Xenoblade Chronicles 2 received a big update on March 1. Developer Monolith Soft added a New Game+ feature, an Easy difficulty mode, and fixed some bugs. But those weren’t the best parts.
The patch brought about some major quality-of-life updates that I had wanted since I started playing the Japanese role-playing game in December. First off, quest objectives and other icons now show up on the game’s minimap. Yeah, that seems like an obvious feature — but before, you had to go into your menus and look at the map in there if you wanted to see exactly where things were.
But even that isn’t the biggest improvement from the patch. Xenoblade Chronicles has a Pokémon-esque element where you unlock Blades (creatures that fight with you) by binding crystals to your characters. The majority of crystals unlock basic Blades that aren’t good for much besides sending out on mercenary missions (Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood style). So if you want a good Blade, you’ll need to go through a lot of crystals.
And this used to take forever. Bonding a crystal starts a sequence where the character holds the gem up to them while it slowly pulses a few times. Then the Blade is revealed in its own animation. That latter part you can skip, but you always had to watch that slow, boring pulsing. It was torture when you had 30 crystals to go through.
But no more! The patch now gives you the option immediately unlock Blades, skipping all of these cutscenes. After having to watch those stupid crystals pulse their dumb lights hundreds of times, it is an incredible burden to be free from.
Does it ultimately make Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a different or a significantly better game? Not really. But even if it is a few months late, it’s nice to have these improvements.