XenoSatori
10 reviews liked by XenoSatori
Neon White
2022
it's hard for me to write a review about this game. i feel like it was designed in a lab to be optimally enjoyable for exactly me, much like how McDonald's french fries are chemically engineered to be Mathematically and Provably Delicious for the general American public.
i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.
---
Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.
i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.
Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.
-----
one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."
at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.
the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard
game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"
after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.
[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]
---
Neon White is a love letter in videogame form
i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.
---
Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.
i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.
Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.
-----
one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."
at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.
the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard
game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"
after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.
[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]
---
Neon White is a love letter in videogame form
Step aside World's End Club, there's a new sheriff in town.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm not surprised that I ended up really enjoying my time with Nirvana Initiative; I already enjoyed the original AI: Somnium Files three years ago and the sequel was probably my most anticipated release of this year. Having said that, I don't think it's anywhere close to perfect and it does carry a lot of the same quirks as the original, for better or for worse, so if you didn't like the original due to the absurdity of it all or the constant dumb jokes between characters as well as the often horny humor, this is not going to convince you and you should take everything I'm saying here with a grain of salt. But nevertheless, Nirvana Initiative feels like a much more polished successor, and in similar fashion to when I was playing the original, I could not put this down as soon as I was a few hours deep.
Two things stand out to me in particular as very noticeable improvements. The first is the improved gameplay; a lot more thought has been put into the interactive aspects of the game. The easiest aspect to explain here is the quick time events (QTEs) that make up the action sequences, and it's improved in a pretty simple fashion thanks to more rigorous inputs that require the joysticks, the letter buttons, and the triggers, sometimes in quick succession to add a bit more complexity when compared to the original. Also, Date's not the main protagonist anymore, so the porno mag gag is almost entirely absent! Huzzah! It's not perfect, because there are times where you have to watch a few minutes of cutscenes before they'll throw some required inputs at you if you get too complacent, but I'll take what I can get.
Somniums are improved a ton as well, thanks to better thought-out scenarios building upon the original formula. It's of a similar structure to the original, where you have to interact with items within the Somnium to get past mental locks and occasionally use Timies to limit the amount of time spent, but now the writers have elaborated upon the scenarios utilizing the same base structure by varying objectives and strategies involved. For instance, one Somnium is a straight parody of Pokemon Go, and requires you to find PokeStop lookalikes to "catch" characters from the game to defeat evil assassins and overlords. Another Somnium acts like a quiz show, and you have to correctly answer questions while figuring out the gimmicks on the fly to stay ahead of the opponent's score. And finally, there's a Somnium that takes some inspiration from Ace Attorney, in that you can present "evidence" in the form of what you know and have found out to force objects and characters to reveal their true nature. It's a huge improvement mechanically over the previous game's Somniums, which felt less like puzzles and more like trial and error with hopefully picking the correct choices with the correct Timies on hand while walking around mysterious landscapes with few, if any, knowledge or execution tests to be found. The Somniums are further aided by the addition of the Keys system, which by providing helpful descriptions, can help lead you to the correct choice/interaction by using up time here and there on "throwaway" observation interactions to better understand both the nature of the person whose Somnium you're in as well as make a more informed decision on how to progress. There's definitely a lot more depth and a lot less hassle here, and even though one could argue that there's still a degree of trial and error due to the need to collect Timies and waste negative Timies on minute throwaway interactions (since they force you to commit to an interaction with the time multiplier), you can even bypass this aspect entirely with Story mode Somnium difficulty if you choose to do so, a setting that I very much appreciated.
Speaking of detective game influence, Nirvana Initiative leans into the detective aspect a lot more than the original, thanks to its third major improved aspect of interaction: the VR segments. Throughout the story, the AI Balls will recreate the scenes of the crimes committed in a VR environment, and it's up to the protagonist to examine every bit of data as preserved through the three scans (the standard environment mode, X-ray mode, and Thermo mode) to dig up every related clue not easily detected by the naked eye. The cherry on top here is that it's played straight and typical of what you'd expect from the series, in the form of an exaggerated "reenactment" demanded by the AI-Balls that let you put your knowledge to the test while rewarding that newfound knowledge with more silly shenanigans as a satirical interpretation for how the crime played out. Seriously though, Ryuki's shrilly caricature of the voice of the victim while constantly protesting the snarky comments of the director kills me every time.
