Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna - The Golden Country (Switch)

HYPE! can't wait.

Can I play this before the main game? Is it a separate story?

As a fan of RPGs that use the Active Time Battle System (and its modern variants) I’m always on the lookout for the RPG that will finally bridge the gap between that style and the modern real-time battle style. With all of the praise surrounding the Xenoblade series, I did some reading on the battle system and picked up a cheap physical copy of Torna with high hopes.
In comparison to ATB, the Xenoblade battle system basically assumes that you’ll want to use your character’s weak attack as quickly as possible, and does so automatically. After a “charge-up” period, you can direct your character to use more powerful alternate attacks by pressing a corresponding button—which leads to further “charge-ups” when performed correctly.
Playing on Normal difficulty, my first battles with Lora and Jin were enjoyable and challenging. By the time I reached the first set of boss battles, though, I’d already mastered the limited set of moves at my disposal, and dispatched them without breaking a sweat, though I was quite satisfied with coordinating the right moves at just the right moments.
Unfortunately, the next progression in the battle system introduced at that point in the game is the addition of friendly teams to your fights, and things go off the rails here for me. Since the player only controls one team at a time, each of the other teams is auto-battling without any active input. In terms of combat, this effectively means that any enemy you are battling will have its HP reduced periodically by the game itself. This makes the battle system more technically complex than before, but it actually has the effect of making fights easier to win and the battle field also becomes a terrible mess visually making it harder to time your own team's alternate attacks. You can try to go it alone with one team, but the game is balanced so that this is not practical unless you somehow manage to take on only one enemy at a time or just go level-up on your own for a while.
The game is absolutely beautiful and the voice acting is quite good, though the characters are stuffy and environments are all stiff in typical JRPG fashion. But for me this battle system has a “close but not quite” feeling, and I just didn’t find it fun once more aspects were added on top of the base system.

Score: 6/10