Let me make one thing clear right away: I love Xenoblade 1 and I love Xenoblade 2, I think they're both excellent games for different reasons. Based on that and the reviews/impressions that came out prior to release, I felt poised to adore 3 in much the same way. Its unique, intriguing concept of a world full of soldiers resigned to a 10 year or less lifespan, how it combines gameplay mechanics and visuals from both games within a single world, the introduction of a job system, all of these things sound like they should make for an absolute slam dunk. But once I got my hands on the game and put some time into it, the allure quickly started to dissipate. Xenoblade 3 feels like a strange, seemingly incoherent soup of a game that's just chock full of ideas of varying quantities and quality with no real strength or specialty to note. It has a lot of things that are tried and true within the Xeno franchise, whether that's huge areas to explore or a romance dynamic pretty much taken straight out of Xenogears, but it also makes other choices that feel nearly inexplicable and do nothing but weaken the experience. Most of what it does is at least OK, but it never aims for anything exceptional or ambitious. It may channel ideas from both games, but it feels like it's secretly trying to reject the heart and passion of 2 wholeheartedly because it dared to be more upbeat, despite its many, many strengths; this is a game that feels like it's trying very hard to be dark and serious and dour, almost as if the developers themselves started to agree with the internet about their previous game being bad. It's the fifth Xenoblade game (if you count 2's Torna expansion as its own game), but it feels like it's their first attempt in terms of polish and design sensibilities. Just goes to show you how ahead of the curve Xenoblade 1 was for its time, huh?

The story starts off so promising conceptually, but quickly gives way to a bounty of pacing and character issues. Within the first couple of chapters, you learn about the central conflict between the nations of Keves and Agnus, get a glimpse at the mechanisms and things that keep soldiers binded to their tragic fates, and you meet your six party members who start off as opponents but quickly become comrades based on the unique circumstances thrusted upon them. They encounter mysterious individuals both good and bad and they get granted the power of Ouroboros, which gives them the ability to merge together in pairs to become cool robot looking things with enough power to change the future of their world. They're also given a vague objective of heading to a city across the world, which makes for a good enough reason to travel the world at first but the game hangs on this objective for such an enormous period of time (especially if you do sidequests along the way, which you should) that it drags the story to an absolute crawl.

For about half of the game's chapters, you're mainly just running from point to point, following quest markers with only the occasional event of note to break things up. Some of these events are indeed climactic battles or notable plot revelations that the series always does well, but many of them are campfire conversations between two characters based on things that happened not long ago or things you probably already knew about the characters in question. Your characters act like they need to rest so often even after just a bit of travel that it gets a bit comical! Imagine the Heart-to-Heart conversations from the first two games if they made up most of the plot for the first half of the game and that's pretty much what's happening here. The problem I have with this is that such a focus on specific pairs during this portion of the story leads to what feels like a weak group dynamic later on. You get a feel for how the main pairings act together, but never how the less common ones do. I think Lanz and Mio interact with each other by themselves like, once in the entire game? Moments where the entire group feel equally involved in a given situation are also somewhat rare until the back half of the game, which makes it hard to get invested in their struggle since they never come together as a cohesive whole.

I see a ton of praise for this game's cast, and that's cool, but I personally don't really get it at all. I wish I did, and there are occasionally effective moments amongst the cast (the end of chapter 5 is so dang good that it feels like it came from a different game because no other moment comes remotely close), but I found myself not at all attached to the characters throughout and I think a big reason for that is the world itself. Because of the circumstances of the characters, being born only to fight with no real recreation or culture available to them beyond the rare bath or meal, they all come from the same backgrounds and can only offer extremely limited perspectives. Since they all have mostly shared general experiences, they can only react to other characters and situations in so many ways and the game itself can only present so many types of quests and conflicts because it has such a limited scope to pull from. The world of Aionios doesn't have conventional towns, surprises that aren't just high level monsters, or much in the way of natural beauty because it can't - its only purpose is to serve as a battlefield and the game commits to that angle to an impressively stubborn degree even if it means that the entire game suffers for it.

