Twenty-five hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the game is still throwing tutorials at you. By that point most RPGs are closing in on their credits. This one is still trying to explain itself, badly, and then never letting you look any of it up again.
That’s the fundamental issue, and the Switch 2 Edition does nothing about it.
The tutorials are the real antagonist
The first Xenoblade Chronicles is a sprawling game packed with complicated systems. Its sequel pushes maximalist design almost entirely against Nintendo's usual sensibilities, and the cruelest thing about it is how poorly it teaches you its own mechanics.
Combat systems. Combat sub-systems. Character progression, which can come with character-specific mechanics attached. Exploration. Every one of them gets a tutorial, and they trickle in long past the point where you’d expect to be on solid ground.
Worse still, none of it is documented in-game. There’s no menu that will remind you how Blade Combos differ from Driver Combos, or what those floating orbs above enemies mean, or what happens when they “burst.” For a game this dense, that’s a serious failing, and the update leaves it exactly as it was.
The visuals give with one hand and take with the other
Loading this up for the first time and watching Rex move, I jolted back in my seat. I wasn’t ready for how fluid it looked.
Then a cutscene started and my stomach dropped. For no clear reason, character models snap back to choppy, stuttery movement whenever they turn around or pivot in place. You notice it. Call it a monkey’s paw, a way of keeping the graphics hounds humble about what they’re actually here for.
It sours every cutscene. And the cutscenes carry a second problem: the audio editing is off, with music now burying dialogue at times. There’s also a New Game+ glitch where using an Amiibo can erase your party members’ third Item Pouch. As of this writing, none of that has been fixed.
Take it on its own terms
Hold onto those flaws, because in spite of all of them, this is still Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Get past them and the maximalism and the hard-hitting story will get you.
The setting is Alrest, a boundless ocean of clouds dotted with colossal Titans that entire kingdoms live on top of. Those Titans are aging and slowly dying, which has driven the nations of Mor Ardain and Uraya into a land war. The fighting is done by Drivers, warriors bonded to sentient weaponized artificial life forms called Blades.
Rex is a plucky kid living in the shadow of all this, worried about nothing bigger than his hometown. A job goes wrong and his life ends up in the hands of the enigmatic Pyra, who is the Aegis, a Blade of untold power. Nations wheel and deal, the terrorist organization Torna plots from the dark, and Rex and his friends hold to their simple mission: get Pyra to the mythical Elysium, said to sit atop the World Tree where the world-forging Architect resides.
Why Pyra inspires this much devotion
How much of the story lands comes down entirely to how far you’ll meet these characters. Masatsugu Saitō’s designs are far more colorful and stylized than the first Xenoblade’s. Even after Definitive Edition brought Shulk and company into stylized parity with the sequel, the Blades stay more colorful and more uncanny than any of that.
But the story reaches beyond its ostentatious cast. It’s about redemption, about finding purpose, about living true to yourself. There’s a reason it has resonated the way it has, and a reason people love Pyra (and Mythra) as much as they do.
Rex is nearer to an Ishmael here, but it wouldn’t be a boy-meets-girl without the boy. Trite as it sounds, sometimes it takes someone who chooses the good in everyone to remind us it’s there.
An uneven dub, rescued by Skye Bennett
Direction on the English dub is spotty, and that hasn’t been fixed either. Bennett’s work as Pyra (and Mythra) steals the show anyway. David Menkin makes the slimy Malos exactly the guy you love to hate. Al Weaver’s Rex is winsome and charming at his best, a blithe hero with a can-do attitude, though his worst moments leave you wishing someone in the booth had stepped in.
The Switch 2 Edition adds a handful of new lines for some of the cast, specifically Dromarch and Zeke. The replacement actors are serviceable. They’re also very clearly not the originals.
It’s the small details where it sings
Maximalism earns its keep moment to moment. HD Rumble in the Joycon punctuates skill checks with vibrating “ding!”s or “bwomp!”s depending on whether you pull them off. Even the in-game gacha, the game’s most controversial feature, was originally built to take advantage of the Switch’s media sharing.
On that note, I’ve heard anecdotes that the Switch 2 Edition improves the odds on Rare Blades, notably the infamously elusive KOS-MOS. After many attempts, I can’t confirm it. I couldn’t even pull the new Blade, M.O.M.O.
What I can confirm is that going back in, I felt at home with the unique quests that improve each Blade, and with the sub-systems built around them: the Shop Deeds that gate useful power-ups, the Salvaging. They’re meaty and they feed the whole. It’s a pity they’re introduced so poorly.
Merc Assault is as close to a musou Xenoblade as we’ll get
The new mode is a short real-time sortie that borrows from the main battle system, the Blade Combo mechanics in particular. You mix weak and heavy attacks, recharge specials, mow down waves and grab power-ups that boost your attributes along the way. If you ever wanted to actually control your Blades, this is your mode.
It’s engaging right away, a little addicting, and fun. The shame is that it only exists in service of the Mercenary Missions. Other unlocks, more costumes, anything, would have gone a long way. Still, it gives you one more option for your Mercenary unit, which feeds back into other systems. If Monolith is testing new battle systems or mini-games, they’re on the right track.
What would have sealed it
Fix the character stuttering and the volume balancing and this becomes a slam dunk recommendation, even carrying every snag baked into Xenoblade Chronicles 2 from the start. If those get addressed later, I’ll be happier for it.
The graphical improvements are beautiful, Merc Assault is fun, the base game is as fun as it ever was. The graphical improvements also stumble, the base game still has all its old problems, and the voice matching on the returning cast isn’t great.
Whether this is a better game than its predecessor, I can’t tell you. But warts and all, it’s still an RPG everyone should at least try.