Not really feeling it.

Before playing the demo at PAX East, I was so sure that Xenoblade Chronicles 3D was a day one purchase. Not only did I love the heck out of it when I first played, but I was looking forward to the novelty of owning a game exclusively on New 3DS. Now that I have tried the demo, I don’t know if I’m as excited anymore.

Monster Games, who did the competent 2013 port of Donkey Kong Country Returns on 3DS, came back to do this version of Xenoblade. If you remember playing Donkey Kong on 3DS, you’ll remember the game’s worst problem: it looked awful. Especially on 3DS XL, the textures looked bad and jaggies were rampant in what was otherwise a beautiful game. Monster Games made the game run well, but they made it look really ugly too.

This is my biggest issue with Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, which as I noted in my review, wasn’t the most technically beautiful game to begin with (despite having an otherwise wonderful art design, like Donkey Kong). Don’t get me wrong – the fact that the game looks as bad as it does is surely the reason why the draw distance is good and there is so little slowdown during combat. Unfortunately, on New 3DS XL (the only way to play this game in North America), the faces look unrecognizable from all but the most zoomed angles, the character models look lifeless, the world is so stuffed with jaggies that it has none of the life it used to, and nothing of scale seems as impressive anymore. It simply didn’t feel like the same world I got entrenched in three years ago.

The game still controls fine on the New 3DS, the combat is still excellent, and nearly every other aspect of the game is intact (see our other previews for more on that). Even if this is the case, and even if this issue does seem like a huge nitpick, I don’t think I want to deal with a game that looks this bad for another 60 hours, let alone the 100-150+ some others have spent.

If you’ve never played the Wii game or now have no other means to play it, I’m sure there is still plenty to love. But for me, outside of the fact that setting up to play a Wii game is kind of a pain, why wouldn’t I go back to the vastly better-looking original version on a larger screen with better control options and (almost) identical content?

Of course, the answer is that I have no self-restraint, so I’ll likely buy this anyways the day it comes out then beat it again. But man oh man, it’ll be a bummer to look at the whole way through.