Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a game that always feels in conflict with itself, tugging at two ends all the way through its lengthy runtime. It’s not offensively bad like Xenoblade 2, not even close; I’d daresay there’s a good few moments in it that are genuinely great. This is a game that has potential to be so much more, but its glaring issues and lack of confidence in what it says pulls it back, and it struggles to find its own identity under the weight of trying to conclude what the Xeno series has led to up to this point. At times I felt I was looking at it too harshly in its shining moments, and at other times I felt I was treating it far too kindly for how much it stumbled over itself, constantly bouncing back and forth in its quality. Sucks that this is the game I decided to sit down and comprehensively review!

Presentation

The presentation in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is really impressive, even held up to the standards of its predecessors. Of course, some performance and visual muddiness is clearly present in being a Switch game, but it holds itself together far better than a lot of other games I’ve played before, even in handheld mode which I found especially surprising. The beginning of the game is where it would hitch the worst and it leaves a bad impression, but it runs as smooth as it reasonably could for most of the game afterwards which is the best I could ask for considering what it runs on.

If Monolith Soft is consistently great at anything, it’s the environment design. The world is still filled with bright and expressive vistas, with monolithic points of interest and views of landscapes that are still as pretty to look at as ever. The cinematography aspect in major cutscenes is certainly of note, as it doesn’t just excel with its combat cutscenes (which look great btw) but smaller character acting moments get some good time to shine. Even if the writing and setup of a scene feels weak, it gets heightened by the tight use of camera work, posing and expression and it gets helped further by how polished and naturally expressive the character models can be.

Combat

The combat in this game is very imbalanced. It handily is the best combat system in the series, and that’s for one reason: you can switch the party member you play as during combat. If this single aspect wasn’t there, this combat would completely flip onto being the worst. The ease of being able to take control of certain functions helps a lot, but the AI controlling the rest of your party is familiarly awful, and I still fall into a lot of moments where I want to perform a break combo just to find out the one who has topple has already used it 5 seconds ago, or a party member who could benefit from being in a buff ring is suddenly running off to god knows where. Don’t get me wrong, the combat is still very annoying. But it gets a lot better through simply being able to switch out on the fly. Why didn’t they do this sooner?

Having 6 to 7 party members on the field ends up not being as much of a mess as you’d think on paper, but it’s still a mess. Every party member is neatly sorted into “Attacker” “Defender” and “Support”, with them all performing the same sort of stuff their role asks of them. It’s simple to understand in the large scheme of fights, but once you get down into the dirt of it it gets a lot harder to keep track of. The game tries to signal when party members are low on health, or are currently holding aggro, but it still isn’t enough to piece out from the audiovisual clusterfuck to act on quick enough. It’s hard to keep track of which tank gets to hold aggro with no signposting of how close you are to taking or losing it, and most healing actions are in an AOE which you have no way of knowing how wide it is. Things move very quickly, and your party gets so spread out and moves so slowly in combat that it feels far too difficult to perform what you need to in an orderly fashion.

Chain attacks are done the best in the series in this title, but have to again come with a harsh caveat. It feels incredibly satisfying getting as close as possible to topping off the meter without capping it over to provide a bigger bonus, seeing the damage multiplier increase with each move, it feels great. My big gripe with it however, is that it’s so overpowered to the point that it trivializes most fights. So many boss battles provide a good sense of challenge until you reach that chain attack, where you can easily just wipe off 75% of the boss’ health bar in one single string. It makes the battle system feel like it has to be drawn around chain attacks, like everything you do is just to serve getting it up again so you can win. It’s powerful in the previous games, sure, but it’s more used as another tool in your arsenal than the be all and end all of every fight.

Interlink forms are one of the game’s main “hooks”, where two of your party members fuse to make a single larger, stronger one. It’s an interesting risk and reward function, sacrificing two of your party members for a far stronger single one. It’s a hook I enjoyed, but again would enjoy far more if the AI didn’t use them whenever they pleased. The AI specifically uses Interlinks as much as they possibly can when they’re really low on health, making it even harder to top them up after the fact, and they allow themselves to overheat every time unless you manually step in to stop them. If only there was a way to order them not to use Interlinks, but obviously the developers must just think they’re always strictly better than not using them so why would you ever not want them?

