Monolith Soft’s most argued-over RPG has been defended in spite of how it ran since 2017. On Switch 2 that argument is over, and what’s left is one of the finest things Nintendo has ever published.
The version this game always needed
There is a particular kind of game that gets recommended with an apology attached. You hear it constantly about Xenoblade Chronicles 2: it’s brilliant, honestly, you just have to get past the way it looks. The 2017 Switch release ran at 720p docked and collapsed as low as 368p in handheld, at 30fps, and the result was a world of enormous ambition rendered as a smear. Monolith Soft built one of the densest RPGs of its generation and then had to ship it on hardware that could not hold the picture together.
I started a clean save on Switch 2 and went the whole way through, docked at home and handheld everywhere else. No apology was necessary at any point. That is the single most important thing to say about this release, and everything below is detail.
What Alrest is, and what you do there
The world is an ocean of cloud with no floor anyone has ever found. What passes for land is the backs of colossal living creatures called Titans, and the civilizations riding them are running out of room, because the Titans are dying. Rex is a salvager who dives for scrap in the cloud sea and ends up bonded to Pyra, a living weapon called a Blade, who carries the location of a place at the top of the world tree that may or may not still exist.
That is the engine of the whole thing: a road trip up a dying world toward a paradise nobody can prove is there. Alrest is built as a sequence of Titans rather than as one contiguous map, so travel means boarding a creature the size of a country and walking its spine. Gormott is a forested hill country on a beast that has effectively been colonized. Uraya is a bioluminescent cavern inside a Titan’s body, lit by its own organs. Mor Ardain is an industrial furnace state that has strip-mined its host into a slag heap. The geography carries the politics, and the politics carry the plot.
Combat, Blades, and the systems that arrive all at once
Battles are the series’ familiar half-real-time structure, where auto-attacks tick away on their own and your input goes into positioning, Arts timing, and chaining. What makes the second game its own animal is the Driver and Blade split. Every party member is a Driver, each Driver equips Blades, and the Blade determines the weapon, the element, the Arts, and the role. Change the Blade and you change the character.
On top of that sits the combo structure, which is where this game either wins you over or loses you completely. Driver Combos stagger and launch. Blade Combos chain elemental Specials in sequence and seal an element into an orb around the target. Chain Attacks then burst those orbs, and if you have sealed the right elements in the right order, the damage curve stops being linear and starts being ridiculous. Landing a full four-orb burst on a Unique Monster is one of the great feelings in the genre.
The problem, and it remains a problem, is that this is taught badly. The systems arrive one text box at a time across the whole first act, several of the most important interactions are explained once and never again, and a player who bounces off in Gormott will never know that the combat becomes genuinely superb. Monolith Soft did not fix this. The Switch 2 Edition teaches the game exactly as poorly as the original did.
The Blade acquisition system is the other thing that hasn’t moved. Rare Blades, the ones with names, voices, quest lines, and personalities, are drawn from Core Crystals at random. Character acquisition is gated behind a slot machine. It was an odd decision in 2017 and it has aged into a genuinely bad one, and the fact that this release adds a new Rare Blade rather than reworking how you get any of them tells you where the priorities were.
What has moved, quietly and to great effect, is field skills. Gate checks in the world used to demand a specific Blade with a specific ability actively equipped, which meant stopping, opening menus, and reshuffling your party to open a chest. Now the check runs against every Blade you own. It sounds like nothing. In practice it removes the single most tedious interruption in the game, and exploration flows in a way it never did before.
Merc Assault and MOMO
The headline addition is Merc Assault, a new action mode built out of the mercenary missions that previously ran in the background as an idle timer. You pick up to six Blades, take direct control of one, and swap freely between them mid-fight, filling a gauge to fire off Special Arts. It answers a complaint the game has always deserved: you spend the whole campaign collecting characters you never actually play as, and now you can play as them.
It is a side mode, and it feels like one. The missions are short, the arenas are small, and it is not going to hold anyone for a full evening. But it hands you the version of these characters you always wanted, it feeds the new Pyra and Mythra outfits back into the main game as rewards, and it turns a menu screen into something you can play.
MOMO is the other addition, and it is a strange, lovely piece of fan service. This is M.O.M.O. Mizrahi out of Xenosaga, arriving as a Rare Blade with two forms, Real and Imaginary, that swap her elemental affinity between light and dark on demand. She fights as a Healer, wields a Bitball called Bunnie, carries a field skill named 100-Series Observation, and comes with her own Blade quest, The Home of the Soul. She becomes available through Tora’s Secret Stash once Poppi is in the party, which is a nicely chosen point: late enough that you know what a Blade is, early enough that you get to use her.
The new outfits, drawn by original character designer Masatsugu Saito, are earned in Merc Assault or through the Pyra and Mythra amiibo, and they carry into cutscenes rather than being cosmetic only in the field. You can switch back to the originals whenever you want.
The story, and why it lands
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a shonen adventure that spends its first third looking like it has nothing on its mind, and then quietly reveals that everything you have been doing was a tragedy about memory and obligation the entire time. The reveal is not a twist so much as a change in altitude. What looked like a treasure hunt turns out to be a story about people who cannot die being asked to keep living with what they did.
Rex is an unfashionably sincere protagonist, all forward motion and no irony, and the game is confident enough to let him be right about things. The supporting cast is where it earns its reputation. Nia’s arc is the best-written thing in the game. Zeke is the funniest character Monolith Soft has ever produced and gets a straight-faced dramatic role anyway. Even Tora, who is a comic relief Nopon with a homemade robot, is load-bearing by the end.
