I'm Playing My First JRPG
My impressions on Xenoblade Chronicles X and JRPG's moving forward
A few weeks ago, Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition launched for the Nintendo Switch so naturally, I opened the website for that most proud of British institutions: CEX and ordered the 10 year old original version for the Wii-U. I wasn’t about to drop so much money on a game I didn’t know I would like.
For the longest time, JRPG’s have given me (and I truly detest to use this word) the dreaded ‘ick.’ I grew up playing Pokémon and I played about 30 minutes of a PS2 Final Fantasy as a kid and decided I didn’t like it but that’s really as far as I dared to venture. My disposition has been so severe that I swore off the Yakuza franchise (I’m not calling it Like A Dragon) when it made the switch to turn-based combat.
I really don’t like anime which plays a big part and worse, I don’t even like Western RPG’s outside of a small handful. The saccharine, fake sounding voice acting has always been a big turn off to me and the anime character tropes make games of this ilk extremely predictable to me; I remember watching a friend stream Final Fantasy 16 and rolling my eyes as I kept correctly predicting what was going to happen next and hearing that same, grating, over the top line delivery and Wattpad-calibre dialogue play out.
Worse yet is the humour.
I’ve watched a few anime in my time, enjoyed one or two of them but even in the ones I like, the Japanese-style slapstick humour and comedic relief characters just never land with me and always get on my nerves.
So, what changed?
Generally speaking, I try to have a Bourdain-like approach to video games; I trust word of mouth above all else, I try to give everything the benefit of the doubt and proper context and I’ll never dismiss a technically shoddy game by a smaller developer if its ideas really resonate with me; at the same time though, I know what I enjoy, I won’t try and force myself to like something because it’s highly regarded and I think everyone has the right to like what they like.
A big difference between being a ‘gamer’ and someone who plays videogames, to me is the willingness to get burned while searching for new favourites in unexpected places. To put it in English? I like to try things I’ve disliked in the past again to see if I can pick up on something new. It’s this approach that made me come to enjoy the deeply flawed yet brilliantly written Fallout: New Vegas and allowed me to get off my high horse and learn to enjoy the delicious junk food feast that is the Modern Warfare Trilogy’s campaign (the good Modern Warfare Trilogy, not the new one.)
And now? I am (sort of) a Xenoblade Chronicles X fan.
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What Do I like?
Let’s get down to business: here is what I like so far about my experience with Xenoblade Chronicles X.
1: The world of Mira is amazing. The creature designs, armour designs, the different continents, the weather, it’s all so deeply immersive and I can’t believe it runs so smoothly on the Wii-U: a console that was only marginally more powerful than the Xbox 360. Not since KOTOR’s Kashyyyk forest floor have I had that feeling of being lost in the deep, forgotten woods until now in X’s Noctilum area. I’ve heard the game’s environments being compared to James Cameron’s Avatar and that’s a high compliment I completely agree with.
2: The game isn’t all about the player. Maybe things change later but as of my current playtime between 20-25 hours, I’m not the chosen one, I’m not the second coming of Christ and I’m not the hero everyone is relying on, I’m just a pretty promising rookie serving alongside Elma: the real protagonist of Xenoblade Chronicles X. I’ve not even been given a Skell (the game’s name for mechs) yet because I haven’t earned my license.
3: The combat is surprisingly fun. The game uses an auto-battle system where the player controls an ability tray, manages team strategy, repositions to better attack specific limbs, juggles cooldowns and performs timed button presses while the party fights. This is a perfect middle ground in my opinion between the dull, turn-based combat I find so mundane and the full-on action RPG system that some games have adopted.
4: I don’t hate the characters. I’m going to be honest: the cast of characters here aren’t exactly the crew of the Normandy-SR2 or the Ebon Hawk and the usual anime tropes and fan-service do rear their heads (I’m sure Elma’s perfectly sculpted glutes and the chest-window in each armour set I give her are there for the plot) but it’s nowhere near as bad as I expected and the cast does get some decent moments of development.
