Video Game / Xenoblade Chronicles 2

All spoilers for Xenoblade Chronicles 1 are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Let's be off... to Elysium!

Amongst the mist, I see a stretching path
Reaches out so far
Beyond what I can see
How far would I be walking 'til I reach the end?
The end of the path is to be seen.

— "Drifting Soul"

Xenoblade Chronicles 2^note  simply Xenoblade 2 in Japan is the sequel to Xenoblade Chronicles 1, the second numbered installment in the Xenoblade Chronicles series, and the third Xenoblade Chronicles game overall. It was developed by Monolith Soft and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch on December 1, 2017.

In the world of Alrest, the last remnants of civilization live on the backs of colossal beasts called Titans, which swim on the surface of an endless ocean of clouds. However, one after another the Titans are reaching the end of their lifespans, whereupon they sink into the depths of the Cloud Sea; and with the increasing scarcity of livable land, the various nations of the Titans are growing uneasy and edging closer to war.

Rex is a young man who works as a salvager, diving into the Cloud Sea to retrieve and sell the various pieces of scrap and ancient technology that lie within. One such lost technology are the Blades, which are sentient weapons that bond with their user ("Driver") and fight in tandem. One day, Rex is hired by a mysterious organisation to help retrieve one of the rarest Blades of them all: an "Aegis"-class Blade named Pyra. Rex ends up becoming bonded to Pyra, and together they embark on a world-spanning quest to reach her place of birth: Elysium, a mythical land of plenty said to exist at the top of the World Tree, with enough livable space for all. This being a Monolith Soft game, it turns out things are a LOT more complicated than that.

Reeling after the disastrous failure of the Wii U, Nintendo executives turned to Monolith Soft, having seen what they could do with their previous games, and requested that they make a game that could show off the graphical muscle of their upcoming next gen console. Despite their team being reduced to around 40 people due to the rest being assigned to work on the next Zelda game and a short time limit of a little over two years, they absolutely did. Unlike the more Space Opera-oriented Xenoblade Chronicles X, this sequel follows up on the more Science Fantasy-oriented setting of the original Xenoblade Chronicles, though it still features new characters and a setting separate from the original.

Yasunori Mitsuda, ACE, Kenji Hiramatsu and Manami Kiyota return as composers, while Masatsugu Saito (Cyborg 009: Call of Justice, Expelled from Paradise) and Tetsuya Nomura handle the character designs, slew of very famous guest artists handling the designs of the rare blades.^note : Artists from such works as Final Fantasy XIV, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Martian Successor Nadesico, Final Fantasy VI, Sword Art Online, Xenosaga, Tales Series, Final Fantasy X, Girls und Panzer, Baten Kaitos, Code Geass, Macross Frontier, Kite (1998), and Double Dragon.

This game is notable among Monolith Soft's catalogue in that while most of their games tend to suffer from being acclaimed flops limited to Cult Classic success at most, Xenoblade 2 quickly went on to be the most successful title they've ever developed, and one of the most successful RPGs released for the Nintendo Switch outside of the mainline Pokémon games. This, combined with Shulk's presence in the Super Smash Bros. series, caused a huge surge in interest in the previous games, finally bringing the Xeno series to comparative mainstream popularity and cementing Monolith's place among Nintendo's most loved and respected studios in the eyes of fans.

In September 2018, a Prequel Expansion Pack titled Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country, which received a digital and physical release.

The game is followed up by Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which connects the futures of this game and the first installment, and chronologically succeeded by Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, which connects and resolves a major plot thread seen in the first two games while creating a more direct connection to 3 itself.

Pyra and Mythra (and Rex) were announced as playable Downloadable Content fighters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and joined the roster on March 4, 2021, helping revitalize interest in the game and the franchise as a whole just as Shulk did for the first game.

You can watch the first trailer here, and the E3 2018 trailer for the expansion here.

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Think you can take these tropes?:

