
The almost universally laudatory critical reaction to Xenoblade Chronicles has heaped ambitious praise on the project. Not content to appreciate Xenoblade‘s design on its own merits, many critics have asserted that it points the way towards “saving” the JRPG. There are good reasons to be dubious of this assertion. For the moment, though, I want to focus on something Xenoblade gets right, and the best way to do it is by focusing on something it gets very wrong: Valak Mountain. I haven’t reached the end of Xenoblade yet, but I find it hard to imagine that it contains a worse [Read more…]