Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is easily one of the worst jrpgs I've played to date, and I've played a lot. The reasons are many, XBC2 suffers from far too much micromanagement, too many poorly explained combat mechanics and seriously frustrating gameplay, not to mention the awful and counter-intiuitive map markers, often making you run through high level mobs areas just to get to the quest area your supposed to be at, speaking of the latter - who designed this game again? Some sadist wacko?
The areas mobs are so strangely placed its not even funny, especially frustrating when side quest content has you wading though areas of monsters 20+ levels higher than you....because reasons? More than a few times you'll see vastly different levels of monsters in the same areas, lets not even talk about all the Level 75+ elites running around waiting to one shot you at any given moment in time.
XBC2 suffers from having far too many game mechanics in play, the game world being poorly constructed with areas having widely different monsters in them, with extremely huge level gaps which often could pop up and wipe your party at a moments notice if your not paying attention.
The combat system is unnecessarily and overly complicated with combo after combo after combo being the only real way forward, regular trash mobs often taking several minutes to beat because your arts always reset after each battle making for a substantial uphill grindfest. Consider XBC2 a single player MMO similar to FF14 but with far slower character progression and levelling, this would be the closest explanation on how this game plays out.
The control system is often janky at best, trying to navigate narrow ledges or jump on certain things often leaves your character bugging out whilst the quest system clearly enforces another very obvious grinder for relatively little rewards, but the player does them anyway because its content even if ultimately time consuming and unrewarding, an early case and point is having to rescue a Nopon from monsters, then fetching wood then going back to the quest giver then finding another Nopon then either paying 30,000 in gold or doing another fetch quest to find rarer wood then going back to the original quest giver for 300g / 200 exp reward and a few measily items, bullcrap like this is unfortunately common.
The character designs, story plot and sound though are at least par or even above par and for the switch do the system some justice but ultimately are heavily let down by everything else the game has to offer. The voice overs can get quite annoying after hearing them for the thousand time - especially Tora and his meh meh meh... Essentially most of the time, you'll be brute force grinding your way though to the game just to unlock the next light-hearted cut scenes and stories with some of the waifus in the game, I'm only half kidding too - XBC2 is basically a chore to play, you'll force yourself into pushing and pushing to unlock the next portion of the story until you start hitting roadblock after roadblock forcing you to go back to grinding, most evident when the game forces you into smaller parties thats when you know your in for a rough patch.
The interesting thing about this game though, it does have the addictive qualities of MMos because it really does feel like your playing on, and that is the only source of fun you'll have most of the time just pretending you'll run into other players to take on a unfair or frustrating raid boss that can cheat or cheese the player resulting in countless wipes until you decide just to overlevel that boss.
Blade grinding again, is another severe uphill grindfest - not only is there a significant amount of cores to find making it almost like pokemon, you'll have to level and grind them up before they'll even be even remotely useful.
Everything is just padded gameplay or mechanics, buying every single item in shops...splitting the exp between active and rested exp, being forced to play Tiger! Tiger! Arcade game until your eyes bleed and you pray someone put you out of your misery.