It causes the pacing to come to a screeching halt if you haven’t been doing those quests as soon as they pop up. In other words, yes, you will have to stop and grind out side quests to progress at key points in the story. Completing their side quests will place them into your list of supporters you’ll need to gain a certain amount of supporters to progress the story at points. As you meet various NPCs, they’ll be added to this chart. Moving onto the gameplay, the Merc System was replaced by a Community chart.

But, when I revisited the main game after finishing this expansion, I found several key story moments to be far more impactful due to added context from Torna. The events of this DLC are in no way required to understand the full picture of Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s main story. Something I think Torna excels at is adding what I call “emotional context”. The story generally takes a darker tone, in contrast to some of the anime antics that Rex and his friends occasionally got up to in the main game. I won’t go too much into the plot to avoid spoilers, but I think it was fantastic at fleshing out character backstories and giving us additional world building. Torna ~ The Golden Country takes place 500 years before the main game’s events. Like with my review of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, this post was originally written for a YouTube video, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness. It’s available as a physical copy at retailers, complete with a cartridge and a code for the rest of Xenoblade 2’s Expansion Pass content for 40 dollars. Monolith Soft and Nintendo decided, in fact, that it was massive enough to warrant a standalone release.

Torna ~ The Golden Country is Xenoblade 2’s big expansion.

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