Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – Feature

If you came here for positivity on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, our original reviewer John Rairdin has your back below. He also did back in 2017, giving the game a 9.5/10 in his review and saying “Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is one of the finest JRPGs of the generation and perhaps of all time.”

So just remember as you look below that Nintendo World Report is a land of contrasts with varying opinions and, for better or worse, the naysayers have numbers today.

Neal Ronaghan: As I’m writing this, I know Syrenne contributed to this feature but I have not read what she wrote about Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I probably could just write “See Syrenne’s section” and throw a low score on this and be done because Syrenne somewhat factors into my journey of going from excited about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to hating it in a way that has made me doubt my interest in video games and RPGs. To sum that part up, I thought I was crazy and Syrenne being on the same page as me was my salvation.

I wasn’t an instant fan of the Xenoblade games, but they grew on me over the years and I was stoked for Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I cackled at the complexities shown in Nintendo Directs. I drooled at the potential for Chrono Cross-esque story nonsense. I blindly pre-ordered the game and the season pass before it came out. And it started off okay. I enjoyed the opening hours, but eventually slowed down as I struggled with overworld exploration, primarily due to the poor map and then wild amount of progress-locking gates tied to gacha mechanics. I dropped the game for a while and then came back to it a few weeks later. This time, I was put off by the lack of clear guidance and tutorials (especially coming back from a break) and I had the sinking feeling of how much the game seemed to leer at the chest size of every female character. I took another break.

I tried again. Then I restarted the game and tried again after some updates promised to make the map better. Finally, after about a year of this on-again/off-again attempt to play this game, I gave up. It’s also worth noting that this was 2018 – the year I had my first kid and probably overrated a lot of games (what’s good, Octopath Traveler) because games were a welcome salve and escape, especially during the weeks my kid spent in the NICU. Even during one of my softest eras of reviewing, I hated this game. I really tried to like this game. I genuinely love the other three Xenoblade games. I even derived some amount of emotional resonance from these characters in the DLC for Xenoblade 3. There are things in this game I can look at and go like “well that part was okay” but the totality of it all is overwhelmed by all the aspects that didn’t work for me. Essentially I guess the combat is good and parts of the story are okay. I think this game gets very gross in its character designs, relies on gacha mechanics in a microtransaction-free single-player game, and has one of the worst maps I’ve ever seen in a modern video game. I tried. I honestly tried.

Syrenne McNulty: Say Pyra, I hear you like ’em young
You better not ever go to Colony One
To any Driver talk to her and they in love
Just make sure you hide your lil’ brother from ‘er

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sucks. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the worst Xenoblade game that Monolith made, that Nintendo made, that Nintendo published.

This is the nadir of the franchise. I am so glad that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 came out to improve my opinion of this franchise again because I thought that the franchise had completely left me behind when this game came out. I had pre-ordered this game. I had pre-ordered the collector’s edition. I then pre-ordered the season pass so sure that I was going to love this game.

And oh my goodness, this game disappointed me so much that it took me a year and a half to come back around and finish it after the mini-map had been patched many times. I think that the gacha system for the random blades is a terrible distribution method that does not need to be in the game. I think that the menus are over-designed and overwrought. I think that the story is mediocre. I think that the characters as annoying anime archetypes are not satisfying for the narrative hooks that they try to take you through.

I think that the world’s design is mediocre. I think that it is very obvious they did not know what the target hardware’s power level was going to be when they went into development and they had to scale back their ambitions radically. I think that the way that you interact with blades by giving them random shit and hoping that they like it sucks. I think that the character designs being drastically inconsistent from one another really helps lock in this lack of cohesion that this franchise had had up to this point. Even if you don’t like the character design or the audio design of X, they at least felt consistent with one another. All of the characters looked like they belong in the same game. All of the soundtrack feels like it belongs in the same game.

That is not the case with the graphical design or the character design in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 at all. I think that it’s DLC Torna the Golden Country is better in some ways and worse in others in a weird, probably-merits-its-own-conversation type of way. I think that really for me the only redeeming grace is that this is my favorite soundtrack by a mile from the rest of the franchise.

John Rairdin I had to step in after seeing the previous two reviews and reinstate a little positivity to these proceedings. Now I don’t disagree with absolutely everything the prior reviewers said. They make some valid points about things that ultimately would be improved with Xenoblade 3. However, Xenoblade 2, in the context of 2017 was pretty incredible and most of it still holds up today. It streamlines many of the systems from the original Xenoblade. It addresses complaints about the narrative and primary quest progression from Xenoblade X. And to this day I’d argue it provides the best underlying combat system in the entire series with plenty of opportunities for stacking combos and mixing and matching your blades and party members. This system was then further improved in its DLC.

While the characters and more personal elements of the narrative can’t hold a candle to Xenoblade or Xenoblade 3, the larger overarching world narrative remains incredible. The story puts a twist on the traditional “kill god” trope of the JRPG genre in a way that weaves into the grander Xenoblade storyline in surprising and unexpected ways. All of this combined with a soundtrack that remains my overall favorite in the entire series.

That isn’t to say nothing in Xenoblade 2 has aged poorly. It very obviously entered development before the Switch hardware had been nailed down, and as a result its overall image quality leaves a lot to be desired. That being said, on a purely technical level, the material and geometric complexity on offer is well beyond the rest of the series and I’d love to see a remaster at some point on more powerful hardware. Other elements, such as the on-screen map, carry over many of the weaknesses of past games but are ultimately as workable as they were in those games. The only part of Xenoblade 2 that truly brings it down for me compared to the rest of the series, is its field skill system. This mechanic is straight up bad (as I highlighted in my original review).

Ultimately while I’d agree with the prior two reviews that Xenoblade 2 is certainly my least favorite game in the series, it remains an engaging world to explore. It builds on the lore of the first game, and excellently sets up the third. This may not be the best Xenoblade has to offer, but it is still a fantastic, charming, and engaging RPG. Oh and the Torna DLC is excellent.

Melanie Zawodniak: I wish I could call Xenoblade Chronicles 2 garbage and move on with my life, but it’s just not that simple.

I could talk (and in fact have talked) for a while about all the things I do not like in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The gacha system for acquiring party members is indefensibly bad, the story is half-baked, field skills are miserably frustrating, and the combat is so streamlined that it’s basically just jangly keys showing you flashy animations while you play bop-it with your skill cooldowns. This game was such a profound disappointment to me as it followed up two of my favorite video games to ever be made. I do not think I have ever felt emotionally wounded by a game’s quality as I was by Xenoblade 2. So why couldn’t I stop playing it for 80 hours?

Xenoblade 2 is not a game without merit, and that kind of makes it worse for me. There is potential here for something more. The game’s lore and setting prompts so many interesting questions about imperialism and personhood that the plot just isn’t interested in examining. The world design is so beautiful and begs for more fun and interesting content than it is actually filled with. The music is utterly immaculate in contrast to how the graphics and art style are…..very much not that. I so desperately want this game to be good, and I’m just so sad that the better version of it I can imagine in my head never got to exist instead of this one.

I have read fanfiction for Xenoblade 2, and I enjoyed that fanfiction a lot. I suppose I must give the game some credit because the fact it exists is the reason that good fanfiction exists.