The cutscenes are long as you'd expect for a Xeno game and they drag mercilessly on most occasions due to a desire to be as subdued as possible, a huge downgrade in general expressiveness compared to the bombast of the prequels (probably in part due to how polarizing Xenoblade 2 was), or just because they're wholly predictable and focus on repeating the themes of the game. Noah tends to speak in such a slow and distracted sounding manner that every scene with him in it (which is most of them!) feels like it's 40 minutes longer than it needs to be. No matter if it's a sidequest or a main story moment, you can bet your arse that Eunie and/or Lanz are gonna say something sassy or react incredulously in response to whatever it is because they really don't have much to work with beyond that. You get occasional glimmers of other character traits - Lanz and Sena like to work out and put on a tough front to hide their insecurities, Taion shows traces of self-doubt despite his skills due to past failures, Mio tends to be reserved unless something really ticks her off - but the characters just feel so standoffish, awkward, and ultimately similar to each other that I found it nearly impossible to care because so little about them evolved over the course of the game.

When their big moments do come, they're always framed around the same thing, too - the death of another character, how it affected them, and how they cope with it. Now, that's by no means a weak angle to base a character's development on, but when it's the only trick in your bag, it gets boring and a bit silly real quick. Every member of the team has what is essentially the same exact backstory of tragically losing a friend who may or may not actually be dead - Joran for Lanz, Nimue for Taion, Shania for Sena, Miyabi for Mio, Crys for Noah, and, uh, Eunie for Eunie, I suppose - and this repetition gives way to the realization that the world building has essentially forced the writers into a corner. You never get particularly excited about any answers the game wants to give because you already have an idea of what that answer is going to be because the state of the world leaves no other possible answers (they're either dead, not dead if you do a sidequest, Moebius, or any combination of that every time). It's frustrating, but understandable if the writers were forced to commit to such a specific, narrow vision of the world for whatever reason; In a world where everyone is supposed to do nothing but fight for 10 years without having any other knowledge instilled upon them, the only real relationship characters can have prior to the events of the game is as comrades in arms, so I have to imagine trying to give six characters their own backstories with such limitations was a huge pain!

Even with how restrictive the scope of the game's world building is, it still finds a way to leave tons of unanswered questions and things that don't appear to make sense. Don't worry, I'm not going to get all CinemaSins up in here, but I've got some questions I need to put out there because they've been gnawing away at me for days after finishing: why don't Nopon need to play by any of the rules? What reason would anyone else have to partake in an economy if only Nopon should be educated on the concept? How and why does Riku have a special sword just laying around that solves every single problem the game throws at it and only gets questioned on it once? What's up with that one dude in a sidequest (Fili) that overtly hits on Mio, is he the only non-city person on Aionios to discover what horny is? I thought the bathhouse scene early on was supposed to establish that sexuality and attraction weren't things soldiers knew about in this world (aside from Noah and Mio because as the game says, they're "special"), but I guess there are exceptions? Why does Lanz's default class have a cool machine gun attachment thing in cutscenes that it can't do in actual battle? Why does Sena get an ascension side quest that isn't really even about her? You get the point; despite this being such a dull, dreary world with an initially straightforward conceit, it manages to find ways to instill doubt and mistrust in the player about how confidently it's handling itself. If you're going to make so many narrative and mechanical sacrifices for the sake of your particular world, you've gotta make sure that thing is airtight, and I never once felt convinced that it was worth all the compromises.

One way they try to circumvent the repetition amongst the cast is through the romance between Noah and Mio, but it just didn't work at all for me. Mio is a fine enough character, probably one of the best ones even, but Noah has the charisma of a wet paper bag and I found myself wishing that Mio was the team leader instead because she deserves better (her relationship with Sena is way more believable and fun to watch!). The idea behind Noah is actually extremely good on paper - as an offseer, someone meant to help the dead find peace, it would make sense that someone who's supposed to be empathetic would be the one to question the cruelty of the world and find a way to liberate its people. The problem is that it feels like you're just being told that while Noah contradicts the idea with his actions throughout. For someone who's supposed to be empathetic, he sure doesn't like to listen to people, his allies especially, the first example of this being when he decides to send off one of the members of Moebius for seemingly no reason beyond "that's what I do I guess" even though the idea visibly upsets his teammates. Even though it's established that Taion is the team tactician, Noah tends to ignore him in lieu of asserting his authority as the team leader, which everyone just kinda goes along with even if it's an obviously bad idea, the end of chapter 4 being a prime example of this. Another scene that ticked me off was one where Mio expresses concern about how she only has a month to live to Noah, only for him to brush it off in a ridiculous manner despite knowing how serious and important it is to her. She obviously gets upset, but really all that he gets for it is a light reprimanding from Sena because Mio's completely fine not long after.

