Xenoblade is the greatest RPG series of all time and continues to deliver incredible performances with every title. This one is a prequel that is less than half as long as the average game and yet it still managed to be elite. By building into the lore from 2, it feels like you’re jumping back into an old adventure you grew up with. It could have done more to actually fill in the final moments for some characters but I suppose you can still fill in those details yourself. The game certainly didn’t want to be going for the depressing ending either.

The game starts off by introducing us to Lora and her partner Jin. Their partnership isn’t quite legal so they have to be careful to make sure that none of the governments get on their back. It turns out that they have bigger things to worry about though as the Aegis, Malos intends to destroy the world. He wants to reset everything in order to make the world more based on power. A prince and a king intend to stop him along with another Aegis known as Mythra. Lora gets pulled into this struggle for power as she needs to keep the world safe as well. Will this end up getting her into a world of trouble though?

From playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you already know which characters will die or suffer from amnesia in the main story. One of the characters was the main villain for a good chunk of the game after all. So you’re here to see the details of what happened exactly. There are also a lot of story development that are completely new here. By the end of it, you can see why a lot of people are so distrustful of Mythra in the main game.

The gameplay is similar to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 but slightly changed which keeps up the tradition of the gameplay being tweaked for literally every Xenoblade game. This time you have elements that are added onto the opponent via orbs for every step of a combo. You then blow them up once your party meter is all the way to the top. Your attacks hit automatically in this game so the idea is to keep on moving to keep your positioning good. Then you use your special attacks as they load up.

It is absolutely necessary to keep on switching characters since that replenishes your meter. Your gameplay is going to be all about strategy here and making sure that you choose the right option in each battle. You are not able to customize your attacks in this game so you better to get used to them. Of course the positive of this is that you are able to really find out the best time to use each individual attack. Haze has a good healing ability so I try to always have her close in the rotation. That does mean keeping Jin out of the action more though and he has the most attack power.

So there are a whole lot of factors to keep in mind here. The gameplay is just as complicated as it sounds so get ready to do some real studying. Even by the end I doubt I was playing in the most efficient way. I had to grind out a ton of level ups in order to beat the final boss and it was a close fight even when I was fairly overleveled. The best way to level up in this game is actually to complete side quests rather than beating enemies.

The whole game is built around doing side quests to the point where you have to complete close to 80% of them in order to beat the main story. It’s not something that you can avoid so you should activate as many of them as possible whenever you pass one by. Sometimes you will clear the conditions as you are doing the main story quests. The reason for this is that a ton of them are collectible based. So you should go ahead and dig everytime you see the harvest symbol lying around.

The game’s a bit infamous for this but because I was doing my best to beat every side quest as I went on, it never felt like a big grind. Additionally, the story is compelling enough where I was just looking forward to seeing what would happen next. It goes without saying that the graphics are top notch. The game got a good amount of budget behind it and the soundtrack is also excellent. You’ll recognize quite a lot of the tunes here but I think a few of them were new for this adventure as well.

Torna may essentially be a story expansion but it’s long enough where treating it like a full game still feels right. I definitely recommend checking it out and you won’t regret the experience. The game really exceled in every category and you’ve easily got over 10 hours of play time here for the story and probably 20-30+ if you’re trying to max out your community level. The prequel serves its purpose well of adding a whole lot of new context to the main game that recontextualizes the whole thing.

Overall, Torna is definitely an elite game and now I’m looking forward to Xenoblade Chronicles 3 even more. It’s time to see how the saga all ends with all of the main characters running around. To be truly complete I would have liked for Lora to return in such a adventure but it makes sense why she would not. There would have to be a lot of plot twists for that to make sense and it would be hard to do that without angering a bunch of the fans. Whether you go ahead to play the other games or not, this one really holds its own as a stand alone adventure as well. Some things will probably confuse you a little bit but you’ll still get all of the major story beats. You may sense some power level issues but that’ll be the case even if you played the main games.

Overall 9/10