The failure of the Wii U has turned out to be a big win for the Switch. While Nintendo’s previous console was its worst selling, it was still home to some of its most inventive games. Over the years, Nintendo has steadily brought many of them — ranging from Captain Toad puzzles to various Donkey Kong adventures — to a much larger audience on the Switch. In fact, the Switch’s best-selling game, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, is an updated version of a Wii U classic.
And even now, with a new-generation console on the horizon, the Wii U still has more to give. This time, it’s an absolutely massive sci-fi RPG — and one that is just begging to be explored.
Xenoblade Chronicles X first launched in 2015. The story involves an ark-like spaceship that left Earth after an an alien invasion and eventually crashed on an untamed world called Mira. Your character is a part of the early stages of the settlement process. Much of the planet is unexplored, and the crashed ship has been turned into a city of sorts, dubbed New Los Angeles. X has more of a hard sci-fi setup compared to other games in the series, and it’s also a standalone experience, so you don’t need to have played any other Xenoblade title to understand what’s going on.
The premise is great, though the story gets pretty convoluted in a very RPG way as it progresses. But the main reason to play X is because of Mira. The world outside of New Los Angeles is a sprawling, strange, and seductive place teeming with alien wildlife. You’ll encounter beasts the size of dinosaurs, so gigantic that you can run under them without being noticed. There are angry monkeys that race through the world, and terrors that patrol the skies.
One of the most compelling things about the creatures in this world is that they feel like wildlife. Yes, some will attack you on sight, but most are content to leave you alone if you do the same. Mira is an incredibly dangerous place, but also one where you have the option to slow down and appreciate its beauty. As I said in my original review, there are areas in the game that look like sci-fi staples from Pandora and Arrakis, and they’re incredible to behold, even if X is a decade old.
Smartly, most of the missions in the game involve further exploration, and you can expand your knowledge of the world by placing beacons that provide more detailed map information. It’s sort of like searching out towers in Zelda; in fact, Xenoblade developer Monolith Soft helped develop both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, so the similarities make a lot of sense.
The caveat is that to enjoy all of the beauty and awe X has to offer, you’ll need a lot of patience. Like every other Xenoblade game, X is filled with complex systems that aren’t always clearly explained, and it can require a good amount of grinding to make your character powerful enough to take on specific missions and enemies. Battles happen in real time, with your character attacking automatically, while you choose between weapons and various special abilities with their own cooldowns.
Image: Nintendo
There are other things to pay attention to beyond XP, like your affinity with other characters or your proficiency in specific skills; if you ignore them, it’s easy to find yourself in a position where you’re stuck, unable to take on a necessary mission with your current build. The game also starts very slow: the first few hours can feel like an extended tutorial.
But for a certain kind of player, it’s worth pushing through the game’s fussiness. Because even now, 10 years after it debuted, there’s still nothing quite like the sense of stunning sci-fi exploration that Xenoblade Chronicles X offers. You even get a mech suit eventually. The Switch version doesn’t change much, but it does make that incredible world portable, which is more than enough reason to jump in — either again or for the first time.
Xenoblade Chronicles X launches on the Nintendo Switch on March 20th.
