Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Finished! Brilliant ending. Glad I waited til the end of the credits Lol.

Also:

Final review: 8.7/10
Doesn't match XC1 for me (almost nothing does). Slightly better than XCX though (although I liked that a lot too). The 3 things it does better than XC1 are 1) the main romance, 2) better sidequests and 3) a much better ending to the story.
The things it does worse are:
1) the world doesn't feel as meaningful as XC1, where the 2 robots were crucial to the story, and linked everything together. The titans in this feel less important and kinda just an excuse for nice scenery. The 3 prettiest areas in the game Gormott, Uraya and Leftheria feel mostly pointless story-wise.
2) too much comic relief. I didn't need half of the entire party to be comedy characters, and I didn't need nopon being used as serious characters in the story.
3) none of the various villains did anything for me at all. None were particularly interesting or threatening.
4) really uneven graphically. It's really jarring moving between a beautiful landscape to an NPC with square fingers and 1 facial muscle.

After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I found that while I enjoyed parts of the story I really didn't care for the characters and definitely felt very little for the Blades. Too often I felt like I did when I played Metal Gear Solid 2 in that the cutscenes were the game.

I think my opinion might be partially due to having played the standalone Torna first (physical cart) which seemed to do a better job of focusing on the specific characters and giving each a specific purpose. I completely enjoyed (and own) XC1 and XCX, but I sold XC2 last weekend as I don't think I will go back to replay it. I did however restart XC2:Torna this week with the goal of clearing the last two community quests in the play through.

Overall, despite the imperfections, I think XCX is my favorite of the series at this point.

@Darknyht

I have the same feeling, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Xenoblade Chronicles are better than Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

XCX is the bigger in term of everything. Scale, gameplay, world, possibilities, graphics, menus etc...
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 doesn't own the magic of the first Xenoblade and the X... something is missing.

Some of the more "anime" cliche moments got me to roll my eyes, as well as some of the ridiculous character designs, but I'd say the story is up there with XC1, it just took a while to get to that point for me. I might have listed XCX as my favorite if the damn story actually felt complete.

The story for XC1 feels really crap in the final third though. I love pretty much everything until you get to Mechonis, then everything after that feels like they ran out of ideas so just came up with some generic sci-fi and metaphysical woo-woo.

I really like the Blades in XC2 to be honest, each of them got their own quests where I felt they are quite fleshed out- better than a lot of side characters in other JRPGs at the very least!

At minimum they provide a good fun, at maximum they felt great to do and it's fun to see what happened to them.

Started Torna expansion. Loving it so far. The new titan is one of my favourite areas in either game. I swear they improved the graphics too. This is some of the best looking stuff I've seen anywhere on the Switch.

You think its worth the price tag?

I think I love Xenoblade 2 because of how Anime it is. The japanese voice acting is actually pretty good.
Really hoping we will get a Xenoblade 3 soon. We need more games in this franchise.

I love 2. It's probably my favorite game ever. Never played X (but read the story). The first game really isn't even a Xeno game (until it was retconed in 2). I think I'd even rate Xenoblade 1 as my least favorite out of all the Xeno games I have played.

It's 20 hours long, and you can occasionally find it as low as £20, or whatever it is in dollars. Definitely worth the price if you enjoyed the main game. There's a great new area and the story is very interesting, which fills in some of the lore used in the main game.

Well get it played. It is notably different from XC1 and XC2, but still completely brilliant. The world especially is something you have to experience. It's really one of the only open-world JRPGs out there, which makes it stand out.

What does that even mean? Given that a lot of people probably started with the series at XC1, that's just gonna add confusion to say it's not even a Xeno game. That's kinda the defining character of it for many people.

I think I'm basically considering the series starting at XC1, not Xenogears.

@Dezzy The series did start at Xenogears though.

Basically it has nothing to do with the Zohar/Conduit being a physical manifestation of the power of God.

Until it was retconned at least.

I wouldn't call that a retcon. They didn't change anything about the story, just added onto it. Also I guess we should use some spoilers if we're talking about the endings

How do you determine what counts as the same 'series' though? Unless it has the exact same titles, it's kinda an arbitrary choice.
If it's purely based on being made by the same developer with the shared lore, well then you could say Bravely Default is closer to the original Final Fantasy than FF7 is.
So which one is the same series?

I'm considering the series starting with XC1. Partially because I missed the Saga games, and haven't played Gears since the 90s, so remember almost nothing about it. But also the Blade games have the shared name, the shared focus on massive worlds, the same battle mechanics, and were the games owned and published by Nintendo.

Xenoblade 2 is the one Monolith Soft game I felt almost completely satisfied with by the end, technical and performance issues aside. Torna, as well. It's the best piece of video game DLC I've ever played. I've tried so many times to get into Xenoblade 1, and I just don't like it. The open world bits feel pointless, and I dislike the characters.

Xenoblade X is needlessly complex, big, and frustrating, although I do have to admire the sheer sense of scale to everything.

@Ralizah

How on earth can you like XC2 but not XC1? They're so damn similar. They feel like almost identical games to me, in every way.

@Dezzy Only in the sense that they're both JRPGs with a balance of free-roaming and linearity. And the story connection at the end, I guess. Combat-wise, writing-wise, setting-wise, aesthetically, musically, in terms of how side quests work, the huge focus on Blades, etc. they're extremely different.

@Ralizah

Relative to other RPGs, the combat, setting, stories and characters are all incredibly similar.

As I'd pointed out during my playthrough, some of the scenes even play out exactly the same. The Cliffs of Morytha scene is almost identical to the fight on Prison Island scene.

@Ralizah I feel the same way. I didn't not like XC1, I just thought it was alright (though I am glad I did play it through to the end, because of the connection to XC2). The open world was beautiful aesthetically, but I also felt a lot of it was pointless and the sidequest system was not implemented well, so I didn't actually do too many of them.
XC2 was amazing and I loved it. Combined with Torna, it was one of the best video games I've played in a very long time. I did all the sidequests, powered up Blades, sought out Blades I was missing, whatever I could do to get more time within that world. I got very immersed in the world of XC2.

@Tsurii And that's how I know you have bad taste.