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Xenoblade X Definitive Edition: For the Love of Mira

This post contains spoilers for all of Xenoblade Chronicles X and the Definitive Edition, as well as vague spoilers for other Xeno titles.

I’ve never seen the BBC show Sherlock. I’ve seen the Hbomberguy video that shits all over it upwards of a dozen times, putting it on in the background while working on something else, as any vaguely nerdy person my age might do. I won’t pretend that that video is a replacement for watching the show, neither as a way of experiencing it nor as a way of analyzing its faults. Even so, I have to admit that I did take at least one opinion from the video anyway: that the show, and its showrunners, have little respect for people who engage sincerely with it.
It seems some people don’t feel much differently about those who engaged sincerely with the original version of Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Make no mistake, Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition is a great remaster. It’s hard not to feel that way about a remaster of a game that actually needed one, trapped on a failed and dying console with a bunch of content stripped from it by the server shutdowns. I can’t think of a fan who wasn’t happy to see it come to the Switch, or anything bad to say about the gameplay changes it has made. It is, on all accounts, a better way of playing Xenoblade Chronicles X than the original ever was. As such, I can’t say I don’t like this game. I love this game. As I finished Chapter 12 once more, I was entirely sure of its spot over the original as my favorite game of all time.
But Chapter 13? It might be the worst possible thing they could have added.

Chapter 13 is a lot of things. Most importantly, it’s a main story chapter in Xenoblade Chronicles X. This, by default, seems to curse it with the affliction of “being kinda bad”. It seems that in ten years, there has been absolutely zero improvement in the writing structure of this game. Act 1 is a bunch of “go here, fight a thing” objectives, starting off strong by showing no sign of improving on something that’s notoriously been maligned.
Personally though, I am more bothered by what follows these fights, which is what I can only describe as a truly obnoxious deluge of drawn out cutscenes. All of a sudden, it establishes a new status quo: the absolute and unavoidable destruction of the planet Mira. Therein lies the rub, really. Chapter 13 makes it clear from the get-go what it intends to do with the questions left unanswered: nothing. It’s nothing. You’re not getting anything. This is a different story entirely. Doesn’t that sound a little familiar?

Now, I don’t like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but the way in which that game connects itself to XC1 is completely inoffensive. The small tweaks made to XCDE to accommodate for this and tease the future of the series are basically big fat nothingburgers too. The real problem has always been Future Connected.
Future Connected, of course, is widely agreed upon to be a steaming pile of shit. …Sorry, that’s a little much. I can’t say I wasn’t happy to see the Bionis’ Shoulder added to the game. It’s just that nothing really happens in FC, aside from some vague allusions to possible plot points in a completely different game. It’s certainly not something that adds much of value to the original game or caters much to its fans, but it at least treats the world of XC1 as its own thing, which we can continue to care about even after the revelations. Mira, on the other hand, is afforded no such dignity.

I need to talk for a brief moment about The Artbook, by which I mean the substantial amount of “unused material” clearly labeled as such in Xenoblade X: The Secret File. I think the existence of The Artbook is something that came to shape fans’ expectations for Mira’s future. The original game and The Artbook together implied a huge amount of mystery and intrigue surrounding the planet itself. I can’t name a Xenoblade X superfan who didn’t keep hoping that we would get a game where we got to see more of Mira, know more of it. To this day, it remains perhaps the most interesting plot hook in all of Xenoblade.
Now, the exact contents of The Artbook are fairly irrelevant, since I certainly don’t believe that plans shouldn’t change at all even after a decade. As much as it admittedly pains me to say, it’s not really the problem that the Hraesvelg is just a normal Skell that kinda sucks, or that the Ares Prime isn’t a tandem Skell, or that the Black Knight is just some guy now. If you have nothing intriguing to do with unused concepts, you shouldn’t do anything with them. I think even for what it is, Chapter 13 should be afforded at least that much leeway.

Unlike FC, at least, things certainly do happen in Act 1 right away. We are quickly caught up to speed with the original Ares and the Ghosts, or basically the concepts from The Artbook that actually matter, appearing for the first time since the game’s opening. For a fleeting few minutes, they’re still concepts tied to the world of Xenoblade X. Even as the game reveals its intent to dumpster Mira, it at least leads you to believe that it has intrigue to be found elsewhere… and then, it happens. Unable to contain itself, it shows you precisely what it wants you to find elsewhere: the other games in the series.
At the moment I actually experienced it, I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it. It felt like seeing that image of Rex’s harem from the XC3 ending when the game originally released. It honestly didn’t even feel remotely as offensive to me as it does now, brazen as it is. In hindsight, it’s a relief that Chapter 13 shows its hand so soon: perhaps a few people were spared the hope that it actually gets any better. Because the truth is that it does not. It’s how the game truly tells you: It’s nothing. You’re not getting anything. This is a different story entirely.

