May 9, 2024|

Filed under: Editorial

Holism: The Blades of Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

For three games and a “something close to spinoff,” the Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy has relied on a convoluted but strong foundation for its combat. While your characters auto-attack for mild damage, you use Arts to launch special attacks, chain effects, and build a rhythm of action. Even though your ground-level involvement is limited, you’re constantly planning ahead. Each game has a web of interlocking mechanics, but you don’t need to dive deep into them so long as you chase that rhythm. It all leads to an almost musical pacing distinct from other games that use these systems. Every entry finds a way to tweak it, with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 providing the weirdest. And like you’d expect from something made by Nintendo, the mechanic that brings it alive is fully tied to character, plot, and setting. Enter Alrest.

Image: Source Gaming. The initial party getting their first real look at Gormott in Chapter 2. The landmasses being living beasts adds a few wrinkles, like weather that sends high level monsters ashore or the beast itself moving into a position disadvantageous for you.

Xenoblade 2’s world is a sea of clouds where terra firma is a collection of huge, animalistic Titans. Unlike the dead and rotting giants the first game traded in, these moving continents are fully alive—at least, until they die, sink, and take their denizens with them. Old Titans are dying and new ones are in short supply, leading to wars over resources fought primarily by a race called Blades. Homunculi made by Alrest’s godlike Architect, they can take wildly distinct forms and are born of a crystal when touched by a person. The latter is called a Driver, and their Blades’ lives orbit them; they psychically resonate, live together, return to their crystal when the Driver dies, and theoretically repeat the process over and over. And when the young salvager Rex meets the long-lost Blade Pyra, the two witness the way these relationships manifest as they dodge terrorists, imperialists, and more on a voyage to the Architect’s home.

Image: Source Gaming. Red and Pyra attacking Malos, the somewhat bland main villain, at the start of Chapter 1.

It’s rather reminiscent of Nintendo’s premiere RPG, Pokémon. You get sidekicks who help you fight, since the weapons you use come from them, and much of the appeal comes from finding favorites. Maybe you’ll fall in love with Wulfric, a hideous monster with a heart of gold, or the nerdy historical scholar Adenine (“Wind! Send me your transient, fleeting aid!,” she adorably cries when assisting you). You’ll have a lot to choose from, since the best way to engage with the game is to resonate with a bunch of Core Crystals and hope for the best.

Image: Source Gaming. The first Blade I ever got in a playthrough was Agate, an earthen gem appraiser with a diamond axe. She’s honestly kinda middle of the road in terms of personality, but it was so exciting getting this kind of character for the first time.

This idea of support and connection is what distinguishes the combat. Like the first game, you have three party members fighting at once, but now they’re Drivers supported by Blades. The Blade gives them a moveset, one of three classes, and an element in a basic, also Pokémon-esque type advantage system. What makes this work is that every Driver can swap between three Blades at once, so you really have six on-screen characters, nine movesets, twelve voices doing barks, and a two-for-one special in Pyra and her alternate personality Mythra. The system is incredibly dynamic, and that’s the biggest encouragement for awakening Blades. If you want your ex-terrorist buddy Nia to focus on healing, since her leonine partner Dromarch is in that class, you could stick her with two healers if she has them. Or make another Driver the dedicated healer. Or eschew any specialization and give everyone a mixed selection.

Image: Source Gaming. The introduction of Mythra, Pyra’s second personality. Mythra and Pyra mostly share the same attack-focused moveset; they’re different in their elements. Having them on Rex’s side gives him access to two types at once, dramatically widening the range of combos he can make.

The main contribution of the element system is how it directs the combat. Your special attacks fill up a meter for a more powerful Art called a Blade Special, and those can be chained together into a Blade Combo if you follow a line of correct elements. So, for instance, you can go from a Fire Special to a Water one to Ice to make the Diamond Mist special. Let’s say Pyra throws out a Special, then Dromarch, then the Ice-type Ursula. You end up with a lot of damage and a magic ice orb surrounding the mark that can power up a Chain Attack down the line. All eight elements have their own unique Combos that require some of the others, so having a type-diverse team means you can complete these more easily and set up a crushing last stand.

