It feels impossible to talk about Xenoblade 3 without first briefly addressing the series in general.
Xenoblade Chronicles, a relentless revenge quest that is so focused on forward momentum that it takes you by surprise when it decides to slow down and take an emotional moment for the characters to breathe. Notoriously filled with pretty tedious side content.
Xenoblade Chronicles X, the side game that seemed to misunderstand what made the first game's combination of elements so special with a plot that hardly feels worth following, but with a fascinating open planet to roam at your own risk.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the "true sequel" that suffers from some of the most frustrating character writing and fanservice I've seen in a long time, and a truly terrible gacha system that drags everything even further down.
To me, this series is the definition of ups and downs. Every game is massive, ambitious, filled with incredible sights and sounds, but every game also has its own issues and it should come as no surprise that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 follows in those footsteps.
That being said, most of the things I disliked the most about XC2 have been reworked and improved. The previously frustrating gacha system was replaced with Heroes, who essentially are permanent party members obtained at set places in the world who you can't control but can inherit a combat class from. The painfully horny character writing and costume design is nowhere to be found. The field abilities are now specific upgrades obtained through story progress instead of being tied to random chance and a lot of grind. It's kind of surprising that XC2 is even part of the same series, with how tonally off it is. Even the intentionally different XCX fits in better here!
The side content has also had big overhauls, relegating most of the fetch quest content to an easily-accessible menu to make way for more involved side quests. Every Hero even has two fully voiced quests each, making them feel just a bit more connected to the overall story and cast.
There's also the combat! It's far more comprehensible this time, with a system that combines auto attacks, art cooldowns, and art cancelling. It's pretty intuitive but if you forget how something works, there are tutorial pages to reference in the menu. It feels like they really needed to nail the combat this time, since you have seven characters on the field at a time and it's chaotic enough as is. Thankfully with classes being separated into three distinct roles of Attacker, Defender and Healer, and UI elements like aggro lines changing colour depending on whether a Defender (good) or literally anyone else (bad) is being targeted by an enemy, it's possible to play this game without worrying too much about the fine-tuning the party if you want. It might still be overwhelming to somebody new to RPGs but it does at least ease you in with a party of three in small skirmishes. If someone wanted to say that the battle UI is cluttered, I'd agree, but everything on there is important information.
If you do want to fine-tune though, there's so much to tinker with and it's very satisfying! A lot of this tinkering can affect how you play the character, like allowing you to revive party members outside of being a Healer, or dealing counter damage every time you're hit. Every class you level up lets you keep some of its moves and passive skills to slot into other classes, so you're highly encouraged to swap everyone's classes and combat roles around to get really great synergies going. There's even a class called Soul Hacker that lets you obtain moves and skills from Unique Monsters to basically build your own class from scratch! It's really fun to be getting new pieces of kit over the course of the game to slowly build up an incredibly gimmicky glass cannon, for example. This class probably should've been unlocked waaaay sooner than it is.
Overall, mechanically most of what XC3 does I like. I still miss flying a giant mech Skell to get around, and I wish the world design was more open, but the actual content of the game has never been better. There are some things that are a little annoying, so here I'll list a few that bug me:
- There is a vehicle in one area that's simply not fun to control most of the time.
- They really could have sprung for more end of battle lines considering how we have the same main cast of six for the vast majority of the game.
- The menu having its own music when I'd rather just listen to the area music especially if I'm frequently opening and closing the map.
- The map having more functionality for placing stamps to return to later, such as to mark Unique Monsters you aren't yet strong enough to defeat. You can only place one waypoint per area! Considering how massive these areas are, this is unreasonable!
- It also would be nice to have an actual item list to log where you picked up various plants and enemy drops. Being tasked with getting a "Gold Condenser" and having no idea where that would be feels terrible, and it's a problem the series has had its entire life! You just have to use a guide sometimes for the side content and I consider that a failure on the game's part. Have you seen the listicle state of guides these days? I'd rather never have an excuse to have to sift through that, thanks. Uh. Does this part count as a listicle? Sorry.
Of course, these are tiny complaints but they do grow in annoyance when you're playing a game as large as this. I haven't even done anything in the postgame yet and I'm already sitting at 200 hours, though I think the enemy drops list is a serious issue that needs to be addressed regardless of game length.
