Isn't one of them at level 100? My team ended up at 65 and I didn't really feel like levelling up, even with chain grinding being as easy as it is.

I admit that lone Nopon Half-sage on my community list does annoy me. Just sitting there...mocking me.

That's a cause worth fighting for. *cracks knuckles*

I was thinking the same thing. I think he probably blamed Mythra for it, based on how he pulled Milton away when she reached out to him, and from his perspective Mythra's Siren was the one that destroyed Torna. There's still no way he would assume Malos to be blameless though, or for no one else to explain the order of events.

I'm guessing Jin was the one who convinced him, or at least gave him a reason, to join, and while he might have never forgiven Malos, he seemed to come to some kind of understanding with him. Malos' goodbye wink and Mik's last request to him seemed to imply there was camaderie there. It might be that whatever happened to Mik after Milton's death was even more traumatizing, and his hatred of Amalthus outweighed anything he felt for Malos.  

I'm sure

that being, from what I recall, the only survivor of Amalthus' Blade Eater experiments was incredibly traumatic.

How long is Torna? I'm a couple of hours in. Planning on doing as many side-quests as I find.

I'm thinking next year I might try to New Game Plus XBC2 so I can play the rest of the expansion pass content - but also do the game in the order Tetsuya Takahashi recommended; that is, do the first 7 chapters of the main game, then do Torna, then do the final chapters of the main game (!). I'll also try to wrap up all the side-quests in the main game, which I didn't in my first (~85 hour) playthrough earlier this year.

I haven't finished but I think I am at the end section having just passed community level 4. I did all the side content I could so the first gate for that literally just went by without issue. At this point I am just under 25 hours but I have been trying to grind because before I go fight Malls I am trying to kill this one gold deer thing that has been kicking my butt since I found it.

I took 32 hours to get everything I cared about, which basically boiled down to all requirements to get Mythra to S rank, or all side quests and Unique Monsters. I still have one Community member that isn't complete, which would take another 3 hours when I finally get back to it, so 35-40 hours is probably a reasonable 100% time (unless you go beyond and fill in affinity charts).

I finished the story early just to get out of spoiler territory, and I was at about 25 hours at that point. 

That boss sucked. I was way overleveled, and it still took me 4 or 5 tries. I eventually just tried to use Chain Attack early, when he still had 60% of his health left. You'll probably only use 6 orbs before the Chain Max thing triggers, but just get as many orbs as possible and it should work.

While playing Breath of the Wild (for the first time in months) I had a bit of an epiphany about about Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Objectively speaking, the game is the most solid of the three Xenoblades, yet there was a missing "wow" factor that XC and XCX both had... at least until the later portions of the game when you start having stuff revealed about the nature of the World Tree and the true nature of the Aegis. In the cases of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the spectacle is all about the cutscenes, and much less about arriving at a beautiful location.

Seeing all this beautiful world, each location, and knowing that this is the world you're exploring around - especially in XCX where you can eventually go every place you can see. XC2's most spectacular moments all tie into the action of the story, very little comes close to as inspiring as the first two games to make me want to see and experience what the world has to offer. Many areas of XC2 are undoubtedly and uniquely beautiful. Plotwise, culturewise, and town-wise (generally speaking: NLA and Frontier Village remain my two favourite towns) - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is undoubtedly superior to the previous games.

I actually disagree on that front, I don't think any of the games have immense "wow" factors when it comes to locations (outside of very high areas overlooking the surroundings). I think the feeling you're getting stems from the fact that 1 and X both reside on extremely weak hardware comparative to what was on the market at the time, as such the highs of the tech in them are elevated (similar to how 1 got an increased Metacritic score due to being one of a handful of good JRPGs on the Wii) especially when compared to other games on the system. With 2, you're on a modern platform with increased performance compared to the other Nintendo consoles; this means you're getting more AAA big budget, good looking games that waters down the individual experiences. 

As well as that, it's the 3rd game in the series, so you're starting to get that repetitive 'been there, done that' syndrome. 

You claim the games don't have the wow factor, but then contradict yourself immediately after and agree with me when you claim they do have a wow factor from high places - which is kind of what my post was about (and what's generally shown in the video clips). So I am not sure we disagree here.

I also don't see how weaker hardware would be in anything but detrimental. I mean, come on! Think about that one! =D
Review scores don't have much to say on this either. XCX (IMO) had the higher "wow factor" but scored lower than XC.

It's also not a "been there, done that" thing either. XC2 is quite a bit different in feeling and structure than the first two games; it is more like "this game is missing something" as it doesn't have those high up moments which show off large landscapes with distant horizons that are inspiring to head in and explore. The game does have spectacular moments - but for the most part, they're in the on-the-rails feeling plot-structure storyline. While I appreciate the interesting plot, I can't help but feel Xenogears did what XC2 (and XC1 for that matter) was trying to do, plotwise, to a much more satisfying degree. So, if any element can be described as "been there done that" in XC2, it's the plot; I actually feel the world is sufficiently unique, just not "wowy" like the other two games are.

Yeah I'm with Jumpin on this one, one of the key features of the first two games was those amazing vistas of vast alien landscapes, and XBC2 pretty much completely lacks this.

Finished Torna after 21 hours - overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. Didn't end up aiming to complete all the side-quests (largely because I have other games demanding my time and attention), but did enough to get the Community level up to level 5.

Thought the final boss fight and ensuing cut scenes were fantastic, but I find it odd they hid so many key moments in the credits, rather than spending a little time to flesh them out more clearly. I mean, to be fair, I can't remember how much of these moments they showed or explained in the main-game, but I felt like Lora's death and her parting with Jin - as well as Jin preserving Lora's body in the Monoceros, could have been in there. The same with Addam placing Pyra in what becomes the Ancient Ship. Maybe they didn't want to alienate people who were playing Torna as a stand-alone game, but for me it felt like there were connections with the main game that could have been more fully explored as an epilogue (not playable - just some fuller cut-scenes) rather than as glimpses during the credits. That being said, I felt the Community system and side-quests made the loss of Torna all the more impactful; that Lora was an excellent character with a great arc, which was neatly finished by the final confrontation with Gort; that Jin and Mythra were both well fleshed-out by the prequel. 

Maybe the reason some of these scenes weren't there is because they were in the main game (Lora's death is, Malos finding Jin in an alley is another moment that's just in the main game) and I don't remember them, given the length of Xeno games. I'd really like to try New Game Plus with the base game so I can push through for the story, do the other DLC content I don't have, and fit The Golden Country in between chapters 7 and 8, as Takahashi originally intended. Though Architect knows when I'll have time for that.