Complex and Active Combat System
Xenoblade Chronicles really changed things up with its combat system, which combines elements from both traditional turn-based RPGs and MMOs. Battles play out in real time, with your characters attacking automatically when you’re close to enemies. You don’t have to control standard attacks in any way; however, the main loop of combat comes with controlling various arts. Every character has a selection of arts to choose from with various effects like healing, dealing more damage from behind, and inflicting status elements like stagger. Xenoblade’s battle system worked in such a way that you wanted to constantly stack these different elements on enemies, inflicting break, then topple, then daze, to take the enemy out of commission for a short while.
Battles played out quickly and oftentimes frantically in Xenoblade Chronicles, constantly keeping you on your toes by moving your character around the battlefield to get a good position and use different arts. You had the option of controlling any one character in battle, not just Shulk which added some nice variation as each one played quite differently. Combat scales pretty well throughout the game and gets more and more challenging, requiring even more strategy as you go. It was fast, fluid, and complex – pretty much everything you could ask for from a JRPG combat system. There was certainly a bit of learning to do initially, but once you got a hang of all the different systems, Xenoblade’s combat was a blast.
