Rex is a boy whose virtues are so gleamingly obvious and uncomplicated that they threaten to render him friendless. He spends his days industriously, niggling at sea beds in a Victorian diving costume - all brass and glass curves - salvaging trinkets from wrecks. Only the bare minimum of the profits Rex earns from this work are kept: he dutifully sends the rest home to support his distant, impoverished family. Together with his friend and father-figure, Azurda, a dragon-Muppet on whose back Rex rides (and, rather rudely, on which he has erected a rusty salvage crane) the pair tour the cloud sea without complaint or quarrel. Who can stand to be around that kind of blinding decency for long?
Certainly not the writers of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. They soon interrupt Rex's wholesome routine with the offer of a freelance contract accompanied by such an eye-wateringly tall fee that Rex agrees to the job before asking for any of the details. Naivety and virtue have always been the twin characteristics of the RPG protagonist: the former is necessary to draw the hero into the story's grand mess, the latter to empower them to triumph over it. But it's one of only a few clichés to be found in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, a game that is just as wildly ambitious and imaginative as its celebrated predecessor. Once he becomes a killer, even Rex becomes bearable.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, humanity is a parasite that lives on the backs of Titans, continent-sized mythical beings whose limbs stretch as great plains off into the distance, whose spinal columns rise like the Himalayas, and whose guts drop like caverns. The Titans are so tall that the clouds through which they once burst have become the sea on which humans sail. They're also, it turns out, dying. And when a Titan dies it's bad news for everyone who live on its surface: their world collapses.
0 comments:
Post a Comment