“Xenoblade Chronicles X” asks a lot of players, but rewards the determined

TORONTO – Playing “Xenoblade Chronicles X,” the massive new role-playing game for the Wii U, is like training for a marathon.

It seems like a long, daunting undertaking with no end in sight, and you might be tempted to quit a couple of times along the way. But if you put in enough effort, the rewards are well worth it.

“Xenoblade,” developed by a company aptly called Monolith Soft, takes place on a huge alien world called Mira, which boasts wandering creatures as big as houses among its denizens.

Checking out all that Mira has to offer is a satisfying experience, but you have to get past a steep learning curve and some uneven pacing early on to get there.

The game opens with Earth being wiped out by warring alien forces. A small group of humans manages to escape, but their massive spacecraft crashes on Mira. From the wreckage they build a city called New Los Angeles, or NLA, and search the planet to recover parts of the spacecraft necessary for their survival.

After a brief introduction, your character is thrown into action. It can be difficult to figure out what’s going on, as “Xenoblade” is not at all interested in holding your hand.

You have to figure out the fast-paced combat system, which is excellent once you wrap your head around it. Your character will attack enemies automatically, while you throw in skills called “arts” to gain an edge. While you only start off with a couple of arts, eventually you will have too many to know what do with.

You are not alone in your quest to explore Mira and protect humanity against ravenous wildlife and hostile aliens. You can have up to three active squadmates, who will attack on their own, though you can issue a list of basic commands to them.

It seems a bit much at first, but I appreciated the depth of the system once I started learning how to mix and match them to create combos and expose enemy weaknesses. You can also set up your squadmates’ palette of arts to complement your own.

You can level up your arts as you progress to make them more effective, something I stumbled upon by accident as, again, “Xenoblade” doesn’t give you much in-game guidance.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I had to refer to the manual several times while playing just to get my bearings, and that brought me back to the days before elements of casual gaming crept into “hardcore” titles.

“Xenoblade” emphatically bucks that trend. Autosaves? Forget it. Tutorials? Go back to playing “Candy Crush.” I lost four hours of progress once because I didn’t save my game, thinking it would be automatically taken care of. “Xenoblade” punishes these kinds of rookie mistakes without remorse.

I doff my cap to a difficult game where difficulty is warranted. However, some of “Xenoblades” more frustrating moments came from questionable design. Before you can start a story mission you have to fulfil a list of prerequisites. That left me scrambling to explore areas or finish off sidequests before I could progress.

In another side mission, I had to obtain an item from a giant floating fish that only reared its head in a certain location at night. I spent over an hour hunting the fish, killing it over and over again and not receiving the item, until I accidentally found it could be bought in a store on NLA’s high street.

Ultimately these are minor gripes. The story missions, once you qualify for them, move at a brisk and enjoyable pace, and many of the sidequests reveal more of the mysteries of Mira, as well as the backstories and motivations of your squadmates.

Eventually you will get access to Skells, which are large weaponized suits of armour. Skells let you traverse Mira at a faster pace and take on some of its larger beasts. And like everything else in the game, they are highly customizable.

Presentation in “Xenoblade” is a mixed bag. The world and its creatures are stunning, while character models look dated. The music can go from sweeping and beautiful when you are exploring the jungles or windswept plains of Mira to near unlistenable when assaulted with the caustic brand of rap/rock they play in the streets of NLA. Cut scenes are also plentiful and lengthy, with no option to quickly advance the dialogue.

But every flaw the game has is soundly trumped by ambition. There are so many areas to explore, monsters to hunt and things to customize to entertain a dedicated gamer for easily 70 hours. There are no role-playing games on the Wii U, and indeed few games on any system, that come close to “Xenoblade Chronicles X” in depth and scope.