VideoGame One of the Worst Sequels Ever Made
The original Xenoblade Chronicles is genre-definingly great, with an impressively twist-filled and intriguing story, a rich cast of lovable characters, well-designed combat and exploration mechanics, an unusual but appreciated emphasis on realism in the art direction, and a beautiful, unique setting that's almost too good to be on the Wii (so it's for the good of mankind that they remade the game for the Switch). I'd say it deserves a place in the annals of the best games ever made, let alone RP Gs...
...and then there's its numerical sequel, which somehow gets everything wrong in creating a follow-up to that experience.
Where to begin? Well, let's start with the story, perhaps the defining attribute of the original. Gone is the meta-commentary on the RPG genre and the consistently mature tone of the heroes' quest; instead, we have an all-too-straightforward The Chosen One narrative driven by people making stupid decisions, over and over and over and over and over again. As identified by Let's Play/Chuggaaconroy, there's some subtext about the conflict metaphorically representing humanity's struggle with climate change, but it's nowhere near as prominent or well-handled as the original's deconstruction of the hero's journey because the story cares more about ticking off worn-down cliches on a list (e.g. killing off a mentor just to motivate the main character). Strike one.
Then there's the characters...oh, god the characters. I can name a whopping five members of the main, non-optional-Blade cast that I actually like: Pyra, Zeke, Vandham, Morag, and Malos. Everyone else ranges from okay (Dromarch, Rex when he's not yelling) to annoying (Poppi, Pandoria), to some of the most aggravating people I've ever seen in a fictional story (Mythra, and especially Nia). Gone is the well-rounded cast of XC 1 that all bounced off each other to build up a believable rapport while being distinct, memorable characters with visible growth themselves; instead, we get essentially a collection of tropes with voice actors (who do their best! No hate toward them) that putz around and initiate/become the victim of any number of stale gags or mediocre attempts at "character development". As hinted above, Nia is the single worst example of this: I cannot remember ever seeing a more annoying tsundere-style character in any other work of fiction (made even worse by her never getting any comeuppance for her ridiculous behavior), and she's one of the reasons, alongside Mythra, that I now firmly believe the character archetype is dead in the water with nothing more to be done with it.
Oh, and let's talk about the combat, shall we? The simple but effective Break-Topple-Daze combo progression aided by individual special attacks of a few different damage types is replaced with an utterly bewildering damage system with dozens of different damage types, effectiveness based on range and position, combo attacks that you can't manually set up and just have to kinda hope will come along...and the Blade system, where your base effectiveness in combat comes down to luck and the hopes that you pull someone/something actually worthwhile from the gacha system instead of your umpteenth ordinary, quickly-disposed-of normal Blade. Because inventory shops were just too outdated, right?
And finally (since the setting of the game isn't bad, just not as grand-feeling as the two titans were), there's the art direction - wholly ditching any semblance of realism in favor of anime, just like the story and characters. This is perhaps the most damning thing about XC 2, its insistence on every prominent female character and Blade being an oversexualized fetish with jiggle physics on two legs (while, somehow, all the male characters and Blades get diverse and actually interesting designs) and getting into at least one suggestive situation at some point in either the main storyline or their personal sidequest. Especially egregious for the two Blades that distinctly appear to be children and yet still get big, clearly defined boobs and/or butts, because god forbid the whole thing not get any weirder. Oh, and did I mention that Morag, the ONE female character dressed in modest clothing that doesn't show off every inch of her figure, routinely gets called a man or "unwomanly" by the rest of the cast? There's absolutely nothing remiss about calling this game a waifu gacha once you've seen how bad this gets...and it's also not great that almost every side bad guy that shows up (and the aforementioned killed mentor) is dark-skinned while the ENTIRE main cast is white as snow.
Ultimately, if it were a completely standalone title, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 would be a very average experience - not unplayable, but not doing anything notable either. But because it slates itself as the successor to one of the greatest experiences in gaming, it instead comes off as an insultingly bad follow-up attempt that gets everything wrong in the process of trying to be different and new. The franchise would be better off if we'd stopped at X.
VideoGame A good game, but probably my least favorite Xenoblade game
As a standalone game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is great, though its predecessors were both tough acts to follow, in my opinion, and when a game is part of a series, I am understandably inclined to compare it to its series-mates. I could say more than I do here, but the 3000-character limit prevents me from covering everything.