Now I’d like to talk about this game’s job system. Leveling alternate jobs are how you get arts and passive skills from other party members and a laundry list of “heroes” to pick from. This job system is pretty basic, but deployed in the manner I find jobs done the worst. Every job has their entire move and skillset accessible from the moment you unlock them, providing little reward for itself to level it, and the core point of leveling them at all is getting cross-class skills and arts you can apply on other jobs. Every job is made to simply pump and dump, get it to the max level and then drop it for something else to grind. Jobs get “inherited” to specific party members and take an arduously long time to unlock for anyone else which requires the job to be used in your party, necessitating a grind using a party member you may want leveling something else, or using a hero you may want to swap out, just so you can get the job on someone you want In the end, it ends up feeling even less necessary than job systems in other RPGs, with each job getting homogenized into the role they fill. The identity these jobs have gets narrowed down to “this one has a defense buff” or “this one has a topple”. Even by the terms of basic job systems, this one feels especially bare and boring, making every party member feel interchangeable and every job serving the system play so similar to each other.

The exception to this system is Triton’s “Soulhacker” job, a clear parallel to something like Final Fantasy’s Blue Mage. It’s an interesting job in how it takes arts and skills from unique enemies you come across in the world, providing a more real incentive to hunt them down other than the satisfaction of just saying “I did it!”. The Soulhacker can fit itself into any role and use any of its arts interchangeably, making it far more flexible than any other job in the game. The job system itself is still below par, but the way this job works and what it facilitates makes it shine far above the rest. Other fun little exceptions come in the late game healers you get, Fiona and Miyabi, who take a more specific support role rather than straight healing.

The direction Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes its combat fits it’s singleplayer MMO type of battle system, but in a way I personally don’t like to see. It’s a lot more active and action-oriented, with you always doing something during fights, but the trade-off is a massive loss in player expression and methodical planning. Most every fight plays out the same way, I perform the same motions and barely ever have to think to get ahead. If I hit a wall I don't have nearly as many ways to switch my party loadout to get better results; I just have to leave and grind to get more powerful.

Side Content

Like the games that come before it, there’s a vast mountain range worth of side content to do, and none of it is that interesting. There’s a lot of it surely, but none of it escapes that kind of droll, boring fetch and hunt questing that Xenoblade Chronicles as a series is no stranger to. The biggest exception is the introduction of Hero Quests, sidequests that revolve around one of the heroes you can recruit to your party, and exploring where they come from and why they come to your party. At its most boring, there are Hero Quests that involve commanders from other colonies antagonizing you for being Ouroboros and then eventually you win them over, defeat their colony’s Consul and destroy their Flame Clock. But some that even fit this mold have some interesting depth and explore little things that either feed back into the game’s core themes or are just an interesting little short story. Highlights of this are Juniper and Fiona’s Hero Quests, who stand out in my mind as the best of them all. Others are more unique in their approach in a way I came to enjoy, like Triton or Cammuravi.

Something I was shocked to find out through the course of this game is party affinity and heart to hearts being axed completely. In the place of heart to hearts in particular is the campsite discussions, in which you overhear conversations between other NPC’s and talk about what’s heard between your party, leading to either initiating side quests or just having a little character building moment. This is by far more convenient and easier to access than heart to hearts, not requiring the exhausting tracking of what heart to heart spots are where, what affinity they require and which party members they concern, but it comes at a bigger downside in how they actually play out as writing pieces. Unlike heart to hearts, these discussions are far more unfocused and casual, bouncing bits of conversation between everyone in the party instead of a more intimate one-on-one talk, one where certain characters can divulge more to specific characters that they wouldn’t be able to with everyone present. Campsite discussions are still enjoyable to watch, and they take a clearly different approach than heart to hearts, but these just aren’t enough to feel worth replacing them entirely.

Story

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 states that it’s a story about life. Like a lot of things in this game, it’s actually tugging on two core themes of life, and the future. Ones that can be mingled together in ways that are done well, and ways that are done well in this game, but by the end it shows a clear preference for one over the other.

