Center Stage: Gaur Plain (Xenoblade Chronicles)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Thanks to Phantom for edits.

Arguably the greatest moment of the titanic Xenoblade Chronicles comes mere hours in. It’s set in an alcove far above Colony 9, the game’s first sandbox. Teenage gizmocrat Shulk has fought his way through Tephra Cave to get to this alcove, has a forgettable boss fight, and is suddenly horrified. An invading force of monsters is descending on the colony! And you have to get there right now! We see a lot of this kind of thing in games, missions that end in a dramatic return from Point B to Point A. In early games, you had to walk back. It was a pain. Eventually, the idea of fast travel—letting players teleport to locations they’ve visited—removed the need, though this extremely useful tool for convenience is dull by design. You halt the momentum by warping through a loading screen… or you halt it by trudging through the same locations and their loading screens. It’s an issue endemic to pretty much all mainstream video games, though it goes down easier with things like fast load times or a lack of forced encounters.

Xenoblade provides both options; you could teleport back to the Colony’s outskirts or go back through the cave on your own. They’re not exactly “cinematic” or immersive, but they’ll do. However, there is a third option: jump. The alcove is technically part of the Colony 9 map, in a rocky outskirt overlooking a lake. And in Xenoblade, you avoid all fall damage, even the fatal kind, by dropping into water deep enough to swim. So jump. You save time, avoid a loading screen, and keep the momentum. For anyone used to the long walk or the quick warp, doing it the first time is revelatory. It almost feels like cheating.

Image: Source Gaming. Shulk, right before diving back into Colony 9. All images therein come from my playthrough of Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, the game’s exceptional 2020 remaster. You can still see the bones of the original struggling against the Wii’s tiny hardware, but what Monolith accomplished is still astonishing.

This moment is emblematic of the game’s goals. It was a Japanese RPG that came out in 2010; that was not a good era for the genre. Broadly speaking, the entire Japanese side of the gaming market was on a severe downward tilt with Western games dominating sales. While most Japanese studios tried to emulate Western games, more traditional JRPG holdouts suffered both commercially and critically. Xenoblade was one of several works that attempted to reverse the trend to varying degrees of success. Alongside adapting mechanics from MMOs and a humongous plot that explored everything from racial conflicts to social evolution, it looked at in-game space. A lot. The conclusions it made subsequently impacted everything about the game, from the most theoretical to the tiniest details. That’s what made it special.

Image: Kotaku, via Nintendo. The very first work on Xenoblade Chronicles was building statues of the game’s setting, the Bionis (right) and Mechonis (left).

Narratively, the setting is propped up by one of the coolest bits of world-building in any game, that the world itself is a creature. Xenoblade’s plot is set on the corpses of twin giants, the Bionis (a titan of “natural,” organic life) and the Mechonis (a titan that spurred the evolution of mechanical life). The plot revolves around a war between the races that evolved on each, one that is ultimately revealed as an expression of a conflict between differing philosophical viewpoints. Colony 9 is a town in the boonies right on the Bionis’ ankle, while other cities and regions grow far above it out of mammoth limbs and organs. Their detritus literally falls on Shulk’s home. The plot is, by extension, essentially a hundred-hour Fantastic Voyage: you go from the ankle to the leg, stomach, shoulder, head, and arm as you approach the Mechonis, then crawl through the landscapes of that body as well. But it’s the leg that’s important now.

Image: Source Gaming. Makna Forest, situated on the Bionis’ back, appears later on. The ridges are part of its body, and the liquidy sky is actually the floor of Eryth Sea. Pretty much every outdoor sandbox is able to see another one from a distance.

After the conflict at Colony 9 is resolved in tragedy, Shulk begins his march to the Mechonis. He goes through a back exit in Tephra Cave to enter the Bionis’ Leg. There’s a tiny cliff you explore, just so you get funneled into the Area proper to see it in its full size. Fans tend to refer to the Leg as “Gaur Plain,” and even though it’s inaccurate—Gaur Plain is just the large section at the start of the sandbox—it’s also so much more romantic. That’s why this article has the title it has. That’s almost certainly why the Bionis’ Leg stage in Super Smash Bros. is called “Gaur Plain” despite not necessarily being in the actual sub-area. A leg is a leg, no matter how Brobdingnagian it may be, but a plain is a sweeping stretch of land.

Image: Source Gaming. Part of the cutscene that introduces you to the Bionis’ Leg (and Gaur Plain, this initial field section).

And “sweeping” is right! Bionis’ Leg is phenomenally big; it was the largest conventional sandbox ever featured in a Nintendo game by several leagues when it showed up. Crazily enough, it might not even be the biggest one in Xenoblade Chronicles, but it also manages to feel bigger than locales like Eryth Sea or Mechonis Field. There’s more ground to explore, more landmarks to find, and a true scope befitting the setting. Colony 9 was a prelude, but this is your first real time in a Xenoblade Area. That’s the message you get from the music, a bombastic theme that’s become synonymous with the game over the years. The things you do in Makna Forest, Valak Mountain, and the like all come from how you explore this space.

