Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Gets Trailer and Gameplay Video

Xenoblade is hardly the first series to pop to mind when you think of long-standing Nintendo properties, but this JRPG has been a fairly regular series for the big N since the first game was released on the Wii as one of those "Project Rainfall" titles that fans were trying desperately to get Nintendo to bring to the west. It worked, really well in fact, and now Nintendo's gotten to the point where the Xenoblade games are stables, and perhaps the only true JRPG Nintendo has in its roster.

But this E3, the next game in the series, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, also had the distinction of being the only JRPG on display... talk about a dying genre, sheeh. Sill, it looks good pretty good, with some pretty funny voice acting, your standard JRPG plot, and a whole lot of butts. And I can always get behind a nice butt.



First thing I noticed, however, was that the music lacked the Xenoblade X edge. That's probably because it wasn't composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, a Japanese composer I know quite well for his exemplary work. It sounds more standard-JRPG now, which isn't bad, just... not as good.

Gameplay wise, it looks pretty much like you'd expect. Beautiful worlds, numbers flying over heads, confusing menu screens, and a whole lot of crystals. One interesting distinction is that characters can apparently either be in the back or in the front of combat: if you're in the front, you're attacking, and people in the back are paired with someone in the front and supply them with a certain kind of buff or power. So you can swap between supports and attackers depending on the situation.  Alright, I'm on board with that.



So, for JRPG fans or people looking to bring some value to their Switch, it looks indispensable. It'll be released sometime this Winter.