The Pacing of Xenoblade Chronicles (No Spoilers)

Assuming you stick to the main story line, Xenoblade Chronicles ends up being one of the best paced role-playing games ever! (For the record, I haven't yet finished the game, so just pretend I did.) (And for the record, I just finished the game, and it might be the best-paced role-playing game ever.) In tonight's post, I give three reasons why the pacing's so good.

The most important facet to Xenoblade Chronicle's pacing is the most important facet because just about every game should do it just the same; this facet is the interest curve the story-telling follows. (You'll have a good idea of what an interest curve is by the time this paragraph ends) What Xenoblade Chronicles does is open with an interesting intro (in this case, a cinematic), then dumps you into a really exciting scene, and then levels off a bit, letting you relax in and get to know the new world a little; and then it puts you into another exciting scene (although not as exciting as that first one); and then the game relaxes you for a moment, then excites with the craziest thing you've seen thus far, then relaxes you again and then excites you again with the most exciting thing you've seen yet, and repeat (with each later exciting bit being, for the most part, even more exciting than all the other ones before). This, dear readers, is the ideal interest curve for...keeping an audience interested! Following it in the year 2012 may seem conservative, but it works.

[The short version of the ideal interest curve is: Interesting, pretty exciting, laid back, mildly exciting, laid back, incredibly exciting, laid back, the most exciting thing so far, repeat the last two until the story ends. The game's main story pretty much follows this.]

Another pacing strength is in the linearity of the areas. We never see anything purely linear nor totally nonlinear ("purely linear" would be like being an actor following a script, "totally nonlinear" would be like a sandbox with toys, or not a "game"). That's the obvious point though. What I'm talking about with Xenoblade Chronicles is how every next area is different in its level of linearity from the previous (and next) area. The different area layouts make the players proceed through the areas at different paces, and, as a result, the game feels a lot less monotonous, just because the new area feels different, and not just in new music and artwork, but in the way it makes you move about space.

And the last, big, good pacing thing to the game's storytelling is the rate at which it tells you about its world. It does it in varying sizes of brief bits. This is something Bioware and Bethesda didn't seem to understand in their games; guys! do not make your characters go on random, minute-long (and longer) monologues about themselves and their world. Random, narcissistic speeches about people and places that do not exist are hard to listen to for more than five seconds. Xenoblade Chronicles avoids this by putting its information dumps into individual sentences surrounded by dramatic pauses or action or humor; plus the sentence quality is high; plus it doesn't force you to drink in its world by the hose.

Of course, there are other ways by which the story's well-paced, but I like pointing out these ones.