Finally finished
Xenoblade Chronicles 2. There's so much content there that you could probably spend a good 200 hours easily and not realize it. I don't have that sort of resolve, so I stopped doing a lot of the side quests and mostly stuck to the story path for the last few chapters. That's what usually happens to me in these
games, anyway.
Let me preface this by saying the Switch is a great platform. But there were some obvious technical issues getting this game to work well on the system. Unlike
Breath of the Wild, which ran at 900p and mostly maintained frame rate except in a few instances,
XC2 keeps the frame rate up through dynamic resolution adjustment. Sometimes, that resolution is pretty decent. Other times, it drops tremendously low, getting awfully close to 3DS levels. They mask some of this by applying some very strong sharpness filters and other filtering, but it can be a distraction at times. Still, overall, the game works fine, and it looks better than the Wii game, at any rate. I'm actually fuzzy on my memories on how it compares with
XCX, though.
There are some really cool tunes in there, too. I really like a lot of the music, and the choir/chant music in places like Tantal or Indol is even really cool. Character voices are pretty convincing as well, and I like that they went back to the various UK accents.
Character design turned out... hmm. The game looks far more "kiddie" anime than things did before, with Rex looking rather doofy. Some other characters look cool, though, even if a few of the antagonists look like they dropped straight out of
Kingdom Hearts. And the outfits... hmm. Some of the rare blades look super-cool. Some look hilarious or are meant to be cute. And a few... well, they don't leave much to the imagination. Pyra (and later iterations) has some rather sizable assets, and if you pull Dahlia...
There's lots of skin showing everywhere, y'all.
Still, we're in this for the gameplay, right? Well, if you didn't like
X1/XCX, I don't think this will change your mind. Some things have been streamlined, but otherwise the combat still feels a little sloggy at times, with enemies taking a bit too long to fell. Your immediate combat options have been reduced to three face buttons for your skills, but you can also swap Blades out to access three more skills. It all works pretty well. Quests are done a bit differently; most of them don't auto-complete and you have to return to the quest giver. Thankfully, they're labeled on the map
much better, so that's not too bad. The other quests you might have taken in earlier
games were replaced by Merc Missions, in which you send out your unused Blades on various missions that give you gear, EXP, and gold.
I don't think I quite explained blades, but basically they're partners that give you various abilities. You get them through a gacha mechanic. Why this was necessary, I don't know, especially in a game that isn't selling these things as DLC, but whatever. At least getting them in most cases doesn't require ridiculously convoluted quests; it just requires hoping for good RNG.
For whatever reason, I actually did enjoy the story, even if it was even
more anime than the other two. And not to spoil anything, but I very much enjoyed the ending. But speaking of the ending, that last boss pulled the usual JRPG trope of being quite a bit tougher than anything you'd faced up to that point. It necessitated a change in tactics after the fifth time I bit it. That was even more frustrating because it takes a lot of time to work him down... or so I thought.
Once again, avoiding spoilers, there were a few combat mechanics that I'd largely ignored. The most important revolves around your Party Gauge, which fills up as you hit enemies and use arts and whatnot. You get three bars, and you can use one of them to revive a fallen party member. This is what I mostly used it for. You can also use it when completely full to trigger a "Chain Attack", which lets your entire team unleash all at once, with a pretty significant damage multiplier. I tried it a few times, but didn't deem the multiplier enough to risk being defenseless if I used it and then Rex fell in battle. The last battle changed that, though. I was getting wiped out pretty quickly by two attacks in particular. The first I could recover from, but the later pretty much killed my entire team at once. Doh!
In goofing around, though, I finally learned the deal with adding "Orbs" to your enemies. See, you can chain level 1, 2, and 3 specials into a powerful ender combo that adds an "orb" to the enemy you're fighting. Once you've added these orbs,
then if you use your Chain Attack, you have an opportunity to break them. If you break them, you get a big boost in your multiplier, and you get to add another round to your onslaught! You can see where this is heading...
...there's also a massively powerful boost for Pyra in the end game that makes her output amazing amounts of damage, especially in chain attacks. It's a one-time-per-battle thing, though. So I worked down the last boss to about half health, adding orbs as I could (it ended up being three), activated the super mode, and triggered my chain attack. I broke all three orbs, and in the course of the chain attack, I basically took that massive pool of health down all in one go. Heck, I had damage to spare! I was just piling on at the end.
So I went from being mad at the game to saying, "Okay, not so bad after all."
Do I recommend this? Well, if you've got lots of free time, then sure! I'd give it a 8.5, probably. When I was in the groove I didn't want to put it down. It's certainly not perfect, but for fans of the previous
games, I certainly wouldn't pass it up. I enjoyed it more than
XCX; it takes a lot less time to feel like you're getting somewhere. I still think the first game hit more high notes for me, but some of the quality-of-life improvements here would be great in, say, a remastered version of the original.
(Oh, right, final time was 76:24, but there's so much I didn't do.)