In 2011, I got introduced to Operation Rainfall.  I was an American Wii fanboy who, like most American Wii fanboys, was dissatisfied with the lack of "core" titles in the Wii's library.  It seemed as if Nintendo of America didn't really care about their core audience anymore.  While publicly we would defend the Wii as a genuine console that could compete in the market, in our own circles we would vent our frustration with NoA.  They had spent the generation moving more and more casual-oriented, with E3 press conferences being dominated by fitness applications and party games.  Mario went four player, Zelda created an ultra-linear experience with excessive handholding, Kirby made a game where you literally cannot die.  It seemed more and more that NoA was moving away from the core audience at all.  It did not help that a lot of core titles, namely RPGs, were releasing outside of America and just not getting US releases, seemingly for no apparent reason other than certain games underperforming in Japan.  So, the audience chose to do something about it.  Thus, Operation Rainfall was created.

Operation Rainfall, named as such for its stated goal of creating a "rainfall" of requests, focused on three games in particular.  The Last Story, an action JRPG that incorporates various elements of tactical games and stealth games.  Pandora's Tower, a dungeon crawling RPG that has a strong emphasis on puzzles.  And Xenoblade Chronicles.  Xenoblade Chronicles is, arguably, the best and most important of the Operation Rainfall games.  The fifth entry in the overarching "Xeno" franchise, a series of largely unrelated subseries that share various themes and storytelling ideas, Xenoblade Chronicles would be lauded as one of the greatest Wii games of all time, as well as just one of the greatest games of all time.  It was a massive critical success that would go on to start a massive series.  The Xenoblade series has become a very important franchise for Nintendo, being their most JRPG-y JRPG and selling solid numbers relative to its genre.  It has a massive, loyal audience and each game in this series is deeply beloved by that audience.

And, at one point, I counted myself among them.  I was present during Operation Rainfall, a couple content creators I really liked at the time were very vocal and active with it and I joined in.  I would repost every update to my Facebook friends who did not care and signed so many petitions.  I preordered Xenoblade 1 from the Nintendo Store, I still even have my invoice for it somewhere, and purchased the Last Story new, though due to a move I never got around to getting Pandora's Tower.  And I fell in love with Xenoblade Chronicles.  I still count Xenoblade as one of my favorite games of all time, it held the second place spot on my "best games of all time" list until I got my hands on Hades and it kind of changed my life.

I had never really played an RPG like Xenoblade before, an RPG with such a rich world full of what felt like hundreds of characters with individual lives.  This is, of course, actually fairly common for RPGs and has been since the genre's inception, but you have to understand.  Before Xenoblade Chronicles, the only RPGs I had played were Pokemon and Final Fantasy X.  My data set was made up of incredibly linear JRPGs.  Xenoblade was not only a massive, rich world with loads of unique characters and a plot that was gripping from start to finish, but it was also a game where it felt like your choices really mattered.  The outcome of entire sidequest chains could be altered by decisions the player made, minor decisions having deeper outcomes long term, some going so far as to continue to impact the game's side content into the end game.  Again, these weren't new ideas for RPGs, this is pretty standard practice for western RPGs in particular.  But Xenoblade was the first time I experienced a game that worked like this and it left an impact.

Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the most important games to me.  It changed how I viewed video games, what I thought they were.  I had always loved JRPGs before I played Xenoblade but Xenoblade is the game that made me truly fall in love with the genre.  For much of the 2010s, I considered myself a JRPG fan.  I got more into narrative driven linear RPGs, started playing more Final Fantasy and got into Fire Emblem and went back and played some classics like Chrono Trigger.  And I was on board for any Xenoblade that came out after 1.  Xenoblade Chronicles X was one of the only games that made the WiiU worth it to me, I never beat it but I put considerable time into it, 120 hours I think before I stopped playing because I got my PS4 and wanted to play some of those games?  I even have the collector's edition with the little awful USB drive which doesn't actually work on any computer.  And, throughout it, I played Xenoblade Chronicles 1 probably seven times, which is a massive ask given that the game is usually 80 hours long.

And then, at the end of the decade, I stopped being a JRPG guy.  I've talked about this in basically every post I've written about a JRPG, I used to be really into them, I'm not any longer, at least as a unified genre.  In truth, there are many factors to why this is.  My wants out of an RPG have changed considerably, I now desire more player freedom and choice from the genre.  I find their lengths exhausting, committing to 60+ hours of any game is such a massive ask, there's so much opportunity for me to just bounce off of a game I really like just because I'm tired of it.  There are many decisions, both narratively and in character arcs I don't agree with.  But, in truth, there is one specific game that caused me to lose my adoration for JRPGs.  A game that I spent many hours in, a game which I have a rocky relationship with.  A game that I'm sure many of you knew was a long time coming on this blog.  You've seen the title.  You know what this is.

This is the Xenoblade 2 post.

It's December 2017.  Due to a series of unfortunate events at my job, I ended up being the only person working at the customer service desk for the majority of the year.  I pulled 14 hour days, for 7 months straight and while my wallet was happy with all the overtime I was making, having essentially four whole work days of overtime each week, I was dying inside.  However, my work did make it up to me, kind of, and went "December is our slow month, we can take the loss, you can have basically the entire month off".  Which was good for me, because I didn't really have any plans for travel and December 2017 was the release month of my most anticipated game for the year.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

I was so excited.  I had this huge JRPG to play and an entire month to marathon it if I wanted.  I spent the previous holiday, Thanksgiving, marathoning Xenoblade 1 in anticipation, spending another 80-100 hours in it for like the fifth time in my life.  The date finally approached, I finally entered my extended time off, and I basically just played Xenoblade 2.  Morning to night.  Taking breaks to eat, go see an occasional movie, go to the zoo one day for sort of the winter times.  But otherwise, in the course of a month, I played Xenoblade 2 like it was my job.  Which I guess it kind of was, since I was getting paid to be off to play it.  And by the end of it all, I adored it.  Xenoblade 2 made me cry.  I excitedly and definitively put it on my list of my favorite games of all time.

A Disclaimer:

I want to make it abundantly clear that I am likely to get details on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 wrong.   I played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 when it was new, heck I bought the collector's edition AND the Switch Pro Controller themed after it when both were new.  That was almost 10 years ago, an entire decade has passed since the launch of this game.  So, my memories are foggy to say the least.  I am basing this off my feelings about a game I spent way too much time in ten years ago and, as such, am likely to just say incorrect things.  Normally I try my best to be thorough and not say anything without double checking if the statement was even true, or at least true to the best of my knowledge and research, but in this instance I feel this piece will be better off from me not being correct.  For starters, it means not having to replay a 100 hour game I already know I hate, which would make me not want to do this long awaited post in the first play.  More than that, this is about how I felt and how I continue to feel about a game I used to love and now despise.  So if I get anything wrong, I'm deeply sorry to anybody who cares a lot about this game.  I would say that hopefully you would continue to read what I have to say in spite of that fact but I have a feeling that most people who like Xenoblade 2 are going to write this one off pretty quickly.  I don't want to stereotype but I have been on the internet long enough and seen the Xenoblade discourse play out numerous times and Xenoblade 2 fans tend to write off people who don't like their game pretty much on sight.

Chapter 3

Xenoblade Chronicles 2's third chapter is a rather famous one.  To much of its audience, Xenoblade 2 has a reputation for having a pretty bad start, with the prologue and the first couple chapters being a long introduction that finally culminates in the game's third chapter.  It is, to a lot of people, at this point that the game truly starts, the point in which it finally becomes the game they love.  There are several posts and memes on the Subreddit about this very thing, using a format where the player starts off not particularly enjoying the game before reaching the end of its third chapter and having their Danny Devito "I get it now" moment.  It may then surprise you to find out that, in my mind, Chapter 3 is where it goes wrong.  This is the chapter where I got my very first inkling that I did not enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Chapter 3 Part 1: A far too long aside about the length of JRPGs

I want to first just state how absurd this idea even is.  The use of "chapters" as a way to divide story sections invokes a novel, and as such you could be under the impression that waiting until the end of Chapter 3 for the story to get moving is not unreasonable.  A lot of novels need at least that much time to cook, there are very few books, even great books, that can open up with a chapter that immediately makes the audience engrossed.  Sometimes you gotta let the stew simmer.  But I think this is misleading.  "Chapters" in this case refer more to arcs in a TV show, akin to how traditional 22 episode serialized shows will have two to four distinct "arcs" in a season.  You can, as such, roughly imagine every few chapters as, effectively, a "season".

This is again, not too difficult to conceptualize.  A lot of shows need an entire season to cook, it's one of the biggest problems with Netflix cancelling every show that isn't a massive hit immediately.  Television writing is often structured around the idea that you will have a buffer, and while waiting until the end of season 1 for a show to "get good" is kind of unusual, it's not that out of the realm of possibility.  But Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is also not a TV show.  It's a video game.  And a rather long one at that.  Howlongtobeat.com says that, on average, if you are mainlining the story it will take you 62 and a half hours.  Xenoblade 2 has 10 chapters, assuming the chapters are all evenly distributed in length storywise, that means that the end of Chapter 3 comes at almost 19 hours into the game.  Granted, the chapters are not evenly distributed in length, they get progressive longer as the game goes on, but imagine telling someone "hey, you should try this game, by the way, it doesn't get good until like 15 hours in".

But people aren't going to just streamline the main story, because Xenoblade is a series that really benefits from the player doing every sidequest they can.  Xenoblade often has massive wells of experience locked behind completing sidequests.  Rather than rewarding the player for grinding excessively, they are instead rewarded for engaging with the world and its characters.  In fact, just fighting enemies is a comically inefficient way to level up the party and there are very few moments in the Xenoblade games where it would be your only option.  As such, it's very common for the game to take twice the length of just a main story playthrough, heck you could go 3 times pretty easily if you get extremely unlucky.  So, Chapter 3 is more likely to end at around the 25 or 30 hour mark.  Can you imagine trying to sell someone on a thing you like, let's say a show since that's the comparison I've been using.  It's, let's say, a long running tv show of 22 minute episodes, say a 300 episode length and you're selling it to your friend, talking about how fantastic it is, how much it influenced you, how much it made you emotional.  And then you go "unfortunately you have to sit through the first 50 episodes, which are not very good, and then at the end of episode 50, the show finally gets good".  And then also that isn't even true because Chapter 3 is followed by the worst chapter in the game, so you're going to be waiting another 20 episodes for the show to be good again.

It's genuinely ridiculous to me that this could be a thing that people not only accept but expect.  At the risk of sounding mean too early, though I probably will be getting a little mean in this piece in general, I kind of feel like JRPG fans are just really easy marks in this regard?  There's almost a pride around the concept of a long game to the people who enjoy JRPGs, that this genre being games with overly excessive length is a point of admiration.  Trust me, I've had a lot of conversations with people who have seen me as the bad guy for daring to question the idea that games should be this long.  But moreover, it just kind of seems like to a JRPG fan, the decision to stick with a game is never a fluid one.  That from the moment they choose to purchase a game in this genre, the decision on whether or not to finish it has already been decided.  It doesn't particularly matter if a game is really bad for a really long time.  Nor would it likely matter if the opposite was true, if Xenoblade 2 started out really strong and then went downhill.  The decision to finish these long games was never something that could be changed, the people who were going to play it were very likely to finish it regardless of if it was terrible.

This is, I believe, the first reason why I have found myself stepping away from the JRPG fandom.  Now, as I've stated before, I did not at first realize that I hated Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  I ended the playthrough rather positively, thinking it was easily a top 20 game of all time for me.  However, this notion of "just stick with a long game and eventually it will get good" was one of the first things I kind of deconstructed as I started diversifying my gaming portfolio, and it was heavily influenced by my evolving opinions on Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  As I grew embittered by this game, as my opinions settled and I realized I truly hated Xenoblade 2, I came to realize that if I had bounced the first time I sat and realized "hey, this game isn't working for me" then none of this would've happened.  I held onto a seething hatred for Xenoblade 2 for quite some time, until I want to say at least 2022/2023.  My life was worse because I didn't leave Xenoblade 2 when I probably should've, and I probably made other people's lives just a little worse from how negative I was about this game for so long.

But more than that, I just take issue with how the JRPG fandom tends to act like this genre is inherently better equipped to tell compelling narratives because of its length.  Having spent much of my formative years in that fandom, a commonly held opinion is that because these games are long to the point of excess, they have the ability to tell emotionally complex, gripping stories.  In fact, the people who like JRPGs are most likely to be the audience for whom story is the primary thing they get out of video games.  And some JRPGs do, in fact, tell excellent stories, among the best the medium has ever seen.  But to pretend this is categorically true, to pretend that because these games are incredibly long they somehow have some edge over other genres in storytelling is ludicrous.  The best narratives in gaming can come from very long games, but they can also come from very short ones.  GRIS is a 3 hour long Metroidvania that manages to tell a beautiful, artistically unique story about loss and grieving.  Celeste is a traditional 2D platformer that tells a poignant story of digging yourself out of your depression and finding your identity.  Oxenfree, a game I have talked about at length in this blog, is literally 4 hours and in those 4 hours it manages to tell one of the best stories about being stuck in your own past, of having your scars define you.  There's no inherent advantage given to a long game in telling a compelling narrative.

And, in fact, I would argue that this opinion doesn't take into account how difficult a longer narrative is to track.  It becomes way too easy to ignore the parts of a game that maybe weren't handled well or just become a pain point both gameplaywise and in narrative because they happen so long ago.  It becomes far too easy to reflect on the destination and not on the journey, to allow yourself to be blind to, say, the fact that your game has an entire filler chapter where you go on a tangent into a factory where they are mass producing maid robots and it completely destroys the flow of the game right after you had a big emotional beat that completely changed the dynamics between the characters.  The player is very likely to become frustrated by this chapter in the moment, lord knows it's one of the most infamous talking points about the game, but the fact that there's just this really bad chunk of this story doesn't matter to them.  Because that was 100 hours ago.  All that matters in the end is how you felt at the end.  That's how I certainly felt the first time I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, all the issues I had with the game didn't matter because of the emotional response I had to the ending.  160 hours of gameplay reduced to how I felt in the last 30 minutes.

Chapter 3 Part 2: But also I just don't think it's true

As mentioned, chapter 3 is the moment that I started to get the inkling that I wasn't loving Xenoblade 2.  However, I did rather like the game before this.  Now this isn't a complete reversal of popular opinion, I'm not going to be like "Xenoblade 2 was actually genius before Chapter 3 ruined it".  There are many things I dislike about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that come into play before this chapter I have now spent way too long on.  But, I was optimistic about it.  I kind of enjoyed the slow burn way it introduced its world, how it seemed to naturally assemble its cast of characters over the early chapters, how it seemed more focused on an on the ground narrative to establish its various players.  It isn't anything I was overly attached to, but I was enjoying myself at the time.

And, at first, chapter 3 seemed like a natural extension of this setup.  It was another instance of "going to a new area, meeting a new party member, learning a bit about this part of the world.  Uraya is one of my least favorite areas of  Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I feel like I should like it more as this sort of Jules Verne-esque "lost world" that takes place within a massive whale.  But, for starters, this is the part in the game where the performance really starts to suffer, I swear sometimes it has a single digit frame rate.  I was never like "frame rates are important" before this, I literally spent my formative years in the online culture that said people who said that were just snobs who didn't care about real gaming.  So add that to the list of things that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 changed my mind on, I started understanding why games should run properly.

But Chapter 3 also is renowned for having a very massive emotional moment.  It is largely considered to be the point where the game gets good, you have a big finale where you have your first proper conflict with the villains and a number of significant things happen in a row, both emotionally significant and mechanically significant.  And it didn't land at all for me.  Not even a little.  I actually kind of groaned at the events that happened.  It was a foundational moment, not simply a moment where I had a break and fully realized for a moment that I wasn't enjoying this game, but a moment where I kind of realized that I wasn't enjoying this genre.  That the fundamental building blocks of JRPG storytelling were something that I had grown adverse to.

So what happens is that near the beginning of the chapter, we get a brand new party member, Vandham.  Vandham explores with the party throughout the Uraya chapter, assisting them through a few boss fights and ultimately leading them to the capital city of Uraya, named the Kingdom of Uraya.  He's a pretty likable and pleasant guy to be around, but also very stern whenever he needs to be.  A perfect mentor type, the guide that will tutor the main characters so that they may mature into the heroes who can save this universe.  Especially within a party like Xenoblade Chronicles 2's, having a more mature, measured voice is practically a necessity.  It is then, supposedly, shocking when at the end of Chapter 3 this mentor character dies in battle in what is our first proper encounter with the enemy faction.  It's one of the biggest emotional beats in the game, this character we've grown to know and love over the course of this chapter dying immediately at the end.  I felt nothing about it.

