Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

This has been a delight in a dark time in humanity's history. [Issue #48 – September/October 2020, p. 74]

A thoughtful update to a classic JRPG that brings it to a whole new audience. With a shiny lick of paint and some fantastic interface changes it’s the best way to experience Shulk, Fiora and Reyn’s epic adventure.

Definitive by name and definitive by nature, XC:DE is as complete a JRPG package as you will find on the Switch – albeit with a few concessions. [Issue 1#1, p.58]

Without a doubt, one of the games of the summer for the Nintendo console!

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is a great JRPG, with a well told story, elemental gameplay and a dazzling world to explore. The massive epilogue, the excellent graphic upgrade and the lightening of some mechanics make it a highly recommended game even for those who have already explored the original. If you know how to go beyond some hesitation in the pace and a video resolution not always up to date, you'll have in your hands a great JRPG.

An excellent port of an already beloved title. A must buy for fans of the genre.

Unfortunately for Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, the Nintendo Switch isn’t exactly hurting for Japanese role-playing games, though few can match its breadth and width. If you’ve been curious about the title and managed to miss out on both the Wii and 3DS versions, picking up the Switch one is practically a no-brainer, even if it does feel like a bit of a throwback. If you’ve played it before and loved it, maybe Future Connected is plenty enough reason to return. But if you are just generally interested in games more broadly, there are probably better uses of your time. If they had seriously reworked the combat in some way, it probably wouldn’t really be Xenoblade Chronicles any longer, but I imagine I also would have had a much better time with it.

Kinda don’t understand how the definitive edition is lower rated than the original, it’s literally the same game but with way better visuals, better soundtrack, and they added a DLC even if it’s not great. This is one of the best jrpgs ever made for me. Amazing story, good characters, extremely underrated gameplay that is actually my favorite in all of jrpgs, amazing soundtrack, and a beautiful world.

I do love this game, but it is absolutely not a masterpiece. The music, world, and narrative are outstanding. However, combat in this game is very frustrating. I like it in general, but some mechanics and systems make it less enjoyable to play. In the end, I played through it for the story and nothing more. Future Connected was, in my opinion, also largely uninteresting. Out of all the Xenoblade games, definitely the one I enjoyed the least. But don't get me wrong—it’s still a fantastic game that is worth playing for any JRPG fan.

It's good, but not THAT good. First, as much as I love it being set on the body of a titan... It's a really hard sell when you're actually in the game. The environments you go through very often hardly look like the actual limb of the titan, whatever scale you look at. Creates dissonance that kinda pulls you out of it... For a JRPG, that is a fatal flaw.

The story is good. The rest of it ****. The combat **** and gets really tedious by the end. Some characters like Riki have absolutely no point and are useless in combat. The exploring ****, the gem crafting system ****, the side missions are tedious and rote. There's no sense of satisfaction from winning the big battles, because once you get the boss HP bar down, it suddenly turns into a cutscene that will show you losing, or the boss is fine and flies off and you have to beat it again later. If this was a well done anime, it'd be pretty great, but as a game it kind of ****.

A boring, overly tedious, and generally underused battlesystem ruins an otherwise good story. The battle system tries so hard to be "MMO but single player!" and forgot to make the party AI more competent than a bag of kittens taking on a tsunami. Specifically it took the typical "rogue" class and built an entire combat system around it. Where you stand matters, and you'll usually have multiple moves requiring you stand to the side or behind an enemy. They're doing this too, and the AI pathfinding is truly a miracle in incompetence. You could set most longer battles to yakety sax, watching you and the enemies dance around each other. Idk if your party members even try to position correctly; you usually can't tell what's going on in combat bc the screen will become cluttered (esp at the end when you're fighting several tall or large enemies). You can call out dynamic party commands such as "focus on my target" or "walk to me". With that I have exhausted all AI combat customizations. You can't dictate what HP level the healer should use her spells (...well, bullets) and therefore often ends up on cool down sooner than she should. You can choose who to control before battle but are locked in during: if you want to police the heals, expect combat efficiency to drop drastically. Most of the characters are useless in general, since you're usually going to have no choice but to use up two of three slots for a tank and a heal. It's usually easier and better to just let Shulk take up that third slot. There are two tanks but really only one healer for most of the game. There's also a gemcrafting side thing where your weapons and armor have slots for them. Most of the game this is useless and once it's necessary, you're drowning in useless crystals and one or two of the one you actually need. Again, the story IS good. But the combat feels like a dudebro who binges WoW and Mountain Dew created a combat system after a week with no sleep. And amphetamine. There's a silver lining though: I just saved some money in not having to buy either sequel. So there's that!