For instance, you might have a skill that works best on a beast's side instead of their front. Those are back in Xenoblade Chronicles X, but they feel much easier to anticipate and use. The game featured a sort of complicated battle system, complete with party-based art and skill combinations that required timing and focus to pull off. I played the original Xenoblade Chronicles on both the Wii and Nintendo 3DS. You can also make yourself look very, very silly. Those choices will affect your parties' opinion of you based on each character's personality. While vocal in battle, your character is silent in cutscenes, only really interacting with binary choices that occasionally pop up. The good news is that you can use "fashion equipment." Yep, you can equip certain things just for their looks while actually wearing other gear for their stats. In fact, as you manage your party of four by constantly swapping in new allies, you'll grow to love the way certain characters behave and look. The characters are all voiced surprisingly well, too. It's a good setup that twists and turns throughout, and the tale boasts a lot of wonderful characters and super awkward cutscenes, just the way I like them. That's the basis, and I won't go into it beyond that. You'll work to take the colony from a simple crash site to a new home for the human race. It crash-lands on an alien planet ripe with life, monstrosities, secrets and all sorts of good stuff.
One such ship, your ship, holds the New Los Angeles colony. Humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction by invading alien races, and each city is chased from Earth on colony ships. The story is more interesting from there, I promise. Yes, audible groaning begins immediately. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, you play a character with amnesia.