XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 2 (UPDATE) the first two hours!

[Asriel]

I found it frustrating at times, because the game often trips over its own mechanics. There's so much depth and potential for experimentation, but your room to experiment (with different Blade/Character combos) is held back by the random unlock system and the extremely limited opportunities to swap Blades between characters. The field skills mechanic is also inconsistently and at times poorly implemented - when you first unlock this mechanic, it's stated it's an optional feature that will function as a shortcut in certain quests, yet too often the game gates your progress behind field skills, which are dependent on random unlocks of Blades etc. There's a final wrinkle in that you can only use the field skills of whichever Blades are currently equipped, which leads to tedious searching and swapping. Finally, there were some UI and useability issues and difficulty spikes, but post-launch patches seem to have done a lot to deal with those issues at least, speeding up the Blade unlock process, improving the awful map system, and adding an Easy mode for the difficulty spikes (often caused by having to fight large groups of enemies).

Overall, though, I loved the game. It's certainly flawed, but it has a lot of charm, character and a superb final couple of chapters. It's also a rare beast - it's an epic length game I'm hoping to find the time go back to, because I want to do New Game Plus (so I can unlock all Blades and do all the side-quests). The world is interesting, the protagonists and antagonists become more engaging as it goes on, the battle system goes from strength to strength, the story ramps up substantially in its last stages, and the soundtrack is almost always first-class. Tonally, it's often light-hearted, with an easy optimism to its world and primary protagonist which reminded me of Skies of Arcadia. With some more polish and fine-tuning I think it would rival the first game, but those rough edges can detract, especially during the middle stages of your playthrough. I realise I spent more time on flaws than positives, but there are plenty of times this game transcends its flaws and becomes more than the sum of its parts. The parts it's assembled from might be uneven, but the final outcome is often enjoyable and, at times, hits incredible high points.

It took me 85 hours to complete, but that's because at the 70 hour mark, I decided to concentrate on the main story. Like I said, though, it's a game I'm really hoping to go through again. The only time I've redone a 60 hour plus game within 12 months of release is with Breath of the Wild and it looks like Chronicles 2 will be the second time that happens.