‘Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition’: RPG Review

No studio makes games like Monolith Soft. That’s not hyperbole — literally no other RPGs blend humanism and sci-fi with philosophy, reflections on grief, and religious commentary the way Tetsuya Takahashi and his writers have for the last 30 years. Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is a remaster of the series’ black sheep, a 2015 spinoff left to wither away on Nintendo’s worst-selling platform, the Wii U. And while it’s disappointing as a re-release, it’s one of the studio’s most interesting and best-designed games nonetheless.

The Xenoblade games are part of a lengthy, often bizarre series of RPGs that started with Xenogears in 1998, a Squaresoft RPG developed in tandem with Final Fantasy VII. It combined traditional RPG storytelling — a young hero seeks revenge after his village is destroyed — with darker themes and, for a video game, unusually deep commentary on religion and philosophy, including the point of existence, the thin boundary between faith and oppression, and how easily people can weaponize beliefs to their own advantage. Final Fantasy VII ate most of Square’s development budget, so Xenogears‘ second half turned into a lengthy exposition instead of a video game. Takahashi, Xeno’s creator, expanded on those themes with the Xenogears games for PlayStation 2, a succession of sci-fi stories examining the meaning of life and the nature of consciousness with a generous helping of biblical references and convoluted plot twists. 

Takahashi rebooted the Xeno series with Xenoblade Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii in 2010, a tale of two clashing civilizations unwittingly at the mercy of gods they didn’t even know existed. It’s more of a traditional RPG than Xenogears, ditching philosophy for a narrative about the dangers of an “us versus them” mentality. Xenoblade Chronicles X launched on the Wii U in 2015 and returned to the series’ fixation on space and insightful storytelling. Then, Monolith released Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for the Switch in 2017, a notable departure for the series at first glance, with a shallower, immature story about the power of friendship until the game’s closing hours. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 picks up its predecessors’ interest in philosophy and builds itself around exploring Socrates’ question of what it means to live a good life.

The four Xenoblade games were, initially, separate from each other, with a few important details that tied them together. Monolith worked to make those ties stronger. In various re-releases and DLC expansions in the 2020s, and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is one of those re-releases. 

Less than definitive

As a remaster, Chronicles X is surprisingly lacking in polish compared to Monolith’s work on 2020’s Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. A handful of character models are of a noticeably higher quality than most of the others and more closely resemble the models Monolith created for Xenoblade Chronicles 3. That includes Elma, one of the central characters, while the rest of the cast are lightly upscaled versions of their original selves from the Wii U version. 

The voice work is also uneven and remains unchanged, as does most of the questionable sound design. The noise of a giant monster drinking from a lake is indistinguishable from the sound of a dog drinking from a water bowl with a microphone next to it, which isn’t the quality you expect from a big-budget game in 2025.

The soundtrack is largely untouched, which is a problem when some of the major themes are short and uninspiring to begin with. One of the main hub’s themes, for example, sounds like someone wrote half a dozen bars of a rap song, forgot to finish it, and decided to just loop them instead. After the bright colors and generally improved lighting in Chronicles 3 and Chronicles Definitive Edition, it would’ve been nice to see a similar touch-up for Chronicles X. 

A how-(not)-to behave manual

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a parable. It’s a warning about how humans behave when they’re in a position where they consider themselves superior to something — or someone — else. Parables are Monolith’s favorite storytelling tool, but Xenoblade Chronicles X is easily one of their best, thanks to how it’s structured.

It opens with a memory. A small fleet of carefully selected humans flees Earth on a ship called the White Whale — a seemingly random Moby Dick reference that becomes more apt as the game progresses — as hostilities between two alien civilizations threaten to destroy the planet. One of those civilizations catches up to the White Whale, destroys most of it, and sends the rest crashing into a planet called Mira.

Out of this wreckage, two months later, steps you, a silent avatar with no memory. A highly trained warrior named Elma recovers your comatose body, wakes you up, and takes you to New Los Angeles, a city the survivors established. After a brief introduction to the locale, she gently pushes you to sign up with BLADE, a “volunteer” organization that everyone is compelled to join, which is part military, part National Geographic expedition to survey the planet, and part government. Your task from here is to help New Los Angeles establish a secure home on this new planet by scouting the environment, dealing with any imminent threats, and helping the government establish control over the city and its surrounding areas. 

Xenoblade Chronicles X uses the trite “hero with amnesia” trope in a brilliant way. You’re a blank slate, without prejudice or assumption. All you know is what Elma tells you and what you see for yourself. Sure, the observant player will think BLADE and New Los Angeles’ general setup lends itself a little too well to militaristic fascism. When helping arms manufacturers is one of your main tasks, and the city’s economy is built on conflict, you know the outcome won’t be rosy. The desire that Elma expresses to live in harmony with the environment won’t last long unless something changes. What the player character sees, though, is that BLADE and its associated arms manufacturers do the people of Earth a great service by keeping them safe and promising a better future.