Now, I do want to make one thing clear.  2017 was probably the moment I had been the most cynical I have ever been and will ever be.  I had very recently gotten into video essay content that year, after essentially an entire lifetime of spending my free time watching pretty low brow media.  And it kind of broke me, I'm not going to lie.  In my mid 20s I was not well equipped to handle the new ways of analyzing media that I was now engaging with and the end result was that I ended up kind of sour on everything.  I was one of those people who took great pleasure in trying to outsmart the media I was consuming, not particularly engaging with the art but using the tools I had recently obtained to sort of "solve" the work.  It was operating in bad faith and it definitely contributed to my response to chapter 3.

That being said, I will still stand by the idea that introducing a character partway through the game only to immediately kill him off is the worst way to make their death mean something.  It is, in my opinion, one of the clumsiest writing potholes that a lot of people, both seasoned writers and newbies, fall victim to.  You, as a writer, want to introduce a higher level of conflict, to show the stakes are more than the previously light-hearted adventure would have you believe.  There are many options to do so but one of the more attractive ways is for a major character to die, it's a very quick way to signal to the audience "hey, this is real, we're not playing around".  However, this runs into the issue that you don't want your major characters to die.  Especially in a JRPG, you don't usually want a major party member who just dies later on because you can end up in a situation where the player has invested a lot of time into their favorite character only for them to die at the end of a major story beat.  As such, it is a very common solution to introduce a character to die.

The problem is that introducing a character only to kill them off shortly after is that the audience is not really given the appropriate time to be properly invested in said character.  Vandham is not with the party long enough for the player to really form a connection with the character.  He's, you know. cool enough I guess but I don't feel very passionate about him as a part of this story because I wasn't given the time to be passionate about him.  Like even in a game with as bloated a run time as Xenoblade Chronicles 2, where chapters regularly occupy 10-20 hours, you still don't really get to know this character in that time because Xenoblade spends so much time on the gameplay.  Which is good, of course, it is a video game and as much as certain people like to act like gameplay is secondary to the plot, that is how it should be.  But it also limits even more what Vandham's impact on the player can be.  Honestly the only reason why Vandham's death can possibly hit is because it is a surprise.  That it is, in fact, shocking that they would introduce this character to the party, one that fills such a distinctive and seemingly necessary place in the cast, only to then kill him off so soon.  And you know what?  Surprise is cheap.

Chapter 3 Part 3: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

But even if I did care about Vandham, which I've established I don't, his death would've immediately been cheapened by two of the most common and, in my opinion, worst tropes in Japanese storytelling.  I want to make a quick aside to say that the people who enjoy JRPGs or anime are blessed by the fact that Japanese storytelling tends to be such a homogenous thing with very distinctive story beats and storytelling ideas.  A lot of people will say "how can you know you don't like anime as a whole, you haven't seen every anime, I'm sure something is to your taste" and that is true.  But also, it is difficult to justify drinking from that well because there are so many similar storytelling ideas present in Japanese media that if you don't like various bits, you will eventually learn to avoid the whole.  At which point the people who enjoy this media have great ammunition to write you off by implying you are simply prejudiced against Japan and as such will not engage with the nuances of your opinions.  A ludicrous belief for them to hold as JRPG fans tend to refuse to engage with games not from Japan and, in more extreme parts of the community, tend to believe that non-Japanese games are actively attempting to destroy the medium as we know it.  Glass houses, you know how it goes.

The first of the two tropes I wish to touch on is what this section is named after: the screaming.  The screaming is one of the most infamous parts of Japanese media, it has been made fun of for decades, at least since Dragon Ball Z made its way out of Japan and became a hit in the USA.  Characters in Japanese media have a tendency to scream their emotions.  They always loudly proclaim what they are thinking and feeling, usually at dramatic and emotionally tense moments in the story, and just in general are very direct with communicating characters' thoughts in said moments.  It is one of the hallmarks of Japanese storytelling, telling the audience very directly what character intentions are and I think there is a certain import to it.  To a lot of people, this lack of ambiguity, this very direct storytelling and character emoting is very comforting, very digestible.  I want to make it clear that I am not saying this is bad storytelling.

It is, however, something I dislike severely.   I've never been an avid anime watcher, my brief flirtations with the medium being that I grew up watching Bobobo and Naruto, I had a massive love of Fruit's Basket when I was in high school (one of my prized possessions is a copy of the first volume of the original English localization signed by the localizer and one of the greatest comic book authors of all time, Kelly Sue Deconnick), and falling in love with Carole & Tuesday as an adult.  I think this is important context as despite growing up with JRPGs, the more decidedly "Japanese" aspects of the genre are not things I was inundated with in the same way that a lot of JRPG fans were.  So by the time I started getting into JRPGs that had these more decidedly anime aspects to it, I had already developed a very distinctive preference for media and a voice with which to analyze it.

And I hate the screaming.  I actually do not enjoy how direct and unambiguous this style of storytelling is.  I believe very strongly in the principle of "show, don't tell", that especially in visual mediums like movies, television and video games, it is much better to communicate how characters think and feel through visual indicators, quiet moments of reflection, places where the audience can, without words, extrapolate a lot about said character(s).  As you could imagine, I then find little compelling about this very direct way of communicating character thoughts and feelings.  I personally feel like this big, grandiose display of emotion actually cheapens the work more than enhances it.  It makes character death feel so overwrought, like we don't have moments to mourn as our protagonists lose their mind over the death.  To me at least it lessens the impact, makes our character's death feel less like something that has weight and more like just a means to push the protagonists forward.

This feeling of Vandham's death only existing to push the protagonists forward is heightened by the other genre trope that occurs that I'm not a super big fan of.  I don't want to talk a lot about Mythra right now, but Mythra sealed the deal for me that I wasn't liking Xenoblade 2 as much as I was telling myself I was.  For right now, let's just say that I can't get behind the "power upgrade unlocked by a big emotional moment" on principle.  Once again, I am fully aware this is common practice in this style of storytelling, the sort of shonen-style of getting power upgrades when they're most beneficial for the story.  To a lot of people, especially those who grew up with this genre and this style of storytelling, it feels very compelling to have these big moments where our protagonist is able to get a power that helps them win right when they need it.  I've even heard people compare it to RPGs as to why they like it, that it feels like the story has a progression system akin to an RPG.  And indeed, it would be reductive to paint most of these upgrades as simple plot convenience, a lot of times the character(s) in question must go on a training arc to gain the strength which then just awakens at a convenient point to add tension to the story.

As you could probably imagine though, I don't think this really works?  I find this practice of "unlocking power at the most beneficial moment to use it" incredibly tiresome.  To me, it creates a far too predictable plot structure that removes a lot of the tension from the story.  Now, I feel bad for criticizing any plot structure as being "too predictable", mind, I feel like in general people put way too much stake in predictability/surprise as a dynamic in critiquing stories, that stories are better if they are surprising and that there is something inherently wrong with predictability.  I often feel like people undervalue the idea that if you can tell where a story is going, oftentimes it means that it's a good story, it means it has set up its themes, characters, and story in a way that leads to a satisfying conclusion that the audience can predict and understand.

But to me it's predictable in a sense that it creates this very clear and obvious flow to the story which puts way too much emphasis on singular significant moments and removes focus from the grander narrative.  Like, I don't gel with Dragon Ball Z, for instance, because in my mind there is no potential for tension when it has such a clear and obvious flow to it.  The protagonists will struggle until at just the right moment, at which point they will conveniently find the strength to overcome through some deep emotional revelation.  Again, this is not a bad way to do a story, lord knows so many people love this type of story and I think that they tend to find it comforting that it has such a decided flow to it.  I can empathize, I love Agatha Christie novels and those are literally all the same structure over and over indefinitely.  It's just the way Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and by extension more anime-esque stories, structure themselves doesn't really sit well with me.

But to circle back to Vandham's death, I also just feel like this serves to yet again undermine the significance of this character's death.  I already feel very little for Vandham, I feel that he wasn't in the party long enough to make a significant enough impact and I feel like his death is very boring and obvious and unceremonious in the grand scheme of things.  But if I did care, I don't think I would find this chain of events satisfying either because in my opinion, the revelation of Mythra and the untold power the party gains from her awakening just fully distracts from the fact that Vandham died.  I feel like I'm not given the space to feel something about Vandham's death because so much happens as a consequence of it that it overshadows that he died.  Vandham's death is almost a footnote, a necessary but unimportant obstacle to push the plot forward.  And while everyone else was feeling that this is one of the most important parts of the game, I was getting my first instincts of "oh, I don't like this, I don't like this at all".

A World in the Clouds

I am happy to say we are, finally, leaving Chapter 3.  I want to talk about the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 next because I really do not like it but I think it'll be relatively light after the Chapter 3 trilogy.  Making a world for a video game, and moreover, an open world for a video game, must truly be a Herculean task.  Like, fantasy worldbuilding in general is difficult, having to create your own world, be it from scratch or from some existing inspiration, is an incredibly arduous process.  Trust me, I know, I've been cooking my own fantasy world for years now.  Having to create a rich, deep world that feels like it has its own history and culture and not make it feel derivative or undercooked, it's just a lot and I respect anyone who puts their worlds out into the world.  Braver souls than I, let me tell you.  Then you multiply that worldbuilding hurdle within the context of the medium, video games, and the difficulties become that much more arduous.

See, video games have to not only create an engaging world, but they have to balance said world with being fun to play.  In a novel or a film, you can be like "this world is just a vast, endless desert" and the audience will accept that, but in a game it's like.  You can do that, and many games have, but by and large players tend to expect a world with a number of different environments to explore.  We have a template for good video game world design that a lot of people like to follow, you have your grassland area, your desert area, your forest area, your snow area, and so on and so on.  Essentially the Mario 3/Mario World template.  It's not a hard and fast rule, obviously, plenty of excellent games have come out with very singular worlds, but on the whole games can and often do get criticized for having very one note environments.  As much as we all like to mock IGN for "7.8/10 Too Much Water", they were kinda cooking, Hoenn does feel very one note and it becomes pretty unfun to revisit because of that for loads of people, myself included.

This is not the problem Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has.  Despite the vast, empty cloud sea that surrounds each area in the game, the individual areas are actually quite varied, and do take into account the ecosystem that would form on each of the game's areas.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes place on civilizations which have formed on the bodies of massive country-sized animals known as Titans and each Titan has its own unique environment.  The giant Titan of Mor Ardain, a massive towering humanoid who reaches far outside the cloud sea, is physically closest to the sun and, combined with the unsustainable mining practices that has built itself on the Titan, has become desertous as a result.  The Gormott Titan, a large goat, exists in a sort of sweet spot, forming a pleasant, lively grassland on its back, but the parts that exist within its shadow have become dark rainforests that crawl up its legs.  Genbu, a massive sea turtle, contains within it a giant cavern which almost never sees the sun save for the transparent parts on Genbu's shell and has, as a result, become an arctic tundra.  It is a world with a lot of variety, a lot of distinctive environments to explore throughout your journey.

My issue with it is, however, the vast expanse in combination with this variety.  The Cloud Sea, the game's setting, is exactly what it sounds like.  A near endless sea that stretches across the entire known world that is entirely made up of thick clouds.  While Xenoblade Chronicles 2 offers a lot of variety in its locales, it all ends up running into a very different problem: feeling a bit too much like a video game.  As previously mentioned, there is kind of a language to how video game worlds play out, they tend to contain a number of similar if not the same environments and Xenoblade 2 follows suit.  You have a grassland, a cavern/lake, a desert, an ice world, a sky world, etc.  This can be a great template for worldbuilding in a game, it is a tried and tested formula to have all these specific "worlds".  However, it is a tricky line you have to toe as well if you are creating a vast, immersive world for an RPG, something the player wants to live in for extended periods of time.  Because you just simply run the risk of your adherence to video game standards pulling your audience out of the world.  Making them hyperaware that it is a video game.

While the world of the Cloud Sea is technically interconnected, it rarely, if ever, feels as such.  These massive Titans largely stay away from each other and keep to themselves in the vast expanse.  This creates a sense of isolation on each of said Titans.  The game attempts to keep the flavor alive, showing on your world map the location of the Titans currently in relation to one another, but it mostly amounts to just that.  Flavor.  Not until the very endgame where the Titans all converge on a single point does it ever feel like they're part of the same world.  Instead, their very distinctive environments and their isolation from one another makes them feel like what they truly are: levels in a video game.  They don't feel like they're part of a world, they feel like they're just "this is the grass one, this is the desert one, this is the ice one".  Your dad who doesn't understand your hobby and is kind of concerned about the little statues adorning your shelves but is trying his best could ask you "so what level are you on" and instead of rolling your eyes and going "games don't HAVE levels anymore, dad" you could just say with a straight face "the lake level" and it'd be accurate.

I find it exceedingly difficult to engage with the world of Xenoblade 2.  It feels so hollow to me, a series of video game design tropes rather than a real world I want to explore.  And for an open world RPG like this, that's damning to me.  Exploring the world is my favorite part of this genre, I want to be engaged with that part especially.  A video game's world can do so much to endear me to it, there are literally games I have lost dozens of hours to that I did not end up liking just because the world sucked me in.  I think that an immersive world is, if anything, more important in video games than possibly any other medium. Given this is an interactive medium, we can genuinely explore and engage with this world in a very tangible way.  It isn't just getting invested in Middle Earth via the deep lore and the characters, it's you, the player, being there and having an impact on the world.  And, unfortunately, I think Xenoblade 2 is a world that fails to immerse.  It reminds you constantly that you are playing a video game.  You are not a part of this world, you are simply a watcher of it.

Character Design and Art Style

Let's toss out another softball criticism, one that's literally so common that the Xenoblade 2 fanbase has practically developed a whole language for arguing against it.  To say that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is infamous for its character design would be an understatement.  JRPGs in general have questionable character design ideas, I think we all have had a friend unironically recommend a Japanese game to us only for the very first thing you see out of it to be a scantily clad woman who is just.  Dressed like that the entire game.  It's actually very funny, as I'm writing this part we are just a few days out from the first proper trailer for Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, a game I was pretty excited for, but now I'm like "I don't want to play this anymore" after seeing how JRPG the character designs are.  I'm too old for this, y'all.

I don't particularly like most of the character designs in this game, and the general gross horniness present in a lot of them is certainly a major factor.  Mythra (we'll still be getting to her later) is a pretty infamous design in particular as she is one of, if not the only playable character in Smash history who has had to be censored because her original design is too provocative.  And it's not difficult to see why, her incredibly short dress that stops at just the right length to emphasize her thighs, the slits on the sides to draw attention to her hips, the boob window.  She has a boob window.  This game came out in 2017 and we're still doing boob windows.  It's just kind of awful.  And it's one of those designs that people will argue has some deeper weight and meaning and it's just like.  Y'all understand there are ways to convey the ideas you think this design is conveying without also being this unabashedly sexist, right?  Like we don't actually need Mythra to be running around looking like she's a college girl in a super sexist 00s sex comedy to convey that she feels incomplete.

Mythra is of course not the only horny design that plagues Xenoblade 2.  Dahlia is rather infamous for being an almost nude rabbit/wolf girl who has a giant claw sticking out of her foot to make it look like she's wearing heels and a silhouette that looks like a Yoshi for how far her breasts stick out.  Brighid, one of the most important Blades to the game's story, is dressed in a dress with such a plunging neckline that it almost goes all the way down to her crotch.  Perun is a beautiful, curvy woman who takes a lot of design notes from Greek and Roman character design but is immediately distracting from how much she jiggles in game.  I don't want to get into how uncomfortable Poppi makes me yet but like.  They really did just have a character build himself a robot that goes from schoolgirl to maid to older woman, huh?  And there is a major character for whom the culmination of her arc is to go from wearing a pretty solid and excellent outfit to wearing a one-piece body suit that is designed to emphasize her boobs and thighs.  I try not to be a prude about these things, because like.  I like seeing attractive characters on screen.  But I also can't help but feel weird about how intentionally provocative so many of these character designs are.

