I was depressed so I finally played Xenoblade Chronicles 2
i do not have the energy for this to be a Proper Blog Post so consider it broad thoughts largely worded as to be ungenerous as possible
Sorry, but...
It kinda is "too anime" for me. Now, as someone who has actively blogged about anime for over a decade, let me be more specific: it's too "harem anime", which is not inherently bad but does not appeal to my sensibilities. The crux of the plot is around how Rex - a 15 year old boy with no specificity to his character other than generic protagonism - uses his luck and pluck to save the hearts of suicidally depressed older women, thus also saving the world. I just don't feel the Rex-Pyra/Mythra relationship has any narrative foundation other than niceness so the big moments don't hit for me. At least Nia has a character, but I'm also burdened with post-2 context and if I think about any of this for more than two seconds my eyes roll directly out of my skull.
Other stuff what's often cited as "too anime", whatever. I don't care for most of the Blade designs, not because Pyra's proportioned like the cut Zorro made on that dude's neck (and frankly she is not even the best big-boobed fire lady in the game), but because there's zero cohesion to the point it actively harms the rest of the package. The gacha system is absolutely terrible from top to bottom, and even non-gacha Blades like Vess, Theory & Praxis, and Wulfric don't mesh. It's made so much worse because the whole Blade concept is conceptually meaty and ties into Takahashi and Xeno-'s long-running love of reincarnation tropes.
The villains (Torna) are obviously more interesting than the main cast due to having understandable goals and motivations. It's the classic "you have a point, but you're also trying to nuke everyone, so your argument must be considered invalid and we have to kill you" situation. The fact they had a bunch of other stuff planned with Jin that got spun off into the Torna DLC campaign makes it even more comically clear that he's the most compelling character.
Of the playable cast, Brighid ended up as my favorite, largely due to the handful of scenes noting that she keeps regular journals during each of her incarnations. The acknowledgement that she is only successful in this due to her arbitrary status as an Ardanian national treasure is the kind of thing I wish was more thoroughly examined. Likewise, the scene where she asks Jin to confirm her journals' contents hits a level of emotional complexity that the rest of the writing rarely does.
Torna: The Golden Country
Rather than tiresome harem tropes, the DLC relies on tiresome fantasy tropes akin to something you'd see in a GBA Fire Emblem, making it a bit less immediately grating for me. Also opening with an adult woman in armor kung-fu kicking a pack of wolves is pretty sick. That said, I ultimately didn't find the plot very exceptional. Torna's real strength is in its quest design.
Because it can revolve around essentially a single hub town and a few outposts, the sidequests in Torna can more easily intertwine and involve the same characters. It's a point I praised in Xenoblade X, which had a huge amount of surprisingly interconnected quests and weird links in its affinity chart. XB3 also has some of it once you get to the City. It's a questing approach that reminds me of western CRPGs, which often use hub towns as nexus points for piecemeal mini-arcs rather than problem-of-the-week storytelling that I more closely associate with JRPGs. Neat!
Alas, playing Torna this far removed from release puts it in an unfavorable light through no fault of its own. It feels like, well, an expansion to the original game that fleshes out the backstory. Which it is. That's cool. But Future Redeemed and X Definitive Edition's Chapter 13, each successively being "The Final Word on Xenoblade as a Series", carry extra thematic weight for me. They feel like meditations on where Monolith Soft and the Xeno- metaseries can go after delivering on the big trilogy. Torna must instead settle for "merely" being the mechanical and tonal bridge between XB2 and XB3.
TL;DR
While I now have more context for how the series has developed over time and a much greater regard for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in its role as a necessary swing of the pendulum to eventually reach the sweet spot of XB3, I also do not feel like I've meaningfully gained much on the narrative/thematic side of things. I don't regret playing but I don't feel like I needed to play it either.
also come on the mechs don't show up until literally the end of the game what are we even doing
---