SoraSky69
Fun Musou game with one piece FLAIR!
1. Story
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place in the world of Alrest. A massive cloud sea surrounds the Titans, huge creatures that people live on because without them they would fall down into the sea and die. Through this cloud sea, there are people who salvage materials that are in its depths. Our main character, Rex, happens to be one of these salvagers. He lives on a Titan named Gramps, who has raised him for a long time and goes to his normal trading post, Argentum, to sell his haul for the day. However, as you are about to leave, the chairman of the trading post asks you for a special job that needs a salvager. You end up joining an organization, Torna, on their mission to salvage the Aegis blade, Pyra. The world of Alrest has beings called blades which are bonded to drivers. Humans who bond with the blades take various forms from creatures, humans, and animals to use special powers, weapons, and arts. And that is our basic premise. I won't go any further because I do not want to spoil anyone, but the story for this game really takes the time it needs to devote to all the characters, making them all feel very developed throughout the game. I was really surprised by the fact that the entire party, blades and drivers included, got really good amounts of character development. It makes everyone in the party just feel like real friends by the end of the game. The cutscenes have very good animation, especially during fights.
1. [CONT.]
And a lot of the story is voice acted, even the heart to hearts, which are little optional cutscenes that some characters have. I found the story to have a strong start and it just kept getting better with every chapter beaten. The ending was also very emotional, and just made me feel satisfied at the end of a 110-hour journey. The voice acting can be a bit annoying and not the best at times, but by the end I found the actors really improved and they got much better. The story has a lot of interesting concepts and the game's world feels truly lived in. Not only with the main story, but all the side stories through the in-game side quests. Overall, by the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 I felt like more than a player, I felt like a true habitant of the world of Alrest, it drew me in that much.
2. Gameplay
The gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 requires a PHD to truly understand. Like, seriously. There is a lot of depth here, and you have to spend hours to truly understand and grasp it while the game spoon feeds you more systems until eventually about 30 hours in where you finally get access to all the major mechanics. However, EVEN AT THE LAST AREA OF THE GAME, they still manage to throw in another mechanic and tutorial. It was funny so I can’t complain too much. The gameplay in this game is poorly explained to the player, so you should refer to Chuggaconroys' video about it to learn what you really need to do. Sadly, this area of the game is a really slow burn. Now, this game is an open world RPG, and the combat is much different than your typical RPG. There are no battle transitions, no random encounters. Everything you see you can walk up to and battle, or they will to you if they see you depending on what enemy it could be. When in battle, you have 3 party members out at once, and you do auto attacks to build up to your arts which you also have 3 at a time on any given character. However unlike in Xenoblade 1, you cannot move and attack, instead you have to stay still to attack. I feel like this discourages positioning yourself as now you have to stop everything in order to reposition and the run speed is slower as well compared to the first game. This is a minor thing though, and overall, most of the time you do not really need to be in any particular position except for doing bonus damage. Another important aspect to combat is your blades. In this game, you control your driver character, let's say for example Rex. You have a total of 3 blade slots per character, and these are given to you throughout the game. You go into battle with one, lets say Pyra and you build up affinity points to use your blade combos, which are special attacks that combo with your other party members blades.
2. [CONT.]
Over time, the other blades you have will also become available to switch through a cooldown timer. So say you do a fire attack, and you want to use a stage 2 combo attack that is water, you can switch to a water blade to build up affinity to use that stage 2 water attack. Eventually, when you get to a stage 3 attack, it does massive damage and also leaves behind an element orb with the enemy, as well as seals a special effect they can do. Returning from the first game is timed button presses as well as the party gauge, which is built up by using blade combos and by arts that have bonus effects. You can use this to revive fallen party members and once you fill it up all the way, you can do a chain attack. Now, the flow of combat for this game can best be described as, use different blades to get as many different combos as possible that drop different element orbs. Once you get 5 element orbs, use a chain attack to break as many as possible, using the opposite element of said orb, so say there is a fire orb, to break it faster you would use a water attack with a water blade. When you break an orb, you can continue the chain attack and once you break every orb you get a full burst special attack which if you have not already killed the enemy will do such massive damage it will kill it if it is not dead already. It is a system that is a lot more complex than it seems at first, since there are so many different blades to get, so many to mix and combine, and many elements at your disposal to get element orbs from. Once you get into the hang of things though, it really shines through and rewards you for trying different blades, combos, and roles. There are 3 main roles in battle, Attacker, Healer, and Tank, which are all easy to explain. Attacker does most damage, Healer heals everyone, and Tank takes all the damage.
