Xenoblade Chronicles - review

To give you an idea of how long the game is, my first play-through took me nearly 78 hours. However, it never started to drag on or get boring. If anything the excitement and anticipation ramp up and then explode at the end. It got to the point when I began to ignore many of the later side-quests and instead focused exclusively on the games main plot quests only because I knew I was getting so close to the end. My final play session lasted eleven hours. I could not put the controller down, not even for food. I’ll admit it got a bit unhealthy there but I could not help myself. The battles became so intense near the end that I would shout “YES!” when I would win after fighting a boss for nearly forty minutes straight.

This brings up difficulty. While I would say about 80% of the game is moderately challenging, most of the truly difficult content comes from optional mini-bosses and the end of the game. I’ll admit that things got a bit out of hand near the end, but they never got frustrating, just incredibly challenging. But with incredible challenge comes the feeling of incredible reward and some pretty nice loot to boot.