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cosmicspearContent warning: This game touches on the concept of suicidal ideation in a way that's too important to the plot for me not to discuss.
It seems like only yesterday that Xenoblade was some silly Japanese game that Nintendo of America saw absolutely nothing in and only released in a very limited form after a massive interest campaign. Not that this is something they're probably fond of remembering, given how big the series it spawned ended up being.
The specifics of that are more relevant to the original Xenoblade Chronicles, so I'll spare you the details here. The short version is that it came out during the height of an honestly pretty damn racist backlash against Japanese games in the English-speaking world so it took a lot to convince Nintendo that there was any overseas demand for it at all.
In the end, though, the game was enough of a success to warrant not one but two sequels. The first one, Xenoblade Chronicles X, is one of a small number of really popular Wii U games that still doesn't have a version for anything that's still supported. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the second one, available only for Switch at present. And it is good.
As Xenoblade Chronicles 2 opens up, it presents us with Alrest, a world in the sky where people live on the backs of continent-sized Titans that drift atop what is known as the Cloud Sea. Unfortunately, the Titans are beginning to die out, and sooner or later there won't be anywhere for people to live. Rex, the protagonist, is very concerned about this, which is why his goal is to climb the World Tree at the center of Alrest. Atop it, it is said, lies Elysium, where mankind once lived alongside their god, the Architect.
Also found in Alrest are Blades, beings that can manifest weapons and magical effects from the ether in the atmosphere and who are bonded to individuals called Drivers. Blades emerge from objects called Core Crystals, which are then visibly embedded in their chests. They generally look somewhat human-like but with some obviously non-human features, but animal-form Blades also exist. They return to their Core Crystals when their Drivers die, losing their memories in the process.
The story proper opens with Rex, who makes a living by salvaging things from beneath the Cloud Sea and selling them, being hired by a group of two very menacing-looking men and one significantly less menacing-looking girl (you have three guesses which of these three winds up as one of the good guys, and the first two don't count) to help bring up the cargo of an ancient ship. Naturally, it's a setup where they want him for something very specific (namely, opening a door they can't) and plan to kill him once he's opened the way to their target. The target in question turns out to be a special Blade named Pyra who has a unique Core Crystal and has maintained her form without a Driver. Rex accidentally bonds with her, is murdered for his trouble, and Pyra ends up bringing him back by using part of her Core Crystal to replace his heart. Conveniently enough, Pyra is looking to go to Elysium, and confirms to Rex that it really does exist.
Not that getting there's going to be easy, of course. The group that initially set Rex up, Torna, still wants to get their hands on Pyra, and they're hardly the only ones—she's the Aegis, a particularly mighty Blade of legend whose world-shattering power is something a lot of people want to get ahold of. Rex ends up travelling together with the obviously-going-to-join-the-party girl from Torna, Nia, along with a few other allies as they try to find a way to Elysium.
So, there's the story setup. Now for how the game plays, and oh boy is there a lot to cover here.
So, like the other Xenoblade games this is an action-RPG with an auto-attack system, but it does its own thing in a number of ways. Your basic auto-attacks are only used when you're not moving, unlike absolutely every other auto-attack system I've ever used, but they end up feeling a lot more impactful as a result if that makes any sense. You've also got Driver Arts—three of 'em per weapon, chosen from a pool of four. These are assigned to the B, X, and Y buttons and charged up by your auto-attacks. Furthermore, using them charges up energy for your Blade's specials, which are assigned to A. You also have the ability to switch between Blades, which can give you access to different weapons (and thus different Driver arts) and specials—each character can have up to three equipped at a time for use in battle.
Things get more interesting when you start chaining specials together to perform Blade combos. The way these work is that all specials have an element attached to them, and when you use one it applies a specific effect based on the element you used. Following this up with another special of the right element (there's always two that work, and they're conveniently displayed on-screen) that's at least level 2 continues the combo with a second stage, and there's also a third stage available by doing the same thing with a level 3 special (there's also level 4 specials, but they're functionally equivalent to level 3 specials for the purpose of Blade combos). Activating a Blade combo gives you a bunch of extra damage and a secondary effect based on what elements you used, with the level 1 and 2 versions generally producing damage over time while the level 3 versions stop the enemy from doing something. Level 3 Blade combos also place an element orb aligned to whatever element they used on the enemy, which raises their resistance to its element but can be used for chain attacks (which I'll get to).
