After spending more than seventy hours playing xenoblade chronicles 2, learning more about
the concept and creation of the product, I finally reached my conclusion on it.
To get this out of the way, and to understand my point of view in this big critique, I think
it's important to note that I did not really enjoy playing the first Xenoblade Chronicles,
barely touched Xenoblade Chronicles X before dropping it, and Xenogears is one of my favorite
games of all time.
This video is more of a way to express my thoughts on this game, and why I did not enjoy
it, and i don't really plan on comparing it to any other game in the series.
I basically took the game as a standalone entry, going in completely blind, without
expecting anything.
This review will be spoiler free as well, and I won't show any footage of the main
story for that reason.
I'm not going to spend much time describing the mechanics of the game to their very core,
there are plenty of classic reviews out there.
But I'll still inform you of the basic characteristics of the game.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2, like the first game, is a classic feeling JRPG with an automatic
battle system.
You travel through multiple places with gorgeous environments and music, fight monsters, complete
side quests, unveil secrets, pretty basic stuff.
Most of the story unveils itself in pretty well directed cutscenes with their own amount
of drama and stuff going on.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is more light than the first game, and its relaxed atmosphere
makes it by far the most welcoming game of the Xeno metaseries.
The story and universe revolve around a world where gigantic titans roam the sea of clouds,
creatures so big that entire species and cultures have spawned on them.
There are also Blades, a sort of weaponized life form that grants their master strong
power.
The people who wield Blades are called Drivers.
The main protagonist is Rex, just some kid Salvager, which means he explores the sea
of clouds to hunt for treasures and all that.
He soon meets Pyra, a special blade with exceptional power, and will help her find the Elysium,
a holy place that lies on the very top of the World Tree, which is the central point
of the sea of cloud.
Rex, Pyra and some other friends will help each other to reach that sacred place.
It is a very long RPG, taking up to 80 hours just to get through the main story.
That was a pretty short summary, but that should do to give people who don't know
much about the game enough context.
Now it's time to talk about what I thought of the game.
I tried to not be too harsh but i don't know if i achieved that… so sorry in advance
to Xenoblade fans.
But I sure hope you'll be able to understand what I'm trying to say in this long video,
and if I said something dumb you can always let me know in the comments.
Unfortunately, even if Xenoblade 2 is a pretty friendly game in its presentation, it is not
really an easy game to comprehend and play through.
Just to learn most of the basic mechanics, it took me more than thirty hours.
The way the game lets the player learns its mechanics is really counterproductive.
You only get textbox tutorials which don't help you in any way to learn the most important
parts of battling, and a lot of things just go over your head because everything is so
messy and cryptic.
At least I knew what I was doing, but it felt like i was lucky enough to have friends explain
all of this crap for me instead of the game casually leaning the player towards learning
all of that themselves.
Speaking of battles there's also this constant anger from being harassed by monsters absolutely
everywhere.
Sometimes the music and places i went to were gorgeous and magnificent until a monster barges
in to piss me off while I'm contemplating or something.
The game doesn't even have any difficulty choice as well.
Which means that if you're here just for the story, you can't play as you like.
You'll be forced to dive into tiresome and long battles just for the sake of progressing
through the story.
Xenoblade X had a system where you could lower the level of the enemies if you were struggling,
but there is none of that in this game.
I don't get why, considering how simple it could be to just make an easy option where
the game cuts the enemy HPs lower, orgive the player a better defense or something.
What really made the game annoying to play was the amount of content there is in sidequests.
It's just too damn overwhelming for me, and I ended up giving up trying them all out
just to play through the main quest.
But if you do that you end up missing a lot of stuff that actually makes the game easier
so you have to keep your eyes everywhere, mercenaries missions, accessories, food and
items, sociograms, equipment, blade, blade gachas, characters that have their own classes
depending on their blades, dealing with money, farming, gathering the materials, repetitive
side quests…
The list goes on and on, and absolutely never stops.
I just played through the game the hard way, not caring about all that simply because I
prefered to play it that way, since that's how I enjoyed playing through the first game.
I do not want to overwhelm myself with uninteresting mechanics, i do not want to deal with all
this stuff that just bores me to death, so why should I ? But this decision was a blow
at the worst difficulty spikes of the game, and kicked my ass far too many times for me
to enjoy.
