- Joined
- Sep 9, 2016
Well its been nearly 3 months since I last posted a game review, that being for the unenjoyable slog that is My Time on Frog Island. What all I have I done in that time? Well I went on vacation, I played a bit of Picross S9 (1 out of 2, insert all previous Picross reviews here,) and I purchased, played and put 140 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3, of course. So..... did I like it? Did I like it a lot? Read on to find out.
Read on to right here, precisely, because I am going to change things up this time and give the score up front. I adored aspects of this game enough to give Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (without any DLC) a 2 out of 2. To be frank, this game is one of the best games on Switch and if just a few things had been different it could have been one of the greatest games of all time. From the characters to the world building to the QoL/UI to everything else barring combat, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a well realized and immense game that will leave you laughing at exactly how good of a deal only paying 40 dollars (going market rate is mid-30s, at present) for it is. I want to, instead of merely listing its good qualities, dissect them and talk about why and how they made this title sing. And the main things that I have thought of include the "world and plot set up", the physical world layout, the characters and personal stories, the UI/UX, the side content and, for the sake of completion, two that I felt fell short, the music and combat. Then I'll have a little discussion at the end about the second half of the story, which I felt was a little bit of a letdown as well.
So then, a somewhat brief overview of the world presented to you in the beginning of the game, for the benefit of those who haven't played the game but do want to read this long post about how awesome it is. The world of Aionios is inhabited by two warring armies, Agnes and Keves, who very blatantly take on characteristics of the inhabitants of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2. The two factions are in a constant, eternal and unending war over nothing. By defeating eachother in close personal combat they can claim eachother's life energy and give it to their own leadership. The end goals of this war are never explained to the soldiers in it or to the audience, other than the fact that they blatantly do not exist and the war, itself, is the end goal. The soldiers, including our protagonists, are hatched out of Matrix-type pods and live a prescribed ten years before being dissolved in light much as a defeated enemy soldier would be. Well, the very few who make it all ten years do, the vast majority fall on the battlefield before then. These soldiers are trained in combat and little else, and have no concept of, among other things, sex, growing old, farming, cities, a human that isn't part of their great war or, really, almost anything. As far as they are concerned food comes from a box with a parachute and the most you can do with your life is kill lots of Agnes or Keves for ten years and then get incinerated during a big party with the queen. Obviously, the main party in the game doesn't keep this up for long, thought the game itself never abandons or strays from these initial concepts and instead explores them from different angles throughout its run. As your party of six heroes (three from each side, though all six quickly rendered stateless by the end of chapter one) navigate the world they discover all there is to a real life and piece together how and why their world works in the way it does.
Why is it that the above plot set-up works so well? I would argue that there are a few key ways they do it. The first is that they are dead serious about it. When your main duo play their combat funeral director flutes for the dead it never pans away or makes a joke of it, it has you look at the corpse and think about it. When your characters open a chest or build a rope ladder they do it one from each side, building unity. Never does the game undermine or belittle its own points. And it goes through great pains to answer questions the player might have, to try to give context. Where does the food come from? Do customs and technology change? Do soldiers ever go rogue? It answers most of the questions the audience will have. Through the various faction military units (called Colonies, in reference to the XB1 cities) the game picks apart all of the ways the system could be bad or how hard it is to break. One has a commander that is losing on purpose, another is stifled in bureaucracy, one focuses on just fixing machines, another trains cadets, etc. When freed from the tyranny of the war (spoiler alert: that happens) they have different problems. They have to farm or forage for food, deal with hold-outs for the old ways, deal with their own side refusing to work with them anymore. And the game does all of this while trying to present a cool, balanced ascetic halfway between the two previous games. Its not as anime as XB2 or the overly western style of the original version of XB1, instead coming somewhere down the middle with characters being anime styled but with ugly western anus mouths (but otherwise cool looking and realistically proportioned.)