5: A strong premise that feeds into gameplay. Xenoblade X is very much structured like a Western open world game, specifically a Ubisoft one; you place probes to fill out areas of the map, complete objectives at markers on said map and every once in a while (usually 5-6 levels) you can attempt a story mission. I usually find this gameplay loop suffocatingly boring but for reasons listed above and thanks to X’s premise, this feels like I’m doing immersive tasks and contributing to the game’s overarching objectives rather than filling out a checklist.
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What Don’t I like?
1: Game balance is bizarre and ephemeral. I am currently level 18 in my playthrough, there is an enemy called Sirene, the Lost who I was ordered to kill in an early game Basic Mission, despite it being level 13 I still cannot kill it, yet in other areas I have managed to defeat level 22-23 enemies through good planning. This issue has been prevalent throughout the game with quests at a suggested level making you fight enemies much higher than that, enemies level 50+ wandering into your battles out of nowhere and some Affinity Missions (more on those later) subjecting you to powerful bosses surrounded by 5+ enemies. It can be extremely irritating.
2: Most quests are tedious and boring. You will spend most of the game doing Affinity Missions for your party members, Side Missions for NPC’s and Basic Missions that just reward gear or money, this is because Story Missions tend to be quite difficult. The trouble I have is that all of these quests absolutely suck, it’s all typical RPG filler crap: kill 5 random fauna, collect 10 goblin foreskins or other bottom of the barrel objectives. There was a time in the mid-2010’s, especially around the launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt when I sensed that gamers stopped tolerating bullshit side quests in games, if you count the Japanese release, Xenoblade X actually launched the same month as that game, just too early to get the memo.
3: Very poor tutorials. The very basics of how to play are explained to the player but not much more than that. To give the game credit, it does come with a highly detailed digital manual but come on, this isn’t the SNES, this stuff should be explained in-game. A big issue too is that X frontloads its tutorials, so it explains things in the first hour that won’t become relevant until your 10th or 15th hour.
4: The sound design and soundtrack are all over the place. There are some cool bits of music in X, I particularly like the theme that plays during the day in Noctilum but most of the time? The soundtrack is just too much, or absolutely bizarre. For example, whenever you face a tyrant enemy: especially big and hard to take down enemies, you get an extremely loud earful of J-Rock. It’s not an awful song but I don’t particularly like it either and when you’re trying to strategise and coordinate a plan of attack, it’s just too bloody much. This is final boss music, not a song to fight a level 13 giant beetle to. On the weird end of the spectrum we have the New LA theme. These ones are absolutely insipid. Both are absolutely terrible songs, the drumming in the day theme is so abrasive that it legitimately gave me a headache in one session but worst of all, it’s catchy enough to get stuck in your head. I hate it. ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t see you!’ Shit! Oh and the music often completely drowns out dialogue.
5: Levelling up is an absolute slog. It was by hour 15 that I started to wish I had gotten the new Switch version of this game. Online multiplayer was a pretty important component to this game in the Wii-U days, allowing you to acquire rare drops for missions more easily, awarding lots more XP and of course containing the added fun of playing with your fellow man but with those features stripped out of the Wii-U version today, it’s taken me an absolute age to level up since missions don’t really give you XP, only combat and most tyrants (which award most of the substantial XP) are too difficult for me to defeat. This has also necessitated some really painful farming for items as well.
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What have I learned? Will I keep playing JRPG’s?
As I said before, I’m really new to this genre and playing Xenoblade X and struggling through the learning process has made me really appreciate how gaming can be so difficult for newcomers. I’ve had older family members attempt 3D platformers before and had to remind them the second analogue stick exists and to line up the camera before a jump; this all seems obvious to me and I caught myself thinking “I wasn’t this bad at games as a kid when I was learning to play.” But here I am, in 2025, googling things and finding answers in forums like “Bruh, it’s a JRPG.” And “Maybe these games aren’t for you.” But you know what? I persevered and the more I learn, the more I enjoy, even if the learning process is a bit painful. There’s no such thing as “Isn’t for you.” In gaming, developers want as many customers as possible.
I can’t say 100% for sure that I will but as of writing? I want to finish this game, even if the primary Xenoblade Trilogy sounds more to my taste. In future I will play those games too and then maybe Dragon Quest 11, that looks like a fun game.
