Torna ~ The Golden Country would not be able to exist without Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and that may be its greatest strength as both a game and an experience. I considered Xenoblade 2 to be a good game with a lot of flaws in both the gameplay and story departments (you can find my review here), and Torna greatly improves on both. In fact, in many ways, Torna is a necessity in order to make the overall Xenoblade 2 story more impactful and complete.
You could consider Torna to be like the "Halo Reach" of Xenoblade 2, in the sense that it is a prequel where you already know how things will end, yet the experience of playing through the events elevates the worldbuilding beyond what simple paragraphs of lore would be able to offer. The main cast here is a major step-up from the base game. Lora and Jin are great protagonists that play off of each other well, and their relationship gives more impact to Jin's motivations in XC2. Addam is such a lovable guy and actually enhances Rex's character since you can see the parallels in their personalities and core values. Hugo doesn't actually do too much but is still a really great inclusion and I very much appreciated his sendoff at the end of the game. Minoth, Haze, Brighid, and Aegaeon are all worthwhile inclusions as well. Overall, I found myself loving this cast and their interactions. No scene ever felt wasted, unlike the several unnecessary cutscenes in base XC2.
I'm not sure if this is a hot take or not but I think it is? I really liked the Community feature here. One issue I had with base XC2 was that I never really felt a motivation to actually do side quests. I was really overleveled even without doing them, and they were too long and gave you too little reward to care about them. Torna's addition of the Community here made me care more about each individual NPC I came across, and also the story made it necessary to level up the Community to progress. I can see this being a hassle if you ignored the quests and then had to do all of them at once in order to progress the main story, but I never had that issue because I was more motivated to complete the quests in the first place.
I only have two real criticisms for this game (DLC? Expansion? Whatever, it's basically its own game). There was a certain flashback cutscene in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that I was hoping to see again in the ending of Torna, but it was strangely omitted. I guess the point is that we're already supposed to know what happened if we played the main game, but it would have been so much more satisfying if we were able to see the cutscene for a second time after seeing all the buildup to that moment. Also, even though I did enjoy the Community feature, it seems like a really, really unnecessary time sink to fully 100% this expansion. Apparently you have to grind to level 99 to fight a superboss? Why, exactly? I was hoping to fully complete this game because I did really enjoy it, but that was a huge turnoff for me.
If you played Xenoblade 2, even if you didn't enjoy some parts, I very highly recommend this game. If you haven't played XC2 because some stuff didn't look appealing to you, you can buy Torna individually and I think you can absolutely enjoy it as its own experience.
Now, time to wait for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 :)
You could consider Torna to be like the "Halo Reach" of Xenoblade 2, in the sense that it is a prequel where you already know how things will end, yet the experience of playing through the events elevates the worldbuilding beyond what simple paragraphs of lore would be able to offer. The main cast here is a major step-up from the base game. Lora and Jin are great protagonists that play off of each other well, and their relationship gives more impact to Jin's motivations in XC2. Addam is such a lovable guy and actually enhances Rex's character since you can see the parallels in their personalities and core values. Hugo doesn't actually do too much but is still a really great inclusion and I very much appreciated his sendoff at the end of the game. Minoth, Haze, Brighid, and Aegaeon are all worthwhile inclusions as well. Overall, I found myself loving this cast and their interactions. No scene ever felt wasted, unlike the several unnecessary cutscenes in base XC2.
I'm not sure if this is a hot take or not but I think it is? I really liked the Community feature here. One issue I had with base XC2 was that I never really felt a motivation to actually do side quests. I was really overleveled even without doing them, and they were too long and gave you too little reward to care about them. Torna's addition of the Community here made me care more about each individual NPC I came across, and also the story made it necessary to level up the Community to progress. I can see this being a hassle if you ignored the quests and then had to do all of them at once in order to progress the main story, but I never had that issue because I was more motivated to complete the quests in the first place.
I only have two real criticisms for this game (DLC? Expansion? Whatever, it's basically its own game). There was a certain flashback cutscene in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that I was hoping to see again in the ending of Torna, but it was strangely omitted. I guess the point is that we're already supposed to know what happened if we played the main game, but it would have been so much more satisfying if we were able to see the cutscene for a second time after seeing all the buildup to that moment. Also, even though I did enjoy the Community feature, it seems like a really, really unnecessary time sink to fully 100% this expansion. Apparently you have to grind to level 99 to fight a superboss? Why, exactly? I was hoping to fully complete this game because I did really enjoy it, but that was a huge turnoff for me.
If you played Xenoblade 2, even if you didn't enjoy some parts, I very highly recommend this game. If you haven't played XC2 because some stuff didn't look appealing to you, you can buy Torna individually and I think you can absolutely enjoy it as its own experience.
Now, time to wait for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 :)