Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a 2017 Nintendo Switch game and the “sequel” to Xenoblade Chronicles. While Xenoblade Chronicles is widely regarded as a masterpiece and the best JRPG on the Wii and Switch, which of these two games is “better” is a hot topic in the Xenoblade community. While I do consider Xenoblade 2 to be a “good game”, the whole experience makes for a rather disappointing sequel in my opinion. I will describe my many thoughts and gripes with it here. I will mark “plot twist”-type spoilers, but I can’t properly discuss my opinion on the game without discussing the content of the story.
Content warning: heavy mental health stuff, some tropey anime character designs that may not be appropriate for work.
The Good
(Most of) The Story
Xenoblade 2 is a Japanese Role-Playing Game, and as is typical of this genre, it has a long and deep story, just like Xenoblade 1. Xenoblade 2 is a sequel, but it’s a sequel in the way that Final Fantasy entries are sequels; that is to say, this game’s story has no bearing on the characters or setting of Xenoblade 1, although there are many intentional similarities.
The setting is imaginative – in the world known as Alrest, inhabitants live on massive living landmasses known as Titans. These Titans are essentially continents and nations, and the “water” between them is actually clouds. In addition to humans living on the Titans, there are Blades, living weapon life-forms that can be awoken by naturally-occurring Core Crystals. If a being successfully awakens a Blade, they become a Driver, and can use the Blade’s power in battle.
In a nutshell, the story follows a young boy named Rex, a Salvager, whose job it is to dive into the Cloud Sea and find useful debris and artifacts to sell. Rex accepts a sketchy but extremely well-paying salvaging job, which is actually organized by the team of bad guys who are trying to capture Pyra, the Aegis, a special, legendary, and extremely powerful type of Blade. After the antagonists kill Rex, the Aegis binds herself to him to revive him. In this moment, Pyra projects onto Rex her one goal: To get to Elysium, atop the World Tree in the center of the Alrest. They escape Torna, and the adventure begins.
This is an interesting enough premise, but in all honesty, the first 20 hours of the game are not actually spent working towards that goal, or even knowing what the antagonists’ motivations actually are. The party just sort of ends up on 3 different Titans before the main plot actually starts. While these adventures aren’t boring per se, the first portion of the game is still a frustrating case of “it gets really good eventually“. At 10 hours in, you’ll be begging the game to take itself seriously, but at about 40 hours in, you’ll be bawling.
With just about 14 hours of cutscene, the game does a lot of its storytelling with them. These cutscenes are very well done, especially the emotional ones. Once the game starts taking itself seriously, there are a lot of great moments, both sad and happy. There’s also no shortage of well-choreographed battle scenes. The overarching theme of the plot is meaningful and the characters are deep and relatable:
The theme is prevailing against nihilism. The arcs of the characters follow themes such as overcoming mental illness, finding where you belong and being true to yourself, and finding purpose.
While the story takes a bit to pick up and isn’t completely fantastic from start to finish like Xenoblade 1 is, I do enjoy it a lot. Although I think Xenoblade 1’s story is “better”, I find that Xenoblade 2’s has more of a lasting impact on me.
The Characters
Xenoblade 2’s story is far more interested in the individual characters while Xenoblade 1 is more focused on the circumstances of the world. While I can’t do these characters justice with just text, I’d like to take a moment to highlight a couple of my favorite characters.
Ironically, the main character, Rex, is not one of my favorite characters. He’s not a bad main character, he just… isn’t quite as interesting as some of the others.
Pyra… and Mythra
Pyra is actually an alternate self created by Mythra. While they share the same memories, they have very different personalities and abilities. Pyra is kind and calm, while Mythra is… rude, headstrong, and reckless. I think this duality is very interesting and is something that is not often explored in video games.
They are different characters with unique personalities. To use a literary word, Pyra is Mythra’s foil. The dichotomy between them is very interesting in the plot, and central to the whole point of the game.