A to C

• Absurdly Short Level: The story part of the Temperantia Titan is very short compared to other Titans and can be completed in a good hour. Partially averted, as the Titan features a big landmass itself even though none of it is required to beat the game.
• Action Commands: Like the previous games, the player is prompted to time a button press or mash a button during Chain Attacks and specials in order to maximize damage output. The salvaging minigame also consists of three timed presses.
• Actor Allusion:
  • The Japanese dub has Takahiro Sakurai as the voice of Jin; a lighthaired swordsman, who has a Dark and Troubled Past, was unable to save a woman important to him, and designed by Tetsuya Nomura. In other words, a very blatant Cloud Strife expy (with Sakurai using the exact same voice for him, no less), albeit sharing some traits with Grahf.
  • In Japanese, Amalthus is voiced by Jun'ichi Suwabe - and this isn't his first turn as a Sinister Minister who watched his mother die when he was a child and is the nihilistic Omnicidal Maniac villain of an Eastern Role-Playing Game out to , lest one forget about Seymour Guado from Final Fantasy X.
  • Shigeru Chiba voices yet another giant winged dragon, though this time, he's completely benevolent.
• Actually Pretty Funny: A conversation with the helmsman of Argentum reveals the Mor Ardainians wrote a book called "How Wars Profit Nopon" that grossly misrepresents Nopon culture. The Nopon of the Argentum Trade Guild find it hilarious and the book has a cult following over there.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The Kingdom of Tantal. The In-Universe reason for the items in Tantal being more expensive than anywhere else in Alrest is that Tantal is in poverty due to its isolationism and the Titan's own internal climate being ill-suited to growing crops, forcing them to rely on a black market for their economy. However, even after you improve Tantal's economic crisis through purchases, side-quests, and merc missions, the items you can buy at the shops are still very expensive.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • The latter half of chapter 4 deals with Tora finally resolving his father's disappearance.
  • Part of the first half of chapter 7 features Nia coming to terms with her Flesh Eater Blade nature and revealing it to the party.
  • Pretty much every non story Unique Blade has their own Heart-to-Heart and/or sidequest that further explores their personality.
  • The final mercenary rank-up quest has Queen Raqura and Roc in prominent roles.
• Alternate Calendar: In Chapter 3's opening, Pyra gives the date as "Amathatober 5th, 4058." This trope only applies in the English version; in Japanese, she simply says it's September 5th, 4058 AD.
• Ambiguous Syntax: During the encounter in Temperantia, Jin tells Rex that if he "saw the last state of humanity," he'd understand why Jin lost all hope and joined with Malos. Then, on the way to the Omega Fetter, Rex reveals he initially thought Jin meant the final state of humanity before realizing he was talking about the previous state.
• And Then What?: The Architect asks Rex what his plan is for when he catches up with Malos. It takes him a second to think of something.
  Rex: I'll punch him in his stupid face... then probably get a drink with him or something. That's the sixth rule of the Salvager's Code: first have a punch-out, then drink to forget. Then the friendship's all set. I'm not old enough to drink, though.
• An Economy Is You: The economy of Alrest is in a steep recession as the game begins, since Titans are dying and harvests are getting worse each year. This translates in gameplay to high prices and poor item selections at shops, but you can personally take it upon yourself to fix the economy by spending all that gold you get from adventuring. Here's how:
  • Some Titans (Argentum, Gormott, Uraya, Mor Ardain, Tantal, Leftheria, and Indol) have a Development Level, shown as a one- to five-star rating in the shop menu. As you buy and sell items at stores on that Titan, complete Merc Missions, and talk to the townsfolk, the Development Level rises.
  • As the level rises, you can take special Merc Missions to increase the selection at various stores. Get the full selection available and buy at least one of every item in any shop (excluding Core Chip, Accessory, Salvaging, and unique shops), and there will be a deed of ownership available the next time you visit that shop.
  • Buying these deeds gives all your characters very useful and permanent passive buffs, such as increasing your running speed and item drop rates. The shopkeepers' dialogue will change to reflect the fact that you are now their boss. Lastly, many NPCs will thank your party personally for singlehandedly stopping the decline of the global economy.
• Another Side, Another Story: The game takes place simultaneously with Xenoblade Chronicles 1, with the same event having created the world as well as the Final Boss being fought at the exact same moment.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Defeating a Unique Monster permanently kills it. You won't be harassed when revisiting the area, and by examining the grave, you can have a rematch without having the struggle with the spawn conditions all over again.
  • NPC party members will hold off using their special combos until you order them to, preventing AI from wasting their specials.
  • Players can keep track of debuffs thanks to the debuff timer at the top of the screen.
  • Blade affinity milestones that are finite or liable to become empty grinding (like landmarks discovered or distance walked respectively) are counted retroactively when possible.
  • Kora's Blade Quest requires you to have a higher total for the Girls' Talk skill than is possible for even a fully maxed out Mythra and Kora. To complete the quest, you must have at the very least two other blades with Girls' Talk and Kora, Mythra, and one of those two blades must have a maxed out Girls' Talk rating. The feature that makes this easier is that, of the three optional blades with Girls' Talk, two of them (Sheba and Praxis) require no luck to obtain; they are both attainable through sidequests, and both of the sidequests needed to obtain them can be done well before you enter Tantal, where Kora's quest is. Additionally, the final blade, Vale, is of the dark element, which has a relatively small pool of rare blades, meaning through the use of Justice cores, she's not that difficult to obtain.
  • NPCs with a star on their speech bubble still have new stuff to say. For anyone who want to exhaust all their dialogue, this is very useful.
  • Sidequest objectives are marked if they can only be completed at certain times of day. Additionally, collectables required for a current quest will be omitted from crafting menus.
  • At the end of Chapter 3, Pyra is very temporarily removed from the party. If the player's been too clever by half anticipating an upcoming boss and Engaged another Blade in her slot, the game will quietly put Pyra back in her proper slot.
  • After Chapter 8 when Indol falls all of the stores and sidequest important NPCs (save for quests that specifically begin in that area) from that area move to other Titans across the world, avoiding becoming Permanently Missable Content.
  • An NPC introduced in a Season Pass quest addresses the Guide Dang It! related to Premium Cylinders mentioned below- after completing the quest, he can manufacture Premium Cylinders for free, provided the player gives him the appropriate materials.
  • For those who find points in the game too difficult, Patch 1.3.0 adds Easy Mode, which can be switched into in the games settings.
  • Patch 1.3.0 also adds the ability to "lock" Blades, preventing you from accidentally releasing them and pinning them at the top of the Blades submenu, making common Blades with useful field skills quicker to find.
  • Patch 1.3.0 adds a Bard in several towns in a New Game Plus that sells valuable items in exchange for Bonus Exp, presumably so that any Exp obtained upon hitting level 99 doesn't go to waste. The one in Argentum sells one extra accessory slot for each character. The Bard in Torigoth sells bundles of 20,000 Ether Crystals in exchange for Bonus EXP for those who aren't very good at Tiger! Tiger! Fonsa Myma's Bard sells Legendary Core Crystals, cutting down on farming. The two more notable bards are one Alba Canavich that sells Ultimate Weaponry, which is otherwise only obtainable via Completing a Unique/Rare Blades Affinity chart. The other is in Tantal, which sells Overdrive Protocols, which are only obtainable via a few chests, completing a driver's Affinity chart, releasing a 4-crown Common Blade with a complete Affinity Chart or through item gifts given to those who bought the Expansion Pass.
  • Patch 1.4.0 adds more Bards that sell Poppi's Elemental Core: Light and Master Role mods. Combined with the Stat II and Fast Blade Switch V parts that can be purchased for Noponstones in the Land of Challenge expansion, Poppi can now be completely maxed out without needing to play the final stage of Tiger! Tiger! until the parts randomly drop.
  • Patch 1.5.0 adds the option to turn off the Action Command system in combat (aside from the press needed to continue the next phase of a chain attack,) so you can sit back and watch all the flashy moves and explosions (however, this results in the game treating the attacks as if the button presses gave only a "good" rather than "excellent" rating, thus lowering your damage output compared to what can be achieved manually).
  • Patch 1.5.0 adds an option to turn off normal enemy hostilities, meaning that enemies that are within your level range or higher won't automatically attack you if you get near them. Unique monsters will still attack you if you get too close.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Core chips are created through concentrated ether which is then refined and purified. The Indoline Praetorium has been forcing the Tantalese government to absorb Genbu's ether for 500 years. The reason the environment is so cold is because Genbu is having his life blood literally sucked out of him.
• Art Evolution: There's quite a difference◊ between the reveal trailer and release.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • When you have the proper arts available to you, the AI is surprisingly smart with Driver combos (Break-Topple-Launch-Smash or blowdown, in order).
  • A big part of the game's battle system is chaining together the special arts into combos, however they must be done in specific order. Naturally, if an ally has that available, they will then swap to it - even if it's in the Third blade slot (which is rarely used by the AI)
• Artificial Human:
  • Poppi the artificial Blade, created by Tora due to his own inability to become a Driver. Torna eventually builds an army of artificial Blades to combat Indol.
  • Blades themselves: not only are many of them humanoid in shape (and in some cases, like Pyra, virtually indistinguishable from humans), but since Core Crystals were built from material originally created to replace dying brain cells, all cores from which Blades are "born" are in fact artificial human brain tissue.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • In spite of the AI being smart, they can also be a little dense at times. Notable with tank blades (Especially Tora) who sometimes get so focused on tanking that they won't even run to get the potion that's right there next to them - assuming you or our third ally will pick them up. It's generally advised that, unless the player were to take on healing duties, that your "healer" only use Healing Blades, or to place the non healer blade in the third slot that they rarely swap to.
  • Your AI-controlled party members are also not very good at avoiding environmental hazards, and unlike the first game, will continue to attack an enemy with Spike, even if the resulting damage will kill them.
  • When you get the ability to have your Drivers use three Blades, the Blade you put into the third slot will often be the lowest priority, (Tora's an exception for most of the game) so if you were to say, give your tank a healing blade and put it in the third slot, they will not use it even when the party obviously needs healing.
  • The Optional Boss Tyrannotitan Kurodil has a unique art called "Bonecrusher" that hits behind it and deals tremendous damage, encouraging the player to avoid approaching it from the back. The AI often does not take this into account and will continue to stand behind it as it rapidly drains their health.
  • If the player-controlled character and one other go down in battle, the remaining AI character will always move to revive the player first even if the other one is much closer to them and may well be the team healer. If the player character isn't revived after enough time, the battle automatically ends as a loss.
• Artificial Zombie: The protagonists encounter zombie-like creatures called guldos in the Land of Morytha. When the characters meet the Architect near the end of the game, he reveals that the creatures were once humans, and were the product of humanity's attempt to achieve immortality using technology that would eventually become the Core Crystals.
• Artistic Licence – Anatomy: Blades, which are meant to be genetically similar to humans, have a lot of stylistic features that distinguish them from the humans of Alrest.
• Art-Style Clash: For the most part, the game utilizes a blend between Masatsugu Saitō and Tetsuya Nomura's art styles, with the former designing all of the protagonists (and Amalthus), and the latter designing the members of Torna. However, throw Rare Blades into the mix, and suddenly, there's dozens of artists designing different characters.
• Ascended Extra: In the first Xenoblade game, the Tirkin were relatively minor enemies who occasionally popped up as required enemies to defeat in some NPC quests. In this game, however, they appear a lot more in side quests and even Blade quests. Sometimes, they're even voiced too!
• As the Good Book Says...: Each of the Trinity Processor cores (the Aegises) have a Bible verse from the Book of Proverbs, in Latin, inscribed below their resting place.
  • Ontos has Proverbs 3:13; "Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding."
  • Logos has Proverbs 10:12; "Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs."
  • Pneuma has Proverbs 4:18; "The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter 'til the full light of day."
• Astral Finale: The endgame takes place in a Space Station far above the planet, the same space station where Klaus undertook his experiment that led to the creation of the universe of the original Xenoblade Chronicles 1.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Just like its predecessors, some high level Unique Monsters and other monsters are particularly massive, especially the Squoods and Cloud Sea King Ken, which are on par with some of the largest monsters in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The two Unique Monster battle themes, "Those Who Stand Against Our Path" and "You Will Recall Our Names", are even more intense and make heavier use of electric guitar than "You Will Know Our Names" from the first game. Lampshaded by the Nopon Archsage:
  Nopon Archsage: Friend sound startled like 10-ton gorilla with fancy name appear from nowhere and start playing electric guitar.
• Award-Bait Song:
  • The heart-rending "One Last You", which plays over the end credits and The Stinger. The visuals start with a montage of clips from the game, with the song thematically being about Pyra/Mythra remembering her time together with Rex, which builds up to the final verse during which Pyra and Mythra are reborn in new bodies and one of them silently mouths something to Rex, suspected to be a Love Confession or a greeting. Awwwwww!
  • The insert song "Drifting Soul" (by the same vocalist) has aspects of this, but doesn't play over the credits and is treated more as a Theme Music Power-Up for the most emotional moments.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Zigzagged for Blade Nia. Arguably the best Healer Blade in the game and certainly the highest damaging, but using it cuts into another the growth for her Driver form. However, at more advanced stages of play, it's generally preferred to bench Nia as a Driver and so this Blade can actually help free up the healer slot for another role and in conjunction with Pyra/Mythra allows Rex to function as a Red Mage.
• "Back to Camera" Pose: The cover art has Rex and Pyra looking out towards Uraya with Elysium/the World Tree in the background. The reversible cover is similar but changes the background to a sunset, switches out Pyra for Mythra, and has them only looking at the World Tree.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Mòrag never intended to execute Nia after capturing her. She just wanted to draw Rex out to get more information about Pyra and knew that threat would be enough to get Rex to come to her rescue.
  • Rex manages one later in Chapter 2. It's made clear that there is no way the team will be able to defeat Mòrag after she effortlessly cleaves Rex's most powerful attack in half redirecting the blast. Rex uses this against her when he runs away and uses a similar blast making it seem like he's just predictably spamming the same trick over and over again. In reality, Rex knew that Mòrag would deflect it and positioned both him and her in such a way that the blast was redirected into a water tower - depowering Brighid for long enough to escape.
• Battle Couple: In Fonsett Village, Corinne mentions to Pyra that a lot of old stories feature Blades who married their Drivers, obviously talking about Pyra's feelings for Rex.
• Behind the Black: When the party meets the Architect, the camera carefully shows only the right side of his face. Somehow, the party — who are on the other side of a well-lit, empty room for much of the conversation — only reacts to seeing his left side, which is caught in an interdimensional rift between this world and the original Xenoblade's, when the camera angle changes to show it to the player.
• Biblical Motifs: It wouldn't be part of the Xeno franchise without a few references.
  • Right at the start of the game, Rex tells the story of how when the lands were first created, people lived in paradise together atop the World Tree with the The Architect. This is a reference to the Garden of Eden and the Book of Genesis.
  • In Japanese, Pyra is always referred as "ten no seihai", which literally translates to "The Holy Grail (of Heaven)." The Golden Country reveals that they got the name from an actual holy cup the Indol church had: Malos destroyed it and took the name for himself, as after all he was now the most important thing in Indol. This is localized to "Aegis" in the English/international release.
  • There's a bit of a lampshade thrown in in the final chapter. When Malos discovers the real names of the Aegis (Logos, Ontos and Pneuma, Greek for Mind, Body and Soul) he asks about their meaning. Klaus's answer amounts to "they mean your creators were pretentious fools."
• Big Bad: Jin, the masked leader of Torna, initially seems to be as the main antagonist. Things get more complicated once it's revealed that his supposed Dragon Malos is the true threat as an Aegis himself, though he's content to act as Jin's subordinate. Later on, Praetor Amalthus becomes another contender for the role, as the one who awakened Malos and caused Jin's Start of Darkness in the first place. Eventually, the game settles into an Evil vs. Evil conflict between Jin and Amalthus... until both die in the second-last chapter, leaving Malos to take up the role of being the party's final opponent in saving Alrest.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • A character at Argentum in Chapter 2, in discussing salvage points, says you should "leave luck to heaven". "Leave luck to heaven" is the English translation of the Japanese name 任天堂, more recognizable in the West by its romaji, "Nintendo".
  • The mini game at Tora's house where you get powerups for Poppi is called, "Tiger Tiger". Tiger is the English translation of the Japanese word "Tora".
  • All of the countries in Alrest are all named after the Seven Deadly Sins. In the Japanese version, their names are the Latin words for each sin, but the English dub has their names derived from different languages.
    • The Argentum Trade Guild's name is derived from the Latin word "argentum", which literally means "silver". But it's also a word used to refer to anything monetary, i.e. "argentarius", a person who deals with money services.
    • The Gormott Province gets its name from the French word "gourmand", which is a word used to describe a gluttonous person.
    • The Kingdom of Uraya's name is from the Japanese word "urayamashi", which means "to be envious".
    • The Empire of Mor Ardain's name is a pun of the Scottish Gaelic words for "great arrogance".
    • The Kingdom of Tantal's name is derived from the word "tantalize", which itself is derived from King Tantalus, a figure in Classical Mythology.
    • The Kingdom of Torna's name comes from the Dutch word "toorn", which is a word for "anger".
    • The Indol Praetorium gets its name from the English word "indolence", which makes it an Odd Name Out. But the word "Praetorium" was used in the Roman Empire to signify a general's tent in an encampment.
• Black Comedy: Concerning how Nopon can be as annoying as they are endearing. A Nopon in Torigoth called Nomon grows special (and very delicious) radishes that look oddly like Nopon. The farmer he got lended the field by, Nugby, remarks that he feels a bit guilty cutting into the radishes given how they look, but adds that its also "good stress relief."
• Black Market: The majority of the shops in the Kingdom of Tantal are of this variety, hence their exorbitant prices, because most of the legitimate businesses have shuttered due to the already worldwide economic crisis further exacerbated by Tantal's isolationism plus freezing climate and lack of good farmland, forcing the populace to rely on whatever is smuggled into the kingdom from the outside. Because said market is the major reason everyone hasn't starved, the government just turns a blind eye to it. One DLC sidequest reveals King Eulogimenos himself utilizes the black market in secret...to secure a supply of Addam's Embercakes for himself.
• Bleak Level:
  • The Land of Morytha, a post-apocalyptic modern city at the bottom of the Cloud Sea. Nothing there but decaying buildings, what are implied to be heavily mutated zombies, the rotting corpse of the old Torna Titan, depressing music and a number of sad plot twists. You don't even get the day/night cycle, only a neverending stormy sky.
  • And even more tragically, after an entire game of looking for it, Elysium itself turns out to be a long dry desert, in a space colony entirely devoid of life (people and monsters alike) save for the old, decrepit Architect himself. As Rex himself puts it, "There is nothing here!"
• Bloodless Carnage: In stark contrast to the previous games, there's not a drop of blood to be seen even in scenes where you'd expect it, such as when Jin stabs Rex through the heart near the beginning of the game or when Vandham stabs himself with his scythes to fuel himself with ether and is subsequently slain by Malos. Briefly averted in Chapter 2 when a Gormotti man fails to resonate with a Core Crystal and Rex even notes all the blood, but the blood is a light blue color and most players may mistake it for a flash of light from the crystal. And then there are flashbacks to when Tora & his family failed to resonate with Core Crystals and got nosebleeds, but this is clearly Played for Laughs. There is a lone blood splatter in the game, that you have to follow to reach the Sanguinous Grotto in Tantal (a den of angry monsters), but it sticks out like crazy when nothing else in the game bleeds.
• Bond Creatures: The primary element of the setting are the Drivers, people who can awaken Core Crystals, and Blades, the beings that wake from said Core Crystals and form a bond with their new master. Through this bond the Blade grants the Driver their powers, but should the Driver die, the Blade will vanish back into their Core Crystal with all of their memories erased. Rex and Pyra take it a step further since he has part of her Core Crystal embedded into him, causing a form of Synchronization between them.
• Boring, but Practical: While Rex gets access to some nice Blades later on, keeping him with Pyra/Mythra, Roc, and a greataxe blade is usually among the best because of this lets him inflict Topple-Launch-Smash in that order. The AI is normally pretty smart about inflicting Break-Topple-Launch-Smash when it's available to them, having all three lets the player have control over it and inflict it quicker and more reliably than the AI. Tora must charge up his abilities to inflict those, and the AI might have the corresponding attack on cooldown. It helps that the AI will usually spam Break inflicting abilities. Fortunately, a later update added Corvin, who not only lets Rex use a Smash Art but is a much better Blade than Roc overall.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Rex and Mythra's argument at the beginning of Chapter 4. While Rex is right not to let the bad guys get a hold of her for their own nefarious goals, Mythra is also right about not wanting to be awakened due to her dangerous power level.
• Bowdlerize:
  • Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe has had a long-standing history of changing religious references in their games, and while the English script of the game is no exception, the changes are unilateral and not necessarily a bad thing.
    • The Japanese script uses "rakuen", which translates to "paradise" or "pleasure garden" as a descriptor of the world where humans lived in peace with the God of Genesis on top of the World Tree, an obvious reference to the Garden of Eden and the Book of Genesis. The English script makes the Christian references less obvious by changing "paradise" to "Elysium", which was one of the afterlives of Greek myth, a paradise where mortals chosen by the gods would spend their eternity after death. Then again, there's a track that's named "Elysium, in the Blue Sky," in English, in the Japanese sound selection.
    • The "God of Genesis" was changed to "The Divine Architect", which still conveys a great creator.
    • Pyra is referred as the "Holy Grail of Heaven" in Japanese and "the Aegis" in English. The Aegis was a shield carried by Zeus and/or Athena, again shifting the reference from Christianity to Greek mythology but preserving the implications of a divine artifact.
    • The Indoline Praetorium is more overtly Catholic-flavored in the original script, with the terms used for the state and the title of Praetor outright being the Japanese words for the Holy See and the Pope.
  • When Pyra says she has a way to make the money needed to pay off Poppi's materials, Gramps replies "Don't tell me...your body?" in Japanese. In the English subtitles and dub, while the implications are still there, the wording is a bit more vague: "Nothing illegal, I hope!"
  • And then there's the weird case of a certain Heart-to-Heart where Pyra and Brighid find an "experimental custom armor" Tora built for Poppi. In the original Japanese, it's a skimpy bikini. In the English version, it gets censored into... a Playboy Bunny costume, which is arguably just as lewd.
• Boy Meets Girl:
  • At its most basic level, this is the nature of the game's plot. The game's director even acknowledges that.
  • The final chapter's name is even 'And thus, boy met girl' (except for the German translation, which calls it 'His Last Gift')
• Bragging Rights Reward: Subverted with the Dilaton, Tachyon, and Moon Matter weapon chips. They are the most powerful weapon chips in the game (Tachyon is especially desired if you wish to restore the Blades' default weapon looks) and are obtained from some of the highest leveled superbosses in the game (Artifice Ophion, Tyrannotitan Kurodil, and Cloud Sea King Ken, respectively). However, those three are not the hardest superbosses in the game. That honor belongs to Gladiator Orion, who is barely 1 level over the level cap. There is also the Challenge Mode, which includes upgraded versions of superbosses and plus brand new ones. Elma: Redux, for example, is harder than Normal Mode Gladiator Orion even when you're fighting her at the easiest custom difficulty. Finally, they can be carried over to a New Game Plus, and there's nothing stopping you from beating those superbosses on Normal difficulty to use the weapons for a Bringer of Chaos playthrough, and they won't save you from the new brutal difficulty.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: On the surface, we have Blades who have supernatural powers, and Drivers who are granted those powers through their Blades. Then we have Flesh Eaters, which are Blades that consumed the cells in an attempt to gain power and survive the death of their Driver; and Blade Eaters, people who have taken (parts of) a Blade's Core Crystal to fully access their power on their own. There's also nothing stopping either type of Eater from engaging a Blade/Driver relationship with another Blade/Driver.
• Breaking Old Trends: There are a few mechanics and patterns that would be done differently from this game going forward:
  • Loot gained from monsters is visible in the overworld and expires if left untouched for some time. A stark contrast from the contained treasure chests in 1 and the instant loot menu in X.
  • There are absolutely no signs of any Telethia. X at least had them as a unique species that served as a brutal Superboss.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The season pass' initial content includes a number of goodies, such as a handful of Blade cores, extra money and salvaging cylinders, pouch items, overdrive protocols, and 30,000 units of ether crystals. Later updates would include powerful Blades like Corvin and Crossette. This is downplayed as the first item in that list doesn't really combat the overall RNG Blade Core draw system much.
• Broken Bridge: When you first reach Torigoth at the start of the game, a set of stairs leading to the farm fields in the back of the city are missing for no explained reason. They show up once you advance the story as you're supposed to.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Barring Nopon and the sapient enemy races like Tirkin, all the races of Alrest are called humans, even when some of these races vary significantly from baseline humans. Leftherians, Ardainians, Tornans, and Tantalese are as close to human as you can get, but then you have more fantastic races like the Gormotti (look human but have feline features), Urayans (have pointed ears, exotic hair colors and scaled skin), and Indoline (tall and lanky, have pointed ears, bluish skin tones and longer than average lifespans).
• The Cameo: A voice cameo, in the form of Shulk's Pre-Mortem One-Liner before he finishes Zanza off for good, signifying that the endgame of the original Xenoblade Chronicles was occurring in parallel to the sequel's.
• Cannibalism Superpower:
  • Flesh Eater Blades. By consuming the flesh of their Driver, they forfeit their immortality but retain their form even after their Driver dies; this can also unlock various other powers. There are also Blade Eaters - humans implanted with part of a Blade's core crystal, who then gain limited access to the Blade's powers. Amalthus becomes one to gain Haze's Blade-neutralizing ability.
  • In fact, the majority of the game's primary cast has this in some form. On the hero side, Zeke was made a Blade Eater to heal mortal wounds, and Nia is a Flesh Eater. For the villains: Jin, Ahkos, and Patroka are all Flesh Eaters, with Mikhail and Amalthus being Blade Eaters.
  • Interestingly, Rex is not considered a Blade Eater, despite having part of Pyra/Mythra's core crystal taking the place of his heart. Partly because the Aegis gave it to him willingly — a power only they have — and partly because Rex can't use Pyra/Mythra's powers himself, like a traditional Blade Eater can. Instead, he feels the same pain they do.
• Can't Catch Up: Averted, party members typically join a couple of levels ahead of where you might normally be, retroactively receive the party's full quota of Non-Combat EXP, and are given the party's average total weapon points applied to all weapon classes. In fact that last one often means they'll be slightly ahead of the rest of the party when they join. As a result, it's often Rex that's left behind in terms of Non-Combat EXP.
• Can't Drop the Hero:
  • Averted. Once you finish the first chapter, you can put anyone at the front of the party to control them. Once you have four party members, you're perfectly welcome to bench Rex if you want.
  • Played straight with a party member's primary Blade who, with the exception of plot events, can't be disengaged from their Drivers. Especially Poppi, who is the only blade Tora can use. The exception is when Rex becomes the Master Driver in Chapter 8 and can bond with the Blades of other Drivers, save for Poppi, though even then he can't ever disengage Pyra/Mythra.
  • Patch 1.3.0 adds the ability to send a party member's primary blade on Merc Missions, including Pyra/Mythra and Poppi. Granted, this can only be done on a New Game Plus.
• Cat Folk: The Gormotti, a cat-eared race that inhabits the Imperial Province of Gormott.
• Cat Girl: Nia, being supposedly Gormotti. She also meows, and has other catlike affects in and out of battle. And while it turns out she's actually a Flesh Eater Blade, her Blade form is also a cat girl.
• Censor Steam: Used to hide girly bits during the Hot Springs Episode. This also cleverly hides Nia's Core Crystal, which is located on her chest, without giving the player a single clue - save for an incredibly vague comment by Mythra.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Most of the first 3/4ths of the game is relatively lighthearted and optimistic Shonen-esque adventure with a few very sad events mixed in still, but after Tantal the tone of the game does a 180 and becomes a deep character study of what kind of turmoil a person can go through when they truly don't want to live anymore.
• Character Select Forcing: A subversion - When Rex becomes the Master Driver late in the game, the game is quick to give and actively encourages the player to use Brighid, the blade tied to Mòrag. It will even go as far as swapping her out from Mòrag's top spot with another blade after finishing the previous boss so Rex can have easy access to her. The player is free to not use her on Rex, but it does clue them in that the initial run through the Land of Morytha is going to be a rough one without some kind of tank on hand since Rex is alone with a blade-less Guest-Star Party Member.
• Chekhov's Gun: Bana offhandedly mentions that Jin asked specifically for Leftherian salvagers, which is how Rex lands the job that throws him into the plot. It takes about two thirds of the game before it's revealed that Rex's native Fonsett was founded by the hero Addam, and not only can only Leftherian people open the seals on the Aegis, he hid the Third Blade in a cave directly under the village.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • In gameplay rather than story. When Chain Attacks are introduced, the tutorial mentions how to trigger a Full Burst, but this is the epitome of Awesome, but Impractical at the time: it requires a precise party setup, a minimum of four element orbs on the enemy, and note-perfect execution of the Chain Attack. Needless to say, there's a dearth of opponents who can take four Blade Combos without keeling over that wouldn't wipe the party in the meantime. Much later in the game, Pyra's True Aegis mode is all about racking up element orbs rapidly and helping her allies knock them down efficiently, making Full Bursts a very satisfying way to end boss fights.
  • In Tantal, Pyra threatens to kill herself in order to save Rex. Akhos thinks it's a blatant bluff since Rex would die if Pyra did, but Jin goes along with it; Malos later explains that Pyra would have transferred the rest of her core to Rex right before she died, fully repairing his heart and letting him survive without her. He also mentions that this is only possible because the Aegis can operate without a core for a short time. At the very end, Pneuma transfers her core to Rex before her Heroic Sacrifice.
  • In a shorter example, when boarding the Ardainian's ship Rex needs Poppi's help to lift up Pyra using his grappling hook. After they escape, Rex and Poppi use the hookshot again, this time to topple the water tank on Brighid.
• Chewing the Scenery:
  • As seen in the final battle, Malos, especially in the English dub. While he's normally The Stoic, morally depraved co-leader of Torna, when Malos gets on his really bad side, he can scream his lungs out like nobody's business.
  • Being a Nopon, Bana already comes across as a silly and cartoonish villain, despite being very evil and a genuine threat to Alrest. But his campiness goes very high during the boss battles with his Humongous Mecha Rosa, where his scenery-chewing reaches unprecedented heights and must be heard to be believed.
• Combination Attack:
  • Every level four Blade Special is a combination attack between Driver and Blade—either passing the weapon back and forth (Roc's Crimson Storm), both wielding the weapon at once (Pyra's Burning Sword) or wielding one half of the weapon each (Brighid's Azure III: Soulfire). All of them are extremely powerful, with the party invincible for the duration of the attack.
  • Chain Attacks return from the first game. This time party members take turns unleashing Blade Specials.
  • In Chapter 10, you unlock a a unique Level 4 Blade Special between Pyra and Blade form Nia that requires Rex to have both engaged and at maximum affinity. The version used depends on who you start the attack with- Nexus Force for Nia's Water special, and Union Sword for Pyra's Fire.
• Combos: Two types, both limited by debuff timers. Advance the combo before it runs out, or you'll have to start over.
  • Blade Combos are performed by executing a lv1, lv2, and lv3 Special of the proper elements in order. Ex.: linking Fire I-Fire II-Light III produces "Nuclear Blast"; Ice I-Water II-Wind III produces "Dead of Winter". There are 24 working combinations. Blade Combos deal high damage, temporarily seal off nasty status effects, and pop out an Element Orb that powers up your big-shot Chain Attack.
  • Driver Combos are performed by linking the Break, Topple, Launch, and Smash debuffs in sequence. Most weapon types have one Art capable of inflicting one of these effects, so proper setup beforehand is the key. Driver Combos amplify concurrent Blade Combos, stun the enemy (they can't thrash you while flipping helplessly through the air), and ultimately release free goodies like money and items mid-battle.
  • Running a Blade Combo and a Driver Combo concurrently is referred to as a Fusion Combo, which extends the combo timer for both components.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard:
  • The tutorials in the game are notoriously bad, varying from incomplete to misleading to flat out wrong. Given the number of complex systems in the game, this is a common obstacle for new players trying to get into the game.
  • "Deal X Damage in One Hit" challenges on affinity charts cannot be done through a special blade art. It must be done via an auto attack or driver art, and is best done on the weakest enemies where their defense stats are lower.
  • One of blade Nia's affinity chart nodes says to "Engage in combat alongside Pyra or Mythra". That's not enough, as you also have to deal the killing blow on the enemy for it to count.
• Continuity Nod: The Architect is none other than Klaus, or rather, Klaus' good half. The same project used to turn the other half of Klaus, Galea, and one of the ship's AI into gods in the original Xenoblade's world, used his power to recreate life in the desolate universe he ruined.
• Cool Airship:
  • The Argentum Trade Guild's Titan is too small to have its own biome, so it carries a ship underneath where its citizens live. Also, many smaller Titans have technology grafted onto them to use as weapons of war or transport.
  • Torna's Monocerous airship, being a giant battleship built during the days of Torna. They even have a bigger one called the Marsenes that can also transform into a Humongous Mecha.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: After you properly take care of Bana, Niranira punishes him by making him run in the hamster wheel. He knows he deserves this punishment, but he's also come to enjoy running in the wheel. You have to threaten to destroy the wheel just to get him to tell you how to open the giant treasure chest in his room.
• Cosmic Deadline: While climbing the World Tree, subplots collide and wrap up as both a hostile Indol and the Marsenes are never visited and are instead both destroyed in the same cut-scene, with their armies both shoved into a side wing of the World Tree alongside the guard robots. Following that, Jin and Amalthus have boss fights back-to-back, leaving only one major antagonist unaccounted for.
• Cracks in the Icy Façade: While she is appalled by the rest of Torna's plans to use the Aegis to destroy the world, Nia is still introduced as being snarky and quick to anger. When she first travels with Rex, Nia is The Drag-Along who only travels with him because he's the way to her home town of Torigoth. When they get there, Nia is captured by Ardanian soldiers. She is genuinely grateful when Rex rescues her, even if she has a hard time showing it. When they escape, Rex asks Nia to continue to accompany him, and although she hesitates, she eventually accepts. This foreshadows how Nia is starting to open up to Rex and friends, and how, near the end of the game, her trust in them is what ultimately leads Nia to reveal that she's a Flesh Eater, and even confesses her love to Rex, not that he seems to realize this ^note  Or does he? .
• Crystal Spires and Togas: As befitting a theocracy, the Indoline Praetorium has this aesthetic, with shiny white buildings and tall towers.
• Cultural Translation: Vess' rice balls are translated as "dumplings" in the English script (dub and subtitles). Because properly-translated rice balls still exist in the game (including Vess' own sidequest) and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 isn't really for children, this was most likely to avoid making the Western-looking culture of Alrest seem unnecessarily Japanese, as with the name changes, and dumplings are a vaguely-defined food that often can still be Asian, unlike jelly donuts.
• Cute Kitten: Most Gormotti children are this, being Cat Folk and having facial features that look vaguely kitten-ish. This includes Nia.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • Several times, winning a boss battle rewards you with a cutscene of that boss kicking your ass anyway.
  • Averted in a few areas in which Blades are weakened and they can't use their powers to escape the situation. Tora then points out that Poppi isn't affected as she is an Artificial Blade.
  • The party will appear oddly incompetent during several of the cutscenes for the optional Blades' sidequests, being overwhelmed by monsters that should by no means pose a threat to them, and not using Mythra's abilities in situations that would be perfect for them. Still, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives rare Blades their chance to shine.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Other times, you have both party members and the boss you just fought all but flying around the map while fighting.

