User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Xeno'jiiva/@comment-15446856-20180824164208

Xeno'jiiva is the first final boss that failed to impress me in anyway. I have fought the offline and online final bosses in 3U, 4U, Gen and Stories and they all has at least one quality that I liked about them. However, Xeno here, doesn't. It is agonisingly mediocre in every way.

First lets take look at the design. People here either love or simply don't care about it. To talk about the appearance, lets compare them to the designs of the final bosses of other games. Ceadeus was mostly unique for the most part, a bearded whale/eal hybrid with giant horns, disregarding its moveset being mostly recycled from other underwater monsters. Dire Miralis was the basic Fatalis skeleton that has the living volcano theme before Zorah. Rusted Kushala was a fail, only serving as a tutorial for the Battlequarters, for the final offline boss fight. Gogmazios is a giant tar covered giant with altered Magala attacks but had several of its own. Glavenus, is Glavenus. And the most unique of those in my opinion is definitely Nakarkos simply for it being something that had never been done before, a skeletal cuttlefish with two different appearances. Xeno'jiiva, to put it bluntly, is just a crystal dragon. It looks like something you'd find in Yu-Gi-Oh or Final Fantasy, not something like Monster Hunter, which gives us monsters with far better unique appearances than this. Yeah, I don't like it. The whole body except for some parts just the same shade of silver and blue throughout the entire design, only being an exception for the eyes and the "fake eyes". I would give it originality points for its critical state having a glowing chest if it wasn't already the case for Gogmazios. They tried to make Xeno'jiiva look alien, but instead they make it look hopelessly generic.

Now, onto what makes Xeno unlikable for me, the battle. During the fight, I counted TWO new attacks that it has for itself. The flying claw grind, a move that just has Xeno spaz out on the spot and somehow creates explosions around itself. That's it. Every single other attack is recycled from the Magalas, Gogmazios and even Nergigante respectively. I'm dead serious. Let's count. Xeno's energy zaps are just altered from the Magala's frenzy balls and the airbone version is from Gog's airborne tar lazer. Its melee attacks are a mixture of Magala, Gogmazios and Nergigante attacks we've seen hundreds if not thousands of times before and know perfectly well how to avoid and exploit them. Like, it has Nergigante's claw smash attack but far less intimidating, which creates an energy explosion like the spikes of Nerg... four seconds after the smash! If you don't agree with me, just go fight Xeno and then fight or watch footage of Magala, Gog and Nerg fights and compare them to what Xeno does.

"B-b-b-bu-bu-but it has the lazor beams! That's super duper unique and coooollll!". Yeah, so what? So does, Gravios, Basarios, Plesioth, Green Plesioth, Ukanlos, Rajang, Furious Rajang, Agnaktor, Glacial Agnaktor, Amatsu, Dalamadur, Shah Dalamadur, Gogmazios and the previous final boss, Nakarkos had the exact same thing with the lazers. And the lazers, like it or not, are recyled from Gogmazios oil breath attacks, which were already recycled from the Magalas's frenzy breath. Literally a recycle of a recycle. And even Xeno's ultimate attack, standing upright and sweeping its beam around is just Gog's sweeping tar lazer but made more dramatic.

When I fought Xeno, I was fully expecting there to be a third phase to come at near death that would make the fight much more difficult and unique as little what I hadn't already seen was happening. Alas, that wasn't the case. Instead we get a painfully unoriginal monster that relies on the player not having played any older games to think its good.

To make it even worse, Xeno is the only "online" final boss which I didn't finish solo at the skin of my teeth. In all other games, I beat the monster mainly after carting and on the last five minutes remaining. Xeno went down in 27 minutes and didn't cart me once. It lies in the fact that Xeno highly telegraphs its attacks and flinches often. The airborne state is a fucking joke. Just hit it with two slinger shots, one after the flinch from the previous shot and Xeno will always, and I mean always, fall to the ground and leaves you to let you have it.

Also, why was Xeno the only monster until updates to have unique descriptions for its carves? Carve descriptions are something Capcom didn't give a single damn about in this game, literally the same fucking descriptions for every carve material for every monster. This is a problem I have with World in general though, copy and pasted material.

You know how Wolf bashed Glavenus for her seeing it like main series trying to compete with Frontier to see who comes up with the better concept for ideas? Well I see it for Xeno. Just look at Xeno'jiiva and the Conquest War Fatalis and compare them together. There is a very big similarity between the two of them and I cannot ignore that. For instance, both Xeno and CWFata both emit blue flames when they enrage/enpower, the blue flames contain both fire and dragon element (CWFata also has a mixed element for that), they both create burning surfaces with attacks when blazing with fire that drain health, and when blazing their movesets are enhanced. I feel like main series devs were running out of time to finish World and decided to "borrow" some concepts from CWFatalis to make it faster. It failed, because Conquest War Fatalis is a complete revamp and a much better looking fight compared to Xeno'jiiva, which is boring and just reuses old attacks from old monsters. If you're going to take concepts from Frontier, can you at least make them as interesting as they were in Frontier too? That'd be great.

And speaking of the sound design, uhhh. The only sound I find really fitting are the lazers. The noises of Xeno are unfitting for a monster of its size, making it sound like it was a juvenile (I'll get to that) and many other sounds sound unsuitable too. The worst in my case are the explosions which sounds like heavy rain instead of fire and thundering sounds. The OST is also bad. Unlike previous final boss monsters, both music tracks are generic to the extreme, it is exactly what you would imagine a fantasy fight to have and nothing more.

Now, about the two theories about Xeno'jiiva. Let's first talk about the one that says its a newborn. It appears plausible at first seeing its introduction in the story and the sounds it makes, but it is said that the thing it emerges from is a cocoon, not an egg. And there is a second one that says that Xeno came from outer space and arrived to the New World in a comet. This one is complete bullshit as why would a monster from a different part of the MH universe be and act so similar to monsters that exist in this world?

Overall, it is the mediocre of mediocre and a bad final boss monster. What was hyped up since the very beginning of the story is just a worse hybrid of much better monsters in older titles and in this very game.

Huge downgrade from Nakarkos, hopefully the next game will give us something that's actually original and fun.