While I understand that the humor of the series is not everyone's cup of tea, there's definitely a part of me that just likes dumb dad jokes or over the top and batshit crazy plots and effects, and Nirvana Initiative had me grinning and chuckling throughout its runtime. The banter between Mizuki and Aiba as Mizuki attempts to assert herself as someone to be taken seriously or Aiba going crazy every time a bug got spotted in a houseplant or a fish got spotted in a pond, really helped uplift my spirits, especially in a murder mystery thriller, a genre that can often get pretty dark due to all the death involved. It also provided an incentive to constantly click on all the interactable objects of notability whenever I was in a new environment, just so I could get more dumb sofa jokes or flavor text of the whiteboard at the yakuza office with a totally unrelated "principle" that changed every time I visited. I get that the quirky humor can easily be written off as overused running gags and that there are definitely plenty of thinly veiled dirty jokes that might spoil the whole package, but ultimately, I came to really appreciate these light moments in an otherwise pretty dismal time of these characters' lives. And I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt here; they're able to hold back the jokes when the going gets very rough and they just want you to focus exactly on understanding the harrowing plot details or talking with characters when they've let their guard down as to not take attention away from their intimate moments. Nirvana Initiative often doesn't take itself very seriously, but it's a more mature and aware product that knows when it's time to move on as well.
And speaking of awareness, that's the other main aspect that really stood out to me while playing Nirvana Initiative; the game is acutely aware that you are an active participant in all of this, and is not afraid to make itself known that it is aware of this. I'm not just talking about the fourth wall breaks that Uchikoshi's works are known for of course, that's to be expected at this point. Rather, the game draws you in by actively involving you with the central mystery, and not just by piquing your curiosity with a bunch of batshit crazy conspiracy theories, happenings, occult leanings, and so on. The game presents itself as a flowchart of related, sequential events, and oftentimes you will need to learn necessary information to progress forward through previously misunderstood locks that you once had no idea on how to approach (something that I very much appreciated as an organic way to both hide linearity while creating additional linkages between all the scattered and strange events of the game). And it's very good at testing your ability to maintain focus while keeping an eye on the bigger picture at hand, in a way that I don't think the original quite captured.
To put it another way: video games distinguish themselves from many other forms of traditional media by serving as an interactive form, and beyond that, a contest. While playing a video game, you're actively competing with something, whether that be another human/computer player or the game itself; the game would lose much of its meaning without another entity to interact with the work, and it's this inherent push & pull present in video games that marks the potential for games as a meaningful art form. When this idea was first presented to me by TotalBiscuit many years ago, I originally took it at face value as execution tests and knowledge tests... but now I want to expand upon that a bit more with this example. Nirvana Initiative is aware that you, as the player, handle a very specific role outside of just controlling the protagonist characters and interacting with the mechanics to progress the plot. It is constantly making its mark known that you are both an active participant and an observer, traversing the game's structure and environments while struggling to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical things that are going on in the in-game universe. And as a result, Nirvana Initiative is constantly fucking with your sense of perspective and perception. It throws every trick in the book at you, from execution & knowledge tests to keep you honest, to unreliable narrators and seemingly dangling plot threads, to subverting controls and manipulating the game's presentation while introducing new concepts here and there into the fold, and so on so forth. More realized than the original is this idea that the game has a mind of its own and knows that you want to solve the inherent mystery after getting invested, and it wants you to too... but not without a meaningful endeavor so you grasp every detail that is left in the shadows.