In addition to Blade combos, there's also Driver combos. The basics of these should be familiar to anyone who played the other Xenoblade games: some arts can inflict Break on enemies, and while that's active you can use certain other arts to Topple them. Toppled enemies can then be Launched into the air, and after that it's possible to Smash them into the ground. Each step before Smash makes the enemy take more damage, and Smashing also grants bonus damage. But wait, there's more! Because it's also possible to have both a Driver combo and a Blade combo going at the same time. This is a Fusion combo, and they do even more damage while also resetting the timer on your Blade combo (so you get more damage over time and more time to build up your specials to continue it). There's also Joint combos, which involve multiple characters using arts at the same time and aren't worth worrying about since you only control one party member directly.
Then there's chain attacks, where all your party members use specials at once. These let you break the element orbs you set up with Blade combos, adding bonus damage to the chain attack and extending it for an additional round each time you break one. This leads to the basic combat cycle: you use arts to build up specials and perform Driver combos, use your specials to do Blade combos (weaving in Driver combos as you do this to get Fusion combos), and use the element orbs from your Blade combos to do long chain attacks for massive damage. It's combos all the way down, basically.
The next thing of note is how you get ahold of the Blades you use, and this is something that a lot of people aren't exactly fond of. You see, it's random. You find Core Crystals, and then you use them and you're randomly given either a common Blade with randomly selected abilities or a rare Blade with specific abilities. Getting the specific rare Blades you want can honestly be an absolute nightmare. Thankfully, the game isn't unfair about it—there's a pity system that gives you a few guaranteed rares and there's enough fixed rare Blades to outfit an entire endgame party—but it's something a lot of people aren't exactly fond of. Particularly since you have a hard cap on how many common Blades you can have at once, which can only be increased by interacting with the mercenary company you end up in charge of (which also provides a use for all those common Blades you get and probably won't be using in battle).
Mechanically, Blades are defined by their element (which is used for attacks), specials (whose specific effects aren't directly stated but can be figured out through trial and error), Blade arts (used semi-randomly in battle for support effects), weapons, and skills. Weapons are divided into attacker, tank, and healer roles that affect how the AI plays to some degree and relate to some degree to how the weapon's arts tend to work (attackers get stuff like positional damage bonuses and conditional damage bonuses for having high HP, tanks get aggro drawing and defensive effects, healers generate HP potions and heal your allies on hit, that sort of thing). Skills are built up though the Blade's affinity chart, which provides challenges that reward you by improving them (along with the Blade's specials). Building up a Blade's affinity chart is worth it even if you aren't interested in the skills you get, though, because completing more of it makes the Blade stronger in general.
Aside from combat skills, Blades also have field skills, which are used to clear obstacles. The way this works is that when you come to a point where you need a field skill, the game adds up the total levels of every single instance of that skill among Blades you have engaged to see if you can clear it. A lot of the time you're inevitably going to have to switch your party lineup to get the right field skills for a particular obstacle, which is irritating but hardly a dealbreaker. The game actively messes with you on this a lot, too—there's plenty of points where you need a particular skill to go somewhere, then to keep going you need the same skill at a higher level. Most of these moments involve checks to jump from one ladder to another, and I can't help but respect the level of trolling involved in that because you can't open the menu, and thus can't switch Blades, when you're on a ladder. Thankfully that particular trick is never used anywhere you need to go to progress, because the devs know better than to be that cruel.
Alas, a lot of what I've been discussing here isn't exactly explained well in the game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game that would definitely benefit from having a real manual, but instead we get short tutorials placed at points where the devs felt they'd be worth putting them. These tutorials are...not great, and the way they're not great isn't immediately obvious if you get what they're trying to say but is staring you right in the face if you don't. I'm personally in the former category, so it took watching Chuggaaconroy's Let's Play where he goes into as much detail as possible for me to really get just how bad these tutorials actually are.
Of course, the main draw of the Xenoblade games is their worlds, and in that respect Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a clear winner. Each Titan presents an impressively massive area to explore, and you get plenty of latitude to go almost anywhere in them. There's only a couple of real roadblocks so you can easily go wherever you want and blunder into whatever postgame areas you can find. And there's plenty to find, too—treasure chests, collectible items, unique named monsters that will absolutely terrify you in the early game, everything you could hope for, really. The environments are also extremely good-looking, with plenty of inventive applications of the whole "continents that are actually living beings" schtick and generally a lot of absolutely breathtaking views to find. There's also a fast travel feature, which is something I'm not normally fond of because a lot of developers use them to paper over level design they're obviously not confident in but in this case it works really well because they're quite clearly not doing that. The fact that it's how you revisit areas you've gone past helps, too.
