Dispatch #1: The game I didn't know I needed
In which your correspondent justifies an unjustifiable purchase
Is it time to grow up?
My reverie was interrupted by my four-year-old daughter asking what I was thinking about. What was I thinking about? I took a beat to answer, wondering, as parents habitually do, how to interpret my subtle adult musings for a child’s mind. I then realised this particular thought needed no interpretation whatsoever, for I had at that moment been thinking of nothing more profound than the twin propositions that (1) there is a video game and (2) I want it.
As I described the basic story, that humans have landed on a strange planet, that you have to find a ship crash landed somewhere, that eventually you can pilot a huge robot, I realised I was basically speaking her language. She nodded sagely, then began to explain the functioning of one of the mechs from a favourite TV show. Ignoring the troubling thought that I may be in essence a four-year-old myself, I returned to my reverie.
So, Xenoblade Chronicles X, then. Newly remastered for Nintendo Switch, the marketing campaign is in full swing and has been extraordinarily effective in my case, since it has taken me from being barely aware of the franchise, to now actively planning how to acquire a copy for myself.
No time to play…but the soul still burns
Reviews of Xenoblade Chronicles X are clear that this is a game long of play and slow of burn. Write-ups include disquieting statements intimating that the fun really kicks in at around the twenty-hour mark. To fully extract the juicy goodness of the game? Maybe 200 hours. I’ve just finished reading the momento mori-themed self-help book 4000 Weeks, the title taken from the average lifespan of a human being. 200 hours seems like a fair old chunk of that.
More to the point, I write in the context of having a newborn, approximately six weeks into his projected 4000. If I can read a few pages of a book during a feed, my ebook reader balanced precariously on my knee, I feel a sense of great achievement. A video game? Hard to imagine.
What is driving this desire to acquire a game that I cannot know if I will enjoy, which anyway I will struggle to find time to play, and which by all accounts will require a significant period of teeth-gritting frustration before any fun can be extracted?
The soft translucency of a weapon trail
I got started with video gaming in my late teens. Some friends had games consoles far earlier; I stood bewitched by the colours, the sounds, the exuberance of the action unfolding on screen. Struck, too, by the blasé attitude such friends had to their consoles, which seemed to me unutterably exciting. How could life continue in its pedestrian fashion when Wolverine in animated sprite form was always available, just a controller away?
When the Sega Dreamcast came out, and demoes of the fighting game Soul Calibur filled the huge TVs of video game shops, I would stop dead, captivated by the fluid movements of the characters, those smooth models with not a polygon in sight, and the beautiful translucent trails that followed each expert swing of their exotic weapons. That this could be available to people - to me! - in their sitting rooms, on their home TVs. I had to have it.
The games we play
The adult mind is a peculiar thing. Denuded of some of its childhood sharpness, it seems to marshal quite a few of its remaining mental resources in constructing complex webs of self-justification. When my seventeen-year-old self wanted to play Soul Calibur, it was purely for fun and those incredible aesthetics. As an adult with the dew of youth long since evaporated, acquiring a new video game is a far more tortuous affair.
Maybe it’s partly the negative associations that video games still carry. I regularly see diagrams and opinion pieces casually placing video games in the same camp as pornography and drug addictions. Maybe there’s the sense, too, that what might be indulged in teenagers begins to look a little - what? Sad? Shameful, even, once the threshold of middle age has been breached. And perhaps especially a game like this which, as a Japanese roleplaying game on the geekier side of science fiction, doesn’t do well in the social stakes, coming in well below train spotting and only just above sex doll collecting in the things-you-can-talk-about-at-a-dinner-party rankings.1
Whatever the reason, my need to justify myself is unfortunately here to stay. I am therefore even now sipping at a cocktail of spurious arguments in favour of acquiring this video game, a concoction carefully blended to produce a heady rush of confirmation bias and probably a headache in the morning. Such are my powers of self deception that I am even now nine-tenths of the way to convincing myself that this is an essential purchase. And you, dear reader, are complicit: for the final nail in the coffin of doubt is this very blog post. Yes, such is my alchemy that I have mentally transmogrified what some might call a glorified toy into a creative muse.
Getting it
Adam Phillips, in his Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, explores the idea of ‘getting it’ and our conflicting paradoxical desire to both get something - both in the sense of acquiring it and of understanding it - and not to get it. I will freely admit that I’m a sucker for those statements in reviews that herald some game or another as the pinnacle of its genre, crucially an unmissable experience that must be lived. The unwritten part of the equation is always the consequence of not living it, which is left tantalisingly to the imagination. Phillips asks us to imagine a world in which the ‘not getting it’ is actively preferred to the ‘getting it’ so highly prized in our society.
Pending enlightenment and my embrace of the cloud of unknowing, the powerful drug of GettingIt (TM) continues to work on me in the case of Xenoblade. At the most fundamental level, that magpie desire to grasp a new shrink-wrapped shiny box full of promise has never really left me since childhood. Then there’s the ‘getting it’ of this reportedly sublime digital experience: a new and wonderful world to explore, incomparable adventures to be enjoyed, a grand narrative to inhabit, a journey to undertake. And finally, there’s the ‘getting it’ that works on all of us so insidiously - the ‘getting it’ of being in the know and in the club.
It’s AI gone mad
A case in point: it seems much of the combat in this game happens automatically. Left to its own devices, your character will start systematically hacking at its prey like an anime-inflected golem with a pick-me attitude. The player steps in merely for special attacks and to move the character around the battlefield, very much inhabiting the role of middle-manager guiding an over-enthusiastic intern. In the parlance of this game’s target audience: what even is this? Also: how is it fun? Call me old-fashioned, but when you want Street Fighter’s Chun Li to kick Ryu in the head, you press the kick button. This is nature’s way.
But all this makes me curious. It makes me want to get it.
I could say the same for the intricate interlocking systems in the game, for which allegedly the already heavy in-game tutorials are not sufficient preparation. I do not relish the thought of needing Youtube explainer videos to unpack the mysteries of investing in mech insurance policies (yes, I think that actually is a feature)…but somehow the fact that such systems are there and others have mastered them makes me want to grasp them too.
As a little side note, not to get too far off topic, I read an article about somebody effectively breaking the game; they had worked out a combination of upgrades and what have you that would make a joke of even the most powerful enemies. To return to Phillips’ analysis, this would be an example of getting it too well, and killing all magic and pleasure in the process.
The adventure starts here - care to join?
This series is emphatically not for those who plan to play Xenoblade Chronicles X at any point in the future, because spoilers will perforce abound. Those who have played it already might get some amusement from my descriptions of ineffective flailing as I struggle to master a game which is - let’s face it - designed for the nerdy teen with too much time on his or her hands. But I am writing mainly for an uninitiated general audience, prepared to discover along with me the elusive pleasures of this sprawling digital concoction. I will be rubbish at it — that was never in doubt. But I hope to be entertaining in the telling. As well as a fair old dollop of Xenoblade specifics and video game generalities, I fully expect to be going off-piste a fair bit, with discussions about life, the universe and everything, as I struggle to shoehorn the game, and writing, into my sleep-deprived life. I hope you’ll join me!
A note to existing subscribers: I’m aware this article is a bit different if you came here either for poetry or hot takes on the Dao, so have made this a separate section. You are subscribed by default, but I believe you have the option to unsubscribe from just this Xenoblades bit if you so wish. For newcomers, I think I’m right in saying that from now on you have to subscribe to both sections separately.
O brave new world that has such mechanoids in it.
At least at dinner parties I have known. Your speed may vary, of course.