With all that said, it's time to give some thoughts about the story a bit so the rest'll be delving into spoiler territory.
It's a story that feels somewhat more episodic than previous games. Our starting party of Noah, Eunie and Lanz belong to a Kevesi colony that's only one among many colonies in an endless war against Agnian colonies. It's a very strange political and character landscape, where child soldiers are born at age ten and fight in the war until either they die or reach age twenty, when a Homecoming ceremony concludes their lives to "return to the queen." Each colony is powered by a Flame Clock, and they must fuel it by taking the lives of the soldiers from Agnian colonies. It feels strange and contrived from pretty early on, especially knowing that Agnian colonies also have their own Flame Clocks that must be filled by taking Kevesi lives. Aside from these two opposing forces, there are the impartial nopon, series staple bouncy little friends who have their own dialect and drastically longer lifespan. They mostly live as traders, travelers and craftspeople.
When the three Kevesi party members meet three Agnian soldiers, Mio, Taion and Sena, in battle, they by complete accident become the shapeshifting group known as Ouroboros. Immediately, they are branded traitors from both sides and have to fight to live, as opposed to their former way of life which was to live to fight.
The episodic feel comes from the Ouroboros rebellion against the members who keep the colonies running, the Consuls. Nearly every Hero recruitment involves the gang liberating a colony by killing its Consul, destroying its Flame Clock, and teaching its inhabitants to live for themselves instead of an endless manufactured war. I think the problem with this being episodic is that with a lot of the Heroes being optional, your individual actions don't affect the narrative that much. You have here a group of ridiculous villain-of-the-week goons who don't try to band together at all to stop a ragtag group that's methodically tearing down their world, piece by piece. When you destroy a Consul, nobody is there to take their place. Colonies eventually connect and communicate with each other, even with former opponents, and the Consuls do nothing to prevent it. Are they that confident that Ouroboros will fail? Even when they win time and time again?
If the war is so endless, how hasn't someone decided to recklessly try and destroy their Flame Clock before? Well it turns out, maybe it has happened before, but nothing could possibly cut through its material. That is, nothing aside from a mysterious blade Noah accepts from his nopon buddy Riku. This blade is Lucky Seven and, considering how crucial it is to the plot and that colony liberations would have been impossible without it, it barely has any explanation for most of the game, but once I reached the end it felt like it busted open so many unanswered aspects about the story.
For one thing, Riku is eventually revealed through a side quest to be one of the seven Legendary Nopon, master smiths who have the experience necessary to forge Origin Metal. It's by his hand that Lucky Seven is made, but it's this aspect that's so strange to me. Nopon are supposed to be impartial! By giving such a powerful, never-before-seen weapon to a Kevesi, what was his goal? Lucky Seven is way too specific a creation to just help continue the endless war. Did he expect Noah to become one of the Ouroboros, despite it really being a chance encounter? And if he did, just how much of a chance encounter was that? It's just a really strange weak point in the story and the missing truth about Lucky Seven stuck with me for the entire game, so it was disappointing that it was never addressed.
There's still a lot to love about the story overall and obviously I didn't address nearly anything that happens in it. The main cast bounce off of each other well and there are many great scenes both dramatic and quiet. The Heroes are all distinct and worth recruiting not just for their class, too. It's just it's a long game! You'll be going on all kinds of episodic tangents between the main story beats, and some of those might suffer as they flashback a character on screen for a moment and you ask yourself, who's that again? What did they do?
Ouroboros fighting the Endless Now is a good spin on the typical "protagonist beats up a god" storyline you see in RPGs. It isn't necessarily a battle against a creator, but an affirmation that change has to happen, even if it's scary, even if there's bad with the good. Maybe Xenoblade is afraid of that change, too. Tied down by passing canonical ties to games past, I'm not so sure adding Melia and Nia (and less directly others like Shulk, Rex, Tora and Poppi) to the plot does anything to reinforce the game's themes. These are world histories that really should never have become chained together.
It might be painful to let go of these characters when even they, despite their own actions, don't want to say goodbye, but I think at this point it's necessary. Let us play a song of mourning on our flutes, and send off Xenoblade with a smile, that the next game can stand tall on entirely its own merits.