Act 2 is a bunch of meandering nonsense that leads nowhere. It feels as pointless as any other main story chapter in this game, which is just a shame, but I can live with it. I loved this game in spite of that, so I’ll not be unnecessarily bitter about it. Act 3 is really where it comes to a head, as expected.
Volitaris is deeply disappointing. It’s hardly a continent at all, instead being a disposable story setpiece, seemingly aiming to condense the experience of playing Breath of the Wild into an hour of gameplay. It hardly works. It doesn’t even feel good. The battle music never played for more than 10 seconds even as I set aside my Ares 90. FrontierNav, the beating heart of the game’s exploration gameplay, is nowhere to be found. With that, I kind of don’t see the point of even having added this content at all. In other words, it’s nothing.
Fighting Void certainly feels like you’re beating up the bad guy. I wasn’t really given much reason to care about it beyond that. The way the game dispenses lore on the Samaarians could have been deeply interesting, but all of it revolves around this one guy we’ve never heard of before now, who’s suddenly supposed to be important. It just doesn’t really land, especially when his motivations are all rather incoherent nonsense. In other words, it’s still nothing.

That said, phase 2 of the fight… is good? On their own, the revelations made at the last second are not bad at all. I like the concept of the Ares as carrying the souls of all the lost people, and I really like the concept of Cross as embodying the unity of these souls. It sounds corny, but let’s be honest for a second: it actually represents what was good about Xenoblade X. I care about this world and its characters so deeply that this is what I always wanted Cross to be. It is through Cross that you experience this world, so how else could it ever have ended? If it was just that, without the destruction of Mira, I honestly would have been praising Chapter 13 to the highest heavens.
Sadly, the game brings the mood down right after by mentioning the Conduit.

Going into Chapter 13, I expected the Conduit. X was the first Xenoblade game to allude to the Zohar, after all. It seemed only inevitable that if this concept actually manifested in Xenoblade, it would be here. I was proven wrong, of course, but that’s fine. If it was left to the implication that X’s world was just another one in a vaguely connected series, it would barely have mattered at all. Now, Chapter 13 is already a thematic dead end for anything brought up in the original game. We shouldn’t act as if it really handled its themes with much grace, as no amount of “Lao was right” posting will make it so, but it was striking to see the game abandon all of it to go a completely different direction. Not purely negative, at first, just striking. My real issue with it is the Ghosts.
The Ghosts (and the Ares) are tied to the Conduit now, and as such, they are implicitly present in all Xenoblade narratives from this point forward. It has effectively been established that the Ghosts are capable of wiping away any given world in the series with absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Seeing what they did to Mira, this just seems like an extremely bleak way of going about things, and it honestly does not make me very confident for the future. Xenoblade, in my view, already devolved into merely alluding to bigger and cooler things in the next entry over and over again. Now, it even threatens to erase any setting it gets bored with! But of course, don’t you worry, because the keen player might have noticed that the plot is just Xenosaga again! The final shot of the ending is a reference to the opening of Xenogears! Doesn’t that Ares Prime look suspiciously like an Ouroboros form? Aren’t you excited to see how it was all connected the whole time? Do you remember that time that the breeze felt so good, and you wished every day could be like this, forever? Don’t you just love Xenoblade Chronicles?

I think at this point, I don’t actually love Xenoblade Chronicles. At least, not in the way that the series wants me to. And that is the problem here.
I loved Xenoblade Chronicles X, the game that released on the Wii U in 2015. I still love that game, even. I love the world it showed me, one that I and so many others came to care about so sincerely. We do care, we really care, we care so much it once threatened to make us grow resentful of the series’ success without it. It can’t be put into words just how important it really was to see it come back on the Switch. Playing DE truly feels incredible, doubly so knowing that so many people experience this game with the same wonder I felt a decade ago. It’s rooted in nothing but a sincere love for all that the game is, and was, and forever will be. It’s so plainly obvious that we care, and that we have cared for the past decade.
So why are some of you so surprised that we do?

