Over the past couple months my friend decided to stream her playthrough of Xenoblade 2 for a few friends and I who all played the original game but for various reasons were hesitant about the sequel based on what we’d seen of it. I’d heard a lot about how this game has a tough learning curve and how the story eventually pulls itself together to make something special. While I won’t be covering much about how this game’s combat works, I did see the story and I can confidently say it does not pull itself together because of all the conceptual and thematic baggage that holds the characters and overall gameplay mechanics back. This critique will feature endgame story spoilers so keep that in mind.
What it means to be a Blade
The game’s core concept carries so many restrictions and hindrances, in both gameplay and story. This is a world where certain humans can become Drivers, allowing them to resonate with special gemstones called Core Crystals which will summon a Blade: a being that becomes tied to their Driver's lifeforce in some vague way. They feel each others’ physical pain and to some extent their emotional pain. For how important Blades are to the story, it’s really unclear what exactly the big deal is. Most of them look human, but some are beasts. The rules about the relationship between Driver and Blade is tenuous at best and it feels like they make it up as they go along.
A huge issue with the concept of Blades is that when their Driver passes away, they revert to their Core Crystal form. When a new Driver manages to awaken them, they are reborn, but without their memory. Get ready for so many scenes to not matter at all to them because they are not the character they were with their former Driver. Stories told to them about who they used to be and what they used to do mean nothing because they cannot add any interesting anecdotes about their former lives. They’re clean slates and it’s terrible every single time.
The only times the writers attempt to skirt around this overbearing stifling restriction is through special Aegis Blades like Pyra and Mythra who can remember their former lives inexplicably, or through Mòrag’s Blade Brighid who managed to record her former deeds in a bound journal. More Blades could have had their own creative ways of escaping their mental restrictions, and seeing how they cleverly defied their immortality’s main weakness by their own hands could have made for exceptional character development. But nope, that’s just not how we do things in Alrest.
Mechanically, Blades are treated as gacha pulls from Core Crystals that enemies will occasionally drop. This system is unbelievably frustrating as you need to pick which Driver in your party you’ll assign this random pull to and it might result in a Blade better suited to someone else, which cannot be fixed without using a very rare consumable. Each Blade has a chart of Affinity skills that have various requirements to unlock, such as defeating a certain number of a specific type of enemy or acquiring certain collectibles. They are many, and they all tend to require severe time investment to become useful in and out of battle.
Their worst aspect is the insane endless pool of generic common Blades you will be pulling over and over and over again. They are so generic that they don’t even have specific names, just randomly assigned from a list. You cannot exhaust this pool of them as you’ll run out of party space and have to begin dismissing them. You’ll start skipping the summon animation eventually, fed up with the chaff, and then you’ll miss all the unique Blade summon animations as a result and have to look them up on YouTube later. They give you so many so that you can send them into seemingly unending amounts of throwaway dispatch Merc Missions, and that can cause another problem that I’ll come back to later.
Many of the actual Blades worth pulling suffer from overdesign or just plain tastelessly horny outfits on characters whose personalities have nothing in common with that kind of dress. They made a lot of them and they all need to stand out while distinctly not looking like main character material, so you get a mess of design principles making it hard to care about most of them. Sometimes you just have to look at one and think "what is even going on here?"
In combat each party member will have a Blade assigned to them, making for six characters constantly shouting their battle cries and attack names. It gets overwhelming, especially if your opponents are humans doing the same right back at you. It also looks plain weird, as at any moment either the Driver or Blade stands near motionless in battle as the other performs a move. This isn’t a turn-based game. Among the visual noise, this looks unfinished and awkward. I don’t think I can properly showcase how bad this gamefeel is with screenshots alone but here’s an idea. Just imagine eight characters screaming their move names over each other as you view this image.
A party built on unearned bonds
Generally in JRPGs the main character is not particularly interesting, often mute. After playing so many, you just end up expecting it. Xenoblade Chronicles broke the mould when it came to Shulk, someone with defined character traits and motivation for his story. It was disappointing to see this approach disappear with Xenoblade Chronicles X’s practically mute avatar, but there was hope with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 knowing that the protagonist would be voiced again. Rex is a letdown. He’s your typical oblivious Power of Friendship type who doesn’t grow throughout the story. He somehow resonates with Pyra, one of the most powerful and important Blades in the world for reasons I won’t get into just yet, seemingly by complete chance. Essentially, it’s a Chosen One kind of scenario involving a kid who didn’t do anything to earn it. He does receive a lot of praise from other characters, but for what? Characters just seem to have some vague faith in him.
His entire goal is to get to Elysium, a place he saw in a vision. If that sounds like a shaky motivation to you, you have to wonder how he got an entire party of allies to join him on that mission. Even Zeke, the man championing him as the potential hope of his country, tells Rex to grow up in one of the final scenes of the game, past the final boss encounter!
