This review contains spoilers
In pretty much every single way, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a step down from the original, and I didn't even like that one much. Every good decision has a swath of negative downsides.
The gameplay and general combat itself isn't bad, and honestly I quite like it on paper. However, I feel it falls apart due to the design of the fights themselves. There wasn't a single point in the game where I remember feeling challenged. As long as you regularly replace equipment and upgrade your characters/blades, it is insanely easy to get by in this game, making the combat depth useless in the main game. There wasn't a point where I had to think about which characters or blades I was using in battle. On every fight you just set up elemental orbs and kill the enemy instantly, and it's super underwhelming. Even the final boss was a pushover. The second you get chain attacks, the game becomes a joke.
The bad utilization of combat really stems from one core issue, not just of this game, but pretty much the whole series; enemy design. Xenoblade, especially 2, rarely ever shakes things up in battle. You're never thrown unexpected bones that makes you rethink how you tackle battles. You just combo, chain attack, and win. The solution to this seems so easy too, just come up with some unique gimmicks and properties. Xenoblade 1 had some of this for better or for worse, with bosses introducing multiple extra enemies that were a genuine threat. If you didn't focus them immediately, you'd be shredded, and so you had to balance the multiple enemies while still keeping an eye on the boss themselves. It wasn't perfect, but it was fun and chaotic. The extra enemies in Xenoblade 2 are so heavily nerfed, they might as well not be there. And even when they are, it hurts the main boss themselves, as they nerf them too to "balance" it. That's not even the only gimmick that could be done. To think of one off the top of my head, have bosses be able to block specific elements. This makes it so you have to be careful which characters and blades you bring into combat, and what moves you use.
Even if the fights themselves were good, it would be held back by the game's overly complex systems. It's hard to articulate, but the game is constantly weighing you down with systems, and they have little depth to compensate. It all feels like just an overcomplicated waste of time. The Aux Cores are a shining example. In nearly every fight you'll be obtaining Aux Cores. However, unlike Xenoblade 1's equivalent, you can't use them immediately. You have to refine them at a station around the world. Simple enough, except to refine them, you need materials. This completely undermines the excitement of finding a rare core, as you likely don't have the specific materials needed to craft it. The system adds nothing to the game but wasting the player's time, which could be attributed to a lot of this game. Speaking of wasting time;
The blade system boggles my mind on how it got passed. Instead of unlocking and finding them yourself, or any other number of way of obtaining them, they decided the best route was to make it a gacha system. The blades themselves bring two big issues to the game as well. The first isn't apparent until the final chapters of the games, but it's baffling. For some reason, they decided to force you to either grind field skill levels on your blades, or to pull blades until you hopefully got one with the right skill. I genuinely don't understand why this is the case, especially when Xenoblade 1 already did it better, having from memory no arbitrary progression barriers outside of battles. The second issue is on a grander scope of the game itself; how much work went into the blade. Each blade has multiple different sets of animations, which all seem to vary slightly per character too. When you have 50 or so unique blades in the game (not including each class of common blade and their variance), you can see how the work would add up quickly. This is moreso speculation, but it really feels like a good chunk of development went into this purely visual element, whereas I feel it could've been spent in much more vital areas. It sucks too, since on paper, I love the idea of commissioning a bunch of artists to make designs that are then implemented into the game (even if it leads to shit like this.)
The story isn't that bad honestly, but it's main issue comes from presentation. The game makes a great step forward with its vastly improved facial animation and expressiveness from the first game, however the way cutscenes are presented and some of the scenes in them can be unbearable. The game takes heavy influence from anime tropes. The first game already had a lot of this, but it used elements from anime I typically don't mind, and I could forgive stuff like the melodrama due to the limited facial animations. Not only does it use those elements to an even greater degree, but it also decided to add some """"""""""comedy"""""""""", which have about as much comedic value as dangling keys. Issues like these are persistent throughout the entire game (even the DLC) which ultimately takes down an otherwise good story. There's too much intricacy for me to go over here, but it's good overall, though it didn't click as well as Xenoblade 1's did.