However, keep in mind I’m talking about their character here – these two’s character designs are another subject entirely that I’m just not a fan of. It’s very unfortunate that there are people who bought into Xenoblade 2 only because of her design and proceed to completely miss the point of the character, and it’s also unfortunate that her design turns people off from the game. I’ll touch on whole aesthetic of the game later.
What’s “the point” of the character, you ask? Here’s my reading of it (spoilers for the whole game, obviously):
She’s extremely mentally ill as a result of past trauma, and carries the guilt of thousands of deaths – this is why she has a split personality. The game is spent unknowingly helping her with assisted suicide. Her dream is not to find Elysium – it is to die.
Throughout the adventures that take place in the game, she finds hope and purpose in Rex.
“I love this world, because you’re in it.”
It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s touching, after all the sadness and despair she (and the player) suffers.
Nia
Nia, who was hanging with the Torna group, quickly abandons them and escapes with Rex after the introduction to the game. She remains an important ally throughout the story. She is very cynical and has a no-nonsense attitude, but warms up to the party as the game goes on.
Nia is by far my favorite character in the game, but for much more than her witty one-liners.
Spoilers:
Late in the game, Nia is revealed to be a Flesh Eater – a blade who has been fused with human cells, either by consumption or by scientific experiment. She is forced into hiding as Flesh Eaters are seen as an abomination and are hunted down, but through the course of the game realizes she does not want to hide, and undergoes a radical transformation and is able to express her true self as a Blade. Many people have read this as a coming-out-of-the-closet story, and I think that’s pretty cool (even if the backstory here is pretty odd and messed up).
Jin
Jin is a member of Torna, but even still is probably the best-written character in the game. His motivation is complex, and I find he has the best justification for his actions out of all the villians. He is also just a badass. His signature ability is absolutely nonsense, but that doesn’t bother me too much, as the rest of his character is awesome. Also, his Japanese voice actor is also the voice of Cloud from Final Fantasy, which definitely helps my appreciation of him.
The Gameplay
Combat
Although it takes a while before the game allows you to use every aspect of the combat system, it is extremely complex, incredibly dynamic, and very creative. The Xenoblade series in general has a nice mix of action and cooldown-based combat. In addition to auto-attacking and Arts, you have Driver Combos (Break, Topple, Launch, Smash), Blade Combos, and Chain Attacks. All of these battle mechanics work together well and allow you to take down enemies even if they have massive amounts of HP.
If you know me, you know my favorite part of RPGs is building up the team. Xenoblade 2 has phenomenal teambuilding. Each Driver party member gets up to 3 Blades at one time. Blade are classified into Healer, Tank, or Attacker, and which types of Blades you engage to a Driver determines their role in battle. Every Blade has different Specials and Arts. Both Blades and Drivers have an Affinity Chart, which upgrades different things about them in battle. There is so much room for experimentation. I love how you can feel your team get stronger as you complete their Affinity Chart.
However, as I will explain later, you are likely to find yourself confused by the tutorials that are supposed to explain the complexities, as well as feel severely limited by how you want to build your team due to the frustrating Gacha mechanic.
Exploration
Outside of combat, the Xenoblade series is known for exploration, and Xenoblade 2 is no exception. The different environments of the Titans are all varied and just fun to look around and move in. It’s just the right amount of open world – when you progress in the story, you get a large new area to explore. I prefer this to “true” open world games; I have plenty of time to stop in one area and do the sidequests, I can move on with the main story when I feel I am done with an area, and I never feel like I have so many directions to go in that it’s hard to choose.
Furthermore, you’re guaranteed to want to come back to an area more than once. The game makes a great use of its wide space by spreading out early, mid, and late game content throughout.
