With this review I've logged in 500 games on this site. I'm somewhat cheating here in this log as there have been several other games I’ve played since first starting my playthrough however I figured I’d make my 500th played game a more special one.
Xenoblade 2 remains one of the most befuddling and unique experiences I’ve probably encountered in not just playing a game, but also anticipating and perceiving post-release reactions to a game. To be honest, when the game was first announced I wasn’t too sure what I was looking at as much of my Xeno experience was solely playing Xenoblade 1, a game I not only enjoyed but regarded as one of my favorite JRPGS ever. Its more ‘moe’ aesthetic and integration of mechanics such as the gacha system was fairly off putting come its December 2017. I didn’t have a switch at the time so I wasn’t expecting to get it immediately regardless, but hearing the opinions of others at the time didn’t sway me into wanting to purchase it anytime soon. It’d take a good while once updates started coming out, an expansion released and general opinion settled that my interest began to pick back up. After seeing friends also praise and regard the game well despite my worries, I figured I’d probably enjoy this more than I had initially thought. Hearing my friend explain these intricacies into the bullshit and all the ways that one can twist the combat around had piqued my interest. Finally, in February I decided after the reveal of Xenoblade 3 to bite the bullet and get through the game. My experience with the game is and will probably remain very complex.

CHAPTER ONE: A brief overload.
From the very first hour of the game you have numerous odd tips and mental notes to keep track of as to how to mitigate certain issues with the game, such as the idea of canceling your auto-attack animation (tipped at in-game) and keeping a narcipear jelly on hand at all times (not explicitly tipped at). After several hours in the game the strengths of that pouch item are extremely apparent, but early on I would not have known just how powerful of a buff this gives, as its almost something you wanna have several of at any time. Then, even before you set off toward your first main story dungeon, you get these weird, weird mechanics like salvaging, resting at inns to use bonus exp, donating to fonsett, development levels, etc. Most rpgs have the hurdle of dumping their cool toys and mechanics early on but goddamn they shove a lot of different stuff from the first game at once.
I was decently surprised however when I saw Torna as a group appear so early in the game. I wasn't entirely sure what each of the Torna members' deals were outside of Nia being a party member and the other two shown, Jin and Malos, being antagonists- however I was immediately interested to see what they were planning for the story. By the end of this chapter I was pretty locked into seeing just what Xenoblade 2 was shaping up to be.

CHAPTER TWO: Opening up to you.
The game finally begins to reveal a much wider sandbox to throw its toys in, while also continuing to introduce several more mechanics, much of these to varying degrees of enjoyment.
For one, you finally get a chance to show off your core crystal summoning abilities and this mechanic is so mixed in my heart. On the one hand, it’s not that bad on a normal playthrough especially as most of your story mandated blades are busted and you get a lot of opportunities to find new blades through means other than the gacha. You also get a small pity system where three blades will be given to you after so many points have been accumulated in the back-end of things. Its pretty easy to get a good team going with just whatever core crystals you pick up along the way, even commons and bottom tier rares. On the other hand, I never did get Kos-Mos and there are about 5-7 hours of grinding I will never get back from my life because of how strange the percentages and mechanics are in summoning are. I didn’t realize until late in the game that the luck stat was actually a factor in blade summoning chances. Also, idea values/boosters felt like such a dumb way to alter your chances, I never paid them any mind in summoning.
Field Skills were a cool concept that I told my friend were neat when they first showed up and then later on understood what his response of “it’ll get tedious” meant. These are a neat way to not only show blade characterization but also growth of said blade. Some blades utilize gathering skills like botany and entomology, others are good at focusing or mastery of an element, and growing those on the affinity chart (I’ll get to these later, See Chapters 5 & 6). These were really cool when I had a few blades and these were only relegated to a few points throughout the story. As the game goes on and you get quest after quest, these requirements not only ramp up- but the amount of menuing whenever you encounter one gets to be absurd. There’s a lot of customization through these menus but in such a way that made me super confused by what exactly I was missing if one blade wasn’t performing as well as I had hoped.
