I played the first 10 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 twice. I made a long video describing the minute details of how the experience made me feel.
(Warning: This video contains some light spoilers for the prologue chapter of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.)
One word to describe how I feel about this game would be “weird.” This is because I played the game with the English voice acting on. The game gives players the option to decrease the voice volume—or, heck, even mute it—though I kept it right where it was, in the name of maximum hilarity. Nintendo is making the Japanese voice track available as day-one DLC. Day one happens to be tomorrow, and I finished this video today, so you better believe we’re gonna hear some of that English voice acting, buddy.
I’ve made a bunch of videos since I started working at Kotaku Dot Com back in June of 2017. This video is certainly the longest one so far. I cover a lot of territory in here. So get a drink, kick back, click play, and hang out with me for 20 minutes or so.
Here are some handy timestamps, if you are, for example, the sort of person who skips cutscenes in your glorious anime RPGs:
0:00: The intro. (This is where videos tend to start.)
1:52: The voice acting. (This section contains an unbroken 40-second stretch of battle voices which I have listened to dozens of times and laughed every time.)
7:25: The art, world-building, and writing. (In which I name-drop Theon Greyjoy and David Mamet, and, yes, in case you’re wondering, I do mention the breasts.)
14:35: The game design. (In which I mention that I could make a one-hour video about JRPG battle systems, and also beg you to not beg me to make that video.)
20:11: The good stuff. (Of course, I mention the game’s brilliant music in here. Fun fact: 90% of the music in this video is actually not from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I just typed “Celtic” into the service we use for royalty-free music. This music may be royalty-free, though I sure feel like a king with fiddling like this!)
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