I very much doubt Torna is good as everything related to Xenoblade 2 is bad.
Xenoblade 2 is one of the worst games I've ever played.
What was there to like here?
It wasn't the story. The story was crap. Tales level crap complete with the same sophistication of themes. Any 5 year old could tell you the some moralizing crap this game does, probably with a bit more directness and little need to keep repeating the same stuff over and over again for hours on end. I get it, life is worth living and it won't change if you refuse to not change. I get it, people need to work together. Jesus Christ did this story have the nuance of a Disney Channel kids show, except here they felt the need to have characters constantly moralize to you the player. It got extermley annoying.
And yet most of the character's had no real development. The party members were awful and for most of them after they had their little episode of development the story put them in the back of the bus, only playing lip service to them every once in a while. Good jrpgs will have their characters tied to the story, the setting, and keep them involved till the end. Not here. Once they join you're party, they are done honestly and in the end what where these character's arcs? Rex's stays an optimistic little generic anime boy the whole time. His only challenge is I guess he loses at one point. Oh boy! A character with really no personality beyond being optimistic anime boy. No challenge in life beyond keep going. No identity crisis. No real conflict. Just super boring. Nothing memorable about this character at all and his strange creepy waifu relationship is lame and otaku baity. He loves Pyra why? What is their relationship beyond "GOTTA GO TO ELYSIUM". Like there's nothing there whatsoever.
Morag becomes useless and offers nothing after she joins you. Far more interesting as an antagonist because at least she had presence. After she joins your party she just continues to be stern anime female. Yawn inducing. I don't know why people like this character beyond their waifu fetishism. She looks stupid. She looks like Chopin from Eternal Sonata and her cool presence fades after chapter 3. But see here's another character that added nothing to the game. Here we could have seen the reflection of the world's politics as she clearly is bias towards her nation. You get a few snippets, but nothing interesting. Honestly what was her character? Did she have an arc? Did she have any conflict? No.
Zekke. Whatever. Not even a character. They don't do anything with his exiled prince aspect and the anime badass goof thing pretty much stops. But here is the perfect example of where the game basically stops to a crawl to show his backstory and then moves past it. Out of nowhere the game decides to stop what it's doing and have his backstory with Pandoria and then goes "oh were done with this episode" time to move on with the Nia stuff. It was like ok, I guess that's all this character deserves.
Pyra. Just more anime waifu crap. What was interesting about her. That she talks mysteriously about this plot(EVERYONE IN THE GAME DOES. EVERYONE ACTS LIKE THEY ARE IN THE KNOW). She seems to be hiding something? She seems to have some secret? Some agency? Whatever thats all droped midway as she becomes more interested in crushy blushy for Rex. Her character just basically becomes Rex's girlfriend and loses any aspect that made her at all somewhat ok. Even Tusandre Mythra gives up the act as the game goes on.
I don't care about the Nippon character, but at least the chapter about him was full of actually amusing anime jokes. I hate the Nippons and thier humor and va. At least Poppi was somewhat fun in a very cliche anime way.
And then Torna is just whatever. I wish I liked them, but Christ did they suck. Nomura's work here seemed very phoned in. Oh he has glasses and is the smart one! Most of them just seem like overly sad sacks with the dumbest goal ever. WE WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD BECAUSE HUMANS ARE BAD. I almost can't belive this is a theme/story beat in the game. Constantly about how humans destroy stuff. Yes, it's never been done before, but here it pretty much stops there.
Jin/Malos: Human's are bad
Rex: Well yeah, but not always and sometimes they do good.
Jin/Malos: Wel....yeah....but eventually all they do is kill and destroy.
Rex: Yeah, but so what not everyone is like that
Jin/Malos: i guess....but BLADES aren't slaves and thats bad.
Rex: Yeah but your driver's loved you and we work as a team.
Jin/Malos: Oh well...WHATEVER
Thats almost every scene and then anyway I guess Torna realizes how dumb and angsty they sounded anyway because reasons. or rather because the story is crappy. It's funny because right before they died it was like the game frogot to develop the glasses dude and the girl and was like oh yeah they I guess had something life...IDK brother and sister because. It was like wtf are you even trying?
And then Fantasy Pope is also evil because get this bad people did bad things and I guess he should control everything because of that. Nobody saw that coming.
No one here had interesting motivations. No inserting conflicts that reveal some character substance. No villain here had a logical argument that a 12 year old couldn't see a problem with. It was the worst of anime philosophizing and it was embarrassing and tiring to listen to.
And then the sci-fi twist is stupid. In the first Xenoblade it worked. The Monodo and just general setting of the world being on two giant robot gods already establishes that the world has something going on. Here honestly the world feels like a generic fantasy world with little real thought beyond that and even Blades aren't odd. So to throw in the connection to the first game feels so random and pointless for the story. It also doesn't add much. I guess the creator is some sad sack in a space station who's point is what? He really makes no impact on the story and changes little about the core of the story. We learn about Blades, but as a non angtsy viewer I already know Blades are people and honestly the game does a really poor job of selling the Blade conflict. Yes there's regulations on them and yes the country where they were equals was unfairly destroyed. But honestly they don't seem unfairly treated and the Driver Blade thing needs to exist anyway. The alternative doesn't really work, so honestly whats the endgame? The game brings up this problem and then basically has nothing interesting to say about it.
And I don't know the world never felt interesting to me. But also because it's a typical jrpg world and you know what? That does not work with the scale of the Blade games. Are these supposed to be big nations and big cities? Because they just feel like JRPG worlds and in that I mean a country has one city and that's it and the city isn't big. That works in things like Tales or other jrpgs. Hell in some Tales games they have in the background the rest of the cityscape to make you feel like this city is bigger. But since Xeno games go for scale, it feels like the whole world is small and less than a million people live in it. I guess that's true, but because of that none of these places feel like what they say they are. These aren't nations. They are some small towns. Other Xeno games did'nt feel like that because well in the 1st Blade it is just a small population, likewise in XBX.
Also the environments never felt as big or grand as XBX. A lot of them felt small. A lot of them felt like linear hallways. A big valley here and there, but most of them had few interesting aspects to them. Nothing like XBX's world.
Also the whole Titans thing was lame and did'nt do anything. At no point did I ever feel like I was on something. If you took out a few sky boxes, this world would feel like generic rpg world. Nothing like realizing your on the arm of a mech god like in XB1.
As for the battle system. It was fun somewhat. It always felt slow. When you switch to combat it felt like your character was now walking through water. Animation was slow and felt like it took forever. Stupid that animation was prioritized as characters would miss out on topples and launches because they had to do their animations. AI was dumb and I've never felt that about ai controlled parties. Not in FFXII, Persona, or whatever. Here since setting up combos depends on your party as well, means you have to wait and pray they switch to the Blade you want them to. Meaning you can miss out and chances and moves you want to do.
The RNG blade system is awful. That is all. After 80 hrs I never got Kos Mos. Fuck this.
And that's it. I hated this game. This has really killed my intrests in Monolith Soft. I can't belvie they made something this awful. I mean I don't even care about how ugly the game looks. There's not a cool design in this game. NEVER HIRE THIS CHARACTER DESIGNER AGAIN. I don't even care about Pyra's tits. Whatever they are stupid, but her outfit in general looks lame. Colorful robot girl anime shit in a world where no one looks like this. Then her and Rex decide to cosplay like Kos Mos. Everyone looks like crap. The game is crap.
