I wanted to share some thoughts about why I love Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 so much and see if anyone else who loved these games was also a fan of Prog Rock, Metal, Jam rock or any kind of high energy exploratory rock genres that seem to feature prominently in the XC2 and XC1 soundtracks.
I was a big classic rock fan as a kid, wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. I dreamed of walking on stage with a crazy costume, the crowd going wild, shredding the electric guitar while the fog machines and spark machines and lighting rigs go off in the background. Then and now, my personality was probably most like Zeke out of any driver in the games.
I was really into Led Zepplin, the Rolling stones, Eric Clapton, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top, and progressing from there into early metal and grunge bands like Alice in Chains, Metallica, Nirvana, Guns and Roses etc. Basically whenever I heard screaming electric guitar solos and I was instantly down. As an adult, my tastes began to get more "out there," and I became obsessed with long instrumental Jams, usually in the context of a live performance (although some bands like YES pull off these masterpieces in the studio.) Some bands like Primus and Lotus take a compositional (math rock) approach to this style and others like Phish take a more improvisational approach. The common factor here is that the music gradually guides the listener like a rollercoaster, up and down progressively more intense "peaks." These peaks often take the form of searing electric guitar riffs, often featuring repeated triplets, although sometimes a drum and bass breakdown or a horn segment can also constitute the musical peak. (full disclosure I know nothing about music theory or music criticsm, so I can only struggle to describe the feelings the music evokes in me)
Anyway, part of the reason I love the Xenoblade games is how music is woven into the experience of battle and exploration. If you've ever been in the middle of a nail-biting boss battle in XC1, and then gotten a monado vision and changed the future *just in time* to avert dying, kicking the fight into the next level while the intense shredding of "Vision Reacts" starts up, you know what I mean. When I pull of a driver combo against a hard enemy, slap them around before launching into a third stage blade combo and then kicking it up another notch by launching into a chain attack, it feels as exhilarating as Jimi Hendrix lays into his guitar solo in the song "Fire" (to cite a classic example). At moments like these, the game music seems to mirror the emotional progress of the fight. Alternatively, take the situation when you're desperately fighting a bunch of Dusky Rikks or Vile Blants in Spirit crucible Elpys and you get dragged into the poison water and are trying to escape while the frenetic electric guitar solo of "exploration!" hits. Or the drum and base heavy intros of "You will recall our names" and "You will know our names" that make an inexperienced driver quake in their boots as Territorial Rotbart comes charging at them across the plains.
To sum it up, I feel like this game was made for people who really *love* epic anime battles and kind of take a cavalier "all in good fun" attitude toward fighting the good fight. There's something unique about this approach that I can't quite describe. If you look at games like Skyrim and Final fantasy XV, they have a vanilla "epic" battle soundtrack that evokes themes of heroic sacrifice (and tbh is not all that remarkable), while games like bloodborne have a minimal ambient soundtrack that enforces a sense of misery and isolation as you get rekt by a savage boss for the 50th time. In many of these other RPGs, battles seem to be thought of as something "serious" and "cool." For me, that detracts from the joy of a true Big Boss Battle. I think what kind of goes hand in hand is an idea in many JRPGs I like that you shouldn't just win a fight by any means necessary, but rather should win with a sense of art and style, destroying your enemy with a massive combo attack and scorching them from the face of the earth.
So now I want to to open the floor up for a general talk about the musical and artistic aesthetics of Xenoblade. Here are some questions I wanted to pose to the sub:
- Is this style something unique to Monolith soft? Unique to games that target a japanese audience? are there other RPGs or fighting games that evoke this? (I'm kind of thinking of Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive for some reason)
- Is there a connection between the zany musical style and the sense of cartoonish glee and the tight or revealing blade outfits showing generous amounts of T&A? Is there an overarching theme here that the true connoisseurs of the media appreciate excess?
- Do you get a sense that the creators of the Xenoblade games really understand you and speak to you on an aesthetic level? or is the success of this game more to do with it's game design and combat system?
- Do you like the aesthetics of this game? or do you feel neutral toward them? or do they actually aggravate and displease you? do any of you guys play these games for the combat system and challenging fights and simply tolerate the art that goes into them as part of the price of admission?
- Xenoblade games have a small "niche" audience, selling about 1/12 as much as BotW and about 1/20th as much as Mario Oddyssey. What I've noticed is that many Xenoblade fans are oddballs. Many of us are proud Otakus who voraciously consume Hentai. Many of us are LGBT who appreciate the campyness and subtle queer-ness of many of the characters. Many of us are rabid completionists who obsess over the layers of interlocking systems and numerical tabulations that characterize this game. And many of us are all of the above. Is the Niche appeal necessary for the Xenoblade games to be as good as they are? could this game ever go "mainstream?" Would it be a good thing if it did?
I would love to hear from the sub on anything you feel is relevant.
Submitted September 01, 2018 at 02:11AM by donikhatru https://ift.tt/2wwgE1n
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