As a related side note, I found myself so invested at this point, that after the central "plot twist" was revealed, I tried to metagame back and scour the past events of the game to see if there were any gaping plot holes present as a result of the main reveal. Yet, after playing further with additional in-universe explanations and spending a bit more time analyzing the gritty details, I couldn't actually find any major plotholes, or at least no loose ends that didn't have some degree of a reasonable explanation attached. To go into further detail beyond what I have just written would be spoiling a crucial part of the experience, but I do have some draft notes regarding some of the more notable things contributing to the game's continuity that I'd be more than happy to discuss with others if prompted to do so. Needless to say, the game's attention to detail (both inside the narrative and outside in the meta-narrative) really impressed me.
Like I said before, I'm not going to pretend Nirvana Initiative is without its shortcomings; there's some dry characters here and there that could have their backstories and personalities expanded a bit (the relationships between a couple of the characters are some of the more egregious examples), there are some mechanical issues such as excessive downtime during QTEs or the trial and error of Timies, and the dumb running gags + seemingly pubescent one-liners are definitely going to drive away a lot of potential players. And that's not even mentioning some of the excess flavor mechanics like the optional Tamogachi pet minigame included for a few quick laughs and eyeballs to buy concept art and costumes, or the occasional technical issues like bugged character models or sudden frame dips when switching between characters in dialogue. But having said that, I'm more than happy to overlook almost all of this, because it just happened to strike the right flavor of what I'm looking for in the medium while improving upon the original in leaps and bounds. And even despite its dark and twisted plot or various layers of irony and fourth wall breaking, and the many other little details or irregularities I could point out, there's a certain earnestness to it all.
Without speaking too greatly on potential spoilers, there's a speech by Mizuki near the end of the game where she comforts a drunk by telling him that there's no need to be afraid of weakness, for it forces us to support each other and put aside our differences.. As she put it, with the cheesiness and triumphant vigor of any classic locker room speech (a perfect fit for this game, as it stands), "Humanity is rooted in weakness... to deny that is like denying humanity as a whole!"
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm not surprised that I ended up really enjoying my time with Nirvana Initiative; I already enjoyed the original AI: Somnium Files three years ago and the sequel was probably my most anticipated release of this year. Having said that, I don't think it's anywhere close to perfect and it does carry a lot of the same quirks as the original, for better or for worse, so if you didn't like the original due to the absurdity of it all or the constant dumb jokes between characters as well as the often horny humor, this is not going to convince you and you should take everything I'm saying here with a grain of salt. But nevertheless, Nirvana Initiative feels like a much more polished successor, and in similar fashion to when I was playing the original, I could not put this down as soon as I was a few hours deep.
Two things stand out to me in particular as very noticeable improvements. The first is the improved gameplay; a lot more thought has been put into the interactive aspects of the game. The easiest aspect to explain here is the quick time events (QTEs) that make up the action sequences, and it's improved in a pretty simple fashion thanks to more rigorous inputs that require the joysticks, the letter buttons, and the triggers, sometimes in quick succession to add a bit more complexity when compared to the original. Also, Date's not the main protagonist anymore, so the porno mag gag is almost entirely absent! Huzzah! It's not perfect, because there are times where you have to watch a few minutes of cutscenes before they'll throw some required inputs at you if you get too complacent, but I'll take what I can get.
Somniums are improved a ton as well, thanks to better thought-out scenarios building upon the original formula. It's of a similar structure to the original, where you have to interact with items within the Somnium to get past mental locks and occasionally use Timies to limit the amount of time spent, but now the writers have elaborated upon the scenarios utilizing the same base structure by varying objectives and strategies involved. For instance, one Somnium is a straight parody of Pokemon Go, and requires you to find PokeStop lookalikes to "catch" characters from the game to defeat evil assassins and overlords. Another Somnium acts like a quiz show, and you have to correctly answer questions while figuring out the gimmicks on the fly to stay ahead of the opponent's score. And finally, there's a Somnium that takes some inspiration from Ace Attorney, in that you can present "evidence" in the form of what you know and have found out to force objects and characters to reveal their true nature. It's a huge improvement mechanically over the previous game's Somniums, which felt less like puzzles and more like trial and error with hopefully picking the correct choices with the correct Timies on hand while walking around mysterious landscapes with few, if any, knowledge or execution tests to be found. The Somniums are further aided by the addition of the Keys system, which by providing helpful descriptions, can help lead you to the correct choice/interaction by using up time here and there on "throwaway" observation interactions to better understand both the nature of the person whose Somnium you're in as well as make a more informed decision on how to progress. There's definitely a lot more depth and a lot less hassle here, and even though one could argue that there's still a degree of trial and error due to the need to collect Timies and waste negative Timies on minute throwaway interactions (since they force you to commit to an interaction with the time multiplier), you can even bypass this aspect entirely with Story mode Somnium difficulty if you choose to do so, a setting that I very much appreciated.