You also finally get your first party member in Nia! Because of the nature of this review, I can’t cover every blade or character obviously. I enjoy the Welsh cat a lot. Her VA’s performance is a lot of fun and overall she’s a good baller. Sadly she gets stuck with Dromarch so her usefulness wanes as he’s locked into her party for the rest of the game and the idea of crit healing becomes more appealing. I do wish you were able to unequip story related blades to drivers (aside from a later mechanic in the game). You also later get access to Tora, making the party comp of fighter/healer/tank complete. First off, Tora’s a lot more tolerable than a lot of other opinions lead me to believe. He’s a dweeb and has his cringey moments but I figured he’d be unbearable from the start. Don’t like him as much as Legendary Heropon Riki though. POPPI though, I loved a lot. Poppi’s extremely cute and curious nature is very fun, and I thought the idea of an artificial blade was a cool idea. On the other hand, Poppiswap/Tiger, Tiger! is a nightmare! I hate that minigame! Overall this starting party is neat enough, although the way the story is structured makes this party quite odd in many respects, and I haven't even mentioned Rex’s qualms yet. Rex is a fighter with low dexterity, meaning he has a tendency to miss, so early fights might have you wondering why that’s the case and what's the best way to alleviate that. But then in chapter two, you spend much of it with Nia as a fighter/healer combo, which is fine. But then Nia gets captured as part of the story and the next half is mostly fighter/tank. These drivers are good enough to get fights done, but it's very odd you don't get a full party until the end of the chapter. Personally, it also didn't help that I still wasn’t used to the new combat mechanics such as combos and arts, so I wasn’t sure what I was lacking if I was getting my ass handed to me outside of pure level difference. Maybe that's just me but it did take me a long while to fully grasp what the combat of the game was capable of and how to fully utilize it. Once you do understand it, its great, but in my experience I did have to spend a lot of time bashing my head against the mechanics to think of what I was doing wrong or what I was missing.
Last thing I’ll mention here but this was when I began to watch some of Chuggaaconroy’s lets play. While I haven't watched that in its entirety, eyeing some of the early stuff to pick up on stuff I didn't realize or things the game doesn’t tell you did help a lot. As of beating it, I’ve only watched/listened to about 60 episodes of his series but his videos have been a great help in understanding what makes a blade good, what to look out for, stuff i missed, plot details I didn’t think about, etc. Major thanks to him and the effort he puts into his projects, long time fan of his.

CHAPTER THREE: Setting the Vibes
Definitely when I started getting into the story of Xenoblade 2 a bit more. I had heard prior that this game was way weaker than 1 in terms of plot but I was glad that despite that impression, I was starting to connect more and more with the cast I was dealt, including its new addition in Vandham. I was definitely curious as to what Vandham’s deal was given some of the details/assumptions you parse for yourself but the time I had with him was good and fine. Although the party comp issue arises again as I found myself hard pressed to have him in my team given Rex’s the main character, and a fighter, while Vandham is also a fighter but I’d like to have my tank and healer out as well. In addition to this, we get the new location of the Urayan titan to explore. The previous titan, Gormott is fine enough for a first major location, although I did find myself getting way to lost in some of its questlines (See chapter 4 for quest issues), not knowing just how exactly the titan was shaped and how certain paths connected to certain areas (also see chapter 4 for map issues). Uraya though, was a major step up to Gormott in my eyes, definitely comparable to the Satorl Marsh (Night) vibe but at a constant throughout its location. Definitely my favorite titan in the game.
Gameplay-wise there isn't too much to point out other than the introduction of the fusion combo/element sphere thing which I also didn't understand until a few hours after the tutorial fight. Also while its not really a complaint of mine I’m just now remembering that Rex never started out with a topple and had to learn that from Vandham. Cool character building moment but also how the hell did I go so long without a topple ability on Rex? Biggest thing to mention is near the end of the chapter and how much I enjoyed the final parts of the chapter, leading into the introduction of Mythra. At this point I had been feeling almost foolish for thinking that I wouldn’t have liked this game, and that this game was just gonna be on an uphill journey for most of the game.

