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Compare and contrast the lead-up to the launch of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with developer Monolith Soft's last two Nintendo outings (or indeed its last effort, given how it lent a hand with Breath of the Wild) and you can't help but feel it's all been a little muted. Perhaps it's just circumstance; this is coming at the tail-end of a spectacularly busy year for the Switch, hot on the heels of a mainline Mario. But when the first Xenoblade Chronicles launched on the Wii it was the culmination of a long journey for creator Tetsuya Takahashi, and perhaps the first game capable of matching his grand ambition, and when spiritual successor Xenoblade Chronicles X arrived some five years later there wasn't much else for Wii U owners to cheer for. It helped, of course, that Xenoblade Chronicles X was a masterly open world RPG, unfairly overlooked by a fair few in part because of its host platform but also thanks to the demands it made of its players - it took some 20 hours for them to be set free on the game's signature Skells, huge mechs capable of devouring the vast landmass of Mira. A small shame, for it remains one of the Wii U's very best games, and one of Nintendo's more important releases of that particular era; play Breath of the Wild and you'll see as much of Monolith Soft's imprint on the expanse of Hyrule as you will The Legend of Zelda series itself.
I've often thought Xenoblade Chronicles X, a game that's as much about reading and conquering its impossibly epic environment as it is anything else, never quite got the credit it deserved when Breath of the Wild was lavished with praise earlier this year for its bold take on open world gaming. But even as an admirer of Monolith Soft's incredible work, I've always been a bit sceptical about Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Maybe it's an element of doubt creeping in - after all, it's only been two years since X, and is it really possible to craft another RPG of such scale in that time?
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