Big Baddies Breakdown: The Unique Monsters (Xenoblade Chronicles Series)

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

Thanks to Hamada for edits.

Edited 12:15 PM Eastern: Added some links and an image of best boy Machine-Gun Julio.

Meet Immovable Gonzales. He’s just like any other Gogol you’d find in Gaur Plain, Gormott Province, or High Maktha Wildwood, except bigger. A lot bigger. And a lot higher in level, while we’re at it. In Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2, he’s Level 90. He’s 88 here in Xenoblade 3. Look at this hunk:

Image: Source Gaming. Immovable Gonzalez in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. You gotta put in a bit more effort to find him in this game than the others.

Despite the fact that he’s a boss in all three games in the Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy, I highly doubt most players have ever beaten him. Or even seen much of him, for that matter. For one thing, he’s at a terrifyingly high level (above these games’ actual final bosses, even), in a series that punishes you fiercely for punching too high above your weight class. For another, he has absolutely no role in the plot, not for any of these games. He gets referenced in some dialogue in the sequels that make no sense unless you’re familiar with him beforehand, but that’s it. Many players will also miss him entirely if they don’t go out of their way to return to XC1’s Spiral Tower or explore XC3’s Gogol Camp. And yet, he persists. He is an icon of this franchise, not for any dialogue or story, or even his design—he is, essentially, any of the ape-like Gogol enemies, just horrifically supersized—but because of what he represents: this series’ Unique Monsters, in all their wild glory.

Xenoblade is a role-playing series obsessed with movement, exploration, and size. It crafts worlds out of giants living and dead. It sends players through perilous falls and Eldritch architecture. It has stories that are linear yet need to be in places like this, places that feel real and massive and fun to explore. And, sometimes, it has bizarre mechanics like throwing out healing potions you have to physically walk to mid-battle. This is all done to create a tangible sense of place. To that end, the encouragement of movement in a genre that has a historically odd relationship with environments, these games add a number of things to entice you, like collectibles, quests, and secret landmarks and rooms upon which to stumble. Even physically running from fights instead of pressing a “run” button in a menu is an important element. These games may have goofy anime aesthetics and thirty-minute cutscenes, but they are meant to be played.

Image: Source Gaming. The first Unique Monster I fought in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. It was a fairly intense fight, but fairly basic by the archetype’s standard.

There’s one other move the series has, and that’s to just stick a big ole’ monster somewhere and dare you to fight it. Unique Monsters are everywhere; they’re a class of optional bosses that numbers well over a hundred members in each game. They can be found in every sandbox. Virtually all of them, like Gonzalez, are just larger versions of one of the series’ many preexisting species, fantastical versions of a real-world creature. If you find a leonine Feris or a batlike Vang, expect that model to be repurposed for a boss fight some point down the line.

Image: Source Gaming. In particular, the spider-like Arachno are often turned into Unique Monsters. Xenoblade 1 has several notorious ones, while this Xenoblade 3 version spawns small sidekicks you’ll want to dispatch first.

From a basic, “risk vs. reward” perspective, the Unique Monsters mostly exist to be fun, one-off challenges. Several of them block secret areas or a cool treasure of some kind, and all of them drop experience and loot, but mostly the fights themselves are the rewards. Your mileage may vary depending on how you take to the series’ notoriously overwrought combat, but these battles allow you to really show your skills. This comes in part from them generally having a lot more health than anything else—to say nothing of their stronger attacks—so if you want to fill out more of a Blade’s Affinity Chart or try a party member’s new move, the weaker ones are surprisingly useful as a test chamber. Even if you’re not at risk, you kind of have to engage with the systems more if you want to win in a timely manner, and it’s nice to have a middle ground between the basic normal enemies and plot-relevant boss fights, some of which are famously challenging.

A few of them do come with special abilities. Evileye Mambor, a giant snake in Xenoblade 2, can shed its skin mid-battle to fully heal itself and jump up ten levels—a problem you can solve by acting quickly or exploiting a Chain Attack. Some summon additional enemies, forcing you to prioritize targets and wrangle your party’s AI. An optional Xenoblade 1 boss that skirts the definition of Unique Monster has a power that automatically dazes every character who uses an attack, forcing you to make ridiculous anti-Daze crystals through the crafting mechanic. Systems like that are everywhere in these games, but most of them are optional by design and often more trouble than they’re worth for casual players. Battles like these can direct you into exploring them.

Image: Source Gaming. Abnormal Clone Barg has a similar ability in a Topple Spike; if it gets toppled, it inflicts Daze. You can ignore most of this stuff casually, but you may have to account for it for these bosses.