CHAPTER FOUR: It could always get worse
I still don’t really understand this chapter or why this was organized in the way that it was. Thinking back on this chapter feels so bad- they did the Ardainian Titan’s introduction so dirty. Its probably odd to be hearing it put like that but prior to playing the game I had heard the Ardainian field (Day) theme quite a bit during some smash matches and it stuck super hard in my head, I love that song a lot. Finally after a long chunk of the game we reach this humanoid titan, one with a super neat lore, cool music and industrial vibes abound. But then story wise it feels like filler and actually exploring the Ardainian titan kinda feels like a squandered opportunity. In fact, I will take a moment to say that while I did enjoy the open world traversal in this game, the big difference in this and the first game to me was there was never a moment like the Sword Valley in this game imo. Sword Valley in XB1 was the moment where it really struck me just how momentous these locales were, that you were crossing this monolithic blade into the enemy territory and the second titan was getting closer and closer. XB2 has a lot of cool environments and exploration is fun and all, but there was never a moment that really struck me as to just how ‘powerful’ the thing being lived on was. I had hoped the Ardainian would be that but after a while of getting my ass beat in some abandoned factory I kinda grew frustrated at this game, at points I wasn’t quite sure where I was actually supposed to be going. Not helped by the fact that later in that area you travel along the side of the titan and encounter a bunch of level 70-80 monsters and you question what the hell you’re supposed to be doing on the Mor Ardain titan in the first place (i barely remembered myself).
This also brings up such other issues as quest trackers and the map screen. The former of which became less of an issue as I figured out to just use L3 to increase the map screen size and just find quest markers on the map through there. Otherwise it was always really hard for me to figure out really just where in space my quest marker wanted me to go other than just eyeing down when the numbers were going down faster. The maps in general however, are abjectly horrible. Some of the worst I’ve encountered. In parts like Gormotti it took me a while to realize Umon’s Shipyard was in the back of Gormotti, meaning northward and that there's a passageway leading up toward that valley, as its kinda hard to recognize that the back is leading to another map section. In Mor Ardain it gets real bad, up to a point where I always had to double check which end of Alba Cavanich leads to the palace or which one leads to the elevator back down to the shipping area or which end leads to the factories and fields. By now I remember but spacing things out in my head and visually piecing every part was already hard enough but the maps did nothing to help piece these together. This especially gets bad at the end of the chapter as the factory you fight through is so generic and maze-like in structure it takes a while to get through the dungeon. Worst yet you get shrunk down to two party members so its a lot easier to get your ass handed to you without your tank (also feeding into that issue of early party comp). This chapter especially feels terrible as its probably the last time we get major Tora development in the story and it could have been way more interesting, to be honest but it just ends up feeling more like a detour than anything. At least you finally get your blade limit increased from two to three finally! Why this was hindered in the first I really don’t know.
The end chapter fights could have also been cooler but I wish you had more time to work with your new party member, Morag. Thankfully I hadn’t died during this fight but I wouldn’t be surprised at people that did given that you start off the fight with your new party member with nothing equipped to her whatsoever and the two Torna members are a fairly competent duo (quartet?). Regardless, this was also one of the highlights of the chapter as Morag is such a cool character. She’s cool and stoic, and has a penchant for skin care- learning Morag was actually a party member was really interesting. I always thought she was a secondary antagonist/rival character but nah, have a character that oozes in style. Also Brighid is a cool as hell blade, being an evasion tank. I love her design a lot but she’s also just in the running for one of my favorite blades in the game moveset/skill wise. Playing Tora as a tank felt alright but not something I ever really thought was exciting but Morag as a tank was super inviting and I enjoyed building her a lot.

CHAPTERS FIVE AND SIX: This review is getting long enough as is and also my memories begin to blend in at this point
From here on the game begins to introduce less and less mechanics to fill in sandbox, but instead most of your time from here on is dealing with the backlog of what blades you’ve gotten and what quests you can get done. This was especially the point in which I figured I should go back and check out what all I could get done with the game, which meant opening up an endless can of worms that are the blade affinity charts and quests. Xenoblade 2 has a total of 38 rare blades, 7 dlc rare blades and 7 more rare blades in the new game plus (never tackled anything new game plus so my experience with that wont be covered here). Each one has its own affinity chart with a maximum of 45 nodes to fulfill (with a Dagas shaped exception), give or take a few pre-fulfilled nodes upon first obtaining the blade. Thanks to merc missions, filling these out one-by-one can be expedited, but even then much of the time spent in xenoblade 2 is spent working on each of these blades. To be quite honest, there's a good chunk of these blades I enjoyed using and seeing develop over the course of their quests but they might have a slight amount of spite associated with them due to the nature of their affinity charts or quests. Nim is a fairly great healer with good arts and whatever but I can’t help but think about how mind numbing it was traveling across temperantia and beating my head over an obnoxious unique monster that seals healing, feeling as though I wasted about 3 hours of my life. Other affinity charts like Ursula have you grind merc missions for an absurd amount of hours for what prolly could have just been an hour’s worth of effort. Much of this can just be done in the background and thankfully I obtained Ursula fairly early in my run but going into the merc menus ~100 times over for those goddamn stamps was so unnecessary. But even weirder are affinity charts and skills that feel completely unnecessary. Vess and Pyra’s cooking abilities are not worth any investment whatsoever, as their pouch items are completely overshadowed by purchasables and require way too many materials to grind for. Also I have no idea why some of these random ‘kill X enemies in X place’ exist on major blades. I can tolerate it on non-story blades as that stuff gets filled out on merc missions anyway. However, on a lot of these major blades it feels incredibly unnecessary, having to bring Pyra and Brighid to fight birds that are usually flying out of reach.
