Xenoblade Chronicles 2
I felt a little bad about all my minor complaints about XC1. They're true to how I felt while playing it, but most are indicative of ambition more than anything else, and I think they obscured the degree to which I enjoyed that game.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has some high-level ideas I like and some satisfying moments. The space between these moments is occupied by a strange and fascinating procession of fumbles and missteps, or what look like as much to me, anyway. At 1/4 as many hours played as I put into XC1, I had already written as many words about XC2 as I did about the whole first game, so let that be a warning, I guess.
What do I know?
Here's a summary from Wikipedia about how XC2 was received:
Upon release, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 received "generally favorable reviews" according to review aggregator website Metacritic, which gave it an overall score of 83% on 93 reviews. The game's story, characters, complex combat system, soundtrack, amount of content, and the beauty and size of the environments were largely praised. John Rairdin of Nintendo World Report considered the game "one of the finest JRPGs of the generation and perhaps of all time" and was highly praising the music, "diverse world", "fresh and engaging combat", and "thrilling storyline". He also expressed doubt that there would be a better JRPG for the Switch. Game Revolution's Jason Faulkner called the game "a joy to review", stating that it was "full of wonder, exploration, and character". Hiroshi Noguchi writing for IGN Japan gave a very positive review, stating that it "offers a timeless tale of adventure and an incredibly deep battle system." Alex Fuller for RPGamer was enthusiastically supportive of the game, saying "2017 has been one of the greatest years in RPG history; Xenoblade Chronicles 2 caps that off in mesmerising fashion by being one of the finest titles of the year".
I'm including this because I don't want to mislead anybody. The game got pretty good reviews. I have no more authority than anyone else you've never heard of and don't claim to understand anything except my own reactions, if I understand even that much. I'm doing this for my own edification, not to tell you whether you should buy a game or not.
With that said,
lol
Some of the things I like most about XC2 are things you may love or hate depending on what you're looking for. In contrast to XC1, in which Riki fits awkwardly into a party of characters otherwise defined in terms of the things they've lost, XC2 is driven by pure cartoon sensibilities. It has what I can only think of as Sega CD energy reinforced by a chaotic English dub. There's a little dragon friend like the one that follows you around in Lunar, except weirder, and intelligent humanoid robots who come to exist not through a confluence of science fiction conceits but for the same reason Nano exists in Nichijou, i.e., because robots make good punchlines (in theory; more on this below) and the universe runs on punchlines. In a general sense, or as a concept, I think this is great. This is one way that fiction can act like fiction rather than pretending at the logic of history. I wish more games with big publishers and obscene budgets would do this rather than twist themselves into self-important knots. For all that Nintendo is as fundamentally soulless as any other company, this is a mode their creative teams are especially good at.
In keeping with this, I liked the nopon in XC1. I've always liked moogles, and whatever other Little Guys these RPG settings come up with. I think it's delightful--in theory--that both XC1 and XC2 have nopon party members, and a travesty that Final Fantasy takes itself too seriously now to have playable stuffed animals. At least FF7R can't weasel out of it ...
No, but here's where things start to go wrong. Because the reason I like the nopon is because they're, you know, just Little Guys (not strictly guys, of course, but I mean in the memetic sense). While they might be a victim of some tonal whiplash in XC1, they perform the important function of upholding the essential, subatomic goofiness of the fantasy world, no matter how many righteous assholes come along with their very serious concerns and try to deny this one core truth. They have a certain way of talking, but it's anime cuteness signifiers and not mockery of any real dialect or accent, as far as I know. Riki is a husband and dad not to convey shitty boomer takes about marriage, but because it's funny to think about.
In XC2, the first important nopon character we see is a corrupt merchant/moneylender type. The punchline of the comedy manga robots is that the nopon who built them, including the one who joins the party, have 21st-century Earth otaku proclivities, for some reason. The nopon cease to be an expression of the joy threaded through the setting and become vessels for tropes that are sometimes tired and unfunny and sometimes plain old bad.
Something I had to come to terms with very early on is that many of XC2's maneuvers are self-defeating. Funny logic isn't encyclopedia logic, but it does still need a kind of consistency. That the game falls apart so often is especially frustrating to me because, on its face, it's exactly the kind of lighthearted thing I'd like to see succeed.