Since I've started going into the art direction it's high time I address something that was initially divisive among players, which is the art style. See, the previous Xenoblade games both used a semi-photorealistic style that was generally liked, but this one switches things up by instead going for more anime-styled graphics, and while a lot of the hatred towards that from the bad old days has died down, there's still no shortage of people who hate on anything that looks even vaguely Japanese. I'm not gonna mince words here: they're wrong, and that sort of knee-jerk racist reaction is just gonna make them miss out on something they could easily end up liking. Another thing that got a lot of irrational hate, albeit of a different type, is the fact that the primary character designer, Masatsugu Saito, draws erotic manga (he calls himself saitom in that field, for anyone curious). This made some very loud people very angry because HOW DARE THEY GIVE SOMEONE WHO DRAWS PORN WORK. I'm gonna be even blunter about this than I am about the art style and say that this sort of attitude isn't just bigoted but also actively dangerous in ways that are beyond the scope of this review, and anyone supporting it can go fuck themselves.
It's probably worth talking about the artists who worked on this game, though, since there's a lot of them. All of Torna's members were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, for instance, which makes a lot of sense because they're basically an evil take on a Final Fantasy party. Most of the rare Blades are designed by guest artists, too, which gives them a very wide variety of designs that helps make them all feel special in some way. The fact that the game can take thest extremely varied designs and make them all feel like they belong in the same world is proof of how good the art direction is.
Anyway, back to the plot. One thing that's interesting is how frequently the game messes with the general expectations behind its major story beats. You're presented with an evil empire that's mistreating its colony...only for it to turn out that the empire in question is trying to make amends for its past and the terrible colonial leader genuinely was an outlier for once. The empire's most elite soldier waxes poetic about how she needs to stop the Aegis from repeating the destruction of 500 years ago...and turns out to be entirely honest about her goals and even willing to trust that Rex isn't going to let that happen. The first half of the game talks up a war between the world's two biggest superpowers in a way that suggests it's inevitable...but the villains' attempts to start it early backfire so badly that they end up signing a peace treaty without any grumbling from anyone. Torna is initially presented as being focused on Jin, a badass white-haired swordsman with a cool mask who absolutely does the Sephiroth/Ghaleon thing...but he's their second-in-command and the actual leader is Malos, the thuggish-looking guy you'd probably peg as a secondary villain from his look and attitude (and who turns out to be another Aegis, while Jin's just a regular Blade, albeit an incredibly strong one). And the silly comic relief character's storyline that ends with you fighting a giant robot maid that's also a Mazinger Z parody turns out to have actual serious consequences. It's hardly unique in doing this—most JRPGs I've played make at least a token effort on this front—but it happens enough that I find it hard to not comment on it.
The main antagonists are also interesting to consider. We've got three of them, and while they all effectively want the same thing their motives for wanting it are inherently very different. First up is Jin, whose reasons for wanting the world destroyed are extremely personal: he wants revenge on the world in general and he especially wants revenge on the local evil church and its leader, Amalthus. They're the ones who, during the war 500 years ago, destroyed the original kingdom of Torna that he took the name of his group from and nearly killed him and his Driver, Lora.
Amalthus, meanwhile, just plain hates the world due to spending his entire life from his childhood seeing it at its worst. A lot is made of how he climbed the World Tree 500 years ago and retrieved both Malos and Mythra's Core Crystals—he was doing that to ask the Architect why there needs to be suffering in the world, only to never even meet the Architect. Learning that his god apparently didn't care about the evils of the world pretty much broke him. By the time of the game itself he's primarily concerned more with maintaining his own power as the self-proclaimed arbiter of the Architect's will, but he's still low-key trying to destroy the world through his policies—normally Blades are supposed to eventually mature into Titans, but he's disrupted the entire system by which this works which has led to fewer Titans being born.
In contrast to Jin and Amalthus' personal motivations for wanting the world dead, Malos is extremely impersonal in his goals. He simply destroys because his instincts tell him to destroy, and as far as anyone can tell he has those instincts because Amalthus awakened him at the height of his hatred of the world. That war 500 years ago I keep bringing up? That was against him, and a flashback shows him telling Amalthus that he's merely granting his wish. In the end, though, Malos rejects the idea that Amalthus being the source of his evil does anything to absolve him of responsibility for his actions. As far as he's concerned, destruction is his nature and the fact that this nature partially stems from someone else doesn't change this. The fact that he actively chooses to reject any motivations beyond simply being the ultimate evil is an interesting departure from how these sorts of villains are typically portrayed.
One other thing that really stands out is how much is done with the fact that Blades normally lose their memories when their Drivers die. One Blade carries a diary written by her past selves, for instance, and a significant deal is made of the fact that she can't know how trustworthy they actually were. There's also a series of sidequests involving two particular Blades who are extremely close in the lives you first meet them in as enemies, but recruiting them involves their Drivers dying so they forget it all and have to start over. The final part of their story involves them trying to make amends for their crimes that they no longer remember, and they're hardly the only Blades whose past lives were radically different from their current ones.
