Xenoblade Chronicles 2: story, battle system and criticism

In 2017, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata and Persona 5 arrived. All four are described as role-playing games with a large story, and all four topped many game of the year lists. I played and liked every one of them. My personal game of the year was still Xenoblade Chronicles 2, released exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.

The reason was not technology or sheer size. None of those games carried me the way Xenoblade did in 2010, when it arrived on the Wii with an open world, ten hours of cutscenes and a real-time battle system that stood apart from other role-playing games. I thought nothing would beat it until I played the sequel myself.

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What Xenoblade 2 is about

The world is called Alrest and it is covered by a sea of clouds. People live on the backs and inside the bodies of enormous creatures called Titans. Legend says humanity once lived on the World Tree in a paradise named Elysium, but was exiled and given the Titans as a new home.

Rex works as a salvager. On one job he meets the legendary Blade Pyra and becomes her Driver. The two make a pact: Rex will take Pyra to Elysium. On the way they are hunted by the organisation Torna, which wants the power of the Aegis for its own ends.

Pyra is not alone. A second personality, Mythra, shares her body with a different temper and different abilities. That double role carries much of the story, because the two women react differently to Rex and to the threat facing them.

Drivers, Blades and the battle system

Blades are summoned from Core Crystals. They give their Driver a weapon and power, and the link is channelled through Ether. A Driver never fights alone but inside a fixed party of Drivers and Blades whose abilities complement each other.

From that grows a layered battle system. Auto-attacks charge arts, arts build combos, and combos set up chain attacks in which the party strikes several times in a row. Button mashing gets you through, but understanding elements and roles wins fights far more elegantly.

Compared with the first game the system is more accessible without becoming shallow. Blades can be levelled, equipped and shifted between roles. That offers plenty to do outside the main story, but it can overwhelm, because the game explains its rules slowly and asks for patience.

A world on the backs of Titans

Xenoblade 2 offers more than fourteen large regions, each on its own Titan with its own landscape, weather and wildlife. The plains of Gormott feel open and green, the kingdom of Uraya lies inside a cavern of flesh and light, and Mor Ardain is an industrial landscape in the desert.

Exploration pays off because the world is not a backdrop. Chests wait on ledges, rare monsters hide in corners, and many side quests tell small stories about the people who live there. Anyone who only follows the main quest leaves a large part of the game untouched.

The map deserves criticism. It is hard to read, does not show routes clearly enough and forces a lot of searching in the first hours. The tutorial explains much in text boxes that cannot be reopened later. Both annoyed players in 2017 and remain the weakest part of the game.

The soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda

The music comes from Yasunori Mitsuda, supported by ACE+, Kenji Hiramatsu and Manami Kiyota. Mitsuda is known for Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, and here he delivers a score that moves between orchestra, choir and folk motifs.

The music carries the big scenes without drowning them. The title song, the Titan themes and the battle music stay with you, and in several places the game uses silence on purpose before the music enters. For me this is the best soundtrack in the series.

What made 2017 special

Zelda offered boundless freedom, Horizon the best graphics and a clear story, Nier and Persona 5 asked philosophical questions. Xenoblade 2 went another way: a long tale with many characters that is allowed thirty hours to develop, and a world you actually have to cross.

After the trailer I expected a decent but forgettable sequel. I found the idea of Drivers and Blades odd at first and refused to believe the music could be better than in the first game. Ten hours in, I knew I was wrong. The game pulled me into its world harder than any other that year.

Criticism: gacha, maps and performance

Xenoblade 2 has real weaknesses. Blades are partly summoned at random, which gives the game a gambling mechanic. Anyone who needs a specific Blade for a quest may wait a long time. Add the confusing map, the brief tutorials and the frame rate drops in handheld mode that reviewers mentioned often in 2017.

The story is untouched by this. It is about friendship, loss and the question of whether a world built on the backs of other living beings can be just at all. Those questions are not asked in passing, they shape the final third of the game.

Spoiler: the link to the first game

Anyone who knows the first game should skip this paragraph. Xenoblade 2 mixes science with fantasy, and by the end it becomes clear how closely both games are connected. The Architect the party meets in Elysium is the scientist Klaus from the first game.

Klaus worked with a device called the Conduit that sends objects into other dimensions. Its use destroyed his world and split him in two. The second game is therefore not a loose sequel but the other side of the same catastrophe.

Why the game is still worth it in 2026

Xenoblade 2 was released on December 1, 2017 for the Nintendo Switch and developed by Monolith Soft. By December 2020 it had sold more than two million copies, making it the best-selling title in the Xeno series and Monolith Soft's biggest commercial success.

Several expansions followed in 2018, including the story expansion Torna in September of that year. In July 2026 a Nintendo Switch 2 edition arrived with higher resolution and frame rate, new costumes, an extra Blade from the Xenosaga series and a new battle mode. Anyone starting today gets the best available version.

Who is it for? Anyone who likes role-playing games with a big story and is willing to learn a complex battle system will stay for over a hundred hours. Anyone looking for fast action or an open world without a fixed plot will struggle with the pace. With all side quests, more than 300 hours are easily possible.

Conclusion

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not a perfect game. The random Blades, the map and the handheld performance are fair criticism. It is still my game of 2017, because it tells a story that goes beyond the usual Nintendo tales and because the world, the music and the characters add up to more than the sum of their parts.

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