The world the game takes place in is one vast battlefield on what appears to be the ruins of XB 1 and 2 mashed together and then bombed to hell and is built to be one seemless area, though the game helpfully slices it up for you on your map anyway for player ease. Largely devoid of human presence you are given a vast plain, barren desert, annoying ocean, and other, smaller areas to navigate through in a grand tour of the world. While it lacks, say, the wow factor of the open plains on Gormott or the Bionis' thigh, it does have a massive world to get lost in, one that does a decent enough job of hiding the fact that by all means you should be able to see the giant robots the colonies base out of from pretty much anywhere. Despite being drawn from the remains of two fantastic worlds it remains very down to earth with all but the most iconic features (the Mechonis' sword is sticking out of the ground and is a key plot fixture) being eroded away to the point where they are barely recognizable. As such it ends up being a suitably dour world for the game's less flamboyant story while still keeping that thread to the past titles that it so clearly wants.
The game changes up traditional party mechanics at this point by giving you a consistent party of 8 (minus 2, plus 1) for all but the opening minutes of the game. Those of you who've played previous titles will remember times where you are "locked into" the story in order to regain access to previous party members. That shits gone, you get some version of the main 6 playable characters and their two non-combat nopon buddies for the whole time. And to go along with them? One extra bonus spot for an NPC friend- of which there are many. All 7 active characters appear on-screen at once, though the camera zooms way out in battle to try to help mitigate the problems of this. And yeah, it can occasionally be hectic or confusing, especially since you're looking at your cooldown bars as much as the battle itself. But its done in service of the main plot about the two sides working together, as well as key to a combat mechanic where your party-members can unite to transform into ugly little Eva-mechs. Despite having so many characters to juggle the game does a "reasonably good" job of giving them all distinct personalities and things to do. One (Eunie, for those curious) gets short shift on character development but I think she talked in a very rude way in the JP dub, with a lot of that characterization being lost in translation and only really showing up if she's the focus of a side-quest. Otherwise you should be very prepared to delve deep into the histories and feelings of the remaining 5 playable characters and those of the people you meet along the way. Whatever game Bible they used when creating Xenoblade 3 must have been truly Bible-like in size, with hair-thin pages crammed with who liked who when and what victories and defeats the various sides have had. Although some of the questing might border on a slog its worth it in the end to look back on the fantastic human world that they have build out of the soldiers who lives were seemingly "mindless killing."
And as to the UI/UX? While I am not a huge fan of the Xenoblade combat mechanics (seriously, when they finally make an XB4 I hope the tear down and entirely rebuild this part of it) I am in awe of how great the game's UI is. From the little stars indicating new dialogue boxes to the ability to overlay the mini-map across your whole screen, this is the world of a game studio who care's and truly a culmination of ten years of giving a damn about player use. Sadly, the slightly complex nature of all the things you can add and switch mean that the first ten hours or so of the game will be filled with a slog of tutorials. And yes, the tutorials do hurt the game. Prior to writing this dissection of it I did check the game's scores on Metacritic and found two groups of players. Those who did deep exploration and gave it 93s to 97s and those who mainly focused on the main story, likely pushed into doing the review, who had a higher percentage of time in the "tutorial" section of the game and gave it scores like 85s and 90s. The tutorials are not fun and the game might have been slightly better off if it just didn't do things like the cooking or the clothing, or if it restricted character arts to just three per class. And, since we're on the topic of mainlining the story, there's a real issue with the levelling curve in the game too, whereby if you stray off the beaten path- which is where the vast majority of the game's content lies and where people love it the most- then you will quickly become overleveled in the main story and the villain faction, who already wear matching pink Power Ranger villain gimp suits, become even more of a joke.