The Music
The soundtrack of the game is, simply put, incredible. There’s a lot of variation too; the battle music tends to be fast-paced rock & metal-like, certain areas have very relaxing music, and the game uses music to evoke emotion very well. Different areas have different ambient and battle themes as well. I’ll just have to let the tracks do the talking here:
The game uses leitmotifs very effectively – listen to a couple seconds of these from the timestamp:
In comparison to Xenoblade 1, I find that 2 has better “emotional” music, while I prefer 1’s “epic” music. Both have fantastic soundtracks across the board, and I find my ears crave particular tracks from time to time.
The Content
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has a lot of side content. There are 87 side quests, 85 unique monsters, and 30 Blade-specific quests. But that’s just in the base game. If you decide to buy the DLC, it adds 24 more side quests. Even without the DLC, there is easily over 100 hours of gameplay contained in this one game (however, as I will discuss later, at least a couple of these hours will probably be spent obtaining Blades). While a long playtime is relatively standard for modern JRPGs, it’s a plus for sure.
The Xenoblade series has a kind of collectibles in the form of conversations between important characters, called Heart-to-Hearts. These are more than 70 of these in Xenoblade 2, and they provide some interesting insight into the characters. Also, while not exactly content, you can spend a lot of time unlocking skills on Affinity Charts.
As if there wasn’t enough to do already, Xenoblade 2 has a prequel DLC that is technically an entirely different game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country has anywhere between 15 and 40 hours of content depending on how you play. The gameplay is just different enough to be interesting and the story gives important context to the main game of Xenoblade 2.
While Torna ~ The Golden Country’s content is mostly sidequests, it improves just about everything about the Xenoblade 2 formula. Since that is technically a different game, I’ll go over it in more detail at the end of this post, once I’ve given my full opinion of the base game.
The Bad
(English) Voice Acting
Or, more accurately, voice direction, is just lacking at times in this game. Many players were quick to notice this at the game’s launch. Apparently the English voice acting cast was very rushed, and had to dub an entire game in a short amount of time. The lack of direction is apparent in-game and during cutscenes. Of particular note is how many players, myself included, could not stand the English voice of Rex – the main character – at first.
What’s even worse is that, in cutscenes, the characters’ lips do not match the language that the game is being played in. While this is tolerable most of the time, the characters’ faces are very expressive, and sometimes it is very obvious that the cutscene doesn’t line up with the spoken words. Here’s the most egregious example (this embed has a timestamp):
Again, most of the time it’s tolerable, but this and the bad voice direction really works against the otherwise great cutscenes. There is an option to use the Japanese voices, and many players, myself included, used this option while playing through the game.
Tutorials / Information
“Xenoblade 2 has bad tutorials” is a very common criticism of this game, but I’d like to go a bit deeper. While I love the complexity of combat in this game, the experience is seriously marred by poor tutorials and severe lack of information, which is unacceptable for such a complex system. It kind of just expects you to just know how the combat of Xenoblade 1 works and to build off of that.
Tutorials have are written with a tone like the player is a baby, and if you missed something in a particular tutorial you can’t go back to see it (which, again, is unacceptable given how complex it is). Several people I’ve talked to went through the whole game without knowing about important mechanics of the combat system. That’s a huge flaw on the game’s part.
A less common, but perhaps just as impactful, criticism is the large amount of mistranslations, typos and/or outright false information in-game, for example:
Affinity Charts in general just have a lot of mistakes. It’s really inexcusable. I think Chuggaaconroy says it best here (again, this embed has a timestamp):
The Ugly
The Gacha
If you don’t already know, Gacha refers to Japanese toy-dispensing “Gachapon” machine. They are essentially the same thing as the capsule toy dispensers that are in almost every kid-friendly restaurant in the US. Imagine these, but as a central part of a video game. A Gacha Game refers to a game where items, characters, etc. are only obtainable from the Gacha system. Players only have so many attempts to “pull” characters/items, and generally have to spend money in the form of microtransactions if they want to have more chances at stronger characters/items. This is analogous to gambling, but is a VERY popular monetization model, especially among mobile games that are “free to play”.
