Welp I finished it. Tales of Xenoblade 2, the latest title in the Tales of series.
While the story and characters in the end were good, really good, it was such a mess in pacing and tone for the first half and got better with chapter 6 and on. There were a lot of moments that annoyed me in that first half and then filled with almost nothing but great moments later on and the characters were becoming so solid and their banter actually entertaining I was surprised to be honest. Cut scene length and at times their frequency can be pretty terrible, especially in Chapter 3 and the last third of the game. Character highlights were Nia, Mórag, Brighid, Zeke, Tales of villain of the week Jin, but I enjoyed the whole cast overall.
The gameplay, just like the story, took a while to hook me, say around 20 hours in I was starting to have fun, once you unlock the use of 3 blades, enemies start to have more moves and strategies to them, it actually becomes really engaging. When it gets going, is more fun than the previous games, but is a long way to get to that point.
Merc Missions were a nice addition. I didn’t care about the normal side quests, besides some dragging on or getting road blocked by those oh so beautiful field skills (nice idea, the execution is highly questionable and by that, I mean terrible), I really didn’t felt engaged with them, they are about as worth it to me as XC1 side quests, didn’t felt it offered as much as X’s ones where even if the structure wasn’t perfect at times, the story arcs and world building were a nice reward. Which kind of applies to the exploration, I check spots here and there, but never engaged enough to explore everything. It also needed the follow ball of X, because that marker for objectives is the worst thing.
This is probably just me, the game looks pretty and all, but I don’t feel the atmosphere of the locations is as strong as XC1 or X’s locations, I feel is not as interesting to look at and they don’t have a great sense of presence, but the towns/cities were damn good, the right size and a nice unique feel to each of them.
Music wise it gets the job done. It sounds a lot like 1 at times, which I liked for the most part, but also I’m the only person on the planet that loves to death X’s OST compared to 1 and 2. There were some good highlights tho, Zeke’s theme, the boss theme with the trumpets and guitar, Mor Ardain’s field theme and Tantal’s field theme. Speaking of audio, thank the lord that I can shut the party up during battles, they need to fix how repetitive and unharmonious the battle talk is, but the option is appreciated.
There are some other things that I liked and other minor annoyances, some exclusive to this game, others just what I have to deal with Xenoblade in general, but that is about my general final thoughts on this game. Is a solid game, at times unpolished, other times quite great. I also came to the conclusion that I hate Nopons, they just bring me despair, Riki’s English voice, Tatsu’s food jokes, Tora’s maid fetish and that horrible arcade game.
I also became Zeke/Pandoria and Mórag/Brighid trash, especially the latter. Their relationships and chemistry were quite good. Zeke and Pandy were a great comedy duo with a good deal of serious trust and Morag and Brighid were such a power couple with some cute moments, plus badass moms to the group. I also enjoyed Rex/Pyra development for the most part with the exceptions of a couple of scenes and HtHs.
Tales of Xenoblade 2 was certainly a videogame.
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