D to G

• Damage Cap: For single hits and damage over time it maxes out at 999999 to keep players from instantly killing superbosses like in Xenoblade X to prevent fights from becoming too simple or easy. Removing the damage cap with hacks reveals that it would've been possible to reach damage numbers that make X's Ether Blossom Dance build look weak.
• Damager, Healer, Tank: Blades come in three primary flavors: Attacker, Healer, and Tank.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The last part of the last main section of the sidequest to get Poppi's final form is a level 50 boss with HP in the millions. The boss itself isn't dangerous, save for the fact that it activates spike damage at low health (which, given the millions of health, is still fairly threatening), but that can be counteracted by setting up and using a good Chain Attack that includes Ascended Pyra/Mythra, who you will have by the time you unlock the quest. Appropriately, most of the bonus bosses listed above also have upwards of 15,000,000 HP to burn through.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Becoming a Flesh Eater or Blade Eater. Extending one's lifespan and/or gaining phenomenal power doesn't sound like a bad deal at all — but that's if it works. Contrary to how often successful examples show up in the story, the success rate of becoming an Eater without consequence is actually very low; the prospective Eater is lucky to survive, and luckier still if they don't become a grotesque affront to God. There's also the process involved, which in itself is understandable grounds for taboo. Most successful Eaters either treated it as a Godzilla Threshold, were Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, or were coerced.
• Darkest Hour: A couple of them in the story. The first being at the end of Chapter 3 where Torna corners the protagonists and quickly defeat them, and even kill Vandham who tries to pull off a fruitless Heroic Sacrifice. This is what triggers Mythra to finally awaken within Pyra. And later a larger one at the end of Chapter 6 where once again Torna corners the protagonists only this time Jin shows off his absurdly powerful abilities that overwhelms even Mythra, causing Pyra to surrender herself to them to keep the rest of the party alive and leaving Rex a depressed wreck.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Like in the first game and in the spinoff, dying at any point during gameplay merely sends you back to the nearest Landmark. Unique to this game is that the playable Drivers and Blades will also comment on this, and will sometimes even admonish the player.
• Death or Glory Attack: Chain Attacks. They're the best way to deal huge amounts of damage and can get you more EXP and better items. Trouble is, they use up all of your Party Gauge, so if one doesn't end the battle, you won't be able to revive any fallen party members for a while.
• Death World: The neutral Titan of Temperantia is a bit like one. It has absolutely no vegetation, the water is all poisonous, and very few things live there. And those that do live there are among the highest level enemies in the game. A major plot point is also Mor Ardain and Tantal slowly becoming one through rising/lowering temperatures respectively as a result of their dying Titans.
• Deceptively Cute Critter: Acknowledged in-universe — the Nopon know they are cute, and characters find it hard to hate even villainous Nopons. This is exploited: One quest reveals that an ancient Nopon discovered that by changing the Nopon language into the cute way they now talk, other races would better perceive their cuteness, which would make it easier to exploit them for money. They used to talk just the same as everyone else with proper grammar and syntax.
• Decomposite Character:
  • The first game's Bana has his role split between two characters: this game's Chairman Bana, who acts as the greedy criminal while also keeping the name, and his father Don Dondon, who is the Arc Villain for a sidequest chain, fights while piloting an aerial enemy, and is the strongest boss in the game ignoring random Unique Monsters. To hammer it home, after Don Dondon is beaten, both can be seen running on the wheel like the original Bana.
  • The game's Big Bad Duumvirate takes their key aspects from the first game's Big Bad Zanza: Amalthus as Control Freak with god-complex who is responsible for multiple calamities and Malos as Omnicidal Maniac with a Monado who intends on wiping out all life.
  • The Monado's abilities are divided between the two Aegises. Pyra/Mythra have the Foresight ability while Malos can use Monado Arts.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • There are a total of six Pouch Expansion Kits to be obtained in the game, yet the party does not exceed five Drivers at a time. The sixth is just in case you "wasted" one on Vandham.
  • Speaking of Vandham, it's entirely possible to fill out his affinity chart. Furthermore, in New Game Plus, he even gets his own expanded affinity chart just like the other Drivers.
  • Vandham has his own quote if Roc's affinity chart is completed in Chapter 3 of New Game Plus.
  • Most content from Indol is relocated to other areas in the game once it is locked off, including quest objectives that aren't initiated there. The stores themselves simply sell items that were available in previous regions, save for one store which is relocated to Fonsett.
  • Some rare blades' affinity charts (such as Perun's or Floren's) require unique tasks to be done throughout the game, some of which can be found in the aforementioned Indol. The maximum available amount of examples possible actually exceeds the required quota to unlock those particular nodes, meaning that none of Indol's examples are actually required.
  • It is possible to jump from Tantal's upper level to the lower level using a pool of water at the bottom. To prevent this from skipping part of the journey of the main quest, the pool is frozen over until you use field skills to thaw it.
  • There is a Heart-to-Heart between Rex, Zeke, and Mòrag in the World Tree where they discuss whether or not Elysium actually exists. If you view this Heart-to-Heart after actually reaching Elysium, the dialogue will change, with them wondering whether the ruined city they saw was really Elysium. Notably, this Heart-to-Heart doesn't have any choices to make, only changing whether or not the player has reached Elysium.
  • One of the responses to Finch's Heart-to-Heart changes depending on whether or not the player reached Tantal (specifically when Finch desires to see a snowy place).
  • Both Zeke and Nia's alternate swimsuit costumes show their core crystals. To prevent this spoiling first time players, those costumes are locked until chapter 8.
  • In Spirit Crucible Elpys, most Blades are unable to build their Special meter past Level II or I, depending on how far the party has advanced. Artificial Blades like Poppi are immune to this. This includes the DLC Blade, Poppibuster. Shulk, Fiora, and Elma are also immune to this on the grounds of technically not being Blades.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • There's a rare ATK-type Blade named Sheba that only emerges from a certain Core Crystal. This Crystal can be purchased for 500,000 gold at an early-game shop in Torigoth. With a lot of smart salvaging^*Once you reach Mor Ardain, go to a highly-developed town and purchase Gold Cylinders. Use these to fish up expensive treasure items and trade them in for cash and boosters. Repeat as necessary., you can obtain her long before you start gaining that much from normal gameplay. Her affinity locks are also cash-based, so simply keep salvage-selling to unlock them. In battle, Sheba has a battle skill that increases damage for every female characters in battle (not including herself), and another that increases damage for every coin collected in battle. When fighting several enemies at once, this means that her damage can increase drastically for every enemy defeated, and doing this with a team of mostly female fighters can quickly give her an absurd damage multiplier. Even against single enemies, she isn't entirely powerless since her level 3 special has a high chance of dropping coins. Finally, her final battle skill reduces her aggro gain, making it easier for your tank to hold aggro even when your damage is sky high.
  • Thanks to the random nature of Blade resonance, any Rare Blade that the player pulls early can potentially become this.
  • Certain Core Chips can be found in treasure troves far before they normally become available. Most notable are a Coil Chip in Argentum^note Accessible from when you first get Poppi which would normally be first available in Mor Ardain and a Wood Chip in Torigoth^note Accessible with some affinity grinding on Pyra and Poppi that completely destroy the first few chapters.
• Dispel Magic: Blade Combos have the ability to seal away Status Effects and abilities used by enemies, which will stick until the seals are overridden with another Blade Combo or the battle ends. The seal that is used depends on the final element used in the combo.
  • Fire = Seal Self-Destruct
  • Water = Seal Stench
  • Earth = Seal Shackle Driver
  • Electric = Seal Back Attack
  • Wind = Seal Blowdown
  • Ice = Seal Shackle Blade
  • Light = Seal Affinity Down
  • Dark = Seal Reinforcements
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Malos warns Rex not to touch the Aegis Sword at the beginning of the game. Rex, however, is too entranced to notice (it's implied the sword is calling out to him) until his fingers have already tapped it, and he gets Jin's nodachi through his back for his trouble (he gets better).
• Dope Slap: When Pyra discusses the issue of raising 60,000 gold for Tora, Gramps jumps to the conclusion that she intends to sell her body. A swift chop from Rex to the back of the head sends him crashing to the floor. Gramps later returns the favor when Rex completely bungles trying to give Pyra emotional support.
• Double-Meaning Title:
  • The title of Chapter 7, "The Fear She Carries", refers to both Pyra/Mythra's fear of her own power as well as Nia's fear of revealing her nature as a Flesh Eater.
  • Wulfric's Blade Quest is titled "Tender-Hearted Beast". This obviously refers to Wulfric himself as a monstrous Blade with a kind and caring personality, but it also describes the Gogols fought in the quest, who only attacked the Tantalese because their mining operations encroached on the Gogols' home, and with whom Wulfric is ultimately able to resolve things peacefully.
  • The title of KOS-MOS's quest, "Artificial Intelligence", refers to KOS-MOS as well as the Artificial Blades.
  • T-elos's quest, "Lingering Resentment", refers to not just the grudge the Indoline Monks have against Rex and his friends but T-elos's own grudge against KOS-MOS.
• Downloadable Content: An Expansion Pass was released alongside the game itself, promising to add support items, new quests, new rare Blades, a new challenge mode, and even a new story which was also released as a standalone prequel, Torna — The Golden Country. The new challenge mode gives the players the chance to recruit Shulk and Fiora as allied Blades.
• Dual Boss: Several, including Brighid and Padraig in Chapter 2, Malos and Akhos at the end of Chapter 3, Mikhail and Patroka at the end of Chapter 4, Jin and Malos at the end of Chapter 7, and finally apparitions of Tora and Zeke in Chapter 10.
• Dub Name Change:
  • Almost every character had a name change across languages, exceptions being Rex, Tora, Nia and Vandham. One of the more important ones was Homura to Pyra—"Homura" means "flame" in Japanese, and the English writers wanted to make sure the flame imagery in the name got across to people who didn't know any Japanese. Similarly, her other self "Hikari" has her named changed to "Mythra" in English—"Hikari" means "light" in Japanese, while the English version alludes to the common fantasy metal "mythril", plays up her power being "mythical", being named after the Persian god of light Mithra. Also, the term "Aegis" in the English script was originally "Ten no Seihai" in Japanese, or Divine Holy Grail. As with most video games, the subtitles are of the dubtitle variety, meaning that if playing in English with Japanese voices, these name changes still apply despite the original Japanese names being clearly audible in dialogue. The name differences are made pretty clear in an official trailer that only has Japanese audio.
  • All European localizations use the English names as a base, given that they use the English audio by default. The French subtitles subject a few characters to Spell My Name With An S, such as Zeke becoming "Zyk" and Malos becoming "Malhos", likely as phonetic transliterations.
• Duel Boss: The Chapter 1 boss fight is a duel between Malos and Rex. Later, in Chapter 10, you fight consecutive Duel Boss battles against apparitions of Nia and Mòrag.
• Dump Stat:
  • For players who have no desire to use common Blades in combat once they have amassed enough Rare Blades, all of their battle-related stats can become this as they have no bearing on Field Skills or Merc Missions.
  • For thought cloud ideas, this, alongside One Stat to Rule Them All, varies between Driver characters, depending on the player's preference for Blades. A player who doesn't want any more Fire or Water Blades on Rex, for example, has no use for his Bravery stat anymore.
  • Out of the thought cloud ideas, Bravery in general is essentially the most useless of them all, as there are a grand total of three rare blades in the random pool that are Fire or Water type (Dagas, Newt, and Gorg; all others are obtained through core crystals obtained by other means).
• Early Game Hell: The early game is often regarded as the weakest point of the game. Your access to blades of various elements is rather thin thus making blade combos hard to pull off, and common blades tend to be relatively weak and lacking in abilities to make up for the elemental variance. Hammer and Great Axe blades also tend to be extremely common from core crystals at the start as well; which are regarded as some of the worst weapon classes in the game. This can make a lot of early combat somewhat of a chore to get through. It isn't until getting to chapter 4 where rarer blades start to become more common and varied as well as Mythra becoming a more stable part of the cast does the combat system really start to open up more.
• Earth All Along: The universe of 2 is revealed to be the original universe after Klaus' experiment, the Architect having created the Cloud Sea to restore the planet's surface. Per the faded but still present signs within the First Low Orbit Station claiming that it's United States property, it's not just an Earth either, it's the Earth.
• Easily Forgiven: Mostly averted in the main game (Rex even noting it isn't a simple thing to forgive, while at the same time imploring that one should try to anyway), but happens in a few Side Quests, the most extreme being one in Indol where you have to stop a child who has hired a mercenary to kill another child all because she got into the choir opening that she wanted. There is some justification in that the girl is poor and believes her shot at a better life for herself and her parents was "stolen" but her Murder Is the Best Solution reaction is still oddly glossed over and she faces no actual consequences.
• Eating the Eye Candy: An implication of the Male Loincloth and Charming Swimsuit accessories. When worn by a Driver who is using Blades of the opposite sex in battle, the damage inflicted by them in battle is increased by 50%. The implication being that the sight of their Driver in revealing attire is so attractive to them that its motivating the Blades to fight harder/provide more power.
• Elemental Powers: Each Blade has one of eight elements, which manifest in different ways depending on the Blade.
  • Fire tends to manifest itself as flames, but occasionally comes out as explosions.
  • Water tends to manifest itself as waves of water.
  • Electric tends to manifest itself as lighting or electricity.
  • Earth tends to manifest itself as rocks, but occasionally appears as plant life or as crystals.
  • Ice tends to manifest itself as solid ice and snow.
  • Wind tends to manifest itself as condensed gusts of wind.
  • Light tends to manifest itself as light energy.
  • Dark tends to manifest itself as shadowy energy, but in Blade Combos, manifests itself as gravity.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The elements are divided into opposite pairs: fire/water, light/dark, earth/electric, and ice/wind (how are ice and wind opposites? Shut up, that's how).
• Evil vs. Evil: What the conflict between Torna and Indol essentially boils down to. Jin wants to exterminate humanity and the Architect to create a world where Blades can live free; Amalthus wants to stop Torna from doing so and prevent anybody from even meeting the Architect, but goes about it in the most horrific way possible. Malos, meanwhile, just wants to kill everything; it's his ideal that Jin follows but he is the way he is due to Amalthus's influence when he resonated with Malos's Core Crystal.
• Evolving Credits: The title screen changes its background to show the area that will be the primary focus of the current chapter. After completing the game, it shows Rex, Pyra and Mythra (And Nia, as of the 1.3.0 update) holding hands while facing the World Tree from the new land.
• Exact Words: When accused of planning to stab Rex in the back, Pyra comments "I couldn't do that. I don't have a knife," a case of her being adorably Literal-Minded. This becomes much, much Harsher in Hindsight on a repeat playthrough, since Pyra is absolutely planning to betray his trust. Since her goal is to kill herself, this allowed her to hide her intentions and keep Rex's enthusiasm up without technically lying. Of course, the story hints huge number of times that Rex had long figured out what Pyra probably was going to do when they got there, but he couldn't figure out how to help her and was too afraid to confront it until Brighid slaps and yells at him for it.
• Expy Coexistence: Poppy QTπ is a very obvious homage to KOS-MOS and T-ELOS from Xenosaga. You can also obtain the original KOS-MOS and T-ELOS as Rare Blades.
• Eyebrows Burned Off: When Pyra melts a door to rescue Dromarch, she overdoes it a bit and Rex jokes for everyone to "check their eyebrows".
• The Faceless: Addam and the Aegis (Mythra, not Pyra) are portrayed this way in Cole's play, Addam as an abstract figure in full armor and Mythra as a faceless angel. Both of them somewhat resemble typical Yu-Gi-Oh! monsters.
• Faceless Goons:
  • Lampshaded verbatim by an Urayan soldier in Chapter 6. He says that they're all just "faceless goons" who obey their orders. CO says jump, they jump.
  • Played with earlier when you talk to one otherwise identical Driver in Mor Ardain, and he turns out to be a minor NPC you met earlier in the game.
• Facial Composite Failure: Nia's wanted poster in Gormott is depicted with Dromarch's face instead of her's. It takes Nia five seconds to tear it to shreds.
• False Flag Operation: Jin almost manages one when he hijacks an excavated Judicium Titan weapon from Ardainian hands in the neutral zone of Temperantia and uses it to destroy a fleet of Urayan ships. It is only due to the mediation of Indol that prevents all out war from breaking out between the two nations.
• Fanservice: This trope is played straight with several female characters, Pyra in particular, who is depicted as a voluptuous redhead wearing rather revealing clothing.
• Fantastic Measurement System: Distances are measured in units called "peds" and "titanpeds," which are essentially the equivalents of meters & kilometers.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • The Empire of Mor Ardain mixes both Roman and Imperial German influences. The localization also gives them a strong Scottish flavor - "Ardain" is a Scottish Gaelic word for "pride." Its people have Gaelic names and sport thick Scottish accents.
  • Gormott can count as one for Wales, with the resident Cat Folk Gormotti sporting Welsh accents. It also has plenty of green.
  • Uraya is a mix of English architecture and culture with Australian wildlife and accents.
  • Torna has a distinct Japanese flair. Their warriors wear Samurai armor and wield Japanese weapons. They also have Japanese names in the Japanese version.
  • Indol is one for the Vatican.
• Final Dungeon Preview: Subverted to great effect. In a cutscene very early in the game, Rex gets to see what might be Elysium, only for it to be vastly different and nowhere as nice as soon as the group finally reaches it.
• Finger in the Mail: Referenced when Akhos comments that they should have done this with Iona during the climax of Chapter 3.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The very first scene of Pyra introducing herself to Rex is a beat-for-beat recreation of Alvis introducing himself to Shulk, a very early hint at her true nature as an instantiation of one of the Trinity Processor supercomputers and the same type of existence as Alvis.
  • In the play about the Aegis War, the Aegis has blonde hair while Pyra's is clearly red. At first, it appears to be a case of Future Imperfect, but this is the first clue for Mythra's existence.
  • Mythra's presence is foreshadowed a number of times by Malos and other characters noting Pyra looks different from how she did in the past.
  • Pyra uses "we" a lot, especially when talking about the past and her own desires. While sometimes it sounds like she could be talking about Rex ("We want to go to Elysium"), in hindsight she's clearly talking about herself and Mythra together.
  • Malos uses powers that are clearly of the Dark element several times, even though Sever is explicitly a Wind Blade. After Mythra is revealed, we find out that he's another Aegis, the darkness to Mythra's light.
  • Despite being utterly sociopathic when it comes to human lives, Torna's Drivers tend to have breakdowns when their Blades are reverted to Core Crystals. This is because Torna's Drivers are actually Blades themselves, and so have a sense of kinship with them.
  • Nia's true nature as a Flesh Eater Blade is hinted at more than a few times. First with how she reacts to Cole/Minoth revealing his Flesh Eater nature. The second is her reaction to Obrona interfering with the ether flow in the area, she clutches her chest as though it is affecting her directly. The third is when she shares a bath with Mythra, where Mythra notices something about Nia's body, with Nia insisting Mythra keep it a secret. The fourth is that she was a member of Torna, an organization made up (almost) exclusively of Blades.