But also, that's not the entire reason I dislike the character designs in this game.  Like, they make me uncomfortable, sure, but that happens in a lot of games!  I can't play a JRPG without encountering some gross, horny character design usually and I just gotta live with that.  I think that Xenoblade 2 is a pretty bad offender but if you've read this blog in the past you know that even if I feel like the game being horny is distasteful, I tend to just mention it, do my criticism, and move on.  No, to me the problem is far grander: the art style conflicting with these character designs.  I'm not going to mince words, I think Xenoblade 2 is one of the ugliest games ever made.  It has this super cheap looking, very generic "anime style" that I associate with the gacha block in every Geoff Keighley show, and the visuals are always super bright and shiny and plastic-y.  Also there's just like so much bloom.  Way too much bloom.  It's a visual style that I really feel makes games look bad and unfortunately it's just what Xenoblade uses now.  They even went back and made Xenoblade 1 look like this in its "Definitive Edition" release and I think the game is worse for it, that Xenoblade 1 had such an interesting visual style and the remaster just throws it out.  I swear one of the most common and worst trends in JRPG history is taking games with very distinctive visual styles and replacing them with a more generic anime style in remasters, it happened to my boy Radiant Historia too and man is the "definitive release" of that ugly.

But with Xenoblade 2 in particular, its visual style is especially problematic as the character designs do not actually have a consistent art style.  Numerous different artists worked on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, each bringing their own specific art style to the property.  I have criticized a lot of the character designs but there are also ones I love.  The entire suite of villains were designed by arguably the greatest character designer in gaming history, Tetsuya Nomura, who brings his iconic style to the game and it makes for a group of really cool villains.  Agate is a design I really love, the gem mining blade who is decorated in precious gemstones she wears as armor, Azami is great, this creepy gothic puppet, Floren is a great design, leaning hard into fae tropes to lure you into a false sense of security while being super manipulative in practice.  Perceval, Ursula, Kasandra, Adenine, Electra, heck VESS, these are all amazing character designs that I truly adore.  There's just one problem.  All these great character designs?  They literally only look great in the key art.

See, the problem with Xenoblade 2 having so many different artists with their own unique styles, but also having a singular, unified, kind of generic "anime art style" is that the end product can end up looking... bad.  Let's just say bad.  Many of these character designs that otherwise would look excellent end up having their own style and personality kind of stripped bare as the artists try and force all these dissonant parts into the same cohesive product.  They don't all look bad, mind, some of them look fine.  Azami is in a cooperative enough art style to where her design translates pretty well and Perceval is so out there that he just looks great no matter where he's put.  But on the whole the characters that aren't from the "normal" artist look weirdly plastic-y, with hollow, doll-like eyes and too clean and pristine features.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is robbing them of their life, of their identity.  It looks uncanny.  It makes what is already a pretty hard to look at game that much worse.  And this is not even to mention what they did to Vess, truly one of the worst translations of a very good character design in the history of the medium.

Masterpon

Okay, enough with the softball stuff.  Let's talk about Tora.  I don't like many of the cast members of Xenoblade 2. I frankly found this cast exhausting and Tora is not the only one I'm likely to talk about on an individual level, but I think Tora is easily my least favorite.  Tora is the third party member that joins the team, being the new party member added on the Gormott Titan.  During the second chapter Nia, the second party member to join the team, is captured by the Empire of Mor Ardain and our protagonist, Rex, has to save her.  He finds an ally in the form of Tora, a Nopon who has wanted nothing more in life than to become a "Driver", that is, someone who can wield a Blade.

I haven't explained thus far about the Blades and Drivers because I want to talk about it specifically in its own section but just bear in mind that Blades are beings who are the physical manifestation of weapons, Drivers are those who can wield those weapons, and Blades and Drivers are kind of soul-linked.  However, Tora does not have the natural capability to be a Driver, only certain people can even become Drivers and Tora is lacking the capability to be a Driver.  Tora does not want to let this stop him, however, and so he has been secretly working on developing an artificial Blade.  His life's work is a robot that functions as a Blade, but is able to be linked to anyone whether they are destined to be a Driver or not.  And Rex is here to get him the final parts needed, in exchange for Tora aiding him in rescuing Nia.

Now, I really wanted to like Tora's arc.  I really did.  There is something undeniably endearing about a character who looks at an unjust system which places emphasis on a small class of individuals who are claimed to have some sort of destiny and says "I'll do it myself".  It's a very relatable sentiment and in a game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, who has this throughline of "maybe the Blade and Driver system is unjust", it'd normally be difficult to not find Tora compelling.  He's a character who takes his destiny into his own hands and puts in the work to achieve something that he was told his entire life is something that you could only manifest via an unspoken privilege.  If there was any character you'd expect the audience to feel strongly about in a positive way, it'd be Tora.  The problem is that the Blade Tora built for himself is Poppi.  And Poppi is uncomfortable.

Tora's Companionship Robot

Poppi is yet another character I wish I liked more than I did.  In fact, if you were to ask me after I had finished the game back in 2017, I probably would've told you my favorite character WAS Poppi.  She has a lot of reasons to like her, she has an arc about how she feels insufficient because she's artificial.  That not being a real Blade actually does impact her quite a bit, and that she both idolizes Rex and his primary Blade, Pyra and wants that sort of closeness with Tora.  Something that drives Rex to get over his depression and failure to protect Pyra late in the story as Poppi reminds him who is relying on him.  It was one of my favorite moments in the game and Poppi was one of the longstanding holdouts for me in terms of things I actually did like about this game.  I don't think it was until 2020, long after I had realized I hated everything else about Xenoblade 2 that I realized that I don't really like this part either.

But I did come to that conclusion.  And the reason why is the reason this section is called "Masterpon".  So, Tora built Poppi to be his companion.  The specifications for an artificial Blade were hashed out by himself and his now missing father and while they had obviously intended the Blade for combat, they are called "Blades" for a reason, Poppi was almost modeled after a different Blade that Tora would've encountered on the daily.  Vess, who lives in the town that was built on the Gormott Titan, is a Blade who lives in town with her aging Driver and who has spent the latter decades taking care of her Driver full time.  She raised his kids, she takes care of the home, there's even implied to be a longstanding romantic relationship between the two, although she is not the literal mother of his children.  This seems to be the actual purpose of Poppi.  To be a full-time companion for the Nopons who built her.  And she calls them "Master" just right out the gate.

Poppi is completely subservient to Tora.  She is built to serve him and love him and call him "Master".  The game has a running gag about functions Poppi has that Tora refuses to talk about and references them in romantic contexts, much to Tora's embarrassment.  It's one of those things that like when you're into JRPGs you really just take for granted sometimes.  Like every JRPG just seems to have a main character who has inappropriate feelings towards or a relationship with another character and it's entirely played for laughs.  It's also one of those things where as you grow up and/or get any space away from a genre where this seems normal, you go "ohhhhhhhh.... ewwwwwwww".  Tora's relationship with Poppi is weird, it's weird that Tora built a sapient being whose entire existence is being hopelessly devoted to him and down with basically all his feelings and opinions.  It is a massive red flag for me, just a transparently awful thing that a main character has done and we are meant to kind of laugh at his expense but also not really question why things have to be this way.

And then also he made her a schoolgirl.  This is inexcusable in my opinion, like, it's already weird, it's already gross, and I'm sorry if I'm being a prude.  But like, Poppi looks so young and is put into so many charged situations pretty early on that I just can't understand how people, including myself, stomached it?  And it becomes so much worse as Poppi "evolves", because the way Tora works mechanically is that as you progress in the game, he unlocks other versions of Poppi that he can switch between.  Each one of these alternate forms of Poppi is supposed to be a signifier of both Poppi and Tora's growth, right?  Like that's the goal of upgrading Poppi, Tora and hers bond grows, they overcome some grand obstacle, Poppi digivolves into a higher form.  It's the same exact deal with unlocking Mythra but it happens multiple times in the story instead of just one, my favorite.

But Poppi's first upgrade is going from "schoolgirl" to "maid".  And they literally named this upgrade "Poppi QT".  It's just so weird that this is what they chose to do with this character.  I've mentioned previously a "gross horniness" that permeates Xenoblade 2 and honestly it kind of permeates the series in general.  So much so that, at the time of this writing, the fifth Xenoblade game (Xenoblade Genesis) was just announced and friends have been saying they want to give it a try and one of the big reasons is that it doesn't have this horniness to it, at least on first glance.  Poppi is legitimately a character that I can't bring myself to like because engaging with her in any way reinforces one of the biggest problems with not just this game, not just this series, but the genre in general.  And if you complete her arc and unlock her final form, which is optional for some reason, it gets even worse as Poppi becomes a tall, attractive woman with a sultry voice in thigh high boots and a black leotard named, get this "Poppi QT Pi".  And she still calls him "Master!!!"  I hate everything about this, I'm too old for this, y'all.  No disrespect to the VA, she did amazingly portraying these three forms of Poppi but also her performance skeeves me out because of it.

And a lot of people will argue that this is the point of the relationship?  Like we are supposed to be skeeved out, the game knows Tora is doing something wrong and as he goes on he learns to view Poppi as a sapient being with her own agency.  They will argue that Tora IS depicted as the bad egg in the party, someone who does not view Blades as people and who built himself a companionship robot as a result of that.  And that as the game goes on, Tora is punished, made a fool out of, and forced into situations where he has to realize Poppi doesn't exist for him.  That she is her own being and should be treated as such.  I really want to believe this is true, I really want to believe that the 140 hours I spent with this awful awful character accomplishes anything.  But I don't.  I really don't.  And the reason for that is...

The Problem With Mythra

 Y'all like that title.  Where my Narnia heads at?  Where my very good short story written by Neil Gaiman Hatsune Miku heads at?  This doesn't actually have anything to do with the Problem with Susan, I just thought it was a fun title.  What can I say about Mythra?  A lot actually.  Tora may be my least favorite character in the cast but Mythra is by far its most frustrating, in my opinion.  Her character design is truly awful, just a transparently horny, impractical, overwrought design that appeals primarily to an audience of people whose primary enjoyment out of anything is derived from how many sexually appealing women there are in it.  Her addition to the cast comes at the expense of another character's death and manages to remove basically all weight from said death.  She spends like half the game being deeply unpleasant to the party and by the time she comes around you're given the option to never see her again if you don't want to.  There are many issues I have with Mythra, many points where I wish she just was not in this game.  But the biggest problem I have with Mythra is that she singlehandedly exposes a pretty significant problem I have with Xenoblade Chronicles 2's writing.

But First, a Query

I would like to pose a question to the reader: how would you go about creating a progressing narrative experience in an open world game.  It's not an easy question to answer, is it?  A meaningful narrative, by definition, tends to imply linearity, the story has to move forward rather than move in every direction.  But an open world game is all about moving in any direction, facing things non-linearly.  You are supplying the player with the freedom to meet objectives at their own pace, set their own course, mayhaps come back around to points as soon or as late as they wish.  It's a difficult conflict of ideas, one that many developers have addressed over the years.  Quick aside, if your answer to this question is "just don't do open world games" and/or "open world games are incapable of meaningful narrative experiences" congratulations, you have somehow stumbled upon the wrong answer to a question designed to have enough nuance so as not to have wrong answers.

Now, I won't go over every solution games have come to when facing this problem, because we would be here forever and even games with seemingly very similar solutions are incredibly nuanced when you get into it.  But I think it's important to get your mind going on this question before I delve into Xenoblade Chronicles 2's solution.  So what Xenoblade Chronicles 2 chooses to do is a very common base solution for JRPGs who opt for open world or open world-adjacent: they introduce the world to you incrementally.  In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you go to each new area in a linear order, gradually opening the world in a fashion that is more traditional for a linear story.  This does exacerbate the issue previously mentioned of the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 feeling very video game-y, mind you.  Because you enter these very disconnected environments in a linear order, it does make them feel as if they are levels in a video game more than environments in a world.  But it is a rather effective solution for a decidedly linear narrative like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the world is gradually opening up as you progress in the narrative.

However, therein lies the issue: how to handle giving players the freedom to engage with the content at their own pace in the context of a mostly linear narrative.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2, being a massive open world RPG, has a lot of content that can be accessed non-linearly. Optional character conversations that the player can access as soon or as late as they want, character-specific sidequests that the player can do at their own leisure or may have to put off until later on the game out of necessity because they have yet to gain the optional character central to the quest.  You are, at every turn, having to toe the line between your players freedom and the plot's progression, having to work through dozens of logistical concerns about how characters grow and evolve vs. how players have access to things that are, technically, meant to be seen earlier on in the game but can be experienced at any point.  It is a truly Herculean task to make an RPG like this, and I am sympathetic to the hurdles needed to jump through to even get this game made and have it be remotely comprehensible.

Now, a way to go about this is actually a solution that other JRPGs tend to favor.  If I may commit the cardinal sin of this discourse for a moment and compare Xenoblade 2 to its predecessor, Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenoblade Chronicles is actually something of a masterclass in approaching what is a nearly identical situation to Xenoblade 2.  Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is, similarly, an open area RPG that has environments which are unlocked in a linear fashion as you move through the plot but with loads of content that can either be accessed at any point in your journey or requires you to return to areas later on to complete.  As such, it must solve many of the same problems that Xenoblade 2 faces.  And, in my mind, its solution is quite genius.  Xenoblade 1 chooses not to fundamentally change its characters from the beginning of the journey to the end.

Now what does this mean in a practical sense?  Well in most pieces of media that feature linear storytelling, the way a character arc tends to go is that a character starts out at a singular point in their life and grows and changes and, well, develops across a story until, usually, they are a vastly different person by the journey's end.  And typically this involves a personality change of some sort, brash characters becoming more wizened and reserved, self-centered characters becoming more selfless, stuff of that manner.  Xenoblade Chronicles 1 doesn't really engage in this form of character development.  Rather, characters in the first game come into the story with very distinctive and defined personalities and it is, instead, their ideologies that change.  Shulk starts out the game with an almost single-minded focus on revenge which spurs him forward but overtime learns the world is more complicated and nuanced than he ever thought, but if Shulk from the beginning of the game were to have a conversation with a party member and Shulk from the end of the game were to have a conversation with the same party member, the result would be the same.  Shulk is, across his journey, a very smart, very awkward guy who keeps things close to his chest.

Now, this writing ideal is not without its own share of criticism.  A character that doesn't meaningfully develop across the story is, to many people, a bad writing decision.  The more dynamic a character's arc is, the more invested many are in the journey.  However, I think for an interactive medium where a vast majority of its content can be engaged with non-linearly, this is a pretty brilliant solution.  As previously stated, your players will be engaging with the content at their own pace and in their own order, outside of certain timed elements of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 (which are present, many quests are unavailable as a result of key story points), players have the freedom to engage with non-story content whenever they see fit.  By making the characters not change drastically in personality as the story progresses, you allow any and every conversation to seem natural at any point in the story.  It is perhaps not the most satisfying for the characters' development but it is an effective solution for the problem at hand: making an open world RPG with a linear JRPG storyline.

I bring all this up because I am not unsympathetic to the plight that Xenoblade 2 has.  Its gameplay makes it difficult for the kind of character development it wants to do, it is caught between two worlds and having the toe the line between both of them.  Xenoblade 2, unlike its predecessor, does have very dynamic characters, to the point where this is often cited as the highlight of the game for people.  A content creator I used to watch, one who is rather associated with the Xenoblade Chronicles series, introduced his Let's Play of this game by stating that it has one of the best casts in any video game he's ever played.  The way these characters grow both as people and as a party is very distinct, and well, Mythra is perhaps the games' best example of this.  Mythra is a character who starts out openly antagonistic to the party, the fact that she even had to be awakened is something she finds to be a moral failing.  She holds a lot of contempt for the protagonist in particular, working with him under duress and constantly belittling them.  But over time, she softens, she sees the party as her friends, she develops a more positive relationship with the protagonist and, ultimately, she trusts them enough to unleash the full extent of her power.  On the surface, she is among the most well written characters in the game.

Character Development (But Only When We Say So)

There's just one tiny problem.  Nothing I just said about Mythra is actually true, and it goes back to the solution the game has for its key problem.  See, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has to balance an open world with largely non-linear content that players are going to engage with at their own pace with not only a linear story but very dynamic and changing characters.  It has several layers of complexity and given I had you thinking about your own solutions and talked about the previous game's, you're probably wondering how Xenoblade Chronicles 2 addresses this problem.  And the answer is it doesn't.  It just kind of doesn't.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2, in one of the most bafflingly clumsy instances of character writing I think I've ever seen from a release of this pedigree and caliber just simply pretends the problem isn't happening.

