Why Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is one of the best Switch games.

Story ; Chapters 1-5
Well let's get into the 'story' a bit more shall we. I gave what's kind of told to you at the start and on the box already but I even went as far as to avoid mentioning names.

You play this lil' shit named Rex, a Salvager in the world of Alrest who lives on the back of this small Titan that is by all means always just referred to as Gramps.
The Titans are dying out, slowly but surely because of old age and that they aren't being replaced. Especially the big ones that have been there for centuries such as Mor Ardain and Uraya. And the only 'safe' place is what is regarded in fairy tales as 'Elysium' where The Architect is said to live.

After being betrayed on a job to bring up a long lost ship from the deep set up by this fuck named Bana, you get revived by the most powerful Blade in existence, the Aegis. Pyra. AKA the lass who has tits larger than her fucking head because they didn't realise that people invested in the series didn't need fan service because of what these games have a habit of doing. And you two have your lifeforce shared so if one is injured, the other gets the same injury.

Quite quickly into it you are introduced to who become the two main characters you stick with for the duration of the game, Nia that was part of the group 'Torna' that ended up betraying you but she was left to die and Tora, this 'Nopon'. Furry little bird fucks that have been in since XC1.
If not for how good all the others are, I'd say Nia's the best since she's a smug git with a Scottish accent. Whereas Tora somehow manages to make up for how useful the main Nopon character in X was in that he's genuinely useful and one of the best as far as actual combat goes with his Artificial Blade Poppi.
 
Obviously because of how powerful she is, a large amount of the characters you first meet know who the Aegis is because of the fact that her Core Crystal is a different colour to every other. Bana wants it for money, this fuck in the Mor-Ardain-governed Gormott wants it, and then Morag 'wants' it.
One big reason I loved Altair from Re:Creators as a character was the get-up so this was just ticking every goddamn box. link

She doesn't want it for power though, quite the opposite. To deny anyone else the power to use it, as it turns out the Aegis has the sheer power that during the Aegis War 500 years ago, it sunk three Titans.
By the fact she's not a complete prick, you get the gist of it that she's gonna be on the party at some point. When a character gets introduced as 'The Strongest Driver in the entirety of the Mor Ardain Empire' you kind of get the idea they'll be following this what, 12 year old kid around based on their intuition alone at some point.

Bypassing onwards a bit to Uraya, the Titan that is frequently at war with Mor Ardain. You are greeted with Vandham, the second person who doesn't want the Aegis for his own gains. A mercenary that decided he'd just try to protect those he loved.
He takes you in, teaches Rex how to truly be a Driver and basically just imparts all this knowledge from a knowledgeable war veteran onto this kid who's got his hands on the strongest Blade in existence for the purpose of taking them to Elysium. Becoming somewhat like a father figure for this bugger who never knew his own.

Naturally it is going too nice for Xenoblade standards and you've been let in on the fact that the baddies know where you are anyway, so cutscene to cutscene and you get into a fight with them that leads to him dying.
I sound like I don't care cause I admit I don't really, Vandham is by no means a bad character but you don't really have him around long enough that I was genuinely sad when he died, not to mention that Rex's incredibly bad screeching kind of ruins any sad moment that could go on there.

This is also because what is like a 10 minute cutscene took me over half an hour because of sheer annoyance. I straight up walked out the room and also banged my head against a cushion at one point, and I usually don't get violent.
But then it manages to save itself with the introduction of 'Mythra'.

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I said the song could get you hyped up and it sure as fuck did. A glimpse of a fucking Mech reactivating, a new fucking Sword that actually functions when the power of one of the bad guys is that he disables everyone's weapons. This almost hit me as hard as that time in X when you are suddenly revealed that your character is a robot when it cuts into first person and you see the arm fucking destroyed and wires poking out where bone should be.
It couldn't end with the bad guys winning at Chapter fucking 3 I knew because I'm not some dumb fuck who's never played a video game before but by no means did I expect it to go the way it did.

See it turns out, Pyra is only one 'half' of the Aegis, Mythra is the actual one that had the power to destroy 3 Titans during the war and had sealed herself away because of said power. And so there's actual logical sense to you suddenly turning full badass mode and pulling a 180 on the situation.
This causes problems later but we'll avoid that for now.


There's also a scene two chapters later wherein fucking Poppi gets upgraded and it plays the badass rock music while she transforms into a second form, that is a Maid because fucking reasons, to fight off a giant maid robot that is also there because reasons and it is absurd but this is the opposite to the game being super serious.

