LogFAQs > #960906047

It was overall a good but deeply flawed game, and the more you hope for a game like XC1, the more disappointed you'll be.
Excellent music and environments/exploration (XC1 and XCX are better, but it's still good).
Side quests are better than XC1 and worse than XCX (where the side quests were better than the actual main story...)
Plot is bad until late game and then is ok. Final chapter kinda "saves" it, but not not in a way that redeems the first half of XC2's plot. Can't go into more detail than that w/o spoilers, have to keep it vague.
Characters are voice acting are hot garbage, especially Rex and Tora, whom you'll unfortunately hear from a LOT.
Combat is...hard to pin down. On one hand, once you figure it out it's more fun than XC1 for a while. Then you realize every single combat and every single character and choice of blades follows the exact same strategy of "painting" different colors then using a chain attack, and the combat gets really repetitive and dull (while as in XC1, every character actually played differently and even had different builds... XC2 is all about "color coordination" for the elements). And long before then, it will just be slow and confusing b/c above all else it is SO FUCKING NEEDLESSLY COMPLICATED.
Oh, and the game is drowning in tedium with all of the merc missions, field skills (and the constant swapping of blades to meet them), blade affinity charts, and most of all the random "gacha" method of finding blades.

It's worth noting the prequel expansion, Torna: The Golden Country is basically a total improvement over the base XC2 game. Combat is streamlined and improved tremendously, there's no tedious merc missions, you always have all your blades "equipped" for field skills, no gacha, and good lord are the characters and voice acting a massive improvement!
Plot's actually worse than XC2, though.

I'd give XC2 a 7/10 and Torna a 8/10.