Reckless driving
The game systems themselves present more opportunities for XC2 to get in its own way, and on that note I guess I'd better address Rex. Out of context, I wouldn't mind him as the hero of a story like this. He's just a shounen manga guy, but he's funny and basically decent. The problem is that there is context, a lot of context, just no end of fuckin context. The driver/blade concept is ... not an unfun idea from a character customization perspective. But this is the problem--as far as gameplay is concerned, a blade is character customization, a thing you put into an equipment slot. The game wants you to believe Pyra has her own stuff going on and Rex considers her a friend rather than a tool, but then she's some gear he puts on. The only attempt at working around this is that you can't unequip her. Sometimes you'll get a core crystal from a blade who was at odds with the party and clearly not fond of them, and then you can reawaken that blade as a perfectly compliant inventory item, and it does not feel great.
There's an overused term from late 00s/early 10s discourse having to do with a particular kind of, you know, dissonance, but I'm getting at something more general and hopefully obvious: just that gameplay, like illustration or dialogue or music, means things. Accidentally or otherwise, it means something when a game presents you with an enemy type that clearly looks like people with society and culture, and then has you slay hundreds of them without the slightest pause for introspection (to be entirely fair, there are a few NPCs in XC2 who pause for introspection at this; the Tirkin even get to talk a little, though it's debatable whether this makes it any better). You feel a certain way when a Fire Emblem game gives you advantages for developing relationships between characters and then having them stand next to each other on the battlefield, and also when XC2 has you wear half its major characters like armor.
So when people say Rex sucks and Pyra should've been the main character, I get where that comes from. The game could've benefited from giving the blades more of an equal functional status, at least. It's also weird that we're supposed to buy twelve-year-old-looking-ass Rex as a plausible love interest for Pyra, whose design is bafflingly horny for a Nintendo product (rest asssured that I'm aware of the relevant doujin trope). Really, though, Nia should've been the main character. Why not? She's in a fine position to be the vehicle for all the necessary background information. Let me be a belligerent Welsh catgirl, cowards.
XC2 spoilers through the ending
Not to mention that, as a blade who was in a sense mistreated by her driver and as someone now occupying an existential position between humans and blades, Nia would've been a much more convincing ambassador for the good guys on all this.
When blade-Nia happens, they pitch her as a flashy and strong addition to your living armory; you get a special move if you equip her and Pyra/Mythra at the same time, even. But I don't want to use her in that way because I like her as a party member and I'm not sure her being into it makes me feel that much better about the implications. I mean, it does probably matter that she's the only one who really, truly consents without any outside pressure. She doesn't agree to it under duress because Rex is injured or ... well, Rex is losing a fight in that cutscene, but she could've done blade stuff in the moment without being "his" blade from that point on. Given her specific situation, why couldn't she be her own blade? Isn't that what the Torna goons are doing?
As we get deeper in, characters challenge the driver/blade system from various angles, and it's established that the question of how to treat blades caused conflict in the past. But mostly what we see is blades acquiescing to their drivers because they like them, problems blamed on individuals rather than systems, and Rex trying to convince blades that their lot in life isn't so bad after all. You'd expect some kind of status quo change at the end of a grand fantasy story like this, and this sort of happens re: the physical shape of the world, but what'll become of blades from here on? We don't find out, and none of the concerns raised within the fiction go anywhere.
It'd be fair to ask what, then, I'd want all this to look like. Torna - The Golden Country uses some of the same systems in different ways, and we'll get to that, but it's several dozen game-hours ahead of us at this point.
Autosaving is overrated
So much about XC2 feels like it was designed with convenience as a low priority, and since it's not a one-person experimental indie effort or a product of devs inventing ways to express themselves within the capabilities of the NES, the friction doesn't do anything but irritate. The sidequests have more involved premises than those in the first game, but quest items having a low chance to drop is still not fun and should still be illegal (FFXIV was half a year into Stormblood when XC2 released, so I'm confident we were already in the era of real MMOs backing away from this). Now there's the added snag of having to do a QTE minigame to get the items sometimes, and they aren't guaranteed to drop through that method, either. The zones are still impressive-looking, but after the first time you have to run across one for an hour or more looking for gathering nodes that might contain the last quest item you need but probably won't, all sense of wonder at the place will be stone-cold dead. They've added a compass bar, but the way it decides where to show quest objectives relative to your facing is, in the most generous possible terms, not very legible. There are so many other little things I could complain about, but you get the idea.