2. [CONT.]
The cool thing here is that any character (except for Tora), can equip any blade with any role assuming they summoned that blade. So, you can make any character any role you want, allowing for a lot of customizability. That being said there are certain roles that some characters certainly exceed in, so you can kind of go either way. For my playthrough, I mainly just used the characters in the way I thought they would best fit. Now, how do you get blades? Well, you get blades by summoning them with core crystals. Enemies, quests, story events, and even some shops can give you these core crystals. They basically serve as a gacha system, with certain odds and common, rare, and legendary blades. There are so many blades in this game that even one playthrough probably will not give you them all, so if you want all of them you will need a new game plus this game. I often liked the surprise of getting a rare blade, but there is a limit to blades you can summon, and this often interrupted when I wanted to mass summon just to get rid of my common crystals. I often had to let go of a blade to summon some more, and I feel the amount of commons you can have should not have been restricted, because it gets annoying fast. Blades and Drivers have their own affinity charts, which are basically skill trees. Through battles, you gain points which can be used to unlock more skills for drivers. However, Blade affinity charts are much bigger in scale and have some easy to very dubious or obtuse methods of unlocking skills.
2. [CONT.]
These charts range from 1-5 levels, and you need to use a blade or obtain another criteria to unlock more trust to unlock the higher tiers of skills. Every blade has a unique affinity chart to them. It gets very daunting very fast if you try to complete all of these. I recommend only doing the most important blades like the story relevant ones instead of trying to do all of them. Adding to this, the game includes numerous sidequests, blade quests (quests involving a blade you have), story quests, and merc missions. Merc missions function as side missions you can send common blades on to gain trust, EXP, money, and further the development level of any town you are in. EXP for all of these side activities is saved and cannot be used to level up until you go to an Inn. Battles give you EXP like normal though. As you can see from this long winded and massive wall of text, this game is so overflowing with content it can be a bit overwhelming. But as long as you take your time with it, learn it, and ease into it, it all comes like second nature soon enough. I can understand if it is not for everyone though, since the gameplay of this game is notably more obtuse and complex than the first game. Refer to Chuggas video or guides online for more details.
I have not mentioned everything but I do not WANT THIS MASSIVE SECTION TO BE ANY LONGER SO LET US MOVE ON TO-
3. Music
THE MUSIC! HOLY SHIT GUYS THIS SOUNDTRACK IS SO GOOD GUYS HOLY SHIT GUYS! Returning from the first game, we have ACE, Yoshinori Mitsuda, Kenji Hiramatsu, and Manami Kiyota. The short version? This games OST is a fucking BANGER! So many good tracks from this OST like Counterattack, Our Holy Land, Incoming, Where we Used to be. This OST has everything from beautiful orchestrated majestic pieces to hard rock battle themes. It is absolutely a delight and I cannot think of a single song I did not like. This is truly one of the strongest OSTS I have heard in a while, and is easily comparable to the first games in so many ways. They really went all out with the OST here. Even if you do not play the game I highly recommend you go out of your way to listen to the OST, it is that good. Overall, it slaps so many knees I would be screaming from pain.
4. Presentation
Now hear me out. This game’s presentation is mixed. On the one hand, it looks good in menus, the art is detailed and nice, and main characters have very expressive and emotional models. However, in motion the performance and resolution of this game are not optimized well for the Switch. The game often frames dips during important moments and even during certain cutscenes, much like SMT V did. Even in busy towns, it also does this. The resolution can dip quite low especially in handheld mode here as well. The audio mixing is also a big problem, as even with audio options the music can either be too loud or quiet, and the voice acting can also be inconsistent with volume as well. Another big presentation problem is the menus. There are many menus, so many menus. Every menu has sub menus and then more menus. I feel they really could have trimmed down the fat here to make it so the menus were much more user friendly and not so annoying, requiring so many button presses and backtracking. I can safely say I spent a lot of my playtime of this game in menus, and it definitely annoyed me at points. It does not completely ruin the experience but it was too much for my liking. Not only this, but map navigation and the map cursor were also quite frustrating at times.
