Thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected
04 Jul 2020Warning: This post contains spoilers for both Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. If you haven’t played these games yet congrats - you’ve got two great games to play! Come back to this post once you’ve completed both.
Future Connected takes place one year after the end of Xenoblade Chronicles and follows Shulk and Melia as they explore a new area, the Bionis Shoulder, and aim to reclaim Alcamoth from the mysterious Fog King who comes out of a spacetime rift. Let’s start with what I liked about Future Connected: exploring the vast, new area was a lot of fun; collecting all the Nopon Prospectors was also a lot of fun; Shulk’s new outfits are very stylish; and the upgrade you eventually get to Shulk’s Replica Monado looks like what 3rd grade me concoct - more mufflers!
The big miss about Future Connected is it really doesn’t add much to the Xenoblade Chronicles universe. The spacetime rifts felt like a perfect way to connect Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 given both games take place in parallel universes that branch off from Klaus’ Conduit experiment; we literally see Klaus as The Architect in XBC2 half-consumed by a spacetime rift and hear Shulk felling Zanza through it! Playing Future Connected I expected some sort of tie-in between the two games and was disappointed to find that not only was there no connection, the story itself was pretty plain and uninspiring. What a miss!
All that said, Future Connected was an enjoyable romp to top off an extremely satisfying second playthrough of Xenoblade Chronicles.