The sense of being jerked around improves a little when you decipher the vague explanation of combos and get access to chain attacks (at about hour 15). After this, fights are less deadly, enemies don't feel as damage-spongy, and exploration therefore becomes less frustrating. If you find the slow-motion plate-spinning act of the combat exhausting, this may not be much of an improvement. But it's something.
And then you start seeing things gated by blades' non-combat skills. There's a dungeon like this in chapter 4--like, not an optional dungeon, a dungeon on the critical path. If you don't have enough levels in one of the relevant skills, the game screeches to a halt while you fiddle with systems that up to this point have demanded very little of your attention. I can't decide whether this is a bad move or a daring incorporation of the kind of problem-solving you'd expect out of a much more niche sort of game. You be the judge. (I will grant that you're guaranteed access to blades with enough cumulative skill levels without leveling anything up, but I was saving one of the necessary core crystals, so I didn't know this until later. And this is definitely not the case in later chapters.)
There are sidequests like this, too. You haven't rolled for blades with the right skills or stumbled across the means of leveling those skills up, or the blades you need happen to be on mercenary missions right now, or they aren't available for plot reasons? You can recall blades from mercenary assignments if you don't mind losing the invested time, but otherwise, you're out of luck. Of course a lot of PC RPGs include non-combat skill challenges, and I play enough of those to be used to it, but generally these are stats you have some control over how to allocate to your characters and not things you're praying to get from the magic gacha.
They maid it wrong
Toward the end of chapter 3, I was starting to feel hopeful. My issues with how some things are handled wouldn't spontaneously fix themselves, but I was getting into the plot, and I like what that chapter built up to.
XC2 spoilers re: chapters 3 and 4
The big ending segment of chapter 3 delivers about half a dozen reveals that provide some clarification of the macro-level stakes. Some of these were things several party members could've just said outright 20 hours earlier, or basic world history Rex should've learned in whatever primary education is responsible for him being literate. But at least we know now. The game manages to be surprisingly evasive in the leadup to Vandham's death, given that he gets all the requisite functionality in the main menu except a thing another party member also can't do, and I was interested to see how Rex would go on to process his encounter with this guy who is basically altruistic and yet claims to believe in nothing but conflict (the idea that ethical justification is the privilege of the strong will turn out to be less characterization of Vandham and more just ... a thing the story treats as true, but I'm getting ahead of myself). The Pyra/Mythra personality difference is fun, and able to be fun because it's presented as a magical thing Mythra can do and not a misbegotten take on neurodivergence. It's satisfying to see Torna suffer a setback, all the more so because of the Character Designs By Tetsuya Nomura--whatever one may say about the guy's record as a project manager, he's a master of drawing beautiful smug assholes I love to beat up.
Unfortunately, then chapter 3 ends and chapter 4 begins.
Chapter 4 is miserable, but I find it interesting because there's a version of this that works, isn't there? The trade guild's whole deal could be a sendup of war profiteering if not for the undercurrent of "one race controls the global economy" that resonates uncomfortably with irl conspiracy theories. If the robots weren't a stale joke about lonely nerds with a maid fetish, they'd be both easier to feel anything about and probably funnier, and I'd have fewer reservations about getting on board with big dumb maneuvers like the mech boss with its own theme song. They could've cut the whole digression with the pickpocket and resolved the thing with the Roc core crystal in five minutes somewhere more relevant; I struggle to believe an entire region is suffering drought and civil unrest because Rex broke one water tower, and it's very strange that this is the thing the party's done that I'm supposed to feel bad about.
The maid robots are an especially spectacular mess, though a familiar one, if you've seen enough audience-pandering niche media. In their capacity as a kind of self-deprecating subcultural meta-in-joke, they feel like the writers signaling their membership in a fandom space in a self-congratulatory way while also assuring us that they're adequately embarrassed of their own material. They're much too deep into having one's cake and eating it territory to register as genuine, either as any kind of real criticism of fan behavior or as a pure expression of somebody's preferences. The game attempts a truly wild number of emotional moments with Poppi, and they all fall flat for me--even when the voice performance just about sells it, it's pulling against too much narrative ambivalence. Maids aren't my personal thing (and this is setting aside how the Japanese names of the various Poppi forms make reference to her apparent age, which, yeah, I dunno), but I even would've had more respect for some honest fetish stuff in comparison to all this tiring winking and nudging.
