in chapter 5 of xenoblade chronicles 2, there is a cutscene titled "no more blades, no more wars" where the refugees displaced by the colonialist war between uraya and mor ardain protest the use of blades as weapons at the base of indol, the vaguely religious organisation that controls and sanctions this use. in a moment that should to the protagonists prove revelatory of the deep societal struggle taking place in this stratified world, they - two of whom are literal royalty, one the commander of one the imperial factions involved in the war - stand around and disparage the refugees as wasteful sloths, given 10 years and paltry charity but having failed to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". i was appalled. xenoblade 1 had certainly struggled in its political allegory to put it lightly, but at no point did it ever effectively turn to the screen and say "refugees are parasites" at a time the real world was facing one of its greatest refugee crises (which is continuing and only made worse). this is not a one off instance of xenoblade 2, deliberately or not, buckling under its own charged ideological language. the fundamental conceit of that game, of blades as sentient people deserving equal rights is undercut by a gacha system where the vast majority of these sentient beings you summon are literally disposible. its a game ostensibly about slavery that uses terms like "master driver" with no introspection. beyond the internet war surrounding its obvious surface level issues like character design and gender politics is a series of ontologically misguided at best ideological expressions. so i was very wary of this game but despite that i enjoy jrpgs and class systems and it looked neat so i thought i may as well try! i would not say xenoblade 3 is intelligent, but it is certainly smart. it is ultimately aware of what it is depicting and why. my favourite case of this is the character shania, an ouroboros candidate from "the city". "the city" is introduced first as sort of a utopia, a place where "humans live as they are meant to" - dig into the sidequests even slightly and you will immediately find that it is an aristocratic hellhole, ruled by a senate comprised of six noble houses with no others having an opinion in its rule. at first i thought this was just takahashi being a victim of terminal old man brain - "humans are meant to live in aristocratic hellholes, birth children and then die". to the protagonists, trapped in an endless war, the city is hope, proof that humans are able to have and make choices. a less smart game would never interrogate the city beyond this, but shania's character, among a few other npcs in the city, asks what if the choices are limited to how one should die in a war because thats all the society values, what if you dont have choices because of your class status? her character arc directly parallels, and is deliberately acknowledged to, that of noah's childhood friend joran who lacked the choice to pursure his talent in art and thrust into the war machine. there is no fundamental difference between the engineered death cogs of keves and agnus and of the city's endless battle fuelled by a society that desires war, even if it is in the name of ending war. once war takes over you have lost to it. choice is an illusion in all of aionios, much as it is in the real world - for the core narrative to be focused on "creating a world with choices", it needed to understand that this lack of choice was not limited to noah or mio, but also the city characters like monica and ghondor - it acknowledges this at multiple points, legitimately surprising me. maybe all of this is simply out of low expectations and being burned by the ghastly attitude of its predecessor that throws out ideologically weighty words but never examines them, and xenoblade 3 is definitely not entirely spotless in that regard. the internal political factionalism in the city throws out loaded terms like "conservatives" and "hardliners" without much exploration of what that functionally means, but it is ultimately aware enough to not make any terrible pitfalls. as for the rest of the game, the main narrative is well executed but pretty passé but the sidequests are genuinely wonderful, filled with memorable npcs who meaningfully interact across their communities, making the world truly feel lived in rather than a collection of video game locations. if i were to play this game at 13 when i played the first game, or 16 when i played xenoblade 2, i would probably consider it one of my absolute favourites. but for now, its one of the unspecial but great jrpgs.

ps: juniper is so gender