Image: Source Gaming. Mini-boss Peerless Beaufort is about to get his. The brown and yellow orbs floating at his right are the results of Blade Combos that ended on an Electric and Earth attack. If the current combo ends in a Dark attack, that’ll add a purple orb to the mix. And in Chain Attacks, you shoot the chain of hits into the stratosphere by breaking these orbs.

It’s… a system that makes more sense when you play it (hell, that last paragraph made my eyes glaze up, and I wrote it). All that matters is building a strong team. Again, rhythm and Pokémon, and it’s much less malleable here than there. Unless you’re grinding on Easy Mode, you’re gonna need a mix of attackers, tanks, and healers of most of the eight Types. It’s overwhelming, and for better and worse Xenoblade 2 puts you on a handicap for a good long while to help you acclimate. Your third party member can only carry one Blade for much of the journey, so you can’t engage too deeply. But it becomes more useful as you get more teammates—and as you improve Trust with your Blades. That lets you swap between them faster, letting you build up an array of Blade Combos within seconds by the final chapters. It demands work, though to its credit, a lot of that work is optional and in the background.

Image: Source Gaming. A challenging boss fight that’s part of an optional questline. If you find yourself off the beaten path, you’re likely to run into a high level of challenge. You don’t have to “min max” everything by a long shot, but you’ll still want to do some exploring, leveling up, and unlocking skills.

That’s because, like a lot of modern games, Xenoblade 2 has a suite of skill trees, one for each Blade. They’re called “Affinity Charts” in reference to the first game’s web of character dynamics and one of the few simple things in this thoroughly complex game. The circular rows are tiers, the columns of dots grant buffs and have to be unlocked in consecutive order, and with each tier the Driver and Blade get a better relationship. You will unlock many of these casually with no extra effort, and you don’t have to do anything more, but players who want to game the system will have to do some grinding, farming, and exploration. This is the point of any Skill Tree, to coerce players into doing chores. But barely any is required.

Image: Source Gaming. The giant skill tree, something every Blade has (though several can be a bit larger or significantly smaller). Finishing it isn’t even the end, though—that gives you an S Rank, but the game tracks and incorporates all additional Trust you build.

Among the things you unlock are Field Skills, solutions to overworld “puzzles.” If you find a giant log in your way, Pyra’s Fire Mastery can burn it away. If you need to dive underwater, people skilled in Water Mastery and Fortitude are called for instead. There are a ton of these, letting you do things like break down walls, uncover treasure, or study arcane glyphs. They’re also central to the Garfont Mercenaries, a giant optional quest in which you send Blades on side adventures while you’re off doing your own thing. Each “Merc Mission” unlocks random steps of a participant’s skill tree and has hard and soft requirements—fulfilling the latter shaves off some time—that give you another reason to build a large network.

Image: Source Gaming. Wulfric here can use the field skills Earth Mastery, Superstrength, and Focus. Those are helpful for things like leaping over ground, destroying half-broken doors, or building ice bridges. Wulfric’s also rare for having access to higher tiers of these skills than most other Blades, so he’s rather invaluable for puzzle solving.

But that is gameplay. Xenoblade is Nintendo’s most overtly political and plot-driven franchise by far, and the Blades are even more central there. Within the labyrinthine jungle of politics and philosophy that is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, they are an allegory for slavery, war economies, and disempowerment. Within Alrest they’re used for… well, the name says it; they’re living weapons. They’re linked to their Driver for life, following them and even absorbing a bit of their personality. And since each reboot comes with a hard reset, they’re both immortal and barred from any form of self-direction, culture, or evolution. This static, eternal dependency is the human condition at its worst in the eyes of Xenoblade, which believes man’s ideal state to be one of constant growth, change, and eventual succession. It’s the reason driving Torna, a Blade terrorist group and the biggest of Rex and Pyra’s many villains.

Image: Source Gaming. Near the end of the game, a flashback by wacky party member Zeke reveals an aspect of Blades the rest of the game undersells: that they are in fact fully treated as products. You actually have to get one of them that way. I think it’d have been good for the game to engage with this idea more, to have Rex see and confront it himself.

Once again, the Pokémon comparisons rear their head. That franchise has drawn criticism both fair and facile about how you corral and dominate living creatures. Xenoblade 2 has an even bigger problem in that these are fully sentient people, with wants and dreams. The game, to its credit, tries to interrogate a world where this injustice was built in by divine intervention. Your Blade partners are at times adored, romanticized, dehumanized, and targeted with racism by the peoples of Alrest. You encounter “Flesh Eaters,” Blades infused with human DNA and hunted as abominations who may be terrifying übermenschen, friendly heroes, or one poor sap who was forced into something that destroyed his body. Then there are all the villains trying to capture and exploit Pyra, whose power to save or damn the world has made her a legend. Meanwhile some Blades, like the main character Brighid, preserve their lives in journals that may not make it to their next awakening. In all this theocracy of Indol controls the distribution of Crystals and effectively sets the pattern of conflicts. And the prequel expansion examines Torna’s namesake, a nation that tried to treat Blades and Drivers as equals and was destroyed by a rival state for it. That’s one major difference with Pokémon; the latter views human and monster relationships as inherently positive. Xenoblade is more ambiguous and conflicted.

Image: Source Gaming. Flame-bringing Mòrag and Brighid, the game’s main example of a Driver and Blade who work fully in synch. Brighid’s past self reappears as one of the main characters of the prequel expansion.

Beautiful though the Titans are, this is a scary and immoral world. But you still have to engage with its immorality because it is literally impossible to go through Xenoblade 2 otherwise. Rex, Nia, and the rest just can’t hack it without their Blades. Almost every single feature, mechanic, even item is built around them. And you can’t ignore them when they’re the story. So you wake up Blades by the dozen, and you don’t abuse them, but almost all wind up as forgettable sidekicks to pad out your team or staff your mercenary company. A slim fraction will be “Rare Blades” with a memorable design, personality, and dialogue. It’s all deeply strange and shaggy.

Image: Source Gaming. A generic NPC in Xenoblade 2 arguing for the extermination of Blades. The game is kind of skittish depicting stuff like this.

Every Rare Blade has a Mass Effect 2-esque “Blade Quest” that lets Rex and his Driver companions help them out for a reward, typically a boost to the Affinity Chart. They also have Heart-to-Hearts, cutscenes that show off their character and improve Trust. While most are comical or inscrutable, some interrogate this status quo. Perceval, a moralist dark knight, discovers that his last Driver was a disreputable cutthroat and tries to atone for his past life’s sins. The self-styled royal Dagas believes himself the reincarnation of a human king and resents being bound to the “commoners” of the party. A series of quests revolve around best friends Theory and Praxis, who live under the thumb of abusive highwayman Drivers and slowly wind up in your orbit. These narrative beats are especially true amongst the main cast, almost every one of whom breaks or tugs at the “Driver / Blade” dichotomy in some major way.

Image: Source Gaming. Roc expressing the pain and challenge of losing his past lives. A number of Blades go through this, particularly ones who you see living with multiple Drivers.

With all of this mesh of complicated systems and philosophical ideas, it’s not surprising that the game has its limitations. For one thing, having fifty-four potential Blades of import—thirteen plot-relevant ones, twenty-eight Rare ones, six from the expansion pass, and seven only available in New Game Plus—leaves you with a cast that varies wildly in quality. Most of even the special Blades share a pool of relatively balanced elements and weapon types, so this isn’t about their battling capabilities. I’m referring more to stylistic factors: personality, voice acting, story, and character design. Xenoblade 2 is the tackiest of Xenoblades, and thanks to a wide pool of Japanese artists ranging from Fire Emblem designers to Kingdom Hearts nudnik Tetsuya Nomura to actual hentai mangaka, the Blades shine with a garish, wildly inconsistent radiance. To be blunt, if you’re someone who bristles at hyper-sexualized anime caricatures, you’re gonna have a hard time. Because that’s the aesthetic, regularly to the point of self-parody. It’s quite embarrassing.

Image: Source Gaming. Sometimes that tackiness works though, as it does with characters like Vale. She was designed by Yasoumi Umetsu, creator of the by all accounts horrifically grim, violent, and sexually grotesque OVA series Kite. Not exactly someone you’d associate with the House of Mario, huh?

Personally, I struggle most with the childlike ones, who don’t fit the allegory or militarized setting. It feels wrong that characters like Electra and Finch exist to battle prehistoric monsters or giant spiders. My favorites tend to be the most theatrical, as though they were made to be colorful, unstoppable actors. The DLC character Corvin is like that; he’s performative, charming in his kindness, and his Sephiroth-esque raven wing is memorable. Another great one is Brighid, who’s intimidating and compelling given her role in the Empire of Mor Ardain as both culture hero and state property. It doesn’t always work—the Ice-type Godfrey and Perun are duller than their wild looks suggest—but this game is at its best when it’s chasing camp, and loudly. Like Boreas, the Studio Ghibli-looking gourmand monster. I love that guy, even if he literally and figuratively ate me out of house and home. He reminds me of Alphonse from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Image: Source Gaming. Boreas finishing a Blade Combo. Look, I get he doesn’t look like Al here, but…

But that’s just their look. Their stories and personalities are no less extreme. Kindly Floren is an unfortunate trans panic punchline, while Crossette from the Expansion Pass is a fun Pyra fangirl whose soccer ball attacks explode into fireworks. Maybe your new sidekick will be intense in the generally fun Azami way (a spooky marionette sniper in love with her owner), or in the unpleasant Newt way (a jockish military fanatic whose outfit jumps far past that self-parody edge). And the Blades are where the otherwise strong English cast is at its most inconsistent, often emotional or hammy or stilted. One of the bigger offenders isn’t an optional sidekick but Poppi, an android made by the party member Tora in lieu of his inability to resonate with Core Crystals. Another childlike fighter, she speaks in a robotic broken English and is compromised by her Driver; their story is supposed to be innocent and expand the worldbuilding, but Tora’s motivation for making Poppi is lurid and somewhat predatory.

Image: Source Gaming. Many of the characters are, of course, mixed on this front. Praxis here has a hideous design (though her partner Theory’s is… eesh, way worse), but her story and charming “Webby from Duck Tales” voice won me over.

Fortunately, most fall into a spectrum of pleasing camp, where they’re charming enough to overcome both the goofy character designs and the thorny social allegory. Gorg, a patissier with an actual water ass, is silly whether he’s fending off Machine-Gun Julio or trying to run a restaurant. A far greater delight is Sheba, a haughty lesbian czarina who speaks in the royal “we,” loudly extols her love of money and beautiful women, and will only be a better fighter if you pay her off. There’s also Vale; she’s a grumpy goth seamstress whose story involves stopping an apocalyptic child cult. These characters and others add a lot of color to the world, to fights, and to the general energy. But, there’s a hitch with how you get them, one that defines every playthrough and is likely the game’s single most contentious element.

Image: Source Gaming. A cutscene in Sheba’s quest. She’s extremely charming, which helps mollify how much cash you have to spend to start and finish it.

While about nine Blades are tied to the critical path, and a few like Sheba come from quests or exploration—thankfully, their batting average is generally good—the vast majority are entirely random. Generic Core Crystals are everywhere; give them to a Driver in your party, and it’s a roll of the dice as to whether it’ll be a Rare one with a unique design or a generic fighter made procedurally with stock body types, voices, Types, weapons, and Skills. A conventional playthrough is going to demand that you harvest a bunch of these day players, since having options is important, and improving their Affinity Charts also improves their Driver’s chances of getting something good. There are also higher tiers of crystal with better chances. In practice, though, this is a gachapon system wholesale, complete with the genre’s crass, objectifying, and flat-out confusing character designs. So while your favorite Blades may look like this…

Image: Source Gaming. Left to right: Vale, Ursula, Boreas, Sheba, Crossette, Perceval. A handsome lineup if ever there was one. This is what your teams look like when they’re being sent out on missions.

Or, say, this…

Image: Source Gaming. Left to right: Corvin, Gorg, Kasandra, Adenine, Kora, Azami. More of a B-team here, but outside of Kora a great one still.

Almost all of your roster will look like this:

Image: Source Gaming. Several generic Blades. Their design is fine enough, but you’ll do everything in your power to not have one on your team the moment you have enough Rare Blades.

This is the most dynamic and dangerous feature of the entire trilogy, because your control is very limited. It’s easy for you to roll snake eyes for much of the adventure and get generic randomized Blades, or to get an unbalanced selection amongst your five Drivers. Maybe one hogs the Blades of one element or moveset. Because of its ties to a confounding and ill-defined luck statistic, you’re also more likely to get the good ones later on, well after you’ve explored many of Alrest’s picturesque sandboxes. If you want to bond with these characters, that’ll expand the back half wildly in ways that may not gel for you and definitely won’t gel with the story’s romantic pace. But on the other hand, that means every playthrough will be at least a bit different. That happened on all three of mine, because either I found a Blade unique to that run or it was stuck to a different character. I found at least a few favorites and a new layout each time. Anyone playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 will have that—and they can hear it, since Rare Blades have unique battle dialogue with each other written for distinct party layouts.

Image: Source Gaming. Another battle. You spend a lot of time with these characters, so getting dynamic voice clips and better attacks from them feels more impactful than if they were just a number on the screen.

In my playthrough this year, I had a lopsided start. The very second Core Crystal I used had T-elos, a character exclusive to profiles that have completed the game at least once. In Chapter 3, Rex also randomly paired with Vale and the sparky gabber Kora. By the time I recruited Zeke midway through Chapter 5, I used specific Crystals to give Nia Crossette and Vess, and Mòrag Corvin and Wulfric, but neither they nor Zeke had gotten any random ones. Just a buncha jokers… at least, until the start of Chapter 6. Suddenly I got Azami, and in an attempt to finish her quest (which requires Blades good in Botany, a Field Skill of which I was in short supply), I activated a bunch of Crystals and unlocked Ursula, Adenine, Perceval, and more in about a minute. Zeke got Godfrey, boring though he is, and I gave him Kasandra to honor their mutual bad luck. And in the days to come—still in the start of Chapter 6, since I spend most of these games in their back halves—I’d get a ton more, almost every unique one available. But it looked weird as a roster. Not counting anyone from a New Game Plus, there are four randomly appearing Rare Dark Blades, and one character got three of them. Meanwhile Nia got the fewest Blades of import despite having the largest number of Blades in total.

Image: Source Gaming. You’re gonna need a lot of generic Blades and Rare Blades, too. Merc Missions like this one have required skills and helpful skills. This one’s prerequisites are all unique to Godfrey, but the bonus skills that can cut down those twenty minutes—Keen Eye and Fortitude—are exclusive to Rare Blades. In this playthrough, I had trouble on multiple occasions dealing with problems that required a high Keen Eye stat, since I didn’t have enough specific partners.