So, then, how much side content is there, if its what people really like about the game? Well, if you include map exploration, freeing non-required heroes and then side and colony quests, I'd say that there's at least 100 hours there for you to enjoy. This is where the game's heart lies. It gives the characters you meet actual character, it gives you the backstory to flesh out the Colonies you met and random grunts you beat along the way (even if its not all entirely consistent with the lore being imparted to you) and it takes you to entire new sections of the map that you would not be visiting otherwise. Seemingly every side-quest you do causes two more to appear and before long they start spilling out not just from the colony you began them in but to the ones around it as well, as the actions you take help to expand the world. I don't want to gush too much but when you think you're done with a Colony's sidequests, the truth is you're probably only halfway there and it its great.
And now, a short note on the game's music. The main character, and his girlfriend, play the flute as a key part of the story, and as such the game's composer decided to incorporate "lots" of flute-playing into the score. Its not really noticeable though and honestly the music fell flat for me and was, in most cases, present at best. While that is a lot better than some other games, where the music is flat out bad and takes enjoyment away from the game, its also not up to the standard set by previous Xeno titles. It is especially lacking compared to 2, which had one of the greatest gaming OSTs of all time. The lack of greatness on Xenoblade 3's soundtrack pains me as I was expecting so much more.
Finally, we get to the last main point I wanted to make, which is that the combat sucks. Its bad. Obviously, the whole Xenoblade series is known for its "MMO-like" combat with button cooldowns and auto-attacks and could do with a refresh. But for this game its even worse due to specific balance issues. This is because the various parts of it are at their best when you are struggling to stay alive but do survive, get that big win and get a big reward for it. But if you are playing on normal mode, or even on hard but do sidequests -which hardmode players are going to want to do-, then that is going to stop occurring in your playthrough very quickly and you will be stuck going through two or three minute fights with monsters that cannot hurt you but still take time to whittle away at the healthbars of, only to get no reward for doing so due to how Xenoblade scales combat XP. This combat, and the level balancing issues arising from doing side-content, are so soul-crushingly bad that there is no way to say that the game is a pinnacle. On a list of the best games of all time XB 3 cannot be included and it is because 98 percent of the time you engage in combat you get no pleasure from it. I said above that the next Xeno title needs to revamp combat entirely and I mean it, future variations on this style should not be acceptable going forward and I encourage the team to do something, anything, else.
And now, just to append to the rest, a little spoilery section where I talk about the plot of the game after you finally get to the big sword. The above had light spoilers but this is going to talk about the end of the game, the villain's big plan and why I think they really dropped the ball on world building here. So really, really, really, really, stop reading here if you don't want the game's ending spoiled. While Xenoblade feels it acceptable to go out of its way to talk about things like food production and cleaning up the existence of outsiders and other such minutiae, it doesn't spend even a little bit of time on explaining what the main villain is. No, "the concept of despair" doesn't work for me, or how it could want things to be stuck in an "endless now" when that world would have only existed for a split second after previous ones were created. It spends very little time talking about what his powers are, how people become Moebius and why they are all assholes about it. Why it felt the need to "waste" multiple Moebius slots on random people who the Ouroboros met years ago, etc. There's plot holes in this game wide enough to drive a Ferronis through and not enough dopamine released for me to just smile and nod. Even the ending ends up being very unclear and, I feel, poorly explained- where the whole main party seems to know that its coming but the game doesn't tell the player that that is what is going to happen. Having made the big, bold choice to merge the worlds of XB 1 and 2, I think its a shame that they chicken out and re-create them as is at the end. But also with Aionios (the world of XB3) continuing to exist without them? And a fourth and fifth world where all of the people from XB3 get teleported to with their memories intact? And possibly a sixth world where young Noah still lives in the city but its somehow merged with XB2 elements and/or different from the near identical world depicted in the opening cutscene? And, since I rewatched the opening cutscene for this, what is up with it? Noah alone doesn't get frozen in time and look around to see the world destroyed? So is he Zed then, because nowhere else in the game does it imply this and indeed seems to be saying the opposite? I assume that Future Connect answers a lot of "early timeline" questions, but this is all late game stuff and I don't think they thought it through enough. They should have had the courage to pick and stick with one ending, the whole way through, with no wavering and left it at that.
