Seemingly built to overwhelm and paralyse, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition manages to capture online magic in an offline package—an otherworldly achievement.

Pummeling the player with abrasive iconography, Monolith Soft pushes infoglut. In some sense, Xenoblade Chronicles X appears as the antipode to another game I greatly admire, Spelunky. Derek Yu’s cavernous adventure is multi-layered, too, but the underlying mechanics that entice repeat play remain largely hidden to the player. Spelunky commits to a rather straightforward internal logic- and physics-based ruleset where complexity emerges from apparent simplicity and unicity in gameplay can be found hours in. Spelunky is economic. Scarce in outward presentation, depth is found through experience and interaction.

Moderation is not Xenoblade’s philosophy however. As soon as one opens the map, one is bound for anxiety. One layer of the map displays accepted and available missions, each varying in colour: Story missions are red, affinity missions orange, normal quests are green, basic ones colour turquoise. A second layer displays the challenges found within each segment of the game’s five major continents. A final layer concerns the game’s probing infrastructures, where resources can be mined and currency generated. Beyond these explicit, visual layers, there’s an intricate combat – both on-foot and in-mech – and class system. Classes branch, and once mastered, can be increased in rank, with new melee and ranged skills to allocate and upgrade. Players are encouraged to experiment, rather than specialise, either solo or accompanied by three members of its ensemble cast of customisable NPC’s.

Unlike Spelunky, many of the game’s intricacies are not organically discovered; they require research and theory-crafting. Though rewarding, menu navigation is par for the course. This might sound tiring, but the motivation and energy for doing so is the pleasure one derives from untangling and testing Xenoblade’s nuances in its carefully crafted virtual world. After all, world-building is Monolith’s calling card. Their environments are vast and sprawling, breathing continents where indigenous and invasive species, both welcoming and hostile, roam and interact. While Xenoblade’s space-operatic aspirations border on pastiche and histories of colonialism are hardly reckoned with explicitly, Monolith Soft touches upon the human condition in a manner that is not entirely oblivious to the xenophobic harms and false narratives that typically accompany survival-based warfare.

The end-result mimics experiences one would traditionally encounter in instance-based multi-player role-playing games like Guild Wars. It does so, however, in a manner that remains (somewhat) condensed, without being dependent on others or having to fear empty servers. Yes, Xenoblade Chronicles X might be obtrusive and opaque, but above all, it is awe-inspiring and successful in its ambitions.