Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna- The Golden Country Review
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Developers: Monolith Soft
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Publishers: Nintendo
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Genres: Adventure, RPG, Action, Open World
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Platforms: Nintendo Switch
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Release date:
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2: December 1st 2017
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Season Pass Owners: September 14th 2018
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Stand-Alone: September 21st 2018
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Playtime: 19 hours
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Reviewed on Nintendo Switch
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Note: this is a review of the Torna-The Golden Country expansion, that is, it does not include other content that is part of Xenoblade Chronicles 2's season pass
After eight months of amazing support for the main game, both through free and paid updates, the game goes out with a bang thanks to Golden Country. Torna The Golden Country is the last piece of additional content to be released for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and this one is so big that it even deserved its own standalone release.
Torna The Golden Country is a story focused piece of content for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 through and through. While it can justifiably stand on its own as its own game for series newcomers, Golden Country is a prequel focused on the Aegis War 500 years prior to the events of the main game. Therefore, characters like Rex, Nia, Tora, Zeke and others are absent from this eighteen-hour campaign. On the other hand, some already known blades, which are pretty much immortal characters than can be revived over and over again (although without memories of previous lives), are heavily featured. Here, Jin and Mythra are quite different from what you remember: Jin is a pure-hearted man focused on protecting Lora, his driver with whom he shares a deep bond, while Mythra is still trying to grasp her own power as an Aegis and lashes out on the people around her.
On the other hand, Golden Country introduces a handful of new characters, like Hugo, the emperor of Mor Ardain at the time, or Minoth, a rogue-ish blade that realizes his original driver is scheming some evil plans and thus decides to join the group of our heroes. Of course, as this is a story about the Aegis War, Malos is placed front and center and the characters take every opportunity to remind you that they are working to defeat this antagonist. Still, the game gives plenty of air time to Lora, Jin’s driver, and Addam, Mythra’s (and Pyra’s) original driver, who I hope was the protagonist of the main game instead of Rex (but let’s not dwell on that too much).
But what about the gameplay you ask? Actually, while this is a somewhat simplified version of the majority of the main game’s (combat) systems, I found it to be just perfect, or at least near perfect. In Golden Country, besides having the option to control drivers during combat, you can also control blades themselves during battle, with the option to swap between blade and driver on the fly. In fact, the ability to swap between characters is one of the main factors as to why combat feels so much better in this expansion. Battles are faster-paced and shorter, without any compromises to the big combo attacks you were used to in the main game (such as the chain attack). Instead of slowly whittling away at the enemies’ health with auto-attacks and building up the meter to unleash arts, swapping between driver and blade fully charges your art meters, meaning that you can fill your special meter that much faster, which represents an increase in your damage output. In other words, you can expect battles to be more interesting, as you don’t need to sit there watching the auto-attack animations play out as the art meters slowly build up so you can use arts and eventually unleash the blade special arts.
Another factor that hugely benefitted Golden Country was the smaller cast of main characters. Here, your group only has a total of nine characters: three drivers (Lora, Addam and Hugo) and six blades, two per driver. Since these are fixed characters that every player will have in their party, the developers could improve the details on each character. While the blades in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 were surprisingly detailed, with only a handful of blades and drivers to work with it was possible to go an extra mile and make the blades feel more unique and attached to their drivers. For example, level 4 blade Specials always featured both blade and drivers but here these specials are actual combination attacks between driver and blade, where they even use each other’s weapons. The interactions and the writing itself are fully committed to making these characters as close as possible. What first begins as a group of driver/blade teams that join each other just for the sake of fighting against Malos, ends up looking like a family by the end (which just makes watching the ending all the more heartbreaking).
While this expansion is an extremely good self-contained experience, it is not without faults. Golden Country introduces a Community system: for every side-quest you complete, that NPC will then join your community. The problem with this system is that, even if the side-quests have a somewhat more developed writing, namely around the concept of civilians trying to survive the war, they are still not good, gameplay-wise. It’s still a matter of “go there and kill three of those enemies” or “go to village X, speak to my friend then come back to me”. Honestly, playing just a few of them is enough and, if you only played the first few side-quests the game puts in your path, you’d have good impressions of the side-quests, since the early ones try to teach you some intermediate and advanced combat mechanics which were presented as walls of text in the main game. However, the Community system is in the game to ruin the experience. You see, this system has levels, that is, once you gather a number of people in your community you’ll level up the community. Problem is, the game locks story progression twice behind this system. What does it mean? Twice in the story, you need to stop what you’re doing and go explore the two available titans (Gormott and Torna) and look for side-quests to complete. Not only does this completely break off the flow of the story but it also does not pay off in any way. You’re in it just for the sake of completing side-quests and level up your community so that you can actually proceed to the final part of the story (yes, after a certain story event, it’s time for the final fight but before that you will need to reach community level four, otherwise story progression remains locked).
For me, someone that played this expansion purely for the story content and found out a much better version of the combat system that improved the overall experience a whole lot, this new Community system completely destroyed the momentum I had for the final fight after an intense encounter that puts you in the mindset ready to go fight the last battle and see the credits roll. As I was already fed up with the game, after three hours wasted on meaningless side-quests, I rushed through the last dungeon just so that I could finally face Malos in the decisive battle. Thankfully, this last fight was a surprisingly interesting fight, with a cool twist that elevated the scale of the battle and made it feel closer to what was portrayed in the cutscenes.
Overall, Torna The Golden Country is an excellent expansion for an already amazing game. While combat is a simplified version of the combat system found in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, it turns out this is how the system should have been originally. Combat is more fun, faster and takes out of the equation a lot of the boring parts of staring at the auto-attack animations. On the other hand, the cast of characters is quite good, and seeing how characters like Mythra and Jin were during this time is something players of the main game should have a big interest in. Unfortunately, the stupid Community system requirements bring the action to an unnecessary halt, which should have never been introduced. At least what comes after makes up for it, even if you somehow already know what is to come from having played the main game. Oh, one last important mention: the Japanese voice actors were amazing. Every single one of them was amazing, but Mythra and Malos’ Japanese voice actors were especially good. Please do yourself a favor and play this game using the Japanese dub!