I got my copy of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sometime in 2017, which is around when I started it. If you follow me, this should be no surprise, I take a long time to play lengthy jrpgs. Well, with XC3 imminent, I decided to beat out the last few hours of this game in preparation. To make my thoughts short, it’s a wonderful jrpg that is characterized by a whole lot of jank and some extremely strange decision-making on the part of the developers. Despite this, it succeeds in a whole bunch of ways and feels like a pretty unique experience. Spoilers ahead.
Story and characters are the thing that defines the Xenoblade series, IMO, so I’ll start with my thoughts on those things. Character-wise, XC2 is a little off-kilter - this will be a running theme for my thoughts. The main cast is strong -
Pyra and Mythra are a wonderful focal point for the game, their differing personalities making their whole character feel fresh and interesting, and introducing so many opportunities for fun character writing. I led with them because Rex is… not as good. He has the hallmarks of your standard jrpg protag: he’s kind, naive, very forgiving, a bit of a dumbass in some ways, and endlessly loyal to his friends. This is nothing new, and unfortunately he doesn’t get a ton of development beyond this point. His background as a salvager is sorta his most interesting facet, but it’s not too important to the story beyond the first chapter and his relatively common quips about the salvager’s code (which is vastly inferior to Deep Space 9’s Rules of Acquisition). His best facet to me is his age - Rex is genuinely a kid, and being immature sometimes comes into play. The best sequence he gets is right at the end of the game, arguably far too late, when the Architect tests him with the dinner scene with Pyra and Mythra. He cries, and it honestly hit pretty hard. This is a kid in the middle of a terribly difficult trial, having to act more mature than he is. There’s not enough of this kind of writing for him, unfortunately. I defended him early in my playthrough, but by the time I reached the end he really hadn’t left more of an impression on me.
Nia and Dromarch are excellent, with the caveat that Dromarch gets left behind by the story hard. Nia stays in the limelight for pretty much the entire runtime, and she just keeps improving. Her background is not overtly shocking considering how much the game uses that particular trick with all the main characters, but it’s effective nonetheless. Rex leaves a real impression on her, and it’s nice to see her grow and change.
Morag and Brighid are a strong duo as well, with Brighid being one of the most story-relevant characters in the whole experience. She acts as the grounding agent, constantly reminding the immature cast of the harder things in life. For my mind, she also has the most consistently strong performance in the game (more on that later). Morag has less overtly powerful moments, but she’s a charming character that often gets to act the straight man in the group.
Zeke and Pandoria are the goofballs of the group and it lands perfectly. Their shtick might strike some as overly quirky and “reddit”, perhaps, but I think it works. Their first appearances as random encounters along the way are hilarious. Zeke himself mostly serves the same purpose on the character front as Morag, he gives advice and tells facts about the past of Alrest, he just does it in a less serious manner.
Tora himself is forgettable, I’m sorry. The nopon shit just does not land at all, and the only one that left an impression on me was Chairman Bana. Tora’s story is sort of a tearjerker, I guess, but I didn’t really care too much either. Poppi is his better half, with some impactful moments at the end of the game. Overall, I’d say my favorites were Pyra / Mythra (with a preference to Mythra), Morag & Brighid, and Nia.
As for the antagonists, I think both Jin and Malos are fantastic. They start strong and only get stronger. Malos’ personality is so wonderfully comically evil, and Jin is a good Sephiroth analogue (kinda but not really). The rest of Torna are… good and bad. Patroka and Mikhail don’t get a ton of screentime, and Akhos is a goofy character. I won’t name the other antagonist for fear of unnecessary spoilers, but he’s developed well enough that he lands as a villain, even if I never personally hated him as the game maybe wanted me to. Malos’ infectiously wicked sense of humor stayed the highlight of the villain side for me.
