Game details Developer: Monolith

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Switch

Release Date: December 1, 2017

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Price: $60

Links: Amazon | Official Website Monolith: Nintendo: SwitchDecember 1, 2017T for Teen: $60

Lock an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, and I’m not sure they’d ever come up with Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The action-JRPG so greatly lacks a cohesive style—mechanically and artistically—that its very absence becomes its cohesive style. It’s a mishmash of ideas from MMOs, anime, gacha games, science fiction, fantasy, management sims, satire, melodrama, and probably a load of other stuff I haven’t even seen.

But just like the classic adage about simians writing Shakespeare, given enough time, it kind of works.

It does not give that impression at first. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 leads with some of the most generic setup and characters I’ve seen since the PlayStation 2 era, when everyone and their uncle put out six 80-hour RPGs a month. You start as Rex: a determined young man on his own. He meets a magical girl who is wanted by an empire, among others, and goes off on an adventure where he slowly accrues party members of various stripes. Some of those party members get amnesia, of course, because what JRPG is complete without an amnesiac subplot?

If that all sounds like the plot of every JRPG in the past 20 years to you, you’re not alone. That familiarity, plus the game’s well-documented and tacky ogling of its female lead, had me ready to roll my eyes right off the screen for the first couple hours or so. The poor start is especially egregious given the incredibly evocative intro to the original Xenoblade Chronicles—which was set on a world made from the interlocked corpses of two continent-sized colossi.

Drivers, start your engines

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 only starts to shine once you realize how the whole product is paced. The enormous game is split into chapters, but they might as well be episodes of an actual anime. Each act rises to an over-the-top climax, complete with smash cuts to title cards, swelling music as our heroes discover new hidden strengths, and stellar camerawork that almost feels like more than the middle-of-the-road graphics deserve. Sooner or later, you’re fighting giant robot maids and playing a fake NES game to upgrade a character (but only that specific character, and no, I don’t know why).

Those climaxes aren’t just for dramatic effect, either. Combat starts off as milquetoast as the story but slowly adds layer after layer of complexity to go with the extreme extra plot payoffs.

The basics remain traditionally MMO-like throughout, just as they did in Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Party members land physical attacks automatically. Skills with bonus effects, like doing more damage if you strike a foe from behind, become available as you deal normal blows. Over time, though, you unlock super moves that charge faster if you time your skills with your character animations. Those special attacks can later be chained with other party members. That builds up your enemies’ elemental resistances over time, but it also leads to another layer of skills to break the buffs.























Between all the positioning, timing, and resource management, the game could get extremely complicated extremely quickly. I haven’t even mentioned the gacha game team-building that lets you customize and swap out your skills at will or the half-dozen different upgrade trees. It’s a lot to take in, sure, but the orderly series of crescendos gives you ample hours to soak in every new system. In between, you still get to explore the gargantuan environments the Xenoblade games have always had to offer. Now there’s just a much gentler learning curve to walk you through them.

Here comes the messy part

Unfortunately, you’ll also wade through old annoyances that really ought to have been fixed by now. As massive as the world is—this time constructed on the backs of living continents called Titans—it’s easy to get lost in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. An ever-present compass only indicates the general direction of your marked objective. The minimap is too zoomed in and cut off at the edges to be much help, and finding your bearings on the full map requires entirely too much flipping through menus.

There’s a lot of guessing your way through menus, actually; I spent hours shuffling through character sheets to upgrade and customize Rex and his company’s abilities and combos. In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, this is done through “Blades,” magical beings in the form of people, robots, monsters, and often very large cats that grant special powers. Some Blades are integral to the story, like the extremely poorly dressed Pyra, who has some interesting things to do when she’s not tucking her skintight apron into her latex hotpants and thong. Other Blades are accrued through random drops.

If you’re not careful, trawling through menus to min-max and theorycraft your Blades to their utmost slides Xenoblade Chronicles 2 from 80 hours to complete to several hundred hours to master. There are enough (often tedious) side quests, hidden areas, unique enemies, and things to collect to justify the time, too, assuming you lead the kind of life that lets you justify that kind of investment.

Parts meet sum

Which brings me back to my PlayStation 2 comparison. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is exactly the kind of game I would have sunk the better part of a summer into as a kid. It definitely has its low points: there are too many fetch quests; the menus and maps need to be better; and this particular brand of sexy magical girl “fan service” feels particularly out of character and downright bad-looking. The first upskirt camera angle or gratuitously lingering shot on Pyra’s chest feels sleazy. The next two dozen are just tiresome.

But there are just so many ideas here—wrapped in rhythmic combat that’s hard to ignore even as it’s slow to develop—that made me willing to check off the fetch quest boxes if it meant seeing what’s next. Will I draw a Blade that looks like a giant stuffed animal and always talks about eating my companions? Will running my own mercenary company unlock a new skill? How can I weave that ability into my usual boss-eroding combos?

Since Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a Switch game, it’s easy to fit those little discoveries into my life than it would have been on a traditional console. I’m willing to keep up with some frequent dips in the frame rate if I can keep grinding away at salvaging robot companion parts without turning off Netflix on the big screen.

I wish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was the perfect combination of the series’ brightest moments. I wish I could transplant this game’s combat into the original’s wonderful atmosphere. Then I’d sprinkle X’s mechs for good, quick-traveling measure. This isn’t that dream game. But it’s a pretty damn good one in the meantime.

The good

Endlessly engaging combat is dished out at just the right pace.

A mishmash of art styles, mechanics, and tones somehow works as a whole.

Tons of stuff to do across massive, open areas.

Heavily customizable for min-maxing aficionados.

The bad

Makes a poor first impression.

Clunky maps and too many menus.

Nasty frame-rate dips.

The ugly

Pyra’s costume design and all the factors that brought us to this point…

Verdict: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 makes up in manic energy what it lacks in elegance. Its mountain of ideas don’t always work, but the core of the game justifies its experiments. Buy it.