Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game developed by Monolith Soft and published by Nintendo. The game is beautifully designed with a masterful soundtrack and graphics; however, it has many flaws that prevent the game from being an overall, enjoyable experience. It suffers from lack of tutorial, framerate issues, terrible handheld graphics, no overworld map, and poor quest markers.

The first big problem with the game is how little it helps to integrate the player into the game. The tutorials provided by the game are all bunched into the first 2 hours of gameplay, which makes the first 2 hours almost unbearable to play. These tutorials are also easily forgettable; therefore, by the time I was in the game, I had completely forgotten everything. This made the game much more difficult than it needed to be. However, another major problem is how little the game does to guide the players. There is no overworld map, so it can be extremely difficult to find anything, especially when the quest markers don’t direct you anywhere. I felt rather frustrated throughout my first 10 to 15 hours of gameplay because of all these problems. They could easily have been fixed to, but the developers just didn’t do anything about them.

Another major problem with the game is that in handheld mode; the game looks absolutely terrible. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild had a similar level of graphics that this game does, but it managed to balance gameplay and graphics on the handheld mode. In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the game just tanks. The framerate drops anywhere between 60 to 10 frames per second. Low frame causes the game to lag. It also looks like garbage. However, the game works perfectly fine in docked mode.

Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is an ok game. It could be better, but it suffers from a lot design problems and bad technology implementation. Overall, I would give it a 4/10. Maybe it will get better with time, but the opening 10 hours of this game have caused me to quit, and I don’t want to come back and finish the game.