Narumi Nitpicks: Xenoblade 2

It should come as no surprise to the people who know me that I’m a big fan of JRPGs, for its ability to intertwine long complicated storyline and character-driven arcs with a satisfying exploration system and at the very least, a passable combat system that is generally simple to pick up despite seeming complex and easy to brute force through with enough overlevelling. In the past decade though, with the rise of HD consoles, these types of experiences dwindled down with the rise in online play and action-driven gameplay with RPG-elements tackled on the surface level, i.e. a leveling system and skill trees but without what made RPGs truly unique. As much as I like the exploration of say, Dark Souls, its stressful combat never allowed me to truly relax in the moment. To add, not many “traditional” JRPGs came out during this decade. FFXIII lacked a lot of key exploration aspects for instance, and it wouldn’t be until 2016 until a new Persona game were to come out. In the midst of this drought however, came Xenoblade for the Wii. Even as a PS3 only gamer back then I knew of its large open worlds that dwarfed even most PS3 games at the time while providing that traditional JRPG experience I was so longing for. A decade later, as its sequel arrived on new Nintendo hardware, the artstyle and lack of JRPGs in the market (again) made me take the plunge in getting a Switch. Over 150 hours later, I can safely say, yes, getting a Switch for this (and Mario and Zelda) has been almost worth it. Allow me to explain in excruciating detail in the review below.

The story is a standard JRPG story where Boy Meets Girl and you have your Hero's Journey here mixed with some existentialism there in a fantasy-ish setting, where screaming your attack names and yelling a lot in battle will mostly be in your favour. I do actually like it, despite how cheesy and drawn out it can sometimes be. There are definitely plot twists in here that do recontextualize previous plot threads, but ultimately at the end of the day it's not something you haven't seen before. But as I said, I do appreciate coming to a typical JRPG plot with the plot beats and character archetypes and the shounen-ness of it all. There are some nice elements of mystery that get resolved relatively satisfactorily enough, and by the end credits I was content with what I had experienced throughout these 4 months or so.

Xenoblade 2's main cast is likable enough and over the long hours of the game I ended up liking everyone on the team. The story is very much Rex-centric though, while Meleph and Zeke get their own spotlight chapters, Rex and Hikari/Homura are very much the centre of the spotlight for the entire journey. It's like a reverse FFXII where the adults get shafted. I'll focus the rest of this section talking about Rex and Hikari/Homura because in these 150 hours characters who drift away from the spotlight long enough tend to fade from memory.

Rex is your typical JRPG protagonist. He's plucked out from some shounen action series and is both the chosen one and an ordinary kid looking out for adventure, the optimistic happy go lucky sort. I ended up liking Rex by the end of the game, even with his tendency to follow the rule of "Yelling out your attacks makes you win battles" philosophy, because in those moments I also clench my fists and have fun watching the battles unfold in the most ridiculous fashion. In other words, he is Hibiki from Symphogear without the singing.

Homura is just the worst. Her meekness and lack of a backbone really grinded on me,with her inaction and inability to do anything at all without someone else (namely Rex) so much so when you get Hikari I switched her out permanently. Of course, there is some payoff to this and she does grow to have a bit more self-confidence, but it isn't enough to redeem her character for me. Hikari on the other hand is a tsundere and my personal biases deem her to be a favourite character by virtue of character trait alone. It also helps that at least she has somewhat of a personality and voice beyond "Rekkusu...".

The other characters are generally fine, even the villains. While I did grow to care for the villains in the end with their goals and motivations, the most I can say for the characters in the game is that they are generally fine. Nothing exceptional or special or groundbreaking, but they're fine and get the job done.

As stated earlier in my intro, my love for JRPGs come mainly from its exploration aspect, that there is almost no useless space and every little corner hides a treasure of at least some value. Its why, for the longest time, FFXII for all its shortcomings on plot and characters still managed to be my favourite FF game solely for its strong exploration aspect. It’s so good I never noticed that the second act of the game basically turns into one long ass fetch quest with little to no plot or character development in between. Xenoblade 2 dwarfs FFXII in size, despite being smaller than say, The Witcher 3, in scale. I think the moment that best exemplifies this, early on, is when you enter Gula for the first time. You run through a linear path for a while before the game opens up to a large field with several beef gates tunneling you into the first major settlement. I initially thought, oh hey, a nice small village that will probably have a few shops and inns and stuff. Then the plot funneled me into a cliffside residential area that’s just hidden from initial view and opening up to a larger area altogether. It’s at that point you truly begin to feel the scale of the world. The game is just filled with so many of these “unfolding” moments where the world just open up in complexity the more you look at it. It’s great, hell, recently I even discovered that you can actually climb up the windmill in the village by jumping around rooftops (which itself is novel). It’s just so satisfying to look at some corner, spot a glowing object, then hop off the catwalk you were on and end up discovering some hidden area off the beaten path. Or making a leap of faith into a big hole and finding a treasure vault hidden with goodies. Fall damage is forgiving enough in this, and once you discover you can swim in the cloudsea, you will start to comb through each and every area for hidden caves or crevices. It’s always rewarding to find areas like these, I think in a few cases it’s even required for story progression as will. The level design in this aspect reminds me most heavily of Dark Souls, but a kinder variant of it. If I have one gripe, is that there isn’t any metropolis or large city area to explore. But the towns still do hide a substantial amount of complexity in its level design and provide a sense of wanderlust as you go through them.