  • A Phonex you can talk with in Gormott will mention having a crush on the daughter of the Lord of Echell, whose mansion disappeared one day. This foreshadows the identity of Nia's original Driver.
  • Similarly, observant players can guess at Zeke's status as a Blade Eater long before it's formally revealed. Looking closely at Pandoria's core crystal reveals that she is missing part of it, and viewing Zeke from certain camera angles reveals the scar on his chest and a faint blue glow from the crystal inside his jacket. This can also be seen with Amalthus. The piece of Haze's core crystal attached to his forehead, while usually hidden by clever camera work during cutscenes, can be seen clear as day on his model if you know where to look.
  • When talking to Praetor Amalthus, Rex has a vision of seeing him as Malos implying that Malos might be controlling him in some way. This turns out to be a Red Herring, as it is later revealed that it isn't Malos manipulating Amalthus but that Malos is the way he is because of corruption from Amalthus.
  • In Chapter 6, Rex is suspicious of Praetor Amalthus after being freshly invited to meet him. When Rex questions if Pyra will be okay alone with the Praetor, Nia immediately dismisses his concern: "He's the Praetor, dimwit. What's he gonna do, eat her?" Chapter-by-chapter, this sentence unravels from a joke to a legitimate fear; Amalthus is one of the big bad guys and someone who did, in fact, eat a Blade, likely against their will. This wasn't a one-time thing, either; near the end of the game, he demonstrates the power to rip out Blades' Core Crystals and absorb them into his body, essentially "eating" them.
  • It's said that all Titans normally experience rising body temperature at the end of their lifespan, which is what is happening to Mor Ardain (and to a much lesser extent, the slightly younger Gormott). Tantal on the other hand, got colder. It's an early sign that Genbu's health problems aren't natural. For the express purpose of creating Core Chips, the Indoline Praetorium forced the Tantalese government to stick a machine into Genbu to suck out a huge amount of the Titan's ether for the last 500 years, which is the equivalent of its blood.
  • A support conversation between Rex, Shulk, Elma, and KOS-MOS will have Shulk recalling the words Alvis told him at the end of the first game, about all life "walking towards the future, hand in hand". While the words themselves predate their usage here, its the context in which these words are recalled (Shulk observing how him and Rex have come together, despite being from separate worlds) that ends up coming into play in Xenoblade Chronicles 3: that game follows up on the first two numbered entries by focusing on the people of the Bionis and Alrest uniting and defeating Z, a villain who was the embodiment of the human desire to remain living in an endless present and refusing to move towards the future.
  • Two instances of foreshadowing that end up taking a six-year payoff:
    • An interaction between Mythra and Shulk has Mythra noticing the significance of Shulk's Monado, with him seemingly clueing in to what she realized and telling her that they can talk about it another time. This went unmentioned in Torna, Future Connected, and 3, but ends up receiving payoff in Future Redeemed by explicitly confirming that Ontos/Alvis was the missing third Trinity Processor core.
    • Two-thirds through the story, Pyra and Mythra received a Fusion Dance form by way of Pneuma, who is also associated with the color green as opposed to Pyra's red and Mythra's white. The full significance of this wouldn't be realized until Future Redeemed, where it's revealed that the energy of the Pneuma core is what activates Ouroboros Interlinks, which operate similarly to Pyra and Mythra's fused form.
• Floating Continent: The world consists solely of these, even though they are floating on the ocean instead of in the sky.
• The Four Gods: Directly alluded to in the Japanese names for Azurda (Seiryu), Dromarch (Byakko), and Roc (Suzaku), and the Titan Genbu. It's foreshadowing for the later reveal that all Titans are evolved Blades and that all four represent different stages in the Titan life cycle.
• Full Health Bonus: Some Driver Arts, such as Rex's ether cannon art Daring Shot, his twin knives art Wind Slicer, or Nia's megalance art Vulture Peck, gain a damage boost of up to 75% (depending on the art's level) if the Driver using them has at least 90% of their maximum health. There are a few Blade Special Attacks that have this effect as well, such as Sheba's level 1 special Dessert Bomb or any of Poppi's specials with a Vital Charge RAM chip.
• Funetik Aksent: The Tirkin talk like this, on top of a You No Take Candle sentence structure similar to Nopon. In the English dub, they're voiced with Cockney accents.
  Head Fire Dragon: D-delishus! Mek Tirkin happy taste! Spicing and sweeting and salting.
• Future Imperfect: Zeke is quite annoyed whenever Pyra and Mythra point out that pretty much everything he knows about the hero Addam is wrong. Even minor things, like Addam's supposed favorite food, are wrong. This is because while they are related to Addam, the Tantalese royal family are not his descendants and the relative they descended from did not like Addam at all, so they just made everything up.
• Gaia's Lament: The bodies of the Titans blight as they near death. Mor Ardain is the most obvious, being a barren wasteland with a fever so bad it powers steam turbines. This is exacerbated by the Ardainians actively strip mining its rocky hide. Their capital city is built into the stump where its left arm was. It is unknown if it lost the arm to sheer age, human abuse, or something else. See Green Aesop.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Various non playable characters will usually have new dialog reacting to recent major events in the main story.
  • Poppi's status as an Artificial Blade is reflected in Gameplay just as much as it is in-story:
    • Mechanically, Poppi is buffed by finding parts. Among these parts are those can change her element and her role in-battle, something that other Blades (besides the Aegis, for reasons that're explained in-universe too) cannot do.
    • On several occasions, the Blades are weakened, explaining some characters Cutscene Incompetence. Poppi, however, is unaffected. The same happens in a dungeon in which Blades are weakened but not Poppi.
  • In New Game Plus, Mikhail of Torna can be recruited as a Blade. Unlike the other six members of Torna, Mikhail is not an actual Blade and cannot be summoned from a Core Crystal. He instead waits for the party in an secluded area after completing a quest that allows anyone not named Tora to bond with him.
  • Like the first Xenoblade, characters showing new techniques in cutscenes is rarely Cutscene Power to the Max, but instead a character getting a new ability, such as Rex learning how to Topple enemies with Anchor Shot from Vandham, Mythra overriding Pyra when Rex is in danger in Chapter 4 becoming a Critical Status Buff for Rex while equipped with Pyra, and Pyra, Nia and Rex's team attack against Amalthus becoming a Level 4 Special attack in Chapter 10.
  • All three times that you fight Zeke, the following cutscene has him getting screwed over by the terrain, whether it be the ground crumbling beneath his feet, a boulder chasing him off the titan, or the fence he's leaning on breaking. As Pandoria points out the second time this happens, Earth is his main weakness.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Non-story Rare Blades (obtained from random Core Crystals or sidequests) will help the party out in battle, but they do not appear in cutscenes unless it's their own Heart-to-Heart and/or sidequest.
  • Played with in regards to Roc and Poppi QT. You obtain both of them during the events of the story (the former when attempting to disperse an ether miasma in Gormott and the latter during the fight against Bana and Muimui in the Old Factory), but most if not every cutscene afterwards will depict neither of them. Sure, Rex will use Roc's scythes in Spirit Crucible Elpys, but Roc himself won't appear.
  • There are several times when you're trapped somewhere for various reasons, such as your party being swallowed by Uraya's Titan. Most of the time, you can fast travel elsewhere just as you could any other time. A particularly egregious example of this happens in Chapter 2, while rescuing Nia and Dromarch from the Ardainian ship. After busting both of them out of their cells, there's nothing stopping you from hopping back to Argentum to shop. However, if you want to trigger the boss fight and move on to the next chapter, you HAVE to keep exploring the ship and exit through its main entrance.
  • A number of post boss battle cutscenes will show the boss having a clear advantage over you, despite their defeat just moments ago.
  • Due to Pyra's sharing half of her life force with Rex, she does not regenerate from injuries automatically unlike other normal blades. And even normal blades can die if their core crystals get destroyed, the tactic which various characters use during cutscenes. Yet, in gameplay battles, Pyra and normal blades cannot be targeted by your and enemies' attacks, nor is Pyra at all impeded by injuries Rex suffers during gameplay battles.
  • It's established in early cutscenes that Pyra can melt her way through solid metal doors with relative ease, and that Rex's hookshot can enable the party to traverse large gaps with a bit of time and effort. It's also established Drivers and Blades alike can leap substantial distances/heights without a problem. However, in actual gameplay you'll often need to have lots of field skills interacting with each other to perform similar feats, not to mention the times when the only way to get through a mundane door is to find the key.
  • In the latter half of Chapter 7, Nia is shown fighting in her Blade form throughout the rest of the chapter, despite that in gameplay you could have set her back as a Driver.
  • When Jin briefly rejoins the party in Morytha, he simply reuses his player character model and artwork from the beginning of the game. Including the mask that at this point hasn't been worn for about three chapters.
  • During the final chapter, Pyra and Mythra have their powered-up form activated by the Architect, and remain so in all cutscenes. However, in gameplay this fails to stick, and you have to activate the form the usual way.
  • Doing early game sidequests with additional party members can lead to them showing up in cutscenes but not doing anything. Of note is Vess's recruitment quest, where Mòrag and Zeke will just awkwardly stand in the background while Rex, Nia, and Tora enjoy some dumplings. Electra's Blade Quest is even worse in this regard, as it's the only one that can potentially have Vandham in the party, but since the quest itself takes up a good portion of the game, Mòrag and Zeke will show up towards the end of it. Zeke will even mention watching Electra growing up before his eyes even though he probably wasn't even there if the player summoned Electra early enough.
  • A sidequest involves following a nopon named Foorara as he travels around Alrest. Finding him in one area and talking to him will cause him to move to the next area, where the process will be repeated until he comes back in Argentum where he started. After meeting him in Mor Ardain's Hardhaigh Palace, Foorara's next location will be Indol. If the player didn't find him in Indol before it becomes inaccessible in chapter 8, then he will instead be found in Mor Ardain's port, claiming to have fled Indol. Problem is, it's entirely possible talk to him in Hardhaigh Palace AFTER Indol gets destroyed. So Foorara will express his desire to visit Indol... and then immediately go to the port, claiming to have fled a Titan that had already sank to the bottom of the cloud sea at the time.
  • Rex's hookshot is apparently long enough to salvage from the World Tree itself but not long enough to cross the gap separating him from Pyra/Mythra in the ending cutscene.
  • Lampshaded in the production notes detailing the new Blades added by the New Game Plus mode; it acknowledges that you'll be able to acquire the Torna Blades as allies while they're still enemies in-story, which totally wrecks the story, but since this is a repeat playthrough it doesn't matter. On that note, Pyra/Mythra stays with Rex throughout the entire game, not leaving the party at points where she's supposed to be out of commission, including the infamous Chapter 7. In fact, Mythra and Pneuma will be available throughout too, to the point that if you ended your last playthrough with Mythra, the first thing you'll see when Rex is controllable is that Mythra is by his side and the tutorial Crustip being on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle having been slain by the Aegis.
  • The city you visit on each of the continental Titans is usually noted to be the biggest or "main" city on that Titan. However, it is likewise often noted or implied that there are other towns and cities on a given Titan, you just don't have reason or opportunity to visit them. The disconnect come in how often you can explore such a large portion of a given Titan's body that its hard to imagine where there would be enough room for these extra towns and cities to even conceivably be located (Mor Ardain has its right shoulder, and Gormott has its left shoulder, but Uraya and Tantal seem completely explored).
  • Several characters and story events constantly emphasize the importance of a Driver and their Blade fighting as one in order to draw out their true battle potential. This isn't fully reflected in gameplay, as the Drivers will be the ones doing most of the fighting while the Blades will be standing to the side to share and build up Affinity, only occasionally attacking using their Specials when commanded to by their Drivers.
• Gameplay Protagonist, Story Protagonist: From a gameplay standpoint, the game is about Rex using the fabled Aegis Sword to get to Elysium. Said sword's human forms, Pyra and Mythra, are the characters everyone is making a big deal out of, hold the knowledge to bring people to Elysium, and receive far more character development, in growing from being suicidal from their past actions and using the pretense of leading humanity to paradise to get to Elysium, to learning to appreciate their life and the people around them, while Rex functions more as an emotional support figure to them.
• Game Within a Game: The Tiger! Tiger! minigame that can be played in Tora's house is a game in the style of old 8-bit arcade games.
• Genius Loci: The game's landmasses are massive, sentient Titans.
• Genre Refugee: The game isn't afraid to use different styles for its characters, but it is the organization of Torna that really sticks out as a group of transplanted Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts characters, especially thanks to being designed by Tetsuya Nomura himself. Mikhail looks like he'd be the hero of his own Final Fantasy game and he indeed is the Token Good Teammate that pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice, Patroka looks and acts like an evil Tifa, Jin looks and acts as a cross between a typical FF hero and Sephiroth which is fitting for his Fallen Hero status while Malos and Akhos respectively would also be The Big Guy and Deadpan Snarker of a Final Fantasy party just as much as they are in Torna.
• Genre Shift: While the game is pretty consistently Science Fantasy, it's apparent that it's also not afraid to crossover into Mecha, Space Opera and After the End tropes, the latter two especially getting focus at the end.
• Ghibli Hills: In true Xenoblade fashion, gorgeous vistas and enjoyable exploration are par the course.
• The Ghost: Two from the first game:
  • Zanza, the Literal Split Personality and Evil Twin of The Architect, whose imminent death is what will cause the Conduit to disappear, and thus forces the heroes into a Race Against the Clock for the final stretch of the game.
  • Ontos, the missing third core of the Trinity Processor and Long Lost Sibling to Malos/Logos and Pneuma/Pyra & Mythra. Players of the first game, however, will be more familiar with his identity as Alvis/the Monado.
• Golden Snitch: Boreas' quest "Hero of the Nopon" involves being challenged by "Yumyum the Burglar" to collect certain items before he could. After you fairly beat him in the first two rounds, Yumyum refuses to accept defeat. He declares the first two were just a warmup, and the 3rd round decides it all. Nia calls him out for making stuff up as he goes.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Zeke and Pandoria act like this, running into and fighting the protagonists multiple times before something bad happens to them. In truth they are representatives of Tantal, and want to have some fun with the protagonists before inviting them there, which is when their bad luck interrupts them.
• Gone Horribly Right: Some of the original humans tried to become immortal by using Core Crystals to replace their dying brain cells. They became immortal and survived the destruction of Earth, but have turned into feral abominations as a result.
• The Good Kingdom: The Kingdom of Uraya, whose domain is entirely contained within their Titan. They have a mastery of biotechnology that all the other nations apparently lack, and a deep respect for nature. Their military even falls under The Unfought category since there's little need to fight with them story-wise. That said, their society is also heavily stratified by class, and many of them are deeply prejudiced against Ardainians.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Applies to most instances where anything resembling gore on a humanoid body would be expected. In multiple cases characters get impaled through the chest, but clever camera angles and cut aways keep the viewer from actually seeing the actual physical contact with the flesh.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Averted. While "Titan's foot!" is the most common exclamation, some characters do use actual swears.
• Gratuitous English: The battle narration in the Japanese version.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • Praetor Amalthus, given he is the one who awoke Malos who proceeded to absorb some of Amalthus's worldview and decide to destroy everything. He does step down to an active villain in Chapters 8 and 9, but it is clear that Malos still needs stopping.
  • The Saviorite rebels are essentially this to the greater universe of both Xenoblade games, being that their attack on the Beanstalk was what pushed Klaus to cross the Godzilla Threshold and activate his experiment on the Conduit before the station was overrun.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed would reveal who the leader of the Saviorite rebels is. The person who is responsible for the Saviorites, and by extension, indirectly responsible for everything that happened in the greater Xenoblade universe, is Dmitri Yuriev.
  • Zanza, the Big Bad of the first game and Literal Split Personality of The Architect, as his imminent death and conflict against the heroes of that game are what initiate the Race Against the Clock in the final stretch of the game, as well as his death being the reason why the Conduit will end up disappearing.
• Green Aesop: Played straight then subverted. The first half of the game has most people continually push that overexploiting the Titans and refusing to respect the nature they provide is killing what little land is left and is why they're going extinct. It's later revealed that this isn't actually what's happening at all, the Titans should be thriving and are only are dying off because Amalthus is keeping their offspring, aka Blades, from developing into Titans and reproducing; all in order to fulfill his desire to kill everyone on the planet.
• Green Hill Zone: The titan of Gormott is this, with vibrant, lush grasslands galore. It's also the first "real" titan of the game after Argentum Goldmouth.
• Grey Goo: The Cloud Sea is actually a mass of re-constructor particles that happen to have the same density as water when compacted, but spread out at their surface. They don't just wildly self-replicate though, instead breaking down anything that lies inert for too long and rebuilding pieces of pre-apocalypse technology with the resources.
• Grimy Water: Purple water that deals damage can be found scattered across various Titans, usually in remote or polluted areas such as Uraya's mouth or next to the Ardainian military base in Gormott. In some areas, such as Temperantia and Spirit Crucible Elpys all of the water is dangerous.
• Guest Fighter: KOS-MOS and T-ELOS from Xenosaga, Shulk and Fiora from the original Xenoblade Chronicles, and Elma from Xenoblade Chronicles X can be recruited as rare Blades.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Premium cylinders are very limited in number, but there is a way to buy them. Good luck figuring out how without a guide.^note You must sleep at an inn and then check the cylinder vendor. Repeat the process until the premium cylinder shows up. As of this writing, you need to have cleared chapter 7 and have a salvager rank of at least B, but it's unknown if there are any other requirements to make premium cylinders appear. Oh, and do your best to not sleep at an inn again once they appear - otherwise they'll vanish, and you'll have to repeat the process!
  • Several sidequests require quest items that might give you a general area to search at best. If you're lucky, there will be a merc mission or an informant to give you a heading. If you're not, good luck searching every nook and cranny of the game world.
  • The effect of blade boosters and thought cloud stats are not well established, with your only clues being one NPC around the second half of the game and some particle effects around the Core Crystals when using boosters. Each of the four types boost the likelihood of bonding with a blade with two of the eight elements.
    • Bravery: Fire and Water.
    • Truth: Wind and Ice.
    • Compassion: Electric and Earth.
    • Justice: Dark and Light.
  • The farmer next to the baby Ardun in Torigoth implies that you have to train it to fight. Cue Video Game Cruelty Potential and Permanently Missable Content when you kill it.