Rather than keep character personalities the same or adjust conversations to account for changing personalities in subtle ways to depict how those characters have changed, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 just goes "well, you were supposed to have access to this conversation much earlier on so the characters will only ever appear in this conversation how they would at this point in the story".  This creates an interesting uncanniness to the often praised character development in the game.  These characters with such distinctive arcs will suddenly, without warning, return back to an earlier version of themselves whenever the game demands it.  Regardless of how their personalities have been shaped, regardless of what their relationships with each other are, heck, regardless of if the character in question has both metaphorically and literally grown up!  No matter what, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 will bring a character back to whatever the current moment needs them to be.

This is the eponymous problem with Mythra.  Nothing about Mythra's arc in this game is allowed to feel genuine.  Or really any character but I think it is the most egregious with Mythra because she is so outwardly antagonistic.  Mythra's arc is, throughout the game, being undermined by the game's own writing.  One second she can be an absolute team player, someone who looks at the party as something of a family and will defend them with her life.  The next she is back to being mean old Mythra, calling the others incompetent and being just generally prickly.  The game wants us to see her sharp edges softening but also isn't willing to fully commit.  Any piece of content hidden throughout the world could have an entirely different version of Mythra attached to it.  It is to the point where there is a late game cutscene where Pyra and Mythra behave as each other in a sort of dream world, and frankly I didn't even notice anything was wrong because I was used to Mythra never being consistent anyways.  Her character development was basically scene dependent.

But it's more than just the optional conversations that fail to sell this character development as something concrete, as it's also in the game's incidental quotes.  Yeah, I'm bringing the quotes characters say when they finish a battle.  I know I'm being petty, trust me.  I've been being petty about this game for like ten years.  So when your party finishes a battle, they tend to have little conversations between themselves.  They can be as simple as "random victory quotes" or as complex as "full conversations between members of the party".  And, as you can guess, these too are the same from the moment you get these characters until the end of the game.  Whatever these characters were like when they first joined will be how you are forced to engage with them at the end of every battle.  This is a JRPG.  There are A LOT of battles.  The combat is the core of the gameplay.  So, every battle Mythra is a part of for like 60-80 hours of playtime, you will bring in Mythra, win the battle, only for her to say something mean and dismissive.  One or two times, it's whatever.  Every battle for as long as you have and are actively using Mythra makes the character development that is the literal point of the character seem hollow.  The game sabotages Mythra, it undermines her growth at every turn, and it is all because the people who made this game, when asked how to solve a problem that they already knew how to solve, just seemed to shrug.

But who cares about any of this?  Like I've said it myself, the content that I am citing which undermines Mythra as a character is, well, optional.  A player could, very well, never experience any of these problems, their own approach to the game building a more cohesive character arc for Mythra.  And that's fair, this criticism of the character is heavily dependent upon how I experienced the game.  I did sidequests and optional conversations out of order, I probably fought a bit more than I should've, I tried to 100% the game until I found out the pull rates on KOS-MOS and decided I had better things to do.  I did the thing I often criticize others for, I played too much of the game, didn't like it, and then blamed the game rather than myself.  I voted for the Leopards eating faces party and a Leopard ate my face.  I will fully admit that a huge part of my dislike for Mythra comes from me.  Heck, I didn't want to make this a full bullet point because "this character archetype isn't to my liking so the game is bad" is like something Lilly Orchard would say, I don't even like tsunderes.

That being said, I do still find this to be an issue for two key reasons; the first being that the Xenoblade Chronicles games actively want you to do as much optional content as you can.  This is genuinely something people love about the games, it's certainly something I loved about Xenoblade Chronicles 1.  Grinding is inefficient in the Xenoblade games, you get pittance for experience at basically every turn and the games will very rarely put you in a situation where grinding seems like a necessary path forward.  In all my time playing the first three Xenoblade games, the only time I felt like I actually needed to grind was the level jump between the Bionis Knee and Satorl Marsh in Xenoblade 1.  Rather, the way you gain experience efficiently in the Xenoblade games is by completing sidequests.  You will gain rather large rewards for doing the optional content in this game, what would sometimes be 20-30 minutes of grinding reduced down to completing a single objective.  I really enjoy this because it rewards the player more for experiencing the game than it does playing it, you are engaging with it as a world to explore rather than a video game to play.  Unfortunately, incentivizing the completion of optional content like this game does has the byproduct that the clumsy, messy way it handles its character development is thrown directly in your face.

The second thing is that I just feel like this could've been fixed?  Pretty easily actually.  Like, just write and record a couple versions of each conversation or end of battle quote and have a flag that says "if they've passed this point in the story, change to this".  Like I don't want to make it seem like it's actually an easy fix, it obviously would take a lot of work to write and record two versions of each thing in the game.  But also like... yeah.  Of course it would.  Anything worth doing is a lot of work.  I've noticed there has been this trend of people criticizing any opinion that would give more work to the people making the game because we "have to be sympathetic to people who make games, game development is hard work after all, they put in so much time and effort for us".  And frankly I find this viewpoint disrespectful.  Like it treats adults, often longtime industry veterans, as if they are toddlers who need to be coddled.  I state that this would be easy to do out of a belief that Monolith Soft is capable of doing this.  Especially since the grand sum of these minor issues is that Mythra, and by extension, the core development of the rest of the cast kind of doesn't land.  This cast is given a death by a thousand cuts, their character arcs never mattering because anything that happens in this game can bring them back to whatever version the game chooses for that conversation.

The Malice of a Bad Tutorial

I have been beating around the bush with regards to one of the key players in the story of my history with JRPGs.  It is, ostensibly, due to my own personal reasons for not wanting to be associated with him anymore despite being such a large impact on my life and my gaming tastes.  This is not the forum to discuss my issues with him, and if anyone is reading this and doesn't already know, I would appreciate you not asking about why I do not wish to be associated with this content creator.  I have my reasons, and I do not wish to discuss those reasons as I don't want to get involved in any drama.  But I must also be clear as I do not wish to make this next section seem as if it's an endorsement of him or his content, even if I have at various points endorsed him in the past.  I appreciate you all for respecting this boundary, and now let's introduce one of the actors in our tale.  Hey everybody, it's Chuggaaconroy.

So, the TL;DR on Chugga is that he is one of the oldest Let's Players still working, he got into the medium in 2008 and has been going strong ever since.  His wheelhouse is Nintendo games and, more specifically, Nintendo RPGs.  He's played most of the Paper Marios for his channel, most of the Mario & Luigi games, a lot of Pokemon games, the Mother trilogy, and, at the time of writing, the first two Xenoblade Chronicles games.  I mentioned at the start of this that content creators I was following in the past were outspoken supporters of Operation Rainfall and Chugga was among the biggest of that category.  And his constant support of Xenoblade Chronicles is probably the fourth most noteworthy thing about his legacy, after being one of the most vocal supporters of the Mother trilogy, his influence on Pokemon content creation, and making a video essay complaining about a mediocre Paper Mario game from 2013.  I had a joke for that, but here I am complaining about a video game I didn't like from 10 years ago, who am I to talk?

I bring him up because of how his Let's Play of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 begins.  Rather than simply beginning the LP with a first episode and explaining everything as he goes, Chugga starts his Let's Play with a tutorial for Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  The video, titled "Everything I Wish I Knew About Xenoblade Chronicles 2" touts in its description "Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has some bad tutorials that lie to you, here's how you really play the game!"  And, indeed, that is the case.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has infamously awful tutorials, it literally does not tell you how to play the game.  It not only does a poor job of communicating how combat works and how various mechanics can be used to aid in combat.  I know, speaking personally, there was no point in the game where I even began to understand Chain Attacks and I think that the only reason I even made it through the late game despite that fact was that I kept pushing through until eventually I won because like.  What else was I supposed to do, the game didn't really explain to me how to play it!

Now, in my opinion, this is inexcusable.  It should be the responsibility of the people making the game to properly communicate how to actually play the game.  It should never, at any point, be the responsibility of the playerbase to fix your tutorials for you.  It should never be the responsibility of your playerbase to fix your game for you!  This is another one of those "Ed losing his love for JRPGs" talking points, once you begin to notice that a JRPG has a pretty bad, confusing tutorial, you start to notice how many of them do.  There are so many JRPGs with confusing mechanics, not immediately obvious but completely important strategy components and just archaic game design that keep their players in the dark on how the game functions.  Like, earlier this year I played Persona 1 for the first time, and Persona 1 doesn't explain anything.  I had to look at a guide to figure out how to play the game, something that is still a problem all these years later with games that are supposedly much better than this.  There are just so many JRPGs that feel like you need to have played the game already as a precursor to your first playthrough if you even want to understand how anything works in them.  Even games I love are like this, I did not understand the Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII very well until like 40 hours into my playthrough and I was like "man, if I was replaying this game, I would enjoy this so much more".

But more than just being a point where I felt distant from JRPGs as a genre, this is where I felt distant from JRPG fans.  See, I have this pet theory that JRPG fans not only don't mind their games being obtuse, they actively crave it.  Now, this is an absurd notion, right?  Why would anyone want something they love to be inaccessible?  Surely, once you find something you love, you would want to share it with people.  Want to spread your love for a game and why you love it to as many people as possible.  It also isn't an absurd notion, if you're reading this, you've been on the internet long enough to know that people who like something do not want to share that thing ever.  In fact, actively being exclusionary is how the fanbase of a thing tends to act, if you've ever interacted with a Kingdom Hearts fan in your life, you'll know that among the first things that they will tell you is that their series does not make sense unless you invest an absurd amount of your life into playing the games.  And whether or not they mean it maliciously, it has the same impact: the fanbase remains insular and those that would invade their space are locked on the other side of the gate.

Gatekeeping is not a new phenomenon, of course.  As long as people have been fans of things, they have wanted that thing to belong to them.  Wanted to possess it, only share it with those who could prove they are as into the thing as they are.  But I think that when it comes to JRPGs, the JRPG community not only is prone to do this, they actively benefit from it.  As previously stated in an earlier section, JRPG fans have a sort of twisted sense of pride about how meaty their games are.  That the length and amount of content somehow makes them "better" than others.  And so who benefits the most from JRPGs being obtuse?  Who actively gains something from engaging with a genre that seems bent on inaccessible?  For you see, if JRPGs remain inaccessible, then they remain lengthy, they remain mechanically complex to the point of absurdity, they remain a genre where it feels as if you need a playthrough to prep for your first playthrough.  And that is what JRPG fans seem to want.

I Am Not Playing Persona 5: A brief side tangent

At the time of writing this section, I had recently released one of my favorite things I've ever written, the gaming diary for Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age.  If you haven't read it, please do. I think it's funny, I think it's among my best critical works, I think it is a good show of my storytelling chops.  It's one of my best, I don't usually hype up my own work but I loved that one.  It almost didn't come out.  Like, I've talked about this with friends and in places I felt were safe spaces for me to communicate my frustration, but the Dragon Quest XI post, a work that I spent much of my summer writing and a game I spent a lot of time trying to understand and form a relationship with.  Three full days of my life were spent playing Dragon Quest XI, more than I've spent on any game for the blog and more than I've spent at all since I replayed Xenoblade Chronicles back in 2020.  And literally as I beat DQXI, as I was putting the finishing touches on my blog post and getting ready to send it for a posting in the morning, I almost scrapped the entire thing.  Because the way people who claim to love DQ, who claim to want people to play it, reacted to my decision to stop playing the game when it literally ends was the most deflating experience of my life.

The moment that I shared that I had beaten the game, I immediately was asked a question by some people who enjoy the game: will I be doing Act 3.  Act 3 is the post game of DQXI, it is a part of the story that happens after the credits that includes time travel, new story sequences, and the "true final boss" of the game.  To me, this is a bonus, an additional chunk of story for people who really love the game.  It's cool, but ultimately unnecessary, you get a full experience from just beating the final boss as that's where the narrative of the first two acts.  I do actually know what happens in it and let me tell you, I would not have enjoyed it.  My main criticism towards DQXI was a failure to commit to the ideas it sets forward throughout the game and trust me, a part of the story that immediately retcons the one story idea I respected them for adding in and sticking to was always going to make me mad.  It is better for all parties involved if I don't play it.  But to the people who already love Dragon Quest, my decision was... controversial.  They actually had a lot of thoughts about my decision to stop playing the game when it ends, stating that to not play Act 3 of Dragon Quest was simply to have not played Dragon Quest at all.  Which is funny, I don't see their 100+ page reviews of the game anywhere, but I guess they wouldn't be very good gatekeepers if they didn't try to immediately invalidate a genuine attempt to meet them at their level, huh?

It was deflating and it made me empathize with the people who are outspoken critics of RPGs as a genre and, especially, JRPGs.  JRPG fans are the most judgmental fanbase in gaming.  They will pick apart your playthrough, criticize you for engaging with games in bad faith, try to invalidate your thoughts and opinions, and ultimately assert that they are the true players and you are just a tourist.  It feels a lot like with JRPG fans you can play the game for 20 hours and if you just think it's okay and don't want to play it anymore they'll be like "you've barely even played it long enough to form an opinion, you gotta play it longer".  So then you check in at 50 hours and you still think it's just okay and they will go "well you haven't even beaten the game, there's still so much story you haven't seen, how do you know you won't love it until you've seen the ending".  So then you beat the game, and you still think it's just okay, and they go "well, you haven't played the stuff after the credits, that's where the real game is, you can't say whether or not you really like this game until you do all that".  And then you 100% the game, and guess what.  You still think it's just okay.  You think it is just okay.  And what do you hear?  "Well, why did you play so much of it if you didn't like it that much, this is clearly a you problem, nobody made you play a game you didn't really like".  They have layered defense mechanisms to invalidate your opinions, I swear.

And this shouldn't get to me.  It just shouldn't.  A few people have told me as much, and they're right.  I KNOW they're right.  I am being weird and getting in my head about this.  Especially since, well, this blog is first and foremost for me.  I write about games as an outlet for me, this is a passion project for me alone and I should not care about what other people have to say on that front.  But like.  It's impossible not to.  I want people to be interested in what I have to say, I want them to look at this blog and find it compelling and entertaining, I want them to read it and go "that was a fun, insightful read".  It then becomes incredibly deflating when you work on a big project and are told that what you did simply didn't actually matter because you didn't meet some arbitrary agreed upon standard held by people who say that they want you to play the game but then criticize you for doing so.

Persona 5 is never happening on this blog, and is honestly not happening on my own time either.  I am making an official announcement of this because Persona 5 has been hanging over this blog for some time, a game I always say I'll do "eventually".  But I am not doing it.  I cannot handle the intense scrutiny I know would result from me playing Persona.  People telling me I'm not playing it correctly, complaining that I'm not making enough of an effort to understand mechanics the game probably didn't explain well, judging me for my social link choices when I don't even want to be doing social links, I'm in my 30s, what do I care about the dating lives of teenagers?  I am choosing my peace of mind, and if that means that the people who already don't want me to play it because they like feeling like JRPGs are this exclusive club get exactly what they want, so be it.  I don't see how making people not enjoy the things you love is a win but I guess for a fanbase who got upset when the director of Persona 6 said he was going to try and make the game more accessible for a wider audience because they decided the soul of Persona was going to die to appeal to the "gun and ball" people, it is.

I Don't Like The Blade and Driver Dynamic

This section should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.  I do not like the core mechanic that the entire game is built around: blades and drivers.  I don't think it is compelling from a gameplay perspective, I dislike it from a story and worldbuilding perspective, and I truly cannot stand how this series treats this bizarre dynamic like it was actually a good thing going forward.  This, more than anything, is the burning fire that has kept my hatred for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 alight for almost 10 years now.  There was even a moment where I thought I wasn't going to write a thing about Xenoblade Chronicles 2, that I was like "it's a game I played a while back, I'm not interested in writing about it anymore", only for things to be revealed about the main blades and driver of this game that reignited my want to talk about this game.  We've got a lot of ground to cover on why I don't enjoy this part of the game, so let's strap in.

Gacha Covered

I want to start by talking about the dynamic as a mechanic in gameplay because it is by far the most consistently frustrating thing about it.  Now, I will admit on its face that gacha mechanics are not my thing.  I have always stayed far away from the majority of gacha games, with my singular exception that is even remotely related to gacha being Yu-Gi-Oh.  I have admitted in the past as well that I do not like gambling in video games, not finding the practice to be particularly compelling or entertaining and have even criticized sections for including mandatory gambling, no matter how weighted in favor of the player it is to account for that.  I have jokingly said in the past that I am the strongest RPG gamer because I have never successfully developed a gambling addiction and that sure wasn't going to start with Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  This is all to say that the fact that you have to roll new blades for your Drivers is something I was never going to like.

