Xenoblade Chronicles: Part 4

I finished Xenoblade Chronicles! A while ago, actually! SPOILERS LURKNG HEREIN

So, first of all, all of my predictions from this post were totally accurate. Your girlfriend's not dead, the dirty fucking hippie is the bad guy, I got to kill god, and everything She-Hulk thought he knew about the nature of his magical sword and the world he lived in was wrong.

I've totally played this game before, is what I'm saying.

The first time I had to kill some douchebag god was when I played Breath of Fire II. I was pretty late to the Breath of Fire train, so I was playing the Game Boy Advance re-release of II. You get about halfway through the game before you realize that the Church of Eva, the mainstream church that uses very Christian-looking iconography, is actually a front for an evil killer demon who eats prayers and is one day going to emerge and destroy the world.

I, being an aggressively atheist and impressionable child, thought the story was the coolest.

Xenoblade Chronicles is sort of similar, with two gods, named Zanza and Meyneth. They're the spirits of the giant creatures everyone lives on, Bionis and Mechanis. Each of them had total control over the "Building Blocks of Reality" (in this case, some made-up magicky crap called ether, and not, say, the elements of the periodic table), and Created Life In Their Image. The organic stuff on Bionis doesn't live very long, and when it dies, the ether is absorbed back into the Bionis's body.

Basically, Zanza needs ether for his body to function, so he made other life on Bionis in order to maintain a steady supply. If life gets advanced enough that it's able to leave Bionis to find greener pastures, Zanza would basically starve to death. Whenever this is about to happen, he wakes up, and kills off everything living on Bionis to give himself a huge influx of energy. This apparently happens on a fairly regular basis.

"Wait a minute," say Our Heroes. "That is total bullshit!"

Meyneth actually agrees with you, and she tries to stop Zanza from waking up the Bionis, but she kind of gets murdered. She tells you to make a world "that has no need for gods."

So, Our Heroes go off on a quest to kill god and affirm their right to self-determination. They succeed, obvs, and then it gets weird.

Weirder. Then it gets weirder.

It's a pretty common theme in Japanese RPGs that gods and godlike entities were once Regular People, who ascended to "godhood" through somewhat irregular means. (In Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch the White Witch was just a princess who accidentally killed everyone, then had to remake the world with magic. In Tales of Symphonia, "the goddess Martel" is actually just a dead half-elf whose long-lived brother has been trying to bring back to life by manipulating the world's life energy. And so on.) Turns out, Zanza and Meyneth were just regular old people living in Our Earth who accidentally remade the universe with an ill-conceived science experiment.

No, seriously, you get to walk through the solar system and watch Earth explode.

One of the people who's been following you around throughout your Epic Quest turns out to actually be the personification of the computer program Zanza and Meyneth used to remake the world. During the Final Boss Battle, She-Hulk manifests god powers through an elaborate glowy sword metaphor.

"So," says your new computer-bro. "You're in charge now, for glowy sword metaphor reasons. What do you want the world to be?"

She-Hulk wishes for a world with no gods, Bionis and Mechanis fall into the sea, and computer-bro gives you some Inspirational Words and disappears.

So, to finish the story of Xenoblade Chronicles, She-Hulk wishes for a world with no gods, where everybro can go about his business without having to worry about getting murdered by some prick who thinks that since he created life, he's allowed to snuff it out.

"Wow. I should not have given y'all free will, this is seriously messing up my shit." - Zanza, deceased

I admit, I never get tired of stories like these, because I have no patience for the "God has a plan for everyone" crap that's such a heavy part of American culture. If your god's plan is garbage, then it should be changed. Thank you, JRPGs, for putting words to my surly atheism.

The rest of the JRPG cultural hallmarks are present, too. The emphasis on teamwork is there, and everyone's always rambling about having to get stronger to protect their loved ones. You get the gratuitous scene where everyone jumps in front of She-Hulk to protect him from The Dirty Fucking Hippie, all while spouting Inspirational Sentiments about how The Power Of Their Bonds will always be Stronger Than The Bad Guys. Also, there are gundams.

Wait, have I not mentioned yet that the giant mechs you fight have human pilots?

Because that is so totally a thing.

Now, do I think Xenoblade is worth $90? Ehhh. It took me 115 hours to be done with it, so it's still less than a dollar per hour, which is cheaper than a lot of other things you could be doing to entertain yourself. ("Xenoblade Chronicles: More entertainment value per dollar than recreational drug use!") As far as whether the game is God's Gift To JRPGs? Ehhh. The fighting system is a lot more dynamic than your traditional turn-based RPG, which is what drew most people to it in the first place. The world is also bright and pretty (hooray for video games that aren't Brown On Brown!), and the monsters are neat.

Basically the plot wasn't all that special, but I'm glad it grew beyond "I need to avenge my girlfriend who actually isn't dead." I was pretty disappointed in the petty man-feelings revenge-fantasy of it all for a while, there. I mean, the characters weren't particularly memorable. (I guess She-Hulk was literally an animated corpse the whole time- uh, don't worry about it- but what's everyone else's excuse?) The emotional punches of the game were pretty weak, with new characters basically showing up just to die tragically in the next scene. Did anyone really think that Sharla's fiancée was going to make it out of the game alive?

The female cast was a hot mess, but... I should save that for another post.

So, Xenoblade Chronicles! If you have $90 to spare, you'll have a good time.