This game is big, busy, and full of charm, even if it doesn’t quite hit the same epic scale as the first Xenoblade Chronicles. If you’ve played the first game, you’ll see some familiar creatures (like the adorable fluffball Nopon) and field enemies, but there’s no direct link between the two stories – at least, not initially.

That said, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is prettier than the first game, with vibrant visuals and more detailed environments. It’s also much busier, with a whole entourage of characters following you around. And noisier – if you thought the party chatter in fights was lively before, you’re in for a shock here.

Oh, and the accents? Incredible. The Gormotti cat people sound like they’ve just come from a village in Wales, the Urayans are unmistakably Australian, and the Mor Ardainian soldiers? Straight-up Scottish. It’s an absolute treat to listen to.

You play as Rex, a young salvager who grew up diving into the sea to recover lost treasures from the ruins of a world destroyed hundreds of years ago. In this world, humanity lives on the backs or inside of massive creatures called Titans, as the continents have sunk beneath the sea.

Rex gets hired by a shady organisation to retrieve a mysterious treasure. Turns out, that “treasure” is actually Pyra, a living weapon known as a Blade – and not just any Blade, she’s one of two Aegises, the most powerful of all Blades. Things escalate quickly – Rex gets killed, Pyra revives him, and they embark on a quest to reach Elysium, a mythical paradise where everyone can live in peace. Of course, it’s not that simple. The bad guys who hired Rex have their own agenda, and there’s a sprawling plot involving secret civilisations, ancient betrayals, and events from 500 years ago. Plus, there are loads of side quests.

If you’re familiar with the combat system in the first game, you’ll recognise some similarities here, but there are big differences too. In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, combat was semi-realtime, with each character having a set of moves on cooldown. Your party members mostly acted on their own, leaving you to manage the lead character.

In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, each character has up to three Blades, which are essentially living weapons that grant you their power. Each Blade comes with its own set of moves, and you can switch between them in battle. This means you’ve got access to up to 12 moves at any time, depending on cooldowns.

The combat also leans heavily on combos. You can string together moves to “break” an enemy’s defence, topple them, launch them into the air, and even smash them back down. Pulling these combos off isn’t easy, though. With cooldowns, short timing windows, and the need for specific moves, you’ll need some serious planning (or a lot of luck) to line everything up.

One issue with the combat is how long fights take. Even when you’re massively over-levelled compared to your enemies, battles can drag on for ages. And then there are the special “named monsters,” with their silly names like Glamorous Alfred and Machine Gun Julio. Taking them down can take half an hour or more, even if they can barely scratch you. It feels like a grind, even when you’re doing everything you can to boost your party’s power.

Now, about the Blades. You mostly get them through a gacha-style system by your characters, who are “Drivers”, bonding with crystals you find in loot drops or quest rewards. Some Blades are unique, with their own storylines and voice acting, while others are randomly generated. Over time, you’ll collect hundreds of them. It sounds overwhelming, but thankfully, the game has a clever way to manage them.

You can also send Blades on away missions, a bit like recruiting assassins in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. They go off, complete tasks, and return with rewards. It’s surprisingly addictive and helps you feel like your massive collection of Blades is actually useful, even if they’re not in your main party.

Other than these differences in combat and weapons, the game isn’t really too dissimilar to the first one. It does feel substantially bigger in terms of “hours spent” if not “physical area”, probably due to the increased density and more to actually do. By the time I completed it at around 125 hours in, I think I’d actually come to like it even more than Xenoblade 1, although the first few hours nearly put me off it completely.

I think I had two initial issues with Xenoblade 2. The first was how much had changed since the first game – the location, the combat, the salvaging, the characters I’d grown to love and/or hate had all changed significantly. The other issue was that the first main story mission was on a drab, dark submarine-type ship instead of a massive, beautiful green-and-blue vista like Xenoblade 1 started off. It took me a few hours to start to get into it, but once I’d reached Gormott – a massive, beautiful green-and-blue vista like Xenoblade 1, it had me hooked to the end.

The end, which, despite having the end of the actual world as a possibility if Rex and chums fail, still somehow didn’t have the epic feel of the first game. It was good, although I still don’t really understand the Big Bad’s motives for trying to bring it about (it was a bit like Ultron from the MCU, I suppose – might as well destroy everything because nothing can be bad if there’s nothing there). The main thing that was WHOAAAA was when there were references to Xenoblade 1. I’d hoped there would be, but couldn’t see how. Then I did. No, I’m not spoiling it for you.

The final fight was a bit too easy. I think because I’d spent so long doing side missions and unlocking the skills on the trees for my team, Blades and so on that I was a good 15 levels higher than the end boss so defeated it no problem. Aside from, as I said, it taking ages because most of the fights just do. With the game complete, I could move on to something else but… there are still places to go, missions to finish and more unique Blades to unlock. Maybe I’ll go back and do them?

I’m definitely in the mood for roleplaying games this year, so Xenoblade Chronicles – a game I already have, unplayed, for the 3DS – came to mind. Of course, I couldn’t play the 3DS version when a newer, better, more complete version exists, so I had to buy that. Naturally, it has never seen much of a price drop but after a few weeks of checking sites for cheap copies an Italian version came up on eBay for £23, less than half the usual going price. Thankfully, it has an English option, and so here we are.

