While researching games to play on my flight home after visiting family over the 2017 holidays, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 caught my eye. Having spent enough time with both Mario and Zelda and needing an alternative, it seemed like the obvious choice. The metascore was decent, but I noticed a trend when actually reading the reviews; they were all, almost unanimously, a list of criticisms and complaints about the game that had ultimately been dismissed because the author was a fan of the JRPG genre. Quietly disheartened, having abandoned the JRPG genre many years ago for being more trouble than it's worth, but with few alternatives (the Switch library still being in its infancy) I figured I would take it for a spin and form my own conclusions.
I'm really glad I did.
If you've spent any time with JRPG games or Anime in general then a lot of the setup will feel immediately familiar: Teenage boy stumbles across a great power, forms team of adventurers who pledge to save the world. Or I suppose in this case, worlds, as each continent is a Discworld-esque titan, floating on an endless sea of clouds and carrying their respective civilisations atop their backs. Our heroes (each of whom can be controlled by the player as the protagonist, a nice touch) are each in possession of Blades - essentially magical weapons that come with a walking, talking, physical manifestation. In the case of Rex, the boy whom the story revolves around, the anthropomorphic personification of his sword turns out to be a scantily clad young woman by the name of Pyra. What are the odds, eh?
As the party of Drivers grows ("Driver" being the term for a character in possession of a Blade), so does the range of Blades themselves, each with their own elemental affinities which can be combined in combat to create devastating combos. There's a heap of generic "common" blades which contribute very little (both aesthetically and practically), but there's also a whole stack of "rare" blades, each with full character art and unique side-quests and full voice acting (in two languages, no less). The way you interact with the NPC's inhabiting the games many cities and towns will occasionally vary depending on who you have in your party, and there are plenty of secrets and alternate routes that only become available if you're equipped with specific combinations as you explore. Because acquiring the majority of these blades is handled by a gashapon (RNG) system, it's rare that any two players will have the same team, giving each adventure an element of uniqueness, which was also appreciated as I made my way through Alrest. This was especially true during combat, as finding a composition of Blades that felt comfortable (as each have their own weapon styles and movesets) became an art rather than a science.
I'm not going to go further into the combat because I feel like it, rather unfairly, seems to already hold the majority of the attention surrounding the game on account of it's complexity. I will merely say that while convoluted; it works, and it's extremely satisfying once you've figured out your Blade composition and you can reliably pull off an extensive series of combos.
As already mentioned, the game comes with full audio for two languages, English and Japanese, and while I was tempted to play through in Japanese I found the range of English-speaking accents refreshing enough to stick with the default. The game employs Mancunian, Welsh, Scottish, Australian, and even Cockney accents, mercifully portrayed by locals and not American approximations. With the exception of the Nopon (the game's race of spherical birdlike inhabitants) I found myself invested in each of the expansive cast, and the game rewards this investment by fleshing out each character arc quite satisfactorily. I even found myself cheering on certain blades as their personalities were given substance. One such example is the Xenomorph-inspired Wulfric, a terrifying nightmare blade with a heart of gold.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the boundless optimism and wholesomeness the game deals out at every turn. Despite featuring themes such as death, war, murder, violence, and heavily implying that it's possible to have sex with the human embodiment of your sword, the world is charming, colourful, and the protagonists are drowning in enthusiasm and positivity. At one point Rex shouts "We'll beat them with the power of friendship!" without a trace of irony and I couldn't help but roll my eyes, but in general the game is good, not just in terms of it being a game, but in terms of it's outlook. Which was a nice change of pace from the endless hours of PUBG that have otherwise been occupying my time.
Perhaps one of the strongest pulls of this game, that kept me coming back for dozens upon dozens of consecutive hours, is it's artistic creativity. The world bustles, each Titan scattered with increasingly surreal animals and monsters, teeming with flora and fauna in the bright oversaturated colours that Nintendo favours. It's a joy to explore, which is fortunate because each area seems to stretch on far further than it might initially appear. Even after sixty hours I'm still finding new areas to explore in the first city, both the smallest and the most compact of the games many metropolis. As you continue through the game these cities can be "developed", evolving to provide you with new quests, characters, shops and opportunities, so that you can return to each through the game and almost always find something new to do there. This contributes to the sense that the world is alive and not just some finite stagnant pool that, once drained, will not refill.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not a perfect game. However, the game can accommodate it's flaws purely by merit of it's scope; not just with it's scale but with its range - it's many systems layered carefully on top of one another. Some of them might not be the most intuitive, but it all works, and it's built on a foundation of charm and easygoing optimism that's hard to fault. In the games own words:
No Rex. It's not weird at all.
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