In Xenoblade 2, the central gimmick of the whole game and narrative is Blades, which are living weapon characters which are literally spawned from small crystals known as Core Crystals. Fortunately, the game doesn’t make you pay for these small crystals, and the main way to obtain them is by finding them in the game world. The “Gacha” system has been modified to be more suitable for a $60 triple-A title; there is a “pity system” that makes it more likely to get the rare characters, after many attempts, and even characters that are guaranteed after a certain number of pulls*.
*We know from datamining that the pity system is mildly buggy. While it still functions as intended for the most part, it’s unfortunate that the only thing that was supposed to make the entire gimmick tolerable is bugged.
Most of the time, when you pull a Core Crystal, you will get a generic, “common” Blade with a randomly generated name, skill tree, element, stats, and one of a few appearances. While it is absolutely possible to complete the game with these common Blades, they are intentionally weaker in their base stats and tend to have skills on their skill tree that don’t synergize together well (because they were randomly generated and not designed). Naturally, players will want to spend their time building their team with Rare Blades, instead of wasting their time with the common ones, especially if they want a chance at taking down the game’s superbosses.
However, no amount of pity system will prevent most players from spending a significant amount of their play time mashing the A button on the Awaken Blades screen, trying over and over and over and over for a Rare Blade. This is uninteractive and unfun, and a system designed to keep mobile game players addicted and obsessively making microtransactions does NOT belong in a sixty dollar Triple-A title. It is unfortunate and honestly distressing that this mechanic was a selling point for this game. I understand that Gacha appeals to Japanese gamers more than western ones, but it’s still an objectively unfun mechanic that will make anyone feel like they are wrestling with the game instead of actually playing it.
It certainly doesn’t help that, when you awaken a Rare Blade, they are initially locked to the Driver you awoke them on. This can harm teambuilding, as you might get a rare Tank Blade on your primary attacker. It is possible to move Blades to different Drivers with an item called Overdrive Protocol, however these items are very rare and are finite. Releasing a Blade makes it possible to awaken them again on a different driver, but the last thing you want to do is release an extremely rare character after you just got them.
On top of being mechanically a mess, many Rare Blades were designed by guest artists, and while there are some genuinely really cool designs (my favorite being Perceval), there is a significant amount of blatantly oversexualized female characters. There’s. So. Many. This is a consequence of the developers of Xenoblade 2 not being able to design enough characters themselves and having very vague guidelines for their guest artists’ submissions.
You can see the names of any particular Blade’s designer in a certain menu in-game, and it’s not impossible to find a name who is an artist of actual pornography. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that fact in a vacuum, the prevalence of these types of characters in the game distracts from the fun gameplay and good story. I find it unfortunate that some of these designs made it to the final game, and it makes me wonder what designs were denied (if any).
It’s also really, really unfortunate that the buzz around these characters’ designs drew a lot of ire and lead people to never try or even consider the game. It comes off as a game where the goal is to collect as many waifus as possible, but in reality the prevalence of sexualized female characters is because the developers could not design enough original characters, and cast a wide net across the industry to fill the space. Apparently, it’s hard to find anime artists in Japan that don’t also illustrate for eroge. I had someone tell me that the Xenoblade series as a whole has “no redeeming qualities”, because they had read one clickbait article about some of the absurd designs in this one game. It’s a real bummer.
Outside of the Rare Blades, the game has a handful of overtly sexual character designs, which do not in any meaningful way contribute to the character’s, well, character.
The Artstyle
This one’s extremely subjective. The artstyle – even without the ridiculous, guest-designed Rare Blades – turns a lot of people off. I’m pretty sure this game’s art direction comes from a lot of feedback (read: complaints) regarding Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade X’s very mixed art direction. Prior Xenoblade games have aesthetics that are “half-anime”, if you get my drift, so for this one they decided to go full anime.