4. [CONT.]
Unlike Xenoblade 1s arrow which pointed all sorts of directions and had a laid-out path for you to follow in Definitive Edition, Xenoblade 2 gives you a marker that ticks down with only an up arrow or down arrow. This gets very very annoying as the environments in this game are so well detailed and have so much verticality that it is hard to pinpoint exactly where you are supposed to go. It does not do a good job of telling you exactly which direction you should be going, which leads to me getting lost quite a bit. Also, if you do not equip certain blades for a blade quest, the marker will not appear at all which is a very strange oddity that the game does not tell you about at all. Despite this, Xenoblade 2s cutscenes have some absolutely fantastic action scenes paired with good voice acting and amazing music to accompany some very emotional moments. The performance, while bad at times cannot overshadow an otherwise well-presented game with emotional characters, sprawling vistas, and music you will never forget even after you finish the game.
5. Conclusion
After my 110 hour journey with this game, rolling the credits felt so satisfying in so many ways. Not only did I experience a wonderful journey with great characters, story, music, gameplay (once you understand it) but I feel like I barely scratched the surface of this game. I am still eager to spend more time in the world of Alrest, to finish some more quests, to get more blades, to tackle the mountain of new games plus content and the DLC. Despite presentation issues, confusing tutorials, weird audio mixing, and annoying menus, I found a game that I was reluctant to end. I still want to go back even now, writing this, and experience it once again with even more to do. And I think that is one of the best hallmarks of a great game. One you want to go back to even after you already spent so much time in it. I truly loved my time with Xenoblade 2. I have to say right here, right now, that it is one of the finest JRPGS on the Switch, and one of Monolith Soft's best games. I am so grateful to it for catapulting the Xenoblade series to a wider audience and giving so many others a similar experience. I highly highly recommend you all give this game a try. Even if you think you might not like, or you did not like the first Xenoblade game, I think you will find something here. With that being said-
FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 8.5/10
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place in the world of Alrest. A massive cloud sea surrounds the Titans, huge creatures that people live on because without them they would fall down into the sea and die. Through this cloud sea, there are people who salvage materials that are in its depths. Our main character, Rex, happens to be one of these salvagers. He lives on a Titan named Gramps, who has raised him for a long time and goes to his normal trading post, Argentum, to sell his haul for the day. However, as you are about to leave, the chairman of the trading post asks you for a special job that needs a salvager. You end up joining an organization, Torna, on their mission to salvage the Aegis blade, Pyra. The world of Alrest has beings called blades which are bonded to drivers. Humans who bond with the blades take various forms from creatures, humans, and animals to use special powers, weapons, and arts. And that is our basic premise. I won't go any further because I do not want to spoil anyone, but the story for this game really takes the time it needs to devote to all the characters, making them all feel very developed throughout the game. I was really surprised by the fact that the entire party, blades and drivers included, got really good amounts of character development. It makes everyone in the party just feel like real friends by the end of the game. The cutscenes have very good animation, especially during fights.
1. [CONT.]
And a lot of the story is voice acted, even the heart to hearts, which are little optional cutscenes that some characters have. I found the story to have a strong start and it just kept getting better with every chapter beaten. The ending was also very emotional, and just made me feel satisfied at the end of a 110-hour journey. The voice acting can be a bit annoying and not the best at times, but by the end I found the actors really improved and they got much better. The story has a lot of interesting concepts and the game's world feels truly lived in. Not only with the main story, but all the side stories through the in-game side quests. Overall, by the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 I felt like more than a player, I felt like a true habitant of the world of Alrest, it drew me in that much.
