Xenoblade Chronicles 2

2024-12-06
I found the same up-down-up pattern of enjoyment playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that I found playing XCX and to a lesser extent XC1. My playtime looked something like this:

Hours 1 - 10: Wow so cool!
Hours 10 - 40: Christ when will it end??
Hours 40+: Ok this is actually sweet.

Let's start with what doesn't work and then work our way around to why I eventually really enjoyed my time with it.

The combat which is why everyone lauds this system IS pretty cool but it's incredibly complicated and is tutorialized incredibly slowly AND poorly over about 10 - 20 hours. Half of it isn't really explained and I honestly think I had like 50% understanding up till hour 40 and even then I probably only got up to a 80% understanding. And the gulf in your power between 50-80% understanding and 80-100% understanding is effectively leaving most of your power on the table. The super combos you can do ARE cool but figuring out how the hell to do them is not explained super well. And the biggest problem with the combat, which is the same problem with every Xenoblade game, is the combat takes WAY too long unless you're overpowered / broken. Until I turned the difficulty to Easy the amount of time I spent just killing trash mobs was insane.

The combat isn't the only thing that's complicated, there's a million systems of dubious importance tossed in as well. You have material gathering points which are used to craft items with small bonuses, you're constantly gathering huge amounts of equippable items to the point that I just stopped looking in the inventory because it's impossible to find anything, you're gathering huge amounts of Aux Cores or some shit that require you to gather mats to even use them...dumb. You have side quests that I heard were better but are just as pointless and unengaging...but sadly necessary if you want to power level because you suck at the combat like me. You have the same old day/night/weather system that causes people to move around or, really, to not be where you need them to be so you have to fucking mess with the clock till the thing spawns...fuck that. In addition to that now you have high and low tide which is used for all of like 2 fucking puzzles and is insane that it was left in the game. You have treasure hunting which is a WHOLE minigame which is cool till you realize the money you get from it is much more easily gained from just fighting...so there's another useless thing. And mercenary missions, probably the most grindy and shitty, mobile-app-ass mechanic in a game I've seen in a while. But let's explain Blades first because they're intimately tied to this shit-ass feature.

Blades are the mechanism by which Drivers (people) fight. There are a bazillion of them. And they are a gacha mechanic. You get cores for Blades, you crack them open, and hope you get a rare one. Yeah, in a single-player game. Seriously. To be fair you realize you don't really need that many unless you're min-maxing but it's pretty insane that it was included at all. Then the whole mercenary missions thing comes up where you use all your background Blades to passively farm shit in the background. Crazy thing about Blades is each one has a unique tree of abilities. So some have more crit, more heals, what have you. But unlocking these is gated behind various tasks. Gather 10 minerals, kill X unique mobs, kill 10 wolves, talk to 20 Nopon, use X move 10 times. It's kind of cool at first till you realize you need to do this for like 10 different Blades and none of those tasks are tallied up retroactively. And then you realize there's another grind.

This is a game of pointless activities and grinding and I fucking HATE that about it.

So what do I like and how did I come around? Well for starters while the story is garbage up through the 5th chapter it takes off right after then and I really enjoyed it. Sure Rex is a whiny, naive, little douche and his creepy romance with a millennia old Blade is in-sane. But it eventually touches upon themes like identity, memory, what it means to die, what you leave behind. Pretty cool. And then you have the slow burn of figuring out who Malos and Jin are and what they're doing. You have the reveal of Amalthus being a psycho bad guy but also a sad lonely boy and his boss fight and death are fantastic. "Father...Why do you not answer when I call?" Fucking brutal. I love it.

And I just shat on blades a minute ago but they are a fun feature. It's pretty sweet that different people can play the game and play with an entirely different set of Blades. Each one has a unique personality and some wildly different character models and you'll have fun mixing and matching to find combinations that are functionally cohesive but also ones that you just vibe with. I will say the first rare Blade I unlocked was Dahlia and I actually cackled out loud I was so aghast. Even in a game that has a fair amount of egregious Big Titty Waifu character models, Dahlia is a truly wretched design lol.

Along the way I changed two things in my behavior which allowed me to enjoy the game. I ignored all the grinding after a while: grinding Blades, doing mercenary missions, gathering things, side quests, etc. And I turned the difficulty to easy. It cuts down the life of enemies and just speeding up the monotonous combat AND making me feel a lot stronger raised the fun for me a bunch. Not only that but around that time period you get the upgraded Mythra who can combo off anything. That meant I could basically win any boss fight without having to memorize good synergies between blades to get the uber powerful level 4 combos off.

Anyway by the end I warmed to the game. To the point that I thought, you know, if I somehow went into the game knowing how the combat worked off the bat AND was able to skip the first 4 or 5 chapters of bullshit this game would be an easy 8 or 9 out of 10. Sadly it doesn't do those things. It's got some really great parts that it makes you work way too hard to get to. And for that it's a flawed gem in my book.