Thats that then, on to the Switch port of Hogwarts Legacy and its ugly ballsack face people and hiding gear changes behind four or five different loading screens. Spoiler alert, that game is a lot worse than other people seem to think.
Read on to right here, precisely, because I am going to change things up this time and give the score up front. I adored aspects of this game enough to give Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (without any DLC) a 2 out of 2. To be frank, this game is one of the best games on Switch and if just a few things had been different it could have been one of the greatest games of all time. From the characters to the world building to the QoL/UI to everything else barring combat, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a well realized and immense game that will leave you laughing at exactly how good of a deal only paying 40 dollars (going market rate is mid-30s, at present) for it is. I want to, instead of merely listing its good qualities, dissect them and talk about why and how they made this title sing. And the main things that I have thought of include the "world and plot set up", the physical world layout, the characters and personal stories, the UI/UX, the side content and, for the sake of completion, two that I felt fell short, the music and combat. Then I'll have a little discussion at the end about the second half of the story, which I felt was a little bit of a letdown as well.
So then, a somewhat brief overview of the world presented to you in the beginning of the game, for the benefit of those who haven't played the game but do want to read this long post about how awesome it is. The world of Aionios is inhabited by two warring armies, Agnes and Keves, who very blatantly take on characteristics of the inhabitants of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2. The two factions are in a constant, eternal and unending war over nothing. By defeating eachother in close personal combat they can claim eachother's life energy and give it to their own leadership. The end goals of this war are never explained to the soldiers in it or to the audience, other than the fact that they blatantly do not exist and the war, itself, is the end goal. The soldiers, including our protagonists, are hatched out of Matrix-type pods and live a prescribed ten years before being dissolved in light much as a defeated enemy soldier would be. Well, the very few who make it all ten years do, the vast majority fall on the battlefield before then. These soldiers are trained in combat and little else, and have no concept of, among other things, sex, growing old, farming, cities, a human that isn't part of their great war or, really, almost anything. As far as they are concerned food comes from a box with a parachute and the most you can do with your life is kill lots of Agnes or Keves for ten years and then get incinerated during a big party with the queen. Obviously, the main party in the game doesn't keep this up for long, thought the game itself never abandons or strays from these initial concepts and instead explores them from different angles throughout its run. As your party of six heroes (three from each side, though all six quickly rendered stateless by the end of chapter one) navigate the world they discover all there is to a real life and piece together how and why their world works in the way it does.
Why is it that the above plot set-up works so well? I would argue that there are a few key ways they do it. The first is that they are dead serious about it. When your main duo play their combat funeral director flutes for the dead it never pans away or makes a joke of it, it has you look at the corpse and think about it. When your characters open a chest or build a rope ladder they do it one from each side, building unity. Never does the game undermine or belittle its own points. And it goes through great pains to answer questions the player might have, to try to give context. Where does the food come from? Do customs and technology change? Do soldiers ever go rogue? It answers most of the questions the audience will have. Through the various faction military units (called Colonies, in reference to the XB1 cities) the game picks apart all of the ways the system could be bad or how hard it is to break. One has a commander that is losing on purpose, another is stifled in bureaucracy, one focuses on just fixing machines, another trains cadets, etc. When freed from the tyranny of the war (spoiler alert: that happens) they have different problems. They have to farm or forage for food, deal with hold-outs for the old ways, deal with their own side refusing to work with them anymore. And the game does all of this while trying to present a cool, balanced ascetic halfway between the two previous games. Its not as anime as XB2 or the overly western style of the original version of XB1, instead coming somewhere down the middle with characters being anime styled but with ugly western anus mouths (but otherwise cool looking and realistically proportioned.)