This is probably part of why chapter 5 and 6 work so well for me - through the lens of another character tied to Noah, the game starts to interrogate his personality and push back a little on the idea that he's a righteous savior who shouldn't be questioned or doubted. You actually think about how the team has been going about their business and how little you truly know about the ethos and reasoning for your enemies' actions; for the first time, Moebius feels like a bit more than a group of clowns with cool armor and a battle theme that's way better than they deserve! Chapter 7 pretty much drops this character growth in lieu of having Noah essentially just restate the theme of the game over and over again (the other characters do this a bit too because their arcs are over and they don't have much else to lean on), but honestly, that's kind of an upgrade for me compared to how he was earlier! For what it's worth, I actually think chapter 7 and the ending are quite good and fit the story well overall, I just wish the story they were telling was more interesting in the first place.

Part of why I love the first two games (and X, though not quite as much) is because of how fun they are to play and explore, so I was ready to be fine with the underwhelming story and characters if the world was as captivating as in past games. Aionios, unfortunately, is a total bore to me and doesn't feel any different than what you'd see in a AAA Ubisoft game or something. Rather than going for the density, vibrancy, variety, and verticality of Xenoblade X and 2, 3 opts for size above all else. Every area of Aionios is, frankly, disgustingly huge, so much so that it can take 20 hours or more to comb a single one even somewhat thoroughly. When you're early on and everything is new and mysterious, this is incredibly exciting, but the more you play, the more it becomes a tremendous burden. Because the world is so huge, it can take far too long to travel anywhere even if you unlock any of the running speed boosts. A lot of the game's headlining areas are essentially just rehashes of locations from older games (intentionally so, I know) but inferior in every way; "Gaur Plains but not as good" and "Eryth Sea but so dang big you need a boat just to figure out there's still nothing cool in it" doesn't exactly inspire much in the way of emotion or imagination out of me! So much of the game is just empty space, collectibles that are rarely useful, and enemies not worth dealing with in most cases; if you're too high of a level for said enemies (and this will inevitably happen), they won't even bother to engage you, so the game feels more like a impromptu virtual zoo full of reused enemies instead of an exciting, hostile world to explore.

Even finding treasure is unfulfilling because it's the same thing every time - literally every single chest contains some combination of an accessory, money, Nopon coins, or these pesky gemstones that I never once used. I had 99 of every type of gemstone by the end of the game and I still have no idea what they do! You do get SP for improving your Ouroboros forms which is nice, but money is basically useless - if you're constantly finding accessories in chests because they're all the same, why would I ever need to buy anything? Normally, I soak in Xenoblade games for 100+ hours with glee, enjoying every morsel of content I can, but by the time I hit the halfway mark here, I was just so fed up with everything and wanted nothing more than to just get closer to the end of the game. Truly depressing stuff!

If there's one oasis in the desert that is exploring Xenoblade 3, it's the side quests. While they're not anything incredible and they often come in such big batches so as to cause burnout, they're easily the most enjoyable aspect of the game and one of the only things that actually feels like an improvement over the previous games. Xenoblade 2's quests had more interesting scenarios and characters, but they often made you jump through hoops or would hide additional steps only to spring them on you at the last second. 3's side quests provide fully voiced stories that tend to play out in a much more straightforward way that makes them feel like they're equally important to the main story. They suffer from Aionios being such a drag, as mentioned before, but the fact that they don't ask you to do a bunch of nonsense (aside from that one potato sidequest!) is very much appreciated. The heroes that they tend to revolve around are also generally more likeable than the main cast and serve as an additional party member that allows you more freedom in selecting jobs to master since they can cover any gaps you might have while granting you new jobs to use. They're considered optional content, but they tend to be more fulfilling than just exploring the world aimlessly, so they feel essential in terms of allowing you to actually engage with the game's mechanics to some degree while staving off all the repetition elsewhere.

