Why Xenoblade Chronicles X makes for a dreadful eye exam
Xenoblade Chronicles X (2015)
Xenoblade Chronicles X (2015)
You wouldn’t know it if you saw me on the street, with a bus timetable in one hand and a can of beer in the other, as I struggle to stay upright. But it’s true - I’ve worn eyeglasses for years. Since about 2003 actually, when I first went to what Americans would term high school.
Well, somebody, probably some scurvy teacher, noticed that I was squinting at everything written on the whiteboard, and they decided they’d better rat me out. Next thing I knew, I was having to go along to an eye-test. Being that I was the classic swot and teacher’s pet, I’d never sweated a test in my life - until that day.
It turns out that you cannot cheat on an eye-text either, more’s the pity. Although, saying that, you might get lucky when they put the classic letter pyramid in front of you. I suppose, if we put on our thinking caps, you’ve got a 1-in-26 chance of getting any individual letter right.
But we can do better than that. I reckon you could shrink those odds if you’re able to at least grasp some of the shapes, and they give you a nice serifed font to work with. That might help you tell the ‘O’s and the ‘Q’s apart. I’d like to see someone ace this particular test though, because have you seen how small those letters get near the end? Well, that’s the point really - you don’t see it.
You feel like a right fool doing this test as well, because the tester is never in the mood for you. They’re usually a somewhat strict, glasses-wearing blonde lady, who has absolutely no tolerance for your craic. They know you’re guessing, and that you’re getting it quite badly wrong, and she’s cognisant of the fact that you’re sort of trying to get one over her.
Why is it that we do our best to lie to professionals like this? I don’t think I’ve ever told a single truth to my doctor, nothing outside of my name, rank and serial number. And why would I? Tell him about the voices in my head, and I’d be spending my next 10 Christmasses in the nut house.
Once you’ve made a fool of yourself at the letters game, we move on to the lens round. You sit up in front of this sort of submarine periscope and are told to look through it. Then, the optician’s answer to the Marathon Man’s dentist starts slotting new lenses into your view, and you’re supposed to intimate to her whether it has made your sight better or worse.
I don’t know man, it all looks pretty damn fuzzy to me in there. You just end up giving a few random answers, as random as saying whether or not you want a receipt for your transaction, and you hope she doesn’t call you out on your nonsensical answers.
Finally, it’s time for your close-up. You may have managed to strike up a bit of rapport with your optician at this stage, but don’t get the wrong idea and make a fool of yourself if she leans in close, because she’s not after a kiss. All she’s doing here is seeing whether you have any, I don’t know, vitreous-eating leeches on the backs of your eyes.
If you scored poorly on the previous two games, she might start off this next one by blasting a spray of water right at your eye, something to wake you up I suppose. But then she’ll draw in as close as possible with a torchlight, and asks you to look all around the room.
She - and I do mean she, because I’ve never met a male optician, ever - almost looks like an alien being at such close range, so obviously you’re going to laugh in her face. You might as well end things on an awkward note, right?
With all said and done, you’ll get the results of your exam, and of course it’s dismal reading. But that’s only natural - you’re typically only doing the eye-test if you’ve been coerced into it, so you’re never actually going to score well.
It’s glasses for the rest of your life, I’m afraid, unless you fancy getting laser-eye surgery. But you will have seen the Final Destination movies, particularly that scene where someone’s eyeballs got all cut up by the lasers, so you’ll give that one a swerve.
No, you’re happy enough to look like a nerd all your life. And you might as well embrace it, because if you’re anything like me, there won’t be an alternative in contact lenses. I find the idea of using those things almost disgusting. I don’t want anything invasive near my eyes, not even a nice shot of vodka taken, through the eyeballs.
But do you know, and here’s some classic tightfistedness for you - from 2003 until 2021, I wore the same two sets of glasses. Now, I regard this as a good thing, a sign of just how formidably my eyes have stood against the test of time. Yes, they’re bad, but at least they’ve remained at a consistent level of bad.
I reckon that, in those 18 years, I inflicted more damage on my face lines and winkles through squinting than I ever did to my actual eyes. My eyesight, incidentally, probably got killed through my many attempts to play Game Boy in the dark, but once the DS brought me some backlit portable gaming, I was all set.
But eventually my two pairs gave up the ghost, squashed beyond repair, so I scaled up to a thicker set of glasses in 2021, proper hipster-style thicker lenses. Sure, I can see now. But at what cost? Well, I don’t get routinely beaten up for money anymore, only sporadically. That’s a tangible improvement.
But you know, even with a set of glasses that match your laughable prescription, you’re still not gonna be able to see absolutely everything. I can see who’s shouting at me from across the street now, and I can see other cars on the road. That helps, immensely.
Yet I’m often struggling to see the screentext in some modern games. Perhaps the answer to this is buying a larger telly. But wouldn’t that just make me blinder, faster? It’s a real vicious cycle, this loss of eyesight stuff.
But with some games, the small TV excuse won’t wash. I had two screens equipped when playing Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U, and I still couldn’t make out a damn thing that was going on. Like my dreadful eye-exam from long ago, Xenoblade X went in some rather strange directions.
The original Xenoblade game on the Wii had just the right amount of anime leaning, some very good characterisation and voice-acting, a strong protagonist, and you could get away with only knowing about 30% of whatever the hell was going on. But there is something about Xenoblade X, by comparison, that was just so uncompelling, so difficult to get into.
And I think a lot of it comes down to how impenetrably small the text is, particularly in the midst of battle, where everything is happening. You might as well be playing the game in Japanese for all the sense it makes. Or Inuit or Ndebele.
And the menus ain’t much better either. Don’t think you can improve your odds by lowering your gaze to the Wii U gamepad and using that to play, either. You certainly won’t get 18 years of life out of that thing - more like three hours - but you also won’t get much more insight on what’s being said, either.
Other than that, the character designs aren’t much good, not particularly memorable. You yourself play a fully customisable protagonist, who you can turn into a 7-foot green adonis if you like, although they censored the boobymeter in Western versions. It’s little wonder the boobs came back full force in the actual sequel, Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Anyway, on paper, XCX sounds like it has a lot of interesting selling points. It’s open-world, expansive, it’ll take dozens of hours to beat, and you can pick up a copy for next to nothing. But I’ll give you a tightwad tip, keep an eye on the game’s price to climb in the future, if a re-release never comes.
Xenoblade X has got what gaming cartographers tell me is still one of the largest maps in gaming, and as you progress through the game you can gain access to a flying mech thingy, although this still takes far too long to get to. It’s fun as an MMO-lite sort of game. There’s lots of customisation. The graphics still look great. The music is… interesting, to say the least, although if we’re honest I’d have to call a lot of it pretty ropey, or at least ropey in comparison to the real Xenoblade games.
Despite those pluspoints though, I still can’t recommend XCX. It’s possible that this game was only ever intended as a side-story, a gaiden, a continuation of the older Xenogears and Xenosaga games. Something that has to be taken on slightly different merits from its fantastic sister games. Personally though, I look at Xenoblade Chronicles X as another Wii U flop that I really should have seen coming.
8 March 2024