This particular theme also bleeds back into Pyra's characterization in a somewhat unusual way because, as the Aegis, she's an exception to that rule about Blades returning to their Core Crystals and losing their memories without their Drivers. As such, she remembers absolutely everything that happened in the war she was part of. All the comrades she's lost, all the suffering directly and indirectly linked to her actions, everything. That's actually why Pyra exists—her original personality, Mythra, was so terrified of her power that she created Pyra as a replacement who wouldn't be able to use it. Mythra's immediate reaction when she first appears in the story is actually one of confusion and anger at Rex for bringing her back because of this.
And in the end? It turns out Pyra and Mythra's reason for trying to get to Elysium is so they can have the Architect kill them and end the threat they pose for good.
And sure, Rex is convinced that Pyra and Mythra aren't a danger to the world, but the war they lived through saw three Titans destroyed. And sure, none of that was their fault, but that doesn't change the fact that, you know, the first thing they remember is a war that destroyed three entire continents. Particularly since the person who acually did the whole destroying part had the same sort of power as them. How could Rex possibly convince them they belong in the world in the face of that? How could anyone?
Thankfully, they have Rex, who is the sort of character who I'd describe as "the goodest boy." He's the sort of person who can see the good in absolutely anyone. And I do mean anyone—toward the end he's asked what he plans to do with Malos and says he'll punch him in the face, then go for a drink with him once it's over. Which doesn't mean he's soft by any stretch of the imagination—he's just optimistic and good at understanding people.
This is, of course, exactly the sort of quality that makes him the right sort of person to get through to Pyra and Mythra and save them. In fact, the sequence dedicated to the party going to "find the true power of the Aegis" isn't about finding any sort of new power so much as helping Rex realize that he's able to accept them. This of course leads into one of the most incredibly heartwarming scenes in a game full of incredibly heartwarming scenes, as Rex comes to terms with Pyra and Mythra's fears, vows that he won't let the world burn again, and promises that he'll help them find their place. This leads to him being able to call upon their true true power in a sequence that's the best possible kind of cheesy.
There's a definite intentional contrast here between Pyra/Mythra, who had a companion who could accept them and help them realize they aren't destined to destroy the world, and Malos, who didn't and thus concluded that he couldn't be anything other than a destroyer. You'll notice that the contrast is also seen in their regular character arcs, since Malos leaned into what he could only think of as his true nature while Pyra and Mythra decided to save the world from themselves by sealing themselves away and planning their own deaths should the seal fail.
Then we get to the game's final act, where its connections to the first Xenoblade are made explicit. The party climbs the World Tree (which has a space elevator inside it, as it turns out), and Elysium turns out to be a space station. Specifically, the space station that was shown in the first game to be the site of the experiment that created its universe. The Architect turns out to be Klaus, the scientist who performed the experiment—or rather, the half of him that didn't get sent to the world of Xenoblade 1 and become Zanza. Pyra/Mythra and Malos turn out to be two of the three computers that controlled the experiment, with the third being sent to Xenoblade 1's universe and becoming Alvis.
Which mostly ends up being irrelevant to this game, except that Klaus is able to recognize that his other half is going to die soon, so the final battle with Malos is happening at the same time that Shulk and his group are fighting Zanza. Which is admittedly pretty cool.
More relevant to the story of this game is the fact that despite all of his efforts to atone for his actions by rebuilding the world, Klaus ultimately found that nothing was different about how people acted, so he concluded that his plan was doomed to failure from the start. This is why he didn't bother interacting with Amalthus or try to stop him, since he didn't think it mattered. But then he realized that Rex and Pyra/Mythra were able to forge a unique bond that proved that humanity is better than he thought they were, and this gave him hope for the world again. This ends up actually being incredibly important, but at this particular point Malos destroying the world is a more immediate issue.
So you go beat Malos, who predictably rejects Rex's attempts to save him because he's too set in his ways.
After that, with time rapidly running out, Klaus gives the world one final gift by creating a real Elysium, right before dying when theZoharConduit, the artifact he was using to become a god, disappears. This also means the World Tree starts collapsing, since the Conduit was what was holding it up. Pyra/Mythra send the party to the escape pods, but they have to stay behind to set the station to self-destruct and stop it from killing anyone. In the end, it turns out that their death was unavoidable.
Except that's not true, because earlier in the story it was made clear that an Aegis can survive for a bit without a Core Crystal. And this allows Pyra and Mythra to choose life, giving Rex the rest of their Core Crystal so they can be brought back. They even get separate bodies out of the deal! Not every day you see a conventional JRPG with a canon harem ending.
