I still remember where I was when the trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 dropped. I was counting down the minutes for one of my college classes to end, because I had known in advance that a new Nintendo announcement demonstration was going to launch during the class. As soon as I rushed out of the classroom doors, I checked my phone, went straight to YouTube, and noticed the slew of new Nintendo trailers and reveals waiting in my subscription box. Standing out amidst all of them, was Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
I could hardly stop myself from screaming out with glee in the middle of the hallway.
Flashforward to the present day, and I look back on that moment with a certain degree of hesitation. See, the reason I was so hyped was because the original Xenoblade was my favorite game of all time, and Xeno X was my second favorite. Surely, I thought, the new sequel had to be just as good…right? It had to be just as groundbreakingly unique, just as monumentally defining as the previous two. It simply had to be!
Unfortunately, it isn’t. It truly isn’t. In the grand scheme of things, it can’t even hold a candle to the previous two installments. It is a deeply flawed experience…BUT, it is also an enjoyable one. For all its faults, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is still a very fun game, and well worth your time. You just need to know what you’re getting into, and know that it won’t compare to its predecessors.
To shake up the structure of my past two Xenoblade reviews, lets address what I genuinely like about the game first, before moving onto what I don’t.
For starters, the game looks good. I don’t believe the anime aesthetic is quite as jaw dropping as the original game or Xeno X, but it is unquestionably good. The environments are bright and detailed, the enemy and character models are unique, engaging, and memorable, and some of the scenic vistas are gorgeous. Every Xenoblade game excels at visual presentation, and this installment is no exception.
The audio quality is also (for the most part) up to snuff. The majority of the voice actors put out commendable performances, and I love the wide range of accents at play here (citizens of the empire of Mor Ardain are Scottish, citizens of the nation of Uraya are Australian, and all of the BLADE heroes and villains are American). The voices for main heroine Pyra, large ham Zeke, and adorably awesome robot girl Poppi are the standouts.
The soundtrack is also, as one should really expect by now, incredible. Almost every song in the game is great, and I’ve got to give the game credit where it’s due: though I think the overall quality is equal to the original Xenoblade, the variety of genres and styles at play here is even better than that game. If you’ve got a minute to spare, I must absolutely point you in the direction of GORMOTT DAY, WE ARE THE CHOSEN ONES, and MONSTER SURPRISED YOU.
Exploration is even more intuitive and rewarding in this game than in the original, too. This is due mostly in part to the addition of treasure chests and unique interactable elements out in the field, but it really does help flesh out each environment. You truly want to poke your nose into every nook and cranny, instead of blitzing through to the end. I’ve spent hours just getting lost in running around, fighting enemies, and finding treasure. The salvaging minigame, while sometimes a bit annoying, is a fun timewaster well worth the investment.
I’ve got a bit to say about the combat for later in this article, but I will absolutely praise the customizability that the game offers. From aux cores, to equipment, to stat-boosting meals, to weapon and art leveling, to choosing which BLADE and which element are right for the situation ahead, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is no stranger to in-depth systems and intensive menuing. It’s a lot to get a handle on, but it ensures that every single player can enjoy the game exactly how they want too.
For that matter, the huge variety of unlockable and equipable BLADES is staggering. So many options across every single element and weapon type are ready and waiting for you to procure and add to your team, and each BLADE has their own unique animations, voice dialogue, and personal story quests to complete. It’s a lot of content to get through, so buckle in! My favorite BLADES are the mecha twins, KOS-MOS and T-ELOS, the icy queen, Perun, and the fearsomely gentle giant, Wulfric.
As for the story, it does two things extremely well: cutscenes, and emotional beats. The big story cutscenes push the Nintendo Switch to the limit, and lean fully into this game’s anime inspired aesthetic. The visuals go nuts, the battles are off-the-walls crazy, and it’s a real treat to watch. The emotional moments (sparse in the beginning of the game and frequent nearing the finale) are all handled surprisingly well. The combination of music and stellar voice acting (darn you, Poppi, for being so tremendously good at being sad) managed to wring tears from me on multiple occasions.
A few characters are truly standout, and shine the brightest throughout the main adventure. Highlight characters include: the dauntless Mor Ardain inquisitor, Morag (absolutely adore her outfit), the comic relief prince with startlingly serious depths, Zeke, the haughty but emotionally distraught Aegis, Mythra, and the twice aforementioned robo-wonder, Poppi. These members of the cast, and a select few others, stand head and shoulders over the rest as truly memorable and well-written additions to the Xenoblade series.
And…that’s about where the positives stop for me. Though I derive no great joy from doing so, let’s get into the negatives.
This game, to be blunt, does not particularly run well on the Nintendo Switch. This is odd, considering it’s the one and only system the game was made for! There is frequent slowdown when entering visually-taxing levels, enemies can pop in and out from odd distances, and the game can screech to a slideshow lag when a powerful explosion goes off (especially in the Switch’s handheld mode). The sound mixing is also all over the place, with characters either too quiet or too loud, and either overlapping each other or waiting awkwardly long to speak.