It's possible to write humorous fiction that takes its characters seriously and invites you to do the same. Plenty of things do it, but my go-to example is Discworld. In particular, if you've read any post-9/11 Discworld novels, from after Pratchett became acutely interested in geopolitics and power, you'll be well prepared for some of the nonsense XC2 serves up later.
Der Wille zur Macht
XC2 spoilers re: chapters 4 and 5
One of the first things I did in chapter 4 was pick up a sidequest that involved chasing an "illegal squatter" out of a town. Great stuff, very heroic. This is the same quest that attempts a, I guess, nuanced take on imperial conquest, and what it comes up with is "but what if the oppressed and their oppressors simply tried getting along?" This conception of heroism as a utilitarian both-sidesism that's either a concession to or a poorly-disguised version of fascism is a kind of fantasy/adventure story writing that I have no patience for. Most recently, it's something I associate with isekai media that isn't explicitly just slavery apologism, though it's rampant in big-budget western media as well (in the US, we have a whole political party that believes this is what doing good means, to whatever extent they believe in anything other than profit).
A little later in the chapter, you make it to the empire yourself, and it turns out that the real villains over there are "anti-imperialists" and warmongers in the senate. If the kind and wise young emperor could just be allowed to make decisions unilaterally ... but then the rest of chapter 4 is about robot maids, so maybe we aren't supposed to think about it that hard.
The moment in chapter 5 when I said, out loud, to the nearest cat, "aw, this chapter's gonna suck too" was when the game introduced the idea that one of the world's main weapons providers (who are also Elf Catholicism, I guess?) takes in refugees of the wars they facilitate, and then immediately established that these refugees are a bunch of ridiculous ingrates for pointing out that maybe the weapons provider could try, like, not providing weapons? The elf pope has his own agenda that we don't know about, but the message that comes across is, "welp, people will fight regardless, so, what can you do?" Once again, for a game in a tradition preoccupied with smashing evil empires and patriarchal deities and so on, XC2 sure has a lot of sympathy for the powerful and not very much time for the people under their boots.
It'd be reasonable to try to read all this as attempts to indicate that these are complex situations. And like I said re: the first game, I don't demand that all the pretend people in a pretend world agree with my own politics. But what actually happens, writing-wise, is that the powerful are allowed to be complex while members of social classes that are in some way disempowered are rendered as stepping stones in other characters' stories at best and caricatures at worst. The first sidequest related to the refugees that I did involved a ten-year-old hiring a mercenary to murder another ten-year-old, which isn't complexity, it's farce. And there's no diversity of conflicting opinions apparent through play. Nia and Zeke have compelling reasons for not just going along with sidequests that involve being a stooge of the Ardainian government, but there's no mechanism for them leaving the party during those quests, no affection stat to decrease, and no way to resolve things by simply telling the questgiver that, no, you're not gonna run an unhoused person out of town for them.
Incidentally, did you know they got the Sword Art Online illustrator to design one of the DLC blades? I could go for the low-hanging remark about reading better books, but really the thing I want writers to do is read many different kinds of books. Hopefully it's clear that I don't think everything needs to be a new wave syndicalist thought experiment, but it's good to understand how the story you're writing rubs up against others, and also to lift ideas from outside the narrow scope of one genre or mode. Maybe you could pose more interesting questions about how to do right by people that way.
As with chapter 3, I was on board with how chapter 5 ends. It's some flashy, high-drama RPG stuff, reveals and counter-reveals, the tables turning and then turning back, and I really don't understand why the game couldn't have just done this while leaving out the NPC chatter about how the powerful deserve to be their own masters and whatever else.
"One of the finest JRPGs ... perhaps of all time"
I want to talk about this dungeon in chapter 7, the crucible whatever. I try to avoid angry gamer hyperbole in writing, but in this case it's taking everything I've got.
