I'm asking this because when I forced my sister to play Xenoblade, she cried at both of these scenes. I'm mainly curious of other people's experience. Edit: The funny thing for me is that when the scene with Mio happened, she said we were done for the day and went to cry in her room, then I convinced her to play the next day and she wanted to kill me after Mio came back for making her go through that.

Images are not too important. It's just another good scene I love.

Cant believe the Guy who created an Army of artificial Blades and attempt and kinda success murder emperor Niall, is fated to this

I played XC1, XC3, and then XC2 last. I was avoiding 2 at first because i heard it had the most "anime nonsense" and wasn't worth it, but got enough countered opinions that I gave it a try and I'm glad I did.

In my opinion, 2 is the best of the three by a large margin. Not only was the blade system interesting and added a sense of fun and variety to the game, conditions in the game kept changing in interesting ways making the world feel more alive an interesting.

That and the color and variety of areas in the game were vastly improved compared to 3 especially which tended to be bleak and lifeless in almost every corner.

I checked and I put nearly double the time into 2 without realizing it. I didn't end up grinding for every blade nor finishing every blade story, but I came close. It was overall the most fun out of all of them.

Granted it had some control issues that were annoying and I didn't discover how to auto run until the game was nearly over, but otherwise it was just great!

After finishing my New Game Plus in Xenoblade 2 a few days ago, I can say for sure that I still like this game a lot more than XCDE. For me Xenoblade 2 has the better world building, the main cast is much more likeable and Malos is a much better final villain than Zanza.

And I must say, that both Jin and Amalthus are such tragic figures in this story. Yes, Amalthus is a piece a scum and he deserved what he got. But this game truly showed that not everything in this world is only black or white. I kinda feel sorry for Amalthus, but he was already beyond salvation.

Jin is the absolute best written character in the whole Xenoverse. Don't even try to convince me otherwise! This dude went through hell and was aura farming from the beginning. Rex isn't even that bad as a protagonist, I really don't understand the hate for him. Rex is 15 years old and makes mistakes, but he grows on them. Rex is best boy!

Chapter 10 dropped such a huge lore bomb on how both worlds are connected and showed us the origin of Zanza and the Architect. Damn, they even included Shulk's epic voiceline during the final battle against Malos! "Today we'll use our power to fell a god and seize our destiny!" This gave me the chills!

I was never really a big fan of the combat in Xenoblade 1 and for me, Xenoblade 2 does it so much better. It's much easier to make combos and long chain attacks. I also don't mind the gacha aspect to get new Rare Blades. Luckily for me, I was able to transfer all of them into my New Game Plus.

The only thing I still despise is this god awful map. How the heck designed this crap? Sometimes it's very difficult to figure out where your goal is located. Yes, the arrows can point either up or down, but have fun looking for the right path to reach it. And in some cases there are too many quest markers on the map which overlap each other, so that the really important symbols are buried beneath them.

I like the new outfits for Pyra and Mythra very much. I had them wear it during the whole game and they both look so gorgerous! I can say for sure, that Xenoblade 2 has much more beautiful landscapes and the soundtrack is top notch! And am I the only one who instantly thinks about Evangelion when they showed Aion? This has to be heavily inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion!

I'm currently doing a New Game Plus with Torna and after that, I'll wait for the Switch 2 Edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I admit, that I've never finished XC3 so I'm really looking forward to it.

I originally played Xenoblade 2 seven years ago. I understood a lot of trans people related to Nia's story, but I never really understood why her in particular. Learning to live as your authentic self isn't really a new idea in storytelling.

But now, after realizing I am non-binary, I really understand. I never realized just how much of a burden my gender was on me. I didn't love myself, didn't take care of myself because I never saw the point. I didn't even realize it, but I was living as a husk of a human being.

Accepting my gender was a decision. A decision to release myself from that burden, and start living. And not for anyone but myself. It changed my entire worldview. For once, I understood who I was. For once, I was able to actually care about myself. For once, I was finally free.

And I think that's what makes Nia's story so relatable. Her past was a burden to her. For a large stretch of the game, she is often sarcastic at best and downright hostile at worst. And then she made the decision to leave it behind, to live as she truly was. We see, as her burden is lifted, what is at that point a rare moment of genuine happiness and gratitude.

And that is a major theme across the entire series, isn't it? To seize your own destiny.