Rex’s main Blade is a dual being, Pyra and Mythra. They are thrust front and centre as his love interest and it never feels right. Inhabiting the same body, these two are a unique and superpowerful Blade called an Aegis and have memories from hundreds of years prior. What in the world could they possibly see in this fifteen-year-old? Because Blades are connected to their Driver in some intangible way, a lot of the bonds between characters are just implied in this flimsy way. Oh, they’d die for Rex maybe, but because of some rule of the way their relationship works rather than any story moments we get to see that would inspire that kind of passionate devotion. This kind of contrived relationship is what keeps the party together. Blades are just obsessed with their Drivers for unspecified reasons and we have to accept that.
Tora is the nopon engineer of the party. He is the worst party member by far, and that’s not because of some bias I have against the mascot party member. He is the only party member who isn’t an actual Driver, instead paired with a robotic maid girl named Poppi he built in his lab. There’s a lot of seriously painful second-hand embarrassment from the sheer horniness he embodies. His pursuit of gradually more well-endowed robo-maid Poppi models as the game goes on only makes him worse, and it pins down Poppi as a character who just has to abide calling this guy “masterpon” the entire game without any qualms whatsoever. His closet overflows with sexy maid outfits tailored for her as a sight gag early on in the game and it paints a picture that no amount of screen time can reverse. “Well, let’s not dwell on that,” Pyra says immediately, which gives you an idea that the writers really wanted this to slide by. Sorry, but first impressions are everything.
The other three party members range from inoffensive to good within this game’s limitations so I won’t touch on them much. Nia isn’t a terrible character, aside from her hyperactive catlike animations clashing with her more serious voice acting. She has a reveal later on where she’s actually a fusion of human and Blade called a Flesh Eater, and suddenly she’s in love(?) with Rex. You can then set her as one of Rex’s Blades if you want, but that seems like a waste when there are so many other Blades to choose from. Sorry Nia, it’s really weird what they did to you. Her Blade Dromarch is supposed to be the wise old man of the group but because of that whole “Blades not remembering former lives” thing, he loses out to Gramps who I didn’t even feel was important enough as a character to bring up and probably won’t again.
Zeke and his Blade Pandoria start out as a minor Team Rocket-esque goofy minor antagonist squad. It’s cool that they join the team and don’t really let up on their goofy antics that much, though Zeke frequently betrays that façade with a deeper understanding of the world’s politics, giving him some good layers of personality to work with.
Mòrag is the calm, collected dodge tank of the group. Powerful and confident, her outfit has to be the most stylish and badass in the game. She’s pretty reserved and because of this, she doesn’t open up much to the rest of the cast. Thankfully we have lots of heart-to-hearts to get to know her better, right?!
Keeping in tradition with the original Xenoblade’s pace, there isn’t much downtime for the party to actually bond. This is mainly the role of the game’s heart-to-hearts. Heart-to-hearts are optional dialogue scenes that provide a chance for select members of the party to bounce off of each other with a topic that may not be directly related to the story. In many ways this is how you learn about how they mesh as a group. In Xenoblade 2, a massive portion of these conversations are one-offs centered around some gacha pull that you’ll never see appear in the main story, and as a result there isn’t much reason to care about what happens within the scene. It’s not like they’ll have any character development, and their scene will not serve as a study of any main characters present. There just isn’t any time for that.
What there is apparently time for is comedy, although for the most part it’s incredibly stilted and usually horny to the point of it being obvious where they’re going with it and wishing the scene would end already. From Tora’s miserable maid fetish, Mythra’s scene about sleepwalking into Rex’s bed then flipping out on him, all the scenes about one waking up on the other’s lap then getting all flustered, to the infamous “one-eyed monster” scene, it’s just more secondhand embarrassment for the pile. Xenoblade’s going through puberty and we’re all going to sit through it.
Villains who suck the life out of the room
The villains in this game are a piece of work. We’ve got the small fries: the smug dweeby Akhos, the cagey edgelord Patroka and the showboater Mikhail. These three show up time and time again, monologuing away and just not explaining themselves at all. They all get their own little micro-moment of heroic redemption right before dying and it all happens in the span of an hour or so. It’s too late to redeem them, and it’s too late to expect anyone to care. They’ve just been annoying and uncompelling this far with all the subtlety and cheesiness of a cocky glasses push; trying to shine a positive light on them right before the end is cheap and gives the player no room to consider their actions from a new light. They’re dead now and the endgame’s afoot.
There’s Amalthus, Praetor of Indol. He’s kind of obviously a villain from the moment you see him but he doesn’t show his hand until hours and hours later and I don’t think anyone could have been surprised by his heel turn. He’s in a position of great power and technically since he controls an Aegis he seems primed to be a major enemy to rival Rex. There are only two Aegises in play, but largely his connection to his Aegis Blade, Malos, is tenuous and underdeveloped. The most we get for a huge swath of the game is Rex going on about how he “felt something” like Malos when he meets Amalthus for the first time. The guy’s underrepresented, does not fulfill any kind of rival role, and also has a sad backstory moment. It’s just too late to care, sorry. His big bad guy motivation is hating the entire world. Cool story, bro! But it gets worse.