The society responsible for engineering the tragedy that resulted in Earth’s apparent destruction probably told its members they were also acting in everyone’s best interests, even as they planted the seeds of their eventual downfall. Centuries later, none of New Los Angeles’ residents — skilled professionals and members of old Earth’s elite — are going to rock the boat, not with lucrative contracts with arms manufacturers and the promise of power over an untamed world hanging over them. 

These problems in New Los Angeles never reach a crisis point, as the city’s growth is halted by a series of deadly attacks from another civilization on Mira, but they don’t need to develop anyway. The revelations that unfold during the game’s second half make it plain that humanity’s current trajectory — and regressive views on equality — will only create more tragedies if left unchecked, a lesson intended as much for the people playing Chronicles X as it is for the characters themselves. It’s a powerful statement and, for RPGs and video games in general, an unusually pertinent one.

On the periphery

Chronicles X‘s main story is hyper-focused on a single chain of events, with almost no room for insight into Mira or the people of New Los Angeles and nowhere near enough opportunities for you to keep up with the difficulty curve. That is, unless you dabble in the game’s dozens of side quests. Affinity Missions, Chronicles X’s term for a type of side quest that’s more story-rich than others, are the most interesting, and where the rest of the story unfolds between each chapter. These offer more insight into party members, the consequences of events that happen in the main story, and the general nature of society in New Los Angeles. 

None of them are particularly deep, but they keep the goal of establishing a new civilization from feeling like a shallow plot device and let key characters have a chance to develop more outside the main story. Leaving so much of the game’s important connecting pieces to side material isn’t the best idea, but the difficulty curve means you’re bound to see at least some of it anyway.

Most of what Chronicles X has you do in these missions and other side quests is usual RPG quest material — finding items, defeating monsters. They’re memorable in other ways, though. One is how they connect to Chronicles X‘s overarching goal of establishing a new colony on Mira. Culling monsters and making it easier to control the environment seem like benign and even helpful tasks, until you eventually see how those could lend themselves to something darker and more destructive. 

The other way is where these quests take you. Xenoblade games normally drop you into massive environments — the leg of a giant, for example, or the belly of a giant fish — but they all have walls, barriers, and ways of keeping you penned in. Xenoblade Chronicles X is the series’ only proper open world, a massive planet with four biodiverse continents and dozens of wildlife species that want to hurt you. 

Having no zone barriers may sound like a minor difference, but it’s hard to overstate how much more vast it makes the world feel and how that adds to the sense of wonder. Sure, there’s not really that much to do and see in the open world beyond fighting monsters, yet swimming its oceans, climbing its mountains, and braving its deadly depths feels like an exciting adventure anyway. You’ve got your green fields and parched deserts as always in Xenoblade games, but they’re peppered with little details like unusual flora and otherworldly geographic formations that make them seem strange.

None of these continents are level-gated, either. You’ll find superpowered enemies who can murder you with their vomit in a single spew literally just wandering around outside New Los Angeles, mixed in with the dinky little level-five bugs and other harmless animals. Any mission into the wild is a risky one, and while that’s a typical setup for Xenoblade games, it’s a strong complement to Chronicles X‘s motif of settling a dangerous new world.

Class warfare

There’s a lot of combat, so it’s a good thing Chronicles X has one of the series’ most robust and enjoyable battle systems. Unlike the first game, Chronicles X uses a class-based system that lets you equip multiple weapons to suit different situations and mix weapon and class skills. Skills have different bonus effects, such as extra damage when used from a specific direction or against an enemy suffering from a status ailment, and they also have different degrees of strength. You can fire them off as soon as they’re ready, or you can actually plan ahead and let them fully charge to unlock extra capabilities. Every class comes with multiple skills, though you can only have six equipped at once. 

Monolith added a Monster Hunter-like component where you can target and destroy specific enemy limbs. Doing so weakens the foe more quickly and rewards you with better materials for making stronger equipment, but it’s also just a refreshing way to give you smaller sub-goals during long battles. Best of all, though, is the option to equip more than one weapon. Any character can have a melee and a ranged weapon, which is far more useful than it sounds when you need to target flying enemies or want to retreat without risking the enemy’s retreat and subsequent recovery.

In short, there’s a lot going on in Chronicles X‘s combat, more than just using skills and waiting for their cooldown timers to end. The tutorials are dreadful, though, and most of your knowledge about how combat works comes from hours of experimenting and dying a lot. On the bright side, failure has no consequences in Chronicles X, as you just respawn a short distance away from where you fell. More clarity about how the game works would be nice, but if it has to be opaque, at least it isn’t unforgiving as well. 

Chronicles X: Definitive Edition might not be as definitive as its name suggests, with few improvements outside some upscaling. However, it’s among the Switch’s best RPGs anyway. This is Monolith’s best effort at game design that actively supports the story it wants to tell, even if parts of that design are poorly explained and not particularly innovative themselves.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition launches for Nintendo Switch on March 20.