Where I found 2 to be better:
- The combat system is similar enough to those of 1 and X that I was able to adapt fairly quickly, though I will concede that there are enough new mechanics, such as Blade Combos, that took some getting used to. While I didn't care for how slowly everyone moves in combat, I found the button-mapped Arts system preferable to the old system in which I had to scroll along a list at the bottom of the screen.
- Alrest felt like a much more diverse and immersive world to me than Mira or the Bionis and Mechonis. The wider variety of accents in the cast likely helped with that.
- While the art style may have also contributed to one of my issues with the game (see below), I do think it allowed for more expressive faces, which I considered a good thing.
- Without spoiling anything, I did enjoy the overall story, even if said story did need more time to get moving than I would have preferred.
Where I found it to be worse:
- Some of the common anime clichés wore rather thin, in my opinion. On a similar note, while I liked the story in general, I do think it wasn't executed as well as that of 1 or X, and that is partially because of the aforementioned clichés.
- The total lack of appearance customization was a major letdown for me. 1 had multiple armor sets to choose from, allowing for a variety of appearances. X took that even further with Fashion Slots. I'm usually rather averse to the more common forms of Fanservice, so I sorely missed having the option of putting characters in outfits that were at least somewhat practical.
- Frankly, the fanservice in general bothered me. Fanservice is nothing new in the series, as Sharla demonstrates, but this game strikes me as having turned it Up to Eleven. I can like Ms. Fanservice when her personality suits her design (Sonya from Fire Emblem Gaiden comes to mind for me), but most, if not all, of the fanservice-y designs I saw in this game felt gratuitous rather than meaningful to me.
Where I feel the games cannot be compared:
- Blades in general are an integral part of 2's story and mechanics and don't have a proper counterpart in 1 or X. Rare Blades can make for fun and interesting secondary characters. Common Blades, however, were of little interest to me; the game can talk about how "Blades are people, too" all it wants, but the mechanics and their cookie-cutter designs encourage me to treat them as tools.
VideoGame Xenoblade Chronices 2 is an excellent game, easily the best of the Xenoblade series.
The Xenoblade series in general is an acquired taste. These are anime-inspired jRPGs, particularly when it comes to their art style and character design. That, and all the blatant anime tropes the games indulge in, can put people off.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 turns the anime art and troping up to 11, and that can be a pretty rough. But if you get through that, you'll find a touching personal story about a gang of misfits who come together out of personal convenience and end up tight-knit friends. Every character has believable histories and motives, and even the blatant anime troping makes perfect sense when you understand who these characters are. This is in contrast to the rest of the series, where the stories are impersonal and many of the characters lack solid motives to be there. It feels as though the prior games were practice runs and Xenoblade 2 was where the writers hit their stride.
Of course, when talking about a jRPG, you need to discuss combat. The Xenoblade series overall has an odd battle system that feels slow but is actually pretty fast. Your characters and the enemies are always moving and acting, and you need to be aware of your strategy and time your strong attacks properly to build up massive combo damage. Xenoblade 2 maintains this system, but puts its own stamp on it with the Driver-Blade system. Your attackers are Drivers, and behind each is a secondary character who is a sapient living weapon, a Blade. The Blade gives the Driver a specific weapon to fight with, and specific magical powers to soup up their attacks. And your Drivers eventually can equip up to three different Blades who they can swap between during combat, to give themselves more weapon and combo options.
The combat system is very powerful and versatile, but there is a lot to keep track of. Newbies can find it pretty overwhelming even early on, and learning it is a tall hill to climb. And this, unfortunately, leads to Xenoblade 2's biggest flaw: its in-game tutorials are garbage. It feels like the developers tried hard to edit down the tutorials so the player wouldn't need to sit through hours of lessons on how to play. But the result is that tutorials are usually badly phrased, often pop up at strange times, have many bad examples, and rarely but sometimes give wrong information. Also, you can not go back to review tutorials later, so too bad if you've forgotten something twenty hours in.
Depending on the tutorials to get good at the combat is a fast road to quitting in frustration. So I recommend watching Chuggaaconroy's spoiler-free Everything I Wish I Knew About Xenoblade Chronicles 2
video as a starting point.
Over all, getting into this game is a slog, and lots of people just can't be bothered. If you manage to make it, though, you're treated to the most touching story and well-written characters of the series. If you're a jRPG fan, you owe it to yourself to give Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a try.