How long does it take to tell a good story? In person? Maybe 5
minutes. In film? About 2 hours. A book? Let’s say 5-10 hours. Video
games? No less than 50 hours. This means you could watch every major
Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch film before
finishing one game. Sure, the standards for game stories have changed
over time as shorter action titles have steered toward a cinematic style
and runtime, but the progenitors of story-driven gaming, the Japanese
role-playing game (JRPG), remain as staunchly extensive as ever.
Xenoblade Chronicles is the latest JRPG from cult-favorite and
aptlynamed developer, Monolith Soft. In it, you play as Shulk, a
“chosen-one” who brandishes a mystical sword on an epic quest to defend
his homeland and unite two worlds at war, for 80+ hours.
For all of the evolving JRPG conventions that Xenoblade perpetuates,
egregious game length is an interesting choice; however, it matches its
expansive world. The characters live like insects on the bodies of two
gigantic titans, frozen still amidst an ancient duel. Your party
gradually traverses from the right leg, all the way up the titan’s back,
to its head – and that is just the first act. From the “ground,” the
opposing giant is always faintly, ominously visible in the distant sky.
Individual areas are pretty big too, and require you to explore on foot
before a fast-travel option opens up for return visits.
Battling and traversal occupy the majority of your time in Xenoblade,
but their significance to the narrative remains up to interpretation.
The “story” is mostly delivered in dialogue-heavy non-interactive
cutscenes that flesh-out the characters and setup the next party
objective. Once control of your posse is given back to you, it’s time to
climb some mountains and slay some beasts. These lengthy stretches of
exploration and survival put you into the shoes of the characters whose
narrative motivations demand persistence and diligence. Similarly, you,
as a player, must also possess a certain amount of endurance to see the
journey through to the end. That’s not to say that playing the game is a
struggle, just that it entails a significant physical commitment on the
part of the player.
Some players may look at Xenoblade’s demands and choose to walk away
from the game before the end, due to real life time limitations or
in-game frustrations. EGM Managing Editor, Andrew Fitch, seemed
particularly frustrated by his playthrough of Xenoblade, as evidenced in
his review,
so I wanted to pick his brain a bit further. He told me that he did
complete the entire game, including dabbling in some sidequests, but
that, in general, he doesn’t think it’s absolutely necessary to spend
the full length of 80+ hours with a game to be able to evaluate its
quality. “At 35 hours, a game—even an RPG like Xenoblade—has revealed
its true self,” he wrote, referencing commenter outcry at
Jason Schreier’s review for Kotaku.
I agree with this statement, especially in terms of evaluation. You
don’t need to get more than a handful of hours into a game to decide if
you’ll objectively enjoy it, and if a game hasn’t made itself known by
that point, it probably has serious pacing issues. However, I’d argue
that stopping short of completion in a game like Xenoblade negates some
of the experience of long-form play, which is in this case essential to
the experience of the game.
Xenoblade took me about a month to complete, playing in chunks of a
few hours here and there, and occasionally taking several days away from
the game entirely. I found my attachment to the game at its fondest
when I maintained a steady stream of “healthy” play sessions, where I
knew that I could take a break and the game would always welcome me
back. Towards the end of the game, I hit my first wall where I could not
beat a boss character and continue forward.
Before this point I had never needed to actively grind through fodder
enemies to level up my characters to be strong enough to topple a foe
for narrative progress. That I hit this wall some 80 hours into the game
made me feel a bit betrayed. I’m sure other players hit walls earlier,
depending on playstyle, but mine felt like an act on Xenoblade’s part to
delay my imminent completion. I knew I’d finish the game eventually,
but hitting the level wall sucked all of the momentum out of the
narrative as well as my general drive to play.
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Grinding is an old standby of JRPGs, a design decision seemingly made
for the purpose of extending the length of time spent playing one game.
Grinding, on its own, is not an especially enjoyable experience, and
the payoff is indirect. That said, every aspect of a game shouldn’t need
to be fun for it to be considered good and/or necessary, as long as
players aren’t being unknowingly exploited. If you could simply waltz up
to a boss character at any experience level and win, the intended power
and gravitas of those conflicts would be diminished. At some point
we’re discussing the relative virtues of “practice” here as well, since
grinding is also about testing out and refining different engagement
strategies. Xenoblade, like most JRPGs, uses a quantitative
reinforcement pedagogy instead of a qualitative one. The side effects of
this are games that take eons to complete, but inspire a transposed
empathy for the hardships of the virtual characters you control.