XC2 spoilers re: chapter 7 in general, Nia in particular
The first thing is, in this dungeon, the game all but takes away blade combos. Arbitrarily weakening the party is a strong contender for my least favorite of the bullshit moves RPGs pull, but also, remember, combos are one of the things that make the game less of a slog. This doesn't add much challenge, but it does turn every enemy into a mountain of HP. You can still do chain attacks, but those plug into the combo system such that they're maybe, at best, 10% as strong without it. So even if this weren't one of those RPG dungeons that overstays its welcome, you'd be looking at a long trek.
The second thing is, this is one of those RPG dungeons that overstays its welcome.
It's also loaded with blade skill checks, relative to every previous location. At this point you probably do have enough blades to throw at each check, but it's one more thing contributing to the obliteration of the pacing through this part of the game; you have to go into the menu and fiddle with your blade loadouts every time you hit a check, and then re-optimize for the next slow fight. And the events surrounding this dungeon are very important as both plot movement and setting detail. In-fiction the place is a kind of trial, I get that, but my question is, why pile all these different gimmicks into the one location? If the premise is that blades are weaker here, why are you then made to rely on them so much out of combat?
And then the boss is five enemies that can all divide into two more enemies. All you can do is try to lower their health without prompting them to make more guys, and then do an underpowered chain attack and hope it finishes them all. Also there's damaging poison juice on the floor of the boss room, and while it's trivial for you to avoid, it sure isn't for your AI party members. Again, not difficult per se, but very annoying.
That this is where they put maybe the single biggest moment of Nia's arc is ... well, the thing you have to understand first is that Nia is the best. In terms of pure amount of material, she probably isn't more developed than Morag or Pyra/Mythra or whoever else. But her growing camaraderie with the party is the kind of inter-character writing that really convinces me to care, much more so than anything about how a character plugs into the fantasy stuff. Compare Pyra, who doesn't really banter until Mythra shows up, and even then Mythra is just sort of the tsun impulse to Pyra's dere. This is just to say we get to see a lot of Nia flexing in conversations and she has a clear growth trajectory, and I have no interest in arguing about shipping, but it's also true that I find Nia's feelings toward Rex believable because the intermediate steps are normal, two-people-getting-along moments. And then, simmering away under all this, we get Nia's disposition toward her own body, one of the more interesting things going on inside a character's head even if we aren't privy to much of it.
The promise of Nia payoff is all that kept me going through this part, other than the sunk cost of how much I'd written about XC2 already. And when it happened, I was so fed up with the game's nonsense that I really just wanted to be doing anything else. It didn't feel like a reward for overcoming a challenge because I didn't feel like I'd overcome a challenge, I felt like I'd been in line at the DMV.
Benign growth
So, yeah, this game sucks, but I want to acknowledge the things that are either good throughout or grew on me before the end.
I find it genuinely remarkable that the world of XC2 is presented to the player not just as a sequence of grand vistas, but also as a huge amount of small interactions and objects. Building on the weird collectables of the first game, the pouch system is used as an excellent excuse for showing us what kinds of books people read, what kinds of instruments they play, even what kinds of beauty products they use. People talk about board games, and then you can go to a shop and buy those board games. XC2 uses the console RPG text-list inventory to convey the kind of granularity you get from the tableware in an Elder Scrolls house. And while I may not love how field skills work as a game system, rare blades' unique skills open up all kinds of interactions throughout the world, and the blades themselves have their own heart-to-heart conversations, sidequests, and even after-battle dialogue. Alrest is a very rich place, when it isn't preoccupied with weak political takes.
Another thing blades' skills let you do, eventually, is harvest massive piles of items from gathering nodes. So sidequests requiring rare pomegranates or whatever become less of a chore as the game goes on.
The people making the music for XC2 aren't any less good than they've ever been. I don't know that the a cappella chorus tracks are my favorites, but damn, what a choice for video game background music. I have to respect it. The art direction also really works for me--while XC2 hews pretty close to a certain set of anime conventions, it's a set of conventions that allows for some playing around with distinct shapes and colors in the character designs, and provides a lot of opportunities for cartoon expressiveness. There's variety in the unique blades because they're the work of a variety of guest artists, which is fun. E.g., Wulfric, designed by FFXI/FFXIV (and Xenogears) artist Ryosuke Aiba, looks like a nonexistent Final Fantasy's take on Ifrit, and he just wants to show people he's essentially kind, and he's my perfect terrifying demon son. Other blades use different sets of anime conventions from the game's standard and look like they're lifted from other games as a result, but rather than getting wound up about inconsistency, I sort of respect XC2's willingness to do this, to let you put, like, Azami and Vess next to each other.
