NOTE: Will not discuss spoilers, but will offer my take on the overall game with very broad references to the narrative.

So, I love Xenoblade. Xenoblade Chronicles is an incredible JRPG that combines fantasy and sci-fi excellently. I bounced off of X, its first sequel, because it took too long to get going (though I want to try again). I love Xenoblade Chronicles 2 so much, even more than the first. It's weird and messy, but I adore its cast of characters and it was a blast to explore.

3 is...weird. I'll start with the good though -- the setting is amazing and devastating and sad, enabling a gripping story and some moments of beauty when love and courage find a way despite harrowing circumstances. Some of the story beats here are series highlights -- I will spoil none of them.

A couple other positive notes. One, it's Xenoblade, so there's --- as expected -- an extremely compelling grind and fun position-based MMO JRPG battling. There are also big scary Level 80 monkeys and some fun vistas to explore. ALSO, compared to 2, everything looks better and runs better on Switch. Looks real pretty on my OLED.

Now the other shoe: This game is sloppy. Really sloppy. Like, sloppy even compared to XC2. Across the board. Monolith Soft tried very hard to smooth out the user experience of 2 by making menus straightforward and including detailed tutorials that explain how each bit of the game works, but they overcorrected.

The tutorials in the first 10-15 hours are out of control, leaving you on rails like you're in Pokemon Sun and Moon. The tutorials feel a bit wasted too, because once you have a good party makeup of 3 healers, 2 defenders, and 2 attackers, you can more or less button mash and strategically activate chain attacks for maximum EXP. This is the same as 2 in some ways, but having seven characters on the screen with different roles and classes makes it a chore to keep track of everyone at all times. I hoped the battle system would have been smoothed out from 2, but it honestly feels even more bloated, with too many equips and too much micromanaging asked of you for what ultimately turns into a mess of pixels on screen.

Next, the leveling. The EXP is handed out like candy on Halloween, and unless you make significant personal modifications to the difficulty (like choosing hard mode/turning off overkill/not using rest stops), it is incredibly easy to overlevel. Once I hit chapter 2, I didn't hit a main story enemy at a higher level than me until the final boss, and I basically mainlined this game with 5 hours of hero quests and a couple diversions.

A side effect of this poor balance is that once you get way overleveled, going back to explore the map can get boring due to slow walking, environments that retread previous Xeno games, and swaths of enemies in new areas that are far weaker than you.

In Chapter 5, I actually changed the difficulty to hard for a bit, but all it did was slow down a battle system I didn't really love engaging with in the first place. I went back to Normal.

Lastly, the story. I said a lot of kind words about the story that I mean, but it is also, once again, sloppy. Cutscenes are strung together a la Metal Gear Solid 4 regularly, including a sequence that may have taken as long as MGS4's ending. I don't remember previous XBC games going this ham with it.

The pacing also gets wacky, as the game gives you extremely interesting plot developments and then chases it with a non-optional fetch quest or diversion that feels like padding/bloat. This is done regularly.

The main cast of characters is quite good (better than 1, worse than 2 maybe) though with the villains, the more the curtain gets revealed the more everything gets messy and obtuse. I don't know if I'm bad at story comprehension or if the truth of this world was confusing. I found myself zoning out in certain late game cutscenes due to verbose dialogue that just goes on and on with wording that feels unnecessarily strange. Moments of the game's script feel like a poor localization, though this is Nintendo so I don't know.

The themes also feel under-baked to me. Two or three times in the story, the game changes or clarifies what it is trying to communicate to you in ways that feel more scatterbrained than thoughtful. Again, no spoilers.

There are a lot of powerful, emotional moments here that made me choke up, but aforementioned issues put a small damper on these parts. I'm not a Tales fan per say, but I played Tales of Arise (which is quite similar to XBC3 in multiple ways) this year and enjoyed it more than XBC3 overall.

As I play (or don't play) more of this, my thoughts may change.

Reviewed on Aug 16, 2022


2 Comments


1 year ago

Very Good review! I agree with a lot of the points you've made especially with the balancing issues. I was always overleveled and had the same problem with the hard difficulty being just not fun. Also the pacing just felt plain bad to me

1 year ago

Thanks Nick!