So, overall, the visual feature set is improved over Xenoblade X but what about performance? This is where things get a little iffy as Xenoblade 2 exhibits some very strange behaviour. We observed what you might call 'hot spots' - areas that cause performance to drop. However, the impact of this drop persists when you return to areas that were previously fine. This suggests a performance bottleneck that isn't related to what's actually being rendered on-screen - and it can hit hard, causing sustained drops down to the 20fps area. Closing the game and restarting via a saved game restored the correct frame-rate, suggesting a pretty serious bug. Returning to the 'hot spot' once again caused the same prolonged hit to performance - a state of affairs that persists when testing the digital version of the game on both internal storage and a MicroSD card.
Regardless, while performance in general seems to hold close to 30fps, there are instances such as this where things come crashing down. In terms of handheld performance, there's no way to accurately measure a 30fps title, but the general sense is that it runs similarly to the docked experience.
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