finally getting around to the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 DLC and thus far it's mostly Mythra being a huge asshole, which rules

also there's a JRPG Protagonist character except he isn't actually the player character. You just fight him once and then he's like HAHA I LIKE YOU COME JOIN MY ROLLING KATAMARI OF ANIME FRIENDS WHO WILL SAVE THE WORLD WITH THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP and you're like uhhhh okay sure

realizing the Sora archetype is is *hilarious* when they're not actually the player-insert protagonist

There's a character who gets both of his arms cut off, except it's Rated T for Teen so they couldn't show this, so instead he just yells "my arms!" and then there's just several minutes of cutscenes where every shot is weirdly zoomed and composed to crop his shoulders out of view

also the dialogue made no particular mention of arms until several minutes AFTER he got dismembered, so it was entirely unclear what was even supposed to have happened there

walking around a time-shifted version of a location from the original game while listening to upbeat jazz is some incredibly powerful XIII-2 energy

EXCUSE ME THAT IS LITERALLY JUST XIGBAR

*haley joel osment trying to sound like a teen voice* He's Xigbar

I don't think I've EVER encountered the word "chalcedony" in any context other than "fantasy characters named after cool rocks"

jrpg villains always get the only good lines

huge props to the xenoblade localization crew; a character just ended a sentence with "but that's just the way it is"

wouldn't be a real JRPG without largely unnecessary lovingly-crafted bespoke models of food

hell yeah videogames

a goofy thing about both of the Chronicles games is they know they're supposed to have mecha, because Xeno, but the story's largely uninterested in them so they tend to just kind of... show up in cutscenes and strike cool poses and then leave

so yeah finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Colon Torna Emdash The Golden Country

It's good but it feels like it should really have just been a bunch of cutscenes included in the original game?

It's mostly about explaining character relationships/motivations that are both SUPER IMPORTANT and SUPER UNCLEAR in the main plot

the base game's like 80 hours long; they could easily have trimmed things down to include the *actual explanation* of why Pyra exists and matters lol

It's an entire JRPG that's like ~20 hours long though, which rules

make more short JRPGs

20 hours still fits all the anime melodrama and elaborate progression systems you'd want, but you can max out a character's skills just by, like, doing sidequests and exploring

I did a near-completionist run and my save's at about 30 hours

my NG+ file in the main game is at something like 120 hours and I maxed out ONE character out of like 30 lmao

Videogames: Make Them Shorter

In conclusion, please listen to the default battle music it is absolutely incredible

probably an all-time fav tbh