The story takes some pretty big swings between good and bad. Chapters 1 and 2 are great. The game throws so much at you and does a great job introducing a ton of characters and ideas while building the world of Alrest and its rules. There are some fantastically strong character moments for Nia and Pyra, and the “twist” of assisting Torna at the beginning is well delivered. Chairman Bana manages to be a pretty fun introductory villain, especially contextualized well against Rex. The introduction of Gormott and Morag and Brighid is really well done. It’s been a while since I played this section myself (nearly… 4 years?) but I have been watching Chuggaaconroy’s LP, and it’s a great start to the game. In general, I would say XC2 is bookended well, with an amazing intro and a strong ending but some lull in the middle. Chapter 3 (“Our Own War”) is the strongest chapter in the whole game, IMO, with the absolutely incredible Vandham arc. In fact, I would go so far as to say the game peaks emotionally here, never really surpassing what it does. The style of Xenoblade 2 is, as many have pointed out, more ““anime”” than the first, and whether or not you agree with this assessment, I would say it succeeds in that regard here, tying some very “anime” tropes with a series of really well-directed cutscenes. The introduction of Mythra alongside the whole Malos / Akhos fight is sublime, and this is where the faintest inklings of what happened in the past and the underlying “real” story start to form for real, and it’s excellent. Chapter 4 is all over the place, introducing this whole arc with more Nopon and another artificial blade (or two), yadda yadda yadda. It sucks. The dungeon is pretty good, however.
Chapters 5 and 6 are both good, with the admission that the story drags a bit starting here and into Chapter 7. The introduction of Zeke into the main party as well as the deeper dive into Jin’s past both make for solid centerpieces of this section of the game. I didn’t really like Leftheria, but the trip to Fonsett village makes it almost worthwhile. Tantal is a great location, though, one of the most impressive in the game. Chapter 7 is awful. The Spirit Crucible Elpys dungeon is not only the worst in the game, it’s practically insulting how unfun it is as a player. Even the story stuff is less relevant here, since the trip for the third Aegis sword ends up being… fruitless. At least there was a bad boss fight too? In fairness, the Nia stuff in this chapter is strong, and her reveal is well done. The Cliffs of Morytha part also kinda stinks, with some notable jumps in difficulty and some absolutely awful exploration, but it leads into the finale of Chapter 7 and the reveal of Coffee With Milk, which is great. It carries directly into the beginning of Chapter 8, which is phenomenal. The whole section in the Morytha ruins, especially that first cutscene, are really excellent. The team-up with Jin is unexpected and quite good.
Chapters 8-10 are where the game really kicks into gear. Again, I won’t spoil anything, but this is where the Xeno elements all start to come together and we get the major reveals for the antagonist and his plans. I quite like this whole section and I think it goes a long way in making him feel like a believable villain. Jin and Malos’ pasts come to light and deepen their character arcs, with Jin getting a huge final showcase. The introduction of Klaus and the connection of this game to Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is more than satisfying, and the ending fights are a ton of fun. The ending is great, and that final cutscene (delivered to me at ~4 AM) and credits sequence is fantastic. I did a pretty quick summary of my thoughts just then because this game is unbelievably massive and going over every chapter in detail would be ludicrous, but I hope it accurately reflects my feelings.
TL;DR: Chapters 1-4: amazing. Chapters 5-7: mixed bag with some genuinely bad moments. Chapters 8-10: amazing. It’s pretty interesting having played this game before finishing the first, as it doesn’t answer all of the questions I have. Very much looking forward to seeing where the story ends up going in 3.
Despite its quirks, I really like the combat in XC2. It’s badly explained, yes, but once you have a grasp of the mechanics (which are maybe sometimes more complicated than they need to be), it’s a fulfilling and engaging system. I will say, I think that the bosses can sometimes be more of a pain than they need to be. Even your best tanks can be hammered pretty hard, and once even one party member is downed, I felt like I was mostly screwed. Being able to play every blade and every character yourself is something I wasn’t expecting going in, and it gives you so much freedom. So many blades have completely different playstyles, with some of the DLC blades even having unique mechanics and styles. I spent a large chunk of the game playing as Nia with Crossette, who plays very differently to any other blade. The gacha system rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and while I get that, I felt it was relatively well done. The game gives you the opportunity to succeed with literally any single blade, so there’s never any difficulty gatekeeping. On the other hand, the rates are probably a bit too low, and god help you if you’re trying for 100%. I got a solid chunk of the rare blades, Kos-Mos included, but not everyone. It’s enjoyable to get new blades with new mechanics and whatnot at a decent pace throughout the game, but it’s also frustrating to not get what you want, all the while being inundated with common blades.
