Xenoblade 2's Most Annoying Feature Is Finally Fixed on Switch 2

Few things kill the flow of a handheld RPG like being forced to dig through menus mid-adventure. In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the Field Skills system was exactly that: a constant friction point where you’d hit a barrier, check your Blades, swap them around, and pray your combination worked. It was tedious on a TV and borderline painful on a handheld screen. Now, early players of the Switch 2 Edition have discovered that Monolith Soft finally addressed this—without even mentioning it in the patch notes.

When Menus Become Boss Fights

In the original Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Field Skills required you to equip specific Blades on each party member to meet elemental or ability thresholds scattered across Alrest, a friction point that the Switch 2 Edition’s 1080p upgrade makes easier to appreciate. Need Leaping Lv. 5? Time to open the menu, unequip three Blades, scroll through your collection, equip the right ones, close the menu, try the barrier, and—if you miscalculated—do it all over again. The Spirit Crucible Elpys section was especially notorious, demanding hours of grinding just to pass one check. For handheld players, that meant extra downtime on the Switch’s small screen, often breaking the immersion you’d built up during a commute or a quick session. The system didn’t just gate progress; it punished portable play by turning exploration into a spreadsheet simulator.

All Blades, All the Time: A Fix That Changes Portable Flow

The Switch 2 Edition quietly implements a simple but transformative change: Field Skills now count every Blade you own, not just the three equipped per character, joining other welcome additions like the Xenosaga cameo that has rekindled handheld hopes for the series. You no longer need to shuffle Blades around to pass a check—the game simply tallies your total. Early reports from Australia and New Zealand confirm the improvement, though it’s still unclear whether the system uses all Blades in order or intelligently selects the best combination. Either way, the result is the same: barriers that once required five minutes of menu fiddling now pass instantly. For Switch 2 players, this means you can explore Alrest with far fewer interruptions, keeping that portable momentum intact. It’s a quality-of-life fix that didn’t make the marketing materials, but it might be the single best reason to double-dip if you bounced off the original due to its menu fatigue.