The environments themselves were probably the biggest disappointment. A big part of the appeal of Xenoblade as a whole is walking around on gigantic creatures, its the reason that the game was made in the first place. Xenoblade 2 generally keeps this up, but I felt like a lot of the magic wore off. In the original, watching yourself move from area to area on the Bionis, and being able to look down on areas previously explored gave this huge, adventurous feel to the game. You could visually see your progression. In Xenoblade 2, you're constantly jumping from Titan to Titan, which leads to generally more unique areas in the game, at the cost of that visual progression feel being largely lost. Even in the World Tree, you don't feel the progression in it. You just go up a couple floors, and then suddenly get in this elevator that takes you to space, it just doesn't feel as natural. The way the levels themselves are laid out also doesn't help here. Look at the first area of Xenoblade 2, Gormott (This picture isn't that good but it's really tough to visualize it clearly). This is the first view you get of an open space in the game. The visual design doesn't really send you anywhere. There's a dirt path, sure, but the scene itself doesn't cause your eyes to follow it. There's no real reason to explore either, as the town, where you're told to go, is all the way to the right. Compare this to the reveal of Gaur Plains in Xenoblade 1. You can immediately see how the game guides you down one path, up the leg of the Bionis. The entire area is just one uphill climb, with various paths on the sides housing little things to explore. It's a much more natural and sweeping first look at a big area in the game. Other areas, especially Uraya and Tantal, do this better, but first impressions matter. Another big thing I was surprised to be omitted was the nightly area changes. There's still a day/night cycle, but for some reason they took out that really cool thing where some areas looked completely different at night in Xenoblade 1, like the Satorl Marsh or Valak Mountain. It added a new layer of wonder to areas, and it's completely gutted here. There were also a few areas which I think were heavily underutilized and disappointing, the biggest being Mor Ardain. The Titan here is the coolest looking in the game, however the area itself is surprisingly bland. I love the mechanized wasteland aesthetic here, it's surprisingly beautiful, however there isn't really much to explore. You have a little bit of area to wander around in, and then an indoor factory level, which is one of the worst areas in the game, gameplay and story wise. Just a huge underutilization of a super cool area, which I think underlines a lot of the game.
And that brings me to a big issue; underutilized and generally useless mechanics. This game has a lot of neat ideas that it does literally nothing with. The strangest inclusion has to be cloud sea levels. The game puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of the cloud sea, and how it will both impede and help your journey. The idea of a rising and sinking ocean that can open up or cross off areas depending on the time of day is a neat idea, adding a bit of personalization to each initial run-through of an area, however the game does literally nothing with it after this point. I don't think I thought about the cloud sea level once after the first area. I genuinely don't think it was utilized a single time afterwards. This is further worsened by the fact that half the titans don't even have the sea levels due to being inside the titan itself, or in an area it wouldn't work well in like Lefteria. When the DLC came around, they didn't even bother including it, which I fully understand. Another more minor but still noticeable disappointment is salvaging. Rex's entire character is initialized by being a salvager, and being able to salvage yourself is a neat idea. However there's literally no reason to outside of sidequests. Cylinders are super expensive too, so 9 times out of 10 you're just wasting money. The dives themselves felt super inconsistent too, sometimes I would get a better reward for diving imperfectly, so it seems to be mostly chance based.
A few side notes I couldn't fit elsewhere:
-The final boss is pretty disappointing in everyway compared to the original. Zanza wasn't anything amazing, but it was visually great with a solid fight and really good music. It wasn't perfect, but it was memorable. I can't say the same about Aion. The design looks like a shitty gundam OC, and the fight is pretty much a worse Egil fight.
-The music in this game is decent. I wasn't a huge fan of Xenoblade 1's ost either, as I'm not really an orchestral guy, but it fits the mood perfectly. I really liked the Indol night theme for how unique and simple it is.
-This game's plot is as predictable as Xenoblade 1's sadly.
-The stuff with Klaus at the end is really cool, but I felt it was a little too overcomplicated. I still have no clue what the Aegises were actually made for, though maybe I'm just stupid. Klaus' design went hard though.
-I don't like how long the side quests take now. They're definitely quality over quantity now, but I personally liked the filler quests in Xenoblade 1 as you could complete them as you played an area. Xenoblade 2's quests just force you to stop your progress for the quest itself. You even have to return back to finish the quest for some reason, which is something I thought Xenoblade 1 already did better by NOT requiring.
Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just a disappointment. I already went in with low expectations, but there was a slight hope in me that this game would have something that called to me despite its flaws like in Xenoblade 1, but I ended up with nothing. Not even the DLC could save this game. The only thing I feel after finishing this game is the hope that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is better.