I think MonolithSoft went really overboard here. Like, a lot of Xenoblade 2’s character designs are extremely trope-y. It’s uncomfortable and took away from what I found fun and interesting about the game. I understand the cultural context here – these designs are not looked down on in Japan, and I’m looking at them through the lens of a western audience. I like to think that the cringeworthy designs of some of the Rare Blades are because they were designed by guest artists, but really it’s a larger problem with the game in general.
There’s some interesting justifications for particular character’s designs, but by and large the anime design tropes don’t sell or express their character, and just serves to be eye candy. I suppose that isn’t inherently bad, but it took away from my experience for sure, and many others can say the same.
I’m not really qualified to speak on how media like this effects real people, so I won’t. I just wish people would be able to see the character designs, say they are bad, but even still give the game a genuine try, but I can understand why people can’t. Even within the first handful of cutscenes, the camera is not afraid to be focused on character’s bodies. It distracts from the actual meaningful story.
I’d like to make a separate post sometime about particular characters that were lauded near the game’s release and how, in my opinion, a lot of the press on the subject was overblown. Remember, the entire game’s gimmick is that you are not likely to get any one of the Rare Blades, and generally speaking the most frowned-upon designs have even lower chances of showing up in your playthrough.
Miscellaneous Ugly Things
The game has a problem with memory leaks. Playing for more than a couple hours will make the game increasingly unstable, and eventually it will crash. Save often. Many players had to learn this the hard way and will lose hours of progress.
Honestly, as an amateur programmer myself, I sympathize with not even noticing problems like this in development, but it’s not acceptable for a game of this quality.
I think it’s kind of gross that buying the DLC gives you some Core Crystals which are slightly more likely to give Rare Blades as a “gift”. You don’t need the DLC to get all of the random Rare Blades, but getting more chances at a bad mechanic shouldn’t be a selling point for DLC. I know it’s “bonus” in addition to the content the DLC provides, but there are certainly people out there who bought the DLC primarily for those Legendary Core Crystals.
Since Common Blades are randomly generated, their favorite pouch items are too. However, there is no restriction on which pouch item the game selects; a common blade’s favorite item may be impossible to obtain. These items may be named with untranslated Japanese text even when playing the game in English. This is an awful bug and yet another reason to not invest any time in common blades.
There are at least two sections of the story where your party is changed in an unforeseeable and very annoying way. I’m specifically referring to (spoilers):
– Spirit Crucible Elpys, where not only do you not have Pyra/Mythra, but every blade aside from Poppi is just weaker, and they get even weaker as you progress. That dungeon is just a pain in the ass in general.
– The part near the end of the game where the party disappears and Rex has to fight imagined versions of them. This is really bad if your Rex is underleveled, because now you have to go grind with only Rex and no other party members.
Conclusion
I consider Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to be a “good game”. However, I think it has a lot of flaws that take away from the experience, and as such I can only recommend it to fans of Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition. The good parts of the game, particularly the story and music, stick with me, even years after I played it. However, the bad parts prevent me from considering ever re-playing it. It’s a real shame, honestly; Monolith Soft made so many great decisions with this game, but they also made a handful-too-many bad ones.
I rate Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
6/10
Regarding Torna
Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s side-game Torna ~ The Golden Country serves as the prequel to the main game. Although a significant amount of the play time for this game will be spent doing mandatory sidequests (that are only required to make the playtime longer), it improves on Xenoblade 2’s gameplay and provides interesting context to the main game that will make you appreciate the recurring characters even more. Disclaimer: I have not played Torna, and my opinion on it is informed by watching several Let’s Plays.
Many problems from the main game do not exist in Torna. There is no random Core Crystals – all party members are set to join you at certain times in the story. While this does remove some aspect of creativity in teambuilding, it also removes the awful feelings the gacha system brings.
Tutorials can actually be revisited from the beginning in Torna. The graves left by Unique Monsters that allows you to re-fight them are now marked on the map. The game also looks significantly better than the base game, visually. The story is interesting from the start, and it provides important and rewarding context for the main story.
Unfortunately, not a single one of these features was patched into the main game.