Barely anything has been compromised in Xenoblade Chronicles’ journey to handheld. Xenoblade Chronicles didn’t quite enjoy the enormous success many believed it deserved on Wii. Despite improving the RPG genre in numerous ways and offering arguably the finest role-playing adventure of its generation, lukewarm sales meant Monolith Soft’s gem instead had to settle for cult status. Nintendo is no doubt hopeful, then, that this 3DS port of the game will attract a new audience of gamers who missed it the first time around. Thankfully, they’ll get the full experience too.
For the uninitiated, the game tells the story of Shulk, an 18-year-old living in a world set atop the ancient remains of two enormous giants. When the mechanical life forms that reside on one half of the world invade Shulk’s half, he grabs the mythical Monado sword and teams up with his friends to stop the invasion.
What makes the game such a joy to play isn’t its plot however, but the way it completely rewrites the RPG rule book, flat out refusing to conform to the typical gameplay tropes and standards set by countless other games in the genre. The irritating aspects of many RPGs – random encounters, fetch quests, forgettable NPCs – are often accepted with a sigh and “that’s just the way it is”, but Xenoblade instead questions why this is so and offers alternatives which are frequently better than the status quo.
The NPCs dotted around the world map are not generic quest and chat providers, but form the game’s interesting Affinity Chart feature, where the more you gain each character’s trust the more you find out about them and their relationships with certain other NPCs. Over time, you’ll end up creating a massive chart connecting everyone in the game, lending the world a sense of personality rarely found in the genre.
Meanwhile, while fetch quests are indeed still present, players no longer have to travel all the way across the game’smassivemap to deliver the goods: once located and collected, the quest is automatically completed. Random encounters are mainly in the hands of the player too: creatures freely roam the environment and often the player either chooses whether to engage, or can avoid battle simply by staying out of eyesight.
Battles themselves are fast-paced realtime affairs, with your party members automatically dishing out basic attacks while special attacks (called Arts) build up and can then be triggered at will. Being able to freely run around the combat arena, avoiding enemy attacks and dishing out commands to your CPU-controlled teammates gives a refreshing feeling of dynamism to fights, leading to the unthinkable: a game that actually makes you want to grind because battling is such good fun.
And if it all goes wrong and an enemy gets the better of you, you aren’t stripped of your money or your items or anything similarly frustrating that makes you think twice about taking on the challenge again. You’re simply sent to the nearest major landmark on the map, fully powered-up and ready to go again. This is a game that celebrates gung-ho bravery, rather than punishing it.
The happy accident that comes as a result of this streamlined, slog-reduced gameplay is that Xenoblade Chronicles is not just a great console game but also perfectly suited for handheld gaming. Players can get a lot of action out of a 20-minute session on the bus, and the Story Memo feature, activated by pressing the R button while the menu is up, reminds you what’s going on so you don’t suffer that all too common RPG nightmare of loading up a game save after a little time away and completely forgetting what you were supposed to do next.
The port itself is as good as could be expected given the 3DS’s lack of power compared to the Wii. Indeed, this is the first game that is only playable on the New 3DS hardware, its improved CPU speed providing the extra horsepower needed to handle the port. Handled by Monster Games (the same studio responsible for the 3DS port of Wii title Donkey Kong Country Returns), the differences between the console and handheld versions are only really noticeable when you sit the two side-by-side, and even then the 3DS port only suffers from slightly reduced texture quality. To all intents and purposes, this is pretty much the Wii game on a handheld, running just as smoothly and featuring almost everything that the console version does.
We say ‘almost’ because there’s a single element missing in the 3DS version that may upset some fans of the game. Presumably for storage purposes, the option to play the game with its original Japanese language track has been removed, leaving players with only the English language dialogue instead. We can easily see how this could be an irritation to some as the English dub is notoriously shonky, with characters’ The Only Way Is Chelsea accents and cringeworthy battle quips (“Man, what a bunch of jokers”) already the target of numerous internet memes following the Wii version’s release.
This relatively minor annoyance aside, everything else about Xenoblade Chronicles 3D remains as incredible as when it originally came to the Wii. A few years on it still remains one of the finest RPGs money can buy, and the move to handheld only serves to further highlight the way its fast-paced gameplay breathes new life into a flatlining genre. For anyone who had been putting off upgrading their 3DS hardware until the release of an essential New 3DS-only title would make it a necessity, that time may have come much sooner than you thought.