A consequence of this verticality is to awake in your explorer mind awareness of a new dimension. You could be swimming in a lake, only to look up and see a braid of vines splicing the sky a few hundred metres up, as, in the greater distance, Mira's moons dip and lean. This exquisite world stretches high as well as wide. These are just two of five continents, each as wild and distinctive as the last. The vigorous plains of Primordia, studded with rocky towers, stratospheric arches and dread caves blend into Noctilum, with its bubbling marshes, purple shrubbery and motorway-thick roots that twizzle up into the clouds. This world is extraordinary, with few rivals to its luxurious diversity in video games. If a party member falls, you'll need to save up a huge number of 'tension points', which are accrued by landing attacks, in order to revive them. Immediately the elemental panic to survive is overtaken by other emotions. There are worse places than Mira for a galactic crash-landing.
The first time you descend the studded ramp leading out of NLA, and head out onto its sun-licked meadows, you realise, happily, this might not be so hard. Rather than sit around faking normality you've joined BLADE, a volunteer peacekeeping force committed to scout the planet, hunt for resources, fight off predators and find a way to make Mira feel more like home. Easier to hunker down in a jack-in-the-box Starbucks and sip a vacuum-packed cappuccino than reckon with the new, horrifying reality of existence. It's a little oasis of urban familiarity in a vast desert of peril. NLA provides both psychic and physical refuge. The truth is that Mira, the planet on which you have crash-landed, is entirely alien and mostly hostile. NLA (as you and its other residents refer to it with somewhat forced familiarity) with its aluminium streets, pop-up shops and shrink-wrapped palm trees would be more accurately described as a beautiful distraction. 'A beautiful lie' is exactly how one of Xenoblade Chronicle X's characters describes New Los Angeles, a flat pack city that the last remaining humans managed to fold and load before they fled a devastated Earth.