Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Is Almost Perfect On Nintendo Switch 2, Except For One Fatal Flaw

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Is Wonderful On Nintendo Switch 2, But I Wish They Fixed The Fisher Price Menus Published Aug 1, 2026, 12:01 PM EDT Jade King is Lead Features Editor at The Gamer and University of Sussex journalism graduate with 10+ years covering the video game industry. She has been seen in outlets such as Trusted Reviews, Kotaku UK, VICE, and more over the years covering everything from the latest releases to major events to in-depth interviews. She loves nothing more than speaking with devs, creatives, voice actors, and so many others about the passion behind their craft and bringing that into the hearts of readers everywhere. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a bona fide JRPG classic, but it also looks like ass. The Nintendo Switch exclusive was first released in late 2017 to rave reviews from critics such as myself — god, I’ve been doing this for way too long — but was rightfully lambasted for its poor performance and image quality. It felt like you were watching a YouTube video in 360p instead of falling in love with a beautiful world at times, but thankfully its terrific art design shined through where it mattered most, not to mention an excellent cast of characters we wanted to root for. But unless you were willing to be naughty and emulate the game on PC, these visual flaws were impossible to ignore and dragged down the experience. Arguably, this turned off new players unfamiliar with the franchise because they weren’t willing to look past how it looked to discover the magic underneath. The combat, characters, and open world are all so good they deserve to be appreciated, and now they might finally get that chance on Switch 2. How Does Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Hold Up On Nintendo Switch 2? Xenoblade Chronicles 2 now runs at a locked 60 frames per second on the Nintendo Switch 2, which alone is a transformative upgrade for the JRPG. Previously locked to half of that, in my brief testing it holds to this limit in both cutscenes, exploration, and combat with a couple of rare drops when panning the camera around larger, more densely packed locations. Such drops have to be sought out rather than regularly impacting moment-to-moment gameplay in my experience though, so chances are they could be addressed with a patch. As for the resolution, marketing claims it now runs at 4K, although I think the reality is much closer to 1080p with DLSS being used to clean up and improve the image as we play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still night-and-day compared to the original, with characters and environments boasting more detail than ever before. I spent a solid ten minutes roaming around one of the earlier towns in first-person simply looking at random NPCs and aiming to find flaws in the high-resolution textures, but it largely looked excellent. There’s also no more garish texture pop-in when fast travelling either, making it much easier to travel around the open world doing side quests or to gather resources. Certain points make it feel like some textures have been entirely upgraded, but I think the reality is closer to that the resolution was previously so low that everything looked like an awkward puddle of fantastical digital soup. That no longer being an issue has me ready and waiting to replay this 70+ hour journey for the first time in a decade. Adjustments have also been made to gathering resources so you no longer need to spend ages looking for the best Blade for a certain task. Now, it’s done automatically and makes exploration more rewarding. I’m hoping that the more I play, the more surprises I’ll stumble across, or even find things that I never encountered during my original playthrough due to obvious shortcomings. I’m also keen to play around with Momo, a new Blade pulled straight from Xenogears, and experiment with new modes like Merc Assault even if they wind up being brief distractions, I play for a couple of hours before never touching them again. The 4K/60fps upgrade would have been enough, but Monolith Soft has done the work to make this game relevant again. Unfortunately, it didn’t think about upcoming parts of the user interface that leave a lot to be desired in 2026. What Is Wrong With The Xenoblade Chronicles 2 User Interface? You might think I’m just looking for something to complain about here, but I’ve never been a fan of the user interface in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. It tries to adopt the same cute aesthetic used by the rest of the game, but in a practical sense, this unfortunately translates to buttons and icons that feel needlessly oversized in the game world and don’t offer much functionality beyond looking pretty. Some work could have been done to at least adjust the size of select icons in the field rather than simply increase the resolution to a native 4K — it feels so unusual for elements like speech bubbles to take up half of the screen. Several parts of the Switch 2 edition feel like awkward relics of what this game used to be on its native hardware, which highlights a deeper flaw in upgrades like this: they can only do so much to the original experience without completely reinventing it. And I find that strange when Xenoblade Chronicles 2 boasts a decent amount of new content. I’m not asking for a comprehensive remaster, but would resizing the user interface or giving it an extensive makeover be too much to ask? You wouldn’t need to sacrifice its chibi elements or redraw the Blade illustrations, which oddly enough haven’t been upscaled to 4K here, shown instead in their original 1080p presentation. Rescaled icons, a few fresh pieces of art, and far more comprehensive quest and character menus would have gone so far in making this game more satisfying to play. I still believe it’s worth playing with all my heart, and the Switch edition is the new best way to do so, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without a few awkward setbacks. Heck, it’s worth playing for legendary Welsh catgirl Nia alone. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Systems Released December 1, 2017 ESRB T For Teen due to Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence Developer(s) Monolith Soft Publisher(s) Nintendo