H to M

• Harmless Freezing: Downplayed in the quest "The Driver in Ice", where the titular Driver Therida has been alive despite being frozen in ice for five years after a battle, but the Quest is prompted by her Blade, Llonya, who has been searching for sufficiently powerful Blades to free her in all that time and mentions they can feel through their connection her time is running out. Even after Rex and the party thaw her out of her ice crystal, which has essentially turned into a idol of worship for the Garluses that scared off her attackers, she's unconscious and they need to give her four Amethyst Vanillas, which are noted to specifically for helping frostbite and freezing victims, before she can recover enough to wake up and move. Llonya still insists they need to go back to Tantal's capital Theosoir for her to recover completely and get up to speed on what she's missed.
• Head Butting Heroes: Godfrey and Perceval, two "Justice" Blades, are often at odds with each other due to their personalities clashing. Godfrey dislikes Perceval's loner tendencies while Perceval dislikes how loud and simple minded Godfrey is.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: There are multiple boss fights where the player has to win the fight to progress, but the immediate cutscene will have the characters struggling to stand or somehow defeated immediately afterwards even if you overpowered the bosses.
• Heart Drive: A Blade's Core Crystal is the source of their being, and sufficient damage to it will kill them instantly and permanently with no chance of revival. The Aegises are the only ones capable of surviving without their Core Crystals for at least a time and in conditions far worse than any other Blade. Malos had a huge chunk of his crystal shattered at the end of his battle with Mythra five hundred years ago and has been able to endure with only the inability to draw upon much of his true Aegis powers. Pyra meanwhile transferred half of her Core Crystal to Rex to replace his damaged heart and bring him back to life. This also would have been how Pyra would have kept Rex alive had she gone through with her threat to kill herself to defy Jin at the end of Chapter 6 by transferring all of her crystal to him to remove their connection and restore his heart in the instant before she annihilated herself with Siren's targeting laser. Another exception would be the process of creating a Blade Eater, as Pandoria had part of her Core Crystal removed and surgically implanted into Zeke to save his life.
• He Knows Too Much: After obtaining the Aegis in the first chapter, Malos orders Nia to murder the remaining salvagers to keep her a secret. Fortunately, Nia refuses to go through with it, and Pyra reawakens before Malos can do it himself.
• Hidden Elf Village: The Kingdom of Tantal is an isolationist state. The inhabitants are the descendants of the survivors of the lost kingdom of Torna, and claim it was founded by Addam, the original Driver of Mythra. However, this claim is false, and the isolation is due to wanting the truth kept secret. The trope is also deconstructed, as the means by which Tantal hides itself results in an inhospitable climate where next to nothing can grow, and its isolationist nature means next to nothing can come in (legally), leaving a population that's starving and living in ruins. Zeke even says it's like living in a museum with no visitors.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The game's one Background Boss deals with the logistical challenges of this by having a hitbox that covers the entire (massive) arena it's fought it. Meaning the party will be swinging weapons in places not even tangentially related to the boss's physical space, and still connecting.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum: Mythra can usually only make use of Siren's lasers when the sky is unobstructed, lest she risk collapsing whatever happens to be in the way on top of her and the rest of the party. Naturally, most boss fights after this point either take place inside or concoct another reason for Siren to not be used- such as the Judicium Titan weapon having unstable and explosive fuel that would kill the party if Mythra tried to shoot it down with Siren.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: The game's dialog features a healthy amount of slang, swears, etc. utilizing the names of creatures found in their world. For instance, Rex makes use of ones like "Titan's foot!" as an exclamation of frustration/anger, while Zeke at one point remarks "Armus will fly before that man welcomes me home."
• Hufflepuff House:
  • Two of the Titans that sank during the Aegis War aren't even named during the story. It doesn't make a difference, but it's odd that nobody musing on the backstory (several of whom were there) even says the names out loud. Even in the Torna Expansion Pack, which takes place during the Aegis War, one of them remains unnamed.
  • The Architect reveals that Malos and Pyra/Mythra were based around two of the three cores of the Trinity Processor (Logos and Pneuma, respectively) that he used to activate the Conduit, and later used to help create the blades and rebuild the world. The third, Ontos, was lost before it could be used and thus never received another name like the others. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition confirms Alvis to be Ontos by replacing the key around his neck with a Core Crystal shaped exactly like Pyra and Malos' Core Crystals, only red instead of green or purple.
• Humongous Mecha: Not as common as prior Xeno games, but still important in the plot, including a white mecha called Siren that serves Mythra. Malos had a lot of black mecha under his command in the past as revealed in flashbacks, but most of them were destroyed during the Aegis War. These machines had been developed on Earth in the 21st century and fought in its final war before Klaus activated the Conduit. The generic term for them is "Artifice" and the most powerful Artifice ever created, Aion, serves as the Final Boss with Malos as its pilot, with him also commanding the other Artifices stored in the World Tree to start razing Alrest. The third, Artifice Ophion, is a bonus boss that you can encounter on a cleared game file.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: Engaging Blades of the Chroma Katana weapon class turns Drivers into this, with the added twist that their sheaths have cutting edges as well, and is frequently used as an offhand weapon or swung with extra weight by not drawing the primary sword first.
  • Played more straight with Jin, who lacks a conventional belt-attached sheath for his sword, but uses it by charging up devastating and powerful swings.
• Idle Animation: Every character and their blades has a variety of idle animations. Some examples from Drivers include Rex putting his arms behind his head and looking around, Nia doing some stretches, and Tora doing a silly little dance. Examples from Blades include Pyra creating and juggling a small flame, Mythra squatting, Dromarch jumping as if to catch a flying insect, and Poppi dancing.
• Implied Answer: During Fan's funeral, Mythra speculates on how Fan could have lost half her core crystal, suggesting that it looks like it had been stolen. In a moment of Foreshadowing, the camera pans to Amalthus.
• Infinity +1 Element: The Light Element acts a bit like this. Light element enemies are pretty rare so it will seldom be resisted. Only two Rare Blades - Mythra and KOS-MOS - have it, generic Blades never do, and Poppi's equippable Light Core is the most difficult to find^note It's a rare prize from the big chest in Tiger Tiger's final stage, and can't be generated from ether crystals in the Poppiswap shop. There is a reason why the legendary Aegis's power primarily comes from Light.
• Innocent Innuendo:
  • After agreeing to be partners, the very first thing Pyra asks Rex to do is touch her chest. She's obviously talking about the glowing crystal sitting on top of her sternum, but Rex still has a mild double-take.
  • While exchanging insults Nia calls Zeke a "one-eyed monster"^note British slang for penis in reference to his eyepatch. The rest of the party pauses to try and educate her, while Rex gets slapped into next week (and a boss battle) by an embarrassed Mythra.
• Innocently Insensitive: While overlooking the ruins of Morytha, Mythra gives a speech about how overreliance and abuse of technology leads to humanity's downfall... to Poppi. Who, being the sweet robotic child she is, is immediately distraught by the idea that she might cause the death of everyone she loves.
• Instant Expert: Rex picks up toppling enemies with his anchor after one demonstration from Vandham, who took years of trying to get it down. Justified, as Rex has plenty of skill with one of the primary tools of his trade, and already used that anchor for several off-the-book problem solutions in cutscenes prior to this.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Averted with Vandham. He has a full Affinity tree, dialog exchanges with the rest of the party for incidents in the field, and a bit of dialog that suggests the reason he won't bond additional Blades is story-driven. Needless to say, he doesn't live long enough for that to be relevant.
  • Subtly played straight with Mòrag. The fact that she can bond with additional Blades and being required for a few sidequests implies that she won't meet the same fate as Vandham, despite claiming to only temporarily join the party. The fact that Mòrag will join the party is practically given away if the party decides to do a sidequest in Mor Ardain the second it becomes available. The sidequest in question leads to a murder investigation, but you are blocked from proceeding until you get the help of someone familiar with Mor Ardain. At that point, there's really only one candidate for this: Mòrag.
  • You get Blade Nia at a point where Pyra's been kidnapped by Malos and Jin for the span of an entire chapter (pretty long time), with seemingly no way for our heroes to have the power to save her, especially after recently failing to get the Third Aegis in order to defeat them. It seems like they might be permanently unable to save Pyra before she's taken to the World Tree. But if you look in Nia's skill tree, you'll see that her Fortitude Nodes say that she must fight alongside Pyra/Mythra in order to level these up, spoiling that you do eventually rescue Pyra/Mythra and get them back in your party. This being such a big plot point makes you wonder why they didn't just set those key nodes to be question marks like Roc in order to avoid spoilers.
  • Played straight with the silhouettes in the Blade Album. Brighid and Pandoria are pretty unmistakable, and the fact that they're located up at the top alongside the other main Blades of party members gives a heavy hint to Mòrag and Zeke's eventual joining. Poppi's two evolved states are also quite noticeable, nestled between her base state and Roc despite no additional party members joining between Tora and Vandham. Aegaeon's silhouette would also imply that something is going to happen to Niall. If you looked at all the silhouettes, this pretty much gives away that Vess's Driver is going to die. This is further reinforced by the Blade being unique, unlike all other NPC's Blades: why would they bother to create an unique Blade and give it to an unimportant/not plot-relevant NPC?.
  • Done with Floren in the Mercenary Missions menu. Assigning Floren to a job that requires a Blade of a specific gender reveals that Floren's a guy, but the boy himself never tells the party this until the end of his sidequest, in which they all react with complete surprise.
  • Downplayed in the Merc Group menu. The symbol for Leftheria is the same symbol as the one on the ship where Pyra was held, implying Fonsett's link to Addam and the Aegis.
  • One of Aegaeon's affinity rewards requires three stars of development on each Titan that has one. This reward is unlocked even if Indol hasn't reached three stars yet, hinting at an observant player that something's going to happen to it.
• Internal Homage: The boxart depicts a scene with a red sword planted on a grassland (that is part of a Titan) and facing another Titan from a distance, a nod to Xenoblade Chronicles 1 boxart. The only difference is that the wielders are visible.
• Invented Linguistic Distinction: All over the English dub. Every nation/race of Alrest is distinguished by a different dialect, mostly borrowed from parts of Britain and provided by authentic actors. The range of British accents is wider than in the first Xenoblade Chronicles 1, expanding to include accents from northern England, Scotland and Wales, and also throwing Australian and American accents into the mix.
  • Leftherians all sound like north Englanders. Rex himself has a Mancunian accent.
  • The Gormotti all speak with Welsh accents, typically southern ones.
  • Ardainians all sound Scottish, usually Glaswegian in particular, although some in the upper classes such as Mòrag instead speak with Edinburgh accents.
  • Argentum as a nation is something of a melting pot, but members of the native Nopon race typically speak in lower class southern English accents. The Nopon also retain their unique dialect of broken English and odd terminologies from the previous Xenoblade games.
  • The Tantalese also speak like southern Englanders, but their royalty (except Zeke) speak in Received Pronunciation for a more upper class sound. They share this with the people of the long dead nation of Torna, implying that Tantal inherited this from them.
  • Urayans are one of the few races to use a non-UK dialect, speaking like Australians instead. They even use distinctly Australian words like bonzer or crikey.
  • The Indoline are another exception, speaking with an American accent. However, they specifically have a more Mid-Atlantic sound, which is an accent that mixes elements of American midwest with English Received Pronunciation, so they're not wholly atypical.
  • Blades as a race lack a nation or culture to learn language from, but for whatever reason they all have American accents. Unlike the Indoline, they aren't restrained to any particular one. Though most of them speak with "typical" midwestern accents, there are some variations, including New York and Dixie. Nia and technically Azurda are the only shown exceptions to this, but both are also far from regular Blades, with Nia being a Flesh Eater fused with a Gormotti and Azurda having completed his evolution into a Titan and long since forgotten his time as a Blade. Mikhail is another oddity, speaking with an American accent despite actually being a Blade Eater, and thus originally human. However, this is notably only true for him as an adult. As a child, he speaks with the appropriate accent of his native Torna, suggesting that somewhere in his hundreds of years of life living with the organization of Torna, a group consisting of American sounding Blades, his dialect shifted. Unlike the first game, the game's text also generally uses American spellings and grammar despite being translated in the UK (even in the European release), likely due to the knowledge that it would be localized for an international audience from the beginning, although there are some lapses into British terminology.
• Ironic Name: The Indoline Praetorium is named after the sin that involves being apathetic towards religious and spiritual matters. Also ironic for general apathy when they do end up being more involved in battle near the end of the story.
• Irony:
  • The legends of Alrest say that the Aegises were made by the Architect himself, and Pyra/Mythra and Malos refer to the Architect as 'Father'. As it turns out, they are the only Blades on Alrest that were not definitely created by the Architect.
  • King Eulogimenos of Tantal reveals to Zeke that the Tantalese, supposedly the descendants of Addam Origo, were founded by "just a cadet branch", and they only used the name of the beloved hero to win the peoples' approval. While it's true that they were not founded by Addam, their true founder Zettar had more of a claim to the Tornan throne than Addam ever did.
• It Began with a Twist of Fate: Rex only got only involved in escorting Pyra to Elysium because Torna had hired him to help salvage the ship she was sealed in. Justified in that Torna needed a Leftherian to open the door that sealed Pyra, and Rex happened to be one of the best young Salvagers in Argentum.
• It Makes Sense in Context: A minor example with Pyra saying the following to Rex at the end of their conversation when they first meet (this is so Rex can have half of Pyra's life force in order to be revived after being fatally impaled by Jin):
  Pyra: "Now place your hand on my chest."
• It's All Upstairs From Here: Chapter 9 consists of climbing the World Tree for a very long time.
• Jiggle Physics: Almost all Blades with a sizable bust tend to jiggle noticeably when moving, some more than others (Pyra/Mythra are rather subdued, Perun jiggles like jell-o at the slightest motion, Dahlia is somewhere in-between).
• Just Before the End: From near the very beginning of the game, it's pointed out Alrest is slowly approaching this point since more and more Titans are reaching the end of their lives and dying, but fewer and fewer new Titans capable of supporting life are being discovered. The reason why Mor Ardain annexed Gormott is because of the imminent threat of Mor Ardain becoming uninhabitable because of the rising temperatures due to the Titan dying. The protagonists also later ponder if something similar is happening to Gormott due to its crops starting to grow less. And unknown to literally everyone in Alrest save for Malos and the heroes at the endgame, the World Tree is on the clock to collapse as The Architect's death is imminent due to the concurrent events of the first Xenoblade Chronicles 1.
• Kissing Discretion Shot: Or in this case, affection discretion shot. In the ending, after Pyra and Mythra are revived, with a push and a nod from Nia, Rex starts walking up to the two, but the cutscene cuts to the chapter end card before he can show any kind of affection. This is most likely left to the player's imagination, but even so, anyone who got attatched to Rex and/or the Aegises were probably left with a void of not seeing them finally embrace after all that's happened, ship teases included. As consolation, the player does get to see Rex holding hands with both Pyra and Mythra as they stand on the new continent for the completed game's title screen.
• Lag Cancel:
  • A core mechanic of the game. After an auto-attack, the player can cancel into an Art, Blade switch, or Special. This removes lag and builds up the special meter more quickly. One can also cancel Arts into Specials to make them more powerful. Each party member can obtain an upgrade that allows them to Lag Cancel Arts into other Arts themselves.
  • You can also interrupt auto-attacks by flicking the L-stick, making your character take a half step and immediately strike again. Very useful for skipping long, heavy swing animations.
• Land Shark: Aligo are semi-aquatic and often aggressive shark-like creatures who have two massive arms instead of side fins.
• Laser Blade: Pyra's weapon is a red sword that can ignite a serrated green blade of light, giving the impression that the sword is on fire. When Mythra manifests, the weapon transforms into an outright double-bladed sword of bright light.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The game's official patch notes for the version 1.3.0 update spoils Akhos and Patroka's identities as Blades.
  • Mythra's existence assuming someone bought the game without watching any trailers.
  • If you care about Spirits in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, you will know that Xenoblade 2 will include a mysterious Pyra-esque character named Pneuma. Ironically, this is only a spoiler if you know it's a spoiler, since you wouldn't know right away that Pneuma is Pyra and Mythra's temporary fusion alter.
• Late Character Syndrome: Rare Blades that you acquire past the half-way point fall into this. By Chapter 6 or 7, you've probably got a set of rare blades on each party member whose moves you know by heart and who have been building up Trust and their affinity charts the whole time, making it less worth it to restart a brand new blade from scratch. Downplayed with a New Game Plus, in which you keep all your blades and can therefore play the new game with your undeveloped ones if you wish.
• Leaked Experience: Benched party members still get full experience and skill point awards (they even get some extra bonus experience in the process). The only thing they miss out on is weapon points, which can easily be compensated by items that boost weapon points obtained by maxing out blade affinity charts.
• Level Limiter: The game lets you adjust your level in New Game Plus.
• Lighter and Softer: The tone of this game in comparison to the first game. Not surprising, considering how the first game's plot revolved around a quest of revenge and killer robots, with an event that could be considered painful, unwilling transformation mixed with genocide. This makes sense considering the supreme deity of this universe is the good half of the being whose evil half was the Big Bad of Xenoblade Chronicles.
• Lip Lock: The game suffers from this for both the English and Japanese dubs, as the characters' lip movements were animated before the audio was recorded. While other Nintendo games such as Fire Emblem: Awakening also had this problem, this game is far more cutscene-heavy than previous instances and also suffers from English voice direction that was largely done in one take, which makes the lack of lip sync even more noticeable. The one exception is the final cutscene in the game, where the lip movements are re-animated to match most, if not all, of the English dialogue for the international release.
• Living Weapon:
  • All Blades are immortal Guardian Entities who are able to materialize weapons and can cast spells and attacks, but need Drivers to wield them. They also have the ability to quickly recover from injuries unless the Core Crystal on their bodies is destroyed, or their Driver dies. Monsters are not exempt from being Drivers. Neither are Blades.
  • Special mention to Ursula, a cute little Blade whose summoned weapon is a live polar bear. ^note Sadly, no clubbing people with a bear involved. You only get to wield the thing's claws as a fist weapon.
• Lost Technology: All over the place. Salvagers can make a killing diving into the Cloud Sea and fishing up ancient technology, and fallen nations like Torna or Judicium left behind all manner of advanced weaponry, such as massive warships that are also Transforming Mecha for the former and Titan superweapons plus the knowledge to create Flesh Eater Blades for the latter. And that's saying nothing about all the technological goodies left behind in the World Tree by Earth's former human civilization, including various combat mechs.
• Love Potion:
  • One quest in Tantal involves helping a scientist obtain the final ingredients she needs to brew a potion she claims will revolutionize Alrest. It's actually one of these and she just wants to get the attention of a guy she likes, though she does compensate the party for their time. Talking to her afterwards will have her sadly reveal it did work...but due to an accident he looked at some other woman first as the potion was taking effect and proceeded to sweep her off her feet. She admits she probably deserved that and affirms her desire to actually start working selflessly from now on.
  • A DLC Expansion Quest from Poppi QT involves crafting a "Love Source" potion, as she wants to better understand the concept of love. Even Tora is a bit worried about this, but aside from boosting her sense of affection for Tora it doesn't do much else as they both note. However, completing this quest allows the party to craft Love Source pouch items with the necessary materials, and though it's a bit of a slog to constantly go back to grab the Flutterheart Grass key item from Tantal each time for another one, it's worth it as they give the most potent Trust increase for Blades at 3,000 per use.
• MacGuffin Girl: The Aegis, a legendary Blade sought by many factions in Alrest; she also goes by 'Pyra'. Or 'Mythra', depending.
• Magic Feather: The third sword Addam sealed away is completely inert, and serves as bait for a deathtrap to kill off anyone greedy enough to want its power. Reaching it alive and fighting off Addam's own phantasms to access the sword requires the strength of character to open Pyra and Mythra's hearts and access that power naturally.
• Marathon Boss: Some of the bosses in Challenge Mode have an absurd amount of HP and defense, such as the Strategizer Nitro which is Level 200, and you'll barely be cracking a Hundred damage in each hit unless you have Phase Transition Tech (Which is only available from T-Elos and KOS-MOS). However that one you're not actually meant to beat, just weaken it enough until Wave 3. The ones you actually have to beat that count as this are Immovable Heir Carlos which has 38 million HP, and upgraded Cloud Sea King Ken which has 50 Million HP. Even with everyone at S+ rank (Including Poppi QT Pi) and with 8 orbs, it can be very hard to kill them with a chain attack, let alone get an Overkill. In Bringer of Chaos Mode the upgraded Cloud Sea King Ken has over 120 million HP, which is higher than Gradivus the Headless Emperor.
• Meaningful Echo: One that spans all the way back to the first Xenoblade where Klaus hears Shulk's Pre-Mortem One-Liner to Zanza about felling a god as the Xenoblade 2 protagonists are fighting toe-to-toe with the godlike Aion.
• Merchant City: The Argentum Trade Guild.
• Meta Twist: In contrast to the wicked gods of past games in the franchise, the Architect is just as benevolent as the world's population believes him to be. The point being that Klaus is disgusted at the idea that someone (including himself at one time) could think he's a god at all.
• Meteor Move: The Smash finisher of the Driver Combo, dealing large amounts of damage while also spawning a round of the enemy's drop rewards.
• Mid-Season Upgrade:
  • In a late chapter, Rex gains the ability to equip any Blade in the party (except Poppi), while Pyra and Mythra get a Super Mode that improves her damage output by a factor of 10 and lets her choose what element her specials are. Rex also learns to Dual Wield Pyra and Nia in a level 4 special if specific conditions are met.
  • The same chapter has a sidequest that upgrades Poppi to a powerful third form.
• Mighty Glacier: Strength-based Tanks fall into this category due to the nature of their Arts, which immobilize them to increase defense.
• Mind Screwdriver: The game's last story beats prove to be one for the ending of the original Xenoblade Chronicles 1, explaining the context behind Klaus' experiement and implying Alvis to be one of the three Aegis.
• Minovsky Physics: Ether particles. They're present in the atmosphere, and Blades draw them in to pass that energy on to their Driver, allowing them to use Arts. The particles can also be gathered using technology and the energy they contain used to perform work via machinery. If something or someone can can remove ether from the air (such as Obrona's abilities, or the atmosphere in the Spirit Crucible), Blades are starved of the energy they need to fight, either underperforming or being paralyzed in severe cases. Ether particles are also subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics. When Jin chills an area to absolute zero, ether particles lose their energy too.
• Mirror Match: The boss fight with Akhos, Mikhail, and Patroka at Tantal. It's three on three, they have the same Damager, Healer, Tank setup the player probably is, use skills like aggro management and position, and debuffs only last as long on them as they do on you.
• Mon: Blades function similarly to the collectible characters in games such as Fate/Grand Order and Fire Emblem Heroes and are acquired through a gacha system, complete with a Gotta Catch Them All aspect. Mercifully, it isn't monetized given that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a full-priced retail game, but the struggle to get rare Blades such as KOS-MOS is still there.
• Money for Nothing: Averted in a lot of ways. You'll need a lot of gold to obtain and max out several of the rare Blades, and raising the Development Level of the various Titans will certainly burn a hole in your wallet.
• Money Is Experience Points: In Patch 1.3.0, Bonus EXP can be exchanged for valuable items with Traveling Bards.
• Money Multiplier: A Chain Attack can push its unlucky target to death and beyond. Once the enemy's lifebar runs out, a "Bonus" counter begins to accumulate. The more damage you deal with the rest of the Chain Attack, the higher your EXP, gold, and item winnings will be.
• Ms. Fanservice: Pick a female rare Blade and they probably are one. Human females tend to be practically dressed, such as Morag and Nia — in her human disguise, at least, though female mercenaries and dancers can be rather skimpy in their own right.
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: Tetsuya Takahashi has stated in interviews that the Xeno metaseries's focus on psychological drama resulted in the franchise being predominantly popular with female audiences, and discussed making games that appeal more to male fans by creating characters with a greater focus on their external appearances. Sure enough, 2 features a Cast of Snowflakes, many of whom are veritable Ms Fanservices.
• Multiple Endings: An extremely mild example. There are two versions of the ending cutscene, depending on which name you picked for Pyra and Mythra's Pneuma form. The only difference is that the camera pans across one girl who smiles at Rex, before zooming in on the one whose name you chose who says something to Rex^note Probably "I love you" before the scene cuts out.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Just like the first game, the Optional Boss Nopon does not play the typical unique monster theme, instead it plays Rosa's battle theme.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Played With in that the characters are not necessarily amazed by the objects but are often mystified by them to some extent. The Cloud Sea reconstructs many things from the old Earth that salvagers then bring to the surface. The names they get given seldom give much indication as to what the objects actually were, and Rex notes at one point that in many cases nobody has been able to figure out what the objects were originally intended for and thus they get used for other, sometimes improvised, purposes. Despite having achieved a fair level of technological advancement, the different paths the people of Alrest have taken to achieve this advancement mean that they don't always have a parallel to the old world that they understand. This gets played up further when they reach the space station Elysium. The group are able to ascertain it when they come upon a old park, get that a tricycle is a child's vehicle of some sort, etc. but none of them can figure out what a damaged swingset is or how exactly it was meant to be used. Nia wonders if it is some kind of exercise equipment, while Tora seems to not understand what material it is made out of despite all the metals and plastics he works with.
• Mundane Solution: As shown by Brighid, there's an easy way for reincarnated Blades to learn about their past: write a diary. Unfortunately, the shortcomings of said solution are just as mundane, in that it's hard to keep your journal safe when your Driver is dead and you're a motionless rock. She admits that she's rather privileged in that regard, being a treasured imperial heirloom that has entire official chronicles written about her lives.
• Musical Nod: The main battle theme contains snippets of You Will Know Our Names.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The game takes place on the bodies of various giant beasts called "Titans," similar to how Xenoblade Chronicles 1 takes place on the Bionis and the Mechonis.
  • The Aegis Core Crystals have the same shape as the Zohar from Xenogears and Xenosaga and the Lifehold modules from Xenoblade Chronicles X. Then there's the Conduit, which is not only shaped like but is identical to the Zohar in function and role.
  • Territorial Rotbart returns once again, reprising his role as a level 81 Unique Monster the player can encounter (and die horribly to) early on.
  • Immovable Gonzalez returns as a level 90 unique monster. Poppi makes a comment that she feels strong enough to move him.
  • Tora, a brown Nopon with tan markings, shares his name and design with Tatsu's business nemesis — something that Elma takes notice of.
  • When initiating a Chain Attack, a mini-cutscene plays with the party members in Ass Kicking Pose and V-Formation Team Shot, similar to Shulk's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros..
  • Ether is again a damage type, separated from physical damage. Various arts for various weapons may use either type.
  • Once again, the Corrupt Corporate Executive Nopon is named Bana.
  • The only thing keeping Rex alive is a red sword lending its life force to him, making his situation similar to Shulk.
  • This game's Vandham may not have the signature "square-taches", but his Blade sure does!
  • Vandham has an X scar on his face. The original Xenogears X logo was a possible facial marking you could apply to your character in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
  • Like the English dub of the first game, the English dub of this one uses chiefly UK based voice talent .
  • The main character, and the Deuteragonist, are two of the earliest party members, are opposite genders, and are a biological life form and a being tied to a plot-relevant, bio-android race.
  • KOS-MOS appears as a Rare Blade, wielding a pair of weapons that resemble the Zohar.
  • Zeke sometimes yells "I'm really feeling it!" during battle.
  • The Torna vessel Monoceros is named after the Indigen from Xenoblade X.
  • The Nopon Muimui shares his name with a Nopon named Muimui from Xenoblade X, with both being weapon developers.
  • One of the earliest party members is a Gadgeteer Genius that uses Shield-type weapons (and is one of the earliest tank members), and a story mission involves them being a Superior Successor who completes an outstanding invention started by family members. Does that describe Tora, or Lin Lee Koo?
  • The Dragon in the Brionac/Lindwurm sidequest chain is a Nopon named Zadazan. In the first Xenoblade, a Nopon named Zazadan was one of Bana's pawns; the mastermind behind this chain is this Bana's father, who takes on the Optional Boss role.
  • The Blade Bots Torna begins to use by the end of the game all wear a very similar mask to the Faced Mechon.
  • In Perceval's personal side quest, he fights against a group of assassins called the Bloody Lobsters. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, a side mission had you dealing with a delusional terrorist known as the Blood Lobster.
  • After Rex and party defeat the Infernal Guldo, Rex finds an ID card next to its corpse. In the "Lakeside Getaway" side mission in Xenoblade Chronicles X, the Cantors attacking the Biahno Water Purification Plant similarly drop ID cards belonging to the Plant's staff when killed. Both cases serve to foreshadow that the creatures are actually mutated humans.
  • Malos' special abilities are the Monado's abilities from the first Xenoblade Chronicles. "Monado Buster!", "Monado Armor!", "Monado Eater!"
  • KOS-MOS's Merc Mission group name, "Erde Kaiser", is a reference to the Humongous Mecha of the same name from her home series.
  • The way Aion gets destroyed is the same way Zanza gets defeated. In addition the songs that play in each game for the final bosses defeat also play at the start of the game. (Grandeur plays when Shulk and Reyn see Mechonis in the distance, and Awakening plays when Pyra revives Rex)
    • In addition, Malos getting launched out of Aion after it gets destroyed is reminiscent of Gadolt and Lao being launched out of their mechs in their respective games.
  • The first battle of the entire game is a crustacean-based monster that was hiding in the rubble the character was salvaging from. Aditionally, you use a weapon called a "Junk Sword."
  • The game as a whole is a more lighthearted remake of Xenogears, with several characters being direct Expies of the Xenogears cast, such as Zeke for Bart Fatima and Poppi for Emeralda (with Poppi QTπ likewise being a very obvious Mythology Gag towards KOS-MOS and T-ELOS).
  • "Pneuma" is the Blade equivalent of Xenogears' titular mech, including their position with respect to the game's title (substituting "Gear" for "Blade") visual elements such as prominent white fins in the back, and is unlocked the same way once Pyra (an Expy of Id) and Mythra (an Expy of Fei) are able to merge their personalities together.
  • Likewise, the progression through the three swords mirrors the progression of Fei through Weltall to Weltall-2 and finally the Xenogears, as well as the progression through the three stages of the Monado in 1.
  • Artifice Aion is very heavily based off of Xenosaga's Proto Omega, sharing design elements and a similar story origin as an antagonistic Humongous Mecha powered by the Zohar/Conduit stored inside its chest which was developed as a superweapon by an organization of high-level scientists studying the Zohar/Conduit as a defense weapon against an invading force. Likewise, the cutscene in which Pneuma emerges for the first time depicts Pyra and Mythra standing in front of Aion on a waist-level platform in the same position as Cecily and Cathe's pods.
  • Judicium and Morytha are nods to Xenogears' Zeboim civilization, an ancient and vastly technologically advanced society that long preceded both the heroes' current society and the past generation of heroes, who corresponded to the Shevat-Solaris war.
  • The Saviorite Rebels from Klaus's time are referred to as the Salvators in Japanese, after the political organization controlled by Dmitri Yuriev in Xenosaga. It is also mentioned in background details for the Siren action figure release that the Conduit was a mysterious advanced artifact found in Africa, just like the Zohar in the backstory to Xenosaga, that it is made of Magnetic Abnormal Matter, just like the Zohar in Xenogears, and that the Aoidos research institute studying it was founded by the Unified Government/Coalition which exists in the backstory of Xenoblade Chronicles X.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • On occasions where you fight enemy Drivers, they simply don't obey the same rules your party do, having access to four Arts to your three. Taken even higher on the occasion where you're fighting a party member, as the AI-controlled versions of them have abilities that the player simply lacks; the fake Nia in the final chapter has the ability to Topple with Dromarch equipped, for example, while Tora has a Taunt effect.
  • For players, the proper Driver Combo goes as Break -> Topple -> Launch -> Smash, and must be done in this order. Several enemies, however, have moves that allow them to send the player into Topple or Launch without ever going through Break at all.

