Xenoblade Chronicles 2 review: A messy yet grand adventure

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 offers a massive adventure but had some glaring flaws that keep it from being the definitive masterpiece it’s aiming to be.

Developer: Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: December 1, 2017

The original Xenoblade Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii was easily one of the best RPGs of that generation of consoles. It might be my favorite RPG of the last decade. It featured a huge world to explore, complex and rewarding combat and a cast of mostly great characters along with an amazing soundtrack and pretty solid story.

I was excited for the follow-up on the Wii U, Xenoblade Chronicles X. But I was massively disappointed. While the huge world, combat and excellent music remained, it was bogged down with a terrible story, horribly undeveloped characters and some of the worst aspects of massively multiplayer online games such as farming extremely rare items to merely proceed in the story.

So when Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was announced for Nintendo’s hot new hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, I was at best cautiously optimistic. Would this be more like the first game, which is one of my favorite RPGs in recent memory, or more like the follow-up? Or would it be something completely different?

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place in a world where pretty much everybody lives on the back of these giant, yet sentient monsters called Titans. But something terrible is happening. Slowly but surely, titans are dying off and nobody really seems to know what is causing it. This is starting to make land and resources scarce, and those are pretty much all the ingredients you need for people to be on the verge of war.

Our protagonist, Rex, starts off as simply a salvager who dives into what’s known as the cloud sea to retrieve ancient relics and sell them off to raise money to send back home. One fateful job leads him to discover he can use powerful beings known as Blades, and not just any Blade. He bonds with Pyra, a Blade powerful enough to determine the fate of the world for better or worse. Pyra knows of a promised sanctuary land called “Elysium” where everybody can live and wants Rex to take her there, starting the pair off on an epic journey with friends and foes at every turn.

The Nintendo Switch may be the ideal console for lengthy, epic-scale RPGs since you can play them on the go as well as on your TV, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a fairly good showcase for that. I spent the opening hours playing on my TV, but the vast majority of my 80+ hours were spent undocked and it definitely helped that I could just dive back in whenever I wanted without even having to turn on the TV. That being said, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sometimes suffers from slowdown when there is a ton going on in battles, though it rarely hurt my ability to play.

This game may actually be the smallest in scope of the series, but it still offers fairly large areas densely packed with enemies and fairly lively and cool-looking towns and cities that all have a unique feel to them. Every area you visit offers different terrain, culture, and cities with their own architecture that make everything fun to explore. This smaller scale may be for the best, however, because Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has one of the worst map interfaces I’ve seen in a game. It’s worse than useless; it’s often outright misleading.

There’s no straight path you are given, merely a distance number and elevation that indicates you need to go higher or lower. What this entirely leaves out is you often have to take a very roundabout way to get to your destination, so the distance and elevation will indicate you are going the wrong way when you aren’t and it is incredibly easy to get confused. If there are multiple markers, they all blend together and it’s nearly impossible to tell which one is closest. It’s something that you learn to deal with eventually, but it’s honestly pretty inexcusable that it is so bad it actively gets in the way of your progress.

What makes this worse is that most areas have multiple enemies that are way above your level and will attack you when you get too close. This makes finding safe paths nearly impossible, and it can be ridiculously frustrating when the same enemies just keep murdering you because you don’t have a clue how to get around and don’t have a good chance to get your bearings.

One aspect of travel Xenoblade Chronicles 2 gets better than most is the quick travel system. Once you reach a landmark, you can always travel back to it from anywhere, even deep in dungeons. Having trouble with a boss and need to raise some levels? You can warp out to anywhere you’ve been to grind for a while, then warp right back to just a few steps before that boss, which makes dungeons a far less tedious affair than in pretty much any game I can recall.

Fighting is what you’ll be spending the large majority of your time doing in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and it remains a big strength of the series. You have your party members, but their role in battle is really determined by the “Blades” they partner with. Blades are beings with specialties such as attacking, defending, healing, etc. and most of your party members can switch between different blades at different times. Though some are gained through story means, the large majority you get are randomly generated from cubes that you pick up.

