What a mess. I'm guessing some of it is down to this particular Switch port, but even so it's really hard to enjoy no matter how much I want to.

A.I. is janky as hell; sometimes enemies just stand around, sometimes your pals walk directly into your line of fire.

Camera occasionally just goes UP to the ceiling, and also sometimes stops turning to one side as if there's a limit to how much you can rotate? Only way to fix it is to spin the opposite direction a few times. Mad.

Shooting feels completely lacking in impact, looking and moving is floaty and imprecise.

The tactical stuff is neat at first, but after a while it's just gimmicky and has very little effect on gameplay. It looks good, when it works, like little set pieces every few minutes, but you're never really making any kind of decisions. Plus, pointing at the right interactive spot is finicky, occasionally takes a few attempts to get your guy to go do his thing.

I like the setting, I think it's good when Star Wars sidelines The Force, but the charm of this team isn't enough to carry the game. Disappointed, am I.

Apologies for the stream of consciousness, but it's midnight and I've just finished this and I want to vent and then go to bed immediately.

After several big pauses to rethink how I was playing, I managed to have a pretty good time, but fuck me it's a mess. Somehow simultaneously too much and not enough, bloated yet shallow, spectacular yet tedious.

System upon system that felt like they did nothing worthwhile, just busywork that I ended up ignoring to mainline the story, which itself never really lived up to the tantalising depths hinted at throughout. There's a bit towards the end where you have to dig up an item, and there's like twenty spots to dig, and after each dig there's a cutscene where at least four characters feel the need to speak before you're allowed to pick another. And that's basically the whole game, padding for the sake of padding, seemingly determined to draw your attention away from the good stuff, which is mental, because when it's good it's really good! But it's so hard to stay awake long enough to see it!

Yet, weirdly, I felt like it ended early, as if it was missing another couple of acts? The final battle was very clearly The Final Battle, but a part of me was expecting some kind of surprise revelation and continuation. In the end it just felt vague, hand-wavy, half-arsed.

I've never been a JRPG guy, there's so much about them that does nothing for me, but the first Xenoblade really opened my eyes. Combat in particular felt really engaging, and the metaphysical nature of it all sucked me right in. X and 2, for all their flaws, were fun and funny and again, great combat. Torna might just be one of my favourite adventures of all time, and definitely my favourite version of the combat system. Yet 3 is so busy, such a wall of both visual and auditory noise, that it feels exhausting, but also frustrating that you can't do more? I never needed to tactically plan out a combo, because the other six team members will just do it by themselves, shouting over each other as they go. I might as well not have been there. Auto-battle, kettle on.

I've been harsh, but there were a lot of good times. It's just that there were also a lot of boring times too. Maybe I'll have a nice time in NG+ five years from now, discovering the last few heroes and going to all those bits of the map I missed. I hope so. I like Xenoblade, and I would like to continue to like it.

Onwards to the DLC!

Fired this up for nostalgia reasons, but it isn't the exact version I remember...was it different depending on the model of phone? There were so many variations in power and screen size back then.

Or maybe I'm just confusing it with Ghost Babel.

Anyway. Tedious!