A ramble of my feelings and thoughts so far with Xenoblade 2, as spoiler free as possible. For progress reference, 25 hours of play time and I assume I’m at the end of Chapter 4.
Expectations wise is meeting them, as in I wasn’t gonna like this as much as the first game or X but still find it a solid game, also not playing it everyday like I did with the first one or up to 10 hours a day with X.
Storywise is alright, hasn’t really hit me hard on much fronts, besides a moment at the end of chapter 3. I’m mostly down on it because the cutscenes drag, especially the times where you end a boss fight and the characters fight anyways in the next one for another couple of minutes, like what was the point of me fighting then. I’ll also say I hate most of the comedy attempts from the game, again it has some exceptions with one character, but I hate most of it.
I do like the characters, I dunno if is because of the English dub, but they aren’t as extreme as I expected them to be, Nia, Mórag and Jin being some of the highlights. And because I have some trust with this studio, I’m expecting to like Mythra later on? Being a generic troupe plus a boob joke isn’t the best first impression being honest, I don’t see her point of existing yet.
While I prefer the style of X, Xenogears and Saga, I like the artsyle and the characters are pretty expressive, everything pops color wise and is pleasant to look at, music wise is pretty good too, some stands outs like the mini boss theme.I don’t have much issues with the character design, besides that Ice blade, I don’t hate anyone else, is not perfect, but I do like quite a few so far.
Gameplay wise, the combat and more streamlined mechanics and inventory management are a plus, combat didn’t got fun for me till 20 hours in, but when it gets going I can see the advancement, the blade combos, elemental attacks and the like are all fun to experiment. Field effects are interesting bonuses for collectibles hunting and I do like the town developing feature (wish I could care about the sidequests and text to develop them, but oh well, is a good enough reward for me to waste some time doing it). Overall more simple and engaging would be the way I would describe the gameplay of 2.
Something I still dislike from this series is the lack of control I have for the AI, like something as simple as a strategy menu like the Tales of series would be enough for me. Like could you stop standing still on the fire circle?
I guess that is all I got in my head rn, fun time, not a blast, but I wasn’t expecting it to be, so I can’t say I have been disappointed by the game yet.
TL,DR. Mórag during the cutscenes makes everyone else look like shit and thanks for reading if you cared enough.