Malos is a weird case. I’ll just say it here: He’s the final boss. It does not feel right at all. If anything, he fits right in with the goon squad alongside Akhos, Patroka and Mikhail. He feels like a goon but he stands back in certain dramatic scenes instead of being on the front lines which makes his vibe just feel sloppy and inconsistent. He isn’t even the final boss of his own will or personality. The game explains it itself: he is driven by his Driver’s desire. Amalthus hates the world so Malos hates the world. It’s not Malos’s place to even have a stake in this conflict. It’s just like how the bonds between Driver and Blade are merely implied and never demonstrated. There’s no sense of camaraderie or bond between these two villains, similar to how the main party and their Blades just kinda happen to stick together for no established reason. A fitting conclusion of unmet unexplained ambitions, maybe. When the final boss of a story as long as Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s doesn’t even have the most basic of motivations of his own, you know something has gone horribly wrong.
And then there’s Jin. It’s so hard to put into words what needs to be said about him. He feels like a kid playing make-believe anime fighting with all the insultingly ludicrous nonsense he can do. He can blitz around at the speed of light with pinpoint accuracy, and…I’m being dead serious here. He can control particles.
This anime villain is so stupidly overpowered that the only way he can be defeated is by Rex, Pyra and Mythra to have a stupidly overpowered ability to match. The twin Blades can assume a third form, Pneuma. Pyra has the power of fire, and Mythra the power of light, so what does Pneuma have? Uhh, the power of “imagination” it appears. In cutscenes, they allow Rex to just do whatever he needs to do to win, whether that be move fast enough to match Jin’s speed or straight up fly. Get ready for this new amazing seemingly limitless ability to barely get any use ever again. The writers don't even try to ground the ability to explain why they don’t just use Pneuma for every problem going forward. Does it make Pyra or Mythra exhausted? In pain? Definitely not because we would see Rex inherit their pain and get all exhausted after the battle for comic relief, surely. Pneuma only exists because they wrote themselves into a corner with a villain who could have done whatever he wanted with his supermassive strength if he was allowed to by the writers. That he’s not even the main villain speaks volumes to the awkwardness of his unnaturally overbearing might.
A world restricted by its own systems
Exploration has changed for the worse and it’s yet again the Blades at fault. A famous way the series has tried to keep players from going wherever they want immediately has been enemies whose levels tower above yours. It may still be possible to get to an item or secret landmark before it was intended, but you will have to figure out a safe way past monsters that could end you in a single hit. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 flips this concept around by introducing the ability to turn off enemy aggression. Inexplicably, this is locked behind DLC. Despite that rude paywall for what should be a courtesy feature in any modern RPG, this is a very nice convenience that helps speed things along especially if you’ve become overleveled and just want to see the story, but it causes a problem: how do they keep players from going to certain areas too early?
It’s a disaster. They place skill checks for areas that require your currently equipped Blades to have the combined skill points to proceed. Made it all the way up here but you don't have enough Wind Mastery? Better just leave, I guess! It negatively impacts gathering points too. For example, at a gathering point that requires Botany, each involved Blade will say their piece before you can collect the drops. It gets tiresome fast. Speaking of tiresome, since these checks only accept skill points from your currently equipped party, sometimes you’ll sit through them talking away only for the skill check to fail because they weren’t good enough, forcing you to then open your menu and swap in Blades who have the skills required to pass the check. Considering they weren’t in your current party for a reason likely involving team composition or Affinity grinding, you’re now going to have to open the menu again and swap them back into place. That’s not even considering the possibility that you can’t reach the skill numbers required because you haven’t pulled the right gacha yet, or in a frustrating coincidence, you have a Blade you could use for that skill check but they're off on a Merc Mission and won’t be available for an hour!
It's a Blade's world
I still think they made a really beautiful world again. I don’t think it’s possible to reach the romantic high concept allure of a JRPG taking place atop the backs of two warring Titans frozen in time but the next best thing is huge sprawling pretty locales atop Titans engulfed in an endless cloud sea. The music is of course also incredible. These two aspects are parts of Xenoblade’s soul, but the other parts have to be the exciting dramatic storytelling. They have to be our participation in the world. These two parts don't work anymore thanks to Blades.
I was right to be apprehensive about this game, and yet it shattered my expectations in ways I was not expecting, the majority of which were negative. For worse, Blades impact Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in ways that are hard to accept. They complicate both battle and exploration in measures of tedium. They make the party dynamic feel largely implied and not earned, with scenes rushing to redeem characters moments before their deaths or relying on schoolkid crush-tier banter to barely squeeze by enough content for another heart-to-heart. They result in a seriously unwanted, unwieldy and disastrous gacha system in a full-priced Nintendo game. They lead to an unstable storyline that feels like it makes the rules up as it goes along. I just wish the rules it made up were in service of characters with agency and interesting backstories, instead of an endless amnesia-riddled sea of clouds.
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