The gameplay and general combat itself isn't bad, and honestly I quite like it on paper. However, I feel it falls apart due to the design of the fights themselves. There wasn't a single point in the game where I remember feeling challenged. As long as you regularly replace equipment and upgrade your characters/blades, it is insanely easy to get by in this game, making the combat depth useless in the main game. There wasn't a point where I had to think about which characters or blades I was using in battle. On every fight you just set up elemental orbs and kill the enemy instantly, and it's super underwhelming. Even the final boss was a pushover. The second you get chain attacks, the game becomes a joke.
The bad utilization of combat really stems from one core issue, not just of this game, but pretty much the whole series; enemy design. Xenoblade, especially 2, rarely ever shakes things up in battle. You're never thrown unexpected bones that makes you rethink how you tackle battles. You just combo, chain attack, and win. The solution to this seems so easy too, just come up with some unique gimmicks and properties. Xenoblade 1 had some of this for better or for worse, with bosses introducing multiple extra enemies that were a genuine threat. If you didn't focus them immediately, you'd be shredded, and so you had to balance the multiple enemies while still keeping an eye on the boss themselves. It wasn't perfect, but it was fun and chaotic. The extra enemies in Xenoblade 2 are so heavily nerfed, they might as well not be there. And even when they are, it hurts the main boss themselves, as they nerf them too to "balance" it. That's not even the only gimmick that could be done. To think of one off the top of my head, have bosses be able to block specific elements. This makes it so you have to be careful which characters and blades you bring into combat, and what moves you use.
Even if the fights themselves were good, it would be held back by the game's overly complex systems. It's hard to articulate, but the game is constantly weighing you down with systems, and they have little depth to compensate. It all feels like just an overcomplicated waste of time. The Aux Cores are a shining example. In nearly every fight you'll be obtaining Aux Cores. However, unlike Xenoblade 1's equivalent, you can't use them immediately. You have to refine them at a station around the world. Simple enough, except to refine them, you need materials. This completely undermines the excitement of finding a rare core, as you likely don't have the specific materials needed to craft it. The system adds nothing to the game but wasting the player's time, which could be attributed to a lot of this game. Speaking of wasting time;
The blade system boggles my mind on how it got passed. Instead of unlocking and finding them yourself, or any other number of way of obtaining them, they decided the best route was to make it a gacha system. The blades themselves bring two big issues to the game as well. The first isn't apparent until the final chapters of the games, but it's baffling. For some reason, they decided to force you to either grind field skill levels on your blades, or to pull blades until you hopefully got one with the right skill. I genuinely don't understand why this is the case, especially when Xenoblade 1 already did it better, having from memory no arbitrary progression barriers outside of battles. The second issue is on a grander scope of the game itself; how much work went into the blade. Each blade has multiple different sets of animations, which all seem to vary slightly per character too. When you have 50 or so unique blades in the game (not including each class of common blade and their variance), you can see how the work would add up quickly. This is moreso speculation, but it really feels like a good chunk of development went into this purely visual element, whereas I feel it could've been spent in much more vital areas. It sucks too, since on paper, I love the idea of commissioning a bunch of artists to make designs that are then implemented into the game (even if it leads to shit like this.)
The story isn't that bad honestly, but it's main issue comes from presentation. The game makes a great step forward with its vastly improved facial animation and expressiveness from the first game, however the way cutscenes are presented and some of the scenes in them can be unbearable. The game takes heavy influence from anime tropes. The first game already had a lot of this, but it used elements from anime I typically don't mind, and I could forgive stuff like the melodrama due to the limited facial animations. Not only does it use those elements to an even greater degree, but it also decided to add some """"""""""comedy"""""""""", which have about as much comedic value as dangling keys. Issues like these are persistent throughout the entire game (even the DLC) which ultimately takes down an otherwise good story. There's too much intricacy for me to go over here, but it's good overall, though it didn't click as well as Xenoblade 1's did.
