Monolith Soft’s upcoming open-world JRPG, Xenoblade Chronicles X got some unexpected news on the latest Nintendo Direct.
In the video, Bill Trinen announced that the game would be available to pre-purchase and pre-load on the Nintendo eShop. It’s a nice incentive but given the Wii U’s very limited internal memory of 32 GB at most it’s an option most aren’t going to take. Especially since the complete game’s file size comes in at nearly 23 GB, meaning unless you don’t have anything on the hard drive, smaller games or DLC for something bigger like Mario Kart 8 or Smash Bros., you’ll be better off getting a disc copy.
Which leads us to the next strange bit of news surrounding the game. Trinen explained that there are four high-speed data loading packs for the game, the Basic Pack at 2 GB, the Enemy Pack at 2.7 GB, the Player Pack at 3.6 GB, and the Skell (the in-game name for the mechs) Pack at 1.7 GB all of which are meant to reduce loading times on the game. Putting aside the fact that that is nearly 10 GB of data, these are meant to be optional, though Trinen insisted that at least the Basic Pack be downloaded. The only upside of the digital copy is that these updates are already factored into the game’s file size.
Considering the wizardry Monolith Soft used to make Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii as expansive as it was, I’m curious as to what they’re doing to optimize this beast of a game. 23 GB, even 10 GB is a lot to ask for on Nintendo’s modest machine afterall, but considering how impressive the game looks it might be worth the investment.