I love JRPGs. So much so that sometimes Western RPGs can fail to grab me. Skyrim is okay, but I've yet to really sink time into it. Fallout 4 and New Vegas will probably eventually become subjects of posts like this one. It's not that they aren't fun, I just happen to be old enough and crusty enough that JRPGs are my bread and butter. I remember being in grade school and staying up all night at my friend Nathan's house as we tried to figure out how to play Dragon Warrior. Ditto Final Fantasy. And I have stayed with both series; they are the best - in very different ways. But again, those are subjects for other posts.
I also loved Xenoblade Chronicles, and I unfortunately missed Xenoblade Chronicles X on the Wii U, so I was determined not to make the same mistake with the Switch. I had XC2 on my must-buy list as soon as it was announced. My excitement, although not exactly misplaced, did not exactly live up to my (admittedly huge) expectations.
The Xenoblade games are like many other JRPG series in that they are loosely connected narratively, but mostly share an aesthetic and some game systems. The aesthetic here being that people in the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 live on enormous living beings called titans, and the bodies of these creatures form the game world through which you travel. In this world you are mites on the skin (and occasionally within) giant monsters. The game systems that flow between the games mostly have to do with real-time battles and side quests. Oh so many side quests. If you really hate side quests, or indeed if you don't really, REALLY love them, this may not be your game series.
Falling Into the Pores of Giants
The first game had only two titans, and while that made for an overall tighter experience, it also limited how many different kinds of environments the game could serve up. XC2 sidesteps that by having several smaller titans. This makes the world feel a little smaller than it should. I am reasonably certain that in terms of "virtual square mileage" XC2 is bigger than the first game. It just doesn't feel that way, because it's been broken up into discreet chunks. Not that it feels small by any means, but there is no real sense of the vastness of this world because so much of it is just a sea of clouds between the titans, and therefore unexplored. Maybe it's the completionist in me, but when I look at a world map, I like to feel as if I can explore most of what's on the map. The world map of XC2 by necessity shows mostly empty space, and I think it gives the wrong impression of how huge the game world really is.
It is both large and beautiful. I suppose I shouldn't have been as surprised by how pretty everything looked, because I had been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for close to a year at the time I was given XC2 by my extremely wonderful girlfriend. Even so, for some reason I was unprepared for how good everything looked. The environments are both fantastical (in the Brian Froud sense) and credible (in the David Attenborough sense). Everything feels present and correct, and well-designed. The colors really popped when I played the game on my TV. In handheld mode, everything felt a little cramped, but at the time I was doing a lot of travelling, so just to be able to take the game with me really took the edge off that.
The titans themselves have seemingly endless territory to explore. I loved how much of the space was used to create nooks and crannies and nearly-invisible tunnels hidden in plain sight, and vertigo-inducing cliffs that you could leap from and land thirty seconds later in water without consequence.
The character and creature designs are similarly well-executed (with certain caveats, mentioned below), and considering the frankly staggering number of character designers, the stylistic cohesiveness is a real accomplishment. I don't know which part of the team was responsible for making sure everyone was designing characters for the same game, but whoever they are should be very proud of their accomplishments here.
Outnumbering All Mobs
The combat system is a bit...Byzantine. There's just a lot to it, especially for a system that has an auto-attack as its basic move. First of all, per the games story, there are two types of combatants in your party: Drivers and Blades.
<Sidebar: I am really not looking forward to trying to clearly and simply explain how all this works. If it gets confusing, I understand and apologize.>
Generally speaking, a Driver is what in other RPGs would call a party member. They have stats, level up, and you can change out their gear. A "Blade" is what would normally correspond to a weapon and / or gear load-out. The twist here is that Blades also have their own sentience, conflicts, associated character-development quests, etc. In other words, your gear has a personality, and a physical, usually humanoid, presence on the battlefield.
Here's where it gets weird. I have no idea how many blades are in the game. It's a lot. Probably more than a hundred, maybe several hundred. Like I said, it's a lot. A few are acquired through story progress, but most are the product of an in-game gashapon. It's just one of many, many, interlocking systems, most of which feel unnecessary by virtue of the fact that I rarely felt the need to look at them, let alone find out how they worked. I suppose it's there if you really want to get into the crunchy stuff, but it's not for me. If I had a question about how any of the gems, stats, Blade skills or whatever worked, I consulted an FAQ at which point I usually said to myself, in the immortal words of Arthur Shappe, "That's not fun, that's maths" and moved on.
A Game About Side Quests
This is a game that probably could not exist without the internet. There are far more things to do than could possibly fit into one of those old Prima guides, so without people on the internet writing FAQs and inhabiting message boards, there would be no reason to create this much content, because nobody will ever see most of it unless they have a helping hand to point the way.
This doesn't bother me, but it's still an absolutely huge amount. Google tells me that if you don't count main story quests, there are still 88 side quests and a further 28 blade quests. Which are side quests, so there are 116 side quests. I did not do them all by any stretch and I still spent well over 150 hours finishing the game. I love that stuff, but if it is not something you enjoy, I don't think XC2 will be worth the money you would pay to pick it up.
Why are All These Nopons Grotesque Perverts?
Okay, here's the stuff that took the edge off what would otherwise be a game I could suggest to anyone who might want to try an epic JRPG. There is an awful lot of problematic stuff in this game.
First of all, there is the character design. The first Blade you bond with is a woman named Pyra. She is an immortal sort-of goddess who wields the power of fire. Also her chest is too big. Far, far too big. Not just to big for her shape to be seen as anything other than a crass, juvenile sexual fantasy, but too big for the laws of physics. Nobody should be able to stand that straight with that sort of weight distribution, even factoring in her status as a super-strong magical being. I would like to be able to posit that perhaps she had some sort of elaborate scaffolding inside her clothing, but she doesn't wear enough of it to make that theory plausible. And she is just one of many, many characters (mostly Blades) whose shape is completely incongruous to the character as written. I just don't understand why the Aegis needs jugs you could, in an emergency, use as a floatation device for a family of five.
Then there's Tora and his family. Tora is a Nopon, a race of furry beach ball that was used as a kind of annoying comic relief in XC1. They are back for XC2, but with an important difference. Tora, the Nopon who joins your party, is basically a creature of pure sexism. And his whole family is too. They build artificial Blades because Nopon can't bond with regular Blades. So they make these robots. And design them to be basically softcore porn bots. Just look up "Xenoblade 2 Poppi" and try to avoid any obscene fan art. And all this basically comes out of nowhere, and then continues for the next HUNDRED HOURS of game time. Seriously. It's uncalled for and repeatedly took me out of the story. I understand that if you want to play JRPGs there is going to be some of this from time to time, but this was really, really flagrant, unnecessary and basically out of left field.
Final Word
You know, in spite of all the things that were wrong with it, it was a great game. I spent more than a hundred hours on it and enjoyed myself most of the time. It wasn't as good as XC1, mostly because of the bizarre problematic bits, but if you could set that aside or work through it, you probably had at least as much fun as I did.
RATING: Worth It
Kommentit