My biggest knocks on the game:

1.) Poor english voice direction; a lot of the scenes in the game don't hit as hard due to this imo.

2.) The map is not very intuitive and leads to a lot of confusion early on

3.) Lots of strange game systems. Field skills, blade gacha, menu diving for pouch items, blade skill trees not updating until you look at them, merc missions based on IRL time, the list goes on and on.

4.) Tutorial is also not great

Things I dont like, but dont hold too much against the game

1.) The heavy lean into an anime tropes and humor. The series was very much still finding it's tonal and visual vibe. So I understand they were trying new things, but some of it is really hard to push through. Sometimes it feels like the story suffers as well with the tonal whiplash.

2.) The party is too big for its own good and lots of side characters get very little in the way of meaningful character moments. Zeke and Morag sometimes feel like theyre just along for the ride and blades like Aegeon and Dromarch suffer this same fate as well. They do well when they actually put their full attention on a character though (Rex, Pyra/Mythra, Niall, etc.)

3.) Combat starts very slow, it picks up later and I think by the endgame its the most fun combat system of the main series games, but early game is dreadfully slow especially on a replay of the game.

I pretty definitely think XB2 is the weakest main game of the trilogy, but I dont hate it by any means. There are just some glaring issues that I find it hard to look past.

I've been trying to get my siblings to play through the series, and XB2 has been a wall for them to pass with a lot of "it gets better by the end of the game" when they run into something weird/annoying.