So that's Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for you. A complex but fun battle system, excellent presentation, an interesting world concept, and a powerful message of hope all wrapped up in a package whose caveats are fairly minor in comparison. I think my opinion on this game is pretty obvious from how I'm describing it, honestly.
It seems like only yesterday that Xenoblade was some silly Japanese game that Nintendo of America saw absolutely nothing in and only released in a very limited form after a massive interest campaign. Not that this is something they're probably fond of remembering, given how big the series it spawned ended up being.
The specifics of that are more relevant to the original Xenoblade Chronicles, so I'll spare you the details here. The short version is that it came out during the height of an honestly pretty damn racist backlash against Japanese games in the English-speaking world so it took a lot to convince Nintendo that there was any overseas demand for it at all.
In the end, though, the game was enough of a success to warrant not one but two sequels. The first one, Xenoblade Chronicles X, is one of a small number of really popular Wii U games that still doesn't have a version for anything that's still supported. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the second one, available only for Switch at present. And it is good.
As Xenoblade Chronicles 2 opens up, it presents us with Alrest, a world in the sky where people live on the backs of continent-sized Titans that drift atop what is known as the Cloud Sea. Unfortunately, the Titans are beginning to die out, and sooner or later there won't be anywhere for people to live. Rex, the protagonist, is very concerned about this, which is why his goal is to climb the World Tree at the center of Alrest. Atop it, it is said, lies Elysium, where mankind once lived alongside their god, the Architect.
Also found in Alrest are Blades, beings that can manifest weapons and magical effects from the ether in the atmosphere and who are bonded to individuals called Drivers. Blades emerge from objects called Core Crystals, which are then visibly embedded in their chests. They generally look somewhat human-like but with some obviously non-human features, but animal-form Blades also exist. They return to their Core Crystals when their Drivers die, losing their memories in the process.
The story proper opens with Rex, who makes a living by salvaging things from beneath the Cloud Sea and selling them, being hired by a group of two very menacing-looking men and one significantly less menacing-looking girl (you have three guesses which of these three winds up as one of the good guys, and the first two don't count) to help bring up the cargo of an ancient ship. Naturally, it's a setup where they want him for something very specific (namely, opening a door they can't) and plan to kill him once he's opened the way to their target. The target in question turns out to be a special Blade named Pyra who has a unique Core Crystal and has maintained her form without a Driver. Rex accidentally bonds with her, is murdered for his trouble, and Pyra ends up bringing him back by using part of her Core Crystal to replace his heart. Conveniently enough, Pyra is looking to go to Elysium, and confirms to Rex that it really does exist.
Not that getting there's going to be easy, of course. The group that initially set Rex up, Torna, still wants to get their hands on Pyra, and they're hardly the only ones—she's the Aegis, a particularly mighty Blade of legend whose world-shattering power is something a lot of people want to get ahold of. Rex ends up travelling together with the obviously-going-to-join-the-party girl from Torna, Nia, along with a few other allies as they try to find a way to Elysium.
So, there's the story setup. Now for how the game plays, and oh boy is there a lot to cover here.
So, like the other Xenoblade games this is an action-RPG with an auto-attack system, but it does its own thing in a number of ways. Your basic auto-attacks are only used when you're not moving, unlike absolutely every other auto-attack system I've ever used, but they end up feeling a lot more impactful as a result if that makes any sense. You've also got Driver Arts—three of 'em per weapon, chosen from a pool of four. These are assigned to the B, X, and Y buttons and charged up by your auto-attacks. Furthermore, using them charges up energy for your Blade's specials, which are assigned to A. You also have the ability to switch between Blades, which can give you access to different weapons (and thus different Driver arts) and specials—each character can have up to three equipped at a time for use in battle.
Things get more interesting when you start chaining specials together to perform Blade combos. The way these work is that all specials have an element attached to them, and when you use one it applies a specific effect based on the element you used. Following this up with another special of the right element (there's always two that work, and they're conveniently displayed on-screen) that's at least level 2 continues the combo with a second stage, and there's also a third stage available by doing the same thing with a level 3 special (there's also level 4 specials, but they're functionally equivalent to level 3 specials for the purpose of Blade combos). Activating a Blade combo gives you a bunch of extra damage and a secondary effect based on what elements you used, with the level 1 and 2 versions generally producing damage over time while the level 3 versions stop the enemy from doing something. Level 3 Blade combos also place an element orb aligned to whatever element they used on the enemy, which raises their resistance to its element but can be used for chain attacks (which I'll get to).