The story likes to aim high a lot, but never quite hits its mark. From the point you start at on to the point it finishes, it brings up a lot of interesting ideas for a story like this, things that could be able to speak well to the themes it tries to convey, just to end up eventually defeating the point of bringing it up in the first place. Things like the Flame Clocks, or the party being composed of two opposing sides of a lifelong war, or the entire notion of the conflict itself are ideas that can present a lot of depth and interesting ways to convey what it wants to say, but just get thrown to the wayside. Well, you can just break the Flame Clocks. Well, the party just like being around each other after an hour. Well, the entire conflict was fabricated by the actual big bad in the shadows and you don’t have to pick a side after all because none of them are really at fault!

The themes of life come to a head in Chapter 5 in a way I found particularly distasteful. It pulls back the curtain on the City and the people who live within it, and they say in simple terms to the characters and the player that to bear children is the natural way of life. It's something that is probably meant to be seen primarily as a shock to the characters, who lived their whole lives under the thumb of Moebius, but the insistence on the importance of specifically heterosexual love and having kids to drive home the themes of "natural life" is kinda fucking weird!! Shinzo Abe got his kicks in one last time, I suppose.

By the beginning of Chapter 6, it pivots itself off of what it previously set up and aimed for go in the direction of being about the future. If you didn’t pick up on this shift in theming, don’t worry! They’ll be sure to nail into your head over and over again that the future is good even if it's scary and you shouldn’t live in the past forever.

It reeks of a lack of confidence in itself and in the player, with every potentially interesting idea getting thrown to the wayside as quickly as it can be, like the writers are itching to return to some status quo as soon as possible. It’s a story that means well, and has a good emotional core it aims for, but feels like it just can’t ever trust its players to understand what it means.

Characters

Noah is a character who flatly wants to do good and strive for peace while feeling devoid of his own interests or inner motivation. He’s a much more timid character, willing to bow out of conflict when possible (something even the other party members point out about him) which may make for an interesting RPG protagonist on paper, but in the end he falls flat. Compared to the rest of the characters who have at least some introspective qualities, Noah is like a vehicle to drive the plot more than he is his own person, the one who has to move things forward and point out things that are happening. Maybe I’m being too mean; they do give him his moments during the peaks of this game’s story that would endear me to him more, but it just as quickly settles back into the valley where he does not do much of anything. It’s hard not to feel bored by him a lot of the time I spent playing, and the payoff is a bit too late to make me really like him.

Lanz and Eunie are the other Keve’s members, and one I found slightly endearing and the other horribly annoying. Lanz is a pretty obvious Reyn stand-in, the bulky tank who plays off the main character as his bro. He doesn’t do much to step out of that shadow, but what is there I found to be pretty humoring and nice. I just have a soft spot for big doofy guys, I guess. Eunie, on the other hand, I cannot stand. The writing tries to make her the quick-witted sarcastic member of the group, quick to poke jabs and point out when other characters are making missteps, but the end result is an insufferable twit who I would find most comparable to a smug slice of life anime girl or a suburban woman yelling at me about her coffee in the drive thru.

Taion and Sena are the Agnus members and the ones who fill out the unit, and these two I definitely got more from. Taion is the pretty standard smartass archetype, the one with the most level head who does most of the team’s thinking. He spends a lot of the game pretty reserved and cordoned off, but he becomes a lot more endearing and shines as a character through the moments where he finds some levity, either through being genuinely excited, or upset, or embarrassed. He’s a sensitive person at heart trying to save face, and although it’s a type of character done very often, the way he’s written made me like him a lot. Sena is probably the one I have the least to say on, more just the bubbly excited type with less underneath the hood. They make it clear that she suffers from imposter syndrome, always looking up to everyone else and feeling like she doesn’t do enough. She even goes as far as to imitate those she’s closest to, trying to be like them because of the insecurity she has in her own identity. This was a point that kinda surprised me, as even though it didn’t leave much of an impression on me now, if I had played this game and seen this character when I was 18 she would have left a deep impression on me. Even if Sena felt like kind of a dud to me, I respect her a lot for tackling this sort of thing that did hit home with me and I feel will hit a lot closer with a lot of people still struggling with feelings like she conveys.

