mechanized beast in what seems to be an otherwise uninhabited world. The two combatants, froze in their final moments for a millenia, have now become home to various lifeforms that call the beast's body their home. With grass covered hills, metallic structures jutting out at weird angles and lost entrances leading into the body of their god-turned-homeworld it makes for some very interesting level design opportunities that the developers were quick to take full advantage of.
Staring off into the distance in some areas will reveal the other machine your "god" fought against, its red eyes still glowing even millions of years after its death. Depending on your location in relation to the two long-dead titans you'll find various body parts visible in the distance. Just gazing up at the brilliant blue skyline and seeing a gigantic hand grasping a sword that has been thrust into the side of the world you call home makes the game feel so alien and original. It helps create an air of grandiosity that you normally only see in the Elder Scrolls games. The world appears so large and imposing that your party seems like a group of gnats walking on the back of a large beast, a feeling the developers must have taken very seriously to have nailed it so perfectly.
Even though the Wii is not known for producing impressive visuals Xenoblade manages to create them regardless of its platform's lack of graphical prowess. Grass waves in the wind, hills slowly roll up and down as you traverse the multi-tiered landscape and weather patterns unfold in real time...all creating a suspension of disbelief I'd expect in a European PC RPG, not in a Japanese-made console style JRPG. While the game's lack of anti-aliasing makes for some overly-jagged first generation Playstation 2 ugliness it's the stellar art direction that prevents the game from becoming the eye-bleedingly awful mess that most Wii games often end up as.
While impressive locales to explore and a captivating plot all help to create a good game, the binding feature in any RPG is its combat and how well it can entertain you after fifty-plus hours of grinding.
Yet again, Xenoblade manages to pull off the impossible and shake free of modern era JRPG mediocrity.
Taking a cue from MMORPGs such as Everquest and World of Warcraft, Xenoblade uses the familiar combat system in those games as a basis in which to build its own. Like those aforementioned MMORPGs you have a hotbar of cool-down dependent abilities to select from and a party whose attacks are completely time based and deliver pre-determined amounts of "aggro"...however *unlike* those games the combat is incredibly fast and cinematic with an added dash of quick time events and a liberal application of status ailment causing combo moves to help keep things exciting.
Xenoblade's combat is nothing if not addictive, and the hidden depth it possesses betrays the fact that you are playing a JRPG. With things like party affinity, crafted socket gems, tension level, linked skills and battle field positioning all playing large roles in every battle you soon find out that mashing the confirm button is a surefire way to earn a game over screen.
Sitting here and describing the battle system in detail would take years, and for the sake of brevity I won't subject you to such a lengthy spiel. Instead, I will say that Xenoblade's one over-powering trait is its uncanny ability to take all of its secondary "systems" and find ways to tie them into the combat in subtle but fascinating ways.
Getting tired of grinding enemies for rare drops? Then go item hunting and spend an hour or two giving presents to raise each party member's affinity rating with one another, unlocking new skill links.
Getting tired of giving presents to everyone? Then go to the nearest town and help raise the relationships between NPCs so that your reputation improves and they offer you better items in trades and unlock special abilities for your characters.
Getting tired of settling disputes between NPCs? Then go mining and craft gems until you become obsessed with making sure everyone's stats are maxed through use of slotted equipment.
Tired of crafting? Then fill the collectapedia book for each zone and earn rare equipment as a reward for your OCD nature.
Tired of collecting? Then shoot for some of the in-game achievements and get boat-loads of experience points for completing them.
Tired of achievement hunting? Then go on side quests hunting unique boss monsters for special item drops.
The wonderful thing about Xenoblade is that if you get bored with one facet of the game there is an equally deep but profoundly different part of it to retreat to in order to stave off the boredom. Combine this with the fact that NPCs don't talk your ear off and you can go about the story at your own snail-like (Or rocket-like) pace and you have a JRPG that never truly gets tedious or snore-inducing.
Even its soundtrack, with it's guitar-laden Shoji Meguro-esque music, managed to break through the confines of its console shackles and become something special.
Yet with the graphics, gameplay and the soundtrack all coming together, there is one thing it does that, although not the best example I've seen, impressed me the most because I never expected a console RPG to do it...
...and that's the inter party banter.
Anyone who has played Dragon's Age, Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate knows that the clever little things the party says to each other during combat helps make the characters you play seem all the more real. They curse, they complain, they congratulate and they show compassion. They give the player a reason to care and help create emotions where normally you don't find any. The RPG becomes more than a number war between two stats and their to-hit percentages and damage totals, it becomes a true role playing experience. BioWare were once the innovators of this, and believe it or not it seems Xenoblade's developers learned something from their American counterparts since their own game masterfully emulates this style.
Each character interacts with one another and congratulates or criticizes them based on their performance and they respond to these statements accordingly. The depth of the back and forth bantering between party members is what shocked me most about Xenoblade and is the one feature I think JRPGs need to incorporate if they want to be taken seriously in today's western dominated genre. It's a welcome addition to a sub-genre of RPGs that has been criticized for its lack of character development.
Simply put, if you own a Wii and like RPGs, there is absolutely no reason not to buy Xenoblade. Though it is quite long (At least 60 hours if you skip all sidequests and activities and at least twice that if you don't) it is still the very best example of a console RPG that I've seen since Star Ocean 3 on the Playstation 2. It's so deep, so complex, so rewarding and so full of both variety and substance that it makes nearly every RPG released within the past five years look like half-finished garage games written by a first year Comp-sci student. The difference is honestly that staggering.
Though I've never been a fan of the Wii and it slightly pains me to say this, the very best console game of this entire generation is on Nintendo's system, and it's Xenoblade. There is simply nothing that even remotely comes close to the amount of on-disc non-DLC content or the depth of its systems that this game possesses. Xenoblade is without peer in a genre desperately in need of new ideas and fresh blood.
It's so perfect that not buying it is almost criminal and any RPG fan who loves the hobby owes it to his or herself to purchase this game before developers get the crazy idea that we don't enjoy them.