Xenoblade Chronicles X is the biggest world Nintendo ever shipped on the Wii U, and the only one where you can cross an ocean in a giant robot that turns into a motorcycle. Monolith Soft built it for the Wii U, released in 2015, as a spiritual successor to Xenoblade Chronicles, and it remains the most ambitious thing the studio attempted on that hardware.
It is also a game that asks for a lot before it gives anything back.
Trailer, via Nintendo of America.
Five Continents on Mira
The setup is grim and efficient. Earth is destroyed in a war between two alien races. A handful of arks escape, including the White Whale, which carries the city New Los Angeles. Two years into the flight, the White Whale is attacked and crash-lands on Mira, an uncharted planet. The Lifehold, which holds most of the surviving colonists, is torn away, and lifepods scatter across the surface.
Your avatar wakes in a lifepod with no memory, pulled out by Elma, the leader of BLADE and colonel of NLA’s Skell forces. Lin Lee Koo, the engineer who builds and maintains the Skells, joins you. So does Lao Huang, a former US Army officer with a cool manner.
Mira is five continents. Primordia looks the most like Earth. Noctilum is forest and bioluminescent life. Oblivia is desert and ancient ruins. Sylvalum is pale, misted, dominated by huge plants and rock formations. Cauldros is volcanic and held by the Ganglion, the coalition of alien races trying to finish what started at Earth.
Skells and the Long Walk
For the first half of Xenoblade Chronicles X, you walk. The game gates everything behind exploration and story progress, and that means a great deal of hiking across terrain built at a scale meant for machines. It is a long stretch.
Then you finish the quest chain that unlocks Skells, and the game changes shape. The mechs are roughly four times the height of a normal character. They walk, drive, fly, cross water, and transform into vehicles like motorcycles or tanks. Aerial combat opens up. Regions that took minutes on foot take seconds.
Fuel is limited. Run a Skell dry and it stays parked until you refill it, which forces a rhythm between flying everywhere and actually paying attention to where you are.
The Eight BLADE Divisions
You build the avatar yourself: gender, face, build, voice. Within BLADE you pick a role, and each one pays differently.
| Division | Duty |
|---|---|
| Pathfinders | Open up new locations |
| Interceptors | Defend research teams from hostile lifeforms |
| Harriers | Seek hostile lifeforms, including Tyrants |
| Reclaimers | Retrieve wreckage from the White Whale |
| Curators | Explore new locations and collect data |
| Prospectors | Collect rare resources |
| Outfitters | Develop gear |
| Mediators | Resolve conflicts among NLA’s people |
Quests split into story quests, affinity quests that build bonds with your companions, small missions that pay in-game money, and side quests from NLA citizens. Standard EXP raises general statistics; Class EXP raises your assigned Class.
What Monolith Soft Got Right
Tetsuya Takahashi served as executive director and co-writer. Koh Kojima directed and designed. Yuichiro Takeda co-wrote. Xenosaga artists Kunihiko Tanaka and Kouichi Mugitani handled art and character design, and anime composer Hiroyuki Sawano wrote the score. Production started in 2010 on a tight budget, and the team set out to build an expansive world anyway.
The online multiplayer was hard for an inexperienced team, and it forced a full story rewrite that turned the protagonist into a player-created avatar. That rewrite may be why the narrative feels thin next to the world around it. The avatar has no memory, and the story often happens around them.
The scale, though, is real. Mira is not padding. It is the argument the game is making.
Score: 8.5/10
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game about traversal that makes you earn traversal. The first half is a test of patience. The second half justifies it, because flying a Skell over Noctilum at night is something no other Wii U game offered, and the five continents are distinct enough that exploration keeps paying out.
The story does not hold up next to the world. The Ganglion are a wall to push against, and the amnesia framing keeps the avatar at arm’s length from every scene that matters. Fans of the original Xenoblade Chronicles should expect a different bargain: less narrative pull, more open ground.
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