Image: Source Gaming. The back edge of the Bionis’ Leg is a chain of light bridges and high level enemies. Completely easy to miss.

What does that mean in practice? Well, essentially, sandboxes in this series tend to be large, untamed, and relatively invested in naturalism. They try to present the idea that terra firma is a being that was or is alive, so you have bottomless pits into a primordial ocean the titans are standing in and animalistic protrusions (bones in Gaur Plain, which jut out to form a range of grassy hills). You fill out the map by reaching Locations and Landmarks; the latter act as waypoints, but both give you mild experience. You’ll invariably hit a few of each just by following the story from entrance to exit. That part’s set in stone; there isn’t a significant ability to alter the proceedings. Nor is there often a narrative reason to go back, since return visits like the one to Tephra Cave are a relative exception in Xenoblade. This narrative progression is required, linear, and entirely unalterable.

Image: Source Gaming. Gaur Plain proper in the Bionis’ Leg. The visual trope of giant ridges crops up here, creating a sense of verticality that’s integral to the setting.

However, that plot progression forms just a sliver of the location’s actual content. Areas in Xenoblade are massive, but they’re also largely optional. It’s probably possible to avoid eighty percent of any location and just focus on the main plot—it’s not advisable on any casual play, since you’ll be wanting for equipment and experience, but possible. This creates an odd and fun spin on the way sandboxes are built in most games. The story is as directed and controlled as can be, but the game is confident in providing adventures, quests, or interesting sights whose uncovery is entirely up to you. The Secret Areas, secret fast travel points most players will ignore by design, are a great example of this. Some are too far off to be rewarding as fast travel points, but they give you experience and are a fun symbol of your skills.

Image: Source Gaming. A Secret Area in the Ether Mine, Glowmoss Lake. It counts as a Landmark for fast travel, and you get experience just for finding it, but seeking them out is often satisfying on its own.

One additional twist to that linearity is that the collection of “safe” and “unsafe” spaces—parts of the map whose enemies are far beyond your expected level—is variable and never perfectly aligned to the critical path. Often, it’s inadvisable to make a beeline for the next stop in the plot, because herds of high-level enemies will be plopped right over it. You tend to need to find side routes that avoid danger. The most dangerous enemies will almost always be at the corners of the world, but you’ll also find regular spikes in difficulty dotted across the map. The most memorable? The “Unique Monsters” who act as optional boss fights; they parade around the levels, hide in secret alcoves, and range so widely in challenge that the vast majority are meaningless to an average player. It creates a sense of naturalism (since it makes the space feel less artificial) and threat, but it also forces you to explore and find the weakest soft walls if you don’t already have the arrangement of enemies down. Most importantly, all of this hides the inherent linearity of the adventure. Of course, you can just follow the dotted line on the map, but it’s so much more fun to ignore it. This idea of a fully realized, physical game world is something director Tetsuya Takahashi and his longterm Monolith Soft partners have been tinkering with ever since 1998’s Xenogears. It’s simply taken in a wild direction here.

Image: Source Gaming. The first floor of the Bionis’ Leg. Gaur Plain is basically just the first section, the one near the player’s icon on the far left, and I wasn’t able to include the rightmost section with Windy Cave due to size constraints.

The Bionis’ Leg structure follows this to a tee, so expertly that it almost reads as a thesis statement. The critical path is extremely strict: you find a crashed vehicle in Gaur Plain, trace its driver to the Refugee Camp where you meet your new party member Sharla, climb up a cliffside and cross Raguel Bridge, Maguel Road, and climb Spiral Valley to fight a boss. There are no required secret paths, no tunnels, no puzzles; it is a straight pathway (though there is a tunnel that’s much easier and which many players will likely go through). A few of the Mechon, the main antagonists of the game, are scattered about, but they’re more important for letting you explore Shulk’s special powers. And that dotted line is always there for whenever you want to get back to the plot.

Image: Source Gaming. Shulk’s battle against Xord at the end of the Area. This was taken using the game’s theater mode, which appreciably lets you change the time of day, weather, and characters’ outfits upon rewatches.

But that’s barely any of what the Area has to offer, and in that way, it’s a masterclass of weaving in required and optional material. The critical path is constantly next to or brushing up on optional side avenues. Gaur Plain mostly moves eastward, but its shape and outcroppings dare you to see how far it goes. There are plenty of caverns that don’t really act as shortcuts but are easy to fall into while you’re casing the region. While you cross the bridge that takes you from the lower to the upper level, it’s impossible not to notice the bizarre chain of platforms over the mammoth lake, all of which seem to hide some sort of secret. And while you spend most of the time here on a rescue mission, it’s easy to drive through a completely optional cave of giant ants, or the tunnels filled with the birdlike Tirkin enemies. The architecture of the Bionis’ Leg lends itself to wanderlust, backed by excellent art direction. It’s the first Area that truly explains what kind of a sandbox and setting Xenoblade trades in; it’s the first moment where you get a good look at the second giant. Probably why it’s used for the cover.

