Xenoblade 3

The original Xenoblade came as quite the surprise to me, even with the preceding years of fans yelling at Nintendo to release it in America. It felt like the first advancement in Japanese RPGs in quite some time, since the PS3 generation raised the requirements so high that Japanese developers struggled to put anything out at all. At most you had Final Fantasy XIII with very pretty graphics and one hell of a battle system, but struggling to have any vision since most of Square-Enix's directorial talent had left either from failed movies or getting worked to death. Or you had something like Tales of Vesperia which was well-crafted, but extremely traditional and anime. Xenoblade, even though it was on the Wii, comparatively blew the doors down with an enormous world scale that resembled a linear MMO more than anything (with accompanying fast travel that was borderline instant), a bold level of quality of life that let players die with no penalty (yet also using that to drop level 80 monsters in early game areas or having spider bosses climb out of pits to get the drop on you), surprisingly well crafted in-game cinematics, and took Final Fantasy XII's offline MMO combat idea and made it actually work by making player movement and positioning actually matter with just a generally more active approach to it. While you can poke flaws at it in retrospect, it was a hell of a surprise coming from a game that wasn't really on my radar at all.

Now we're 4 games deep into the franchise. Xenoblade X kept up the experimentation by introducing an open world that actually required you to engage with optional content to be powerful enough to deal with the main story content (much to reviewer's despair and my delight), while Xenoblade 2 rolled back the innovation in favor of refining the formula- adding timing-based attack inputs, ramping up the action cutscene budget, and making the character models more appealing if also a bit more generically anime. That left me wondering where Xenoblade 3 would end up going and the answer is, for better or worse, even more refining and ramping up the budgetary scale?

Xenoblade 2 was extremely shonen. I'm talking boy meets mysterious girl who go on an adventure to find some magical place with some magical artifact (well I guess the artifact is also the girl in this case). I'm talking boy accidentally falls on girl's boobies and gets yelled at for it. I'm talking cutscene after cutscene of the heroes getting their ass beat followed by getting angry from some emotional revelation and overcoming it with their newfound power. I didn't entirely hate it (those fight scenes have some legit well done anime fight choreography), but with it being the series first actual bonafide financial success I was worried it was going to go down the path of big booby babes forevermore.

Xenoblade 3 might be some flavor of anime plot, but it sure didn't continue going down that route. Instead we have a bleak setting where child soldiers who can only live for 10 years are locked into an infinite war where neither side can ever win. There's a certain emphasis on mourning, with the protagonist being an off-seer who plays on his flute to see the dead off. Elements even start to resemble parts of Xenogears (though I don't know enough to substantially comment on that). The main cast don't entirely rely on likable one-note anime tropes either- compare Lanz to his Xenoblade 1 counterpart of Reyn for example: Reyn is the rock-solid upbeat meathead best friend archetype from start to finish. Lanz looks like that, but he's actually more of an arrogant dick that's somewhat dimwitted but is aware of it and his respect can be earned. I'm not an English major so I'm mangling my descriptions here. The point is that the game tries to have more depth with its main characters, containing tons of flashbacks fleshing them out. That's commendable. But it also didn't really work for me. I didn't particularly like or dislike anyone, and the flashbacks did not force me to re-evaluate the characters like a good season 1 Lost flashback, so much as just going, "oh. ok".

Up until this game, Xenoblade has been stuffed to the brim with sidequests. The cheap kind that mostly revolve around some text boxes at the beginning/end, and just involve killing things or collecting things or getting to a place (with a few more involved ones here and there). I suppose someone must have slipped them a copy of The Witcher 3, because Xenoblade 3 takes a turn into dramatically upping the production value on some them to nearly matching the main story while still having a hell of a lot of them. That sounds great on paper, but in reality the quality of writing tends to take a huge hit. 

Often it's just cruddy writing, but part of the problem is also just the game's commitment to the setting of an infinite child soldier war. People make fun of Japanese RPGs for always having teenage protagonists, but in this case the entire world is literally populated almost exclusively by teenage soldiers. It's exhaustively samey. Even as someone who tends to love deep dives into how an interesting hypothetical world could actually function, it isn't handled that well here. I cannot count the number of quests that boiled down to a villain monologuing about how one aspect of the world functioned, only for the protagonists to get mad about how wrong and evil it is for things to be that way. While the "how it works" aspect was often interesting (though sometimes dumb), the fact that the response to it was always just righteous outrage starts to make it almost feel like parody. Doesn't feel like it really explored the ideas presented.

I think it ultimately just made me appreciate cheap sidequests for the first time. My previous experience with the franchise has always been to do quite a lot of them, but once I started getting tired I'd just pull the plug and finish the main story. This worked quite well- the quests themselves contain enjoyable bits of world building, incentive to explore the world, but also aren't so high quality that I felt bad about skipping them. Xenoblade 3 meanwhile made me play it for way longer than the game itself could hold my interest because it felt wrong to skip such substantial content. The fact that the content in question was sometimes pretty bad made things even worse (compare to The Witcher 3, which while the gameplay runs out of steam almost immediately, at least the sidequest writing manages to be so consistently high quality throughout that I was only kind of grumpy about the whole affair).