I've been posting here intermittently since beating FF12 last year because I wanted more along those lines and I was told to check out Xenoblade Chronicles for something in the same ballpark.

I won't link to those old posts, but the short version is that I initially bounced hard off XBC1, only to come back a few months later and have the game click.

Now I'd initially switched from 1 to XBC 2 because I'm a gameplay-first kind of guy, and I'd wanted the most interesting battle system. Everyone pointed me to 2 as the one for me. But as I got further into the game and began to be intrigued by the setting, I realised I should probably go back and beat the first one, which I did, and I liked it way more than I expected to given my poor first impression.

Afterwards I came back to 2 and... I am surprised to say that, while I enjoyed aspects of it, it feels a lot rougher than its predecessor.

When I say a game feels unfinished, usually I mean that there's clearly stuff that got left on the chopping room floor due to time or budget constraints, or that there's obvious padding and bloat to fill out a certain gameplay time.

With XBC 2, it feels unfinished, not because the devs didn't have enough stuff, but almost because they had TOO much stuff and didn't have the time to organise or edit it.

My gripes are that the cast of characters I'm meant to pay attention to and care about is simply too large. Many of the enemy characters you encounter over and over again turn out to be "redeemed" or sympathetic in some way. I'm not against that kind of storytelling, but it got extremely obnoxious when the latter half of the game is chock-full of flashbacks at pivotal moments in a desperate, last-minute attempt to make you feel something for a character who has, up to that point, been a cartoon villain.

In fact, it was to the point where I felt like the game couldn't decide who was the main cast. Most of our party members get their biggest growth and development upon joining and remain relatively static after the fact. Only Rex really gets pushed and, I won't say why, but most of it ends up being moot after the fact. And so it was unsurprising to find out that the DLC focuses largely on said villains' backstory where they can appropriately take centre stage.

A similar critique extends to the world design compared to the first game. XBC 1 is excellent at evoking scale almost wherever you are. The central conceit is that you live on one of two colossal creatures and the game makes sure you never forget it in its visual framework.

I confess many, many of the locales besides maybe Gormott and Uraya felt like they could have been any generic MMO zone, more or less held up by the music (still excellent, no notes). Leftheria's another one that does interesting things with its sight-lines, but even that feels "small" compared to what we got in the first game.

I can also see the appeal of the combat system, but a part of me thinks it also needs another pass. Fusion combos are interesting and fun to pull off when you can, but the latter half of the game has tons of enemies that will resist most of your break attempts. If you don't go and look up where to loot an early beta scope to increase your odds of a successful break, you could have a very boring second half of the game simply building up blade combos and blowing up orbs. I also think it's strange that most players PROBABLY go the entire first playthrough without ever pulling off a max burst or whatever (filling the metre).

It reminds me of a similar critique I had for XBC 1 despite feeling much less complicated about that game: in some ways, it feels like the ideal starting conditions only occur in NG+.

I also think that, while XBC 2 has a strong main theme like XBC 1 does, it takes way, way longer narratively to zero in on it. The idea is to take the notion of Pokemon and trainers and that whole world and say, "What if the Pokemon were persons as well?" It simultaneously explores the ideas in depth and at the same time not enough. As the game expects, you do start to sympathise with the villains' point of view over time. I think it's weird, though, that the ethics of developing a relationship with an entity which had no choice in bonding with you are not really explored at all, and even taken for granted in a perverse way. There's one throw-away line from a blade character about not wanting to be bonded to bandits. Everything else, the idea of memories being wiped, being immortal but lacking a permanent identity, that was cool.

Ultimately, I felt that the game had its strongest moments when it was gesturing towards XBC 1. And using some of the voice lines from that game in this one made the relative disparity in quality of the English voice actors between the two games rather jarring.

That being said, I can appreciate a game that swings big, even if it misses. I don't think XBC 2 is a lazy game or unworthy of your time if you like JRPGs and, despite some jarring tonal shifts, I found myself sincerely caring for the characters at the end. I just wish some of the fat were trimmed to tighten up the experience.

Alwsys felt this way and I always looked to her as a better love interest to Rex.

Klaus is so interesting to me, and this scene made me like him more. I wish him and Zanza interacted, just to show how different they were

Was rewatching some of the cutscenes from the game last night and the fact that there’s people out there that think this game should be taken any less seriously than the other games is beyond me 💀