Xenoblade Chronicles 2: A bit of a let down, but still good.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was not the ride I was expecting going into it. Compared to other titles of the series (Xenogears and Xenosaga) the game takes itself a lot less seriously. At first, I was beginning to groove it, and after a while, I even started loving it. Though as soon as I started loving it, the games faults began to weigh on me more and more. It is still a good game, but the problems I have with it are hard to ignore.

To start, the game's story takes place on a world full of giant creatures called Titans, so large are these creatures that people live on and inside of them. In fact, there is no typical land mass anywhere, all life is on the Titans. The swim through a place called the Cloud Sea, clouds so thick you can swim through them as though they were water.

The main character is a Salvager, a person whose occupation is diving into the Cloud Sea and pulling up ancient artifacts that the people of the world can use. He takes on a job and ends up bonding with a powerful blade known as the Aegis. Blades are creatures that awaken when someone touches a core crystal, granting strength to the Driver, the person who woke them up. The Aegis is a blade of exceptional power that was responsible for an enormous amount of destruction five hundred years prior, and can seemingly live on without the need for a driver, as hers should have died ages ago.

Together, Rex and Pyra are trying to get to the legendary land of Elysium, which exists atop The World Tree. With the Titans of the world dying off, Rex hopes that this will be the key to saving the world from dying. You battle against Torna, a terrorist group also trying to get to Elysium and obtain the Aegis's power.

The actual concept of the world you live in is pretty fantastic and lends itself well to explain the conflicts between Uraya and Mor Ardain, as Mor Ardain's Titan is nearing the end of its life. That being said, it never really feels like you exist on some kind of living creature, the terrain itself looks and feels like typical land mass you could find in any other game.

Which is not to take away from the game's design, it's overall a fantastic looking game. Generic blades look pretty dumb, but the rare blades you can unlock look fantastic. Monster designs, character designs, and environments all look fantastic. I won't lie and say I was disappointed with Xenoblade 2 taking on a more typical anime aesthetic then the last game, as I've played so many RPG's lately with that kind of appear it would have been a breath of fresh air for something more in line visually with the last game, taken on its own merits it looks great.

Combat is kind of sort of turn-based. It's one of those hybrid systems that give you a degree of real-time control letting you move around in battle and reposition yourself for purpose of bonus's too attacking from behind or beside an enemy, but all your attacks are on a cooldown, and auto attacks happen so long as you aren't moving. There is also an element of timing your attacks. Use one of your arts as auto-attack hits and you decrease the cooldown, as well as build a gauge to use your special attacks. Throw in the fact using attacks of certain elements in the right order (Each Blade has it's own that all it's special attacks have) and you can perform combo attacks. You can switch between up to three blades after a certain point in the story, and have three party members. There is a high level of customization available because of this, and it's fun to play around with different strategies.

Where the combat becomes a bit boring is the special attacks themselves. Each special attack pulls up a quick time event that involves either pressing B when it indicates or pressing B fast when it indicates. Each attack will always be the same sequence, and there aren't that many possible sequences, maybe six or seven. And they are all very easy to do. So easy that there isn't really any effort put into it, yet you will be doing this a lot as you will constantly be using specials to win fights, even normal encounters. They are an essential part of the game's combat. Around the halfway point of this game, I was getting sick of the combos, but there was no way to get around it, you have to use the specials. The inclusion of such a simple and easy set up for using specials just feels like it's dragging the battles out for longer then you need to.

And the repetition of boring quit time event isn't limited to the combat, but Salvaging. You can salvage to make money and get boosters that allow you to more effectively obtain stronger blades when bonding, and to Salvage, it's a quick time even much like the combos, only all four face buttons come up. Almost every salvage spot uses the same three over and over, only a couple of them randomize the sequence that shows up. But by the time you start getting higher end Cylinders for salvaging and blades that grant bonuses, even failing at the mini-game yields a lot of rewards, so the only handful of spots that will require any effort on your part it is largely unimportant to worry about it.

And then comes the blades themselves, and this is the games next frustration in terms of mechanics. The big problem here is almost all blades you are going to get are worthless to use in combat, and only really come in handy for the Merc Missions you can send them on for rewards. To get good blades is a really, really low chance. You can increase your chances by raising your luck, taking time to strengthen blades to gain bonuses to your 'Idea' stats which affect your blades, using rare or legendary cores, and using boosters to raise your Idea's for a bonding. Even at higher levels with accessories that raise luck, bonding blades to raise your luck, using legendary cores, and max boosters it is still a painfully low chance of getting a rare blade. I have, no exaggerations, used hundreds of cores. Not one legendary core yielded a rare blade, and I have unlocked fifteen rare blades. At first that sounds like a lot, until you realize how many cores I have gone through, how long you have to sit through an animation (the light from the core in unskippable, but non-rare cores you can skip the animation after that) this is a really long time for a lot of blades that serve no real purpose.

This is what does more to bring down this game more than anything else, tedious busy work that does nothing more than drag out the length without adding anything to the experience. All of the above things are inescapable when playing the game, and after one hundred hours I was getting pretty sick of them.

The story can also be frustrating at times. Overall it's good with a lot of good characters, but there are more than a few aspects that bother me. A big one being almost every villain has some sort of tragedy behind them. Now this, in and of itself, is not a problem, but you don't discover what their deal was until after, or just as, they become pretty much irrelevant, or such things are given to characters who don't even seem to really matter until the moment they do and they are immediately forgotten again, like Mikail. Or in terms of your party, there is eventually a twist with Nia, which I'll avoid spoiling, but the problem is during her big reveal you realize it doesn't really have an impact on the narrative. It's presented in such a way that makes it feel like a big deal, but had the reveal not happened their nothing would have changed. A slight spoiler, but the event in question was a fight that resolved when a certain someone sees's your resolve to keep fighting. The reveal with Nia has her keeping you alive longer and helping protect you, but as mentioned above his dedication to keep on fighting is what ends it, there really wasn't anything gained as this was the end result of the fight with or without her.

There are times the games doesn't treat all of it's themes with the same gravity as previous titles of the Xeno series, though this will only be an issue depending on the perception you go in with. So long as you can step back a bit and accept that, by comparison, it's a more light-hearted story then the last game you'll be fine.

That aside, there are a lot of things to do in this game. Far more quests then I can count, powerful enemies for those who want to do more than just beat the game, all kinds of hidden areas and things to explore, and a handful of fantastic characters. All of the Rare Blades even have their own unique quest lines you can follow, that vary in terms of quality and tone. Some are funny, some are charming, some are pretty serious. Even taking out all the aspects mentioned above that feel like they needlessly pad out the length of the game, there is, in fact, a lot to do in this game, most of it being a lot of fun.

A last thing that came up, two times the game crashed on me. This is, again, after well over a hundred hours of play time, but save often as this is something that can happen. It's frustrating to lose a few hours of play time in this game.

The issues with this game come down to some boring and repetitive aspects you can't avoid doing and far too many moments in the plot that pull you out of the scene for a bit. Characters are a bit more clique then I'd like, the main character and Pyra being a bit on the dull side, but other characters can be fantastic, like Moraq, and have some great interactions. If you have either a lot of free time, or don't mind a game taking you a very long time to complete playing in short intervals, it's a game worth picking up despite some of the issues it carries.