In addition to Blade combos, there's also Driver combos. The basics of these should be familiar to anyone who played the other Xenoblade games: some arts can inflict Break on enemies, and while that's active you can use certain other arts to Topple them. Toppled enemies can then be Launched into the air, and after that it's possible to Smash them into the ground. Each step before Smash makes the enemy take more damage, and Smashing also grants bonus damage. But wait, there's more! Because it's also possible to have both a Driver combo and a Blade combo going at the same time. This is a Fusion combo, and they do even more damage while also resetting the timer on your Blade combo (so you get more damage over time and more time to build up your specials to continue it). There's also Joint combos, which involve multiple characters using arts at the same time and aren't worth worrying about since you only control one party member directly.
Then there's chain attacks, where all your party members use specials at once. These let you break the element orbs you set up with Blade combos, adding bonus damage to the chain attack and extending it for an additional round each time you break one. This leads to the basic combat cycle: you use arts to build up specials and perform Driver combos, use your specials to do Blade combos (weaving in Driver combos as you do this to get Fusion combos), and use the element orbs from your Blade combos to do long chain attacks for massive damage. It's combos all the way down, basically.
The next thing of note is how you get ahold of the Blades you use, and this is something that a lot of people aren't exactly fond of. You see, it's random. You find Core Crystals, and then you use them and you're randomly given either a common Blade with randomly selected abilities or a rare Blade with specific abilities. Getting the specific rare Blades you want can honestly be an absolute nightmare. Thankfully, the game isn't unfair about it—there's a pity system that gives you a few guaranteed rares and there's enough fixed rare Blades to outfit an entire endgame party—but it's something a lot of people aren't exactly fond of. Particularly since you have a hard cap on how many common Blades you can have at once, which can only be increased by interacting with the mercenary company you end up in charge of (which also provides a use for all those common Blades you get and probably won't be using in battle).
Mechanically, Blades are defined by their element (which is used for attacks), specials (whose specific effects aren't directly stated but can be figured out through trial and error), Blade arts (used semi-randomly in battle for support effects), weapons, and skills. Weapons are divided into attacker, tank, and healer roles that affect how the AI plays to some degree and relate to some degree to how the weapon's arts tend to work (attackers get stuff like positional damage bonuses and conditional damage bonuses for having high HP, tanks get aggro drawing and defensive effects, healers generate HP potions and heal your allies on hit, that sort of thing). Skills are built up though the Blade's affinity chart, which provides challenges that reward you by improving them (along with the Blade's specials). Building up a Blade's affinity chart is worth it even if you aren't interested in the skills you get, though, because completing more of it makes the Blade stronger in general.
Aside from combat skills, Blades also have field skills, which are used to clear obstacles. The way this works is that when you come to a point where you need a field skill, the game adds up the total levels of every single instance of that skill among Blades you have engaged to see if you can clear it. A lot of the time you're inevitably going to have to switch your party lineup to get the right field skills for a particular obstacle, which is irritating but hardly a dealbreaker. The game actively messes with you on this a lot, too—there's plenty of points where you need a particular skill to go somewhere, then to keep going you need the same skill at a higher level. Most of these moments involve checks to jump from one ladder to another, and I can't help but respect the level of trolling involved in that because you can't open the menu, and thus can't switch Blades, when you're on a ladder. Thankfully that particular trick is never used anywhere you need to go to progress, because the devs know better than to be that cruel.
Alas, a lot of what I've been discussing here isn't exactly explained well in the game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game that would definitely benefit from having a real manual, but instead we get short tutorials placed at points where the devs felt they'd be worth putting them. These tutorials are...not great, and the way they're not great isn't immediately obvious if you get what they're trying to say but is staring you right in the face if you don't. I'm personally in the former category, so it took watching Chuggaaconroy's Let's Play where he goes into as much detail as possible for me to really get just how bad these tutorials actually are.
Of course, the main draw of the Xenoblade games is their worlds, and in that respect Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a clear winner. Each Titan presents an impressively massive area to explore, and you get plenty of latitude to go almost anywhere in them. There's only a couple of real roadblocks so you can easily go wherever you want and blunder into whatever postgame areas you can find. And there's plenty to find, too—treasure chests, collectible items, unique named monsters that will absolutely terrify you in the early game, everything you could hope for, really. The environments are also extremely good-looking, with plenty of inventive applications of the whole "continents that are actually living beings" schtick and generally a lot of absolutely breathtaking views to find. There's also a fast travel feature, which is something I'm not normally fond of because a lot of developers use them to paper over level design they're obviously not confident in but in this case it works really well because they're quite clearly not doing that. The fact that it's how you revisit areas you've gone past helps, too.