Sometimes, the rewards are more substantial. Some quests are predicated on fighting one or another, like a late-game Xenoblade 1 mission that sets you against Territorial Rotbart, an apelike beast whose extremely high level doesn’t match his extremely early-game home of Gaur Plain. Most of the Blades in Xenoblade 2 have to fight a specific one to fully complete their skill tree; one of these optional sidekicks, Zenobia, has a skill tree based exclusively around this idea. Similarly, the chimerical Soulhacker class in Xenoblade 3 gets optional moves from felled Unique Monsters. But for a lot of players, the best reward is a musical one: some of the best fight themes to ever grace a game. Each game has one track in what became a trilogy of songs—”You Will Know Our Names,” “You Will Recall Our Names,” and “You Will Know Our Names – Finale”—that are exciting, propulsive, and iconic in their own right. These are so good that the games always find a way to add it to an important mid-game boss fight. You’re gonna hear it, whether or not you intend to do any optional content. And you’re gonna like it.

Of course, it’s not just challenging battles and excellent music. If Xenoblade Chronicles is Nintendo’s top-tier depiction of video game camp, then the Unique Monsters are one more outlet for it. Design-wise, being a large version of already silly enemy types like Bunnits, Brogs, and Volffs adds a little bit of kitschy charm. The general image of these monsters chilling in gorgeous, sprawling sandboxes is wacky too, especially the ones like Rotbart who wildly outpace everything else in power. They’re fundamentally video gamey in what are otherwise very serious stories. But what matters, what really makes these guys iconic? It’s the names.

Image: Source Gaming. Behold, not even the twentieth most ridiculous name in Xenoblade 2.

Joyful Nimroog. Lightspeed Sonid. Soul-Eater Stanley. Frolicking Parker. Handwinging Bigelow. Phantasmagorical Rist. Machine-Gun Julio. Acute Melvyn. Conflagrant Raxeal. Majestic Mordred—him being one of Central Factory’s several Arthurian-named bosses. Altruistic Maribel. Runaway-Train Bool. Many-Lived Derrick. Killhappy Brijaidor. Decapitator Marvin. Experienced Tristan. Sensitive Catullus. Terpsichorean Cenoth. Sharkblade Nedd. Gourmand Galgan. Househunter Carly. North Star Gusion. Banquet Vassago. Cavalier MacBright. Thunderfish Duna-Roa. Deputy Seagal… that one can’t be a Steven Seagal reference, can it? And that’s just a soupçon from all three games and their expansions. They’re all like this. If BioShock always has a man and a lighthouse, these bosses always have a name and an absurd, only sometimes accurate descriptor.

Xenoblade is not a particularly funny series and when it tries it rarely succeeds, but these are laff riots of the highest order. You can go through the Urayan Trail and find yourself beset upon by a giant bat named Bloodsucking Elvis (perhaps he’s the devil in disguise?). You can be storming the dramatic final level of Xenoblade 1, awash in horrifying revelations and powerful character development, stumble upon some giant evil mass of magical fire energy, and that mass of energy is called Inferno Heinrich. Future Redeemed pits you against a giant elk named Treehugger Gerald. You can fight him within the first chapter.

Image: Source Gaming. And for another boss fought by Matthew, A, and the rest, here’s Smackdown Brannigan. A shark with ripped arms.

Many of the best names come from Xenoblade 2, the schlockiest and silliest entry, but it’s a laundry list of absurdity no matter where you go. That’s important, because that in and of itself is enough reason to want to engage with these enemies. Maybe you’ll be disappointed by White Eduardo down in the Bionis’ Leg, but just wait until Satorl Marsh and you’ll get to meet Despotic Arsene or Tumultuous Felix! And if you’re finding the final sandbox of Xenoblade 3 to be a bit too spooky and overwhelming, maybe things’ll feel a bit nicer after you stumble onto Cruelfist Rojou or Dishonest Karom. Video games are full of rewards that are more emotional or atmospheric than material, and coming across any one of these bosses feels like that. Makes you feel warm seeing them. Then, at times, very, very nervous.

Image: Source Gaming. Every sequel manages to find new enemy types, which inevitably become turned into Unique Monsters. Future Redeemed and the base Xenoblade 3 added these anglerfish-esque monstrosities. They are delightful, and I made time to come back later and beat this one.

