New Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Update Doesn’t Fix The Annoying Voiceovers

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 made some extremely bad decisions when it comes to its English voice acting. Specifically, characters Rex and Nia have voices that hardly fit their personalities, so much so that it detriments the game. There were some particularly annoying battle cries in the midst of the the title’s numerous fights as well, though much of them didn’t come from the main protagonists at all.

Ardainian Soldier enemies are faceless enemies in helmets that you had to fight off in droves and they’re hardly important in the grand scheme of things,. However, their exclamations in the heat of battle were particularly bizarre, and now it looks like the latest 1.2 patch for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has removed some of that particular weirdness.

Previously, the soldiers screamed things like “Think you can take me?!” and “Don’t forget me!” in awful Scottish accents. When you fought multiple soldiers at once, their exclamations built up into one and you had to hear the same phrase said over one another again and again. It made playing through each battle a chore, or at least one the prompted you to turn the sound off. Not only were the lines poor acting, but neither their inflection nor what they were saying made sense in the context of the game.

Honestly, the alterations that came with the 1.2 patch haven’t made it much better. Now they say “Take this!” and “Don’t forget me!” has turned into “Don’t forget!” instead. It’s even possible that these sound somewhat worse and make even less sense. Don’t forget what? To win the battle? Take what? Are you offering me something?

If you haven’t played Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you can always turn the Japanese voices on instead of the English voiceover tracks, which I’d definitely recommend over the silly battle cries. You can even turn battle voices off if you’d like—they can get aggravating in either language very quickly. Keep that in mind before you settle in with the game after downloading patch 1.2.