The one major caveat (this game loves 'em, doesn't it?) is that completing quests grants you loads of bonus experience that can easily overlevel your team to an absurd degree should you choose to use it. In Xenoblade 2, I was able to use all my bonus experience without ever getting overleveled, but here the game doesn't feel like it was designed for the feature at all. If you use the resources you're given (you know, like you're supposed to in video games), you can get so powerful so quickly that most of the main story will just bend to your might instantly and entire stretches of the game will have no hostile enemies for you because they're so underleveled. It's kind of ridiculous how poorly balanced this game is, especially for a team that has gotten it (at least) reasonably right multiple times, and the one workaround (lowering your level) is locked to the postgame for some reason! I really don't understand what they were going for here at all; it is genuinely one of the most baffling things I've seen in a video game in quite some time!

At this point, after the disappointment of the exploration and story, all I could think is, "maybe the combat will grow to be amazing like in Xenoblade 2... right?" Well, it's not awful, I guess? A lot about it is still seriously lacking and feels like a downgrade compared to the previous games, though, which is a huge bummer. At its core, combat here is essentially a combination of 1 + 2: you have six arts that are on cooldown (and a talent one that gets used less often since it takes specific conditions to fill), auto attacks to shorten your cooldowns (if you're using an Agnus class), and a chain attack maneuver that's the key to getting anything done. You also have the new Ouroboros stuff, which is essentially a temporary super mode - build it up, fire off attacks with impunity, and repeat once you've built up juice for it again. The big draw here is supposed to be the job system, which should allow for infinitely more flexibility and creativity than the previous games, but the implementation is so unexciting and comes with so many caveats that it never justifies its presence. You see, with each job, you get like 4-5 arts (only three of which you can equip at a time), a couple of passive skills built in, three slots for passive skills pulled from other jobs, and then a selection of combat arts based on the other jobs you've learned arts from that get assigned to the other three slots on the left side of the screen. The idea here is that you use your class arts in conjunction with arts learned from other classes to deal more damage through fusion arts, which is when you use both arts simultaneously and combine their effects. There's a lot of problems here, though, that I'll go over because they really do go out of their way to interfere with the fun.

For starters, almost every single job plays exactly the same. Attackers rotate through their cooldowns and do positionals if they have them, healers do whatever until their heals are ready (which are now tiny as heck AoEs with invisible range that miss constantly or are circles the AI refuses to stay in, for some reason), and tanks basically do the same thing as attackers except their goal is to maintain aggro, which is just done through achieving high damage anyway. Since just about every class has the same general ideas for their arts (attacks, buffs, AoEs), mixing and matching skills between classes doesn't make them play any differently. The game is also weirdly precious about which arts can be carried between classes - Keves classes can only pick from Agnus classes' arts and vice versa. It reminds me of how Yakuza: Like a Dragon only lets you carry over like two specific moves from a class. You also can't even access the second half of a job's levels until you unlock them by doing a sidequest way later in the game! The thing that makes a job system fun is how many different and absurd options they open up, so it's surprising to me that games that want a piece of the job system pie somehow keep forgetting this by making everything so restrictive (you can't even equip three accessories until level 50!), especially when Bravely Default II showed everyone exactly how to do it right. The game also usually picks either the worst ones or the most boring ones to spread around too, so there's a bunch you'll never use because they do less damage than that one Flash Fencer move that's tremendously strong for some reason. A few jobs actually do try to make you play in slightly different ways - Signifier focuses on passing buffs to the team, Soulhacker can be built to be any of the three roles, and Yumsmith has a buff that encourages you to only attack while in effect circles - but the novelty of these is nowhere near enough to last for the entire game. I can't forget to mention that they actually expect you to re-fight every single unique monster you've ever fought to learn Soulhacker skills (and more to upgrade them into usefulness) since none of it is retroactive - that's just plain sadistic!

Even on hard mode, the combat is mostly about waiting for your arts to charge, doing fusion arts and/or art cancelling, using your Ouroboros form when it's at level 3, and then finishing with a chain attack if they're still not dead. The new chain attack system is kinda fun and extremely powerful, but it takes quite a long time to do and it overrides the current battle theme, so you're either making every fight feel exactly the same or you're intentionally restricting yourself just to desperately grasp onto any kind of variety. It's a lot of watching the same animations over and over again since fusion arts don't have any unique animations and just reuse the animation of the base class's arts. 3-4 moves and their respective animations per character are nowhere near enough to sustain a 100+ hour game! I suppose it's a good thing that combat can get pretty speedy when you know what you're doing, but it becomes quick to resolve not because you've gotten much better but because you're probably like 20-30 levels above the opposition and they can't do a thing to stop you.