2023-04-09
Weirdly my feelings on Xenoblade 2 are incredibly similar to both 1 and X. I started by thinking all the complexity and systems were cool. I loved the music and the open world was gorgeous. The story was...eh. But I was hooked by the promise of a game that people loved with a combat system that was supposed to be incredible. Fast forward about 10 hours and I'm sick of the game. It's the same in each of them. Once the luster of the new mechanics fades you realize there's just too many systems and the Cool Combat System is actually quite repetitive.

And yet by the end I grew to like the game. It's so I odd my playtime looked something like this:
Hours 1 - 10: Wow so cool!
Hours 10 - 40: Christ when will it end...
Hours 40 - 55: Ok this is actually sweet.

Let's start with what's bad and then work our way around to why I eventually enjoyed my time with it.

The combat which is why everyone lauds this system IS pretty cool but it's incredibly complicated and is tutorialized incredibly slowly AND poorly over about 10 - 20 hours. Half of it isn't really explained and I honestly think I had like 50% understanding up till hour 40 and then even then I probably only got up to a 80% understanding. And the gulf in your power between 50-80% and 80-100% is effectively leaving most of your power on the table. The super combos you can do ARE cool but figuring out how the hell to do them is not explained super well. And the biggest problem with the combat, which is the same problem with every Xenoblade game, is the combat takes WAY too long unless you're overpowered / broken. Until I turned the difficulty to Easy the amount of time I spent just killing trash mobs was insane.

The combat isn't the only thing that's complicated, there's a million systems of dubious importance tossed in as well. You have material gathering points which are used to craft items with small bonuses, you're constantly gathering huge amounts of equippable items to the point that I just stopped looking in the inventory because it's impossible to find anything, you're gathering huge amounts of Aux Cores or some shit that require you to gather mats to even use them...dumb. You have side quests that I heard were better but are just as pointless and unengaging...but sadly necessary if you want to power level because you suck at the combat like me. You have the same old day/night/weather system that causes people to move around or, really, not be where you need them to be so you have to fucking mess with the clock till the thing spawns...fuck that. In addition to that now you have high and low tide which is used for all of like 2 fucking puzzles and is insane that it was left in the game. You have treasure hunting which is a WHOLE minigame which is cool till you realize the money you get from it is much more easily gained from just fighting...so there's another useless thing. And mercenary missions, probably the most grindy and shitty, mobile-app-ass mechanic in a game I've seen in a while. But let's explain Blades first because they're intimately tied to this shit-ass feature.

Blades are the mechanism by which Drivers (people) fight. There are a bazillion of them. And they are a gacha mechanic. You get cores for Blades, you crack them open, and hope you get a rare one. Yeah, in a single-player game. Seriously. To be fair you realize you don't really need that many unless you're min-maxing but it's pretty insane that it was included. Then the whole mercenary missions thing comes up where you use all your background Blades to passively farm shit in the background. Crazy thing about Blades is each one has a unique tree of abilities. So some have more crit, more heals, what have you. But unlocking these is gated behind various tasks. Gather 10 minerals, kill X unique mobs, kill 10 wolves, talk to 20 Nopon, use X move 10 times. It's kind of cool at first till you realize you need to do this for like 10 different Blades. And then you realize there's another grind.

This is a game of pointless activities and grinding and I fucking HATE that about it.

So what do I like and how did I come around? Well for starters while the story is garbage up through the 5th chapter it takes off right after then and I really enjoyed it. Sure Rex is a whiny, naive, little douche and his creepy romance with a millennia old Blade is insane. But it eventually touches upon themes like identity, memory, what it means to die, what you leave behind. Pretty cool. And then you have the slow burn of figuring out who Malos and Jin are and what they're doing. You have the reveal of Amalthus being a psycho bad guy but also a sad lonely boy and his boss fight and death are fantastic. "Father...Why do you not answer when I call?" Fucking brutal. I love it.

Also I changed two things in my behavior which allowed me to enjoy the game. I ignored all the grinding after a while: grinding Blades, doing mercenary missions, gathering things, side quests, etc. And I turned the difficulty to easy. It cuts down the life of enemies and just speeding up the monotonous combat AND making me feel a lot stronger raised the fun for me a bunch. Not only that but around that time period you get the upgraded Mythra who can combo off anything. That meant I could basically win any boss fight without having to memorize good synergies between blades to get the uber powerful level 4 combos off.

Anyway by the end I warmed to the game. To the point that I thought, you know, if I somehow went into the game knowing how the combat worked off the bat AND was able to skip the first 4 or 5 chapters of bullshit this game would be like a 8 or 9 out of 10. Sadly it doesn't do those things. It's got some really great parts that it makes you work way too hard to get to. And for that it's a flawed gem in my book.