Presentation is, again, an area in which XC2 bounces between high and low at speed. This is a launch Switch game, so it has a pretty bad resolution, but given the size of the locales, I think it manages in docked mode. I actually played the majority of the game in handheld mode just because that’s how I prefer to play most Switch games, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as people make out online. Compared to any number of previous generation handhelds with jrpgs, I think XC2 looks significantly better, even handicapped by handi-mode. Load times are pretty good, and cutscenes look really good. I did play the final chapters in docked mode for /the experience/, but I wouldn’t have had much issue doing handheld for them as well. The cutscenes themselves vary pretty wildly in quality. Like the Yakuza games, there’s a couple levels of complexity. The highest being voiced, pre-rendered cutscenes that play as video, and the lowest being unspoken, in-engine scenes. The former is amazing, some of the best sequences in the game rely on these and they really deliver. The latter is awful. Genuinely atrocious. The engine that Monolith use seems to absolutely crack at the seams in these moments, with janky ass animations and terrible timing. You can tell when these pop up that there was an internal sort of recognition at Monolith that this or that section wasn’t as important, that they could just use the unrendered cutscenes to deliver the information and it would be fine. There’s other things I feel fall under “presentation”, and it’s usually not good. For instance, why does the game not give you information on the Level 4 Blade specials? The information online was dug out through scraping the game’s code, of all things. At least put it in a game guide or something, christ. The maps are terrible. I hate the skip travel map for how clunky it is and how badly it delivers the information to you. Why does the game drop that ridiculous boss fight with all the spike damage on you for no reason? Why do anti-fun mechanics like blade shackle even exist? I can’t even think of all of them right now but there are probably dozens of bizarre decisions like this that feel like they go out of their way to hurt the player for no reason. Sure, some of these were just new console growing pains, as shown pretty clearly by how many QoL improvements are in both Torna and XC Definitive. Finally, the dub. I don't hate the dub, in fact I think it was sorta brilliant to use different accents for the different Titans of Alrest, I'm not sure it's ever been done before and it adds a nice layer of worldbuilding. That said, it's undeniable that the dub has some noticeable issues. Rex is the biggest offender, with some truly bizarre line reads at the worst possible times. Morag and Pyra / Mythra are probably the most consistently good, with very few flubs at all. The rest of the cast is somewhere in between, and even the better performances have some very odd lines scattered throughout, either feeling entirely out of tone with the rest of the conversation or bizarrely paced with weird staccato thrownin. The latter is the most common complaint. I can only assume it was somehow a result of production speed or a weird communication between Monolith and the teams in charge of the dub itself, because these little quibbles are everywhere. Again, I don't think this ruins the game - far from it - but it's an issue that pretty much everyone will recognize. Pyra and Mythra are the standout performance and they don't have much of this issue.
This is sort of a tangent, but with a game as long and complex as this, you end up doing a lot of menuing, so I wanted to talk menuing. You have to spend a lot of time managing your characters and blades in XC2, from their affinity charts to their accessories or their pouch items, movesets, weapon upgrades, aux cores, etc. etc. While this system is arguably not perfect, there’s a genuine sort of rhythmic meditative quality to doing it. Swapping between blades to check stats, checking affinity charts, I feel like on more than one occasion I ended up spending the bulk of a play session, usually late at night, doing just menuing.
This is the miscellaneous section, I guess, so I’ll bounce between different things here. This is an absurdly massive game, and some of its faults stem just from that alone. The number of quests, the number of blades, the number of stats and weapons and items and pouch items… ugh. It’s just too much. I’m not a guy that goes for 100% in anything, and I can’t imagine I would ever go near this game with that in mind. The platforming is awful - the game gives you no real idea of what you should be pressing or doing in some of these moments, and the level geometry and physics seem to vary wildly, resulting in some of the grossest movement I’ve ever seen.
Okay, I feel like I’ve complained enough. I love the soundtrack. Drifting Soul is a fantastic piece and so many of the exploration and battle themes are incredible and seriously memorable. I love the heart-to-hearts. Character moments are where this game shines, and a whole freaking boatload of them are just scattered around for you to find. I love the unique battle lines and unique blade lines. They feel like you’re commanding a party of friends. I spent a ton of nights in my dorm room, sitting in bed, smashing through blade gacha and through this game, exploring the massive and incredible world that is Alrest. I played this game at the nearby Starbucks, right when I started playing, getting the whole Chapter 2 introductory cutscenes while I waited for my next class to start. I have a lot of great memories with this game. There are so many baffling moments, but they’re offset by dozens of hours of charming characters, enjoyable exploration, fantastic music, challenging bosses, and a captivating story. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a terrible game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a wonderful game.