Those problems have been here since the first Xenoblade game and it's been at the core
of the series forever, so of course they weren't gonna lighten it up.
If you play this game, you better pray that you enjoy doing all of this side content stuff.
If you don't, you're gonna suffer just like I did.
Sometimes the main story asks you to have sufficient skills to progress but if you dont
have those yet, youre locked.
Well most of the time its corrected by feeding your blades the right items but its still
fairly annoying for those locks to be here in the first place.
A better way to do that would have been to let the player choose between different paths
to reach an objective, which is the case most of the time, but sometimes you're just forced
to go through those locks.
The game will never let you play the way you want, and no matter how bad you want to simply
enjoy the story and not give a damn about tactics and the intimidating combat system
and all of its roots and menus, you're in for a terrible time.
And for a role playing game, feeling like doing whatever you want is usually one of
the most important aspects.
Something stops being optional when it becomes mandatory to go on in the main story.
Sounds obvious but the entirety of the content in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 completely forgets
that.
I found the combat system less obnoxious than that in the first episode.
You can now do element combos depending on you and your friends blades and their elements
and once you get the hang of it, it can be interesting.
though they can be extremely risky since they require you to use your blue gauge on the
top left corner of the screen, which is the same that is used for resurrecting yourself
or the others.
The combat is often do or die, for better or for worse.
The game seemed more accessible thanks to the new battle system and i felt way more
engaged in battles.
It took me a while but i got used to it though it has the worst tutorials and ways of making
you understand the mechanics i've ever seen in a video game before.
But the main issue of the combat system is how so many of them are based on stats and
rng, sometimes.
I honestly think I was pretty good at the game in how the battles take place, I was
able to do combos very fast and I had a good balance of elements in my blade choices, dealt
a lot of right timed attacks to raise my blade levels and all that.
But as long as you don't have the right level for some battles, you're just stuck,
and that's never something I enjoyed in RPGs in general because it's simply artificial
instead of asking the player to play well.
I'm fine with punishing mistakes, but when i'm not making any and still keep dying,
that's a problem to me.
So all you can do when you're stuck is do some grinding, or even : optional content
and side quests.
The structure of the side quests are far from well composed.
You know how in Nier Automata, whenever you complete a portion of a sidequest, you get
rewards even if you didn't finish it.
It motivates the player to go on with it, and even if they don't want to see the end
of it or simply wanna do something else, the time you've spent doing it is not wasted.
But in Xenoblade 2, you're constantly asked to get some items or kill some enemy, once
you do and get back to the client, you don't get anything in return and then you've got
another objective which is most of the time, identical to the previous one.
This could have been avoided if you were simply tasked to get everything you need at the same
time.
If the objective is too intimidating for the player, they could simply skip it and do something
else instead of wasting their time.
But here, usually, the quests are structured this way :
-Get the items -Get back to your client
-Get more items -Get back to your client
-Repeat until there's no writing left -Get your rewards
If you got rewards and experience once you're done with every section of the sidequest that'd
be way better, you could go back later.
It gives you experience and eventually makes you stronger to do some other sidequests until
you get back to your original objective or not.
But nope.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 works in a do it and get everything at the end way.
And when you're already struggling through the main quest and need to do side content
to level up, this ends up being the most frustrating shit on earth.
Near the end of chapter 7, I almost lost it.
There was a boss that just felt mathematically too strong for me to pass through.
I tried every possible build, equipment, everything, and still couldn't do it.
Because of that I was forced to grind some of the most dull and boring side quests I've
ever seen before.
I spent half an hour on one until i was asked to go and clear yet a third a objective, and
to get access to a certain zone i needed a level 6 blade with Ice power that I didn't
have.
So I was stuck yet again.
On the side content.
It was never ending, I had to keep doing side quests praying that I could actually finish
them.
Side content that asks you to do more side content to proceed.
They're a chore, completely unfulfilling and have no impact on anything at all aside
from giving you barely enough XP to level up.
At this point in the game, and I'm serious about what I'm going to say, I don't think
I've ever felt this negative while playing a game before.