I bring these up now because I started to spiral here, dodging a lot of story progression despite actually being intrigued in where the plot was going. It’s fucked up because in reality you shouldn’t be doing but a few blade quests ever during your initial playthrough to be honest. Hell, don’t even bother trying to do more than 50% of the game’s content until post-game or new game plus. That’s not to say that other 50% of content doesn’t have worth, but it’d probably be way easier and worthwhile on a second playthrough where the new game plus features/changes open up to do clean up. Thankfully these two chapters do show off a bit more intriguing stuff plot/world wise as Leftheria is one of the cooler locations in Alrest, and I enjoyed my time in Indol. Still hate Temperantia though, I really wish the landmark system was better utilized and this map was the worst offender for bad fast travel spots. Also it wasn’t until I was finished with this segment and moving onto the next chapter that I realized tantal was also part of this duo of chapters. To sum up an entire chapter: Cool vibes, annoying traversal, Rex gets cuck vibes, Herald is a cool blade. These two chapters also show off a bit more of our last party member, Zeke, along with Pandoria). It’s kinda funny that we get a lot of Zeke-related lore in these two chapters as he has relations tying in with Indol and he’s the prince of the last major ‘town’ in the game. I love Zeke a lot, I’m a sucker for dipshit characters. I wish ‘new game-plus Pandoria’ wasn’t relegated to new game-plus.

Chapters seven and eight: The deepest depths, figuratively and literally.
Fuck the Spirit Crucible. I hate temperantia but I begrudgingly trekked it whenever a blade quest or something would require my attention there. Thankfully Spirit Crucible isn’t as revisited but any time it was required for some quest I tried avoiding it as much as possible. I still can’t remember the layout and its such a bothersome dungeon with its stupid art limiting mechanic.Story wise its a good chunk of developement for Nia and her relationship with Rex, but it was hard to focus when I could physically feel the desire to want to finish the dungeon as fast as possible. It was also hard to remember much of what I did in this chapter because this might have been the least amount of side content I did in my playthrough simply because of the nature of how these two chapters go. Not having Pyra/Mythra in the first half dissuaded me from doing anything outside of the main quest, and then chapter 8 is mostly confined to the area you’re stuck in.
After Spirit Crucible you get the last ‘bad’ area in the game with Cliffs of Morytha. Its so bizarre. In talking with a friend I was expecting his opinion to be mostly iffy about this location but I was glad to hear his mutual annoyance toward the level because I figured my disdain was primarily focused on the fact that I spent too much time in this area for reasons not tied to the plot. Even on a single shot through the place, just doing story stuff it's an annoying field skill ridden “dungeon” where you just juggle through blades in your inventory to traverse the place. It doesn’t even have its own theme music, just using the song from the factory from chapter 4. For me, this place has also dug its way into my brain as it’s the primary source for grinding gold and treasures once you have the expansion pass, so I did spend way more time here than I would ever recommend (but also maybe I wanted to max out Sheba’s affinity chart). You at least have a cool fight with Jin and Malos here and I will say, they’re a pain to fight but I'm kinda glad they are;. I’m more annoyed whenever I get my ass handed by some random merc in a blade quest because they have one obnoxious skill. Meanwhile Jin and Malos can be annoying to fight at times but I'm more tolerant of that because they’re supervillains with ridiculous powers to deal with. Also I had a lot of fun seeing Malos’s A.I freak out for some reason at points of the fight, sometimes not caring to path his way toward the party fighting Jin solo.