Story and characters are the thing that defines the Xenoblade series, IMO, so I’ll start with my thoughts on those things. Character-wise, XC2 is a little off-kilter - this will be a running theme for my thoughts. The main cast is strong -
Pyra and Mythra are a wonderful focal point for the game, their differing personalities making their whole character feel fresh and interesting, and introducing so many opportunities for fun character writing. I led with them because Rex is… not as good. He has the hallmarks of your standard jrpg protag: he’s kind, naive, very forgiving, a bit of a dumbass in some ways, and endlessly loyal to his friends. This is nothing new, and unfortunately he doesn’t get a ton of development beyond this point. His background as a salvager is sorta his most interesting facet, but it’s not too important to the story beyond the first chapter and his relatively common quips about the salvager’s code (which is vastly inferior to Deep Space 9’s Rules of Acquisition). His best facet to me is his age - Rex is genuinely a kid, and being immature sometimes comes into play. The best sequence he gets is right at the end of the game, arguably far too late, when the Architect tests him with the dinner scene with Pyra and Mythra. He cries, and it honestly hit pretty hard. This is a kid in the middle of a terribly difficult trial, having to act more mature than he is. There’s not enough of this kind of writing for him, unfortunately. I defended him early in my playthrough, but by the time I reached the end he really hadn’t left more of an impression on me.
Nia and Dromarch are excellent, with the caveat that Dromarch gets left behind by the story hard. Nia stays in the limelight for pretty much the entire runtime, and she just keeps improving. Her background is not overtly shocking considering how much the game uses that particular trick with all the main characters, but it’s effective nonetheless. Rex leaves a real impression on her, and it’s nice to see her grow and change.
Morag and Brighid are a strong duo as well, with Brighid being one of the most story-relevant characters in the whole experience. She acts as the grounding agent, constantly reminding the immature cast of the harder things in life. For my mind, she also has the most consistently strong performance in the game (more on that later). Morag has less overtly powerful moments, but she’s a charming character that often gets to act the straight man in the group.
Zeke and Pandoria are the goofballs of the group and it lands perfectly. Their shtick might strike some as overly quirky and “reddit”, perhaps, but I think it works. Their first appearances as random encounters along the way are hilarious. Zeke himself mostly serves the same purpose on the character front as Morag, he gives advice and tells facts about the past of Alrest, he just does it in a less serious manner.
Tora himself is forgettable, I’m sorry. The nopon shit just does not land at all, and the only one that left an impression on me was Chairman Bana. Tora’s story is sort of a tearjerker, I guess, but I didn’t really care too much either. Poppi is his better half, with some impactful moments at the end of the game. Overall, I’d say my favorites were Pyra / Mythra (with a preference to Mythra), Morag & Brighid, and Nia.
As for the antagonists, I think both Jin and Malos are fantastic. They start strong and only get stronger. Malos’ personality is so wonderfully comically evil, and Jin is a good Sephiroth analogue (kinda but not really). The rest of Torna are… good and bad. Patroka and Mikhail don’t get a ton of screentime, and Akhos is a goofy character. I won’t name the other antagonist for fear of unnecessary spoilers, but he’s developed well enough that he lands as a villain, even if I never personally hated him as the game maybe wanted me to. Malos’ infectiously wicked sense of humor stayed the highlight of the villain side for me.
The story takes some pretty big swings between good and bad. Chapters 1 and 2 are great. The game throws so much at you and does a great job introducing a ton of characters and ideas while building the world of Alrest and its rules. There are some fantastically strong character moments for Nia and Pyra, and the “twist” of assisting Torna at the beginning is well delivered. Chairman Bana manages to be a pretty fun introductory villain, especially contextualized well against Rex. The introduction of Gormott and Morag and Brighid is really well done. It’s been a while since I played this section myself (nearly… 4 years?) but I have been watching Chuggaaconroy’s LP, and it’s a great start to the game. In general, I would say XC2 is bookended well, with an amazing intro and a strong ending but some lull in the middle. Chapter 3 (“Our Own War”) is the strongest chapter in the whole game, IMO, with the absolutely incredible Vandham arc. In fact, I would go so far as to say the game peaks emotionally here, never really surpassing what it does. The style of Xenoblade 2 is, as many have pointed out, more ““anime”” than the first, and whether or not you agree with this assessment, I would say it succeeds in that regard here, tying some very “anime” tropes with a series of really well-directed cutscenes. The introduction of Mythra alongside the whole Malos / Akhos fight is sublime, and this is where the faintest inklings of what happened in the past and the underlying “real” story start to form for real, and it’s excellent. Chapter 4 is all over the place, introducing this whole arc with more Nopon and another artificial blade (or two), yadda yadda yadda. It sucks. The dungeon is pretty good, however.
