Awwwwwww man, it’s 2018.

Neat.  I’m not that great at writing 8’s, so this is going to be a rough “writing the date on things” year.  2014 was a similar nightmare for me.

4’s are hard.  Like, mine are the capital H but missing the lower left leg style of 4, but I don’t do the two strokes, I do it all in one line so it looks goofy most of the time.

Good thing it’s 2018 then.  No real worries concerning writing dates until 2024.

Anyway, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is pretty sweet so far, but in the same way the Tales series has certain tropes, XB2 has a lot of stuff I remember from the first Chronicles game on the Wii:

Side Quests:  All of the “fetch” variety with an annoyingly large dash of “if you give a mouse a cookie” syndrome.  Great!  You got the ingredients!  BUT MY OVEN IS BROKEN, HELP!  There was one quest of a dude whose kid was missing.  I found him, but the kid was like, I need to collect stuff.  So I collected the stuff and went back to his home, and then his dad was like, I need to collect stuff too…  GET IT TOGETHER, FOLKS.

Character Design:  Everyone is super over-designed.  Each principle cast member has tons of knick-knacks hanging off of them in a situation that looks like everyone is in a competition to look like a retro futuristic wedding cake.  There is absolutely no way for half the cast to fight with what they’re wearing.  Even the randos around town have multi tone and multi layered apparel.  Simply put, there is too much visual stimulation in the worst and most meaningless way possible.

The game is still fun, though!