Xenoblade Chronicles' Core Loop

On Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles is a well-known JRPG developed by Monolith Soft, published under Nintendo's guidance. The series received positive aclaim world-wide, and is considered a standard, if not a classic of the genre. It has a compelling narrative, excellent music and voice acting, and the Definitive Edition enhanced the graphics to provide a well-rounded title. I first entered in contact with the series when owning a console was out of my reach, being satisfied with watching a movie of the game's cutscenes in Youtube. Loved it, great afternoon. Years passed, I began a videogames-centered degree, and realized I was a fanboy of a game I hadn't even played. Thus, it was time to actually go play it.

While the overall experience was positive, the unending praise I and others had for the game quickly became disingenuous, as a major problem was quickly noticed, which made me feel obligued to analyze what went wrong, and how this could have been a better title.

This review is spoilers free.


Xenoblade's Noxious Core Game Loop

The Core Game Loop of this game is a classic one in RPGs: get to new area, power-up, reach the end of the dungeon, defeat its boss, repeat. Xenoblade's problem is in how it executes it: not in the components (although they are not necessarily perfectly functional), but in the dynamics that surge between them.

Those are the actors in play:

  • Traversal through the world is slow, can last several minutes, and it lacks interesting interactivity to fill the journey with. The only solution the game provides are certain gems and skills to slightly increase movement speed, which are acquired relatively late in the game.

  • Uninteresting secondary missions: as much as it hurts me to say so, an overwhelming majority of quests are quite superfluous and typical of the genre, most of which are about taking a teleport to the closer place, and then spending 3-10 minutes going somewhere to kill generic enemies / pick a key item up. Since the clear conditions are only registered after the quest is received from an NPC, doing any exploration prior to gathering as much of them as possible usually means having to walk back to places far away from a teleport, wasting time.

  • The 4-levels rule: this is a check the game does to dynamically control the difficulty, making enemies that are 4+ levels under you much easier, and viceversa, making harder enemies even more tough. This mechanic is only superficially hinted at in one of the pop-up tutorials, saying that the level of danger of an enemy makes it harder to hit and evade, indicated by the color on its name card, which goes through the range of easy (grey) - weak (blue) - balanced (brown) - strong (yellow) - dangerous (red). This hint is an absolute understatement. It also fails to explain how this distinction is made, that is to say, that it isn't the enemy that determines the difficulty type, but the difference of level between them and the player, thus difficulting the reasoning that grinding, at least to be at the same level, is a simple solution to the problem.

Image taken from here

Returning to our Core Game Loop, an iteration would go something like this: player gets to a new area, does some narrative progression and gets directed towards the dungeon. They clear it and reach the end. At this point, there are two options: since combat itself yields very few experience, either the player has done a bunch of secondaries before reaching the boss, or has to go do them after being defeated. In either case, the main story, which is the main selling point of the game (at least for most people) has to be interrupted to do a bunch of tasteless quests through a terribly slow-to-traverse world. This results in anti-climatic, frustrating formalities that take from 20 minutes to an hour of grinding every time a level ceiling is reached.

What is most aggravating is that there were no need for patches or core changes to the character progression to solve this disruptive problem: the game already has the systems to fix it. Everytime a new area is completed, the characters receive some experience for it. Additionally, the game is totally linear. Since experience gained in combat is, most of the times, insignificant, why not control player level-up based on their map and boss progression? The only efficient way the game provides to gain experience is through completing secondary missions. People who care about those will already do them; those who don't care, or find out how boring and repetitive they are, will want to drop them. In the current game, only one group of players is satisfied; with the proposed approach, the game gets to respect all play-styles.

An even simpler alternative would have been to increase character movement speed, or at the very least, give access to the tools that improve it much faster. Some kind of shortcut system would have been appreciated too, so that exploration can be performed at any point without being a waste of time if the specific quests that take place in a far away location have not yet been acquired; even new, different ways of navigating the map, although more expensive to implement, would have made for a nice change of pace.


Conclusions

As a designer, I look at the experience that the game's loop makes up, and I can't conceive it as anything but a detriment to the story, both in engagement and themes, since the act of going back and powering up is not a challenge, it is not meaningful in the context of the game. This is not because the idea of the loop itself is poorly conceived (it has been a serviceable standard of the RPG genre for a long time), but because it failed in the implementation of two fronts. Firstly, it failed to account for the player experience: just because the world is big, doesn't mean that movement options have to be so barebones. Secondly, the context for which this problem surges in the first place (the secondary quests) also fails at being interesting, despite how much the macro conception of the world is.

As closing statement, Xenoblade Chronicles, despite its high peaks, felt for a problem that could have been identified through better testing, and that could have prevented big chunks of the game from feeling like mandatory filler, ultimately hurting the final experience at the benefit of more playtime.