You get to Mor Ardain, meet more of the bad guys, get Morag in the party (What a shocker) and yada yada but we've mostly avoided mentioning the last party member. Zeke.
This fucking guy...

He makes one of my favourite scenes all the more powerful and yet he's introduced completely as the comic relief character. There are at least two interactions that I'd love to find gifs of but sadly there doesn't appear to be any out in the open so I'll have to go digging for gold later.
Doesn't actually join the party until the end of 6 but almost instantly becomes one of the mains because of how stupidly powerful he is.

Story ; Chapters 6-9

I'm cutting it into a line here because there's a lot to skip and it really starts to take off after 6.
I'm going to avoid most of it except the ending of it where shit proper hits the fan. You go to another Titan, deal with shit there and get in another fight with the bad guys, especially the main one Jin, which I'll mostly cover why he's so good near the end and also in another section.

I'll cover the villains first though, so it's a tad understandable of who they are.
Malos, he's the 'sidekick' and turns out to also be an Aegis Sword, the one that fought Mythra during the war. Jin who was a very powerful Blade that also fought during this war against Malos.
Then these other fucks, Akhos (Cunt), Patroka (Also cunt) and Mikhail. All as this terrorist group 'Torna'.

Jin, Akhos and Patroka are 'Flesh Eaters', Blades that effectively consumed human cells and thus fused, making them both no longer immortal but also more powerful.

This shows in Chapter 6's ending wherein Jin destroys Mythra's sword and beats the lot of you. Like you actually lose here and Pyra/Mythra gets taken away by them. A lot of this comes down to the fact that Rex got a bit too optimistic, thinking that with Mythra's power he could always win no matter what.

So unsurprisingly he gets in a slump and it takes a ton of effort alongside the promise of a 'third sword' to get him actually willing to go after them because he thinks he just caused her pain and that 'they'd look after her'.
See that's not the case, as JRPG's like to show you what it actually is that the bad guys are planning.

The purpose of finding her in the first place, and chasing you lot after you awakened her instead was simply to take away all her memories so Malos could get his full strength back. Taking all the fucking memories of a living person just to get power. That's a whole lot of nope in my book. So I rushed through the whole next chapter all the way to 4AM because I refused to put the game down knowing what was going to happen.

Along the way in this dungeon designed by Addam the Hero, of the Aegis War that wielded Mythra in that time period, you learn that Zeke is a 'Blade Eater', the opposite to a Flesh Eater in that Indol, the almighty powerful church in Alrest fused his own Blade with him so that he could live. And in the Dungeon, you learn that Nia is actually a Flesh Eater as well. It's a nice scene, the best Scottish lass got all the more powerful.

At the end of the dungeon, you find the third sword is naught but a fake meant only to 'explain' what it was that the Driver had to do to actually wield it, as told to Rex by Addam himself before his spirit truly fades into nothingness.
He couldn't wield it himself, because he was both afraid to wield such power, and because he was not able to help the Aegis with her own fears.

But you've lost, Malos has already taken her memories and she's nothing but a lifeless husk. There's no way to win, except for protagonist invulnerability.

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I think this is my favourite scene of the whole game from 1-9, it shows off how good Malos's VA is. You goddamn regain someone's goddamn memories and you get the full power of the sword in a scene where it plays a song that only plays twice the entire game.
The Third Sword mode is also borderline OP gameplay wise, as it does batshit insane damage during combos and can literally do any combo it likes, you can just switch between what elements you want.

4AM in the morning and I'm stood on top of a chair jumping with joy because I've just managed to get back the memories of such a huge character. 


Now while still progressing the story a fair bit, let's take a moment to discuss Jin.
Jin was this powerful Blade of this lass named Lora, who lived on the Titan 'Torna'. Being good friends with Addam and even Mythra herself. 

At the end of the Aegis War, Addam chose to acknowledge Mythra's decision to seal herself away and while this was supposed to be good so that nobody else ever got this kind of power, what it caused instead was something very bad for Jin and Lora.
Immediately after the Aegis and the Great Hero disappeared, Indol set upon Torna and wiped it out, going as far as to sink the Titan, and in the attack Lora was almost killed, but what she feared most was the thought of Jin not remembering her.

When a Driver dies, the Blades just go back into their Cores until they are reawakened, with no memories whatsoever of their previous life. And so he became a Flesh Eater so that he would never forget her, with that plaguing him for centuries until Malos returned.
It kept him in this world, and made him seek out to destroy it with Malos because of how infuriating it was, for Blades to be nothing but 'tools'.