Mio is one of the game's strongest points. With everyone else in the party having two years to live, she only has 3 months left. On the outside she looks content, accepting of the fact that she doesn’t have much time to live. But as the game goes on, as the initial goal to reach stretches further and further away she starts to break. She can’t handle knowing that the rest of her time may be spent doing this, that she might die before even reaching their simple objective. Even if they succeed, she won’t be able to live in the world they envision while everyone else will, and that’s something that weighs on her more and more heavily throughout the game. She keeps a consistent diary counting down each day she has, and starts trying to find ways to keep her memory alive in those she cares for. I don’t know what it’s like to know you’re going to die soon, but I feel that the way it was conveyed through her is genuinely effective and one of the most well done parts of the game.
However, at the end of Chapter 5 it feels like all this gets thrown out when after one of the most emotionally poignant sequences in the game where she contently passes on, it’s found out that she just switched places with M and she’s just fine now. Great. Isn’t that just really cool. I’m glad Monolith Soft didn’t have the guts to effectively send off most everything that this character and her arc was leading up towards and let her just come back. Nothing in the game upsetted me more than this, and it would’ve been even worse if I didn’t get spoiled about it beforehand. Like, why even bother? Why build up such a strong emotional core about the knowledge of your own impending death, the struggle to know you won’t be there in the lives of those you love, the importance of keeping the memory of yourself alive, when you’re just gonna tell me to my fucking face that she’s just fine now I guess. It even defeats the point of the sequence I would’ve given such praise to before, when the clear message behind it is knowing to grieve and move forward into an uncertain future is better than being stuck in the now, staying stagnant and still forever, but the focus character leading that moment and what it meant just comes back anyways. What a waste.

The Consul are the game’s main villains, and one of the worst points of the game. With such a large amount of characters to juggle, not many of them get any depth beyond being saturday morning cartoon villains that are just another obstacle for the heroes to clear out. Even the more major villains in the consul like X, Y and Z similarly lack depth, acting like vehicles for opposing the themes of the game, with motivations not much more than “I’m afraid of the future and I hate this world!” or “I’m doing this because it amuses me”. None of them did anything for me at all, and more often made me scowl over how little they actually provided. The obvious exception to this is the character N.

N is an antagonist that would be far more interesting to me if it wasn’t a kind of villain I’ve seen done in other games better and more tactfully. A direct parallel to the protagonist, a visage of what could happen if they went down a darker path. N chooses to make time stop, live forever in the past at the cost of those around him, even the one he loves. Noah, in his darkest moment, would have done the same thing if things didn’t get better for him. It’s a dynamic I enjoy, but… It’s a dynamic I enjoyed more in Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) with Shulk and Egil, and it’s a dynamic I would appreciate more in Xenogears (1998) between Fei and Grahf. This game has some fun new twists on this kind of villain, but it likes to bluntly hammer into your head who this character is and what he’s meant to represent; Noah literally says “I would be like you if I didn’t have the people I care for to move me down a better path!” like, yeah, I get it! It’s hard to come up with ideas and writing that hasn’t been done before, but it’s difficult to see these scenes and not be able to see where they came from… and it came from places that would do it better than it’s done here.

Ending

The back half and ending is where the game falters the most. After Mio’s revival, the game almost feels like Dragon Ball Z with how many past dead characters come back. Mwamba, Cammuravi, Ethel, Miyabi… Some are brought back without memories of who they were, but others like Miyabi just get to regain their memories and be just like they were back then. Geez! They really did not care about anything that revolved around Mio’s story and arc.
The game remarkably finds a way to both drag its feet with the pacing and also get to its conclusion way too quick, going right from having to do slow little fetch quests to oops! You just found the queen of Agnes and got a massive exposition dump! To doing more slow fetch quests to… oh! You’re in Origin now and beating up all the major villains you faced. The pacing here is a mess, feeling like I’m being shaken around on a rollercoaster made entirely of agonizingly slow buildups and quick sheer drops. The ending takes its sweet time beating its message about the future into your head for two (two!) hours in its final fight, accompanied with scenes of Keves and Agnes teaming up to take down Origin, their respective castles turning into big mechs shooting lasers and stuff. It’s a big visual spectacle, but it’s not in service of much. The actual ending sequence, after N and M destroy Moebius with the power of their heterosexual love bomb, was one that is nice enough for what was finally set up to get there. It’s bittersweet, seeing these two worlds come apart towards the uncertain future, these people who grew to love each other have to accept that they may never see each other again. It got there, I guess, but it didn’t do much for me. I’d hazard to say it’s the best Xenoblade ending, but the competition isn’t really stacked, and it still isn’t a “good” ending by any means.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a game I wish I could have loved. But I didn’t love it. I barely even like it, to be honest. It would endear me enough with its best moments, but then pull me back out with the drudge it walks through to get there. To be honest, I’m a bit envious of those who could get so much from this game. I feel like they really did try their best to make something great, but could never stick the landing, and too many decisions it makes feel uninspired, dull, or at worst completely antithetical to what it feels like it wants to say. Is it a good game? Yeah, sure, it’s competent at what it does for sure, and smooths out a lot of the numerous rough edges and mistakes the previous game had. Is it a good story? I wouldn’t say so. It sets a high bar that I was excited to see it clear, and in the end disappointed to watch it unceremoniously fumble over, and it wastes so much time that it feels like anything another RPG story would say in an hour this game wants to say in 5. This game at least was enough to make me believe Xenoblade Chronicles 1 wasn’t just a lucky fluke, but Monolith Soft and Tetsuya Takahashi still feel like they lost their touch.