I called the English dub chaotic, and I mostly mean that as a compliment. At times the performances for Rex and Pyra don't quite seem to align with the intent of a scene, but are in fact more interesting takes on the characters to me than whatever battle manga maneuver the game's trying to execute. The villains sound like they're from an edgy PS1 game, and are especially fun when they think they've won and start gloating. Often, in a game as directly indebted to manga/anime as this one, I'd go for the Japanese audio, but I don't mind that I didn't. Maybe if I play XC2 again ...
I hate myself, but not that much
XC2 spoilers through the ending
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about the whole run up the world tree to the confrontation with Malos. This is three chapters worth of game, during which you'll probably want to leave and do some sidequests. For example, you can't get the final Poppi until chapter 8, and this requires you to run around doing all sorts of random tasks. Nothing's stopping you from fast-traveling away and back, but this is nonsensical given the position the characters are in, and the story through this section is all forward momentum. There's no moment of downtime when the characters could reasonably go check up on things in the rest of the world. I dunno, maybe I'm nitpicking--it's a video game, ultimately, and at a certain point, total commitment to the bit would impose an onerous level of inconvenience. You'd be sunk if you were underleveled and couldn't leave. It just makes me think about the pause before the final dungeon in XC1, when you're back on the Bionis, and it makes some amount of sense for the party to tie up loose ends before finishing the job. Not that I didn't bail out of the final dungeon several times and even harvest materials from the place for Colony 6, so maybe I shouldn't complain now.
It all worked out anyway--the plot once again slammed into a wall because of a skill check during the big events of chapter 9. Despite the urgency of the mission at that point, I couldn't walk through a door because Mythra hadn't eaten enough desserts. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
There's a very late point at which the game tries to introduce a thematic thread about how self-loathing consumes the self-loather and everything around them. I wouldn't have minded a version of XC2 that took an interest in this theme earlier on, in which failure to accept oneself showed up in a variety of characters in many different ways, in the same way that XC1 was about loss and moving on. Or at least a version in which Rex struggled with this (or, did I mention Nia should've been the main character?). But, no, that simply would've been too much consistency for XC2, and instead Rex's basically liking himself isn't used to say anything much more interesting than that he's better than people who don't.
I will say it's fun to see another incarnation of the villain from XC1, literally an instance of the same guy owing to spacetime tomfoolery, who, instead of doubling down on the original sin of the Xenoblade setting(s), became mired in regret. I guess that's the better way to go, considering what he got up to over in the XC1 universe. Though it's not as if XC2's future Earth isn't also facing an apocalyptic threat that can only be resolved by a crew of determined young heroes. The dude can't do anything right.
Otherwise, the ending is ... well, it's sure the point at which the story ends. It doesn't feel sudden, but it doesn't resolve very much, either. I've talked about the blades already. The ending also isn't interested in all the political particulars, important as they were through the middle chapters. Though, if the implicit position is that the strong don't need politics because reality bends around them, maybe calling it disinterest is being charitable.
Rex has two hands
At about 95 hours played outside the final boss room, I wasn't satisfied with the amount of things I was leaving undone, quests unfinished and blades ungotten. This attests to both how much there is to do and how it all feels like too much of a chore to bother with. I didn't see all the sidequest outcomes I would've liked to, but was I going to spend the time required to get ten total levels of whatever field skill across all my blades, and in such a configuration that I could equip them at the same time? Shit no. I was, for all the reasons mentioned here and a few not (because if I'd brought up Tiger Tiger, that would've been an entire section about minigames as a concept), beyond ready to put XC2 to bed.
I spent this whole game feeling like I was missing something or doing something wrong, but I can't imagine what. Combat-wise, I'm pretty sure I was using all the tools available to me. All the ones the game told me about, anyway. I rolled for dozens of blades and was still running into skill checks I couldn't do. Similarly, if reviewers were out here calling XC2 "a timeless tale of adventure" and whatever else, clearly some people found more to like about it as fiction than I did. In that sense I don't think I missed anything. I just wasn't getting very much of what I wanted. Or maybe the stuff I wanted came with too much stuff I didn't want.