Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Caused My Disappearance

I'm back! Finally...

Had a lot on my plate lately but I can finally come back to hopefully regularly update this blog. And  a lot of things have happened since I last posted. E3 2018, Avengers: Infinity War, and I'm also another whole year older! Time is flying by real quick.

But the real reason I was gone wasn't because of real life. No...no...it was because my fake life that had encompassed all that I would know. A fake life that I had constantly kept at my side through the months, checking on it every free moment that I possessed.  That life was called Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XC2). And while I certainly did not finish the game completely, I don't think I will touch this game again (this sounds worse than I make it out to be).

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a large- wait, no- vast game. It's got so much space in it that I think the Witcher 3 world map could fit inside with room to spare. This is just an estimation, I could easily be wrong. But if anything, XC2's art direction and scale is so fantastic and awesome that I feel, once experienced, any gamer would agree with the previous statement.

Nothing like hunting some steak at sunset

To prime readers who are not familiar, XC2 is set in a world mostly covered by a sea of clouds. The world's population live on living beasts called Titans. Titans can vary in size but the larger ones can support whole nations and even continents. And these massive Titans have architecture that seem built for giants. Literally every location in this game makes you feel tiny. The effect is efficient at delivering a sense of wonder and awe very early in the game. But this effect slowly loses its charm towards the end of the game where backtracking and item finding/grinding becomes prevalent. Doing side-quests becomes an exercise in risk/reward determination that gamers shouldn't have to consider in the first place. The last part of the game seems to contradict the rest of the game's beauty by forcing players through long empty corridors and monotone colors. Not sure if there is some hidden meaning there, but while I was super hooked throughout the game to see new locations, the ending just seemed to sour that experience.

People live on that thing...

The game's large world is a strength as well as a curse. For every moment I stopped to just comprehend how insignificant I was in relation to the world of XC2, I had a moment of frustration trying to navigate it. Exploration is not just horizontal but also vertical which makes finding certain areas a chore. The in-game map doesn't really do verticaltiy very well which had me unnecessarily lost several times. Even with fast travel, trying to get from point A to point B can take a looong time. I still recall a point in the better half of the game where it  took me two hours to go from the harbor to the first city in the area I was in. This was just about the point where my interest in the game started to wane.

Xenoblade's gameplay also suffers from the same problem. It's got so much content and depth but doesn't seem to explain it well or execute it well. There could be small seminars given  to explain each facet of the XC2 mechanics. Everything layers into everything else so that you have to constantly monitor your equipment and Blades (characters in the game that act as your weapons) to survive. The game almost requires it, since the "real-time" battle system is mainly built like an MMORPG. Auto-attacking is the filler damage that isn't meant to kill. These attacks are meant to help build your special skills up which can so some damage. And it's soon apparent that strhese skills aren't enough and the special skills isn't where the game stops, it keeps going. There's blade combos, driver combos, fusion combos...different levels of combos. Then there's a chain attack that gets better if you stack up your blade combos. Not to mention this stuff is already on top of the normal JRPG combat tropes of doing element roshambo and administering status effects to help ease the difficult of the battle. Over-leveling can help, but the grind for experience can take forever if not executed properly (i.e. combining all 'dem combos and such give more experience)

It's totally intentional that you look like Megaman X by the end of the game...

The story isn't really too much to write home about. The simple "too long; didn't play" (or TL;DP) is that a ordinary boy finds a powerful girl who asks him to take him to a giant tree (Elysium) in the center of the world. You get there and find out why she is so powerful and then the game is over. While the world building is very nice, the game takes it's sweet time getting to the main adventure. I think I spent over forty hours just trying to get off the beginning continent. There are half a dozen in the game. While the XC2 has plenty of cutscenes, they don't really help make much sense of the plot. Seemed like every encounter with the main baddie didn't matter in the end. It also seemed like the main baddie's intention for destroying the world changed every time you met him. The terrible and inconsistent English voice acting did not help those cutscenes at all.

Next time on Dragon Ball Zzz....

But the world building is pretty good. There is a lot going on in XC2. Each main Titan acts as its own country with a government and economy.  Heck, you can even invest in each area to help get access to new items and equipment. The issue to me is in my own ability to keep track of everything. I spent a lot of time on certain side quests that I'd forget characters and plot elements in the main quest.

With all the terrible things I have to say about XC2, it makes me wondering why I stuck around to finish it. Part of the reason must have been so I could write this review. But the other part must be that I'm terribly addicted to JRPGs. I like to play them, especially if the battle system is unique and not completely vanilla. I did enjoy my time with the original Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii, but that may be due to the lack of JRPGs on the system. Operation Rainfall had to be created just to petition for that game to come the West.

Thankfully, my next game isn't a JRPG. So hopefully the breath of fresh air will help me come back to my senses.


P.S. This game almost requires a guide. I didn't want to look up how to get every Blade in the game, but I had to. You could say it was my last resort...

SUFFOCATION...NO BREATHING...DON'T GIVE A F$#@ IF I CUT MY ARM, BLEEDING!

P.P.S. Also this the most "me in real life" moment in the game...