It can be cool to have a wide variety of Blades with different abilities for different predicaments, but it seems exceedingly difficult to score the really unique ones. If I get a “legendary” cube, you think that would guarantee me a rare Blade, right? But I only got common ones the few times I acquired one. I had just as much luck using “common” cubes as I did any other. This is not to dismiss common Blades, as they can be very powerful and extremely useful, but the rare ones have cool designs and side quests available to flesh out their personalities more if you wish to pursue them. Only getting a handful even when using rare and legendary cubes was disappointing.

Combat itself works somewhat similar to previous games in the series, but it gets far more complex and you’ll need to have at least a decent grasp of the more nuanced aspects to stand a chance further in. You have basic abilities that have cooldown timers, but you also have combos, a super meter of sorts and “elemental orbs” that can help you unleash long and powerful combos that get you through battles you might otherwise lose. It is very complex, and the game only gives you the briefest of explanations, but when you really get the flow of combat down it is extremely satisfying. There are few feelings as good in this game as properly building up your meter, getting those orbs and unleashing them to get a massive combo that often can take off more than half off a boss’ health bar.

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A big part of the combat being enjoyable is thanks to the mostly spot-on A.I., which handles better than most RPGs I’ve experienced. You control one party member while the others do their own thing, but the amount of babysitting is extremely minimal. Your partners are adept at setting up for massively damaging combos, stunning enemies and switching between their blades and spawning heals when they can. If I lost a battle it never felt like it was due to my partners being practically useless and me doing 99% of the actual work.

My one major complaint about combat is how some of the healing is handled. Granted, it’s a massive improvement over Xenoblade Chronicles X, which had a confusing system I still don’t really understand even though I finished that game. In Xenoblade Chronicles 2 you have some characters with healing spells, but most often you’ll be using attacks that spawn potions. The potions literally bounce out of the enemies you are fighting and you have to go grab them to heal. This aspect is fine; it creates a good amount of tension. The problems arise with some of the terrains in the game. Potions will go off cliffs or get stuck up high where you can’t reach, which can be incredibly frustrating at crucial moments. The majority of boss battles in the main story are in wide open spaces though, so for the most important fights, it was not a problem.

While your party members pretty much exclusively gain more power through experience, Blades get stronger through a variety of means. I’m sure this is meant to encourage you to do something beyond the monotony of grinding, but I don’t think it’s any better that I might have to consume X amount of someone’s favorite snack to raise their “focus” level and that takes 20 minutes per item, or having to not just talk to 40 of a certain race to raise one stat, but spending a ton of time raising someone’s affinity level just so I can talk to those 40 NPCs to raise that one stat. It would be one thing if these abilities were only required for certain side quests, but many are necessary to proceed in the story and it was pretty annoying that I would have to stop progress for several hours to raise a stat a level or two. This was not a constant problem, but it did impede my progress on a couple of occasions.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes major steps in righting the series from the train wreck that was Xenoblade Chronicles X.

A story-driven RPG like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 often lives or dies by its cast. These are characters you are potentially spending dozens of hours with, so they should be people you care about and don’t find insufferable. There are some notably annoying characters such as Tora, your furry tank that definitely wants to use his artificial Blade Poppi as a sex toy. But there is also a great story of the bond between the two main characters, Rex and Pyra, along with some strong stories of growth from characters like Nia, your main healer at the start of the game. The villains have complex motivations that are well-explained, giving them more depth than your run of the mill bad guys. This is bolstered by a mostly fantastic voice cast. There are definitely some bad line reads that stand out in a couple of scenes, but most lines are delivered well in the many cutscenes you’ll encounter both in the main story and in some incidental scenes.

This combat, story, and exploration are all bolstered by a pretty excellent soundtrack, which has been a pretty consistent strength of this series as a whole. It helps it feel like a grand adventure when you are exploring, properly punctuates important cutscenes, and most of the boss battles feature excellent music that really helps up the tempo.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes major steps in righting the series from the train wreck that was Xenoblade Chronicles X. However, it definitely suffers from major flaws that might turn away those not willing to dig a little to find the really solid RPG epic underneath. I feel that despite these flaws the sense of exploration of the huge and diverse world, the complex, yet incredibly excellent combat, the compelling story, great music and mostly stellar cast come together nicely to overcome these flaws. If you are looking for a meaty and complex RPG that can take up dozens of hours on your Nintendo Switch, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 fits the bill quite well despite its problems.

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A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.

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