My experiance with Xenoblade Chronicles DE on switch Thread

i played xeno de & xeno 2 with graphics mod & overclocked to 768mhz, because handheld graphics so awful
xeno de yeah most of ppl will love this game, and the ending its climbing to klimaks with such great story not like common jrpg, its feel like classic rpg ffx and modern rpg ff12 with massive scale of the game, but i still like xeno 2 in terms of story, music, maps, graphics, more complex game with truly outstanding beautiful moral story, but more ppl dont please with xeno 2 because gameplay to complex, to anime, the character to much skin exposed lol.....

xenoblade 2 is my favorite game of all time after 15 years playing many platform and games, xenoblade de is the second one

xenoblade de include future connected:
map is larger, great feel classic rpg similiar to ffx, the cutscene almost 11hrs long, total gameplay 40hrs

xenoblade 2 include golden torna:
map more dense & beautiful, the soundtrack absolutely the best, story more colorfull, the cutscenes 20hrs long, total gameplay 60hrs well (similiar to the witcher 3 complete dlc in term of total gameplay)

i liked so much this game with such linear gameplay

 

I would suggest that if you're contemplating moving on to XB2, you start with 2, then Torna afterwards (though considering how long the XB games are it might be a while.)

Torna is shorter, understandably, as it is an expansion pack to XB2, but also takes the gameplay mechanics of 2 and streamlines and user-friendly's them a hell of a lot more then the core game.

The problem is if you start with Torna (which you could, realistically, since it's a prequel/backstory to 2) you'll spoil yourself with the gameplay mechanics and jumping from Torna to 2 would suck.

In terms on the actual gameplay mechanics though, it's basically similar to the first game at it's core (but with Gacha, without the real life costs), but there's additional elemental based combo attributes to it which make it much much more complex, whilst also giving you more adaptability on how you approach combat.

Problem is that unlike XB1 where pretty much all of the mechanics were there from the start, XB2 drip feeds you them over a much longer period such that you're still getting mechanic tutorials half way through the game.

I'm not sure if it has since been changed because I haven't played it in a while, but one of the other common complaints about 2 is the sheer amount of mechanics involved, and the tutorials that came with them. When I was playing it, there wasn't a repository for all these tutorials, so if you forgot about a certain mechanic introduced hours and hours and hours ago, well, sucks to be you.
This may have been rectified in post launch updates but again I'm not entirely sure myself.

Another complaint is usually the pacing of the game, because the first part is...slow, to put it politely.

However, if you can overlook a game that starts slowly and does take a fair amount of investment to actually learn the mechanics properly, it is a good sequel to the first game.

Hopefully this covered most of your questions, and maybe someone else may clarify on if somethings have had improvements (like the tutorial system).

Tl;dr:
XB2 is basically a more complex XB1, expanding on existing mechanics but allowing a wider diversity on battle choices. (And obviously the..gacha).
Torna is XB2, but refined and more user friendly, whilst maintaining the story built by 2.

 

To further clarify on the "elemental based combo system", this works similarly to the existing "Break/Topple/Daze" system, in that you can hit a mob with, say, Fire. This will set them alight for x amount of time which you can then follow up with Fire again to make the fire ailment more intense, or you could introduce water which causes it to detonate and create an explosion.

All of the elements themselves have associated ailments attached to them as well, as do the elemental interaction combos, and naturally, enemies will have resistances to particular elements, which means the time they are afflicted may be longer or shorter. Think of the "time affliction" similar to how they're affected by Break or Topple and you have that time period to quickly follow up with the next part of the chain.

That is basically how the combo system works.
So it isn't just Break and Topple and Daze.

It's break and topple and daze, or fire, then water to trigger steam bomb, and then fire or water to finish with steam explosion.

And that's just the interaction between two elements. There are eight elements that can be utilised in total.

Again, you likely won't be hitting Steam Explosion levels of Combo's immediately, because you won't have enough gacha-pulled-characters to reach that level of combo complexity until a pretty decent chunk in. But in terms of how the combo mechanics compare to 1, as you can imagine, they're pretty complex.

 

xeno 2 better choice than torna dlc
xeno 2 is linear game like xeno de, torna in other hand its feel like back in forth gameplay