However, the reason I dislike it is maybe a bit more complicated than just simply going "well I don't like to gamble".  The thing about the vast majority of blades that you can roll in the game, and especially within the base game of Xenoblade 2, is that many of them prescribe to pre-existing weapon types that fulfill specific roles in combat.  You have the Healer weapons (Twin Rings, Bitballs, and Knuckle Claws), the Tank weapons (Shield Hammers and Chrome Katanas), and the Attacker weapons (Greataxes, Megalances, Ether Cannons).  There are unique weapons for story-important blades and various DLC blades but the vast majority of blades you will encounter in the base game follow these weapon types and categories.  A blade that wields a Lance will always be offensive, a blade that fights with their fists will always be a support unit, etc.  Not only will they always fit these categories, they will also usually have identical attacks, with only the element that they represent changing.  Every Greataxe at its core plays the same, every Shield Hammer plays the same, every Bitball plays the same, etc.  There are nuances to be sure that become revealed as you engage with Blade and fill out their affinity chart, but the core gameplay is always very similar no matter who you choose.

Now this is disappointing for quite a few reasons.  The Blades effectively are your party, in a standard party you have 3 characters active who each have three interchangeable blades equipped at a time.  So the fact that the various weapons are not very distinct from party member to party member does kind of put a damper on things in my opinion.  Especially when many of the party members that the game wants you to care about, the named characters you can randomly roll through the gacha instead of the blank slates that normally arrive, also abide by these gameplay restrictions.  The first Rare Blade you roll is a special event, the fifth Rare Blade you've rolled of that weapon type is getting boxed forever.

I think I understand the idea, that they did not want to put too much emphasis on the non-story Blades initially because it is a randomized element.  You would basically be rewarding players with better luck by having them get the named characters with specialized movesets and weapons.  But like.  That's a gacha game.  This is the system you made.  If you don't want players with better luck to be rewarded, don't make luck a central tenant of your gameplay ideology.  Or develop a way to get special blades without rolling for them, but I guess that only stops players from rolling new blades and burning through their cores by taking the characters they want out of the pool; rather than them simply stopping the process of rolling new blades because it's hour 60 of the game and you're sick of watching the same sequence over and over just to roll another generic Blade.

As well, the randomized elements make many of these Blades a massive inconvenience.  It is exceedingly common to have a Blade join your party either too early in the game for the player to actually do something with, or too late in the game to where they can naturally complete their own objectives to be enhanced without you having to do a lot of grinding.  As mentioned previously, the Blades have a way of differentiating themselves even when the movesets don't.  The Affinity Chart, a chart of various different objectives that, when completed, can grant your Blades new skills, buffs to their stats or entirely new abilities.  Most of them are pretty simple, kill x amount of enemies, cook a specific dish because every JRPG needs to have cooking now, walk so many km, stuff like that.  Some of them are "beat every superboss in the game".  Like literally every one, that is a real Affinity Chart and it is built around actually beating every superboss in the game.  The first Rare Blade I ever rolled, the wind spirit Boreas, requires you to not only gain access to a hidden part of one of the Titans, but also fill that area with just ludicrous amounts of food, way more food than you could ever naturally obtain.  The most infamous Blade, Ursula, is built around just grinding a sidequest that you could either unlock as soon as it's available to you or right before the final boss of the game depending on how your luck goes.  Despite trying to balance this system to be fair to people regardless of luck, they managed to make it so much more dependent on luck to get any character to be halfway decent.

However, the big problem I have with the gacha element is not really with the Blades themselves.  It's with the Drivers.  Now, when you add a specific Driver to your party, they tend to have a pre-established role within the party.  Rex starts out as a fighter, being kind of an all-arounder but with a focus on offense.  Nia starts out as a healer, providing the support for the party early on in the game.  Tora is technically your aggro Tank early in the game but his whole deal is different and I don't want to get into it because I never really understood how to customize Poppi and hated playing Tiger Tiger anyways so I just avoided using him.  These are very distinctive roles that are directly synonymous with the roles of the Blades.  So, if you have not played Xenoblade 2, you are probably imagining a very intuitive system where you roll Blades and then equip them to the Drivers they feel most natural on.  Healing blades can get funneled to Nia, DPS to Rex, Tanks to Morag, etc.  You as the player gain the ability to customize your party members to fulfill what you need them to do and, after you've learned how everything works, you could maybe experiment with different builds to carve out your own play style.

Xenoblade 2 doesn't function like that.  Instead, to summon forth a Blade, i.e. to do your gacha roll, you must first select the party member you wish to perform the roll with and then perform your gacha roll.  The Blade you roll will then be bound to the party member in question, with the only ways to remove and rearrange being either a very specific and fairly rare item or a late game power-up that we will get to discussing at some point.  This is annoying to say the least, especially on a first time playthrough.  Establishing these characters as having specific roles to fill only for the way to expand their possibilities being entirely random and, often, contradictory to the roles established from their literal introduction is often frustrating.  For starters, it kind of removes the unique identity that many of these characters have.

This is a common criticism people have against job systems, they don't like that you can technically class any character into any job and rework them as you see fit.  As if the jobs remove the identity.  And I understand that, in my opinion, the job systems work because they are a decision you're making, you have the agency to make your characters whatever you want, develop their skills both to the best of their own abilities and to fulfill roles on your team.  To me, THIS system is what a lot of people think job systems are.  Every character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is constantly adopting and adapting every play style, to the point where the meager party of 5 somehow feels redundant within its own context.  We don't truly have "Tanks, Healers, and Attackers", we just have "a character who might be slightly more capable at something than the other characters".

But more importantly, it removes player agency from the situation almost entirely.  I don't want to get into the whole debate of "what is an RPG really", it is, as with most catchall genre terms, too broad to really define anything clearly.  Especially when, like, some people are always like "well you play a role in every game so every game is an RPG".  Come on guys, we all know what that actually means.  Anyways, if I had to define it, RPGs are about the player's choices and the consequences that follow.  This isn't the only real point I think makes something count as an RPG but it is a pretty central design philosophy.  We tend to associate this idea of choice with Western RPGs, games where the player is actively leading the story and literally making decisions, but it is in JRPGs too.  If you are making a team building decision that impacts how you progress, that is a choice and a consequence.  Building a unique skill build and living with the aftermath is a choice and its consequence.  This is the fun of RPGs, even if it sometimes seems like the audience is too busy trying to optimize this fun to really see it.

Xenoblade 2's heavy focus on random elements ends up creating an environment where the player is bound by the consequences of choices they did not make.  Team building is decided entirely by elements far outside of your control and you, as the player, as basically left to work within the confines the game has decided for you in order to progress in the game.  I am used to playing suboptimally in games, I try not to look at the optimal strategy in anything I play because I want the playthrough in question to be my own.  That's kind of the core thing with this blog, sharing my experiences with playing games for the first time.  It would be so much less fun if I went "oh I looked it up and it turns out the best thing to do is keep buffing this one specific character and they do 600 damage a hit for 6 straight hits a turn".  But Xenoblade 2 always felt like I didn't have a choice to play optimally.  If my DPS unit rolled all healers, my healer rolled all tanks, and my tank rolled all DPS, I was simply stuck either having to grind enough to fix this, or having to make do with builds I never would've practically chosen if I were given literally any choices.  It's trying to win at poker when every hand is low numbers.  I don't feel challenged, I feel cheated.

A Lack of Agency

 The mechanical issues also bleed into some of the issues I have with this dynamic from a lore perspective.  Frankly, the relationship between blades and drivers makes me super uncomfortable.  And I know in some respect it is supposed to but in my opinion, it is uncomfortable to a degree that I do not think the game is intending.  So, I have described Blades as "living weapons" in the past, as if they were simply sentient tools that the game summons forth and their humanoid variants are simply an alternate version.  I have been burying the lede in this respect.  Yeah, I know, me burying the lede?  It's almost like I'm a wannabe Hbomberguy or something.  Blades are not simply living weapons, they are people.  They are fully autonomous beings with their own personalities, dreams, aspirations, and so on.  They have names, histories, they have desires.  Even the generic Blades, who otherwise have nothing more than a randomly selected name, have their own form of identity via their randomized skill trees.  These are people... that you can summon forth via a gacha roll at any time.

This is the first ripple of why I find this whole thing deeply uncomfortable.  I've been alluding to this previously but personhood and fighting for your right to exist in your own skin are pretty major themes of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  There are several characters who either see themselves as nothing more than a weapon to be utilized for others or characters who feel the need to hide who they are from a world that will see them as objects.  And so it can be argued that the fact that, as Blades are treated as non-people in the lore, it makes sense for the game to treat them as such.  To set up that these are literally entities that spring forth into existence as fully formed people with unique identities only to then be primarily utilized as weapons by a world that only sees them as such.  I get it.  I really do.  I just don't think the game effectively sells this theme.

See, the issue with establishing that this game is about personhood, that the Blades not being treated as people in the text is kind of the point, is that you have to actively make that mean something.  You can't just go "yeah, Blades aren't really treated as people, that kind of sucks" and it hold any weight.  This is a theme that needs to be addressed, needs to be built off of.  You need to see the world and its inhabitants grow and change across the narrative, become more empathetic to the plight of the Blades, a class of citizens that are treated as weaponry.  But it doesn't really go anywhere.  The world does not meaningfully change as a result of the events of the story, people do not learn empathy, they don't learn acceptance.  Instead, the world just fundamentally changes to make their decisions for them, the status quo shifting to where the common man ultimately has to shrug and go "welp, guess we were wrong, it wasn't really my problem to begin with".  It is a level of apathy that I feel permeates the story and, honestly, permeates the gameplay as well.  Like, whether or not you realize the Blade and Driver system is awful, that it strips full people of their autonomy, you still have to participate in the subjugation of these people as that's just the game.  You can't stop your gacha rolls on behalf of institutionalized enslavement of an entire class of people, how else will you get that one half-naked woman you're still missing from your collection?

I feel like, genuinely, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is bolstered not by the fact that its theme is, you know.  Well done.  But just that it has a theme at all.  There's this kind of level of media illiteracy that I have been calling the "Hunchback Principle", named after Disney's 1996 adaptation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It is kind of the first level of learning analysis and critique, being able to look at something and go "this has themes" but not being able to really examine those themes in a meaningful way, so you think that anything that has a theme is really meaningful.  I'm describing myself a lot here too, when I first got past my "making fun of every movie I watch" phase, I entered my "I think that I'm a critic because I watched three Lindsay Ellis videos" phase and I was just like "this film has a noticeable theme that I like, therefore it's good".  Its connection to Hunchback of Notre Dame is that in my lifetime I have seen Hunchback go from "a Renaissance Disney film nobody talks about" to "the Disney film that everyone agrees is the best if you get past the mainstream picks", namely for its gothic animation, dark storyline, and themes of religious abuse and racism.  Ignoring the awful shoehorned in comic relief and how often it undermines its own themes by kind of both-sidesing the arguments to create a more "vibrant" end product.  And I think that's where Xenoblade Chronicles 2 discourse has been sitting in for nearly a decade now.  People like that it has themes but can't identify if it does them well.

My second ripple with this is that not only is Xenoblade Chronicles 2 built around this class of people who exist primarily for utilitarian roles, but that their existence is physically and emotionally dependent on who their Driver is.  Blades are technically immortal.  They have existed since the birth of this world and have persisted into the modern day.  Any Blade that appears connected to a Driver in the present has, seemingly, existed for as long as anyone can remember, with many Blades being centuries old.  There is a caveat to this immortality though.  See, Blades can technically "die", there are periods of nonexistence for the Blades that, when they occur, turn them back into their core crystals and return them to the gacha pool to be rolled again.  However, Blades themselves are incredibly resilient, they do not age, they cannot get sick, and so long as they don't manage to expend all the power contained within their core crystal (a nigh impossible task for an ordinary Blade), they cannot revert to their core crystal on their own.  So how, pray tell, do Blades "die".  Simple: their lifeforce is tied to their Driver.

From the moment that a Blade is summoned by their Driver, they are bound to whatever lifespan the Driver has with no choice in the matter.  Their entire existence is dependent on their Driver managing to stay alive, with their only option to prevent their own untimely demise being binding themselves even more to their Driver by infusing the Driver with their own essence, essentially making the Driver part Blade.  Which is a cultural taboo.  It is a cultural taboo for the Blades to seek a means of their own survival.  They are instead expected to willingly and capably serve a master who may or may not have their best intentions at heart only to one day cease to exist for an extended period of time simply because their master got themselves killed.  We actually see this happen over and over throughout the story, both in main story content and in sidequests, and while it is treated as a tragedy it often is played as simply an unavoidable fact of life rather than the injustice it truly is.

And the worst part is that it is still not the worst part.  I have previously stated that Blades are fully formed people with their own identities, aspirations, and feelings about situations.  This is only a half truth.  Blades do have concrete identities of their own, but what they lack is histories.  Learned experiences.  Those sorts of things.  Why do they lack these?  Because the moment that a Blade returns to their Crystal, their previous existence is wiped clean.  They go into a default state, like hitting a factory reset setting on a piece of tech.  This way when they are once again summoned they don't have to worry about, oh, the weight of centuries of lost friendships and conflicts weighing down on them.  They can just serve their new master without any additional baggage added onto them.  How very Westworld of you, Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  It's so gross and I know the point is to be gross but like, I don't know y'all.  Like to me this is such an absolutely bad thing that the idea that our protagonists are kind of fighting for the future of a world where this is happening makes me feel very nauseous.

Not only do the Blades enter this factory reset mode upon their death, but it's also heavily implied, if not outright stated, that their allegiance to their new Driver is absolute.  That their own motivations and allegiances belong to the new Driver regardless of their own personality and/or past.  Take for instance the Blades Praxis and Theory, a pair of Blades who are, if not biological sisters, have at least adopted each other as sisters in a sense.  We first meet this duo as a pair of thieves, their Drivers being people who steal core crystals from unsuspecting Drivers wandering the Titans and who use the sisters to do their dirty work.  However, Praxis' Driver ends up getting killed in the midst of the conflict, and Praxis' core crystal gets picked up by the party, to free Praxis once it's active again.  When you summon Praxis, not only does she have no memory of her previous life obviously, but her entire existence is so aligned with the party now that when she reunites with her sister and Theory tells her what they were in the very recent past, Praxis seems confused by the notion she ever could be a thief in the first place.  This a fully sapient being, a literal person, whose entire ability to conceptualize doing crime has been rewritten in a matter of days.  And this is not the only story like this.  This memory erasure separates lovers (Brighid and Aegaeon, who have been in love for centuries but must fall back in love each life time), families (Vess raised her Driver's kids as a mother only to have any memory of them erased when her elderly Driver passed on), brothers in arms (Roc was Vandham's partner and friend).

Now, I'm sure you read that their allegiances change upon reset to be in line with their Driver's wants and needs and you had a chill shoot down your spine.  "Surely not" you're thinking to yourself.  "There's no way they would go there", you're hoping.  So when I said that the game was unconcerned with actually punishing Tora for his weird, obviously sexually charged behavior towards the robot he built, there was another reason for it beyond just the game's inconsistent character writing.  See, romantic and/or intimate relationships between Blades and their Drivers are not only a thing, it seems exceptionally common for Blades and Drivers to form relationships with one another.  In fact, throughout Xenoblade 2 we only really see one relationship involving a Blade that isn't with their Driver, that being Brighid and Aegaeon's tragic romance.  Every other relationship depicted between named characters is usually between this indentured class and their Masters.  Now, I do want to be fair here: the core relationship that the game focuses on, while being between a Blade and their Driver, is a very different thing than the ordinary Blade dynamics.  The Blade in question, Pyra/Mythra, is a special creation and so does not technically need a Driver to exist.

That being said, that is kind of only one instance of this occurring.  Every other time that a Blade/Driver relationship is depicted within the game, it is between a Blade whose existence, allegiances, and motivations are dependent on their Driver.  It is difficult to find these relationships endearing, in my opinion, which the game wants us to.  The game sees this as a victory, that many Blades and Drivers overcame the separation between the two classes and found love in spite of that.  But knowing that Blades' ideologies are shaped by the person who wields them does kind of make the relationship icky no matter what way you slice it.  Like I find it hollow to state they found love despite their obvious class separation when one of them objectively holds power over the other.  Who's to say how deep the influence a Driver has over their Blade goes, you know?  Could the Driver being attracted to the Blade create a scenario where the Blade in question becomes attracted to their Driver because of this?  The emotions of the Driver clearly shape the Blade's personality in some way so whose to say a Blade ISN'T forced to be romantically attracted to a Driver who is attracted to them?