The world the game takes place in is one vast battlefield on what appears to be the ruins of XB 1 and 2 mashed together and then bombed to hell and is built to be one seemless area, though the game helpfully slices it up for you on your map anyway for player ease. Largely devoid of human presence you are given a vast plain, barren desert, annoying ocean, and other, smaller areas to navigate through in a grand tour of the world. While it lacks, say, the wow factor of the open plains on Gormott or the Bionis' thigh, it does have a massive world to get lost in, one that does a decent enough job of hiding the fact that by all means you should be able to see the giant robots the colonies base out of from pretty much anywhere. Despite being drawn from the remains of two fantastic worlds it remains very down to earth with all but the most iconic features (the Mechonis' sword is sticking out of the ground and is a key plot fixture) being eroded away to the point where they are barely recognizable. As such it ends up being a suitably dour world for the game's less flamboyant story while still keeping that thread to the past titles that it so clearly wants.
The game changes up traditional party mechanics at this point by giving you a consistent party of 8 (minus 2, plus 1) for all but the opening minutes of the game. Those of you who've played previous titles will remember times where you are "locked into" the story in order to regain access to previous party members. That shits gone, you get some version of the main 6 playable characters and their two non-combat nopon buddies for the whole time. And to go along with them? One extra bonus spot for an NPC friend- of which there are many. All 7 active characters appear on-screen at once, though the camera zooms way out in battle to try to help mitigate the problems of this. And yeah, it can occasionally be hectic or confusing, especially since you're looking at your cooldown bars as much as the battle itself. But its done in service of the main plot about the two sides working together, as well as key to a combat mechanic where your party-members can unite to transform into ugly little Eva-mechs. Despite having so many characters to juggle the game does a "reasonably good" job of giving them all distinct personalities and things to do. One (Eunie, for those curious) gets short shift on character development but I think she talked in a very rude way in the JP dub, with a lot of that characterization being lost in translation and only really showing up if she's the focus of a side-quest. Otherwise you should be very prepared to delve deep into the histories and feelings of the remaining 5 playable characters and those of the people you meet along the way. Whatever game Bible they used when creating Xenoblade 3 must have been truly Bible-like in size, with hair-thin pages crammed with who liked who when and what victories and defeats the various sides have had. Although some of the questing might border on a slog its worth it in the end to look back on the fantastic human world that they have build out of the soldiers who lives were seemingly "mindless killing."
And as to the UI/UX? While I am not a huge fan of the Xenoblade combat mechanics (seriously, when they finally make an XB4 I hope the tear down and entirely rebuild this part of it) I am in awe of how great the game's UI is. From the little stars indicating new dialogue boxes to the ability to overlay the mini-map across your whole screen, this is the world of a game studio who care's and truly a culmination of ten years of giving a damn about player use. Sadly, the slightly complex nature of all the things you can add and switch mean that the first ten hours or so of the game will be filled with a slog of tutorials. And yes, the tutorials do hurt the game. Prior to writing this dissection of it I did check the game's scores on Metacritic and found two groups of players. Those who did deep exploration and gave it 93s to 97s and those who mainly focused on the main story, likely pushed into doing the review, who had a higher percentage of time in the "tutorial" section of the game and gave it scores like 85s and 90s. The tutorials are not fun and the game might have been slightly better off if it just didn't do things like the cooking or the clothing, or if it restricted character arts to just three per class. And, since we're on the topic of mainlining the story, there's a real issue with the levelling curve in the game too, whereby if you stray off the beaten path- which is where the vast majority of the game's content lies and where people love it the most- then you will quickly become overleveled in the main story and the villain faction, who already wear matching pink Power Ranger villain gimp suits, become even more of a joke.
So, then, how much side content is there, if its what people really like about the game? Well, if you include map exploration, freeing non-required heroes and then side and colony quests, I'd say that there's at least 100 hours there for you to enjoy. This is where the game's heart lies. It gives the characters you meet actual character, it gives you the backstory to flesh out the Colonies you met and random grunts you beat along the way (even if its not all entirely consistent with the lore being imparted to you) and it takes you to entire new sections of the map that you would not be visiting otherwise. Seemingly every side-quest you do causes two more to appear and before long they start spilling out not just from the colony you began them in but to the ones around it as well, as the actions you take help to expand the world. I don't want to gush too much but when you think you're done with a Colony's sidequests, the truth is you're probably only halfway there and it its great.