2. Gameplay
The gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 requires a PHD to truly understand. Like, seriously. There is a lot of depth here, and you have to spend hours to truly understand and grasp it while the game spoon feeds you more systems until eventually about 30 hours in where you finally get access to all the major mechanics. However, EVEN AT THE LAST AREA OF THE GAME, they still manage to throw in another mechanic and tutorial. It was funny so I can’t complain too much. The gameplay in this game is poorly explained to the player, so you should refer to Chuggaconroys' video about it to learn what you really need to do. Sadly, this area of the game is a really slow burn. Now, this game is an open world RPG, and the combat is much different than your typical RPG. There are no battle transitions, no random encounters. Everything you see you can walk up to and battle, or they will to you if they see you depending on what enemy it could be. When in battle, you have 3 party members out at once, and you do auto attacks to build up to your arts which you also have 3 at a time on any given character. However unlike in Xenoblade 1, you cannot move and attack, instead you have to stay still to attack. I feel like this discourages positioning yourself as now you have to stop everything in order to reposition and the run speed is slower as well compared to the first game. This is a minor thing though, and overall, most of the time you do not really need to be in any particular position except for doing bonus damage. Another important aspect to combat is your blades. In this game, you control your driver character, let's say for example Rex. You have a total of 3 blade slots per character, and these are given to you throughout the game. You go into battle with one, lets say Pyra and you build up affinity points to use your blade combos, which are special attacks that combo with your other party members blades.
2. [CONT.]
Over time, the other blades you have will also become available to switch through a cooldown timer. So say you do a fire attack, and you want to use a stage 2 combo attack that is water, you can switch to a water blade to build up affinity to use that stage 2 water attack. Eventually, when you get to a stage 3 attack, it does massive damage and also leaves behind an element orb with the enemy, as well as seals a special effect they can do. Returning from the first game is timed button presses as well as the party gauge, which is built up by using blade combos and by arts that have bonus effects. You can use this to revive fallen party members and once you fill it up all the way, you can do a chain attack. Now, the flow of combat for this game can best be described as, use different blades to get as many different combos as possible that drop different element orbs. Once you get 5 element orbs, use a chain attack to break as many as possible, using the opposite element of said orb, so say there is a fire orb, to break it faster you would use a water attack with a water blade. When you break an orb, you can continue the chain attack and once you break every orb you get a full burst special attack which if you have not already killed the enemy will do such massive damage it will kill it if it is not dead already. It is a system that is a lot more complex than it seems at first, since there are so many different blades to get, so many to mix and combine, and many elements at your disposal to get element orbs from. Once you get into the hang of things though, it really shines through and rewards you for trying different blades, combos, and roles. There are 3 main roles in battle, Attacker, Healer, and Tank, which are all easy to explain. Attacker does most damage, Healer heals everyone, and Tank takes all the damage.
2. [CONT.]
The cool thing here is that any character (except for Tora), can equip any blade with any role assuming they summoned that blade. So, you can make any character any role you want, allowing for a lot of customizability. That being said there are certain roles that some characters certainly exceed in, so you can kind of go either way. For my playthrough, I mainly just used the characters in the way I thought they would best fit. Now, how do you get blades? Well, you get blades by summoning them with core crystals. Enemies, quests, story events, and even some shops can give you these core crystals. They basically serve as a gacha system, with certain odds and common, rare, and legendary blades. There are so many blades in this game that even one playthrough probably will not give you them all, so if you want all of them you will need a new game plus this game. I often liked the surprise of getting a rare blade, but there is a limit to blades you can summon, and this often interrupted when I wanted to mass summon just to get rid of my common crystals. I often had to let go of a blade to summon some more, and I feel the amount of commons you can have should not have been restricted, because it gets annoying fast. Blades and Drivers have their own affinity charts, which are basically skill trees. Through battles, you gain points which can be used to unlock more skills for drivers. However, Blade affinity charts are much bigger in scale and have some easy to very dubious or obtuse methods of unlocking skills.
2. [CONT.]
These charts range from 1-5 levels, and you need to use a blade or obtain another criteria to unlock more trust to unlock the higher tiers of skills. Every blade has a unique affinity chart to them. It gets very daunting very fast if you try to complete all of these. I recommend only doing the most important blades like the story relevant ones instead of trying to do all of them. Adding to this, the game includes numerous sidequests, blade quests (quests involving a blade you have), story quests, and merc missions. Merc missions function as side missions you can send common blades on to gain trust, EXP, money, and further the development level of any town you are in. EXP for all of these side activities is saved and cannot be used to level up until you go to an Inn. Battles give you EXP like normal though. As you can see from this long winded and massive wall of text, this game is so overflowing with content it can be a bit overwhelming. But as long as you take your time with it, learn it, and ease into it, it all comes like second nature soon enough. I can understand if it is not for everyone though, since the gameplay of this game is notably more obtuse and complex than the first game. Refer to Chuggas video or guides online for more details.