In my opinion, regardless of whether Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sees this reality as a bad thing, it doesn't really matter?   I don't think that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is fully prepared to deal with the gravity of what they are stating.  It obviously understands that this is an unjust system but I don't think it views this injustice on a personal level in any meaningful way.  In a big picture sense it understands that it is a game about prejudice and the injustices of having an entire class of people exist to serve another, but I don't think it really understands the repercussions of that on a personal level.  It alternatively never brings it up, brings it up only to draw attention to how fine it is, actually, that this is happening because the Blades like their Drivers (despite not having a choice in who to be bonded with in the first place, making them liking their Drivers a moot point), or acknowledging the tragedy of them not having any real autonomy over their lives but in a way that feels very hollow, like "yeah it sucks, but this is just how it has to be".  Ironically in a game about self-actualization and personhood, it fails to address the key thing that is ultimately stopping people from being seen as people in any meaningful way.  Well, almost any meaningful way.

The Villains Are Just Simply Right

I want to preface this by saying that I do not particularly like the villains in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  The villainous organization of the game is, in my opinion, an absolute mess.  Introduced in some of the first moments of the game through their apparent leader Jin and his apparent henchman Malos, they seek Pyra and the power of the weapon she is manifested from in order to gain the power to bring about the world's destruction.  As you might guess from the title of this section, I find their motivations very compelling, but I don't find them to be so.  Many members of this villainous organization are effectively nameless jobbers, fitting generic anime villain archetypes like the smarmy schemer, the crazed comic relief, the woman, etc. only really recognizable not due to their individual characters but just due to the fact that they keep coming up.  They then expect you to care about these characters by revealing their backstories and own personal tragedies, only to then immediately kill them off seconds later in what is one of the clumsiest writing bits in a game that already has exceptionally clumsy writing.

And the organization of these villains is just awful, Jin seems to be the main villain with Malos being his kind of muscleheaded subordinate who you expect to take out early on, only for the game to very suddenly reveal halfway through that Jin is actually working for Malos and that he is the actual big bad of the game.  A role Malos does not fit well into because he is such a muscleheaded jock who manages to feel like an early henchman all the way into his final boss fight.  I even struggle to consider the idea that Malos is the main villain to be a reveal, both because the game kind of treats it as information you were already supposed to have, but also because it just never feels true.  Malos is just such a bad fit for a main antagonist that the push to make him the actual real threat kind of undermines the latter half of the game.  The game would've been legitimately better served by not revealing what Malos was until the literal end of the game and having the player believe that Jin was the main antagonist up until the point where they separate so Malos can ascend to be the weapon to destroy the planet.

However, despite my distaste for the villains as characters and as villains, I do think they're just transparently right.  As previously stated, their ultimate goal is to gain the power of some ultimate weapon and destroy the world.  Malos is essentially a being of pure chaos and destruction, he craves the end of everything, he was born with the goal of bringing about the end of all things.  But the others are not just simply a death cult, the villain faction has not rallied behind Malos because they seek the end times.  No, they have rallied behind Malos because of the injustices present within every facet of the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  The villain faction are, themselves, all former Blades who have managed to divorce themselves from the need for a Driver, to continue their existence past their Driver's limited lifespan, memories intact.  Being the victims of not only an unjust system but also the way society looks down upon those who attempt to escape this injustice, the villain faction has grown to be a bit extreme, feeling that there is no way to change this world and no way to save it, so it must be destroyed.

It's very interesting to me how the fanbase of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 discusses this motivation?  The way they usually talk about the villain's motivation is how sympathetic it is.  How the villains have a distinctive point, an understandable motivation that you could feel for.  They see their actions as villainous, but that the core ideals are good.  And maybe it is just that I hate this world and these characters and don't care whether any of them live or die at the end of the day, but I think that what Jin and gang are doing is the only correct action.  Like, the entire world only functions with systemic slavery.  It is the core dynamic at the heart of their society, being a Driver is a methodology through which people can gain societal advancement and build wealth, Drivers are often significant members of government and/or the military, they are thought to be, effectively, chosen by the gods.  It is difficult to conceptualize this as a world worth saving, it is so fundamentally broken from the bottom up that this extreme form of abolitionism seems like almost the only valid solution.

Not only that, but Blades are necessary for the continued existence of the peoples of the Cloud Sea in general.  Late in the game it's revealed by Jin that the Titans themselves are also Blades, that the fate of all Blades is to eventually grow into Titans and serve as landmass for the people who live in the sea.  The Blade's fate is to serve, they serve in life, they wait to return to service in death, and eventually when they're aged enough they evolve into continents for people to live upon, mining their bodies for resources in service of the continued existence of the peoples who once claimed ownership over them.  And, as Titans, they beget more Blades, giving birth to them inside massive chambers deep within their physiology.  It is frankly horrifying how this entire cycle works, Blades are born into this world to serve a select class of people who are deemed to have the spark to wield them, who will influence their very autonomy once said connection is formed, they then die alongside their Drivers only to be reborn again still in service of Drivers with no memory of their previous life, and they do this for an unknown number of cycles until they grow into a continent for the people they used to serve to live on and give birth to more people who will continue the cycle.  This is horror.

And it's a horror the protagonists have to defend.  By virtue of standing against Jin and crew, they are defending the systemic enslavement of an entire group of people regardless of whether or not they agree with it.  They are the Confederacy, whether they want to be or not.  Any argument they could come up with to the contrary kind of falls flat in my opinion.  The idea that Blades are fine with this system, and in fact form genuine partnerships with their Drivers rings hollow when their existence and, indeed, their very personality is directly impacted by who their Driver is.  Entire persons giving up their autonomy is the only way this world functions, burn it down, it doesn't deserve to live on.  The only reason any of this turns out well is that Pyra and Mythra just decide at the end to sacrifice themselves to just reboot the world to where this doesn't need to work like this, which seems like an admission that they created a world that wasn't worth fighting for and so hit the magical reset button.

Nia

If you were to ask me who my least favorite character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is, it's Mythra.  If you were to ask me who the worst character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is, it's Tora.  But if you were to ask me who the most frustrating character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is?  Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to the stage: Nia.  Now this is, perhaps, my most controversial take in this entire analysis.  Nia is widely considered to be the best character in this game.  Her sharp wit contrasts the main characters well, her prominent Welsh influence gives her such a distinctive voice, there's a mystery surrounding her that plays throughout the story as we get hints that she's hiding something major from the rest of the party.  And her story arc is often cited as the narrative and thematic high point of the game, a moment of incredible self-actualization that gives the party the strength to carry on at a key moment in the story when they're kind of lost.  Nia is the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 fanbase's GOAT, everyone I've ever heard talk about this game says that Nia is their favorite character.

So the big reveal in Nia's storyline is that she is a Blade herself.  A long time ago, maybe years, maybe centuries, Nia was the Blade to a father who treated her as if she were one of his own daughters, raising her to be a proper lady and companion to his actual daughter.  When said daughter fell sick, Nia's Driver was distraught and, after exhausting every other option, pressured Nia into fusing with his daughter so she would live on.  Nia agreed, and lived as the other girl for her Driver's entire lifetime until he passed on and, as Nia was now infused with human components, the rules about her returning to a core crystal were bypassed, meaning she now would wander the Cloud Sea as an immortal.  She would eventually manifest another Blade, her companion Dromarch, and after running afoul of a religious organization that we're not going to get into but you can probably guess is secretly evil given this is a JRPG, killing god is like the thing, she encounters Jin and joins his cause, apparently not knowing how extreme his standpoint actually was.

Fast forward to the present and, after a mission with Jin and Malos goes south, Nia finds herself allying with Rex and Pyra on their mission.  It helps that they rescued her from capture after she was arrested for being a terrorist.  But her status as a Blade remains a secret to the party, with only a handful of people ever finding out before the big reveal, the most notable being Mythra during the chapter she is introduced into as they have a bathhouse scene because of course they have a bathhouse scene, the Xenoblade series is uncomfortably horny.  This eventually gets revealed to both the player and the rest of the cast at the start of the late game, the party has been separated from Pyra and Mythra and are attempting to find the strength to rescue them.  Their backs are against the wall battling phantoms of a dead hero and at a point of desperation, Nia realizes that she can no longer hide herself.  That for her friends to survive, for everyone to accomplish their goals, she must be true to who she actually is.  She sheds the persona she had developed across her life and, for the first time in who knows how long, reveals herself to be a Blade, choosing Rex to be her Driver.

Do I even need to say why I don't like this?  Yes, I do, this is the point of this section.   I just have to ask, how do you get to the point where you are so disconnected from the material you are making that you literally manage to create a storyline where a character frees herself from the shackles of trauma and societal expectation and her own personal hangups by putting on shackles.  Nia had already successfully escaped the system that literally said that she belonged to someone else.  She was free.  She may have not enjoyed what that freedom entails but she was free.  It is truly baffling to me that this game is so divorced from its own implications that it does not seem to understand that one of its main characters essentially decides that being open as an enslaved person is better than having to wear a big coat to hide her butterfly wings as a free person!  It's so maddening, it's not moving the character forward, it is moving her backward.  Like am I crazy?  Is this not one of the most hollow self-actualization storylines of all time!?

Oh and then also she reveals, seemingly out of nowhere, that she has fallen in love with Rex.  Now, granted, I played with the English audio track for this game so if the Japanese version does a better job of setting up this relationship, then good on them.  But in the English audio track, this literally comes out of nowhere.  Nia spends the entire game being mostly frustrated by Rex, albeit usually in an affectionate way.  It's sort of a big sister/little brother dynamic if anything, which would track with Nia's storyline of literally being a big sister figure/protector to her previous Driver's daughter.  You could maybe even draw comparisons there between that girl and Rex, develop that connection to explain why she chooses what she chooses.  Nia falling in love with Rex is such an absurd idea that makes her character and her arc so much worse and it just doesn't make sense.

Like the game is so heavily built around the love triangle between Rex, Pyra, and Mythra that Nia confessing her love for Rex almost feels like a joke.  Like "this game is already such a harem anime that we might as well lean into it".  The only people I've earnestly seen go "yeah, I expected this the whole time" were people who just inherently assume that every woman just inherently wants the main character.  Even if I enjoyed anything about Nia's storyline, this revelation just reduces it down to the most dumb motivation.  She chooses to return to enslavement after a long time of being free just because she's fallen in love with the guy who she's handing the reins of her life to.  And then the game treats it like a joke,  I was foreshadowing.  It is a literary device.  Rex literally says "I love you too, Nia.  I love all of you, all of my friends."  Just the worst.  Nia deserved better and now the one character who was even a little likable is now among the worst parts of the game.

The Man Who Rex the Game

You know, it's funny, I wasn't even originally going to write about Rex.  Like, I don't like Rex, I think he's a very uncompelling protagonist who manages to take the "lovable idiot" trope seen in a lot of anime and remove the lovable and replace it with more idiot.  He's probably only not in my bottom five characters of this game because the rest of this cast is hateable for more interesting reasons.  But like, this isn't an interesting opinion to have, people who adore Xenoblade 2 hate Rex.  He is the platonic ideal of "annoying anime-esque JRPG protagonist" and it is not uncommon to state Rex is a hurdle you must overcome to get to the good parts.  Which I think is kind of silly, given that they also say this about the first three chapters of the game, meaning Xenoblade 2 requires you to overcome both the protagonist of the game and the first like 30 hours before it becomes something worth playing.  To me that sounds like a game you shouldn't play.

So I was going to leave Rex out of the post because I just don't think he's interesting enough to talk about.  But as I was writing other sections of this post, writing about why I think Xenoblade Chronicles 2 isn't a very good RPG, I realized that Rex is very important to that argument.  That some of the biggest sins you could ever commit with regards to a party-based RPG are done on behalf of making Rex the central character to the story.  The remaining party members often feel secondary to Rex during the gameplay, the game keeps giving him distinctive advantages that strongly suggest the game always wants your party to be built around him.  Xenoblade 2 already has such a limited number of party members, 5 total and one of them may just be a dead slot depending on how much you engage with the Poppi mechanics, but Rex's unique abilities further makes that number seem smaller because there is just no reason not to run him.  Rex ultimately gets two incredibly unique buffs that make the entire party seem like it's built around him, to the game's detriment.

The first comes with the introduction of Mythra to the plot.  It always comes back around to Mythra, I swear.  So, normally Drivers can equip three Blades at a time.  That is the hard rule for every Driver in the game, they have three Blade slots to equip Blades on at any given time and they can switch in or out the Blades that they have access to into one of those slots.  With the introduction of Mythra, however, Rex gains a fourth Blade slot essentially.  Pyra and Mythra are able to freely switch between themselves mid-battle, thereby giving Rex strictly more options than every other character in the game.  Mind you, this isn't a proper fourth blade slot, you aren't equipping a fourth blade to fill out his kit.  You equip one of the sisters and then can switch into the other.  This distinction is negligible however, you are often forced to have Pyra or Mythra equipped throughout the story and even if you aren't being forced, you kind of want them equipped anyways.  Pyra and Mythra, especially Mythra, are among the strongest Blades in the game.  This is mostly done because you are forced to have them equipped for the vast majority of play time so if they were an ineffective or insufficient Blade, it would be annoying to say the least.  But Mythra is effectively an entirely unique character gameplay wise, she is only one of two Blades total in the base game that is able to utilize the Light element, which is an incredibly powerful element that kind of breaks the elemental balance chart due to its rarity.  Couple that with Mythra's naturally very high damage output and basically Rex not only gets more Blades than everyone else, but the Blades he gets unique to him kind of win the game.

The second occurs late game, after the part where Nia decides that she's willing to be enslaved if her master is a guy she has a crush on.  Which come to think of it is also just every Romantasy book on the Goodreads choice awards list.  Anyways, after rescuing Pyra and Mythra, they unlock yet another new powerup in the form of their green-haired "goddess" form who calls down lasers from the sky.  She has her own name but the game always calls her either Pyra or Mythra depending on which you chose as the default personality after unlocking her, so I don't actually know it.  Now, I'm not going to tell you that Rex now gets a fifth Blade slot because that's just not true.  This other form is a super form he can get during battle to deal massive damage, it's not a proper piece of his arsenal.  No, he gets something much more powerful.  He gets to completely break the rules.

I have mentioned previously that Blades, once rolled, are locked to very specific Drivers, only allowed to be moved through a very specific and rare item and/or an effect you unlock late game.  That effect is what Rex is given during this point of the game.  Rex gains the ability to move Blades around, unequip and reequip the Blades rolled throughout your journey as you see fit.  This seems like a useful ability, finally unchaining the players from their luck and allowing them to customize their builds as they see fit.  However, you can rearrange Blades, but you can only rearrange every Blade to go on Rex.  While this does technically still solve the key issue of not being in control of your own build, it does also heighten the problem where Rex is treated as a necessary tentpole for the gameplay.  You are essentially building around Rex, he is given so many advantages that the other party members often feel like they're there because the game has already decided on a party of three and so you have to have two other party members.

To me, this is a pretty major issue because a good party-based RPG never directly places one party member over any other(s).  Like, inevitably it's going to happen, if there are differences between characters, one of them will be better than all the others.  The moment you unlock offensive magic with Yuna in FFX she completely invalidates Lulu, when you unlock the enhanced Serena in DQXI she invalidates Sylvando and Rab, stuff like that.  But these are not intentional prioritization of one party member over all others, these are circumstantial because of how the game plays out.  The intent is for the party to be balanced so that the player can find their own play style and their own way to address the problems put forward by the game.  Develop their own unique way of playing the game (assuming they aren't just going to look it up and immediately optimize everything).  This is, legitimately, one of the most important things in JRPGs in my opinion, the idea that the party is balanced enough to where you can find your own play style in them.

The emphasis on Rex removes this element because it makes Rex feel like he's always the correct option.  He is given truly insane buffs that place him leaps and bounds above the other party members.  It truly ruins the core dichotomy at the center of every single JRPG, your party is not a group of heroes unified in a common goal, it's the tale of this one super powerful demigod who gets all the special toys and the people who have gotten sucked into his orbit.  The numerous story problems, unappealing world, and bad tutorials are all one thing, all key problems but problems one could simply write off as this being a very specific kind of JRPG.  But if there is one thing that I would cite as the reason I don't want to play the game, the reason I do not now nor will I ever find Xenoblade 2 a fun experience to play, it is truly that from top to bottom I feel like I have been given no choices and am instead suffering the consequences of a pre-determined path.  I do not feel like anything I, as a player, choose to do in Xenoblade 2 matters.  The correct options are obvious, the weapons loadouts inconsequential, the characters barely different.  I am simply here to consume, not to think.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is hollow.  Deeply and truly hollow.  

