Hoo boy. This one was a doozy. I had expected as much but still playing from late August into late November and putting in ~180 hours is quite a lot. Xenoblade titles are dense, lengthy RPGs with plenty of side-quests. The original Xenoblade launched for Wii in 2010 in Japan. It gather a cult following and became one of the poster games for "Operation Rainfall" a online campaign to get Nintendo to port over several Japan/EU-only Wii games also including Diaster: Day of Crisis (which never came to the US), The Last Story and Pandora's Tower. I made sure to pre-order because I expected it to become a rare game. It was, sorta, but it turned out to be surprisingly popular, enough to spawn a high-profile sequel Xenoblade Chronicles X, an absolutely surprising new 3DS port and a Definitive Edition on the Nintendo Switch. While I had expected JRPG fans to be over-exaggerating as much as fans do, Xenoblade was good, really good, and instantly settled as one of my favorites given the design, the combat and especially the music by ACE.
Xenoblade 3 follows up Xenoblade 2 on Switch and in some ways positions itself as a direct sequel to both. All Xenoblade games share the same basic combat setup and quest design but Xenoblade 2 went in a different direction in terms of art design and general feel. It got a lot of flak for it's overly "anime" designs and tropes. 3 fits right in the middle, still anime but also a little more toned down (especially the costumes). While I really though 2 was a step up in the general look department, especially over 1's low poly limitations and X's plastic mannequin look, 3 really nails the whole thing from animation and expressiveness to the nice and believable designs of the characters combined with the always wonderful environmental art. What does remain consistent is the love of systems. You'll be getting new combat features 50 hours in, there will be many things in the game you just ignore because you can't be arsed to figure it out. And the game anticipates this. You often don't need much more than gain a level to progress but if you hit a wall, then you can begin optimizing in other ways (gems, accessories, skills, class composition etc) to bring yourself up-to-par without the need to grind.
The game splits the characters into 2 main camps: Keves, and Agnus who's war sets up the primary driving force for the game. Characters from Keves descend from Xenoblade 1 and include the main races from that game: High Entia, Homs and Mechon. These are all referred to as "humans" and the differentiation for races is almost never touched upon, it just winds up be a nod to players of the first game. Agnus is populated by Xenoblade 2 Blades; humanoids with various features like cat ears, flaming hair, and glowing body art (including core crystals). I like the decision to just never speak about that, there's lots of different people and they're just pure diversity and nobody bats an eye about it, no strained real-world metaphors. Designs also differ as Keves uses a more western looking clothing style and Agnus uses a more Japanese inspired style. The Levnises (mechs) that Keves use are also similar to Mechon in Xenoblade 1. Even smaller system details make their way into the Xenoblade 1/2 dichotomy. Keves units and classes have arts (special moves) that build up over time as in Xenoblade 1, while Agnus build up by attacking as in Xenoblade 2. These are very neat touches that serve as winks and nods but the game never really acknowledge it in-world because they aren't important, you just know because you played them.
The general battle system is tried-and-true Xenoblade. You approach and enemy or group of enemies, start auto-attacking and eventually build up to use "arts" which are powerful moves that have special effects like healing, applying buffs, debuffs, or have specific effects when used from certain positions relative to the enemy. A new and very nice change is that addition of moves that impact a certain area. This are marked as circles on the battlefield and can do things like heal or provide attack boosts when characters stand in them. This takes the already positional aspect of Xenoblade's combat and enhances it by making you much more aware of your position on the battlefield to get the most buffs along with your attacks. Combos are also back and you get the variations from both games, either ending with launch/smash or daze/burst. The game differentiates the two as well. launch/smash does more damage, while daze/burst causes the enemy to drop a lot of rare items as well as causes enraged enemies to revert back for a period of time. While it takes a while to build a party to the point where you can reliably pull off full combos being able to direct them for different purposes as another layer of depth. The biggest unique change is the Oroboros system. You can combine each pairing of characters for a limited time to get more powerful attacks and invincibility. These still play like normal characters and get their own set of skills and arts. Since it is powerful there is a cooldown when you separate and additional depth is added by the fusion level. Fusion levels come from fusion arts which are basically arts that your learn from one class combined with your current class's arts allowing you to add additional effects. Perform enough of these and your fusion level rises, up-to 3, which make your more powerful in Oroboros form. In general I wasn't as impressed with this addition. It doesn't have that same layered level of build-up that Xenoblade 2's elemental burst system had and just feels like a tack-on ability. The same is true of chain-attacks which make a comeback. They work differently and are pretty confusing at the outset but become more natural over time. While the system itself has decent depth it mostly has you picking attacks in a time-frozen world. Since these are the highest damage dealers (and also a good emergency way to heal and re-direct enemy attacks to your blockers) this winds up being too much of the game and you feel constantly slowed by the unskippable attack animation you will see perhaps hundreds of times through the game's run time. Xenoblade 2 keeping this more interactive was a better choice in my opinion.
