Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Review

I bought Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as a fluke- I’d heard the first one was good, and there was an article prior to it coming out suggesting that it was the game to play after Breath of the Wild. Well, I’ve put a week or so into it so far and here are the takeaways.

• The battle system is an over-complicated mess where you don’t actually battle, you just wait for permission to press buttons. It’s completely chaotic and near impossible to follow and you feel like a spectator rather than a participant.
• Once a battle is done, all damage is healed. There’s no consequences. other than dying and having to “try again”
• Oh, each of these battles takes an eternity to finish. Walk from point A to point B, and have 30 battles. But if you die half way through, you get to go back to the beginning and do it all over again.
• The map system sucks, as does the fast travel. You can’t scroll the overlay map to figure out where you need to go, just follow the stupid compass arrow and hope it’s leading you the right way (it’s led me to solid walls already, resulting in me giving up on that side quest. The fast travel screen is just unintuitive, and the map it shows doesn’t correlate with the overlap map in any meaningful way.
• The voice acting. My god- I was embarrassed when the first mustashe-twirling govenor guy showed up because it sounded like… I don’t know, like a horrible person doing a Scotty from Star Trek impression.

I’m on chapter 3, and at this point it feels like a trudge. to get through the game. I keep hoping it’ll get better, but it isn’t. and to top it off, I bought the digital download like a fool so I can’t even resell it. I just spent 3 hours grinding my way to the next section only to die and start over.

What a disappointment.