Go Set a Watchman

Bear with me for a second, let me put y'all on game.  In 2015, author Harper Lee, author of the American classic "To Kill a Mockingbird", a standard of American literature and a usual suspect for required reading, would release her second ever novel, 55 years after the publishing of Mockingbird.  Not only was it the first book in five and a half decades by an American icon, but Go Set a Watchman was more specifically a genuine sequel to the beloved first book, detailing the life of a now-adult Scout as she returned to Maycomb after having moved away to pursue a career in the big city.  Go Set a Watchman was unprecedented, an author coming out of what was essentially a permanent retirement to write a sequel to her beloved original work before her imminent passing.  A lot of people were excited, the buzz was insane, a return to this world they loved so much, these characters who have shaped them as people.  And then it was released, and rapidly became one of the most controversial books of all time.

Now, much of what I said in the previous paragraph are half-truths.  Go Set a Watchman was not technically a finished novel, but rather an unreleased first draft of a book Harper Lee was working on before To Kill a Mockingbird.  Not only that, but the book is not really a sequel.  It IS To Kill a Mockingbird, or at least Harper Lee's original intention for it.  The novel that we would come to know as To Kill a Mockingbird started out as a book that juxtaposed the storyline of Scout Finch as a child growing up in Maycomb with the story of the adult Scout returning to Maycomb as an adult, showing us how childhood innocence and our want to see the world we grew up in within its best light can, and often does, crumble when faced with the reality of the situation.  This would change during writing and editing as both Harper Lee and the publisher found the parts that would become To Kill a Mockingbird more compelling and more fulfilling and chose to expand those into their own novel, leaving the adult Scout's sections in the archives for 55 years.

Now there are a lot of shady things about Go Set a Watchman's release.  I don't really want to touch upon the controversy surrounding the release and all the allegations regarding the treatment of Harper Lee therein, it's not relevant to this post, but there are many things that make this book controversial.  The shadiest thing I wish to touch upon is how Go Set a Watchman was discussed and, seemingly, how it was marketed.  It is now easy to understand Go Set a Watchman for what it is, an unfinished work showing the creative evolution of one of the most iconic books of all time, an interesting source for writers and audiences alike to look upon and understand the creative process.  But, at the time, it was, if not intentionally, at least accidentally marketed as a sequel to the original book.  That is what people who were buying it in 2015 and reading through it would understand Watchman as being.  And I believe that Watchman makes one of the most egregious errors a sequel can make, and it's a pretty perfect example of this error.  That error being that Watchman makes the original work worse.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a book about many things.  It is a book about childhood and the loss of innocence.  It is a book about racial tensions in the deep South and the lack of fairness given to its black citizens.  It's a book about the inadequacies of our justice system, in which you can literally prove a man's innocence and that man can still be found guilty if the well is already sufficiently poisoned.  But more than that, it is a book about doing the right thing even when it isn't the smart thing.  Protagonist Scout Finch's father Atticus, who in many ways has kind of supplanted the original protagonist into being the protagonist of the story, is a lawyer in the city of Maycomb, Alabama who takes the unpopular position of defending one of its black citizens in the face of accusation by one of its white citizens.  To the people of Maycomb, this is an open and shut case.  They need no evidence to condemn the defendant and vindicate the prosecution.  But Atticus does not see it that way.  This case is clear to him, the defendant clearly and obviously could not have committed the crime and he trusts that, if he can prove it, even the racist citizens of Maycomb could not condemn him.  That justice will prevail.  That the goodness of people will prevail.

Atticus has been, over the years, a symbol for decency, for respect, for humanity.  The person we should all strive to be.  A man willing to fight for what's right even against insurmountable odds.  A man who teaches his children not to judge based on the color of one's skin, but rather on a man's character.  A man who, to many people, represented a fighter against racism.  Some may interpret it as naivety, the very excellent Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird for instance tends to frame Atticus as a man who sees good where there is none, where even as the people in town constantly prove to him that he's wrong about them, he still holds to the belief that the system will work, that justice will prevail.  But on the whole, Atticus seems to be written as the kind of man we should all strive to be, an encapsulation of the core themes of To Kill a Mockingbird.

It is then, unsurprising, when Go Set a Watchman gained controversy for its stance on Atticus.  I want to state that, while I do not enjoy Watchman that much personally, I do find its ideas very compelling.  The idea of facing your childhood and realizing you were incorrect is very compelling, and if it had released more as a companion to the original work, I think that our understanding of it would be different.  The long and short of it is that, when the adult Scout returns to Maycomb, she quickly discovers that her father, the symbol of morality and justice that she has built her entire life around, is not really who she thought he was.  Namely, Atticus has been attending Klan meetings and is a very prominent member of the Maycomb chapter of the KKK.  If the book had been released as its original intention, this would be a brilliant and unsettling plot twist.  In many ways it still is.  It works very well within the themes of Go Set a Watchman, of what it is trying to say, trying to accomplish.

The problem is that To Kill a Mockingbird existed as a complete narrative for so long.  That for decades, we knew this book as one thing, we knew what it was about, we knew what it was trying to say, we knew what it did and did not accomplish and how effectively it did or did not.  Go Set a Watchman on its own might be a poignant exploration on reflection and a critique of nostalgia, but as a sequel to a long standing completed story, it only exists to make the original worse.  To accomplish its themes, its pathos, its narrative, it must rip those away from its predecessor.  It is a sequel that sacrifices the original to build itself up, and I think it is fair to call it out as such regardless of how well it does so.

But what does this have to do with Xenoblade Chronicles 2?

If you have existed within the Xenoblade Chronicles fandom for any amount of time, you will know there is a lot of tension in general, but more specifically there is tension between people whose favorite is Xenoblade Chronicles and people whose favorite is Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  The former camp tends to be kind of uppity, I'll admit that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 lovers, myself included, have a habit of building up the original work while tearing down the subsequent works for being, to use a more modern phrasing "anime slop".  Xenoblade Chronicles has kind of had the same arc a lot of JRPG franchises have where the earliest adopters, myself included as I'm sure you could imagine from the everything here, look down on newer entries for leaning too hard into the audience, in our minds usually at the cost of what made the series special to begin with.

However, I think that it is typically more on the side of people who enjoy Xenoblade 2.  Granted, because social media favors engagement and anger is easy engagement, my distaste of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has historically led sites like Twitter to really highlight that game in an attempt to foster engagement.  So I tend to see the opinions of people who like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 more than those of people who I have more camaraderie with.  Not that I particularly like Xenoblade Chronicles 1 fans either but that's a whole other thing.  Xenoblade 2 fans, in my experience, tend to be defensive.  They see any criticism of their game, regardless of how valid it may be, as an attack from an outside force and as such will try to paint that criticism in its worst light.  For instance, they will tend to paint any criticism against Xenoblade 2's often questionable character design as if it is simply looking at one or two particularly egregious designs and not what most critics believe, which is that its character design issues are a systemic problem.

The biggest disconnect, in my experience though, is this idea that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 lovers think that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 ruined the series.  And they're right, people who exclusively love Xenoblade Chronicles 1, usually people who played it on launch, do think that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 ruined the series.  I mean, look at what you're reading.  But I think that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 fans, and for that matter people who got into the franchise after Xenoblade 1 had been out for a while will never truly connect with why there is such a resentment towards Xenoblade 2.  Because, my dear reader, Xenoblade 2 is Go Set a Watchman.

When you reach the final area of Xenoblade 2, you find yourself on a massive space station that used to be orbiting what was, at one point, the planet Earth.  It is here that you meet the creator of the Cloud Sea, the Blades, the Titans, etc., the mysterious "Architect".  In a shocking revelation to those who are familiar with Xenoblade Chronicles, it is a man known as Klaus, or at the very least one half of him.  Klaus, to those who know the first game, is the main antagonist of Xenoblade 1, Zanza, before creating the world of Bionis.  And his usage in this game is, in my opinion, questionable.

See, Klaus in the first game was the perfect antagonist for the themes of that game.  He was a nihilist who had given up on humanity, believing them to be too corrupt and too vile to be allowed to continue.  He had, in effect, desired to create an entire new world to remove their ability to make the choices that would lead to the same corruption, the same suffering.  He became as god, a divine being capable of creation, of dictation, and in this new world all living creatures would exist to serve him.  To fuel him.  Zanza stands in opposition of everything that the first game was about, he is a god in a world where humanity must move past gods.  He believes humanity is worthless, in direct contrast to our heroes' repeated insistence that human free will is the most powerful force on the planet, our ability to make decisions and have to face the consequences is what makes us human.  The literal end of the game is our protagonist being handed the same divine power that Zanza wielded, the same power to create a world that he could shape to his will.  And Shulk chooses, instead, to let that power go, to not allow the continued existence of divine beings.  To move forward without need of gods.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 retcons Klaus' motivation substantially.  In a way that it no longer actually is compatible with Xenoblade Chronicles 1, which would almost seem like an effective out for the series but, alas, they seem insistent upon constantly treating all these games as if they're in the same continuous universe.  The Architect is a mournful creator, a man who made mistakes an untold number of millions of years ago and has devoted his existence to correcting it.  He is a broken and ancient old man, existing between dimensions as the other half of him is the evil god of the Xenoblade Chronicles 1 world.  He has created the entire world of the Cloud Sea in an attempt to rebuild the Earth he had destroyed eons ago.  He is, very literally, the good side of the man we met in the first game, a man who was initially depicted as being arrogant and cruel long before he became divine.

This retcon manifests very specifically in Xenoblade Chronicles 2's redux of the scene where Klaus uses his creation machine to create a new world, which of course is the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 1.  In the first game, this moment is depicted, as much of Klaus' behavior is, as a moment of sheer unadulterated arrogance.  He believes himself to be better than the gods themselves, that his ability to build a machine to create new worlds meant that he had the right to decide the future of all of humanity and bring about an age of service to his whims.  Now if Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had built off this issue, shown the Architect as a man who had simply learned to regret the arrogance of his youth over his billions of years of life, then there wouldn't be an issue.  I'd still think it's unnecessary to tie Xenoblade 2 into Xenoblade 1 like this, mind you, but it wouldn't rub me the wrong way like it does in practice.

Instead Xenoblade 2 shows us an alternate version of the scene where Klaus uses his creation machine.  In this version, Klaus is depicted as an exhausted, well-meaning scientist who sees a world in peril.  Disease is widespread, famine is everywhere, the world is facing threats both internal and from outer space, it is a truly horrid time to be a human.  Klaus is a man standing at the end of the world, seeing the downfall of Earth laid out in front of him, and he has built a machine to fix it.  This obviously changes the context and motivations of Xenoblade 1's villain, depicting him as a man trying to save humanity by any means necessary, even if it means creating a brand new world for them to exist on.  They even reuse much of the same dialogue from the first game, now recontextualizing it not as the arrogant ramblings of a mad man, but as a solemn vow to right the wrongs of a world in chaos.

Now, I'm sure a lot of you are probably sitting here being like "how is this a problem?  How is it a problem to provide more depth and nuance to a character who was so comedically on dimensional in the first game, how is it a problem to reveal that what we thought we knew about that scene wasn't actually true?"  And I am at least partially sympathetic to this viewpoint, I understand the idea that taking a very simple character and adding pathos and nuance is very compelling to people.  Klaus is a very one dimensional bad guy and so finding out he has so much more depth than you ever knew is arguably a good writing decision, a way to expand the context of Xenoblade Chronicles and make for a more well rounded narrative overall.  Xenoblade as a series is arguably much stronger for this reveal.

Unfortunately that strength comes at the cost of Xenoblade 1.  See, Xenoblade 1, like To Kill a Mockingbird, was an entirely unique, solo entity for a considerable amount of time.  A finished story.  It had a concrete thematic arc with every piece perfectly in place.  And Klaus was one of the central pieces to that journey, as I've stated a million times he was a villain crafted to work within the themes of Xenoblade Chronicles 1.  By adding more depth, by treating Klaus as a person who reluctantly became a creator instead of forcefully became one, what it is suggesting is that Xenoblade 1 is a lie.  Klaus now isn't an arrogant man who believed it was his right to control everyone's destinies, but a failed savior who wanted to save the world.  Xenoblade 1 is just worse off for this additional context, the theme now lessened by what is revealed about its main antagonist.  Xenoblade 2, as such, commits one of the worst crimes a sequel can do, it makes its predecessor worse to mine it for parts to prop itself up.  It is, in no uncertain terms, Go Set a Watchman.

Waiting For Torna

In December 2017, I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  And I adored it.  Xenoblade 2 made me cry.  I excitedly and definitively put it on my list of my favorite games of all time.  By December 2018, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 decisively was my least favorite video game I had ever played, a title it maintains to this day.  So what happened?  Simple.  Torna the Golden Country happened.  The wait for Torna the Golden Country was a nearly year long endeavor and, as I was at the time getting into physical game collecting, I was awaiting the physical game in order to play it.  In fact I couldn't play any of the DLC until it had shipped because it was my season pass.  In that year, I went from one of the game's biggest fans to quite possibly its biggest hater.

So I, as most Xenoblade fans have done historically, was a massive proponent of getting people into this series.  If you know a Xenoblade fan, you have heard them try to pitch you on this series because it means that much to them.  And like, I was BIG into trying to get people into this series, you don't understand.  I would point people to guides I thought were very reputable and try to help them conceptualize how the characters in Xenoblade worked so that they didn't fall into the trap of relying on the original three and experimented more.  I was VERY annoying about it.  Surprisingly, aggressively pitching this series to people actually worked and a few of my closest irl friends did actually give it a shot and fell in love with the series too.  And, as I had finished Xenoblade 2 before them, I got to see their own experiences evolve as we talked about this game.  I got to see their reactions to big moments in real time having experienced them already.  It should've been great.

But every time I would talk to my friends about it, I would be forced to reflect on my own opinions about Xenoblade 2.  Things that I may have overlooked on a first playthrough because I was enjoying the overall experience, things I just maybe hadn't thought too hard about.  My entire thought process on Nia's story hadn't really been solidified until I talked it over with a friend and realized that I didn't like the reveal that she was a Blade, nor did I like the part where she was in love with Rex.  I continued to notice things that I hadn't really noticed before, bits that I didn't even realize I hated in the moment.  And as time went on, I started thinking about this game in more of a negative light.  Which was really annoying to the people in my life who were finding out they loved Xenoblade 2 a whole lot and were already tired of me criticizing it so much.  Not made better by the fact that the autism made it so that I really hyperfixated on this game a whole lot because I hated it so much.  I'm sure you can tell, this is like page 47 or something like that of this whole document.

But, I was holding out hope across that year for the DLC.  That Xenoblade Chronicles 2 would finally come together when I got my copy of Torna and gained the DLC for the game.  I could replay the game with so many additions it would be brand new, have many of the criticisms I had in my initial playthrough addressed via the addition of a New Game+, and really settle into my opinions on Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  And besides, we were promised a brand new story campaign, Torna the Golden Country, filling in the history of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and telling the origins of many key characters.  And so I waited.  And I reflected.  And I talked to my friends about it.  And the release date of Torna came ever closer.

Torna would release physically about a week after it did so digitally.  I don't remember exactly how long it took me to receive the game but it was a long enough time to where my friends would be ahead of me when I did play it.  In a reversal of what the status quo had been for years, I was now the outsider, with the people I had convinced to play these games in the first place doing the job of telling me how great this new Xenoblade game was.  My friends had, at this point, known I had discovered I do not really like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but they had assured me that Torna was different.  The gameplay was better constructed, the story more focused, it gave a lot of depth to characters from the original game.  I was almost convinced to give it a chance.

However, I couldn't bring myself to do it.  It occurred to me that Torna was primarily focusing on characters I just strictly did not care about.  Like, I didn't like Mythra, I find her to be obnoxious and the game up until now has not inspired any confidence in that changing.  Jin was a serviceable antagonist but I had no follow-up questions about him and honestly think that because the game replaces him with Malos partway through, he kind of loses everything interesting about him.  And I just hated Malos.  I think he is a bad villain, I think nothing about him works even a little, he should've been the first major boss we take out in like Chapter 3 and we never see again, not the end game baddie.  I would've been playing Torna just to say I had done it, because this is a world I do not care about, populated by characters I do not like, that actively stood to ruin one of my favorite games of all time.  And as I stared at my physical copy of Torna the Golden Country, I realized that I hated Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  Not just disliked it, not just had problems with it.  I actively thought it was the worst game of all time.  

