Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a true mixed bag, filled with as many great things (a dense, rewarding combat system that gradually escalates in intensity; an interesting-if-misguided premise; unconventional world designs that are interesting to explore; a more consistently good soundtrack than the first game) as bad things (pseudo-gacha mechanics; a terrible minigame that powers up one of the game's central characters; ridiculous grinding requirements to make characters viable; ridiculous crafting menus; endless pervy anime horniness). Torna, as a DLC that's essentially the size of a full game (and is sold separately as one), seemed poised to condense that into a singular great experience: cut the fat, focus in on the good stuff for a tighter experience. Instead of your character roster being at the whims of RNG, you have a fixed roster of 9 characters, while the story focuses in on more immediately relatable characters and disposes of any weak attempts at humour. (Well, except for one callback to the original game that's brushed aside pretty easily.) It keeps the good stuff and gets rid of a lot of the bad stuff.

The problem, though, is that it's a little light on the good stuff. The story is fine, but it doesn't really get at anything thematically that XC2 didn't already do better; the only thing that makes this story stand on its own is the very likeable Lora. The actual plot is a little thin, basically a straight retelling of some limited facts that were already told in XC2. You basically just hang around a few different places until you're strong enough to fight the big bad Malos, which in practice means you wander around doing side quests and grinding levels until the game tells you you're allowed to go to the final area. (You literally have to do about a third of the side quests in the game in order to proceed to the end of the game, for no apparent reason than to pad out time.) Which I get; there aren't really a lot of areas in this game, one of which is a tweaked XC2 location, which kind of limits how much narrative you can stuff in. Keeping a brisk pace would mean the game didn't really hit full game length, which then doesn't work as well for some of their other mechanics which take some time to learn and develop. So it's kind of an awkward middle ground where you don't do much for a long time.

That said, it is a really nice game to just hang out in. (Though admittedly it'd be even nicer to hang out in on a console that could actually run it at 1080p, or 60 fps, or both. Someday I'll get a computer that can really dig into Switch emulation and I can see these games as they deserve to be seen.) The levels you do get are fun to explore (as usual for the franchise) and the battle system is still a dream. It's slightly tweaked from XC2's excellent combat, with a new character-switching mechanic that lets you recover health similar to Bloodborne and encourages you not to rely on one character. The flow is a miracle, as you build auto-attacks that charge up arts, which in turn charge up specials, which in turn combine to combos, which power up chain attacks, which essentially undo all of the work you just built up in one massive attack. It's a little harder to get into the weeds with Torna's combat, since it was streamlined a bit for the game's shorter length, and there aren't really giant bosses where you can really put those skills to the test. But it's still very satisfying to do; it didn't get old in my dozens of hours in XC2, and it doesn't get old here either. Most of your time is spent either in battle or scrounging for materials, and while the latter is kind of excruciating, I relish in every fight I can do.

Most importantly, though, the soundtrack might be even better than XC2's. (Which I already thought was better than the first Xenoblade soundtrack, even though it never hit the highs of "Gaur Plains" or some of Yoko Shimomura's contributions.) Yasunori Mitsuda wrote some really beautiful piano and choral music for XC2, and while there's still some incredible piano pieces in Torna as well (the descending piano quarters in "The Beginning of Our Memory"), both of the final boss battles he contributes are reflective pieces reliant on lushly arranged acoustic guitar and flutes. In general, the soundtrack shies away from electric instruments (supposedly to reflect a more somber tone for the game), a big departure for a series that's quick to bust out the power metal for any of its big battles. Instead, ACE and Kenji Hiramatsu took strong jazz influences to remarkable results. ACE's new arrangement of the Gormott theme is given a loose rhythm section (great drumming) that feels less bombastic and more personal, almost as though the music is traveling with you instead of leading you.

And Kenji Hiramatsu's battle theme, well. It's jazzier than the rest, a piano/upright bass/drum trio accompanied by strings, but it actually frames those jazzy underpinnings with house motifs, blending the genres in a stunning way that lets traditional Xenoblade string melodies shine against solos and fills in a tight, danceable framework. It's almost like an acoustic version of Hiroshi Yamaguchi's Bayonetta soundtrack, except it feels a lot looser, with incredible highs. The theme's "chorus", as it were, first shows up a minute into the theme, peaking with a piano fill so casual it seems as though it's part of the main melody. When it arrives again a minute later, that fill is now a tentative piano quivering with excitement; so much excitement that it arrives again even sooner, this time a confident descending melody that asserts your position in the battle, probably at the same time that you've built up a massive chain attack. By then you're cooking, and the music starts throwing bass and drum solos at you before running through the whole loop again. God, despite hearing it dozens of times in the game I can't get enough of hearing the thing on its own. That's as good a reason as any to play through this game, to just luxuriate in that theme in its true environment. What a marvel.