With Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Return to the Golden Country we return after just 9 months to explore the world of Alrest, 500 years before the main game, with an expansion that takes serious steps forward and a bad slide back
Less than a year after the excellent Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Monolith soft. returns to the charge with a consistent DLC that expands the story of the latest work by Tetsuya Takahashi and associates, an unprecedented operation for the Japanese house, which goes a bit to recall what has been done in the West with the substantial expansions of The Witcher 3, eg. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Golden Country is back it is in fact presented both in physical edition as a standalone DLC, i.e. that does not require the base game to be used, and in digital version, for which it is instead necessary to have a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
To learn more:
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
For enthusiasts or for newbies?
But what is the meaning of this double version, standalone and otherwise, for a job like Torna? First of all, although it is characterized as DLC, Torna is best described with a term that has now fallen into disuse, that is expansion. We are faced with a product that offers 20 hours of play, a new location, new story, new characters and substantial changes to the combat system, so the definition of downloadable content is starting to get tight. Secondly, Torna will bring us back to Alrest's sea of clouds, but 500 years before the events narrated in the main game. The protagonists of this new adventure will be Lora, Jin e Addam, names not new to the ears of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 players.
The events of Torna The Golden Country were in fact presented in the main game as flashbacks, without a real in-depth analysis. So this expansion is able to work quite well for both fans of Xenoblade 2, who finally can see the puzzle completed in every piece, which as great entry point for newbies, which will be introduced elements and characters that will then find again in the main adventure.
Of course it takes a lot to introduce a modified battle system within 9 months
Back inherits much of its gameplay from the main chapter, with the usual mix of exploration and fighting, and in the latter we find the main novelty. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 put at our disposal the characters defined Ducor, able to form bonds with living weapons called Gladius. While in the main adventure we could only directly control the Ducors, in Torna the Golden Country we will have the possibility to exchange vanguard and rearguard, controlling not only the Ducors but also the Gladius.
This modification, without upsetting an articulated combat system rich in subsystems like that of Xenoblade, succeeds in the purpose of adding dynamism to action, making the approach to the neophyte less traumatic than that of the main game, which required a large number of micromanagement decisions. It is also true that while the main title constantly introduced new concepts in Torna with only 80 hours available for the duration of its 100 - 20 hours of play, it was necessary to opt for a simplification. This is not necessarily a bad thing, also given that the rate of growth of the characters quite fast, as well as the enemies with a substantially lower "time to kill" make the experience dynamic, fresh and fast.
Progression stopped
If substantial progress has been made in the combat system, the same cannot be said regarding the progression of the adventure. To continue in the key points of the story, the player will in fact be required to reach a certain level of "Prestige". To do this we will necessarily have to interrupt our main activities to dedicate ourselves to completing some tedious side quests. We will then have to talk to the NPCs, complete the missions they will entrust to us and collect their gratitude until the game informs us that we are ready to proceed.
Not only is it really one way not very elegant and very invasive to lengthen the broth of a few hours, but the quality of these side missions, which often differ very little from killing a certain number of monsters or collecting a certain number of materials, leaves something to be desired. It is truly strange that a team as skilled as Monolith has not been able to devise a less invasive and more organic method to integrate the side quests into the main quest, a method that does not break the rhythm of the narrative and the progression of the player of the story. And if all of this is barely tolerable in Torna, an adventure that can be completed within twenty hours, we hope that Monolith Soft will abandon or decide to completely overhaul this system for the next full-length RPGs: on a title of 80 - 100 hours as a main Xenoblade, the Prestige system would be absolutely deleterious.
Good docked, bad laptop
As for the audiovisual sector, we are faced with the revival of what was already seen in the main game 9 months ago. Come back one more time it amazes us with its immense and colorful settings, which in portable mode make Nintendo Switch waver a little, not so much for a speech of framerate drops, but of a quite aggressive automatic resolution and an image quality that struggles with the large number of elements on the screen. The situation improves dramatically in docked mode, which is once again the best way to experience the lush world of Alrest. By force of things this time the settings will be less varied, with only two continents to explore (Gormott, already seen in the main game, and Torna, which gives the name to the DLC), but the care lavished in the artistic realization is absolutely unchanged compared to to that of major production. Similarly we find the soundtrack composed by an all-star team of Japanese composers, led by that Yasunori Mitsuda of chrono-triggerian memory and a dubbing of exquisite workmanship, both in the original Japanese version and in the Western English one, made mostly with actors with a “British” accent.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Golden Country Returns - Nintendo Switch [Micro SD Card]On amazon: 39,9 € buy Verdict 8/10 Back to the golden age Comment More than a DLC Back the Golden Country is literally what 15 - 20 years ago we used to call expansion. This is a huge amount of additional content for an already huge game of its own. With a story accessible to both newbies and enthusiasts, over 20 hours of gameplay, a revised combat system, it's hard not to recommend buying Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Return to the Golden Country. The only flaw, rather big in reality, is the mechanics of Prestige, which breaks the rhythm of the adventure and artificially lengthens it. We only hope that this experiment will not be carried over to future Monolith Soft titles. Pros and cons ✓ 20 hours of unreleased content
✓ Suitable for both enthusiasts and newbies
✓ Refreshed combat mechanics
✓ Excellent artistic sector x The Prestige mechanic alters the pace and artificially lengthens the game
x Still teetering technically in portable mode
