Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U Limited Edition Pack)
0Just when you thought this year's list of really big game releases couldn't get any longer, Monolith Soft's impossibly large open world JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles X comes charging forth from its Eastern heartlands to beat all competition into the ground. There's almost no way to convey the size, scale, scope, breadth, depth or sheer stubborn ambition at display in this insanely overproduced monster of a game, but suffice it to say that an estimated playtime of some 200 hours (at least for true completionists) sounds very plausible to me after having gone through the first few missions and seen just a small part of the enormous alien planet of Mira.
At its most basic, Xenoblade Chronicles X is a party-based realtime RPG influenced by Final Fantasy XII with its atypical open world structure and MMO-like combat. Xenoblade's flashiest addition to this formula is giant Mechs (in typical fashion, it takes some 30 hours to even unlock the first one), but what really sets the game apart is how it fleshes out so many potential RPG components - like resource collecting, exploration, crafting, factions, relationship building and party management - into their own detailed subsystems complete with a variety of rules and settings. No individual mechanic seen here is unprecedented in the history of roleplaying and open world titles, but very few developers dare cram as many elements with this amount of depth into the same gameplay loop (think MGS5's daunting feature creep on an even larger scale). Not everything is particularly well explained, but it sure helps that the game looks great (especially the enemy designs) and the world is a joy to explore.