There’s this one part in FFXII that has always stuck by me and many others. It’s that goddamned T-Rex in the first open field of the game. It’s always there, menacing but actually docile, baiting many an early player into an early game over by their foolish overconfidence. It wasn’t until I got to early-mid game until I could have my revenge, if only barely. And every subsequent runthrough I always make an effort to kill it just to spite it. Xenoblade 2 offers that same feeling of empowerment and disempowerment many times and I am grateful for it. Those gorillas and T-Rexes can take down Ira with no issue at all I can assure you.

The actual combat itself is just okay. It looks stupidly complex with its poor UI design and the fact that the game does not allow you to view tutorial hints after you dismiss them the first time (the closest you get are brief descriptions of the game mechanics that have to be bought separately from an informant, which in it of itself is baffling game design). No MP system means you just have a wait timer and auto-attacks. Not much autonomy is given beyond choosing which special you want to perform once your wait timer is up, and any given challenge that isn’t a superboss can be circumvented via overlevelling, so the combat is mainly white noise for me. It’s nice to see the special attacks play out though. The AI party members are a crapshoot to rely on, but in general they hold on decently. There have been a few boss fights where they just would not do what I want them to heal, especially that one case where I desperately needed the AI to heal me when she would just keep attacking. Oh and they have a tendency to run into unblockable attacks by bosses that stun them. There is a very specific way to manipulate the AI into doing what you want it to do, but I only really used it once.

Combat basically has you and 3 other Blades (1 story locked one and 2 gacha ones) to do battle. Blades determine which attacks you will do and what role you fulfill (Combat, Medic, Tank) and each Blade has some passive, latent skill that either improves your combat outcomes, or my personal favourite, enhance exploration options. Tying this is the gacha system which I kinda enjoyed. Yeah it’s a Skinner Box system with endorphin release (or dopamine or whatever) each time you get an SSR. Even though you can only hold 2 other Blades at any time and that near the end of the game you would have your permanent roster, that rush when you get an SSR just can’t be beat. That and grinding for gacha crystals is painless enough. I play Maneater in the background in my grinding runs for added irony. Some SSR can be gotten from side quests if you’re so inclined.


Which brings me into side content. They do range in quality in this game. Early on especially you get nothing but generic kill/fetch quests. But later on they do diversify with stuff like solving a murder case or unravelling a conspiracy or even treasure hunting. The generic stuff still persist even towards the end, but those special quests do make it worth doing each side quest in the game just to see what the game can offer. The best parts are undoubtedly the Blade Quests. SSR Blades get their own personal quests to go through and you get the whole first class treatment for those. Special cutscenes with voices and a personal story all add to the charm of the Blade quests. Most are comedic little side stories that flesh out each Blade at least a little. Nothing game changing, but they are certainly nice to go through. The rewards are miniscule but the true reward was doing the side quest in the first place. They provide a good break from the story.

More on exploration. You are given a “Skip Travel” option early in the game which allows you to travel back to previous areas at any point in the game. Absolutely any point in the game. Even when Rex and friends are stuck in a prison or stranded without an airship. You can warp anywhere you’d like with no repercussions at all. Hell, even NPCs have their dialogues refreshed on a chapterly basis so the game practically expects you to travel everywhere over and over. Some areas don’t even open up until you make a return trip.

One of the real negatives I can think of is the absolute kusoge that is Tiger! Tiger!. A barebones minigame that is equal parts tedious as it is frustrating. You get damaged by hitting the wall. And you get very little in the way of rewards unless you play perfectly. And you have to constantly play this over and over just to upgrade Hana, Tora’s only Blade. Three times. So, I’m sure you can gather Tora has been permanently in my reserve team. Even if the plot circumstances call for it, I would rather overlevel than have him and Hana on my party. It is a very very slow grind to even get Hana half as good as your other SSR blades (which just require a weapons upgrade and some accessories). Hell, Rex’s default Blade Hikari basically outclasses almost everyone in the game. By mid-late game I basically had her carry my whole team for me.