Thankfully Chapter 8 onward I can ease up and say the game finally gets back to a point where I find myself sincerely enjoying what its offering. Not a lot of bullshit, not a lot of egregious dungeon trekking or padded exploration. The Land of Morytha is a great location overall, and trekking through this area and piecing together some of the final parts to the world was incredibly intriguing to compare with Xenoblade 1. While I enjoy much of Xenoblade’s last third I do think it peaks a bit early and much of the final third I have mixed up in memory, while I think this one might stay in my memory a bit tighter (partly due to how it compares to the latter chapter).
Near the end we find ourselves finally at the world tree, you can feel the end in your bones and personally I’m thinking, “Finally we’re just about done here”. But I encounter one significant issue, I can’t put the game down.
Chapters nine and ten: How I learned to stop caring and love the smell of salvage
It is a bit weird how the last three chapters are pretty close in proximity, the start of Morytha to the end of the game isn’t but <10 hours probably? A good chunk of that is story and even then a bunch of that is probably still inflated by any last things you might wanna wrap up if you so want, assuming the position of a player going through this section casually. However, we are talking about a game in which every chapter, no matter how much or how little the story progresses, will have a good chunk of sde content be revealed. I did switch back and forth between going up the world tree and going back to side content I might wanna do. It finally sunk in, the completionist brain worms finally took hold and I did wanna see what each and every blade had in store no matter what the stupid requirements entailed. Eventually I did get Ursula maxed out, I did go through lengths to try and obtain every blade (sans Kos-Mos sadly), I did grind an incessant amount of money to max out Sheba’s requirements, and the checklist of missions and blades kept growing and my want to see everything for what its worth kept growing as well. …Until that 5-7 session of legendary core crystal grinding. By the end of that I just gave up and walked shamefully to the final boss, Kos-Mos-less.
If I had thought harder about it beforehand I probably should have just bought the game myself to be honest, rather the copy I played was borrowed from a friend. You should not nor would I ever advise anyone that picks up the game to binge it as much as I have over the past three months. There’s too much to this game, and adding more on top of what was initially released is an even more insane testament to whatever black magic fuels monolith and Tetsuya Takahashi’s mind. I don’t even wanna bring up the entirety of challenge mode, or how cracked that entire system is for wanting no less than peak performance from your blade prowess (also I lied, Elma wasanother pre-new game plus blade I didn’t see). I didn’t even try any part of new game plus, a mode that spans way further than just carrying over progress as it also unlocks new blades, different ways to spend bonus exp, and different driver charts. There were also plenty of blades I didn’t end up fulfilling, like all of the Shield Hammers (for good reason, sorry Finch), Vale, Newt, Aegeon, Gorg or Dahlia. But I think that’s alright.
Its a typical sentiment for a lot of gamers when playing these large 100+ hour rpgs to be attached by the end and feel as though its actually saying farewell to real people. Its not something I’m immune to and I’ve come to expect such sentiment with these kinds of games but it hits weirder -not exactly stronger- with this game. Even by the time credits roll I know deep down that its not striking me quite like other endings to games.
But I kept thinking about it, and I kept watching Xenoblade 2 content that I hadn’t continued like Chugga;s lp or dodged like some of Enel’s analysis videos. I also kept thinking about Drifting Soul, how fun of a villain Malos is, or how cool certain blades are- it hasn't left my mind and it’s going to be hard to do so leading up to Xenoblade 3’s release.
This game isn’t perfect, I can’t even really recommend it and I don’t even wanna begin the sentiment of ‘i hate this game; I love this game’. But I think I get it. After about ~180 hours of gameplay I get it.
It kinda feels nice, not only being able to kinda see this game for what its worth and not have this air of disappointment I had when it first released, but also being able to see this as nearly equal in my heart as the first game, on top of recognizing some of the shortcomings and faults of Xenoblade 1. I still think there’s a lot more quality of life stuff I wish they had just up and overhauled during their updates, such as changing map layouts or integrating better search functions or a multi-release function for blade menus. The main cast is somewhat of a mixed bag and tutorials are infamously bad, and some gameplay mechanics are confusing as all hell because of that. Some chapters are stellar while others leave you wondering what they were thinking? But I love this game, and I love the world Takahashi and the fellas at Monolith have made (even if my vision of such a series only encapsulates two of these games). I can’t really recommend this game, but I could say it was worth the time and wait. I hope you enjoyed my 5000 word long ramblings about this game.