Image: Source Gaming. The Bionis’ Knee, the last section of Tephra Cave before you enter the Leg. That large part of the sky with no stars? That’s the Mechonis’s blade, the city-sized Sword Valley.

It is, however, still a challenge to go through it all. That’s where those higher-leveled enemies come into play, because despite this being the third main location of well over a dozen, they’re everywhere. Those insects in Windy Cave? They’re obscenely high in level. If you can get past the baddies guarding Daksha Shrine, you’ll still have to contend with a powerful optional boss. The falls can be perilous. Oftentimes, the smartest thing to do is simply explore as far into the high level section as you can until you either find a landmark or get one-shotted by a random enemy. Death is thankfully meaningless (you’re simply sent back to the last landmark you were at with no loss to money, experience, or gear), so you can try to sneak or run through places without repercussions—that’s another appeal of this kind of level design. But these deadly enemies aren’t just in the furthest reaches of the map. Many of them really are just thrown into the main and most approachable parts of the Area. The Unique Monster Territorial Rotbart runs around a space east of Gaur Plain, and he’s at such a high level that a player nearing the final boss a hundred hours later might still struggle against him. Immovable Gonzalez, who replaces the required boss for repeat visits, is even higher. You’re not expected to engage with this; it’s there for a sliver of hardcore players and a sense of tangible scale.

Image: Source Gaming. In the end game to Xenoblade, I returned dozens of hours later to fight Territorial Rotbart and Immovable Gonzalez. Rotbart is situated in one of the early sections of the Bionis’ Leg and is dangerous to approach, so there’s at least a bit of motivation to finally beating him.

In a way, this is itself a pretty good expression of Nintendo game design, even though Monolith Soft was a Namco studio that Nintendo simply bought out. There is a path, it is direct, but there’s a constant array of optional material to explore. Movement is direct and rewarding on a very basic level, far from many of the hardcore RPGs that inspired or released alongside it. You’re constantly encountering optional challenges and being led through your own interest as much as the plot. If things are too tough, grinding is easy, and you literally get rewarded EXP just for exploring. And that’s all so much easier in a cool world that doesn’t match a conventional sandbox. The weird protrusions, hollows, and intrusive man-made structures are fun to discover for their own sake. Just being able to tilt the camera up and see natural formations you’ll get to explore yourself hours later is captivating, and something no one was doing in 2010.

Image: Source Gaming. Looking at the second tier of the Bionis’ Leg from a high up Secret Area. There’s Spiral Mountain, the sprawling Windy Cave below it, and a small marshland to the right.

But Bionis’ Leg is also important to Xenoblade as a franchise in how much it seems to have influenced level design. The sandboxes follow its template far more thoroughly than the one set by early Colony 9—which does have optional sub-areas and unique monsters, but not really a space to fully facilitate them. It’s not that many of them look the same; each game’s locations are wildly distinct from each other by incorporating different shapes, movement options, and uses of verticality. But this general idea of this explicit main path, optional side paths, and large hidden sections comes through again and again. Level design uses that weirdly naturalist architecture to draw out places you might want to explore. Hidden Landmarks are there for any player willing to seek them out, as are Unique Monsters and things like unique weather patterns. Conventional features of open worlds are largely limited to sidequests and collectibles, both of which are plentiful.

Image: Source Gaming. Looking back on the first level of the Area by way of the bridge. Each sandbox’s dynamic weather is fun, if (like a lot of the game) a bit obtuse to understand.

And while early levels based on large, furtive plains are a constant in games, Xenoblade has made a habit of making early game Areas that very notably look, sound, and play like Gaur Plain. Xenoblade X kicked things off in Primordia, which added sizable beachfront land. In Xenoblade 2 it was Gormott, a hircine Titan whose back was a rural agricultural province. Millick Meadows in Xenoblade 3 was more reigned in, less important, but still the first sandbox you explore after the plot formally kicks off. The latter two follow the rules Bionis’ Leg set out to the letter, complete with similar sweeping musical themes (Primordia doesn’t due to X’s structure and score being markedly different). They’re wide landscapes with big lakes, large cliffs, and side sections that are completely optional but impossible not to see. They do the same thing with enemy placement and unique enemies, with a couple of the same ones reappearing. They’re never the very first Area, but the first one that truly reveals their game’s scale.

Image: RPGFan. Millick Meadows in Xenoblade Chronicle 3, feat: Territorial Rotbart’s counterpart Jingoistic Gigantus.

The series has other recurring geographical tropes, from icy precipices to towering cities. The setting of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is literally a hodgepodge of them smushed together (Millick Meadows, for instance, is built out of sections of Gormott and the Bionis’ Leg, and repurposed terrain from the latter can be found throughout the XC3 expansion Future Redeemed). And there are plenty of bustling towns, boneline bridges, and innards literally pulsating with life. But Gaur Plain is arguably the best. It’s the most fully realized Area in its own game and weaves in plenty of ideas that would become standard for the franchise. You walk into that open plain, the music blaring and the shadow of Sword Valley cascading over you, and you can’t help but want to see how far it all goes.