I felt like everything I've played through those fifty hours were meaningless, useless,
like I just wasted days of my life on it.
I felt stupid and awful because nothing felt decent in the slightest in my experience.
It was bad things topped with other bad things, with even more bad things added altogether
to create one of the worst RPG experiences I've ever had in my entire life.
I've spent hours, hours and even more hours just to catch up with the fake and mathematical
difficulty that the game imposed on me just so I could progress through the main story.
And that happened again on chapter 9 where i had to grind for xp because i was just 4
levels short to actually do anything during another fight.
I could inflict tons of elemental orbs on the enemy but since me and my teammates died
so many times and so easily, i could never perform a single combo to destroy those orbs
and perform correctly.
And even if i did, an empty friendship gauge means that a single death is enough to end
the long 10 minutes battle.
Tell me again that an easy mode is unnecessary for this kind of game, I dare you.
Because it's necessary.
People don't all play the same way, and if there's an easy way out to appeal to
a bigger audience without impacting on the quality of the game aside from making it more
accessible and friendly to others, developers should definitely take it.
And then i tried the battle where i was blocked again.
With the exact same level as before, with the same build as the time i first fought
it, and luckily won somehow.
I don't even know how, but at this point in the game I just embraced this luck to proceed
through the game.
Speaking of which, some chapters are completely disconnected from the main story and that's
fine, but you have to do some stuff that's sometimes almost completely irrelevant to
the story aside from some weird shonen anime filler episode like thing.
It's kinda funny in a way because they're like portions that felt added at the last
minute to make the game longer, because most of the dialogues in those parts don't even
have voice over, which feels completely unnatural since every other main event in the game are
in the form of cutscenes and dubbed dialogues.
Like that one part in an early chapter where you either have to grind or be lucky enough
to reach a certain level of field skills to progress, or send some blades on a forty minute
quest to do the job for you while all you can do is just wait or grind in the meantime.
It's pointless, boring, useless, stupid and busy work and completely unnecessary to
the story, and definitely not worth it in the end.
Sometimes there's even some haunting fetch quests or grinding.
Or how about that part in chapter 7 where you need specific blade skills where you need
to be lucky enough to even use the required blades to proceed through the MAIN quest ? Luckily
enough for me, i just about managed to reach those requirements because I used them, but
what about players who didn't ? Speaking of which, whenever you have hazards on the
map, you always and constantly need to swap around your blades to get the right requirements
to get past those.
Because of course, the game ignores the blades that are not assigned directly into your team.
You'll have to swap them with your combat ones, hope you don't get agro'd by some
random overpowered enemy while you're getting past the obstacle, and pray you got the composition
right.
I don't understand why the game doesn't process through every blade you have in your
"inventory".
A small inconvenience, but i've spent way too much damn time on these menus.
There are a lot of moments like those in the game and they clearly don't help or motivate
the player to have fun, even through the main content.
Near the last few chapters, long cutscenes felt like bliss because i at least didn't
have to play the game.
That's how bad it was for me.
I could spend hours just talking about every detail that brings about pure annoyance for
me, like how some lower level quests require you to pass through the only road that contains
tons of level 80 enemies but whatever.
But anyway.
Now that I've talked about the game in itself, let's talk about the narrative aspects.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place in a sort of fantasy setting, but with its own rules
and world building.
Basically, instead of taking place on some planet with earth and water, Xenoblade 2 takes
place in an immense sea of cloud.
Here, titans live.
Gigantic titans which are sometimes so big that they have their own ecosystem, places,
and of course, towns and countries.
Basically like the first game but this time with more titans instead of there being just
two titans.
In the middle of all that is the World Tree, which kinda is the Yggdrasil of the world,
with the main plot and objective relying on that.
I find this idea fascinating, original and really interesting, and kudos for that, because
I usually can't digest games with a classic fantasy setting.
But...
Just because you have a setting doesn't mean you have a story.
There are games with good premise and ideas that end up being very poorly executed.
Xenoblade 2 on the other hand, is a fairly well executed, but unsurprising game struggling
to be meaningful at all for me.
The entire game and story has an identity crisis, and loses itself between trying to
act self aware, falling in its own traps in the process like a bad 2010 light novel, moments
of pure nothingness, and rarely, memorable and dramatic scenes.