The majority of the voice acting is solid, but a fair bit of it is…not. At all. Big bad Malos has an energetic and frenzied voice actor who hits it out of the park ninety percent of the time, but agonizingly flubs some delivers the other ten percent. Nia takes a few hours into the game to settle comfortably into her role, side villains Patroka and Mikhail are more commonly shoddy than good, and main hero Rex genuinely disappoints. He’s good at acting casual, concerned, and goofy, but the moment he needs to be angry or inspiring, his voice actor can’t deliver. It’s a shame.
The combat, though theoretically fun, falls apart quickly. A battle against even the tiniest bunny can take upwards of five minutes once you get a ways into the game, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 expects you to grind A LOT. You need skill points, art points, affinity, money, experience, and random loot drops from the beasties in the world, and fighting gets old quickly. The only way to speed things up is with BLADE combos and element chain attacks. Problem is, you do those two things the same way, in the same order, with the same end result, every single time. It’s draining, and it’s not engaging.
I don’t know where else to mention it, so I’ll throw it in here. The side game called TigerTiger, which is a requirement to play over and over ad nauseum for upgrade materials, sucks. It’s entirely too lengthy, frequently luck dependent, and the smallest mistake screws you out of rewards.
After the amazingness of the original game and Xeno X, it’s heartbreaking to find that the side quests in this game are so bland and uninspired. NPCs do not have unique character models or day and night schedules. There is no affinity chart linking the citizens of the world together in one huge web of interactivity. The missions you are sent on are vapid and uninteresting. Only one late game mission harkens back to the glory days of Nopon drug trade. At least the plentiful BLADE missions are enjoyable and fully voiced, but that brings me to one of the game’s two hugest issues…
The system in which you unlock new BLADES is incomprehensibly dumb. It’s like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was meant to be a mobile game, but they ported it to consoles at the last second. Random chests around the world give you core crystals (read: lootboxes), which you then pop open and pray you get a new character and not generic material fodder. In essence, summoning new playable heroes is all up to random chance in this game.
What this means is that, unless you grind for genuine tens of hours, you WILL NOT discover every single BLADE in your playthrough. This locks you out of extra missions, character building heart-to-hearts, and customization options. There is no defense for this gacha system of obtaining BLADEs, and no reason why it should exist. This is a single player, offline JRPG. Why couldn’t there just be a finite number of core crystals in the world, and dedicated players can find them all by the time the credits roll. Then, just make the BLADE who appears random each time. That way, finding all the pre-set core crystals still nets you all of the BLADEs, just in a different order each time you play the game. Such a simple solution!
The story is also a pretty big step down from the original Xenoblade, which is a shame for a sequel. It’s your typical cliched, anime-inspired JRPG. If you can think of a plot twist, its in here, and played about as straight as you can imagine. For the most part, the game makes it work, but it’s still disappointing. Half of the cast is bland too, or at least uninteresting or unimportant to the overarching narrative. The main hero, Rex, is your stock standard protagonist, and he doesn’t mature or grow beyond that. His sole motivation is to help a girl he just met get to the mystical Elysium, and he never diverts from this path even when those around him get hurt. He doesn’t grow, like Shulk did in the original.
This brings me to the second of the two huge issues plaguing this game, and it’s admittedly an uncomfortable one to bring up. The character designs in this game (particularly the females, but some males as well), are distractingly oversexualized without reason or purpose. This isn’t new for anime, but that doesn’t excuse it. It’s disgusting to see an emotional scene ruined because the camera keeps focusing on a ludicrously proportioned woman in an unfathomable outfit. They knew what they were doing with some of the characters in this game, and it’s annoying beyond belief.
At this point, it probably seems like I hate this game, so it might be surprising to hear that I actually enjoy it, and quite a lot. But, I have to preface that by saying most of my enjoyment came from my second playthrough, after the game had received a year’s worth of free updates and DLC, chief among them Custom difficulty.
I cannot stress enough how much Custom difficulty changes the game. You can blitz through the world with glee by cranking all the enemies’ health to laughable low levels, and your own to gargantuan limits. You can do the reverse for extreme challenge. You can pump on your special energy bar so that you’re casting ultimate specials left and right with impunity, or you can inflate an enemy’s defense so that you can practice your combos without them dying. How you play is left entirely up to you, removing just about all of the tedium of the combat experience.
The other updates also added tons of bonus items, several awesome (and tasteful) new BLADES to recruit to your side through quests and not lucky drops, and a brand-new arena mode. Fighting in the arena allows you to garner medals to unlock elite equipment and cute and funny new costumes for the main party, and also lets you cross universes to team up with Shulk and Elma! Talk about an amazing addition to this game.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is deeply flawed, and it’s folly to pretend that it isn’t. At the end of the day, it is still Xenoblade, which means it is still an above average JRPG worth your time if you’re a fan of the genre. It might have disappointed me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a heck of a lot of fun with it, especially after the updates and DLC. Give it a try.
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 