Xillia 2 thoughts

So, Xillia 2. Short version: Not nearly as good as Xillia 1. I’ll cover design stuff first and then character and plot stuff at the end, with nice spoiler markers for where to stop reading if you haven’t played this yet for some reason.

While Xillia 1’s fields and dungeon’s weren’t great, I didn’t mind them when played through the original game, twice. I mind them a lot more when I’m going through them another 3-5 times in a sequel with zero changes. This was, frankly, a very, very lazy sequel.  The worst part of going through all these palces multiple times was the need to scour them for missable chests, which mostly meant trying to find all of the holes in the walls. The world map makes it clear the Elympius is HUGE compared to Rieze Maxia, yet the game adds very little to that area. Granted, with the dull field design, perhaps that’s a blessing. Even so, they could have added a few more towns and dungeons there, rather than just sending the player to the first game’s locations several more times.

And you do go basically everywhere from the first game. The only exceptions are the sewer from the very start of the game and most of Fort Gandala. And I suppose the Dimensional Abyss in Xillia 2 is an abbreviated version. That’s it though; you go eeeeverywhere else. And fight every single boss from the first game, with maybe the exception of Gilland. I don’t recall actually fighting him the one place he showed up, but maybe I just forgot and I can’t be fucked to go check.
The game has precisely 4 new dungeons. One of them is sort of remix from the first game, one is the final dungeon, which is quite possible the worst final dungeon I’ve ever played. It’s both lazy AND obnoxious, and the entire concept of the dungeon is to waste the player’s time in a supremely obnoxious maze.

Xillia 1 handled ‘side quests’ quite well. After hitting ridiculously and unpleasant extremes  in missable content with short windows of opportunity in Vesperia and having virtually no missable content in Graces, Xillia 1 found a great balance. Plenty of things were missable, but most or all of them where hinted at with special hint skits. If the game had a flaw in that regard, it perhaps did it a bit too much, leaving little for the player to discover on their own. Xillia 2 decided there was too much risk the players might not pay attention and just sticks everything in a subquest dispenser.  So while the game will send you out to areas you’ve been to before, sometimes huge chunks at a time, there’s nothing there for you to really discover.  Most of these sidequests are just more “kill X enemy Y times” or handing in random junk. Even among the red one-time quests, only a small portion have scenes.

The only other “optional” content as you go through the story are elite monsters and character chapters. The character chapters are generally quite good, at least. My personal favorites were the Gaius, Leia, and Elize quests. These all have markers next to the locations in the quick travel menu so that you know where they are and can’t miss them. These are so significant that I think marking them this way is a good thing, but it nonetheless means there is really nothing for players to find as they mostly retread the first game’s content.

The concept of paying off debt to progress and unlocking areas at certain thresholds is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work that well. You’re never actually hurting for cash in this game, so it just caps what you can hoard at any given point. There’s little to look forward to since it’s almost all recycled from the first game and the size of some sections (particularly the ENTIRE Xian Du/Kanbalar region) results in pacing issues, as you suddenly have to put off progressing the story for an hour or two as you re-explore these locations, on top of any new character quests that pop up, which may have you re-re-explore parts of it.  And seriously, I hope you really, really like Bermia Gorge.

Combat has a few tweeks, mainly thanks to Ludger being special.  The weapon swapping thing is nice on its own, I guess, but it really does not mix well with the link arte system. The issues is that now you suddenly have 3 times the number of artes to keep track of as each weapon has its own set of artes. Some characters only link with certain weapon types (you have to use swords if you’re linking with Milla or Gaius, need to use Hammer with Leia) others might work with two or even all 3. I’m not really sure, because I just stuck with swords 99% of the time after the first few chapters.  It was way too much to keep track off, on top of the existing issue of trying to balance link artes with your rapidly growing array of new artes that may or may not work with the characters you want to link with.

However, major draws of Tales games have always (at least since Symphonia, anyway) been their characters and stories. As usual, I quite liked the Xillia cast, so I enjoyed seeing them again. And as mentioned, the character chapters were varying degrees of good, if a bit over-reliant on alternate dimensions popping up that just happened to be relevant to those characters and their immediate issues. As usual, the skits were usually entertaining and the game had some good to great after battle scenes (some of my favorites being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdZht_IwwuY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5yTiWli_XQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCnPjNOFgzw). Granted, there are surely a decent number I haven’t seen yet just for not having the right combinations of characters in battle together enough.