Chapters 5 and 6 are both good, with the admission that the story drags a bit starting here and into Chapter 7. The introduction of Zeke into the main party as well as the deeper dive into Jin’s past both make for solid centerpieces of this section of the game. I didn’t really like Leftheria, but the trip to Fonsett village makes it almost worthwhile. Tantal is a great location, though, one of the most impressive in the game. Chapter 7 is awful. The Spirit Crucible Elpys dungeon is not only the worst in the game, it’s practically insulting how unfun it is as a player. Even the story stuff is less relevant here, since the trip for the third Aegis sword ends up being… fruitless. At least there was a bad boss fight too? In fairness, the Nia stuff in this chapter is strong, and her reveal is well done. The Cliffs of Morytha part also kinda stinks, with some notable jumps in difficulty and some absolutely awful exploration, but it leads into the finale of Chapter 7 and the reveal of Coffee With Milk, which is great. It carries directly into the beginning of Chapter 8, which is phenomenal. The whole section in the Morytha ruins, especially that first cutscene, are really excellent. The team-up with Jin is unexpected and quite good.
Chapters 8-10 are where the game really kicks into gear. Again, I won’t spoil anything, but this is where the Xeno elements all start to come together and we get the major reveals for the antagonist and his plans. I quite like this whole section and I think it goes a long way in making him feel like a believable villain. Jin and Malos’ pasts come to light and deepen their character arcs, with Jin getting a huge final showcase. The introduction of Klaus and the connection of this game to Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is more than satisfying, and the ending fights are a ton of fun. The ending is great, and that final cutscene (delivered to me at ~4 AM) and credits sequence is fantastic. I did a pretty quick summary of my thoughts just then because this game is unbelievably massive and going over every chapter in detail would be ludicrous, but I hope it accurately reflects my feelings.
TL;DR: Chapters 1-4: amazing. Chapters 5-7: mixed bag with some genuinely bad moments. Chapters 8-10: amazing. It’s pretty interesting having played this game before finishing the first, as it doesn’t answer all of the questions I have. Very much looking forward to seeing where the story ends up going in 3.
Despite its quirks, I really like the combat in XC2. It’s badly explained, yes, but once you have a grasp of the mechanics (which are maybe sometimes more complicated than they need to be), it’s a fulfilling and engaging system. I will say, I think that the bosses can sometimes be more of a pain than they need to be. Even your best tanks can be hammered pretty hard, and once even one party member is downed, I felt like I was mostly screwed. Being able to play every blade and every character yourself is something I wasn’t expecting going in, and it gives you so much freedom. So many blades have completely different playstyles, with some of the DLC blades even having unique mechanics and styles. I spent a large chunk of the game playing as Nia with Crossette, who plays very differently to any other blade. The gacha system rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and while I get that, I felt it was relatively well done. The game gives you the opportunity to succeed with literally any single blade, so there’s never any difficulty gatekeeping. On the other hand, the rates are probably a bit too low, and god help you if you’re trying for 100%. I got a solid chunk of the rare blades, Kos-Mos included, but not everyone. It’s enjoyable to get new blades with new mechanics and whatnot at a decent pace throughout the game, but it’s also frustrating to not get what you want, all the while being inundated with common blades.