Also I get really irrationally annoyed at how much these characters say “snuff” and “spark” in place of actual swearing. Just say fuck. I know you can. You literally can and have said shit. What are you afraid of…

With the mess that was the controversy leading up to its release, and the general downtrend of Platinum Games’ output, I wasn’t especially keen on getting Bayonetta 3 at all. I ended up grabbing it in the end, mostly just to just see how it would come out.

To my surprise, I enjoyed it a lot! Maybe it’s a case of lowering my expectations, but I had a much better time playing this than I thought I would. The gameplay as Bayonetta is easily the best in the series to me, with an incredibly fun new set of weaponry, impressively executed demon gameplay, and everything packing that signature Bayonetta punch. In a vacuum, everything Bayonetta 3 does in its gameplay is the best of its kind, and most of the praise I have for this game lies there. It’s incredible how well it’s all done.

The structure of the game however, is by far the worst. It follows a pretty rigid structure for the entire game: Go to an alternate world and location, meet that world’s respective Bayonetta, watch her get killed, then do a big demon battle. It only slightly deviates from this in its fun setpieces, but I found myself very worn out by this format very quickly.
The Homunculi, the new central enemy, are so much more boring compared to the angels and demons of games past, and even if they’re something new I almost feel like nothing would be better than them. The tone is something I wasn’t into either; it deviates from the gothic stylings of the previous two games into spreading a wide berth, and being a lot more bland overall for it… Doesn’t help that everything is bathed in a muddy, blurry wash on the Switch.

If you know Bayonetta, you already know most of these characters. Bayonetta, Jeanne, Rodin, Enzo, none of them are remarkably different in any sense, and that’s fine! They’re all great characters who continue to be great. The new major character they want to sell you on now, Viola, is a bit more of a mixed bag. Being a young witch-in-training, her loud attitude and penchant for screwing up plays well against Bayonetta’s cool elegance (and her pop-punk musical flavor rocks). On her own, she would sadly be totally unremarkable, which kind of makes me worry about how they want to make her the new focus going forward!

The ending is the biggest mark against this game by far. What an embarrassment. In a game that tries to take itself much more seriously than the rest of the series, every bit of writing is some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard, for which it never even bothers to explain itself or make sense, or be interesting, or good. When these writers step out of the campiness that is Bayonetta to tackle something more, it really starts to unravel the fact that they simply aren’t good writers in any sense.
Bayonetta being paired with Luka is gross too, and it totally undermines everything she was and is. Bayonetta was always unbound, relying on nobody but her own strength. Her unwavering strength comes from the facets of her femininity, which she never fears to put on display. Her representation as a female lead was always on a bit of a tightrope, but I felt it always kept steady for her. Until now. Now she gets to be tied down to a man, get to lose her individuality by being pushed into this hetero romance she has zero place in, and it sours everything I saw in her as a commanding and powerful woman. Now she’s just.. Another sex object for men. She fell off that tightrope hard.

Bayonetta 3 is still Bayonetta, in the end. It’s a game that I’d say is good, and that I enjoyed, but sadly can’t even get close to the peaks of quality Bayonetta 1 and 2 set. The story dragged this game down like a ball and chain, its structure felt horribly boring, how it passes the torch feels underbaked and horribly forced, and it just feels like a shame that the most refined gameplay Bayonetta has ever had has to be packaged in this.