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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round: 6 Xenoblade Chronicles 2 vs. 14 Blue Prince
2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round
East Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 6 Xenoblade Chronicles 2 vs. 14 Blue Prince
The JRPG That Rewarded a Hundred Hours Against the Puzzle Box That Rewarded Obsession
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 defeated Returnal in the Round of 64 by a score of 2-1, and the result confirmed something that the game's fanbase has always known and has always been frustrated that the broader gaming world does not seem to share. They show up. They have always shown up. The series has spent years being the JRPG that people who care about JRPGs care about deeply, and that devotion is not abstract. It translated to two votes against an 86-rated PS5 exclusive that is one of the most technically ambitious games of its console's launch era.
Returnal is a roguelike shooter from Housemarque built around the DualSense controller's haptic feedback in ways that made it one of the defining early PS5 experiences. It is genuinely extraordinary. Its fanbase voted for it. Xenoblade 2's fanbase voted slightly more, and that is the whole story of a result that came down to one vote.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 came out in December 2017, the first year of the Nintendo Switch, and it served as one of the console's early demonstrations of what the platform could deliver in terms of scope and ambition. It scored an 83 on Metacritic, a number that its fanbase has spent years arguing is inadequate to describe what the game actually is. The combat system is deep to the point of intimidation. The Blade system, which lets you equip different supernatural beings that grant different abilities and playstyles, creates a customization space so vast that dedicated players are still finding new and interesting configurations years after release.
The game follows Rex, a salvager who forms a bond with a legendary Blade named Pyra and sets out to reach the mythical land of Elysium at the top of the World Tree. The world of Alrest, where enormous creatures called Titans serve as the landmasses on which civilization is built, is one of the most imaginative settings in recent JRPG history. The Titans are dying. The seas below are endless. The cultures that have grown up on each Titan are distinct and richly developed. The game uses this world to tell a story about loss and purpose and the meaning of a life lived in service to something larger than yourself, and in its final hours it delivers emotional moments that players who committed to the full experience remember with genuine intensity.
That is the phrase that matters for understanding Xenoblade 2 in any kind of competitive context. Players who committed. The game asks for a hundred hours. It gives those hours back with interest if you stay. The people who stayed are the people who vote in tournaments like this one, and they vote with the conviction of people who feel their game has been underrated and underappreciated and are ready to do something about it.
On the other side of this matchup is a game that produced a completely different kind of devoted audience through a completely different mechanism.
Blue Prince came out in 2025 from Dogubomb, a Swedish studio, and scored a 92 on Metacritic for PC, which is one of the higher scores of any game that entered VGM 2026 in its final eligible year. It is a puzzle game set in a mysterious manor called Mt. Holly, which you must navigate each day in search of a hidden 46th room. The catch is that the manor's layout changes every time you enter it, with rooms drawn from a deck and placed as you explore, creating a different configuration on each run.
The puzzle is not about any individual room. It is about understanding the system, about learning which rooms appear together and under what conditions, about slowly building a model in your mind of a house that refuses to hold still. The game never explains its rules with words. It trusts the player to observe, to hypothesize, to test, and to revise. The moment when the system becomes legible, when the patterns that had seemed random reveal themselves as structured and purposeful, is one of the most satisfying experiences the puzzle genre has produced in years.
Blue Prince is the kind of game that rewards obsession, and the players who fell into it fell completely. Forum threads dedicated to its mysteries filled up with theories and discoveries and the particular joy of collaborative puzzle-solving that the best mystery games generate. It became one of the most discussed games of 2025 among a certain kind of player, the kind who finishes a game and immediately wants to talk about it, to work through it with other people, to compare notes and build understanding together.
That community beat Resident Evil Requiem 2-1 in the Round of 64. Resident Evil Requiem held the all-time highest Metacritic user score in history. It carried the weight of one of gaming's most recognized franchises. Blue Prince beat it anyway. The obsessive devotion of a puzzle game's community proved larger than the mainstream recognition of a franchise giant, and that result says something important about what Blue Prince's players are willing to do for their game.
The question this matchup answers is whether that obsessive devotion can outlast a JRPG fanbase that has been defending its game's review score and its game's legacy for nearly a decade. Xenoblade 2 voters are motivated by something specific and personal. Blue Prince voters are motivated by something specific and personal. One of those motivations carries further than the other on March 22.
The East bracket continues March 22. 12PM.
