Xenoblade 2: Torna - The Golden Country
☞ This post gets into deep XC2 spoiler territory, so exercise caution if you haven't played that game and want to for some reason.
I don't think "course correction" is the right description for Torna - The Golden Country, which I'd imagine was developed at roughly the same time as the rest of XC2. There are some small unambiguous quality of life improvements (e.g., autosaving), but mostly what I think is happening here is that the repurposed mechanics have fewer obstacles to being actually fun versions of themselves, and it's much easier to make new or changed mechanics suit the overall goals of a game when those goals are less nebulous.
The first thing we learn is how combat differs from the base game: blades and drivers participate at the same time, not sharing the blade's weapon, but taking on different roles depending on whether they're in the front or back line. That drivers and blades have the same range of actions available to them makes the relationship feel more cooperative and reciprocal out of the gate, and it isn't long before we learn that people fighting in this way is a consequence of how they feel about the driver/blade arrangement generally. Which is to say, there's some aspect of the setting that the characters have concrete opinions about, and these opinions are conveyed in how you interact with the game. This is all I was asking XC2 to do, really, even if not in this specific way--if the characters think of blades as equals, figure out a way to make them equal as game objects. (The Forrest Gump-esque implication that drivers using their blades' weapons is Lora and Jin's fault is just ... yeah, I'm choosing to ignore that. Fuck off lol)
I also just think fighting things in this one is more fun. It all seems balanced such that low-threat fights aren't needlessly long, and switching characters within the team you're controlling feels more meaningful than basically any in-combat decision XC2 ever asked me to make. It's a question of combo effectiveness vs. mitigating damage from recent attacks, but a desperate switch in the interest of survival doesn't mean your damage output is totally sunk--you can now make a blade combo out of any three elements even if it may not be as effective as one of the defined sequences.
Field skill checks are back and mostly unchanged, but they feel less like chores or needless roadblocks when designed to account for a fixed lineup of blades rather than sheer quantity and random chance. There's no more swapping your blades around at every check, and considering that every time XC2 crashed for me it happened in the character menu, that's a relief in more ways than one. Pouch item clutter is replaced by character-specific craftables, and while I liked the clutter and am not always very interested in crafting, it works as a way to use items you're probably picking up anyway that also provides a little characterization as a treat. It's a sensible consolidation of things like salvage turn-ins and aux core crafting into a system where you care a little more about the outputs.
You can buy Torna - The Golden Country independent of XC2, but I'm not sure how well it'd work as a standalone thing. The characters are written around a preexisting understanding of where they'll end up and how they'll change. Maybe too much so, even--TTGC is determined to have something to say about every 500-years-ago cutscene from XC2, and some of that stuff feels shoehorned in for the sake of thoroughness. I do, however, like that we get to see what Mythra's deal is in the absence of Pyra. I might've felt like Pyra was a little too amenable in the early hours of XC2, but lacking any desire to get along with anybody she's just a regular jerk, and you can imagine why Jin might be annoyed at having to deal with her again 500 years later. Though it'd be fairer to describe her as alien--personality-wise she's a blank slate trying to glean what she can from her driver, and her driver is a massive doofus. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
While it's about events that we know won't end well for everyone, TTGC hasn't totally dropped the XC2 cartoon logic. I don't want to spend a bunch of time explaining jokes, so I'll just say there's a scene in which a character is chopping cabbage and the cabbage output pile is bigger every time it's on camera, and it's a very simple visual gag, but I lost my entire mind at that. There's also some good after-battle dialogue, my favorite of which is Mythra and Jin very seriously talking about fighting ghosts.
There are a lot of sidequests relative to the total playtime; you even have to do a certain amount to progress. I've seen comments in various places by people annoyed at this, and that's fair, though I didn't mind it so much because sidequesting is so much less frustrating in general than in XC2. What's interesting to me about it is we know in advance what'll happen to most of these people--those who don't make it to Tantal will go down with Torna or be hunted afterward. And yet here we are, resolving their petty issues anyway. I'm tempted to look at this as part of the XC2 suite of games' broader statement about what helping people means. That it's worthwhile to help people achieve momentary happiness regardless of long-term considerations is a nice sentiment ... it's just that in XC2 proper, this intersects with the global politics such that you're doing conflict mediation for colonizers without regard for the consequences, and that's where I check out. Again, maybe it's just a symptom of too much going on.
The noblesse oblige nonsense sure is back in TTGC, though. And I mean, look, I get why fantasy writers do stories about nobles--they're convenient in that they have a higher-level view of what's going on in the world than the average peasant farmer. But doing a story about nobles doesn't mean you have to clean their boots with your tongue, and anyway, while I'd be willing to give Addam a pass for being a good excuse to show us what the Tornan royalty is up to, there's no good explanation for including yet another wise and magnanimous boy-emperor of Mor Ardain. Like, come on. We don't even go there in this one.
For all its many sins, XC2 is a lush experience with well over 100 hours of things to do, and sharing the basic structure of XC2 means that TTGC is pretty much doomed to feeling like a slice of that kind of game. Plenty of 90s console RPGs are the same length, but where they get a lot of mileage out of small but diverse locations and overworld-map-spanning plots, TTGC doesn't have those tools in its toolbox. It's definitely worth playing as a companion piece to XC2, though, given that it treats some of the base game's ideas with more care.