It’s worth examining how much “story” is really being told in
Xenoblade since the vast majority of play time is spent doing things
that seemingly have no bearing on the plot beyond contextual nuance.
Monolith Soft previously developed a trilogy of RPGs called Xenosaga,
each providing 40-50 hours of gameplay and featuring what at the time
were considered extensive cinematic cutscenes. Part 1 was never released
in Europe, but bundled with the EU version of the sequel was a video of
all of the original’s cutscenes, running over 3 hours. That’s a long
movie, but less than 10 percent of the game. I bring this up to
illustrate Monolith Soft’s penchant for story-centric games that
actually put the player in command the vast majority of the time. It’s
the player’s choice of actions with those characters that makes the
story sink or swim as a game. After all, what’s way more boring than 5
hours of expository dialogue, rote cinematography, and a short rotation
of canned animations? Answer: 45+ hours of tedious button-pressing
sequences, broken up only by fits of inventory management.
Xenoblade comes out mostly on the positive end of the spectrum here.
Battles play out MMO-style, similar in execution to FFXII’s Gambit
system, which makes for seamless transitions between fighting and
traversal and fun, snappy combat. Individual battles require you to
position yourself on specific sides of monsters to increase chances of
dealing critical damage. Things actually happen so quickly that it takes
a few hours with the fighting system to catch up and really understand
what you’re doing. Once you’re there though, you can establish rhythms
to maximize how different characters’ attacks can play off of one
another. Xenoblade piles systems on top of systems to such a degree that
you really won’t master everything unless you play well beyond the
basic story path. I felt like I was constantly reaching new tiers of
understanding with the combat system up until the final fifth of the
game. The length of Xenoblade allows you time to figure this stuff out
at your own pace. Even after finishing the game there are several parts
of the battle system that I never grasped, particularly Melia’s magic
spells, which could make for a totally different approach to
confrontations altogether.
One of Xenoblade’s major accomplishments was how briskly and
efficiently it flowed throughout its considerable breadth, level-walls
in the final stretch aside. Its dialogue has an economic sensibility
that prioritizes character action over character depth, making narrative
setpieces attention-grabbing, if emotionally detached. This is bucking
the JRPG trope of long-winded, redundant internal monologues and
painfully melodramatic conversations. Not that Xenoblade doesn’t turn
insular and sappy from time to time, but you end up tasting it far less
than you’d normally expect. The UK voice crew deserves some credit here
too for realistically grounding the characters and delivering lines in a
way that brings them to life when some of the animation falls short.
Outside of cutscenes though, be prepared to hear the same handful of
pre- and post-battle quips hundreds of times, which will grate no matter
how much you like hearing the word “jokers” in an English accent.
And that’s the quandary of the epic game: how much repetition can
players take without “play” turning into “work?” The more similar
battles you fight, the more likely you are to notice a multitude of
annoying “flaws.” Why do party members willingly tread into poisonous
water when fighting? Why is the camera so close when fighting gigantic
enemies that you can’t see anything? Why is the inventory system so
laborious to configure? The list goes on (again, Andrew Fitch
has your back).
When Xenoblade is flying high, the imperfections fade into the
background, but there are bound to be lulls in any 80-hour experience.
Repetition and “practice” reveals the true nature of systems and
mechanics to the player over time, both good and bad. Xenoblade’s
approach to this inherent hazard is to load up with so many systems and
accruable points that something is always unlocking or reaching a new
level. It’s the video game equivalent of sleight of hand. This strategy
works remarkably well most of the time, pushing you through slower
moments without batting an eye. That said, nothing brings the whole trip
to a screeching halt like detrimental AI behavior or an unwieldy
camera, both of which plague Xenoblade sporadically.
Monolith Soft could have just made a shorter game and delivered much
of the same content, but it just wouldn’t have been the same Xenoblade
Chronicles. There is something to the 80-hour experience that 20-hour
games don’t have, that they can’t have. It is a unique feeling to play
such a gargantuan journey. This is because each upcoming play session is
iterative, building on the last, but offering the same repetitive
pleasure that keeps people tuning into soap operas on a daily basis.
There is drama and progression to a point, but you know the actions to
get there are going to be relatively unchanged each time. What separates
playing Xenoblade from watching Days of our Lives is the sense of
increasing complexity that eventually comes to a head. I’ve always found
the unending nature of MMOs unappealing and desperate. In contrast, the
monumental JRPG isn’t afraid to end, shoving you out of the nest and
into a world in its wake. I respect that confidence; it’s a rare thing.
That’s a large part of why I consider my experience with Xenoblade
Chronicles as time well spent.
:Reposted on
Medium Difficulty: