Consider the fact that this enormous open-world RPG lacks a cohesive or easily accessible world map. The game follows on nearly 15 years of modern sandbox RPG design yet frequently fails to incorporate even the most basic quality-of-life features. On paper, Xenoblade 2 should frustrate and annoy me to the same degree its spiritual ancestors did. Xenoblade 2 is meant to be played at a leisurely pace This is a mess of a game in a lot of ways, but by god, it’s an ambitious and big-hearted mess. More importantly, though, it suggests why players might be willing to struggle through Xenoblade 2’s many design flaws. Between the perfectly timed music and the sudden sensation of cramped corridors opening into an agoraphobe’s nightmare, your arrival on Gormott stands right alongside Lara Croft reaching the buried Colosseum in the original Tomb Raider. Composer Yasunori Mitsuda’s score ties a bow on the moment, swelling to a crescendo as the sheer immensity of the world in front of you sinks in.Īs video game environment reveals go, it’s a good one. Green grass and impossible topography stretch as far as the eye can see off in the distance, you can spot the faded silhouette of the nearest city, a kilometer away. Young protagonist Rex and his newfound allies climb from a crash site in the lower thickets of an unfamiliar land and suddenly find themselves looking out over a rolling veldt populated by a menagerie of monsters. Its designers clearly intended players to take things slowly and soak in the world, a fact that becomes clear the first time you wriggle your way clear from the linear path of the first chapter and set foot into the unruly wilds of Gormott Province. Xenoblade 2 doesn’t really lend itself to play under deadlines and time constraints. More than 40 hours in, I appear to be just past the story’s halfway point … and that’s with me skipping over countless incidental side quests and peripheral world-development systems that could easily consume just as much time as I’ve already given. ![]() Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the latest entry in Monolith and Nintendo’s loosely connected series of role-playing games, is another one of those huge, sprawling open-world adventures that will eagerly devour as much of your time as you’ll allow it to. The review will be updated in the coming weeks with final thoughts on the conclusion and a score. What follows covers roughly the first half. ![]() Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a sprawling role-playing game.
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