Ursula, an Ice-Type Healer who gives her Driver knuckle claws, is a great example of this system’s pitfalls. She hums Xenoblade 1’s fan favorite song “Engage the Enemy” and fights on a polar bear, so even though she’s yet another child soldier her design is top tier. Easily the best Ice Blade in an otherwise poor selection. However, her story involves going on Merc Missions to become a musician, and it utterly defines her skill tree. You cannot get anywhere without engaging it in, but it’s not just “one” quest. She has to go on dozens and dozens and dozens of them, well over a hundred, and while they’re very short and can be made shorter, there’s no reason to ever have her on the team so long as there are more to do. These missions are meant to be repeated, and several give the same rewards, but they all demand random Blades you might not have. You can send up to six people on these, and unless you have one clod who’s both an Earth-type and a talking animal—a criteria that does not apply to Wulfric despite him looking like a Xenomorph—you can’t do the mission that requires three animals and three Earth guys. Almost all my time with this character was spent sending her off on missions. She only graced the side of Inquisitor Mòrag by the end. Ursula’s really charming, and I put more time into her than anyone else, but you’d never know it.

Image: Source Gaming. An optional Heart-to-Heart cutscene with Tora, Ursula, and Mòrag.

It’s an odd feature to come from Nintendo, which prefers randomness to be moment by moment. In general, Xenoblade Chronicles feels far out of the publisher’s orbit between the philosophy, the aesthetics, and the bewildering mechanics. But the publisher’s signatures come up now and then, most notably during Chapter 6 in the game’s best setting, the isolationist Kingdom of Tantal. The game’s chapters form a ten act structure, so by this point you’ve been relying on Pyra and Mythra a lot. They’re the strongest, plot relevant, built for the combo system, and their skill trees are easy. So, naturally, they get kidnapped for a spell, and if you’ve only been playing as Rex, you’re suddenly out of sorts and a bit scared. This is one of Nintendo’s big moves, to give you a cool power… and then take it away. Think of the Super Mario Sunshine levels that steal your jetpack, or Breath of the Wild’s gear-banning Eventide Island. Even though this only lasts a small dungeon, you very quickly realize how useful Blades, this one especially, really are. The degree of your dependence is made clear in a way it never was before. Which is good, since soon after Pyra is abducted again for far longer, and you’ll have to use what you learned in a level that severely restricts your Blades’ powers. It’s odd narrative plotting but great for gameplay, a reminder that this is a Nintendo game, not just a Monolith Soft one.

Image: Source Gaming. Pyra’s abduction shakes up the gameplay right as you’ve gotten used to the mechanics and (probably) found enough Rare Blades to take her place.

The Blade mechanic and everything it entails is Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in a nutshell. The game’s less the best or the worst of the trilogy than the most of the trilogy, the series at its most unhinged, awkward, imaginative, cringeworthy, energetic, and colorful—literally, as it’s got the most visually sumptuous palette. Its combat system often works, sometimes doesn’t, and leads to a level of randomness that’s both exciting and frustrating. Dynamism in a way that’s rare for hardcore JRPGs. It’s not surprising that Torna ~ The Golden Country, XC2’s giant expansion from 2018, would fully replace it with a much tighter nine-person system. But the stuff that powered it isn’t gone at all. Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s take simply excises the randomness and focuses on the character drama. Instead of the relatively lifeless sidequests of Xenoblade 1, these two games funnel the bulk of their world building through these castmates’ stories. And even this has something on its successor with how so many of these optional characters can interact with each other through mid-battle dialogue and bonus DLC quests, not just the protagonists.

Image: Source Gaming. Both a good and a frustrating element is that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is painfully, fully sincere with its (often very serious and deep) ideas. If Blades are based on the idea of making connections, then creatures of connections they are and impact the gameplay and drive the plot they must. It’s just one more challenging and fascinating aspect.

Is this a good system? After three playthroughs that each went well over a hundred hours, I don’t fully know. It’s so weird and wobbly and out of the player’s control despite being a mechanic based around player agency. Many of its parts, like the mercenary subplot, feel like they only exist to justify the others. Narratively it’s wild, and I don’t think the story as a whole examines the concept’s social implications as much as it could. And what you get out of it will depend on the stories you’re allowed to see. But it’s also wildly ambitious even for a series that’s already wildly ambitious. Xenoblade is a series about finding life, surprise, and drama, and frankly, it’s hard to find a battle system more lively, surprising, and dramatic.