The Xenoblade series from Monolith Soft is arguably the most "hardcore" of Nintendo's first party IPs and as such can be incredibly intimidating to new players. I have myself attempted to play the first game and X a number of times before and i quite simply couldn't get the games to stick for long enough, they are after all 100's of hours long!
So it's from this strange starting place that i decided to give Torna (A Prequel stand-alone expansion to the also massively long Xenoblade Chronicles 2) a chance to hook me into the series.
Torna is set about 500 years before the events of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and is spread across 2 of the series signature living land masses: Titans. You take control of Lora and her Blades (The name given to the games living weapons) Jin and Haze. You'll be joined in your quest by other characters throughout the journey with your party reaching 3 "Drivers" with 2 blades each. Although from what i understand of XC2 this is actually a very limited number of blades i actually came to enjoy the character development that everyone got as a result of this. I also understand that all of these characters are involved in the plot of XC2 so i'd imagine if you played Torna AFTER XC2 you will get an even greater insight into these interesting bunch of characters.
I don't want to go into the story too much as to not spoil it but i found it utterly engrossing. The dual tales of Lora/Jin and Adam/Mithra is brilliant told throughout the 20-30 hour adventure, each character develops over the course of the game, showing real pain and anguish at the events that unfold. It sets up the Main XC2 brilliantly to all those that played the game in this order and i couldn't wait to jump online and read theories of what became of world after the game was over.
The gameplay is what you would come to expect from the Xenoblade series, an active turn based system that reminds chaining elemental and situational damage together as a unit to take down sometimes massive enemies. There's no random battles here, everything you can see, you can fight! The main change to the battle system compared to XC2 is the ability for blades and drivers to swap positions allowing the blades to take the lead and causing massive damage as they switch in. Overall i found this to be a fairly enjoyable combat system that became second nature after a few hours.
As is standard with Xenoblade there is a huge amount of side quests in the game that vary from the standard fetch quests and monster hunts to more elaborate combat style based mission that reward you for fighting in specific ways. The quest log does a great job of showing you what to do and where to do it but at least twice throughout the game you will hit a massive roadblock where you need to complete a certain amount of side quests to improve your "Community" and thus progress the story. This is obviously not really a problem overall but the game does a poor job of signposting this early on so if your like me and tend to mop of the side quests post game at a chilled out speed you may find yourself grinding through a lot of similar quests for a few hours before the final boss. Thankfully the fast travel system and the fact the Switch is portable make this much more manageable.
Overall i think Torna is both a great addition to the XC2 universe and a good starting point for the series. It's shorter length and small band of characters really help to tell a personal and emotional story that ramps up by the end to a climax that is truly something special. The combat is fast and fluid and despite side quest roadblocks and occasionally frustrating collectables Torna is wonderful place to explore. And hey, if you liked it then you can go out and buy Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to find out what happened to Lora, Jin and the rest of your Tornan allies.
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