Speaking of detective game influence, Nirvana Initiative leans into the detective aspect a lot more than the original, thanks to its third major improved aspect of interaction: the VR segments. Throughout the story, the AI Balls will recreate the scenes of the crimes committed in a VR environment, and it's up to the protagonist to examine every bit of data as preserved through the three scans (the standard environment mode, X-ray mode, and Thermo mode) to dig up every related clue not easily detected by the naked eye. The cherry on top here is that it's played straight and typical of what you'd expect from the series, in the form of an exaggerated "reenactment" demanded by the AI-Balls that let you put your knowledge to the test while rewarding that newfound knowledge with more silly shenanigans as a satirical interpretation for how the crime played out. Seriously though, Ryuki's shrilly caricature of the voice of the victim while constantly protesting the snarky comments of the director kills me every time.
While I understand that the humor of the series is not everyone's cup of tea, there's definitely a part of me that just likes dumb dad jokes or over the top and batshit crazy plots and effects, and Nirvana Initiative had me grinning and chuckling throughout its runtime. The banter between Mizuki and Aiba as Mizuki attempts to assert herself as someone to be taken seriously or Aiba going crazy every time a bug got spotted in a houseplant or a fish got spotted in a pond, really helped uplift my spirits, especially in a murder mystery thriller, a genre that can often get pretty dark due to all the death involved. It also provided an incentive to constantly click on all the interactable objects of notability whenever I was in a new environment, just so I could get more dumb sofa jokes or flavor text of the whiteboard at the yakuza office with a totally unrelated "principle" that changed every time I visited. I get that the quirky humor can easily be written off as overused running gags and that there are definitely plenty of thinly veiled dirty jokes that might spoil the whole package, but ultimately, I came to really appreciate these light moments in an otherwise pretty dismal time of these characters' lives. And I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt here; they're able to hold back the jokes when the going gets very rough and they just want you to focus exactly on understanding the harrowing plot details or talking with characters when they've let their guard down as to not take attention away from their intimate moments. Nirvana Initiative often doesn't take itself very seriously, but it's a more mature and aware product that knows when it's time to move on as well.
And speaking of awareness, that's the other main aspect that really stood out to me while playing Nirvana Initiative; the game is acutely aware that you are an active participant in all of this, and is not afraid to make itself known that it is aware of this. I'm not just talking about the fourth wall breaks that Uchikoshi's works are known for of course, that's to be expected at this point. Rather, the game draws you in by actively involving you with the central mystery, and not just by piquing your curiosity with a bunch of batshit crazy conspiracy theories, happenings, occult leanings, and so on. The game presents itself as a flowchart of related, sequential events, and oftentimes you will need to learn necessary information to progress forward through previously misunderstood locks that you once had no idea on how to approach (something that I very much appreciated as an organic way to both hide linearity while creating additional linkages between all the scattered and strange events of the game). And it's very good at testing your ability to maintain focus while keeping an eye on the bigger picture at hand, in a way that I don't think the original quite captured.