One of my big issues with Symphonia 2 was how the new characters fit in with the existing characters.  Unlike a lot of people, I didn’t hate the game or even Emil, though he certainly was…. Less than ideal.  But the character chemistry felt awkward. Like they were suddenly buddy buddy with everone else without sufficient cause. This is not really an issue in Xillia 2 at least.  One thing that helps here is that Ludger meets Jude at the start and is then never meets another character from the first game on his own, rather than somehow meeting each character from the first game shortly after a previous one left over and over. I suppose part of it might be that it’s just better written, plus he has a unique situation that gives the original characters a compelling reason to stick around.

A big part of this is Elle. Elle is a non-combatant, and an 8 year old that tends to act like one. She is funny, cute, and ridiculously endearing. She is the soul of the game and what ultimately holds it together despite its major problems. It is not at all difficult to buy the characters immediately becoming attached to her, and I really think that’s the main thing that makes it all work

Then there’s Ludger. As I said before, one of Tales big draws is the characters. As anyone familiar with my taste and opinions on anime knows, I have…. rather strict standards for male leads. I typically find them quite dull and/or irritating and not at all engaging as characters. This is somewhat less of an issue in video games, but that’s probably largely a numbers issue. HOWEVER, it’s never really been a problem for Tales. I liked Lloyd, I liked Yuir, I loved Luke, I really like Jude, I even liked Asbel. I really don’t remember Senel. Legendia was a shitty game and I only remember liking Norma. Anyway, the point is, this is not a situation where I would want a character to be a mute hollow shell of a character. But that’s what we got. Ludger’s dialogue, other than the choices, is basically all “….” “huh?” and “what?”. Sure, we get some information about things that happened to him in the past, but that’s not a character. The player gets to determine the direction skits go at times, but he doesn’t make any actual contribution himself. You make the choice (and in some cases it’s unimaginable that both responses could come from the same person) a character reacts, and then they go back to bouncing off each other. Anything involving him that works, does so because of the other characters, in spite of his black-hole of characterization.

And then there’s the plot itself. Simply put, it’s not very good. The alternate dimension stuff is a bunch of utter nonsense. In itself, that’s not inherently a flaw. But the that and the concept itself just doesn’t feel like a good fit with the original game, and ultimately isn’t very engaging or interesting in itself. My issue here lies largely with the “find the doohickeys to completely this dumb challenge the spirits gave to humanity” aspect of it. So, uh, yeah, basically I wish about 90% of the story after chapter 2 had been different. Also, I maintain that it gets rather silly that every single alternate dimension revolves around this group of characters. The game was never going to be Steins;Gate in approach to appearing scientific and it didn’t need to. Not really explaining how the dimension stuff works is about the only option; you either go all the way or don’t even attempt it. HOWEVER, all 20-something alternate dimensions revolving around these characters needed some sort of fig leaf and it wouldn’t have been hard to do.

I also felt that everyone was way too okay with killing thousands or millions of people every time they went into a fractured dimension. This problem is basically the opposite of the previous one. Here, they specifically brought up “WE’RE KILLING THEM” and everyone basically just goes “man, that really sucks. Welp, it’s our (uh, Ludger’s) job, just gotta do it.” I don’t think they even had the “we need to do it to save the world” excuse when that first came up.

Part of the problem was that laziness and keeping costs/time down was part of the entire design philosophy of the game. If there’s one thing I can’t fault the game for, it’s taking some risks and doing some unusual things (much like how Symphonia 2 decided to be half monster-raising sim), but it didn’t work out well here. One potential problem with Elympius as a new location was that the whole planet was apparently a desolate wasteland like the areas we saw in the first game, and then reaffirmed with the one new area, Catamar Heights. But the alternate dimension thing was a way to get around that. And the game already did introduce a spirit that didn’t exist in the Prime dimension (oh yeah, gotta talk about that). So that plus just the ability to not have it all be Tattooine meant they could have done all sorts of things on Elypius. They could have done more of a Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross approach. There could have been one big alternate dimension the cast kept going back and forth between for whatever reasons, or several smaller ones (with likely some overlap, but it wouldn’t have to be to the degree here). Of course, that would have taken a lot more time, effort, and money.

Okay, so yeah, Aska. So, first of all, before meeting Aska the second time, at least one NPC referred to Aska as “her”. Then in the cut scene, Aska has a masculine voice and is referred to repeatedly as “he”.  So the localization gets a strike for inconsistency there. But the voice is masculine in a way that distinctly says “homosexual”, which he quickly confirms. And then fights you because he’s super jealous Jude “cheated” on him with Milla. Sooooo yeah. Doesn’t strike me as a plus for the game.