Xenoblade Chronicles 2

It's almost impossible to talk about Xenoblade 2 without talking about multiple elements of the game's visuals. The better environments are some of my favorite in JRPGs, period. Gormott's port, the otherworldly islands of the Leftherian archipelago, these areas perfectly capture a look that few games seem to even try: specifically, this is the closest that a game has come to looking like pre-rendered PS1 JRPG backgrounds, but rendered in real-time. When the environments are bad, they feel unfinished. Much of my time with Xenoblade 2 was spent back to back with alpha and beta versions of the game Hellpoint. Xenoblade 2's more sci-fi or industrial areas, flat grey metallic surfaces, box shaped rooms, often look about as complete as Hellpoint did in alpha.

On a technical level things could certainly be better. I generally think resources were spent on the wrong things. The previous game, Xenoblade X, was not the best looking game and had short render distance for certain objects and NPCs, but it at least managed a consistent framerate and resolution. Xenoblade 2 tries to do much fancier animations and post-processing effects but the trade-off is slow-down and variable render resolution that tends to go embarrassingly low even when playing in docked mode. I only have a 1080p TV, so it isn't as ridiculous as it might look on some people's 4K displays, but it just doesn't look good during visually busy moments.

If there's anything that literally everyone familiar with this game knows about, it's the character designs. Certain groups of major characters were designed by different artists, most of the game's gacha-esque Rare Blade party members were all individually designed by completely different artists than any other character in the game. Put simply, even if you like the character designs (and I do like some of them), it's just a simple fact that the art direction here is not coming together. There's a particular scene in Tantal, where the heroes (designed by Masatsugu Saito) and a group of villains (designed by Tetsuya Nomura) stand face to face. As the camera cuts back and forth between the two groups, it genuinely looks like spliced footage from two completely different games with different art styles.

I don't think it's inherently wrong to have sexualized characters in media, but I'm not going to argue that the particularly eyebrow raising anime babes in Xenoblade 2 are anything other than tasteless. Pyra and Mythra being added to Super Smash Bros. has restarted the years-old conversation again, and I will repeat myself: I don't think Nintendo should "censor" these characters, because I think that they should have to live with whatever negative attention these characters receive. They changed the character designs for their appearances in other games because, simply put, a lot of these character designs are embarrassing, and Nintendo knows it. It would be embarrassing to have Mythra's normal appearance in Smash, it would be embarrassing to show that character to other people in your living room, and I say this as someone who has literally done just that.

Although, Pyra's character design did give us That One Greentext, so really it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.

Any attempt to shut down conversation around the game's depiction of women on the grounds that it's "political" to do so rings hollow when the game these characters are from is not remotely shy when it comes to political issues (though I think we all know what it really means when people say that): politics is literally the main thing that makes the world interesting. The "Xeno-" in the title of these games isn't just there because it sounds cool. One of the villains is a guy called Amalthus (one letter away from Malthus) who keeps a refugee camp in his front yard just to remind himself of how much he hates them. The main character is a child laborer who at one point rounds up a bunch of kids and basically sells them into slavery. The closest thing this world has to the concept of mixed race is only possible by way of literal cannibalism. Every fantastical element of this fiction seems to be aimed at making a world where reactionary thought is simple truth, and what the author sees as its idealistic protagonist is largely terminally liberal centrist "both sides" rhetoric with a hopeful coat of paint. Anyone trying to change the status quo, for any reason, really "just wants the same thing".

Here's the thing: I don't mind this setting as much as my conscience says maybe I should. I'm not sure if I could say for sure that the game presents one singular political outlook, if it does I certainly have trouble relating to it, but at the very least this world has something that a lot of recent games of this scale lack. Xenoblade 2 feels, clearly, like it was written by human beings with their own thoughts about the real world, like those thoughts clearly impacted the final product. It doesn't feel like themes or subtext were gutted to make it more approachable for general audiences, or that edges were whittled to make a Saturday morning cartoon plot of heroes and villains and nothing in between. The ideas that this game seems to play straight range from misguided to scary, but at least I can tell it's trying to say anything at all. I might disagree with what Xenoblade 2 seems to be trying to say, but with plenty of open world games and JRPGs I can't agree or disagree, because it doesn't seem to be saying anything at all. Even if I feel compelled to approach the game's themes interrogatively, at least I feel compelled by them at all.

Combat is top notch for JRPGs. Every weapon has a three hit combo, activating a skill the moment that the third hit makes contact will give a bonus. Activating another skill when the previous skill's final hit makes contact will give another, activating a special move in the same way will as well. Using different special moves of particular types in (relatively) quick succession will allow the player to do a combo, which if they pull off successfully will do significant damage, but the enemy will have an orb circling them to signify that they are now resistant to that combo finisher's element. The final goal of this system is to get as many of these orbs around the enemy as possible, and by expending a full party gauge (which usually serves as your revive system) you can put regular combat on standby and unleash a flurry of QTE based combo attacks; if you manage to get 5 orbs and successfully combo in this way, it's rare for victory to not be guaranteed.

