At long last it’s time to talk about Game-Wisdom’s #1 favorite game for 2012. Earlier when I brought up Diablo 3, I mentioned that it was the 2nd longest time I spent playing a game in 2012. For the # 1 game, my total playtime was just around 120 hours.
#1 XenoBlade Chronicles:
In the past I’ve talked about my love-hate relationship with the JRPG genre. In the early 00s after becoming bored of the Final Fantasy series and other games like it, I gave up on enjoying the JRPG genre.
But then a few years later, I discovered the Shin Megami Tensei series and Disgaea and became a fan of them and the developer/publisher Atlus overnight. Since then I’ve been attracted to JRPGs that are about challenging the player or delivering something new, instead of the same 40 hour content I’ve seen before.
And that takes us to last year with XenoBlade Chronicles: a game that Nintendo was actually considering not releasing in the US. I don’t know if it was a ploy or if all the petitions and sites got to them, but we got the game in the US, and I got my favorite game of the year.
XenoBlade Chronicles worked for me as this was a game where you could just tell that the designers took a look at the JRPG genre, deconstruct it and put it back together again. The game streamlined a lot of the annoyances of other JRPG games: no random battles, instant travel to previous areas, can change day/night cycles instantly and more.
Xenoblade’s combat system was a take on the active combat system seen in MMOs: As your party of three could move around and attack with a variety of skills. Combat was fast, but engaging as each character had completely unique abilities to use in combat and you could even share character buffs between different members.
The cast of characters were developed well over the course of the series; even the overly cute Riki got some decent screen time and became one of my mainstay party members for the final battle. Speaking of party members, the entire cast levels up evenly, preventing further grind of having to keep everyone at relative levels.
I would love to shake the hand of the designer who made the decision to have health automatically restore after combat, further removing the grind of constant fighting.
Given my love of city builders, you could guess that I fell in love with the side quest of restoring a former colony to its previous glory. The various areas to explore were just beautiful and made Xenoblade Chronicles one of the best looking games not only on the Wii, but for the year.
The story while it did get a bit crazy in the second half was a good motivator to keep playing. Even though the game didn’t technically have post game content, as beating the final boss ended the game, there were a lot of extra things to do. Such as additional side quests, to high level enemies hidden in areas. I’m willing to bet that even past the hundred hour mark, that there were side quests and content that I missed.
In the end Xenoblade Chronicles easily shows that there is still innovation out there in the JRPG genre and that the many archaic designs of the genre aren’t needed to create a great JRPG. If you have a Wii (and classic controller Pro) and still haven’t played Xenoblade Chronicles, then you’re missing out on one of the few titles for the Wii that could be classified as a system seller.