So he's not truly evil, like almost all of Torna actually as it turns out in Chp. 9. 

Indol turns out to be evil, what a shocker there didn't see that one coming and the Praetor Amalthus only sought to use you to try to get to The Architect. But when attempting to kill you, you find yourself saved by Mikhail. On a whim.
He doesn't know why he chose to do it, but he just decided that hey, he doesn't truly want this world to be destroyed. And sacrifices himself to let you chase after them while sinking Indol.

Jin knowing his time is coming, chooses to stand for one final battle against you, but this ends up a big loss for him, however Rex ain't no stone-cold murderer and simply wants to talk him down with words.
Akhos and Patroka try to help him, but are promptly killed by Amalthus as he goes super saiyan and is shown to be one of the sad backstory characters that while a proper cunt, you can't truly hate him.

The man had lost his mother as a child to bandits, and when he helped a refugee in a camp he swiftly found the same refugee pillaging a house and going as far as trying to murder a baby so it wouldn't give him away. He hated Humans and Blades alike, even himself thinking that only he should be capable of seeing The Architect so he could erase this dreadful world.
And despite this, he's got one of the saddest deaths. Made even more sad by the fucking comic-relief character Zeke.

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But with his power fading, Jin too also begins to fade away, having chosen to use the last of his to kill Amalthus. And in his last minute of life, he smiles. Something he never does the entire game.
In one Chapter, all but a single 'villain' is killed off and yet it does not feel rushed, in fact it feels planned, they had set out to give you as much insight into the villains themselves as they did the good guys yet not enough to spoil this chapter and their end.

And thus begins the final Chapter.

But, before that, back to XC1 for a moment.
As it turns out, the world that Shulk and his chums live in was once Earth, but this scientist Klaus had decided to attempt an experiment to make Humans have the equivalent power to Gods.
It failed, and it just wiped out the world instead, leaving Klaus as this new 'God' Zanza, and his assistant some other god that isn't a total shithead.

He's a truly evil villain, planning to kill off all life so simply elevate his own powers. From a simple Scientist saying 'Let's begin the Experiment', to a God that thinks himself incapable of dying.

Chapter 10 of Xenoblade 2 begins, and you're shown a whole battle waging on at this Space Station, with the implications that even the whole planet is ruined.
They try to activate this incredibly powerful being 'Aion', only to be locked out. By one Professor Klaus.

So all of a sudden, the world's become connected. And yet done in such a way that someone who knows his character from the original has the experience enhanced, but someone who's no idea who he is doesn't have theirs ruined.

He is halved, one side lives here in Alrest in the remains of it all while the other went on to become Zanza, and yet despite desiring oblivion for the sin he committed, it never came.
I am going to put his cutscene later, and it's one of the longest but fucking gr8 ones.

He lets you go off to beat Malos, not kill actually, Rex makes it abundantly clear that his intentions are to punch him in his face and then maybe go have a drink with the fella.
And thus you meet Malos, having awoken Aion to destroy the world. Again I'll go far more into detail about it all in another whole spiel but for now we're just focusing on what happens.
Halfway through the boss fight, it goes into a cutscene, with The Architect knowing that his other half is about to perish, this is made apparent by the fact the game literally plays the line of dialogue that Shulk says before you defeat Zanza. 

After you learn why he is truly like how he is, you fight and eventually defeat him, huzzah the world is saved. But the World Tree begins to crumble, having lost its power supply because of Aion.
So Pyra/Mythra informs you that there is a set of boosters which you can use to make it sustain itself again so it doesn't come crumbling down on the entirety of Alrest. Which turns out to be a lie, the location is that of escape shuttles.

And thus, they choose to sacrifice themselves to save the entire world, going as far as giving Rex their Core Crystal so that he can live without them, where previously they'd both die.
The world is saved, it turns out The Architect had spent his entire lifetime making a whole new 'world' beyond what Alrest was for the people of this new world to live in, and so the Titans dying out is no longer an issue.
With the game at an end, it starts the credits. However at the end it cuts back into the game.

The Aegis Core Crystal begins to shine, and then resonates before bringing them both back. I've actually seen a few comments here and there that don't like that and think they should have either stayed dead or only hinted at them returning one day. In my honest opinion I was ecstatic as all hell to have them return on screen as the ending because I thought they'd just pull another fucking cliffhanger.


That's the story done, and honestly it may end up cut in half into two posts because of hitting the word limit on the site.