If you think this sounds overcomplicated, you're right. However, I assure you, this is the most intuitive sense that any of the Xenoblade series' combat systems have ever made (outside of maybe the revamped combat in this game's expansion).

Exploring the world isn't as rewarding as in Xenoblade X but that just makes sense, this isn't even remotely as open a game as X was. There are far fewer quests than there were in previous games but they are generally better than the hundreds of "kill 5 goblins" style quests in the original Xenoblade. It's possible, at least, to tell what type of item something on the ground is going to be, unlike in previous games where literally every item is a nondescript glowing shape, but the gather points from which items are obtained still all look the same until the player interacts with it.

It's a bit difficult to say that I like much of the main cast, as individuals at least. Together they play off of one another's personalities pretty well, though the result is usually more humorous than it is charming. Most of the Blades who aren't one of the handful relevant to the main plot aren't particularly well-developed outside of their side quests, but even main characters like Pyra come across as underwritten to me (probably because the supposed main mission of the story, and Pyra's main motivation, is loosely dangled in front of the player until the very end of the game). Zeke and Nia are probably my favorites, Jin and Brighid are interesting.

Many people love the soundtrack, and I have a hard time disagreeing, but I do wonder sometimes how good it really is. It definitely isn't bad, but sometimes I see people say that one of the Xenoblade games has the best video game soundtrack of all time, and I start scratching my head. I really like Xenoblade X's soundtrack, I really, really like it. I like it enough that I wonder if the only reason I like these games' soundtracks so much is because these games take so long to beat. The entire soundtrack of one of these games is several hours long, but still only a fraction of the length of the actual game, meaning anyone who beats one of these games is going to be hearing a lot of these songs several times. Enough times to get theie melodies stuck in your head, enough times to start idly humming or whistling the town themes while you do things outside of the game.

And then I really start wondering, even further than the soundtrack, how good are these games as a whole? Is it just that the simple fact that these games take so long to beat means that the only people who play enough of the game to get an idea of whether they like it or not... are the people who like it enough to begin with to play that long? Or is the success of these games, and perhaps all open world games, dependent on their overlong play hours to inflict a kind of sunk-cost mindset, where the player simply must decide that the game must be good, that their hours with it must have been worthwhile, after the fact?

Maybe, maybe not. Even if Xenoblade 2 sucks, I still find myself liking it.

The Xenoblade series may be one of my favorite game series right now. I spent 80 hours in the first Xenoblade Chronicles a few years ago, and I dumped 80 more hours into Xenoblade Chronicles X on the Wii U. I finished this game minutes before I started writing this, after having dumped - you guessed it - 80 hours into it. Thankfully, that investment was once again worth it. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a massive success.

I remember reading somewhere that Xenoblade 2 is a reaction to the fan response of Xenoblade X, which was a bit split. This seems like a bit of a bummer at first, because Xenoblade 2 ditches some of the most interesting concepts of X, such as the open world and the mecha combat, to return to the large, closed maps of the original. This is especially noticeable because the areas in Xenoblade 2 feel smaller than the areas in the original. While the upper levels of Gormott evoke similar feelings to the Guar Plains from the original game, areas like Mor Ardain and Lefteria feel more cramped and linear than anything prior.

Still, the disappointment with the game's scale is superseded by the impressive combat. Each game in the series has very different approaches to combat, and Xenoblade 2 has my favorite one yet, combining the MMO-like approach from the previous games with Pokemon levels of collection and team composition. At its most simple level, each character, referred to as a "Driver," has up to three "Blades" that they can switch between at the push of a button. Each Blade has a different weapon that determines the Driver's available actions and their role in combat. This ties into a bunch of other systems that, in true Xenoblade fashion, are too complicated to explain here, but I can assure you that figuring out good synergies and effective ways to activate combos is tremendously satisfying.

In contrast with the inventive battle system, the story and characterization plays safe. This is not a bad thing, since in doing this Monolith fixes what I thought were Xenoblade X's biggest flaws. This is very stock JRPG stuff - superweapons that are also young women, scrappy young heroes from nowhere in particular, an unrelenting large ham villain - but it works. Part of the reason why is that Monolith changed the art design of the cast, going from the realistic style of the first two games to an anime design with a major emphasis on the characters eyes and facial expressions. By the end of the game, I felt more for this game's cast than I did for the cast of the original game, and I know it is because this design style emotes better.

(A brief aside, however, is that this art design leads to some ridiculous nonsense involving the main female character Pyra's breasts, as the cinematography loves to show them from crazy angles, which is easily the biggest "come on..." moment of the franchise)

In all, I think this game is a step back from the inventiveness of X, but it works better as a whole because of this. This game is almost certain to become a cult classic as the Switch's user base expands, and I would recommend that you not miss this.