Am I a JRPG fan now? I wouldn’t go that far but I’ll keep exploring, keep playing.
Have you tried Persona 5?
I used to love JRPGs as a kid, but somewhere along the way I lost interest. I think this is a common story. In those days, JRPGs offered something unlike any other game. Now there’s not much to make them stand out, and what does make them stand out is mostly bad.
I enjoyed the Final Fantasies up through X, which came out when I was in college. In the 20+ years since, I’ve tried a fair number of JRPGs. I liked Octopath Traveller, but not enough to finish it. Haven’t played the sequel.
But Persona 5 got me back into the genre. I don’t even like anime. Too long, but amazing game nonetheless.
I read once a description of JRPGs [and I think the Dragon Quest franchise in particular] that really stuck with me. The idea is that they're the gaming equivalent of comfort food, familiar and somewhat sedating media largely designed to be consumed by Japanese salarymen to wind down over the course of a few months on evenings and weekends, and anyone else engaging with them will always have some points of friction with the genre due to that. Personally, I feel the same way about the Ubisoft open-world model and I think that is the closest comparison for the West - if you're jumping into a game like that and knocking out a few nearby outposts, gradually whittling away at the map, it's a lot like grinding out a few levels in a JRPG, and if you're trying to just beat, say, a modern Far Cry game without engaging with the speed bumps, you're in for a frustrating time.
But I also think the genre is a bit broad and is easy to make assumptions about based on generalities. I agree with the sentiment that JRPGs have bad pacing, dull writing, and tedious gameplay... for the most part. But like most things there is a sliding scale, and with JRPGs it mostly falls along two axes, the narrative and the mechanical. For both aspects, there are games that are more or less engaging, depending on the developer's focus and the targeted demographic's preferences. The reason I think most JRPGs seem to have banal casts, repetitive writing, and boring drama is because they're intentionally emulating the kind of schlock anime the intended player is comfortable having on in the background while they're doing stuff. Meanwhile, on the mechanical side, there are plenty of modern JRPGs that stretch the definition of the genre with arcade-y action or have confusing and convoluted turn-based combat, but the majority still tends to lean towards the kind of thing you can do while watching a show or listening to a podcast.
And, as you pointed out, I think the most important quality in JRPGs isn't either of those, but the setting. More than most other genres, the backdrop the game takes place in front of is far and away the thing that determines whether people settle in or not - a strong visual design framework, coherent worldbuilding, and consistent tone can easily cause people to overlook bad writing and any other obvious flaw. I'd say this is true for all RPGs, not just those of the Japanese persuasion, but it's arguably more appreciable there due to extremes.
Now, depending on your own preferences, and how exactly you're trying to engage with any particular JRPG, you can quickly become bored or very frustrated with them, and write off the whole genre. I'd like to make a case for a few recommendations that shouldn't require you to get into the mindset of an exhausted middle aged office worker.
First, and most strongly, Helen's Mysterious Castle - this is superficially a random RPGMaker game, but has an incredibly tight pacing and a genuinely engaging combat system that combines customization and turn order manipulation to give you some surprising depth to one-on-one fights. I would recommend it regardless of the topic of JRPGs.
Secondly, the first two Paper Mario games - these hold up extremely well, and combine some of the best defined settings in JRPGs and just enough engagement in the combat to stand out. They are long games, but never feel like they're just wasting time or forcing a grind on you, and have a lot of humor and charm that isn't lost in localization.
Third, I'd like to encourage you to give at least the first Like a Dragon Yakuza game a shot - it nails the setting and tone, has some of the best writing and characters in any JRPG I've ever played, and the silliness of the combat helps cover up its mechanical faults. The sequel is mechanically superior but narratively inferior, but still decent.
Finally, I recently replayed the first Dragon Quest trilogy, and I really enjoyed the way I could see the genre crystalizing over the course of the three games, on top of them not being nearly as expansive and exhausting as tackling even one of the later entries would be. If you really want to grapple with where the genre came from and what the next three decades of JRPGs were trying to emulate, I think there's no better place than the first three DQs.