2025-06-08

(DROPPED) Xenoblade Chronicles X

I’m dropping this game. This isn’t the only game I’ve dropped this year, but I really wanted to give it a shot, so here are my thoughts. The game has this constant pressure to make me dislike it, constantly insisting that it is in fact a waste of my time. Its missions are these naked checklists, which would be great if I could just put on a stream or album or something and zone out, but then there’s voiced cutscenes or something to read or some big difficulty spike and I have to pause. Or, there’s an easy level 5 mission I just wanna clear out of my log, and its location is swarmed by level 50 monsters that oneshot me for getting too close. The optional missions list is full of these landmines where you need to use a certain weapon or certain weather condition, requiring you to pull up the mission and tab over to read details after you realize you’re not making progress in it. I had to spam fast traveling to one location because the monster I needed to fight has a 2% chance of appearing. That is the intended way of completing the mission. There are more than one mission like that.

All these things might be fine, if the player is willing to put 100% focus into actually playing the game. But once the combat starts, it’s something that only demands 30% of your focus. Subjecting 100% focus towards circle-fills-up just makes me feel like I’m wasting my time on a dumb kids toy. It’s clear the devs no problem with this, if they have self-awareness to begin with. Xenoblade’s concept of difficulty is a binary state between “melt the enemy in 2 seconds” and “struggle for 20 minutes before dying”. Making the de-aggro range 5 miles, means every fight is a fight to the death. It’s just annoying by design.

I know I’m probably missing some mechanics. I had to watch a video to explain how combat and character building actually works in the game, which prevented me from dropping it the first time, but I’m really really not interested in finding out what else I’m missing. External guides isn’t a complete dealbreaker for me, but Xenoblade Chronicles X seems to be hostile to making anything go smoothly.

The story wasn’t hooking me either, but I got the (wrong) impression that it was a story-light MMO-ish experience where I just fight stuff and complete missions. I was cool with zoning out for cutscenes, but the combat is also a zone-out, so all the actual game content is in menu navigation. It all sucks, it’s just bad. I have to conclude Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fluke, since I had a lot of similar gripes towards 1 and 3.

Score: 1/3. Deliberate waste of time.