N to R

• Nebulous Evil Organisation: Torna. They're after Pyra, due to her reputation as the Aegis, and have some purpose beneath the Sea of Clouds. They are named after one of the Titans that were lost during the Aegis War and are comprised of Flesh Eater Blades who want to destroy humanity, whom they believe to see Blades only as tools.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Several things.
  • The character trailer paints Vandham as a constant threat to the heroes. Vandham only fights the heroes once to test his skill against the legendary Aegis, and then becomes their guide around Uraya, and is even a Guest-Star Party Member. Lastly, Vandham ends up dying at the hands of Torna.
  • The Character trailer also paints Mòrag as another threat who is determined to stop the Aegis at all cost due to its destructive power. She is in fact a Reasonable Authority Figure and later joins the party permanently.
  • In relation to the above spoiler, the character trailer paints Zeke as the fourth party member. He's actually the fifth and final party member.
  • The trailers also paint Jin as the Big Bad of the game. And while he does act as the leader of the antagonistic group Torna, in the end that role is shared by Malos and his Driver, Amalthus.
• New Game Plus: Similar to the original Xenoblade, this game's version allows you to carry over several different aspects of the game into a new playthrough, such as EXP, money, town development, affinity charts, and even your rare Blades. It also enables story-based Blades such as Pyra and Dromarch to be sent into Merc Missions, though the Merc Missions themselves will be reset, as well as all of the side quests and Heart-to-Heart scenes. Most significantly, it also allows you to use any member of Torna outside of Jin and Malos in your party, including Akhos, Patroka, and Mikhail, as Blades. You will even be able to use the trio's original Blades of Obrona, Perdido, and Cressidus, respectively, and can also get Malos' Sever from Chapter 1.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Talking to the people in Torigoth after defeating Mòrag reveals that you kinda made a mess, and nobody's really happy about it.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: As the ending demonstrates, the World Tree was going to collapse soon and destroy life on Alrest. If Malos hadn't tried to get his hands on the other Aegis, Rex would have just remained an ordinary salvager and Pyra would have remained deep under the Cloud Sea, effectively guaranteeing that life on Alrest would end—though to be fair to Malos, he had no way of knowing that. Amalthus by extension would've never figured this out either, so if he had never awakened Malos or gave Jin motivation to end the world the world would've been destroyed eventually anyway, accomplishing his goal.
• No-Sell: If the player unleashes a Chain Attack, Level 3 Blade Combo finisher or a Level 4 Blade Special during an enemy's attack, that attack will not do any damage against anyone in the active party, even if it's a One-Hit KO move. Arts that provide evasion during execution also full under this label.
• Non-Combat EXP: Experience from quests and merc missions isn't applied immediately, but rather added to a "bonus EXP" pile that can be spent to level up when resting. It's perfectly possible to beat the game comfortably without spending a point of it, but if you do get stuck, it eliminates the catch-up grind.
• Not Quite Flight: Most, or perhaps all, titans that fly or float appear to operate in this way. Argentum's floating titans are noted to maniplulate the ether in the atmosphere in order to achieve lift, and since ether density decreases the higher in the sky one goes, there is a limit to how high they can fly (them having to achieve a balance between staying low enough for the titan to get enough ether, and high enough to be out of range of the monsters in the Cloud Sea that will harrass their titan). Indol's titan had to be heavily modified/enhanced to fly even partway up the World Tree, normally being restricted to flying less than its own body length above the Cloud Sea.
• Not Zilla: An Optional Boss named Tyrannotitan Kurodil is a large, dinosaurian Titan with an upright posture and a very similar build to Godzilla. It's also weaponized with machine guns and lasers, and it's implied that the Ardainian military is responsible.
• Oddball in the Series: This entry does a few things differently from the other games in the series:
  • There's no Collectopedia to insert collectible items in for rewards and recording.
  • Material items are practically nonexistent. Only a few DLC quests re-introduce the act of gathering such items from slain monsters, and their unlocked crafting blueprints are rarely used.
  • The importance of NPCs and how your actions affect them and their relationships during sidequests are essentially gone, with the term "Affinity Chart" now referring to the progress made for a Blade's battle arts, skills, and field skills similar to that of a character's skill chart. Choices made during sidequests have minimal impact, and there is no place to register people by name. Ironically one of the features introduced in this game are markers whenever a person has new dialogue to share affected by sidequest or main story progress, which would have made it immensely useful in games prior, but has little use here.
• Oddly Small Organization: The global terrorist organization Torna is made of a whooping five people (six if you count Nia), in spite of their theft of a large number of Core Crystals early into the story that they could have easily turned into soldiers. When lampshaded late into the game it's one of the more obvious hints that Jin and company aren't nearly as cold as they want to be.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • For common blades, Field Skills are this. There are many obstacles in Alrest that require certain field skills to overcome, or various collectible zones to gather items where field skills can improve one's results. They're also used with frequency in Merc Missions, either as a mandatory quota or as an optional recommendation to speed up the process. A common blade with nine circles' worth of field skills may actually be worth keeping around for some time.
  • For 4-crown Common Blades, it's the stat boosts they give to their Drivers. The maximum stat boost of Rare Blades is 15%, while 4-crown Common Blades can reach 24% stat boosts. Strength, Ether, Agility, and Luck are highly sought after.
  • Those seeking KOS-MOS would consider Justice to be the number one priority thought cloud stat. It helps that there are also many dark blades in the random pool.
  • For New Game Plus, assuming one got all other rare blades, Compassion suddenly becomes important, as of the seven rare blades introduced upon starting New Game Plus, four of them are either Electric or Earth (the seventh is actually a static encounter and cannot be obtained from the random pool whatsoever).
  • For all Blades used for combat, damage per second is the most important factor deciding their viability. Attacker Blades need high dps because it is their job; Tank blades need high dps so they can obtain aggro; Healer Blades' healing abilities can be augmented by damage dealt.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: Only those with aptitude can become Drivers. The unworthy are harmed or killed with a single touch of a Blade's core crystal. Drivers don't even have to be human, as shown with multiple Unique Monsters that have resonated with a Blade or the Nopon that fell on the World Tree.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • Just like with the first game, the English dub was recorded in the UK. As such, many (but not all) American-accented characters, such as Pyra and Mythra, are voiced by British actors who occasionally lapse into their native accents or British English terminology.
  • The game also provides a text-based variant; it was localized by Nintendo of Europe, but uses mostly American English spellings with occasional lapses into British English terminology ("aubergine", "ladybird", "night-time", etc.).
• Optional Boss: Some of these are worthy of falling into Superboss territory.
  • As with the previous games, there are a few bosses that exceed the player's level cap of 99.
    • At level 100 is Gladiator Orion, who resides on the Cliffs of Morytha.
    • At level 104 is Reeking Douglas, who appears in the Brigand's Hideout in Gormott.
    • Pernicious Benf, a level 109 Behemoth, lives in the Aegishammer crater on Temperantia.
    • At level 110 is Cloud Sea King Ken, who appears on the ice fields in Tantal under specific weather conditions.
    • The level 114 Mk. VII Arek appears where you fought Amalthus in the World Tree.
    • At level 117 is none other than Artifice Ophion, who can be fought at the location of the Chapter 7 boss fight at the Cliffs of Morytha.
    • The Old Factory in Mor Ardain has Chickenheart Dagmora, who is at level 120.
    • Finally, at level 130, you have Tyrannotitan Kurodil in the Profaned Place in Temperantia.
  • After completing Bana's Secret Treasure and Farewell, Good Friend, Niranira can give you a quest to track down an anti-Ardainian organization Bana was involved in that was mentioned in the latter quest and its predecessors. At the end, you fight Don Dondon, Bana's father, piloting an Indoline Star at Level 70, the same level as the Final Boss.
  • There is an Ardun in Torigoth that you can feed, causing it to become bigger and gain levels. If you keep feeding it and don't kill it, it will eventually become a level 99 Unique Monster called Relentless Arduran. It also happens to be a good punching bag for farming Legendary Core Crystals.
  • The Challenge battle Mode has many high level Unique Monsters that go far above the level of the players up to Level 200. The Level 200 miniboss however is only meant to be weakened slightly before using Shulk's vision to stop it killing everyone while exploding. The real high level Unique Monster is a Level 150 Gogol named Immovable Heir Carlos, which has somewhat high attack power, can become awakened, has multiple attacks that can one-shot the party, and possesses almost 40 million HP. There's also an upgraded version of Cloud Sea King Ken, an Ardainian Kurodil and True Rosa. The most infamous of all is Elma: Redux, who is required to permanently unlock Elma and can tear unprepared players apart even on the easiest difficulty.
  • In one of the DLC quests called "Mystery Launch Codes" there is multiple very high level enemies involved, however there is only one that is Level 125 and it is at the end of the quest, called the Nameless Sentinel. It has some of the highest attack power in the game and has over 22 million HP. It is alongside the Challenge Mode bosses as one of the hardest bosses in the game. Sadly, it can't be refought or farmed.
• Organic Technology: Even though we never directly see it it is mentioned that the fallen nation of Judicium were experts at biotechnology. After all they were the ones who created the first Flesh Eater Blades. Titan weapons and ships are also shown to be a bit like this, having technology used to manipulate their organs and movements.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Mor Ardain is a humanoid Titan.
• Our Humans Are Different: Just about any sapient race that isn't a Blade, Nopon, Titan, or Tirkin is called human. Among these, the Ardainians, Leftherians, and Tantalese are straightforwardly human-like, but there are also the Gormotti Cat Folk, the somewhat crystalline Urayans, and the grey-skinned, Long-Lived Indoline, who are still considered human despite their drastic physiological differences.
• Our Titans Are Different:
  • The Titans are creatures varying in size with several the size of continents, having entire ecosystems and civilizations living on their bodies. Titans are near immortal with small ones even living on the backs of the giant Titans. They wander around the Cloud Sea circling the World Tree.
  • Small Titans are used as ships and war machines by mortals, making a number into Cyborgs to fire weapons or move the way mortals wish.
  • Titans are the next life cycle of Blades after they have lived long enough. Once they grow large enough in size an ecosystem begins to develop and they birth new core crystals, from which new Blades are eventually born so the cycle can repeat.
• Outside-Context Problem: Rex has the idea that, once he gets to Elysium, he can open the way for everyone else so they can settle there, with plentiful resources and no further need for war. His thought process takes for granted that Elysium is a natural habitat, like Gormott or Mor Ardain, such that even without people, the area should have plentiful fauna and flora necessary for human habitation. Of course, neither Rex nor anyone else on Alrest has any concept of an artificial habitat bigger than a ship, such as a space station, which could only be habitable if there were people actively keeping it that way. Thus Rex's plan was doomed: Elysium turned out to be a ruin with no way for the residents of Alrest to resettle it. Had it not been for the Architect's last gift, everyone on Alrest would have ultimately been screwed (assuming the remaining continental Titans would have died before any new ones produced would have grown enough for habitation).
• Overhead Interaction Indicator:
  • Characters with new sidequests for you have a question mark over their heads, while characters who you need to talk to as part of an in-progress quest have an exclamation point overhead.
  • Random NPCs who you either haven't spoken to before or who have changed their text since you last spoke to them have a small star overhead.
• Point of No Return: The game treats boarding the Maelstrom in Chapter 1 like this, requiring you to confirm you're ready to an NPC. If you back out, he laughs at himself for taking it so seriously, noting it's not like you're going to war or anything and can return to Argentum as soon as the job's over. He's right, too - as soon as you can free-roam again, you can warp back there.
• Permanently Missable Content: Overall very little when compared to the previous two games in the series.
  • Feeding the Ardun in Torigoth will eventually turn it into the level 99 unique monster Relentless Arduran. Kill it before then however, and it's permanently dead.
  • Indol becomes inaccessible during chapter 8, but the only content that becomes lost are the three quests that start in Indol. A number of quests that don't start in Indol still require you to go there, but those requirements will just be moved elsewhere following chapter 8. Shops will be moved to other areas as well. Affinity charts that require doing unique actions all around the world (such as Floren's Beguiling Charms and Perun's good deeds) will still have enough of the required things in the rest of the world to complete it. Even the Titan's Development Level progress is transferred to Leftheria.
• Piñata Enemy: There are a number of enemies that can drop valuable loot, but an apparent mention is the Tolen Krabble that spawns from salvaging at Mor Ardain's docks. It's often farmed for Core Crystals.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Averted, Rex continues his salvaging career throughout the game as a side activity. It's a way of Money Grinding and getting some rare materials.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: Upon finally realizing her desires to be part of a team that cares for her, Nia tells Rex she loves him. Rex responds by saying he loves her too, shocking her... only for him to add all his friends to the declaration, which sends her into a laughing fit. Rex may have missed her intentions. However, the Nia apparition in chapter 10 (which is a manifestation of Rex's thoughts as revealed by Klaus), along with a post-battle exchange with Blade Nia suggests he either later realized what she meant or he Knew It All Along.
• Player Nudge: Unlike levels 2, 3, and 4, which open at the start of new chapters, level 5 of Tiger! Tiger! opens up, complete with unskippable event popup, at a pretty arbitrary moment. It's the same time the completely optional sidequest to unlock Poppi's third form opens up; heading to check out the Tiger! Tiger! machine requires the player to walk past Tatazo and his sidequest marker.
• Porn Stash: During the Poppi Buster DLC quest, you acquire the "Not-safe-for-work Folio."
  A mysterious book that Soosoo hid. Its contents are not exactly wholesome.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Perun's personal quest involves her investigating the disappearances of children from all over. You eventually discover a kidnapping ring that leads back to the old factory in Mor Ardain. While no details are explained, it's mentioned that the children were going to be used as experiments for artificial blades.
• Power Creep: The DLC updates in the Expansion Pass have created some of the best Blades in the game, such as Elma, Shulk, Fiora and Corvin (Crossette is a very good Blade, but not as good as these). These Blades mostly outclass the ones in the original game, with a few exceptions. These are made for Challenge Mode though which has a stronger difficulty than the aftergame and superbosses. Even Mythra generally finds herself outclassed in most cases, although she's held up quite well regardless.
• Power Nullifier:
  • Certain military factions employ "stasis webs", a technology that restricts the airborne flow of ether to a trickle. This renders most Blades helpless.
    Captain Padraig: Ha! This is an ether net!
  • The Blade Obrona has the power to restrict ether flow through the air for everyone but her teammates, rendering enemy Blade/Driver teams almost helpless. It doesn't work on Mythra though, since her power isn't dependent on ether.
  • Fan la Norne/Haze is similar. She can completely neutralize almost every Blade, including the aforementioned Obrona, and she can even neutralize some Titans. The Blades that she can't completely neutralize, she can still heavily weaken.
  • Jin's "Absolute Zero" power freezes the environment around him, again cutting off the ether flow between Drivers and Blades. He rarely has to use this power since he's so strong to begin with though.
• The Power of Friendship: Rex quotes this word-for-word as a battle quote. As the director said he wanted to make a more optimistic video game, it's almost certainly intentional.
• The Promised Land: Elysium, a land full of verdant hills and land as far as the eye can see where both Rex and Pyra have seen in visions. Unfortunately it turns out to be of the Cynical Flavor, the land being abandoned ever since Klaus's experiment and deteriorating into a rusty desert. However in the ending it jumps back into Optimistic Flavor with Klaus creating a new land for the new humanity.
• P.O.V. Sequel: The game's set in an alternate universe as Xenoblade, with Shulk being a Hero of Another Story from Rex's point of view. In fact, it runs concurrent with the events of the original, as both Rex and Shulk fight their final battle at the same time.
• Power Source: It is implied that the Conduit was utilized as one as the World Tree was constructed, as when the Conduit vanished the World Tree began to destabilize.
• Praetorian Guard: The Indoline Praetorium has warrior monks who tend to accompany Praetor Amalthus at all times. Amalthus himself notes that he prefers the company of the warrior monks rather than fighting alongside a Blade.
• Prehistoria: One of the Challenge Battles, "Dino Drama", pits the party against dinosaur enemies (along with small salamanders meant to annoy the player and enrage the dinosaurs). You need to beat it if you want to bring Shulk and Fiora into Alrest.
• Proud Merchant Race: The Nopon are as business-minded as always. They're arguably the most exemplary of this trope they've been yet in the series, now running an entire Merchant City.
• Pun With Pi: This game has the artificial blade Poppi. As she's essentially an android, she gets upgraded across the course of the story to two additional forms, each making her appear older and designated by a punny acronym. Her final upgrade, when she resembles a beautiful young woman, is called QTπ.
• Purposefully Overpowered: The five guest characters, Shulk, Fiora, Elma, KOS-MOS, and T-elos, are extremely powerful Blades whose power level can only be matched by Mythra, Corvin and Poppi QT Pi. So what stops you from using them to effortlessly cut through the game? KOS-MOS has the notoriously lowest pull rate in the entire game at 0.4% even with a legendary core crystal; T-elos is unavailable until you beat the game; Shulk, Fiora, and Elma are locked behind challenges that are harder than the final boss and are only avaliable with the DLC.
• A Quest Giver Is You: Once you get control of the mercenary group, managing the Blades that join the group and sending them off on missions becomes a significant source of rewards and filling out affinity charts.
• Random Number God: Drawing Rare Blades is heavily subject to chance. There are ways of skewing the selection in your favor (certain character stats increase the likelihood of getting certain elements), but ultimately you just have to be lucky. Though the game does throw you a bone: if you use a certain number of cores without getting any rare blades, the game will guarantee that you get one on the next draw. There are a total of 15 blades sorted into 5 columns that can be obtained through the pity method, and your save file determines which 3 of those 15 that you are guaranteed to get.
• Realpolitik: While most of the international intrigue goes on around the party rather than involving them, what's there is portrayed rather realistically, particularly between Mor Ardain and Uraya. As an example, even after the near-miss that almost caused total war is exposed as a False Flag Operation Mor Ardain still owes reparations for their negligence. A Heart-to-Heart later reveals that they didn't leverage this for money or supplies, either; they demanded shared control of Gormott, a much longer-term solution to several problems that also disadvantaged Mor Ardain.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: With its openly corrupt ponce of a governor and and guard captains that don't know what color emerald is, it's clear Mor Ardain is using the underdeveloped-by-their-standards Gormott as a dumping ground for the dead weight. Exploited by some of the guards, who were smart enough to know this backwater settlement was unlikely to be attacked again and got transferred there on purpose.
• Recurring Element:
  • This game marks the third appearance of the Nopon race and a character with a name that starts with "Van" in the series.
  • The Zohar, referred to only as "The Conduit" in this game, makes its return, being an artifact that has been a part of the Xeno games ever since Xenogears.
  • This game, like the other Xenoblade games, includes a level 81 Gogol-type Unique Monster whose name means "Red-beard" — in one of the very first areas.
• Redheaded Hero: Pyra, who has a similar color palette to her sword. While her powers involve fire, she is not a Fiery Redhead, as she is sweet, kind and calm.
• Red Herring:
  • The heroes know that Bana is planning to attack a meeting between the leaders of Uraya and Mor Ardain, but do not know how. After some intel gathering, the crew gets the following bits of info: a Nopon has been seen buying lots of poison, the cooks are of the same species as the staff of the Old Factory, a number of terrible-smelling ingredients has been shipped to the meeting location, as well as an unexplained giant crate. The natural deduction is that he's going to attempt to poison the food... which only results in the party beating up a bunch of innocent cooks, while his real plan was the much less subtle smuggling of a Humongous Mecha in the aforementioned crate.
  • We learn Azurda is the real name of Gramps fairly early on from Malos and Pyra calling him that. Given Malos is a villain and Pyra clearly knows more than she lets on, it seems Gramps might be some major backstory revelations coming up related to his true name. When we come to Rex's hometown, his aunt calls Gramps Azurda without any build up or reaction from anyone and it never gets brought up again. Though Gramps does turn out to be a guardian for where Adam left the third Aegis Sword.
  • In Chapter 8, in Morytha, the characters speculate that it was destroyed in war by some kind of Weapon of Mass Destruction, and the place certainly looks like it was nuked. We learn otherwise in Chapter 10.
• Replay Mode: An Event Theater mode accessible from the title screen lets the player re-watch previously viewed cutscenes (including story cutscenes, blade quest-exclusive cutscenes, and blade awakening cutscenes). Depending on its contents, a cutscene can be viewed at different times of the day, in different weather conditions, and with different "versions" depending on certain choices the player made.
• Revision: The flashback to Klaus' experiment is expanded upon the one in the first Xenoblade Chronicles, with a few alterations. First, it was revealed that the space station was under attack, with mecha being used in its defense. Second, it revealed the existence of a Zohar-like artifact known as the Conduit, which was what Klaus was using in his experiments. Finally, it establishes that unlike what Xenoblade Chronicles implied, the experiment did not actually destroy the universe, but instead created or shunted Klaus (or at least half of him) and his partner, Galea to a different one which is where the first game took place; the old universe continued to exist, though all life on Earth was apparently sent away to other dimensions. The flashback however retains much of Klaus' dialogue from the first game, and even does a shot-for-shot remake when the experiment actually happens.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Torna fights to liberate Blades from the control of the humans of Alrest, who they see as controlling Blades and treating them as slaves. They don't care how many humans they have to kill in the process, and they aren't that worried about the safety of Blades who get in their way, either. Furthermore, they blame the Architect for making Blades the servants of humans in the first place, and so they want to kill him, too, and destroy the world. Notably, they never actually grant the Blades freedom, as this would bind them to humans. They would rather the world end than have it continue as it is.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • If you're paying close attention during the cutscene right after the tutorial fight, you can see the elevator extending from the top of the World Tree to the First Low Orbit Station. You can even see this in normal gameplay just by looking at the World Tree.
  • When Rex is requested for the job in Chapter 1, particular attention is paid to his hometown. If you talk to Jin on the Malestrom, the first thing he asks Rex is if he's Leftherian. Torna needs a Leftherian to open the door to Pyra.
  • The darkness powers displayed by Malos in chapter 1 and 3 should not be possible given that his Blade, Sever, has wind as his element. This is an early hint that Malos may be more than he appears...
  • In the opening cutscene of chapter 5 where Addam spars with Lora, Mikhail as a child can be seen sitting with the others while eating.
  • Pyra and Mythra's confession to Rex that they're trying to get to the top of the world tree so that the Architect will help them commit suicide doesn't surprise Rex. This is because he had a vague idea that's what they wanted already, which is foreshadowed by his reactions and frustration of trying to figure out what he can do to help with to Pyra and Mythra's strange, self-destructive, and depressive behavior in the earlier chapters. Nia's warning that Pyra could have a sinister motive for going up the tree at the very beginning of the game is also spot on, but not for any of Nia's or the audience's likely expected reasons but because Pyra absolutely at that point was using Rex to help kill herself without telling him.
  • Nia gives several hints that she is a Blade.
• Rhyming with Itself: Drifting Soul rhymes "top" with "top."