I have not mentioned everything but I do not WANT THIS MASSIVE SECTION TO BE ANY LONGER SO LET US MOVE ON TO-
3. Music
THE MUSIC! HOLY SHIT GUYS THIS SOUNDTRACK IS SO GOOD GUYS HOLY SHIT GUYS! Returning from the first game, we have ACE, Yoshinori Mitsuda, Kenji Hiramatsu, and Manami Kiyota. The short version? This games OST is a fucking BANGER! So many good tracks from this OST like Counterattack, Our Holy Land, Incoming, Where we Used to be. This OST has everything from beautiful orchestrated majestic pieces to hard rock battle themes. It is absolutely a delight and I cannot think of a single song I did not like. This is truly one of the strongest OSTS I have heard in a while, and is easily comparable to the first games in so many ways. They really went all out with the OST here. Even if you do not play the game I highly recommend you go out of your way to listen to the OST, it is that good. Overall, it slaps so many knees I would be screaming from pain.
4. Presentation
Now hear me out. This game’s presentation is mixed. On the one hand, it looks good in menus, the art is detailed and nice, and main characters have very expressive and emotional models. However, in motion the performance and resolution of this game are not optimized well for the Switch. The game often frames dips during important moments and even during certain cutscenes, much like SMT V did. Even in busy towns, it also does this. The resolution can dip quite low especially in handheld mode here as well. The audio mixing is also a big problem, as even with audio options the music can either be too loud or quiet, and the voice acting can also be inconsistent with volume as well. Another big presentation problem is the menus. There are many menus, so many menus. Every menu has sub menus and then more menus. I feel they really could have trimmed down the fat here to make it so the menus were much more user friendly and not so annoying, requiring so many button presses and backtracking. I can safely say I spent a lot of my playtime of this game in menus, and it definitely annoyed me at points. It does not completely ruin the experience but it was too much for my liking. Not only this, but map navigation and the map cursor were also quite frustrating at times.
4. [CONT.]
Unlike Xenoblade 1s arrow which pointed all sorts of directions and had a laid-out path for you to follow in Definitive Edition, Xenoblade 2 gives you a marker that ticks down with only an up arrow or down arrow. This gets very very annoying as the environments in this game are so well detailed and have so much verticality that it is hard to pinpoint exactly where you are supposed to go. It does not do a good job of telling you exactly which direction you should be going, which leads to me getting lost quite a bit. Also, if you do not equip certain blades for a blade quest, the marker will not appear at all which is a very strange oddity that the game does not tell you about at all. Despite this, Xenoblade 2s cutscenes have some absolutely fantastic action scenes paired with good voice acting and amazing music to accompany some very emotional moments. The performance, while bad at times cannot overshadow an otherwise well-presented game with emotional characters, sprawling vistas, and music you will never forget even after you finish the game.
5. Conclusion
After my 110 hour journey with this game, rolling the credits felt so satisfying in so many ways. Not only did I experience a wonderful journey with great characters, story, music, gameplay (once you understand it) but I feel like I barely scratched the surface of this game. I am still eager to spend more time in the world of Alrest, to finish some more quests, to get more blades, to tackle the mountain of new games plus content and the DLC. Despite presentation issues, confusing tutorials, weird audio mixing, and annoying menus, I found a game that I was reluctant to end. I still want to go back even now, writing this, and experience it once again with even more to do. And I think that is one of the best hallmarks of a great game. One you want to go back to even after you already spent so much time in it. I truly loved my time with Xenoblade 2. I have to say right here, right now, that it is one of the finest JRPGS on the Switch, and one of Monolith Soft's best games. I am so grateful to it for catapulting the Xenoblade series to a wider audience and giving so many others a similar experience. I highly highly recommend you all give this game a try. Even if you think you might not like, or you did not like the first Xenoblade game, I think you will find something here. With that being said-
FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 8.5/10
2008
Fun zombie shooter
2009
Fun zombie shooter again
Rena is pretty cool
Mion is pretty cool
Rika is pretty cool
Keiichi best