Presentation is, again, an area in which XC2 bounces between high and low at speed. This is a launch Switch game, so it has a pretty bad resolution, but given the size of the locales, I think it manages in docked mode. I actually played the majority of the game in handheld mode just because that’s how I prefer to play most Switch games, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as people make out online. Compared to any number of previous generation handhelds with jrpgs, I think XC2 looks significantly better, even handicapped by handi-mode. Load times are pretty good, and cutscenes look really good. I did play the final chapters in docked mode for /the experience/, but I wouldn’t have had much issue doing handheld for them as well. The cutscenes themselves vary pretty wildly in quality. Like the Yakuza games, there’s a couple levels of complexity. The highest being voiced, pre-rendered cutscenes that play as video, and the lowest being unspoken, in-engine scenes. The former is amazing, some of the best sequences in the game rely on these and they really deliver. The latter is awful. Genuinely atrocious. The engine that Monolith use seems to absolutely crack at the seams in these moments, with janky ass animations and terrible timing. You can tell when these pop up that there was an internal sort of recognition at Monolith that this or that section wasn’t as important, that they could just use the unrendered cutscenes to deliver the information and it would be fine. There’s other things I feel fall under “presentation”, and it’s usually not good. For instance, why does the game not give you information on the Level 4 Blade specials? The information online was dug out through scraping the game’s code, of all things. At least put it in a game guide or something, christ. The maps are terrible. I hate the skip travel map for how clunky it is and how badly it delivers the information to you. Why does the game drop that ridiculous boss fight with all the spike damage on you for no reason? Why do anti-fun mechanics like blade shackle even exist? I can’t even think of all of them right now but there are probably dozens of bizarre decisions like this that feel like they go out of their way to hurt the player for no reason. Sure, some of these were just new console growing pains, as shown pretty clearly by how many QoL improvements are in both Torna and XC Definitive. Finally, the dub. I don't hate the dub, in fact I think it was sorta brilliant to use different accents for the different Titans of Alrest, I'm not sure it's ever been done before and it adds a nice layer of worldbuilding. That said, it's undeniable that the dub has some noticeable issues. Rex is the biggest offender, with some truly bizarre line reads at the worst possible times. Morag and Pyra / Mythra are probably the most consistently good, with very few flubs at all. The rest of the cast is somewhere in between, and even the better performances have some very odd lines scattered throughout, either feeling entirely out of tone with the rest of the conversation or bizarrely paced with weird staccato thrownin. The latter is the most common complaint. I can only assume it was somehow a result of production speed or a weird communication between Monolith and the teams in charge of the dub itself, because these little quibbles are everywhere. Again, I don't think this ruins the game - far from it - but it's an issue that pretty much everyone will recognize. Pyra and Mythra are the standout performance and they don't have much of this issue.
This is sort of a tangent, but with a game as long and complex as this, you end up doing a lot of menuing, so I wanted to talk menuing. You have to spend a lot of time managing your characters and blades in XC2, from their affinity charts to their accessories or their pouch items, movesets, weapon upgrades, aux cores, etc. etc. While this system is arguably not perfect, there’s a genuine sort of rhythmic meditative quality to doing it. Swapping between blades to check stats, checking affinity charts, I feel like on more than one occasion I ended up spending the bulk of a play session, usually late at night, doing just menuing.
This is the miscellaneous section, I guess, so I’ll bounce between different things here. This is an absurdly massive game, and some of its faults stem just from that alone. The number of quests, the number of blades, the number of stats and weapons and items and pouch items… ugh. It’s just too much. I’m not a guy that goes for 100% in anything, and I can’t imagine I would ever go near this game with that in mind. The platforming is awful - the game gives you no real idea of what you should be pressing or doing in some of these moments, and the level geometry and physics seem to vary wildly, resulting in some of the grossest movement I’ve ever seen.
Okay, I feel like I’ve complained enough. I love the soundtrack. Drifting Soul is a fantastic piece and so many of the exploration and battle themes are incredible and seriously memorable. I love the heart-to-hearts. Character moments are where this game shines, and a whole freaking boatload of them are just scattered around for you to find. I love the unique battle lines and unique blade lines. They feel like you’re commanding a party of friends. I spent a ton of nights in my dorm room, sitting in bed, smashing through blade gacha and through this game, exploring the massive and incredible world that is Alrest. I played this game at the nearby Starbucks, right when I started playing, getting the whole Chapter 2 introductory cutscenes while I waited for my next class to start. I have a lot of great memories with this game. There are so many baffling moments, but they’re offset by dozens of hours of charming characters, enjoyable exploration, fantastic music, challenging bosses, and a captivating story. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a terrible game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a wonderful game.