If I could climb up to the top, would you be waiting at the top?

• Rising Empire: The Empire of Mor Ardain is moving on its way, having relatively recently (less than 50 years before the start of the game) assumed control over Gormott and turned it into a province. This has only increased tensions with their major rival, the Kingdom of Uraya, who views their expansion as a threat. It should be noted that the major reason for the takeover is because Mor Ardain's Titan is nearing the end of its life and even now is becoming rapidly unable to even produce enough food to feed the population, hence them wanting to get a foothold on a Titan with an abundance of land for settlement and food production before things get worse. The current Emperor Niall is also opposed to attempting to expand the Empire's territory through militarism.
• Rush Boss:
  • Level 114 Mk. VII Arek has low stats and relatively weak attacks for a Superboss. What makes it dangerous is its ability to summon high level Mooks to overwhelm you, so you have to destroy it quickly or apply Seal Reinforcement.
  • At level 120, Chickenheart Dagmara is the second-most-powerful Unique Monster in the game, but its HP is extraordinarily low compared to its fellow Superbosses. It still hits like a freight train, however, so the fight is unlikely to last more than two minutes before either side wins... or Dagmara flees the battle.
  • There is a challenge in Challenge Mode where you need to take on a trio of enemies one at a time (the game doesn't tell you which order is optimal though). One of them hits hard but is vulnerable to a chain attack, resulting in something like this.