So the DLC does alleviate some of the grinding by giving you a ton of Ether Points to upgrade Hana with. If you have the DLC just use that and never touch Tiger! Tiger! (A character from a DLC side quest even calls it a kusoge).


As you can tell from the screenshots in this, yes I played the entire game in Japanese, going so far as to import the Japanese version for it. Reason being the localization (not to be confused with translation) is awful. The voice acting, while I do give them credit for bothering with accents and all, is pretty bad when you have unnatural dialogue that flows poorly in english but are fine in Japanese. While most male characters sound fine, the female characters in Xenoblade 2 sound awful. Homura/Hikari sounds like she’s half asleep for most of the lines, Nia sounds like a 40-year old chain smoker and Meleph sounds overly feminine despite her gimmick being that she’s pretty masculine. I do have a soft spot for Rex’s Northern English accent though. Also the name changes are aggravating, names that weren’t even in Japanese are somehow localized into something else, with little to no consistency too. Some name changes and some don’t. I initially thought all Blades were changed because fair enough, Japanese names to English, but then you have people like Meleph who have their name changed for no good reason. The translation as a whole doesn’t commit to any major errors, but if you’re playing the game with the Japanese voices, good luck wrapping your head around all the inconsistencies. My Japanese isn’t good but I found the game perfectly playable and the story perfectly comprehensible (It’s not Yakuza). The Japanese version also includes a Traditional Chinese option that is more faithful to the original script. And the Japanese voices are really good in this. Top notch voice performances throughout, from Hikari’s tsundere voice, Homura’s overly dere voice, Meleph’s masculine voice, Zeke’s over the top Kansai accent, all delightful to behold. All the SSR Blades get the A-list seiyuu treatment too, though it’s a pity you only get 3 voice samples when viewing them in the Blade screen. I’ve also heard rumors on censored/changed content when transitioning from the Japanese to English version, but I can’t verify this.

The music is alright. Repetitive and nothing special, but there are a few nice enough tracks. The mark of any good JRPG music is the ability to listen to it for hours on end without getting tired of it and I got really sick of the main battle theme about 10 hours in. That's less than 10% into my 150 hour playthrough. Which is why I put on Maneater on my grinding sessions as mentioned before. You’ll see why when you get to it. I also put on Kojima’s mixtape of weird indie songs about death.

You know despite being primarily a PS4 gamer up to this point, I do find the graphics in the game to be pretty good. When docked of course. The game looks miserable in portable due to the resolution drop. Which at times can be worse than the original game on the Wii. It’s a small screen but it can be glaring. I pretty much relegate portable play for grinding and side quests. Plus bedtime sessions just exemplify shorter gaming sessions. Thankfully the game has a cutscene viewer so you can review any nice looking scene on the TV. The motion blur in particular adds a lot to the presentation and I love it. The character expressions in the main cutscenes are fantastic and the 3D animation work is simply amazing.It's for my money one of the most beautiful and true to form anime-styled games out there (with Shin Sakura Taisen beating it, but that's on much powerful hardware). For the main cutscenes of course, smaller cutscenes use very stiff animations and lip sync to get the job done.


Stray thoughts I can’t fit naturally into the review:

• I hate how certain side quests are time-dependant without giving you much of a hint. Some do, like “meet me in the morning” but others require some moon logic bullshit like buying a specific item at 0500 to 0600.
• The amount of items you get are staggering but since your equipment slots are so limited most end up being filler items.
• Leveling the town economy is bullshit
• There is a genre shift somewhere near the end that I won't spoil (but is hinted at Chapter 4 and would probably be expected if you played the other Xenoblade games). I quite liked this shift and it was quite a surprise for me the first time through seeing that thing I won't spoil.
• The world building is fantastic even for an otherwise simple story.
• I really love the hard cut-to-black the game does at the end of each chapter. Makes me expect some cheesy happy ED to accompany the cuts.
• Meleph is best girl and Zeke is best boy but it’s a shame that, outside their specific chapters, they play almost no role in the overarching plot. It’s a reverse FFXII where the adults have little to do with the story.
• I know the main character designer also did Rakuen Tsuihou back in the day but man, I can’t unsee Balzac whenever I look at Hikari. Hell whenever fanart of Hikari popped up, I kept thinking she was Balzac and I would always end up confused over why someone would remember an old trash anime film.
• I really didn’t want the game to end near the end of it. You know a game is good when you’re just prolonging the inevitable.
• I love all the seiyuu they brought in, but no HanaKana to my knowledge.
• JRPGs are perfect for portable play and I want to see more JRPGs for my Switch.

All in all, I was looking for a great JRPG experience and I found one. While the story is nothing to write home about, the world is still fascinating to explore and behold. The game has left me with a gaping heart for which I may never recover from, but maybe the DLC would keep me afloat for just a little longer.

8/10.

Maybe I’ll review the DLC on some other day.