The English dub takes accents from across the British Isles and commits to them fully, which is either the best localization decision Nintendo made that decade or an acquired taste, depending on your tolerance for a Welsh catgirl. I fall on the side of loving it. The performances got a full remaster’s worth of polish in cutscenes here, and hearing them at this image quality changes how the dramatic scenes read.
4K, 60fps, and what the upgrade actually delivers
Nintendo’s claim is 4K and 60fps in TV mode, and 1080p and 60fps handheld, with the technical work handled alongside Logicalbeat, the studio behind the Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster.
The frame rate half of that is completely honest. It held 60 for me throughout, in combat, in exploration, and in cutscenes, and doubling the frame rate does more for this game than any resolution figure could. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game of constant camera motion across enormous vertical spaces, and at 30fps that motion was soup. At 60 it reads. Fights that used to be a wall of numbers and effects now have legible spacing, and you can actually see the positional cue for a Driver Combo instead of guessing at it.
The resolution half needs an asterisk. This is sharp, and it is a colossal improvement, but it is reconstructed rather than native. The image is being upscaled, and it shows: foliage-heavy areas shimmer when you stand still, some surfaces settle a beat after you stop moving, and filtering in certain locations leaves things softer than a true 4K presentation would. None of that is fatal. Set it beside the 2017 version and the comparison is close to absurd. Just know that the number on the box is the output resolution and not the whole story.
Everything around the rendering got attention too. Menus respond instantly where they used to crawl. Texture pop-in on fast travel is gone. Cutscenes carry HD rumble that wasn’t there before. The system capture button now records video, which for a game people have been trying to document since 2017 is a bigger deal than it sounds.
Handheld is the interesting case. Docked, the leap is dramatic. Handheld, the gap is narrower, because Switch 2’s boost mode already improved the original version on this hardware, and because 1080p on a 7.9in screen was never going to be the differentiator that 4K on a television is. It still looks and plays better. It is just the mode where you notice the upgrade least, and I say that having played a substantial share of the game that way.
Mitsuda’s score, and a mix that finally has room
The soundtrack was written by Yasunori Mitsuda with ACE, Kenji Hiramatsu, and Manami Kiyota, with ACE largely on field music and Hiramatsu largely on battle. Mitsuda was brought in by Tetsuya Takahashi in December 2014 and, unusually, also ran the audio budget, the musician booking, and the scheduling.
It is the best score in the series and one of the best of its era. The field themes are long-form, orchestral, and unafraid of a full choir. Battle music escalates into a genuine crescendo rather than looping politely. Individual pieces carry entire regions, and the Titan themes function as characterization for creatures that never speak.
What the Switch 2 Edition does for the audio is less about the mix and more about the frame it sits in. Music that was always fighting a compromised image now has a picture worthy of it, and the cutscene work in particular benefits: the emotional beats are scored to within an inch of their lives, and at this presentation quality that no longer feels like overcompensation.
Torna, and the awkward part of the offer
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country is the expansion, a prequel campaign with a reworked battle system and a tighter structure, and it is the best-paced thing in the package. It also has the messiest upgrade path.
The standalone physical and digital release of Torna received a free update on July 30 that brings it to 4K and 60fps in TV mode and 1080p and 60fps handheld. Owners who have Torna through the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Expansion Pass, meaning the people who bought in earliest, have to purchase the Switch 2 Edition upgrade pack to get the same thing. The ordering is backwards on principle, and Nintendo should have found a cleaner answer.
In practice it costs very little. The upgrade pack is $9.99 in the United States, checked at launch, and it covers the main game and Torna together, so anyone weighing it up is deciding whether the best RPG on the system is worth a single-digit purchase. It is. The principle still nags, and both things can be true at once.
What Monolith Soft left alone
Read Nintendo’s own list of what this edition adds and you get resolution, frame rate, a new mode, a new Blade, and new outfits. The interface is not on that list, and it shows. The menus are the same oversized, rounded, cheerfully impractical things they were in 2017, speech bubbles still occupy an absurd share of the screen, and the quest and character screens still make you work harder than they should to find information the game already has. A pass on icon scaling would have cost comparatively little and improved every hour you spend in here.
This is the structural limit of a Switch 2 Edition. It can fix what the hardware broke. It cannot re-author what the design got wrong, and it was never going to rebuild the gacha or rewrite the tutorial ramp. Judge it as what it is, which is a technical rescue with a decent bag of extras, rather than as a remake that never arrived.
Verdict
The thing I keep coming back to is how completely the technical fix changes the argument. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has spent since 2017 being recommended with caveats about how it ran, and every one of those caveats has now been answered. What is underneath was always this good: a combat system that becomes magnificent once it clicks, a world with real geography and real politics, a cast that earns its ending, and a score that could carry a film. The rough edges that remain are the game’s own, and they were survivable in 2017 at 368p. They are trivial now.
Buy it if you have never played it, because this is the version that removes every excuse you had. Buy the upgrade pack if it’s already on your account: 4K, 60fps, MOMO, and Merc Assault is not a decision that needs thinking about. And if you dropped it years ago in Gormott because the systems were opaque and the picture was mud, come back and give it until Uraya. It is a different game now, and it was always a great one.