These enemies can be found across almost every single sandbox in every single game, only avoiding what little space is tamed by people. Even Xenoblade Chronicles X, the weird Wii U spinoff that may or may not exist in its own universe, has them in the form of the Tyrant enemies. Their goofy names actually go harder with ridiculous honorifics, like “Gradivus, the Headless Emperor” or “Sheldon, the Dentally Challenged.” For whatever reason, the series has chosen these mini-bosses as a major and consistent trope. And I suppose one question for this would be… why? Like, why is it so important to have these kinds of enemies? Why give them these names? Why are Immovable Gonzalez and Territorial Rotbart so special that they outpace many plot-relevant bosses in iconography?

Image: Source Gaming. Levialord Empireo is a special kind of Unique Monster, as it’s a Superboss. Only five exist in each base game, they’re all above the player’s level cap and hidden fairly well, and you get only cryptic references to seek them out.

I suspect that at the start, there was a meta element to it. JRPGs in the era of the first Xenoblade Chronicles were derided for being dull, linear, grindy, needlessly abstracted, and rote at a time when the industry was rapidly changing. The standard bearer for the genre in the late Aughts was Final Fantasy XIII, which came out a year before and was castigated as the symbol of a genre in insurmountable decline. Xenoblade 1—which is also, to be clear, linear and abstracted and grindy in its own way—was trying a number of different things, the biggest of which was the reimagining of physical space. It was okay to run away, it was okay to go off the beaten path, and levels would account for those as possibilities. That’s why you have some dungeons that restrict your ability to run past obstacles or Hidden Landmarks that encourage exploration. This degree of openness had to be the norm, which meant it had to be challenged. And having these gigantic, weird, unstoppable bosses sent a message. It said “this guy here? You can’t beat him. You’re not gonna be able to grind your way to beating him at this point in the plot. Just run, but think about him and come back when you’re ready.” Ideally, you should think about coming back to that monster for a long time.

Image: Source Gaming. The iconic Machine-Gun Julio also shows the value of sticking these in late game eras. He’s in one of the last sandboxes, positioned in such a way that you’re likely to get stuck fighting him. It makes the Cliffs of Morytha a little more memorable.

It’s a good message to send to players, especially new ones. Each Xenoblade game is relatively standalone and meant to be anyone’s first entry in the series. And they’re all rather complicated, filled with so many mechanics and ideas right from the start. These monsters aren’t complicated, though. They’re large and threatening, and there’s always a few easy ones right at the beginning to imply that they can all be beaten, eventually. And in the first game, which requires much less backtracking, it highlighted that there were reasons to make return visits. You’ll want to come back to old areas for the plot or to find new party members or for the sake of a giant side quest, but now that you’re back, why not tussle with a creature that threatened you earlier?

Image: Source Gaming. The fights give players who are so inclined a chance to really show their skill, though you can just crush them at a high level without a problem. Xenoblade 3 turns it into a game: your various EXP stats get almost nothing from fighting underleveled monsters, though gold and item rewards stay the same.

I think there are other things they bring, though. Their very existence makes the sandboxes more fun, for one thing. The series is obsessed with creating a sense of life, so NPCs have time schedules, some enemies and quests are dependent on the weather conditions, companions constantly talk to each other during battles, and a billion other things are there to make the world seem deeper. Having enemies like these helps with that, because it means you’re liable to pay more attention to the environment, enemy encampments, and where you’re going. They can make places more iconic and make you pay attention. And they manage to solve a problem many sandboxes have, where early-level areas become boring or too simplistic on return visits. Now, there’s always a potential challenge—one that, in the later games and Xenoblade 1’s remastered Definitive Edition, can be fought again and again after you beat it once. Their graves are even a nifty fast travel point in the third game.

Image: Source Gaming. Xenoblade 3 has a few other quality of life features for its bosses, like telling you if it’s carrying a Soul Art. Its expansion even shows them on the map once you see them in person. The game is definitely geared more towards helping you find and fight them.

Xenoblade is a very heady franchise, and it can be easy to fall into a trap of viewing it only as a heady franchise. Focusing on its politics and world building and philosophy, or only thinking of its game design as an extension of that philosophy. And sure, the Unique Monsters are part of that philosophy because they’re central to the series’ vision of what video game spaces should be. Enemies like Gonzalez exist to facilitate a certain kind of game design. But they’re also not only that. They also carry a gonzo energy; these creatures are goofy, scary, and exciting. Their silliness and strangeness deepen settings that would be so much duller without them. Perhaps they’re a symbol of how high and low concepts can mix. No matter what, though, I’ll always look forward to the next one I challenge. Gotta Soul Hack that secret Art I’m never gonna use, after all.