I think what really helped in Xenoblade 1 and 2 is that every character felt unique while also having more to do than anyone in Xenoblade 3. Characters in the first game had 8 arts and each one had a defined role with further customization available. Shulk has his arts and then he unlocks a whole second batch with different applications whenever you use his talent art in battle, while Dunban can choose to sacrifice defense (and clothing!) to specialize in his evasion tanking abilities to an extreme degree. In Xenoblade 2, every character gets three blades, unique animations for every single weapon type (some of which are better than others, factoring into the strategy!), four arts per blade, pouch items that give personalized stat boosts, the ability to make auto attacks faster through animation cancelling, and there are both driver combos and blade combos with multiple combo routes for different effects. It was such an exquisite batch of combat mechanics that only got better and better over time, whereas Xenoblade 3's combat peaks very quickly and becomes so rote that I just auto battled everything I could after a certain point since hard mode did nothing to make things more interesting or strategic.

To add insult to injury, the game turns what should be such a simple thing (obtaining new jobs to play with) into a multi-step chore for no discernable reason. After completing one of the hero quests and unlocking a new job, you only get that job for one particular character to start. To give that job to other characters, you need to keep the one character with the job (and the hero if you want) in your party and fight with them until the other characters learn it. This process can take a really long time depending on what enemies you fight, though if you're able to find elite/unique monsters higher than you that you can actually beat, then you can get it done much faster. The big catch here is that characters won't earn any experience towards unlocking jobs if the level gap between them and their foes is more than 5 levels. This leaves me (and most people, probably) with one burning question:

Why?

What good does this process and restriction do anyone? Why not just give you the job for all characters at once so you can get to playing around and experimenting? Does anyone actually think to themselves, "No, I'd rather have to earn my reward multiple times even though I already went through a bunch of effort to earn it once"? If it wasn't for the internet being full of people who noticed this, how long would it take oblivious people to notice since the game doesn't tell you about this at all? Why punish your player in such a cruel way for engaging with the content that you keep putting in front of them? Even though this never really gave me much trouble because I knew to go after elites/uniques, I imagine this is such a nightmare for people who get overleveled without exploring too much and want to get the game over with and just the idea of it being there at all makes me mad. Imagine being stuck using Lanz's lousy starting class forever because the game refuses to let you learn a new tank because you decided you wanted to do sidequests that the developers went and made exactly for that purpose - now that's true horror!

Initially, I was going into this ramble of mine thinking that Xenoblade 3 was alright but heavily flawed. The more that I think about it, though, the more I realize that I just disliked it, honestly! Probably should have figured that out when I read this over and realized I had little nice to say, huh? I would go as far as to say it's one of the most underwhelming games I've ever looked forward to, at least on the same level as No More Heroes 3 which was my big disappointment of 2021. I tend to have a lot of weird, contrarian opinions compared to the majority of people (I swear it's not on purpose!), but it's hard to think of other games where I think so differently compared to the general consensus. People seem to be head over heels for this game, seeing it as a vast improvement, beautiful enough to make them cry, and the peak of the development team's craft, "the game they've always wanted to make", as I've seen it worded in a few places. I, uh, don't see that at all (no offense to anyone who likes 3, of course) and if you ask me, Xenoblade 2 was already that game! Xenoblade 3, to me, struggles to have anything interesting to say, prefers to taint the previous games in the trilogy with a story that doesn't feel like it needed to be told (seriously, why did they feel the need to fan the flames of the internet's hatred of Xenoblade 2 once again with that bizarre photo at the end?), it tries to make sure you've never doing anything too exciting or varied, and mostly spins its wheels as it has you going through an approximation of past Xenoblade experiences without any of the soul or passion. Even the music is completely unremarkable aside from a couple of the battle themes, which is such a shock coming from the previous games! To me, it just feels like a Xenoblade game without a cohesive vision beyond needing to make another one, and I sincerely hope that's not true nor do I even feel good about that insinuation in the first place. When Monolith Soft is firing on all cylinders, they can do truly incredible things, but if 3 is a sign of what's to come, I think this will have to be where I tap out even if it pains me to do so.