On paper this should be the best Xenoblade battle system yet- it involves unlocking tons of classes and by leveling them enough you can then use their abilities on other classes. It even includes a Blue Mage style class that allows unlocking like hundreds of abilities and creating custom versions all 3 roles in the trinity (tank/damage/healing). Having 6 characters instead of 3 allows a lot more creativity in party composition. They finally let you change leaders mid-combat. It still retains Xenoblade 2's addition of timing while having a more understandable version of chain attacks and sort-of giving you more abilities at a time (sort of less too). 

But in practice the nature of having to level up classes to use their cross-class abilities (and the UI making it difficult to see what the cross-class abilities even are without looking up names) just means you have to spend the entire game constantly changing classes across 6 characters to level up all the classes. While in previous games I would happily tweak my party every so often, occasionally changing leaders when things got dull, in this game I pretty much resigned myself to letting the game set up my party instead- there was just too much crap to be changing it every 2 hours or so. Actually executing combat has gotten pretty rote and stale at this point too despite the number of classes. So in the end, despite sinking so many hours into the game, I basically feel like I never actually got around to really getting to play the game (which is to say actually building a party of my own). I suspect if I sat down and did the endgame monsters I would probably find some satisfaction, but I'm kind of too burned out to want to (as is I ran into a couple bosses that demanded tweaking my party, but out leveling them is an equally viable strategy)

I got about that far in the review before looking at my notes and realizing this game had already sucked 120hrs out of my life and I didn't want to drop too many more into reviewing it. So please enjoy the cliff notes version:

• You still can't skip the lengthy chain attack animations in battle. They are criminal and probably add hours to the game.
• Xenoblade 2 (and X to a lesser extent) had stellar cutscene fight choreography. This worked very well with the shonen anime plot where emotional outbursts could translate to fighting power, and generally pumping players up for a fight. Xenoblade 3's plot doesn't really operate like that, but they still had a talented team good at that kind of thing. So they ended up with lots of fight scenes involving coming up with tactics mid-battle that are tangentially related to character growth instead. It really doesn't work.
• Xenoblade 1 set a painfully high standard for creative visual world design by having the game take place entirely on two dead giant mechs. It was a spectacularly great choice for a 3d world, allowing you to slowly piece together where the different body parts of the giant you were relative to your current position and how the pose might have affected the environment. Xenoblade 2 tried to follow this up by having the world consist of several still-living giant creatures, but it didn't even come close to comparing since they didn't do much other than have a mountain head move around a bit. Xenoblade 3 takes a stab at something far more interesting: the worlds of the previous two games getting merged into one. It's a clever way of doing a sequel that I don't think has been done before. But once again in practice I found it kind of underwhelming- most of the mergers just didn't result in anything particularly neat. The few returning characters are barely recognizable as themselves. Worse, the world music ends up lacking in identity due to needing to invoke the previous games.
• The actual structure of the world is still pretty great, though. They took a more vertically layered approach that works really well- the higher you climb up, the more you get to start recognizing places you've been and getting to see places far in the distance that the plot has mentioned hours before you arrive there.
• If I had to summarize my feelings on the story it would be: parts of the backstory were more interesting than the actual main plot. Restructuring it to tell that backstory in a more linear fashion would probably have been way more compelling, but also wouldn't fit into a Xenoblade game's structure. For all I know Xenogears or Xenosaga are already that story given some of the overlap. I suppose this might just be really good marketing for the upcoming expansion, which is likely a prequel story though likely not of the time period I'm referring to (and unlike Xenoblade 2's attempt at selling a prequel expansion, I am actually interested in this world's history).
•  When Xenoblade 1 took a bold new expansive direction to Japanese RPGs and then Xenoblade X straight up told me "you pilot a mech in an open world in this one", I thought I was seeing a bright, ambitious future for the genre for the first time in a long time- something that started to look like that RPG future where you get to ride on to-scale airships that Grand Theft Auto III hinted to me long ago. Unfortunately, the series seems to have given up and fallen into just refining its existing scope for now. There's a boat in Xenoblade 3. It's not the worst ocean in a game, but it's not great. Feels more like a pond rather than, say, getting a boat for the first time in a NES/SNES era RPG where your entire perception of the world gets redefined.
  

So should you play Xenoblade 3? The world is still stimulating to walk around and look at, the combat is the second worst it has ever been (2 is still worse), the beefed up side quests somehow made them worse, and I don't even know where to put the story. So like. Objectively, probably not? Might be better if you can talk yourself out of doing too many side quests. I have the same feeling as with Elden Ring where I'm being overly harsh towards a game because it wore out its welcome. I certainly don't regret playing it, and I'm quite likely to buy the expansion because that story looks really interesting. So basically: if you haven't played a Xenoblade yet, go play X instead. And if you're already in this hole with me then: I can see a future where I stop playing every entry in this franchise on the horizon now, but we're not there yet.