Outside of combat is also standard Xenoblade fair. You gather glowing items in the field, kill enemies for items and use these to either build up characters or solve quests. You'll also need to kill X enemies or fight a boss. Nothing has changed much here either, especially not in quality. It's filler for sure. Quest rewards can vary, items, money and exp are the most common but side-quests start sequential series of side-quests so you need to complete them to move up. Occasionally these can even open up new areas or make small transformations to the environment. This also plays into the Hero system. Your party of 6 can have an additional hero unit which is a unit that doesn't get Oroboros powers and not very customizable. Do a hero quest will allow you to use a hero and gain their respective class. Hero units get special side-quests that are much closer to story sequences, complete with full voice acting. These have the best rewards and offer the best content and there's quite a lot of heroes with a wide breadth of interesting classes to use.
Technically the game is a Switch masterpiece. Literally a dozen characters on screen, in large open worlds and a ton of special effects and it manages to hold it together. Not that there isn't frame-drops or resolution scaling but it's really making the trades-offs it needs to to remain playable even under extreme circumstances. Another thing worth noting is the incredible speed of loading. Within the same area (which is not small mind you) you can warp in about 3 seconds, between areas it's closer to 10 but coming from games that can easily take 20+ seconds to load a level its very impressive.
The narrative is also quite good, at least for the main cast. They build up very rich connections with each other and this is enhanced by good voice acting. The over-aching themes deal with life and death which I think it tackles successfully. However, as it gets into secondary content there's a noticeable drop-off. Side quests are almost entirely fetch this, and fight that with extremely thin framing. There's also different tiers of cut-scene which can be a little jarring. Story points usually have manual complex animation and mo-capped characters with voice acting and dialog that cannot be skipped, hero quests will have voice acting but will typically be animated with the in-game stock animations and can be skipped, and the run-of-the-mill quests are not voiced at all. Clearly budgetary cuts, and if the series ever becomes bigger than it is, this would be a nice place to fill. Hero quests are the middle tier between the banal (and mostly dialog skippable) quests and the main story. These can offer something of a little more weight. Specifically Ashera's stood out to me, but these also just degrade into anime-tropes too (finding a hot-springs). I think it was worth completing all of them to see full extent of the content even if I may not decide to finish every normal quest.
I found the game pretty easy at first being a Xenoblade veteran so I decided a couple hours in to bump the difficulty to hard. This mostly just increases the HP of things so they take twice as long and for bosses it's often necessary to be at least a few levels higher. This was not too much of a problem since I was constantly exploring and doing side-quests. I also didn't bother with leveling-up at camp and I pretty much never used Nopon coins to buy things. The one feature I didn't turn off was bonus exp from chain attacks because without that leveling up would take ages.
I put a huge amount of time into this one and I really did enjoy it, to the point where even 3 months later I was still enjoying it. I just loved the little nods to the rest of the series, especially the "if you know, you know" presentation. Combat was good but I feel the chain-attack system could be a little more active. It's fantastic technically and the presentation when it tries is excellent. The only real criticism is I wish there was budget to bring the rest up to the same level. Xenoblade has solidified itself as an essential open-world and JRPG series and at the same time I can't help but think of it as an underdog. And each entry shows meaningful progress in addressing the issues of the last. It doesn't sell or have mind-share like Elder Scrolls or Final Fantasy and yet at this point it might be better than both.
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