There are more things in this game that I hated that I didn't even get to.  I didn't want to go over every individual storyline I had a problem with, every character I think is boring and underdeveloped, every individual mechanic I didn't like.  I didn't even talk about Blade Missions, I hate Blade Missions, but I didn't find them compelling enough to talk about.  But trust me when I say that I do not think Xenoblade Chronicles 2 does anything right.  I think it is one of the worst stories ever told, I think it has one of the worst casts ever put in a narrative medium, I think it has some of the worst gameplay in the history of gaming.  And all of these were in ways that I suddenly saw everywhere.  Every JRPG reminded me of how much I hated Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  Characters would scream their emotions and never feel like they were feeling them.  Implications would come up in the story that the game was unwilling to and possibly too incompetent to address.  The knowledge that beating these games meant playing for 100 hours only to possibly end up disliking it by the end made them all feel like wastes of time.  Xenoblade 2 is not just a bad game to me, it is a game that blacklisted an entire genre and it took me almost a decade to become okay with JRPGs again.  And even still, some of those criticisms I have of this genre guide my decisions on what I choose to play.  Xenoblade Chronicles 2 made me not want to play games.  That is an unforgivable crime for someone as passionate about this medium as I am.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

I almost bought Xenoblade Chronicles 3.  Not only did I almost buy Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I almost bought the pitiful North American Collector's Edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 3.  I know this probably sounds insane to you given how much I've been talking about how I fell out of love with JRPGs as a genre and grew to resent the audience that surrounds them, as well as literally just writing a massive essay about why Xenoblade 2 broke my heart, but I did almost buy it.  Now, I want to be clear: I did not do this out of an interest in Xenoblade 3.  I was incredibly disinterested in Xenoblade 3, actually, from the reveal trailer it just looked like everything I already didn't like about Xenoblade 2 but more and none of the other trailers inspired confidence that I would enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in any capacity.  I was buying this to complete a collection.  I once fancied myself as something of a game collector, in particular a Switch collector, and since I already had bought Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2 for the system it would only be natural to buy Xenoblade 3.  I figured I'd buy it, have it for the collection, maybe give it a shot one day and maybe it would surprise me.  And even if it didn't, like, I still had it for the collection.  

I get in the queue to buy the game, I actually get in to preorder it, I put in my shipping and payment info, and then?  I just stare at the checkout button for a long time.  Long enough for the session to expire.  I couldn't do it.  I couldn't bring myself to buy Xenoblade 3.  Because my faith in Monolith Soft had died.  It felt, and still feels, like every decision Monolith Soft makes with the Xenoblade franchise only serves to make the series less interesting to me.  I realized that up until Xenoblade 3 had been revealed, I was holding out hope for the idea that Xenoblade 2 was a fluke.  That Xenoblade 3 would go in a completely different direction, be its own self-contained story that simply contains some of the wider themes and worldbuilding ideas of Xenoblade.  Something that, before Xenoblade 2, felt like what Xenoblade was doing.  Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade X did not, at the time, have anything in common outside of reused enemies and themes.  Think of how Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest handle themselves.  But with Xenoblade 3, my worries were realized.  Monolith Soft was going to continue destroying their games all for the sake of a unified canon.  They were going to take art and turn it into a content mill.  They would crush this series under the weight of its own lore, taking things that were finished, things that were unique, and homogenizing them and warping them to fit a wider brand identity.  And I could no longer tolerate it in any way.

In what is perhaps a bit too much of an on-the-nose visual, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes place in a world that is built from pieces of the previous two worlds sewn together.  In the same way that the Xenoblade series continues to dig up the corpses of its previous entries to scrape them for parts to prop up a new entry, Xenoblade 3 literally forms a Frankenstein amalgamation of the previous games for its setting.  Furthermore, Xenoblade 3 brings back numerous characters from across the franchise who already had their endings pretty set in stone.  The main antagonists for much of the game, the leaders of the dueling armies at the core of 3's plot, are led by Melia from the first game and Nia from the second, two characters who had very complete stories, now appearing as the warlords of the warring armies present on this world.  As well, the DLC brings back numerous characters from the previous Xenoblade games, including the revelation that Rex had married the people he used to own and had children with all of them, having a literal harem of essentially sister wives.  Cowards, make a decision.

The third game is an exacerbation of the problems seen at the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 2: that this franchise will never truly have endings, that nothing it does means anything in the long term.  These games are not stories to fall in love with and want to see a conclusion of, they're just pieces for Monolith Soft to rearrange as they see fit.  As a person who loves Xenoblade Chronicles 1, this is disappointing.  That a game that is so special to me, so complete, is constantly being dug up and paraded around by a company for whom "lore" is more important than art.  That having a single cohesive whole is worth making the parts that comprise that whole weaker.  It is a tragedy for Xenoblade 1, and honestly it is a tragedy for Xenoblade 2.  Like, for as much as I hate that game, I still respect it enough as a work of art to feel upset that it is being scraped for parts to prop up whatever new idea Monolith Soft has come up with.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 broke my heart.  Xenoblade Chronicles 3 broke my ability to trust Monolith Soft.  Because Monolith Soft has made it abundantly clear that their games don't mean anything.  That the idea that they made art was an accident, an accident they wish to correct posthaste.  The stories will never be finished, the characters never allowed to rest, they are all part of a system.  There is no ending, there is only lore.  There is no theme, no pathos, there is only the greater story.  There is no art, there is only content.  Xenoblade Chronicles is content.  It makes me feel like a fool to have ever felt this series meant something, that these games were unique works of art worth spending so much of my time trying to get people to experience.  I will always love the first game, mind you, but it will always have this shadow of what Monolith has done to it over it now.  That these characters I enjoyed are always doomed to be pulled out whenever the company thinks it's a good time to bring them back.  That this story that had such a concrete thematic arc will never end.  Xenoblade is being crushed under the weight of a lore it was never designed to support.  And I can no longer trust that it will be anything else.  Xenoblade is dead, all that remains is a Frankenstein's monster of what it once was.

But that's what people want, isn't it?  Like most people who are fans of something don't really care about the artistic integrity of a work.  They just want as much of it as possible.  They want to consume and consume and consume, and then tell you that because they've put in the time that their opinion means more than yours.  That because they're a "true fan", they should be looked to as an authority.  That their excessive consumption of every aspect of a thing they like proves that they understand it more than you do, that they see it in a greater light than you do.  They reduce the things they like to content, and then tell the world that they are the ones who see them as art.  They appoint themselves the gatekeepers of the things they allege to love, attempting to shield them from the world.  When in truth, the people for whom the things they love should probably be shielded from are, in fact, them.  Because fandom can only beget content, not art.

There are many reasons why I find myself unable to love JRPGs like I used to.  Many of which are highlighted by Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  But the fandom itself?  That, more than anything, has killed my want to engage with the genre.  This was true long before anything more recent happened but it is especially true now.  Taking a step back, letting myself breathe, was eye-opening.  I began to see how often people who love JRPGs speak of how artistically important their genre is, and yet shy away from any discussion that targets something other than the lore or the very surface level ideas.  They speak of artistic integrity, that they value the importance of people being allowed to create in their own parameters, and yet are immediately suspicious when those parameters take steps away from the genre they love.  They speak of accessibility as if it were a slur, a demeaning of their genre that will strip it of its identity.  They play the victim, always behaving as if their genre is despised by everyone outside of their circle, but will be quick to look down upon any entry that gains popularity.  Trust me, I've seen my fair share of "Clair Obscur is not a real JRPG" just because it became popular and swept awards shows.  

They speak as if they are the bullied ones, but often they are the bullies.  They're judgmental, attempting to micromanage others' enjoyment of the game to cultivate an experience in line with their own biases.  They look down upon those who enjoy other genres, JRPG fans are quick to complain about "gun and ball" people, the gamers who play primarily new shooters and new sports games, as if their gaming tastes are invalid.  Which is laughable to me because JRPG fans often just play JRPGs!  Their time is consumed by them, they commit their lives to multiple 60-100 games back-to-back and then look down on others for being similarly committed to their own favorites.  And say what you want about gun and ball people, they don't have pretense that their genres of choice are better than others.

It is unsurprising to me how many fans of this genre have pivoted to being anti-woke grifters, the genre is already conservative.  Not in a political sense but definitely in a social one.  And often in a political sense, let's be honest.  JRPG fans, on the broad scale, want everything to remain static.  They despise new ideas and crave the familiar.  They want things to be as safe as possible, even if it is the exact reason that nobody wants to partake outside of them.  And if anything, that's a bonus.  They feel more important because their genre is kept to themselves.  It is their content to consume.  But I want art.  I want meaningful, new things.  I lived with the familiar, I want the interesting.  I want works that challenge me, that mean more to me than comfort.  And it is my opinion that a lot of JRPGs only seek to provide comfort.  Comfort is all well and good, but art sticks with me forever.  It is a sad divorce, one that has probably cost me friends, one that has made me unpopular, one that sours my experiences with games I once loved.  But it is who I am.  And I am unapologetic for it.

"Okay, but be honest with yourself, was Xenoblade Chronicles 1 that good in the first place?"

I am sure you have been looking at various criticisms I have had in this post and then sort of eyeballing my frequent admissions that Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is my third favorite game of all time and one of the most important games to me.  That there is a hypocrisy to my criticisms of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, that Xenoblade 1 can similarly be criticized for many of the things I criticize 2 for.  "What about Xenoblade Chronicles 1" you may be asking.  Now my instinct is to go "yeah what about it".  Like, we aren't talking about Xenoblade Chronicles 1.  We're talking about 2. I tried my best to avoid comparisons unless it was strictly necessary, I specifically did not want this to be a post about "Xenoblade 1 good, Xenoblade 2 bad".  One of the most frustrating things that I encounter on the regular with discussing anything on the internet is that people will see a specific data set and immediately go into what aboutism.  Trying to pick apart the data and prove themselves to be smarter than it.  Like yeah dude, I didn't put an allergies option under a "what is your favorite kind of peanut butter" poll, mostly because I assumed that people who had no opinion and/or had allergies would just simply not vote, not need an option for themselves.

But, I might as well bring it up, cover my bases.  We're this far in, right, why not at this point.  Don't worry, I'm not going to include an entire essay on Xenoblade 1 in the midst of this essay of Xenoblade 2, I'm going to keep this relatively brief.  Xenoblade Chronicles was a revolutionary title to me growing up.  As stated in the beginning, I had never played a game like Xenoblade Chronicles before it made its way into my life.  I had grown up with Pokemon and Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts, games that have very linear storylines and worlds that, while they do change on the larger scale, rarely feel like they do from moment to moment.  Xenoblade Chronicles was the very first time where I had ever played a game that felt like a living world.  A game where every NPC felt like they had their own individual life, with their own routines and relationships that can change and develop over the course of the game.  A game where my own choices substantially impacted not just some large scale plot but a world with people living in it, whose lives would change based on the choices I made.  A game with massive open areas that the player could not only explore in-depth, but they would be actively rewarded for combing over every nook and cranny within them.  It was the first time in my life that I truly felt my horizons expand, that I understood what games could be.

Now, I'm not going to state that Xenoblade Chronicles is particularly unique in this aspect.  If you were to ask many people who grew up with RPGs, in particular Western RPGs, the world being shaped by your choices is like the entire point of an RPG.  A sentiment I have definitely come to agree with over the years but I don't want to get into the "what is an RPG" discussion.  I have especially seen older players who get talked into playing Xenoblade by their Xenoblade-loving friends kind of go "yeah, it's fine, you need to play other games though".  But this was my first encounter with an RPG that operated like this and it is probably one of the most significant games to my journey as a gamer as such.  I did not know what I wanted out of video games until I played Xenoblade Chronicles.  I think that's truly why I hold onto it so tightly all these years later, even as my desire to engage with the "long JRPG" has long since faded, my love of Xenoblade 1 remains entrenched within me.  Like I said, I've played it at least a half dozen times, which is crazy because it's usually an 80-100 hour playthrough.

That being said, if I were to play Xenoblade Chronicles 1 for the first time nowadays I think I would also think it was terrible.  Now, I do think there are numerous things Xenoblade 1 does better than its successors.  I think it does a better job with the gameplay, making every party member feel equally viable and allowing you to craft your own playstyle.  I find its cast of characters better written, both in terms of their actual personalities and their character arcs, but also in the consistency of how they are written.  I find its worldbuilding to be more interesting, with a singular continuous world where each new area you encounter follows a distinctive logic in terms of where it's placed and why its environment is like that.  I think it is a more thematically compelling and coherent product, it tells the story it wants to tell simply and effectively without losing any meaning or pathos.  If you were to ask me which game I thought was better, assuming I was playing both games for the first time in the modern day, I would very likely say that Xenoblade 1 is better.  Actually I would more likely say "I'm not playing two 100 hour RPGs to give you an answer, leave me alone, who even are you" but assuming I had to play the two of them, I would say Xenoblade 1 was better.

But better does not mean great, or even good.  And I think that if I played Xenoblade Chronicles for the first time in the modern day, I would not think it's very good.  While I do find the worldbuilding more compelling, if I take a step back from Xenoblade Chronicles I can acknowledge that the game is just as "video gamey" as its predecessor.  Each area is a mono-environment that, while cool in context of the overall picture, does not make for the most interesting play experience while you're on the ground.  The characters' reactions to things are as overwrought as they are in subsequent games, leaving little room for true the emotional depth and nuance I crave.  If anything it's even worse about this as we are always privy to characters' internal monologues in various scenes, meaning that we are literally being told what characters are thinking and feeling even during the quiet moments.  While I think that it does a better job of creating a balanced party, it is undeniable that one party member (Shulk) spends half the story as a mechanical necessity due to the multitude of necessary features the Monado provides in battle and the AI is so poorly designed that the party's primary white mage spends over 50% of every battle incapacitated due to their inability to naturally regulate their own gimmick.  And while the characters are more consistently written in Xenoblade 1, it is not a perfect solution by any means.  There are numerous conversations where characters forget information they already know and/or behave as if they are plucked from an earlier point in the game.  If I was being truly honest in my critique of Xenoblade 1, I would generously consider it especially mid.

So what does this tell us?  Not really much of anything surprising, I guess.  My opinions on this kind of game were much different when I was 18 than they were when I was 24.  Shocker, I know.  I cannot tell you what my opinions on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 would've definitively been if I had played it at 18.  But I do think that, like with most things, the games that you play when you are younger will leave a bigger impact on you than those you play when you're older.  They just mean more to you.  You are more receptive to what they have to offer you.  This is, in my opinion, especially true of JRPGs like Xenoblade.  It is a poorly kept secret that the primary audience of JRPGs is younger, people in their teens/early 20s.  People who not only have the time for these games but are still trying to figure out who they are.  Me enjoying Xenoblade Chronicles 1 but not enjoying Xenoblade Chronicles 2 despite their perceived similarities is mostly indicative of being a different person when I played them.  Having broader horizons, different thoughts on the media I consumed.  If Xenoblade 2 is that for you, if it hits you at the right part of your life to mean something to you then good on you.  I sympathize, Xenoblade 1 is only as important to me because of when I played it, because of who I was back then.  But, eventually, you gotta grow up, you gotta move past the moments in your life where things are the most important, and you do have to be honest with yourself.  Me understanding that I would not like Xenoblade 1 now does not diminish what it meant to me.  But, no.  Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was not that good in the first place.

The End

Y'all... that's it.  I don't have anything more to say about Xenoblade Chronicles.  Not as a trilogy, not as a series, and certainly not really about Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  After almost ten years of holding onto my hatred of this game... it's over.  I almost can't help but mourn it, not that I want to continue holding onto how much I hated this game but.  It feels like now a part of me is drifting away.  A part that has, whether I wanted it to or not, been an influential part of my life.  This experience was cathartic, don't get me wrong.  To finally put into a document everything I've felt about this game, this series, this genre, this FANDOM.  It's therapeutic.  I will breathe easier.  But it is also losing a fixture of my life.  I know not what comes next, but hopefully I will be much happier for letting this go after all this time.  I truly do hope so because I have a feeling that I've made a few enemies after this post.  I wish I had more concrete parting words, I wish I could give you an easy thesis statement to wrap everything up all nice and neat.  But all I can ultimately say is that, I don't know man, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sucks.  Thank you for reading.