Xenoblade 2 is not an awful story.
It's constructed in an okay way, there aren't many contradictions or things left unexplained
I can't deny that.
But i absolutely can't lie to myself here : Xenoblade 2 was not impactful in any meaningful
way.
It is a really simple plot, game, and execution.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Maybe i'm just not meant for this kind of teenager fantasy story.
But the game is designed with such a vast and big idea that it just fails at delivering
a simple story.
Every mechanic, every gameplay element, every useless side quest is there to remind us that
the game is wide, complex, with a lot to explore and plenty of rewards for your accomplishments.
But this is in direct conflict with the way the plot and story is built.
A story ceases to be straightforward and candid when everything else is overwhelming and here
to make us feel like we're on a titanic journey with the fate of the world on our
shoulders.
Maybe i'm biased.
Maybe im missing something.
Maybe i'm overthinking this.
Lots of maybe went through my mind while i was playing this.
But Xenoblade 2 failed at trying to capture anything of interest for me.
I don't want to be taken for an idiot.
I dont want any of this "hero's journey that ends up saving the world".
I wanted something more childish, or more mature, one or the other.
But Xeno 2 is trying desperately to make us go through both at the same time, but all
it left me with was this uncanny feeling of not understanding what the game is going for.
It lacks the innocence, charm and substance of a classic and feel good adventure like
dragon ball or pokemon, but it also lacks the depth and mature content of a rich adult
story.
And xenoblade 2's atmosphere constantly tries to adapt to these dramatically different
moods but completely fails at it.
Less ambitious than any RPG I've played to appeal to a more teen friendly audience
(the kind of audience that would clearly rather play Pokémon or Zelda anyway), because of
that it avoids darker themes like Xenogears did.
In a storytelling aspect Xenoblade chronicles 2 felt plain, tasteless and without much of
a unique vibe.
Every chapter is structured and rhythmed in a similar way: you have a new objective, go
and discover a new place, spend hours admiring it and defeating some monsters, reach a new
town, have a few unsurprising events, something terrible happens to someone, usually pyra,
you then go save them, you have some dungeon, win and save the day, and suddenly the bad
guys come and do something very evil, end of chapter, repeat.
It is not fun, predictable, and the character interactions in between do not make up for
it.
And let's not talk about the comedy of the game in its first half, trying to make some
self awareness or mockery of basic light novel fanservice humor since it's doing the exact
same thing hours later, completely unironically like there's not a care in the world, and
making me feel like i'm playing or watching some early 2000 teen fantasy or some random
PS2 RPG.
Actually, the entire game felt like it came out 15 years too late.
But back then this could have been excused because it was a pretty experimental era,
where JRPGS were trying to adapt to a wider audience like Final Fantasy X, trying science
fiction like Xenosaga, finding a special art direction like Okami, being as unorthodox
as possible like Shin Megami Tensei, being as weird and dark as possible like Drakengard.
Those titles were ambitious, had something going for them, themes, and that's why these
games are still memorable to this day, and I can't say the same for Xenoblade 2.
Because Xenoblade 2 really doesn't have anything special, fun, or innocent going on.
Like a melting pot of cliches and the worst aspects of the genre.
The characters are not all dislikeable but they're mostly stereotyped to a depressing
end like Zeke, or simple eye candy plot device like pyra.
Some others can be fun, like morag which i applaud for being one of the only characters
I almost love just because she doesnt act like a dumb spoiled brat all the time.
Poppi is nice but was unfortunately fetichized to no end because some writers couldnt help
but make her a stereotyped moeblob at times, tora is here doing his stuff and moaning all
the time, Nia is kinda alright aside from the nekogirl memefest, and…
Rex.
After playing for so long as him (and noone else) i still dont know about him.
At the same time he's the most cliche teenager male character that could exist, but I dont
wanna kill myself whenever he speaks, at least.
He is composed most of the time and overall, he's just a nice guy that knows how to keep
his shit for himself and he's pretty respectable.
But its like he has this constant sticker on his forehead saying "protagonist" and
thats what i hate most about the character buildups and interactions.
Its like everyone was made to fit a space in the game without really trying to link
them much together.
