engineered to make me wince but wanted a JRPG in the Switch's first year real bad and gave it a shot. has a feel adjacent to a crusty comedy seasonal anime about a 13yr old with fucked up teeth who can't stop kissing her older brother in an isekai world. i like a lot of its ideas but its tone and script are frustrating. i like starting as a diver-miner worker dude but i hate the guy who is that. he should be chill and real as fuck but he's this lame dork and not in an endearing sense. there are multiple scenes where the little boy accidentally touches tits and they go all "stupid baka pervert!" and i just don't care for it. i've seen this all too many times before, i simply cannot get down with these anime babes. i hear it gets better but it shoulda been good when it had the chance to hook me!!! aside from Nia, i didn't connect with any of the characters. Pyra and Mythra especially bored me to tears (i just don't like those sorts of tropes) and i wanted to throw Rex into an evil boiling cauldron. this game is stuffed with lame anime gfs who call u 'master.' the battle system has a gacha mechanic just to spite me and a UI so overstuffed it invokes violent urges in me like a caged, tortured gorilla. the environments and character models look really great for switch although this game's character design is mostly (Morag is pretty cool the game should be about her) some of the lamest, goofiest, and horniest (in a bad way) i've ever seen in a wide-release game of its pedigree. horny in the most boring way, in a vanilla ecchi way where it's too cowardly to get weird with it. the voice acting is silly (positive) and kicks ass tho. and Nia, she's pretty good.


why did they put this in Smash instead of my boy Travis Touchdown smh. i want the bad anime enjoyer, not the bad anime

for context, I want to preface, I am a big fan of JRPGs, i have been playing them since the mid 90's, on all different consoles, including some more obscure ones. I have also been an avid anime watcher since the same time. I have played Xenogears on PS1 and thoroughly enjoyed what I've played.

I waited some time to play XBC2, and i thought it would tick all the right boxes, but it fell flat on all fronts, so I'm just going to list why I did not enjoy the game at all:

- Did not enjoy the combat at all. There is a lot of combat in this game. it was slow, and felt cumbersome. my attacks did not feel like there was a large impact and using combos did not seem to be as useful as they should be.
-the game does not explain it's own combat system well through natural progression, and more mechanics keep getting thrown in throughout the game, which just makes it very bloated.
-Enemies do aggro you from a long distance away, forcing you to retreat to safety if they are too high level.
- constant repeated, annoying lines and quips after every single battle gets on your nerves.
- the levels are 3-dimensional but maps are 2D, and don't have multiple layers so everything looks like it's on top of each other on the map, making things confusing.
- excessive chance-based/ gatcha elements for a bunch of things like getting blades or dive containers.
- too many damn shops. why are there like 15 shops in every town?
-an excessive amount of fetch quests which often amount to "collect 10 of this and bring it back" which comes parceled with going out to the field, killing monsters and coming back, and then doing it again, repeat ad nauseum. I fully expect this in an MMO, not in a single player game, at least not this many.
- all the characters are written like someone threw a bunch of anime tropes in a hat and drew lots. of course all the women are comically well-endowed and are in love with the main protagonist. it's all cringey and I can't take it seriously. other JRPGs have this of course but not to this extent.
- the performance is pretty poor on the switch, it's probably one of the worst I've seen from a 'AAA' developer. I would enter a town area and it would get extremely blurry and stay that way for a good 5-10 seconds. this is not fun.

I gave it a serious chance but it did nothing for me.

I like to pretend this game doesn't exist. The gameplay is fun once you've read 10 articles and watched 2 videos on HOW to play it, because the in-game tutorials don't explain anything at all. The story is good and the setting is gorgeous but I just cannot deal with the horribly objectifying character designs and weird, gross anime tropes. It's a very uncomfortable experience. The ENG dub was poorly directed, but playing the JPN dub removes all the charm of the different accents. It's sad, because I feel like if it was done better it could be a masterpiece just like the first game, but there's just so much wrong with it.

I'll go back to it one day, but I'll be damned if I play this thing before Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

I started the game the day it leaked online. Some spoilers in the spoiler section

I've been sort of passively waiting for xc3 since the day it was announced. I say passively because I did my best to distract myself from its release so that I could avoid the agony of waiting everyday for it and building expectations so believe me when I say I didn't go into this with unreasonable expectations.

Story
The story unfortunately is full of unanswered questions or questions that were explained badly. It would be one thing if it was just minor stuff, like how Noah tells Mio that he doesn't like the name of his sword and chose to name it something else and then never tells her but important plot elements and items will just happen or show up with no explanation and for a series that's as methodical and planned out as the Xeno series its quite disappointing to see. That said, the story does have many kino moments, the cutscenes are well choreographed and the dialog is mostly good with odd sentences and conversations here and there.

Characters
The main 6 are pretty good and each of them get their own time in the spotlight thankfully but I don't think Noah gets enough. This might just be me not vibing with the type of character he is though as he is more of a thoughtful quiet character as opposed to the shonen type characters that are Shulk and Rex. The side characters are quite good and their personalities mesh well with the main 6. The villains mostly suck though. Moebius D, J and C are good but the rest are just bruh moments. Its one thing to have a few villains that are just "Hohoho I am the evilest evil" but its another thing to have almost your entire villain cast consist of that. X and Y in particular I feel were really badly handled and Z, the main villain is contradictory about his beliefs and methods. Also for some reason, most of the villains share 90% of the same design and their lackluster character makes it hard to differentiate them.

Gameplay
Might be the best combat in the series. I loved the elemental orb system from XC2 but the combat and customization can get pretty deep here with loads of build options. Exploration is really good, the story takes you through a small part of all the areas in the game but if you choose to explore there is so much to see and do. The world design is pretty good with plenty of callbacks to areas from previous games. Side Quests are plentiful but don't feel generic as each one typically has its own story to tell which is connected to the Colony that quest came from. Hero Quests are a new type of quest where completing one grants you access to a new Hero which is an AI controlled ally you can add to your party as well as unlocking a new class that your party can use. The combination of Hero and Standard Quests fleshes out the world and side characters quite well.

Music
Music is great as always for a Xeno game but the non battle tracks are less memorable. I did not rush through the game at all as you can see by my playtime (this is the most time I've spent on a xeno game even) but I can barely remember any environmental music. Battle tracks are really good though except the final boss track which is kind of nothing for half the fight. Weight of Life is a really good track but they play that thing only twice in a 40 hour story lmfao!!

Spoiler stuff
Originally I was going to type out questions I had regarding the story and how it doesn't explain many things but it got way too long so I put it in a pastebin instead. If anyone knows the answer to any of those questions hit me up on discord, @Shu_Watch#0423.

Also I just remembered that all the hype of 3 being the conclusion to 1 and 2 was a lie and Future Connected is pretty useless because the story is quite separate which can be a benefit or a negative depending on your tastes but I don't think the story is strong enough to stand on its own without that connection.

Conclusion
Everything gameplay related is top notch and honestly the price of the game could fully be justified by the gameplay and I will certainly be returning to this game after finals to get the 100% but the story is disappointing. Definitely did not expect that of a Xeno game. Like I said its not awful, there are still many kino moments but you should temper your expectations going in