Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Nintendo Switch Digital) - $41.99 or Less @ Nintendo eShop

Thanks OP, unfortunately I'm a stubborn mule about owning things in physical (so yes, I'm still waiting on this one.)
Can someone give me the cliffnotes on why they seemed to stop making the North American physical releases of this title? I had been watching for this title for years to no avail…at best I would see the EU release on Amazon drop to somewhere near $60. Simply not understanding the ongoing shortage of a AAA Switch title in physical.

I strongly recommend against buying this title. It is wretched, irredeemable tripe.

The story is overwhelmingly terrible. This is the kind of game where the main character announces "We'll beat 'em with the power of friendship!" before every third fight -- and that's an actual quote, not a paraphrase. It's a storyline really aimed at 8-year-old children. Alas, the game is also filled with weirdly sexualized female characters in skimpy costumes complete with exaggerated boob physics, so I'm not sure how comfortable I would be having my child play it. Just everything about the game's presentation is poor. There's no consistency to character designs. Some are literally inserted from other games set in different universes. The player characters are incredibly annoying, like one who will just constantly say "meh" after every movement or utterance. The game contains some almost indescribably cringe-inducing dialogue -- just check out crap like this [fandom.com]. It's all just bad, bad, bad.

The gameplay is hideously boring. The core gameplay is, in theory, based on waiting through auto-attacks until you can use skills. Unlike the original Xenoblade Chronicles, you can't auto-attack while moving, and actual skills are quite slow. However, in practice... you get yourself enough gear about 25% of the way through the game so that you just never stop using skills. You can't move while attacking, and you never stop attacking, and your abilities are just cooldown-based, so gameplay is pretty much just mashing your fingers mindlessly up and down in the face buttons until you win. Woo-hoo. The main source of variation is that the game is so broken that your damage can scale exponentially with Fusion Combo hits, which is even more incredibly stupid. This doesn't work on the DLC difficulty, but if you do play on Bringer of Chaos, then you're going to have to grind down boss health bars for an hour using Corvin while your AI teammates take a dirt nap (and no, I don't mean "like an hour", I mean 60 actual minutes of waiting). The only real attempt to mix this up are various forms of timed button press events -- but it gets worse.

The framerate is egregious. You're going to see this game swing wildly from 2 to 20 frames. Worse, the gameplay is locked to a base frametime and slows down when the framerate does. When the game chugs down to 2 or 3 frames per second, you're stuck waiting 2 minutes for the camera to move enough that the game will at least give you a chance to run away from whatever was causing the game to choke again. Even if it isn't catastrophically failing, you will find yourself battling the timed button press mechanics, as the pace at which those events actually play is variable with the framerate. You can't time something when you don't know when the next frame is going to render. It's just a huge mess. There are, of course, other technical issues as well. I repeatedly found the sound breaking and requiring a restart to fix. The game also crashes in other dumb ways, like soft-locking in the Mercenary screen.

The AI is also something else. It's terribly stupid and often just broken. At a basic level, it won't use abilities because it would rather use weaker basic attacks, which means that the player character will often do 4-5x as much damage with the same character as the AI. That is, of course, if the AI attacks at all, which they sometimes simply choose not to due to pathing issues. Sometimes they run off into the distance repeatedly just to be teleported back and do it again. Characters will also occasionally walk off ledges and die, but they also sometime just teleport through the ground and die. The game doesn't seem to respect elevation differences at all.

Gameplay is bad, balance is bad, story is bad, presentation is bad, and the technicals are a mess. Save your $40.

How does this compare to XBC 3?

How does this compare to XBC 3?

I strongly recommend against buying this title. It is wretched, irredeemable tripe.

The story is overwhelmingly terrible. This is the kind of game where the main character announces "We'll beat 'em with the power of friendship!" before every third fight -- and that's an actual quote, not a paraphrase. It's a storyline really aimed at 8-year-old children. Alas, the game is also filled with weirdly sexualized female characters in skimpy costumes complete with exaggerated boob physics, so I'm not sure how comfortable I would be having my child play it. Just everything about the game's presentation is poor. There's no consistency to character designs. Some are literally inserted from other games set in different universes. The player characters are incredibly annoying, like one who will just constantly say "meh" after every movement or utterance. The game contains some almost indescribably cringe-inducing dialogue -- just check out crap like this [fandom.com]. It's all just bad, bad, bad.

The gameplay is hideously boring. The core gameplay is, in theory, based on waiting through auto-attacks until you can use skills. Unlike the original Xenoblade Chronicles, you can't auto-attack while moving, and actual skills are quite slow. However, in practice... you get yourself enough gear about 25% of the way through the game so that you just never stop using skills. You can't move while attacking, and you never stop attacking, and your abilities are just cooldown-based, so gameplay is pretty much just mashing your fingers mindlessly up and down in the face buttons until you win. Woo-hoo. The main source of variation is that the game is so broken that your damage can scale exponentially with Fusion Combo hits, which is even more incredibly stupid. This doesn't work on the DLC difficulty, but if you do play on Bringer of Chaos, then you're going to have to grind down boss health bars for an hour using Corvin while your AI teammates take a dirt nap (and no, I don't mean "like an hour", I mean 60 actual minutes of waiting). The only real attempt to mix this up are various forms of timed button press events -- but it gets worse.

The framerate is egregious. You're going to see this game swing wildly from 2 to 20 frames. Worse, the gameplay is locked to a base frametime and slows down when the framerate does. When the game chugs down to 2 or 3 frames per second, you're stuck waiting 2 minutes for the camera to move enough that the game will at least give you a chance to run away from whatever was causing the game to choke again. Even if it isn't catastrophically failing, you will find yourself battling the timed button press mechanics, as the pace at which those events actually play is variable with the framerate. You can't time something when you don't know when the next frame is going to render. It's just a huge mess. There are, of course, other technical issues as well. I repeatedly found the sound breaking and requiring a restart to fix. The game also crashes in other dumb ways, like soft-locking in the Mercenary screen.

The AI is also something else. It's terribly stupid and often just broken. At a basic level, it won't use abilities because it would rather use weaker basic attacks, which means that the player character will often do 4-5x as much damage with the same character as the AI. That is, of course, if the AI attacks at all, which they sometimes simply choose not to due to pathing issues. Sometimes they run off into the distance repeatedly just to be teleported back and do it again. Characters will also occasionally walk off ledges and die, but they also sometime just teleport through the ground and die. The game doesn't seem to respect elevation differences at all.

Gameplay is bad, balance is bad, story is bad, presentation is bad, and the technicals are a mess. Save your $40.

I agree with everything you said but the worst thing is definitely the voice acting.

I strongly recommend against buying this title. It is wretched, irredeemable tripe.

Gameplay is bad, balance is bad, story is bad, presentation is bad, and the technicals are a mess. Save your $40.

I'm doing the same with ghost of tsushima. The issue is that xb2 doesn't have language options so I was stuck with the awful English dub. I couldn't take it and ended up selling the game.