Theyre supposed to be close friends but we never ever really see any interactions between
them, let alone some serious discussions or even drama.
Aside from Pyra obviously, since she's the girl plot device with a tragic backstory.
I didnt enjoy xenoblade 1 either but i can at least remember that shulk, dunban, reyn
and fiora really did live a while together, theyre family, and the other characters soon
join them and they still felt like a much more connected band of friends than xenoblade
2's way of approaching it.
There was one part towards the beginning of chapter 7, minor spoiler here, when Rex kinda
goes through this usual "im useless anyway" scene and ive gotta admit that this was one
of the only scenes in the game where we actually see characters acting like human beings.
People are upset and some characters are angry at Rex and stuff, and overall that was a powerful
scene, but after that, it just went back to being Xenoblade 2.
He's got his objective in mind and nothing else, in a really innocent way and for that
I kinda like it.
He really makes me think of a classic shonen protagonist like Gon or Son-goku.
The game plays with that during the later part of the story, which is also a nice touch.
Chapter 10 really helped to make the story a bit more interesting to follow too.
Speaking of which its by far the most intriguing chapter; it's a pretty good conclusion and
it has some daring moves, but its still not worthwhile enough to go through dozens of
hours of playing.
Rex never really goes through any kind of real character development, for better or
for worse.
It's like the game refuses to be ambitious or involving in any way.
Like there's no will to make it feel remarkable, distinctive from the rest and the pile of
rotting plain JRPGS.
The most depressing part is that a lot of elements in the games were designed with a
lot of love, but every other angle of the game are corny, edgy, pointy and rough.
Anyway.
The more I played, the more i learned to like some of its aspects, but its flaws just grew
bigger and bigger the more I went on in it.
I appreciated some parts and disliked some others.
A quick and simple question you may ask of me would be "Then why did you even play
xenoblade 2 if you hated the first game ? "Since i knew xenoblade 2 had a much more simpler
and intimate story, i imagined it to be on par with my favorite part of the first entry
: exploring a land of wonder, and bask in a sea of great music and environment art.
But this time with more emotions, more character buildups.
And truly, this game delivers.
That is, only its environment and sound ambiance.
But thats about it.
Everything else felt like trash to me.
Xenoblade 2 marked for me the end of the trust i had in takahashi for this series.
And i didnt even expect anything much.
Somehow i knew what was coming for me, but i thought that maybe, takahashi could understand
what he's best at and give in to make xenoblade 2 a memorable game for its themes and character
psychology.
But it didnt.
Can i blame him ? No.
It seems the team is proud of what they accomplished.
The saddest part here is to tell myself that the kind of game i'm looking for, takahashi
is not interested in making them.
It feels like an important person in my life gave up doing what i love, instead to do what
i hate most : making something unmemorable.
And i would prefer a wonky and unfinished ambitious title to a well executed game that
has nothing for itself, nothing to feel different from the rest.
In the end Xenoblade chronicles 2 feels like a pointless game with no ambitions, with no
flavor, with nothing to prove itself and separate itself from the rest.
The game is here, it's not awful, but it's not pleasing or memorable in any other way.
And that makes me sad, far more than angry.
I dont like ending videos on a negative note but i guess those things just happen.
However if the game does interest you in some way, maybe you're not looking for the same
things in a game as i. so go for it, give it a shot and i hope you'll enjoy it.
Thank you for having watched this video ! It was hard for me to come up with the right
words without feeling like an asshole but i think i did okay.
If you do disagree or feel like pointing stuff out, leave it down in the comments, i'd
love to discuss with you.
Thanks to Aimee for proofreading my text and especially Raytreau on twitter for lending
me his avermedia and making this video possible.
If you enjoy what i do and wish to support me in the future you can check out my patreon
in the link below in the description.
For a small monthly dollar you can participate in a nice and chill discord channel, and get
tons of other rewards like videos in advance, special updates, exclusive content and stuff.
I hope you enjoy the rest of your day, and I'll see you around !
For more infomation >> WBZ Morning Forecast For January 29 - Duration: 2:45. 
For more infomation >> Cast Of "Two Cops" Expresses Their Fondness For The Drama As It Comes To An End - Duration: 3:36. 
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