Since I've started going into the art direction it's high time I address something that was initially divisive among players, which is the art style. See, the previous Xenoblade games both used a semi-photorealistic style that was generally liked, but this one switches things up by instead going for more anime-styled graphics, and while a lot of the hatred towards that from the bad old days has died down, there's still no shortage of people who hate on anything that looks even vaguely Japanese. I'm not gonna mince words here: they're wrong, and that sort of knee-jerk racist reaction is just gonna make them miss out on something they could easily end up liking. Another thing that got a lot of irrational hate, albeit of a different type, is the fact that the primary character designer, Masatsugu Saito, draws erotic manga (he calls himself saitom in that field, for anyone curious). This made some very loud people very angry because HOW DARE THEY GIVE SOMEONE WHO DRAWS PORN WORK. I'm gonna be even blunter about this than I am about the art style and say that this sort of attitude isn't just bigoted but also actively dangerous in ways that are beyond the scope of this review, and anyone supporting it can go fuck themselves.
It's probably worth talking about the artists who worked on this game, though, since there's a lot of them. All of Torna's members were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, for instance, which makes a lot of sense because they're basically an evil take on a Final Fantasy party. Most of the rare Blades are designed by guest artists, too, which gives them a very wide variety of designs that helps make them all feel special in some way. The fact that the game can take thest extremely varied designs and make them all feel like they belong in the same world is proof of how good the art direction is.
Anyway, back to the plot. One thing that's interesting is how frequently the game messes with the general expectations behind its major story beats. You're presented with an evil empire that's mistreating its colony...only for it to turn out that the empire in question is trying to make amends for its past and the terrible colonial leader genuinely was an outlier for once. The empire's most elite soldier waxes poetic about how she needs to stop the Aegis from repeating the destruction of 500 years ago...and turns out to be entirely honest about her goals and even willing to trust that Rex isn't going to let that happen. The first half of the game talks up a war between the world's two biggest superpowers in a way that suggests it's inevitable...but the villains' attempts to start it early backfire so badly that they end up signing a peace treaty without any grumbling from anyone. Torna is initially presented as being focused on Jin, a badass white-haired swordsman with a cool mask who absolutely does the Sephiroth/Ghaleon thing...but he's their second-in-command and the actual leader is Malos, the thuggish-looking guy you'd probably peg as a secondary villain from his look and attitude (and who turns out to be another Aegis, while Jin's just a regular Blade, albeit an incredibly strong one). And the silly comic relief character's storyline that ends with you fighting a giant robot maid that's also a Mazinger Z parody turns out to have actual serious consequences. It's hardly unique in doing this—most JRPGs I've played make at least a token effort on this front—but it happens enough that I find it hard to not comment on it.
The main antagonists are also interesting to consider. We've got three of them, and while they all effectively want the same thing their motives for wanting it are inherently very different. First up is Jin, whose reasons for wanting the world destroyed are extremely personal: he wants revenge on the world in general and he especially wants revenge on the local evil church and its leader, Amalthus. They're the ones who, during the war 500 years ago, destroyed the original kingdom of Torna that he took the name of his group from and nearly killed him and his Driver, Lora.
Amalthus, meanwhile, just plain hates the world due to spending his entire life from his childhood seeing it at its worst. A lot is made of how he climbed the World Tree 500 years ago and retrieved both Malos and Mythra's Core Crystals—he was doing that to ask the Architect why there needs to be suffering in the world, only to never even meet the Architect. Learning that his god apparently didn't care about the evils of the world pretty much broke him. By the time of the game itself he's primarily concerned more with maintaining his own power as the self-proclaimed arbiter of the Architect's will, but he's still low-key trying to destroy the world through his policies—normally Blades are supposed to eventually mature into Titans, but he's disrupted the entire system by which this works which has led to fewer Titans being born.
In contrast to Jin and Amalthus' personal motivations for wanting the world dead, Malos is extremely impersonal in his goals. He simply destroys because his instincts tell him to destroy, and as far as anyone can tell he has those instincts because Amalthus awakened him at the height of his hatred of the world. That war 500 years ago I keep bringing up? That was against him, and a flashback shows him telling Amalthus that he's merely granting his wish. In the end, though, Malos rejects the idea that Amalthus being the source of his evil does anything to absolve him of responsibility for his actions. As far as he's concerned, destruction is his nature and the fact that this nature partially stems from someone else doesn't change this. The fact that he actively chooses to reject any motivations beyond simply being the ultimate evil is an interesting departure from how these sorts of villains are typically portrayed.
One other thing that really stands out is how much is done with the fact that Blades normally lose their memories when their Drivers die. One Blade carries a diary written by her past selves, for instance, and a significant deal is made of the fact that she can't know how trustworthy they actually were. There's also a series of sidequests involving two particular Blades who are extremely close in the lives you first meet them in as enemies, but recruiting them involves their Drivers dying so they forget it all and have to start over. The final part of their story involves them trying to make amends for their crimes that they no longer remember, and they're hardly the only Blades whose past lives were radically different from their current ones.