Going into a 50+ hour RPG can be pretty daunting. That’s a big ol’ time sink for a start, but it’s also “what if it’s too hard and I can’t complete it?”, or “what if it’s terrible?”. Reviews suggested the latter wasn’t likely to be true and being an RPG you can always grind levels for any hard bits, but very quickly I hit a bit of a wall – I hated the combat.

Traditionally, any JRPG to me has turn based combat. You could also (incorrectly) argue that games like The Legend of Zelda are RPGs (they’re not) and so are action based combat. Then you have western RPGs like Fallout 3 or Knights of the Old Republic which have their own systems with Action Points and semi-real-time combat. Xenoblade is different. And I didn’t like it.

You see, when you trigger a fight (ideally by sneaking up behind a baddie and slashing your sword at them) you move into what superficially appears to a be real-time fight where you can move as much as you want and attack when you want and physically dodge rather than (seemingly) hidden dice-rolls determining actions and success. Except it isn’t like that, as although you can use one of your various attacks (and buffs, debuffs and heals) each one has a cooldown. There’s a bar along the bottom of the screen with your moves listed, and you spend 95% of each fight looking at and selecting things on this bar rather than the action unfolding, and it’s just weird.

Or at least it was until something clicked: This is basically the same combat system as in Eternal Sonata.

Now I realise you, dear reader, are about to be shouting in the comments about how Final Fantasy have been doing this for years and how it’s used in Kingdom Hearts and it’s really common or something. But I haven’t played those to any degree. I have, however, played Eternal Sonata. Anyway, following this revelation, it was fine. Well, I mean, the game operating through a set of icons along the bottom of the screen was still a bit odd but gameplay-wise, all good.

With all that out of the way, what about the actual game, eh? Unfortunately that got off to a bad start too, as within minutes of actually taking control of my character, I’d unlocked twelvetentymillion quests. Which was more than a little overwhelming. And they just kept coming. Luckily, they’re dealt with in a really clever way, in a nice checklist which you can turn quest tracking on and off for with map icons and instructions and reminders. I believe this is a system from the later Xenoblade games which was backported to this remaster of the Wii original, where the old quest tracking system was essentially unusable. Yay for waiting to play a later version! So, like the combat, I was won over and ticking all the boxes became a fun obsession rather than an irritating chore like it appeared at first.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a big game. Sure, I mean that in that it’s a huge RPG, and I also mean in that it’s an epic storyline, but I really mean that the whole world is set on (and in) the body of two massive titans – Bionis, a creature of earth and nature, and Mechonis, a being of gears and metal. Areas explored and encountered are on the leg, or hand, or inside the chest of these creatures. In the distant past of the world of Xenoblade, these two giants fought, and ultimately both “died”. The Xenoblade of the title was the weapon of choice for the Bionis, and it’s this that Shulk – tiny human that he is – ends up wielding himself. Yes, somehow it’s a lot smaller when Shulk holds it, although like most JRPGs it’s still hilariously oversized.

Anyway, Doings are Afoot, and it seems that the denizens of Mechonis (mostly robots) have been sent to war with those (mostly humans) of Bionis, and they’re near indestructible without the power of the Xenoblade. So begins Shulk’s quest to avenge the apparent death of his friend, and he travels the world to reach Mechonis and defeat the Big Bad. Only, of course, there are more twists than a telephone cable and things aren’t as straightforward as it seems.

This plays out in a fairly standard JRPG way – reach new areas, get new friends (some of whom join your party) and foes (or are they?), fight increasingly more powerful baddies, complete side quests, rebuild a city, make embarrassed faces when any sort of physical attraction might be construed, get progressively more powerful yourself, augment your clothes and weapons with stones that boost various stats, and so on. You know the deal.

Fights are complex, with three characters to keep track of (although you can only directly control your leader), combos to try and build, and a system of staggering, knocking over, and paralysing baddies which require certain attacks in specific orders to achieve – and they’re necessary for some baddies or they just won’t take damage at all. All this while there is so much chatter. Reyn constantly yelling “Now it’s Reyn time!”, Sharla peppering every fight with “My rifle’s getting hotter!” and so on. It’s a bit much after 80 hours. There is some funny (for a while…) bants though, mainly involving Riki the catmouseturnipbear thing. Behold the “Riki Need Paws!” exchange:

I’ve made a few comments now where it suggests I didn’t like the game. I haven’t mentioned the slightly annoying fetch quests, or the sometimes dodgy graphics (mainly when close up or in caves), or the fact you often have to wait until a certain time of day (there’s a full day/night cycle in the game) to talk to people. You would be wrong – it was bloody brilliant, warts and all.

The plot, especially the resolution, is utterly mental. The twists along the way are whaaaaaaa? in the extreme. But it works somehow. The gameplay is solid, the just one more area carrot is strong. The areas, when there are big open vistas are gorgeous, with some very Breath of the Wild vibes. The soundtrack is great, the main characters are brilliant (although “Shulk” is the worst name in all of creation) and it’s just fun. I may have taken a very long time to come to the Xenoblade party, but after 90-odd hours of it I’ve definitely arrived and look forward to some Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Once I can find a cheap Italian copy, of course.

Oh, and to explicitly answer the two concerns at the start of this post – it was easy, and I did like it. Phew, eh?