S to Y

• Sad Battle Music: The Power of Jin plays during Jin's boss battles which reflects on Jin's sadness and desperation.
• Save Scumming:
  • A notable aversion: The game saves every time you activate a Core Crystal. Since you can obtain rare Blades even from common crystals, this is to prevent players from unlocking all the good rare blades early on in the game without spending many core crystals.
  • Played straight with the first common Blade Azurda gives Rex. This can be abused to ensure that the common Blade that emerges (which can never be ditched) has two crowns rather than one.
  • Also played straight when it comes to abusing Nintendo Switch cloud saves.
• Scenery Gorn: Just as there are places that are beautiful there are a handful of places that are large in scope of devastation. Of note is The Land of Morytha and Elysium, being places that humanity used to live in countless years ago.
• Scenery Porn: As usual for the Xenoblade series.
• Sea Hurtchin: Urchin enemies are usually territorial and will aggro if you get too close. Their spikes double as a layer of armor that block most physical attacks. With few exceptions, you must wait for the urchin to initiate an opening and strike its core in order to topple it before you can do any real damage to it.
• Sequence Breaking: With a bit of grinding, it's possible to do Heart-to-Hearts for late-game blades like Sheba and Herald before certain story events occur in the main game.
• Seven Deadly Sins:
  • In fitting with the franchise's religious overtones, the seven major nations in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 are each named after and, in some way, embody the sins.
    • Argentum (Greed) is a Merchant City full of notoriously stingy Nopon traders. Their chairman, Bana, is an outright criminal war profiteer who has been instigating conflict between the other nations so he can make a killing.
    • Gormott (Gluttony) is a relatively peaceful and pleasant land, but its abundance of resources and bountiful harvests make it a prime target for the imperialist nations to colonize. The consul in charge, Dughall, is Ardainian, not Gormotti, but nevertheless has been using his position to live a lavish lifestyle if his portly build and opulent livingspace are any indication.
    • Uraya (Envy) holds perpetually-tense relations with its rival nation Mor Ardain and also has designs on Gormott; if the Ardainian emperor's statements are indicative of the past, diplomacy with Uraya often involves placating them with things they want that other nations have. On an intranational level, it is the nation with the most severe social stratification and tension between the haves and have-nots.
    • Mor Ardain (Pride) is the aforementioned imperialist nation. Their land is dying (literally), but rather than swallow their pride and ask other nations for assistance, they've bolstered their military and have taken land by force; Gormott is already under their control at the start of the game, and a war of conquest could break out between Mor Ardain and Uraya at any time. The Ardainian character who joins your party is herself an incredibly prideful person, albeit not in a self-sabotaging or antagonistic way.
    • Indol (Sloth) is a theocracy that leads the world in worship and takes a role as the peacekeeper between other nations, but their contentment with the status quo means that only the symptoms ever get addressed, not the roots of the problems. By the end of the game, Indol's Praetor, Amalthus, is revealed to be one of the game's Big Bads and embodies the more despairing aspects of Sloth; he hates the world and its people because he's given up hope, he refuses to change who he is or acknowledge change in others, and he'd rather see the world wither away than make any more effort to improve it.
    • Tantal (Lust) does not particularly embody the sin in its government at first, but it is later revealed that the royal lineage is a sham; they are not descendants of a legendary hero, but in fact descendants of some criminals who seized the throne in a lust for power. In regard to the more sexual aspects of this sin, the nation's crown prince is quite a flirt, and many of the region's NPCs and side quests embody it: one woman wants your help in creating a Love Potion, another is writing a book that turns out to be smutty Yaoi, another only seems to care about catching a glimpse of the aforementioned crown prince, and one pair of NPCs consists of a man constantly trying to woo a woman.
    • Little is known about the original nation of Torna (Wrath) as it was destroyed 500 years ago, but in the present day a small band of terrorists have taken the name onto themselves and spend the bulk of their time wreaking havoc upon the other nations. All of its members are filled with an intense hatred toward humanity, and a desire for revenge against all the cruel mistreatments and indignities heaped upon them by the rest of the world, especially Amalthus. Much like Bana, they also like to exploit the other nations' tensions to try and get them to destroy each other.
    • Other nations based on the seven heavenly virtues once existed if some ruined areas' names are anything to go by (Temperantia), but fittingly, most of them have died off leaving only the sins in a Purgatory-like world. Only Leftheria (Charity) remains habitable, and for the most part it is indeed an untainted land of generosity and bliss.
    • In the final chapter, squads of lv90+ enemy Drivers appear in the Olethra Playhouse. They are named for several of the deadly sins.
• Sex Slave: It's alluded that this can be the fate of unfortunate humanoid Blades who fall into the wrong hands. When discussing why he was attacked by bandits, Zeke mentions they were probably after Pandoria, since she's "quite human-looking for a Blade," and "They line [Core Crystals] up with pretty little pictures of the Blade inside."
• Sheath Strike: An interesting variation with the Chroma Katana weapon class. When used, the Drivers attack by dual-wielding the katana and the sheath, but the sheath also has a cutting edge. It's frequently used as an offhand weapon or swung with extra weight by not drawing the primary sword first.
• Shmuck Bait: The "Profaned Place" in Temperantia has several lizardmen kneeling before something that can't be seen due to being frozen in a block of ice surrounded by a miasma of darkness. You can dispel the miasma and melt the ice with Field Skills. What is the result? Congratulations, you just removed the seals on the Level 130 Superboss!
• Shout-Out:
  • Tora activates Poppi by using the energy of a lightning storm.
  • The entire scene with Rosa is a long series of Super Robot anime references:
    • Rosa is a direct reference to Mazinger Z. The pilots even manage to get in the "becoming god or demon" classic tagline. One extra joke got missed by the dubbers, who renamed the upgraded "Great Sakura" into "Giga Rosa".
      Bana: NOPON GO!
    • The entire sequence where Bana jumps into the tube to get to Rosa is a reference to Getter Robo.
    • Poppi creating a barrier to protect itself while transforming is from GaoGaiGar.
    • Poppi's Badass Arm-Fold is another reference to Getter Robo.
    • The symbol Poppi creates during the transformation sequence is a reference to Voltes V.
    • Poppi's transformation dialog in Japanese is a reference to Getter Robo.
      Poppi: Change JK-Mode, Switch on!
  • In a Heart-to-Heart between Zenobia and Mythra in the Land of Morytha, if the idea that Mythra and Zenobia fought against each other 500 years ago is brought up, Zenobia says "she strives to the the very best, like no Blade before me."
  • In Chapter 10, in what seems to be a throwaway line, we learn that the original name of the World Tree was the Beanstalk. If we accept that Alrest is Earth All Along, this is In-Universe as well since, just as in the original story, this Beanstalk allowed the protagonist to travel from Earth to a paradise in the sky.
  • Mythra's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate outfit is called "Massive Melee Mythra", whose name is a reference to Super Smash Bros. Melee. The NPC that gives this outfit is even named Brobro, saying that he "have strange feeling it maybe even most Ultimate item of all".
  • When calling in Kasandra for a Special, she may sometimes say "It's-a me!"
  • If Fiora is in the party, one of Zeke's post battle quotes has him say that he wants to be the "Hardest, Bestest, Fastest, Strongest, ultimate fighting machine".
  • During Dagas' Blade Quest, Mythra, a tsundere character, chides him with a "What are you, stupid?" ("Anta baka?" in the original Japanese). Put her in the Pyra-style Mythra outfit for extra fun.
• Sidequest Sidestory:
  • Much like in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, several sidequests in this game lead into others to tell sidestories alongside the main plot.
  • A sidequest in Mor Ardain starting with the party meeting Jac, the minor Gormotti NPC that became a Driver and joined the military, and helping him deliver some gifts to his siblings back in Gormott. It spirals into helping him solve an investigation involving the murdered wife of a senator by a group of Emperor Niall-hating extremists of which his Disappeared Dad has joined. This organization, Brionac, ends up being the subject of another sidequest given by said senator to try and take them down, then another sidequest to stomp out the remnants, which leads to learning about another anti-Empire organization called Lindwurm, who are lead by Bana's criminal father in one final sidequest.
  • The Heterosexual Life-Partners Rare Blades Praxis and Theory have no less than three Blade Quests ("Crystal Clear", "Blade-Sharp Memory", and "Theory and Praxis") dedicated to their story going from villainous thieves to atoning heroes.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Titan Genbu has nothing but snow-covered tundra, leaving the Kingdom of Tantal unable to produce enough food on their own. The Endless Winter weather is due to Tantal being blackmailed into producing Core Chips for Indol. Said production involves harnessing the majority of Genbu's ether flows, leaving little energy to maintain a warm climate.
• Soft Water: No matter the height, if you jump into any water deep enough to swim in you'll take no damage. The lone exception is if you jump into the Cloud Sea at low tide, in which case you just went into a Bottomless Pit.
• Space Whale: The Titan Uraya is a continent-sized flying whale whose residents live inside it.
• Status Effects: On top of the series' signature Break and Topple, this game introduces Launch and Smash. Linking all four in the correct order makes a complete Driver Combo.
• Stealth Sequel: While it seems that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is set in its own continuity compared to the original like how X was, it's later revealed that the world of 2 was created by the Architect, who happens to be the good side of Klaus, the evil side being Zanza from the previous game, after his actions destroyed the world in his experiment.
• Steampunk: Mor Ardain's primary aesthetic, due to their Titan's poor health causing it to overheat. On one hand, it means the place is quickly turning into a desert, on the other they get lots and lots of free energy to power all their machinery.
• Stripperific: Female humanoid Blades, almost to a one, are infamous for this — their outfits are good for fanservice, but not for actual fighting (though their Healing Factor and superhuman durability mitigates need for clothing in general). Some male Blades, like Gorg, also dress like this. The human characters, at least, tend to be much more practically clothed.
• Suave Sabre: Played with. Ardainian Special Inquisitor Mòrag Ladair's default weapons are whipswords that are styled and worn like sabers, but are not sabers completely. Mòrag is an extremely cool-headed character who almost never raises her voice and serves as one of the party's tanks, but rather than having high defense and health, it's more because she has high Evasion instead.
• Suddenly Voiced: The Tirkin have speaking roles in this game unlike their counterparts on Bionis, both in cutscenes and in normal combat.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: While there are many mook enemies that stand little chance against your party even if they are on your level, this is still overall averted in the game in the sense that once you become a good number of levels higher than an enemy they will usually not attack you (unless you attack them first). You can walk right past some very imposing creatures and they will ignore you, sensing that attacking you would be foolish. Only Unique Monsters will attack you regardless of level.
  • On the other hand, your computer-controlled allies will do things like this, such as jumping off cliffs to try and attack airborne enemies only to plummet to their death.
• Super-Strength:
  • Some blades exhibit obvious versions of this, but to a lesser degree Drivers seem to have it as well (namely we see Rex and others jumping far greater distances without help than any human could under normal strength), along with various degrees of superhuman agility and durability.
  • A remark by an early NPC that Drivers have "incredible strength" plus a summary of an interview with Takahashi confirms the Super-Strength aspect of Drivers. Namely he states in the interview "Blades take their energy from Ether in the atmosphere, and send it to their weapons. Drivers use the said weapons to fight, but when a Driver is there with a Blade, the Driver's physical strength and agility can be raised to superhuman levels; which is why the 15-year-old Rex can fight with such strength." See here for the interview.
• Swap Fighter: Pyra and Mythra can switch back and forth between each other instantly as much as you want during battle, in contrast to the usual cooldown for switching between other Blades. This was adapted into their play style in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: Pyra, who possesses immense power and thus is sought after by many factions- either to use it for themselves, or to destroy it. It's a matter of semantics whether she is a sword (a "Blade"), or is in possession of one that is formed from her, but either way, they are inextricably linked.
• Synchronization: Most Blades can come back to life after their Driver is killed as long as their cores remain intact, but due to Pyra sharing her life force with Rex, if he dies, she'll die too. Pandoria is similar, with a piece of her Core implanted in Zeke. Flesh Eater Blades are another exception. They can continue to operate without their Drivers being present, but they lose their Healing Factor, and can grow old and die just like regular humans, albeit they may still live for centuries.
• Take Your Time:
  • Early on in Gormott, Nia gets captured by Mor Ardain, and when the party begins to mount a rescue operation, they overhear that she's slated for execution in three days. Naturally, you can take as long as you want and Nia will be just fine when you break her out of jail. However, this example later turns out to be Justified: Mòrag had no intention of executing Nia, but she intentionally started the rumor and used Nia as bait to draw Rex and Pyra out of hiding.
  • Happens in Chapter 6, when Tantal's ether accelerator punctures a hole through Genbu's head, compelling itself to submerge into the Cloud Sea. Zeke states that the party has a little over three hours to save the Titan before it dives so deeply that it and all of Tantal dies from the Cloud Sea's high pressure. However, not only is there no real time limit to this, an hour in-game is equivalent to a minute in real time. Even if the party isn't being distracted by side quests, they would still take at least an in-game day to get from Theosoir to the Omega Fetter on foot. In fact, not only is it impossible to get to the Omega Fetter in three in-game hours even with debug exploits, it's actually encouraged that you do side quests before reaching the Fetter, as some of those quests will be temporarily inaccessible due to Required Party Members being unavailable for over a whole chapter afterward.
  • An even more egregious example occurs in the Final Chapter. Cutscenes show Artifices from the First Low Orbit Station raining destruction down on Alrest, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from Skip Travelling back down to the surface to complete side quests, even in areas that were explicitly shown under attack and none the worse for wear. Despite this, there is at least one NPC who comments that the aforementioned destruction has happened, and resulted in the destruction of one unseen town, though nothing in the environment shows damage.
  • As far as the main story is concerned the last few chapters of the game are a near continuous race/struggle between the villains and heroes to reach the top of the World Tree. However there are many side quests in other parts of the game world, including a major development for Poppi, that can only be started or finished after this race has started.
  • The entire game is actually a low-key example, as inter-Titan travel is established to take days and the party never gain access to a Global Airship, making getting between Titans a recurring plot obstacle. Yet there's nothing stopping you from skip-travelling between Titans when the party is nominally stranded, or even visiting areas where they're allegedly persona non grata.
• A Taste of Power: During Chapter 1, Jin and Malos join temporarily and will make short work of most of the monsters. Additionally, any time a tutorial introduces a new mechanic, they'll often let the player put it in practice immediately, such as skipping some of the setup required or relaxing time limits.
• Technobabble: Lampshaded in the final act, when Pneuma says that they need to activate the World Tree's retro-rockets and launch it into space. No one else has any idea what she's talking about. In a variant, what she's saying is simple and correct, it just has absolutely nothing to do with the current situation because space elevators don't have rockets of any type. It was all just a distraction to get the team to the escape pods while she performs a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:
  • Becomes a Discussed Trope when a Heart-to-Heart reveals Tora has no idea Mòrag is a woman. Zeke comments that most humans can only tell male and female Nopon apart by the way they dress, so it makes sense for the reverse to be true. Mòrag's strict military dress and gruff voice caused Tora to confuse her for a man.
  • In Finch's Blade Quest, you must find a wayward Tirkin countess. Once you meet her, the only distinguishing feature between her and the other Tirkin is a large pink bow at the roots of her topknot.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The "2" contains the Aegis symbol seen on Pyra and Mythra's clothing, while the lettering is in flames to represent Pyra's fire powers.
• Theme Naming: A number of the Blade Quest's cutscenes are given themed names. For example, Dahlia's quest cutscenes are named after flowers.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: There is very little that will survive a chain attack of any length, let alone a Full Burst, short of a story boss or particularly tanky Unique monster. The rewards dropped by enemies killed this way are amplified accordingly, however, so it's worth doing.
• The Theocracy: The Indoline Praetorium, the government of the titan Indol. They're especially notable for being the group in control of the supply of Core Crystals, which is where Blades come from, giving them disproportionate influence over military matters.
• Third-Person Person: While specific characters can be this, the entire Nopon race is this. Poppi, who adopts the Nopon speech pattern, is also this. While Lila also adopts this speech pattern in the English dub, she actually speaks normally in the Japanese dub, probably to reflect her maturity compare to the childish Poppi.
• Title Drop: Most of the chapters' titles are significant and get specific mentions in dialogue:
  • Chapter 2:
    Gramps: Perhaps 'aptitude' would be a better word.
  • Chapter 3:
    Vandham: Remember... to fight your war!!!
  • Chapter 5:
    Jin: Why are you the masters, and we the slaves?
  • Chapter 6:
    Malos: With wounds like that, they're done for. It's their biggest weakness.
    Jin: Your own Blade has been wounded so deeply, and all you can think of is yourself.
  • Chapter 7:
    Addam: When you take on the weight of all the fear she carries, then you will be her true Driver.
  • Chapter 9: More of a visual drop: the title is "Rain" and the final scene of the chapter is a flashback to the rainy night when Malos found Jin after the destruction of Torna.
  • Chapter 10 (applies only to the German translation of the game):
    Architect: This is the last gift I can offer you... the rest is up to you, my children.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Xenoblade Chronicles, Shulk's optional art Monado Eater was an area-wide attack that removed enemy buffs and inflicted the Bleed status, but was relatively mundane compared to the Monado's other powers. Here, it's one of Malos's favorite attacks once he regains his full power, and while its in-battle effect is still an area-wide debuff, its depiction in cutscenes is that of dark energy that completely erases all matter it comes into contact with. Ironically, Shulk himself cannot use the attack in-game for his Guest Fighter appearance.
• Trailers Always Spoil: A gameplay presentation before launch spoiled that Gramps survives his Disney Death and turns into a helpful little baby. Also, several trailers include Mythra, whose existence is treated as a major twist.
• Transforming Mecha: The Marsanes, the massive warship that serves as Torna's base, has the ability to transform into a giant mecha similar to a massive Face Mechon. It's unclear if that was a natural function of this final surviving Tornan warship or an upgrade Mikhail managed to install himself in the 500 years since the Aegis War, but he puts it to good use fighting the Indol Titan during the endgame.
• Trauma Inn: Averted (characters heal rapidly outside of combat on their own). Inns are used to cash in Non-Combat EXP, wait for tides to change, and to activate or advance certain quests.
• T. Rexpy:
  • The Sauros enemies return from the first game, now looking even more like T. rex with long necks and a mishmash of other dinosaur features. One of them is the main boss in the Challenge Mode stage that unlocks Shulk and Fiora.
  • The Optional Boss Tyrannotitan Kurodil is a small Titan (but large enemy) that looks like a cross between a T. rex and an alligator but is more of a Not Zilla, with laser cannons.
• Tree Vessel: The World Tree is an interesting example. It started off as a Space Elevator that housed the Conduit, but after human scientist Klaus succeeded in creating a new universe and was split into two halves, the station stayed behind in the old universe with Klaus' good half, and vegetation eventually came to coat the station, giving it a tree-like appearance. To the modern citizens of Alrest, this station is now the World Tree that is fabled to house the promised land of Elysium at its peak.
• Trrrilling Rrrs: Multiple Large Ham characters indulge in this (even Zeke in one of his battle quotes), but none moreso than Bana, who draws out and savors every delicious morsel of the letter R that he can while speaking.
  Bana: "This is secret weapon based on blueprints of Lila... Gigantic Artificial Blade: Rrrrrrrrrosa! Ahahaha!"
  Dromarch: "You enlarged the design? Incredible."
  Bana: "Wahahah! Now, you all bow before the power of Bana! Go get them, Rrrrrrrrrrrrosa!"
• Turtle Island: Creatures of massive size (as in reach past the clouds) known as Titans comprise the landmasses in the game. Each one follows a certain climate, such as grassland, tundras, and oceans. The Titan Genbu is a literal one.
• Unexpected Kindness: After Rex receives a verbal beatdown from Nia and a Get A Hold Of Yourself Man slap from Brighid due to having fallen into a depression due to Pyra/Mythra trading themselves to Torna for the assurance of the others' safety, Poppi raises her arm in preparation to strike and... gently caresses him while reminding him of all he's done and how much she and Tora look up to and believe in him.
• The Unfought: Out of the major military powers in Alrest, only Uraya's military is never fought in battle^note Excepting the individual Driver who picks a fight with Rex and Pyra over their trying to give a little girl food. Mor Ardain's soldiers are common mooks until Mòrag gives the heroes a pardon and even joins them later on, and Tantal's and Indol's armies fight the heroes under various circumstances.
• The Unreveal: At one point in the game, when given the opportunity to question someone she knows knew one of her previous incarnations personally, Brighid asks him if the information written in her diary is accurate. The answer isn't shown to the player.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Pyra is extremely recognizable, including her shaped and colored Core Crystal, but the party goes largely unmolested. Hand Waved by showing that by the time her description and bounty become common knowledge, so has the the party's reputation as combatants, so most people avoid picking fights. The exceptions are represented by enemy Driver groups in the field.
• Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: Chapter 4 has Poppi get into a battle against Lila, who's made to be superior to her. Poppi wins due to her having a much better ether engine than Lila as well as being shaped by Tora's leveling up.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The World Tree. A massive sprawling dungeon that begins midway through Chapter 8 and continues on for the rest of the game.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • In Torigoth, you can help raise a domesticated Ardun by feeding it, and as it grows up, it gains levels. However, unlike most domesticated monsters, it's still registered as an enemy and thus you can kill it at any time (even when it's still a level 1 baby) for some easy Experience Points. If you do this, the person raising the Ardun will act like he doesn't blame you for what you did, but might consider not letting you help raise animals again. Completing the sidequest turns the Ardun into a very tough Unique Monster, which can be revived indefinitely after defeat like any other UM.
  • There's nothing stopping you from releasing Blades in droves right after they are awakened, especially if they're common ones that don't meet your expectations in field skills or stats. However, it is sometimes necessary to do this, as there is an Arbitrary Headcount Limit on Common Blades and reaching this limit will keep you from even awakening Rare Blades.
  • Once Rex becomes a Master Driver in Chapter 8, you can engage then disengage Dromarch, Brighid and Pandoria and leave them at Garfront Village. They even have lines of dialogue when you interact with them, which includes both Brighid and Pandoria complaining about having nothing to do there.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing the domesticated Ardun in Torigoth before it's fully matured will ensure that it stays dead for the entirety of your adventure. This means that it won't grow up to become a Unique Monster (which can revived indefinitely) and a good source for farming Legendary Core Crystals.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: One of the difficulty options lets you turn off almost all Action Commands in battle. This is convenient, but you will only ever get a "Good" on the automatic commands, making your specials weaker than doing them manually.
• Villain of Another Story:
  • The Saviorite Rebels, mentioned only in passing during the introductory cutscene of the final chapter. They led an attack on the First Low Orbit Station, and were apparently threatening enough to warrant activating Aion. Although their threat was ended rather abruptly when Klaus tore the world apart with his experiment.
  • Zanza, the Big Bad of the first game, becomes one here. He's not present, but his imminent defeat at Shulk's hands sets up the Race Against the Clock for the final arc of the story (his death means The Architect dies too).
• Violent Glaswegian: The Mor Ardainian soldiers in the English dub come off as this, especially so with their battle quotes.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: The DLC gives the party the ability to unlock swimsuits which actually do confer benefits and carry over to cutscenes, though it doesn't change the content of said cutscenes even when the cast is Exposed to the Elements in the snow.
• Water Tower Down: The heroes drop a water tower in Torigoth in order to weaken the powerful Fire-element Blade Brighid enough for them to escape. Deconstructed when it's pointed out that destroying the city's primary water tower has serious repercussions; the crop fields are flooded, and even once that is dealt with, the farmers have a lot of trouble watering their fields. People complain about it for the entire rest of the game.
• Weapon Specialization: All the Blades provide their Driver with some form of weapon; Pyra's is the red Aegis sword in the page image, though axes, shields, and ether cannons are other possibilities.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 8 begins with Rex and the others find themselves in a ruined modern city. This is followed by major reveals in regards to the Blade/Titan lifecycle, the true fate of the lost Kingdom of Torna, and discovering that the World Tree is actually plant growth surrounding a futuristic tower/Space Elevator that wouldn't look out of place in XenoSaga or Xenoblade Chronicles X. And that's only the first half.
  • Chapter 10. ALL OF IT! It is revealed that the Architect is actually Klaus who activated the experiment, and he was genuinely trying to save the world, revealing that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 took place at the same time.
• Wham Line:
  • Chapter 7. The boss fight against Malos has him using a variety of new abilities with "Monado" in the name, the significance of which will be immediately obvious to any veterans of Xenoblade Chronicles 1.
  • Chapter 10 has plenty.
    • The introductory cutscene. A firefight in the space above Earth. Mission Control attempting to analyze the situation. Then:
      Assistant: We're locked out by Professor Klaus.
    • The line in which The Architect refers to Malos and Pyra/Mythra by their original names, as it turns out they weren't the only Aegis cores that existed, and what he says afterwards about the third Aegis core is a massive hint towards their identity. Those who have played the first game could piece it all together when one remembers that Malos wields a Monado and Pyra/Mythra have the power of foresight, two abilities wielded in the previous game by Alvis.
      The Architect: Ontos, Logos, and Pneuma. However...Ontos triggered a space-time transition event, and disappeared forever.
    • Another one from the same chapter, not because of what it says, but because of who is saying it, as it ends up recontextualizing the entire game.
      Shulk: [overheard by Klaus] Today we use our power to fell a god, and then seize our destiny!
• Wham Shot:
  • One in the beginning of the first trailer no less. Our first glimpse of gameplay we see is Rex running through some valley with a mountain. Then said mountain starts to move. And shows its head. That's no mountain, that's a Titan.
  • After Rex picks up the third Aegis blade, he is shown a vision of a glowing light circling around the planet. Players who completed the original Xenoblade Chronicles 1 will immediately pick up the implications.
  • Malos' Blade Weapon is a Monado.
  • Upon falling to the bottom of the Cloud Sea, the protagonists discover the Land of Morytha, a post apocalyptic modern city. After that is many shots showing that the fantastical fantasy setting of the game is much more sci-fi than previously thought.
  • One that accompanies a Wham Line when the party meets the Architect, the reveal that his body is split in half. Players of the first game will know exactly what his other half became.
  • When starting a New Game Plus, the very first gameplay shot that the player is treated to is that Rex is already accompanied by Pyra/Mythra, the first tip-off besides the introductory Info Dump that things will be different and a perfect follow-up to their Disney Death and resurrection during the ending.
• What the Hell, Hero?: People in Torigoth are not happy that the water tower got destroyed. In one particular sidequest, a group of NPC drivers even attack you when they learn that you were the one that destroyed it.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you release a Blade (which you probably will do often with common Blades to make room for more Rare Blades or common Blades with desirable field skills), some of them will either be despondent or chew you out for discarding them. This is especially relevant in regards to the game's theme of Blade personhood (as being turned back into a core crystal is comparable to death since they lose their memories).
  Floren: So... I was just a tool to you, huh? Harsh.
  Crossette: P-P-Pyra? Please don't let them do this!
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Blades are sentient and have their own thoughts and emotions but need a Driver to have any sort of form. The Flesh Eater Blades only further blurs the line.
  • The refugees on Indol, having lost their homes to war, started hating all Blades in general and try to have them banned. It sounds like Fantastic Racism at first, but Blades being what they are, the debate ends up sounding like a discussion about gun control more than discrimination.
• Whoring: One easy way to farm Blade Cores other than smashing up a Unique Monster again and again is to constantly salvage from the docks on the outskirts of Mor Ardain. The Krabbles that spawn from it yield quite a few cores upon defeat.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?:
  • Blades are in a sense immortal provided their Core Crystals remain intact but lose their memory when their Driver dies, so the next iteration of them is like a whole new person (Brighid remarks that this means in a sense Blades actually tend to live much shorter lives than humans, since their driver is usually in their teens or adulthood before they are awakened). While Pyra observes this is not necessarily a bad thing as it means they aren't burdened with bad memories, a late game conversation reveals the party's Blades would prefer dying entirely. It is eventually revealed that blades, with the possible exception of the Aegises, are not truly immortal (though effectively extremely long lived). Assuming their crystals are not at some point destroyed, they eventually become titans which birth more blades, and the titans they became eventually die of old age. Also subverted with Flesh Eater blades and Blades bonded to Blade Eaters. Flesh Eaters can live for centuries but their human side eventually causes them to die. Blades bonded to Blade Eaters have their lives linked to the Blade Eater and will die for good when the person implanted with the piece of their Core Crystal dies. In Rex's case this turned out to be a link that Pyra/Mythra could break at will, being the Aegis, but for other blades like Pandoria this probably isn't the case (not that Pandora minds as she quite likes that no one will ever replace Zeke and that she will be able to pass on with him).
  • There is extra nuance in the late game conversation where Nia asks this question in an attempt to better understand Jin's pain. Rather than forever, the question is more about if any of the Blades want to be able to "extend" the lives of their current selves rather than be replaced by new incarnations. The Blades quite unaminously agree that the idea of outliving their Drivers does not appeal to them, wanting to keep the relationships they have separate from that of any future incarnations, and in as much as the end of their current incarnation counts as death, they consider it acceptable compared to the alternative. For her part, while she no longer is suicidal, Pyra believes much the same regarding not wanting to outlive her Driver, wishing that she will one day be able to die alongside Rex.
• Womb Level: The people of Uraya and Tantal live inside their Titan's stomachs. Downplayed in that aside from a few areas in Uraya, they are not really presented like one, looking more like a massive cave than the inside of a creature's body.
• World in the Sky: The characters and ecosystems live on the backs of giant stone creatures called titans.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Humans and demihumans usually have fairly standard hair colors, but also throw in silver here and there. In addition, the Blades also throw in a bunch of unnatural hair colors - In the main party alone, Pyra has a bright, unnatural shade of red, Poppi's and Brighid's hair is purple, and Pandoria has green hair. The optional Blades cover most of these colors as well, plus some blue hair for good measure.
• World Tree: Yggdrasil, the tree where the Architect lived alongside humans and shown in the page picture, is Pyra's ultimate destination. The tree is actually cover for a Space Elevator connected to the space station where Klaus performed his world-changing experiment.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: Even worse than worthless. A late-game sidequest tasks you with hunting down the 11 Nopon Doubloons in order to open Argentum's most ancient treasure. You crack it open, and... discover a record of Azurda's shopping arrears from centuries ago. Which he took out to buy a gift for his girlfriend. And which you are now responsible for. Pay up. Though it is played with in that you get his collateral back, which is made up of rare equipment.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Mesulia in Tantal becomes this if you allow her with certain dialogue paths. She's a writer who asks you to perform a few tasks and draws inspiration from your feedback. If you choose the "friendship" route after defeating the monster and then collecting the ring, her final story becomes a massive success among female readers.
  Mesulia: And so contrary to my own expectations, I have written a book that's chock full of charming men! I think it'll be a hit! Oh, don't worry, I've used all the tropes that appeal to the masses!
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Rex's reaction when the party first encounters Rosa is, "This is too ridiculous for words."

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Pyra: That was wonderful, Rex!
Rex: R-really? I'll try even harder for the next one, just you wait!

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