And now, a short note on the game's music. The main character, and his girlfriend, play the flute as a key part of the story, and as such the game's composer decided to incorporate "lots" of flute-playing into the score. Its not really noticeable though and honestly the music fell flat for me and was, in most cases, present at best. While that is a lot better than some other games, where the music is flat out bad and takes enjoyment away from the game, its also not up to the standard set by previous Xeno titles. It is especially lacking compared to 2, which had one of the greatest gaming OSTs of all time. The lack of greatness on Xenoblade 3's soundtrack pains me as I was expecting so much more.
Finally, we get to the last main point I wanted to make, which is that the combat sucks. Its bad. Obviously, the whole Xenoblade series is known for its "MMO-like" combat with button cooldowns and auto-attacks and could do with a refresh. But for this game its even worse due to specific balance issues. This is because the various parts of it are at their best when you are struggling to stay alive but do survive, get that big win and get a big reward for it. But if you are playing on normal mode, or even on hard but do sidequests -which hardmode players are going to want to do-, then that is going to stop occurring in your playthrough very quickly and you will be stuck going through two or three minute fights with monsters that cannot hurt you but still take time to whittle away at the healthbars of, only to get no reward for doing so due to how Xenoblade scales combat XP. This combat, and the level balancing issues arising from doing side-content, are so soul-crushingly bad that there is no way to say that the game is a pinnacle. On a list of the best games of all time XB 3 cannot be included and it is because 98 percent of the time you engage in combat you get no pleasure from it. I said above that the next Xeno title needs to revamp combat entirely and I mean it, future variations on this style should not be acceptable going forward and I encourage the team to do something, anything, else.
And now, just to append to the rest, a little spoilery section where I talk about the plot of the game after you finally get to the big sword. The above had light spoilers but this is going to talk about the end of the game, the villain's big plan and why I think they really dropped the ball on world building here. So really, really, really, really, stop reading here if you don't want the game's ending spoiled. While Xenoblade feels it acceptable to go out of its way to talk about things like food production and cleaning up the existence of outsiders and other such minutiae, it doesn't spend even a little bit of time on explaining what the main villain is. No, "the concept of despair" doesn't work for me, or how it could want things to be stuck in an "endless now" when that world would have only existed for a split second after previous ones were created. It spends very little time talking about what his powers are, how people become Moebius and why they are all assholes about it. Why it felt the need to "waste" multiple Moebius slots on random people who the Ouroboros met years ago, etc. There's plot holes in this game wide enough to drive a Ferronis through and not enough dopamine released for me to just smile and nod. Even the ending ends up being very unclear and, I feel, poorly explained- where the whole main party seems to know that its coming but the game doesn't tell the player that that is what is going to happen. Having made the big, bold choice to merge the worlds of XB 1 and 2, I think its a shame that they chicken out and re-create them as is at the end. But also with Aionios (the world of XB3) continuing to exist without them? And a fourth and fifth world where all of the people from XB3 get teleported to with their memories intact? And possibly a sixth world where young Noah still lives in the city but its somehow merged with XB2 elements and/or different from the near identical world depicted in the opening cutscene? And, since I rewatched the opening cutscene for this, what is up with it? Noah alone doesn't get frozen in time and look around to see the world destroyed? So is he Zed then, because nowhere else in the game does it imply this and indeed seems to be saying the opposite? I assume that Future Connect answers a lot of "early timeline" questions, but this is all late game stuff and I don't think they thought it through enough. They should have had the courage to pick and stick with one ending, the whole way through, with no wavering and left it at that.
Thats that then, on to the Switch port of Hogwarts Legacy and its ugly ballsack face people and hiding gear changes behind four or five different loading screens. Spoiler alert, that game is a lot worse than other people seem to think.