The environments themselves were probably the biggest disappointment. A big part of the appeal of Xenoblade as a whole is walking around on gigantic creatures, its the reason that the game was made in the first place. Xenoblade 2 generally keeps this up, but I felt like a lot of the magic wore off. In the original, watching yourself move from area to area on the Bionis, and being able to look down on areas previously explored gave this huge, adventurous feel to the game. You could visually see your progression. In Xenoblade 2, you're constantly jumping from Titan to Titan, which leads to generally more unique areas in the game, at the cost of that visual progression feel being largely lost. Even in the World Tree, you don't feel the progression in it. You just go up a couple floors, and then suddenly get in this elevator that takes you to space, it just doesn't feel as natural. The way the levels themselves are laid out also doesn't help here. Look at the first area of Xenoblade 2, Gormott (This picture isn't that good but it's really tough to visualize it clearly). This is the first view you get of an open space in the game. The visual design doesn't really send you anywhere. There's a dirt path, sure, but the scene itself doesn't cause your eyes to follow it. There's no real reason to explore either, as the town, where you're told to go, is all the way to the right. Compare this to the reveal of Gaur Plains in Xenoblade 1. You can immediately see how the game guides you down one path, up the leg of the Bionis. The entire area is just one uphill climb, with various paths on the sides housing little things to explore. It's a much more natural and sweeping first look at a big area in the game. Other areas, especially Uraya and Tantal, do this better, but first impressions matter. Another big thing I was surprised to be omitted was the nightly area changes. There's still a day/night cycle, but for some reason they took out that really cool thing where some areas looked completely different at night in Xenoblade 1, like the Satorl Marsh or Valak Mountain. It added a new layer of wonder to areas, and it's completely gutted here. There were also a few areas which I think were heavily underutilized and disappointing, the biggest being Mor Ardain. The Titan here is the coolest looking in the game, however the area itself is surprisingly bland. I love the mechanized wasteland aesthetic here, it's surprisingly beautiful, however there isn't really much to explore. You have a little bit of area to wander around in, and then an indoor factory level, which is one of the worst areas in the game, gameplay and story wise. Just a huge underutilization of a super cool area, which I think underlines a lot of the game.
And that brings me to a big issue; underutilized and generally useless mechanics. This game has a lot of neat ideas that it does literally nothing with. The strangest inclusion has to be cloud sea levels. The game puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of the cloud sea, and how it will both impede and help your journey. The idea of a rising and sinking ocean that can open up or cross off areas depending on the time of day is a neat idea, adding a bit of personalization to each initial run-through of an area, however the game does literally nothing with it after this point. I don't think I thought about the cloud sea level once after the first area. I genuinely don't think it was utilized a single time afterwards. This is further worsened by the fact that half the titans don't even have the sea levels due to being inside the titan itself, or in an area it wouldn't work well in like Lefteria. When the DLC came around, they didn't even bother including it, which I fully understand. Another more minor but still noticeable disappointment is salvaging. Rex's entire character is initialized by being a salvager, and being able to salvage yourself is a neat idea. However there's literally no reason to outside of sidequests. Cylinders are super expensive too, so 9 times out of 10 you're just wasting money. The dives themselves felt super inconsistent too, sometimes I would get a better reward for diving imperfectly, so it seems to be mostly chance based.
A few side notes I couldn't fit elsewhere:
-The final boss is pretty disappointing in everyway compared to the original. Zanza wasn't anything amazing, but it was visually great with a solid fight and really good music. It wasn't perfect, but it was memorable. I can't say the same about Aion. The design looks like a shitty gundam OC, and the fight is pretty much a worse Egil fight.
-The music in this game is decent. I wasn't a huge fan of Xenoblade 1's ost either, as I'm not really an orchestral guy, but it fits the mood perfectly. I really liked the Indol night theme for how unique and simple it is.
-This game's plot is as predictable as Xenoblade 1's sadly.
-The stuff with Klaus at the end is really cool, but I felt it was a little too overcomplicated. I still have no clue what the Aegises were actually made for, though maybe I'm just stupid. Klaus' design went hard though.
-I don't like how long the side quests take now. They're definitely quality over quantity now, but I personally liked the filler quests in Xenoblade 1 as you could complete them as you played an area. Xenoblade 2's quests just force you to stop your progress for the quest itself. You even have to return back to finish the quest for some reason, which is something I thought Xenoblade 1 already did better by NOT requiring.
Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just a disappointment. I already went in with low expectations, but there was a slight hope in me that this game would have something that called to me despite its flaws like in Xenoblade 1, but I ended up with nothing. Not even the DLC could save this game. The only thing I feel after finishing this game is the hope that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is better.