Why Xenoblade Ages Like Fine Wine

Xenoblade Chronicles, the strongest brick in any gaming backlog wall. Who knew it’d had this reputation 16 years ago, when it came out on Wii? At the time, it was a game about something else: the kind of a free-roaming scale that even contemporaries from PS360 couldn’t usually handle. The challenge of bringing it to 3DS, even the New one, looked even more daunting, but it worked. Then the game came out on Switch: the kind of a remaster that sticks closer to a remake, with a new engine and parts of the visual pipeline fully reworked. Even if at its heart it was the same game, just in a trendier outfit.

Cheap Out on Rendering

What made Xenoblade look and work the way it did in the early 2010s was a key concession many timeless games make. If something is too expensive to render, there’s probably another technique that achieves a similar result at a fraction of the computational cost. Does foliage need to be 3D? No, it can be flat, and then the camera will pretend it’s not. Do you need to animate character faces in 3D? Not if their eyes and mouths are textures projected on smooth heads. And for some purposes, baked lighting will look and work better than any real-time solution.

Avoid Realism

It’ll be both true and not enough to say that it’s art direction that ultimately matters. One decision that Xenoblade made and later The Legend of Zelda games adopted, with Monolith Soft’s assistance, is the impressionistic, painterly look. I’m not the most visual person, but I’m good at identifying when something looks wrong, even if I’m not sure what exactly—and the more detailed it is, the louder the alarm bell rings. So keeping things subtly undefined, relying on contrasts and abstract shapes, makes me more forgiving. And lets all textures have a much lower resolution!

Build on a Massive, Vertical Scale

It’s the same principle as coordinating an outfit: direct attention where it should be from where it shouldn’t. Thanks to a massive scale with vertical layers, there’s always something far away to look at. So I don’t look at those occasional muddy textures or angular character models up close, I look at the skybox, or I look at a mountain range that is even less detailed. But I don’t need the details: it’s far away, so my imagination kicks in, just like in real life. And you can never beat an imagination! This is why the Xenoblade series always punches above its weight visually: it’s really good at hiding its shortcomings.

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