At long last, Nintendo finally dropped a Direct on us. We finally have a full trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. In addition to updated graphics with a new artstyle, the HUD looks sleeker, and we’re getting at least 90 tracks of remastered music.

While the game looks to be a faithful remaster of the original, a lot of small quality of life changes have been added.

First off, let’s have a look at the HUD.

This new UI looks cleaner and easier to navigate. Most notably, it now seems like opening this menu will now pause the game, unlike in the original title where you had to go further into one of the sub-menus to pause the game. The layout is somewhat reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts III’s menu as well.

As shown in the trailer, your armor once again affects your characters’ appearances. The bottom left menu in this screenshot seems to confirm we’ll be getting a mechanic similar to Xenoblade Chronicles X’s Fashion Gear, where you could choose what armor designs you wanted to wear without it impacting your stats.

The way that the your assortment of gear is laid out is now a lot easier to read and sift through, too.

And now, for exploration and combat.

It’s a tad difficult to see in this screenshot, but it seems like Collectables will return to how they were in the original game; you’d just pick up these blue glowing dots/objects on the field. In contrast, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 placed lots of gathering spots across the map that would drop a bunch of items when checked. Whether this change back to the original system is better or not is somewhat subjective; I’ve seen some people claim that XC2’s system is tedious and breaks the game’s pace. On the other hand, that system tends to allow you to rack up more rare collectables at a faster rate than in the original game.

The UI now looks very clean and sleek. All of the original game’s mechanics seem to be returning, right down to character portraits changing to reflect the party’s tension levels.

As in XCX and XC2, the enemies now have health bars displayed at the top of the screen. And just above that, we can see that effects like Break and Topple now have visible timers, which is a nice change.

Also, changing targets is back to how it was in the original, with both the L and R buttons being used to change between enemies. This is in contrast to XCX and XC2 requiring slightly more clunky button combinations to change targets.

Enemy detection types also seem to be back. This was something that was strangely omitted from XC2, forcing you to figure out for yourself if an enemy attacked you based on hearing or seeing you nearby.

An exclamation mark can be seen on Shulk’s Back Slash art here. What could it mean? I have a few potential guesses (all of this is pure speculation).

The conditions for the art’s extra effect have been met. Probably unlikely, since Shulk isn’t behind the enemy (Back Slash does more damage when hitting an enemy from behind). It IS possible that he’s positioned in such a way that the game might barely consider him as being behind the enemy, but I doubt it.

Some sort of equivalent to XCX’s Soul Voice system has been implemented.

Or, it could be something else entirely.

Update: A recent overview trailer confirms that the exclamation mark is indeed an indicator for when you’ve met the conditions to trigger an Art’s secondary effect, such as Back Slash dealing more damage when striking an enemy from behind.

Either way, we’ll have to wait a bit to get more info. You can spot a heart-to-heart icon in this screenshot as well.

Our friend Alvis seems to be sporting a fancy new necklace as well…

If you’ve played and finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you’ll likely know what this means.

And now for the big new addition to the game (POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T FINISHED THE ORIGINAL XENOBLADE CHRONICLES):

As confirmed by the trailer, Future Connected will be a new epilogue taking place after the events of the game. It seems like they’ll be repurposing the Bionis’ Shoulder, rather than trying to slot it in where it might have originally gone in the main story. In the trailer, we can hear Shulk saying that if the capital is on the Shoulder, there’s people there. Perhaps this could be related to the remaining High Entia after the end of the game? But it’s interesting to note that Shulk calls this place the “Shoulder”, implying that the Bionis might somehow be intact, at least enough for this place to be recognizable as its shoulder.

If this game will indeed be connecting the story to XC2 in some way, that glowing portal might have something to do with it…

We can also see that there seem to be 2 new Nopon characters. It’s likely they’ll be heavily involved in this story in some way.

Melia looks really cute now, even moreso than ever. But the dialogue here implies that this new weapon that Shulk is wielding is indeed a new replica of the Monado. I guess Monado Boy is just too used to fighting with a giant laser sword now, huh?

On a more minor note, I really like how the dialogue for calmer scenes is formatted here. The black textboxes of the original game looked kind of messy to me, and this is a nice alternative to the dialogue boxes of XCX and XC2.

Also, Shulk and Melia are the only ones we see in the footage for this epilogue. Is this story focused completely on them? I’d love to see the other members of the cast at some point during this postgame story.

What do you think of these changes and additions? Let me know in the comments below!

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is slated to launch on Nintendo Switch on May 29, 2020.