That statement isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. It’s aimed at Monolith Soft, perhaps, but they’re not listening. I’d say it’s aimed at the people who played Xenoblade X for the first time and told us that they liked… the concepts it introduced to the series. Some people in a Discord server expressed genuine surprise that anyone cared about Mira at all. A friend of a friend referred to it as a “worthy sacrifice for the sake of a connected universe”. I honestly feel bad even putting people on blast like that, so I have to clarify: I’m not really mad at any of them. If it was just a few people stating an opinion of their own, it wouldn’t be worth writing about. I’m just upset, perhaps, that the game has allowed that to be their takeaways from it.
If I might make it entirely about myself now, I just feel snubbed. I don’t feel snubbed in the sense that my exact theories didn’t come true, or that L doesn’t actually have a demonic true form, or that Reina Sakuraba never showed up. It wasn’t really about those exact things to begin with. We got Neilnail, and she’s probably nothing like what they originally envisioned, but it’s fine because she’s a great addition. She interacts with another recruitable character quite prominently, elaborates on the world of Mira and the Qlurians without being overbearing, and is also a very fun character on her own. It’s exactly what I wanted out of the additional content, to be honest, and I’m very grateful that Neilnail exists.
In the context of how the game ends, though, it just leaves me wondering why they even bothered. Why make me believe for even a second that the game was elaborating on this world because you cared, and not purely because you felt obligated to tie up a too-obvious loose end from a time attack mission? It feels akin to how they put the Core Crystal on Alvis’ necklace, at best. Knowing Neilnail was going to be in the game, I really was happy. I thought that perhaps the devs cared as much as I do. It seems, however, that they just don’t.

I know I have yet to address the elephant in the room: whether I am any more entitled to get what I want out of this series than anyone else. The answer, of course, is no. It’s not a moral failing on Monolith’s part to start catering to Xenoblade’s newly established fanbase. I actually greatly oppose the notion that game series should remain stagnant in order to continue appeasing the same group of existing fans, especially when that group is small. I want to make it very clear that, even if I don’t like XC2 or whatever, that I don’t fundamentally oppose these entries existing in the way they do.
That said, there are reasonable limits to such things, and especially in this case. This is not a new game. It’s a damn remaster of a game people already loved, a world they already cared about. A friend, who didn’t even finish the game back on Wii U, put it better than I ever could:
“This is not a reward for loving Xenoblade Chronicles X for all these years. This is a reward for having played the whole numbered series and thinking: ‘Wow, I can’t wait to see how they bring Xenoblade X into this! I never had a Wii U, so I don't know what happens in that game. Elma's cool though!’”
That’s what’s disappointing about it, in the end. The content added to this game does not feel like it was for me at all. Selfish as it might be, I genuinely am left wondering why the game would even pretend that it did anything for its existing fans, when it never really did. There’s plenty of overlap with full series fans, sure, but come on now. This game has been detached from the rest of the series from the start. It can’t be hard to imagine why it would develop a separate fanbase, and why forcibly janking it into an overarching narrative after a decade might leave a lot of us disappointed.
The notion, then, that it’s silly for us to have cared in the first place… that is what makes me downright resentful. I really do wonder what it was about this game that made people feel that way, that made them come out of it not caring about Mira at all. I think, in that sense, Definitive Edition actually just fails as a remaster. It feels like it doesn’t trust any new Xenoblade fans to care about any of it beyond the carrot on the stick at the end. It feels like Monolith Soft doesn’t trust in the original appeal of Xenoblade Chronicles X anymore, or even cares about that at all. It is then that I’m reminded of Sherlock’s showrunners, and how they seemed to resent their own fans just for caring. I wouldn’t go nearly that far as to say Monolith does the same, but it certainly doesn’t really seem concerned with the people who actually cared about Mira, and it kinda ends up feeling like they’re similarly spiting you anyway. It’s not even about old or new fans at that point, now is it? If you came out of it caring about the world you spent all this time exploring, too bad. The game doesn’t.

Does this mean you shouldn’t have played this game if you just wanted to see how it tied in to everything? Of course not. If you played it at all, I’m still happy. If you love Mira as much as I do, I’m really happy. And if you find yourself actually caring about the Xenoblade-shaped things you saw on the screen, I’m still fine with that. I think it would have been even worse if after all this, the actual target audience of it ended up hating it too.
You can’t really play the original Xenoblade Chronicles X anymore, for now. I mean, it’s there, but a lot of the content is gone. I’m sure someone, somewhere, is working to bring it back, and that might seem pointless. It’s not as if DE isn’t just straight up a better way of playing even the original content, and I’d be insane to recommend the original over it.
I feel a similar way about the Wii version of XC1, though, and the reason is quite simple: it doesn’t have the carrots on the sticks. It’s the game as it was originally presented, and nothing more. Even if it’s just Alvis’ necklace and a separate campaign that means nothing, I think it matters that these things just aren’t there at all. I feel that way about a lot of remasters and remakes, even if they’re good, and I am generally very positive on remakes. Returning to the basics makes you really care about the very core of what made a game beloved enough to return.
I think for that reason I’ll continue to call Xenoblade Chronicles X, the game that released on the Wii U in 2015, my favorite game of all time. The people who feel the need to understand that are the ones who will, anyway.