Xenoblade Chronicles 3D: Hate at first sight

I'm royally pissed off right now. And also crestfallen. So that is the quality of the New 3ds exclusives? This is what I bought the system for? Naaah, okay: I'm exaggerating for the sake of drama. I bought a New 3ds as a backup system, not solely to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, and I certainly don't regret having bought that New 3ds. Xenoblade Chronicles, on the other hand... Jeez, I curse the instant I opened my wallet to purchase that game.

I've had instant love affairs with so many great games in the last years that I somehow forgot that the opposite could also happen. Yet Xenoblade Chronicles shoved that unpleasant reality in my face, and I hate it all the more for that. Not that there was a lot of room to squeeze more hate, mind you: I don't remember having ever loathed a game that much upon the first minutes of playing it. Right now, thinking of XC makes me feel nauseous. I kid you not.

Of course, I won't stop at saying that I hate that game's guts. I will elaborate and get the whole thing out of my chest, lest these bilious feelings fester inside my soul. Be off with them! Here's an exhaustive litany of all the things that aggravated, antagonized and infuriated me during my hour spent playing XC. (Yes, my hour. I couldn't stand more of it.)

—The sheer ugliness of the game offends my retinas. The fact that the graphics are blurry and look like a giant pixelated mash is already insulting enough, but that rampant ugliness is worsened by the total absence of any discernable aesthetics. XC is just your dreary, tedious, run-of-the-mill attempt at photorealism, with washed-out colours and blonky character models devoid of any charm. I like my games to showcase a modicum of graphic stylization, and XC sadly shows nothing else than a total lack of inspiration in that department.

—The little I've seen of XC is already way too messy and complicated for my taste and comfort. There are way too many actions to execute and data to keep track of in battles, way too many items, way too much of everything. I fought only a couple of battles and yet XC threw at me a mountain of items and just as many tutorials. Have you ever heard of that thing called learning curve, game? And let's not even talk about those useless hindrances such as needing to readjust the camera or to lock on an enemy before being able to fight them. Why can't I just stomp over them like in good ol' Dragon Quest IX, damnit? The worse part is that this overwhelming complexity seems to have been shoved into the game just for the sake of it. But just like throwing tons of yummy ingredients into a pot is not enough to make a delicious soup, throwing tons of gameplay elements into a game is not enough to make said game compelling. Far from ravishing or impressing me, this sprawling, milling mass of gameplay mechanics left me overwhelmed and nauseated.

—Likewise, the sheer scale of the game world is just too enormous for my taste. Since I've been playing on portable systems for most of my gaming life, I'm used to game worlds that are much more compact and somewhat easier to embrace and assess, and the scales at work in XC seriously disorient me. I'm also not too fond of having to cover such humongous distances just to go anywhere. It took me literally five minutes of running through grassy areas to rally the first town in the game, and that's five minutes I could have employed to do something much more interesting. As much as I enjoy taking a five-minute walk to the grocery store in real life, I really don't want to see this kind of experience emulated in a video game. And just like the overabundance of gameplay mechanics, the enormity of the game world seems to have been implemented just because, probably with the secret intention of flabbergasting players and reviewers alike. Wooo, look at our huge game world!! You've never seen something that big, have you? Well, bigger is not always better, especially when your big game world looks fugly. I'm definitely not impressed, game.

—The little I've seen of the story left me rolling my eyes and facepalming myself. Yeah, I know that the story of XC is widely said to be stellar; but honestly, I have a very hard time believing that a story starting with two guys bantering before single-handedly taking down an army of mechas with a super-powerful mythical sword will be anything else than a milling mass of J-RPG clichés and platitudes, no matter how many references to Nietzsche and Jung are thrown into the mix. Also, I hate stories that pit humans against mechas. And given that hardly anything happened in one hour except for a couple of vapid dialogues, I can also tell that the pacing of XC is much too sluggish for my taste. The mere idea of spending seventy or more hours playing that snooze fest makes me shudder with horror.

—Last but certainly not least, the battle system is a pathetic joke. I'm still seething when thinking of it, seriously. I started frothing at the mouth and spitting in disbelief when I realized that the cursed game was handholding and patronizing to the point of triggering hits without my input when I got close to enemies. Colour me outraged and appalled. How fun can it be to butcher foes if said butchering is not the direct result of my generous button-mashing? This is like the worst of two worlds put together in one fighting system, as you have to suffer both the hectic and somewhat taxing pace of real-time fighting and the lack of direct input of turn-based fighting. There are also way too many moves to choose from on the fly for my taste; I like my real-time fighting to be a simple and streamlined affair, not some kind of multi-tasking test. The constant babbling and interjecting of the characters during fighting made focusing even harder, and I wished I could just shut them off. I've read that this fighting system makes room for an amazing amount of strategizing, and maybe it does later on; but in these early stages, I just found it messy, scattered and totally unfulfilling.

I've painted a very bleak picture so far, and you may wonder if there was really nothing in that game that appealed to me. Well, there was actually something: I was very fond of the British voice acting. However, I'm not going to suffer that game solely for the pleasure of hearing British accents. I was half-thinking of watching a playthrough, but I'm not sure I want to waste 70 hours or more of my life doing that, especially since I could clear one or two better games instead. So I'll probably leave it at that and try to forget that bitter gaming failure. I've already started, in fact: I've been playing a brand-new game for a couple of hours, and said game is so excellent that XC is as good as lost in the sands of time. More on that soon! As for my pitiful experience with XC, it taught me at least one important thing: don't believe the hype! Just because 97% of players and reviewers praise a game doesn't automatically mean that I will like it. (Heck, the opposite has happened often enough!) And also: be wary of home console ports, especially the ones bragging about their huge open world. Bigger is not always better, indeed, and I'd rather stick with the small-scale cosiness of portable gaming worlds. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!