This particular theme also bleeds back into Pyra's characterization in a somewhat unusual way because, as the Aegis, she's an exception to that rule about Blades returning to their Core Crystals and losing their memories without their Drivers. As such, she remembers absolutely everything that happened in the war she was part of. All the comrades she's lost, all the suffering directly and indirectly linked to her actions, everything. That's actually why Pyra exists—her original personality, Mythra, was so terrified of her power that she created Pyra as a replacement who wouldn't be able to use it. Mythra's immediate reaction when she first appears in the story is actually one of confusion and anger at Rex for bringing her back because of this.
And in the end? It turns out Pyra and Mythra's reason for trying to get to Elysium is so they can have the Architect kill them and end the threat they pose for good.
And sure, Rex is convinced that Pyra and Mythra aren't a danger to the world, but the war they lived through saw three Titans destroyed. And sure, none of that was their fault, but that doesn't change the fact that, you know, the first thing they remember is a war that destroyed three entire continents. Particularly since the person who acually did the whole destroying part had the same sort of power as them. How could Rex possibly convince them they belong in the world in the face of that? How could anyone?
Thankfully, they have Rex, who is the sort of character who I'd describe as "the goodest boy." He's the sort of person who can see the good in absolutely anyone. And I do mean anyone—toward the end he's asked what he plans to do with Malos and says he'll punch him in the face, then go for a drink with him once it's over. Which doesn't mean he's soft by any stretch of the imagination—he's just optimistic and good at understanding people.
This is, of course, exactly the sort of quality that makes him the right sort of person to get through to Pyra and Mythra and save them. In fact, the sequence dedicated to the party going to "find the true power of the Aegis" isn't about finding any sort of new power so much as helping Rex realize that he's able to accept them. This of course leads into one of the most incredibly heartwarming scenes in a game full of incredibly heartwarming scenes, as Rex comes to terms with Pyra and Mythra's fears, vows that he won't let the world burn again, and promises that he'll help them find their place. This leads to him being able to call upon their true true power in a sequence that's the best possible kind of cheesy.
There's a definite intentional contrast here between Pyra/Mythra, who had a companion who could accept them and help them realize they aren't destined to destroy the world, and Malos, who didn't and thus concluded that he couldn't be anything other than a destroyer. You'll notice that the contrast is also seen in their regular character arcs, since Malos leaned into what he could only think of as his true nature while Pyra and Mythra decided to save the world from themselves by sealing themselves away and planning their own deaths should the seal fail.
Then we get to the game's final act, where its connections to the first Xenoblade are made explicit. The party climbs the World Tree (which has a space elevator inside it, as it turns out), and Elysium turns out to be a space station. Specifically, the space station that was shown in the first game to be the site of the experiment that created its universe. The Architect turns out to be Klaus, the scientist who performed the experiment—or rather, the half of him that didn't get sent to the world of Xenoblade 1 and become Zanza. Pyra/Mythra and Malos turn out to be two of the three computers that controlled the experiment, with the third being sent to Xenoblade 1's universe and becoming Alvis.
Which mostly ends up being irrelevant to this game, except that Klaus is able to recognize that his other half is going to die soon, so the final battle with Malos is happening at the same time that Shulk and his group are fighting Zanza. Which is admittedly pretty cool.
More relevant to the story of this game is the fact that despite all of his efforts to atone for his actions by rebuilding the world, Klaus ultimately found that nothing was different about how people acted, so he concluded that his plan was doomed to failure from the start. This is why he didn't bother interacting with Amalthus or try to stop him, since he didn't think it mattered. But then he realized that Rex and Pyra/Mythra were able to forge a unique bond that proved that humanity is better than he thought they were, and this gave him hope for the world again. This ends up actually being incredibly important, but at this particular point Malos destroying the world is a more immediate issue.
So you go beat Malos, who predictably rejects Rex's attempts to save him because he's too set in his ways.
After that, with time rapidly running out, Klaus gives the world one final gift by creating a real Elysium, right before dying when the
Except that's not true, because earlier in the story it was made clear that an Aegis can survive for a bit without a Core Crystal. And this allows Pyra and Mythra to choose life, giving Rex the rest of their Core Crystal so they can be brought back. They even get separate bodies out of the deal! Not every day you see a conventional JRPG with a canon harem ending.
So that's Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for you. A complex but fun battle system, excellent presentation, an interesting world concept, and a powerful message of hope all wrapped up in a package whose caveats are fairly minor in comparison. I think my opinion on this game is pretty obvious from how I'm describing it, honestly.