To put it another way: video games distinguish themselves from many other forms of traditional media by serving as an interactive form, and beyond that, a contest. While playing a video game, you're actively competing with something, whether that be another human/computer player or the game itself; the game would lose much of its meaning without another entity to interact with the work, and it's this inherent push & pull present in video games that marks the potential for games as a meaningful art form. When this idea was first presented to me by TotalBiscuit many years ago, I originally took it at face value as execution tests and knowledge tests... but now I want to expand upon that a bit more with this example. Nirvana Initiative is aware that you, as the player, handle a very specific role outside of just controlling the protagonist characters and interacting with the mechanics to progress the plot. It is constantly making its mark known that you are both an active participant and an observer, traversing the game's structure and environments while struggling to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical things that are going on in the in-game universe. And as a result, Nirvana Initiative is constantly fucking with your sense of perspective and perception. It throws every trick in the book at you, from execution & knowledge tests to keep you honest, to unreliable narrators and seemingly dangling plot threads, to subverting controls and manipulating the game's presentation while introducing new concepts here and there into the fold, and so on so forth. More realized than the original is this idea that the game has a mind of its own and knows that you want to solve the inherent mystery after getting invested, and it wants you to too... but not without a meaningful endeavor so you grasp every detail that is left in the shadows.
As a related side note, I found myself so invested at this point, that after the central "plot twist" was revealed, I tried to metagame back and scour the past events of the game to see if there were any gaping plot holes present as a result of the main reveal. Yet, after playing further with additional in-universe explanations and spending a bit more time analyzing the gritty details, I couldn't actually find any major plotholes, or at least no loose ends that didn't have some degree of a reasonable explanation attached. To go into further detail beyond what I have just written would be spoiling a crucial part of the experience, but I do have some draft notes regarding some of the more notable things contributing to the game's continuity that I'd be more than happy to discuss with others if prompted to do so. Needless to say, the game's attention to detail (both inside the narrative and outside in the meta-narrative) really impressed me.
Like I said before, I'm not going to pretend Nirvana Initiative is without its shortcomings; there's some dry characters here and there that could have their backstories and personalities expanded a bit (the relationships between a couple of the characters are some of the more egregious examples), there are some mechanical issues such as excessive downtime during QTEs or the trial and error of Timies, and the dumb running gags + seemingly pubescent one-liners are definitely going to drive away a lot of potential players. And that's not even mentioning some of the excess flavor mechanics like the optional Tamogachi pet minigame included for a few quick laughs and eyeballs to buy concept art and costumes, or the occasional technical issues like bugged character models or sudden frame dips when switching between characters in dialogue. But having said that, I'm more than happy to overlook almost all of this, because it just happened to strike the right flavor of what I'm looking for in the medium while improving upon the original in leaps and bounds. And even despite its dark and twisted plot or various layers of irony and fourth wall breaking, and the many other little details or irregularities I could point out, there's a certain earnestness to it all.
Without speaking too greatly on potential spoilers, there's a speech by Mizuki near the end of the game where she comforts a drunk by telling him that there's no need to be afraid of weakness, for it forces us to support each other and put aside our differences.. As she put it, with the cheesiness and triumphant vigor of any classic locker room speech (a perfect fit for this game, as it stands), "Humanity is rooted in weakness... to deny that is like denying humanity as a whole!"
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Balan Wonderworld
2021
This isn’t even remotely as morbid a failure as it’s being made out to be (imo this is far from being the worst platformer of the year, let alone of all time), and they clearly responded to what criticism about the demo they could in the small window of time they had, but this is still a very disappointing release from someone of Yuji Naka’s pedigree. There are some real easily corrected choices here that totally perplex me: why do you need a key to unlock the costume pickups when these keys are, without fail, placed directly next to the box pickups and mindlessly accessible? Why are Balan’s Bouts dreary, maliciously unforgiving QTE sequences instead of cute little rhythm games that would enhance the game’s theatrical motifs? Why do you have to “stock” costumes instead of just being able to swap to them once encountered? Like almost everybody, I have LOTS of problems with the game, but it feels a little cruel and incurious to see people hammer so hard on BW for not being this conventionally engaging mechanically tight platformer (none of Yuji Naka’s games really are lol) when to me it seems like Balan’s priorities… clearly aren’t to be that? I agree that the game fails on its potential in a myriad of frustrating ways, but I’d much rather discuss those briefly glimmering unique elements that could have been pushed further rather than rail on it for feeling “dated” while simultaneously condemning it for not being kinesthetically identical to a legacy platformer series that’s pushing 40.
I think, ideally, the game’s one-button input philosophy and limited level design are intended to create a hyper-accessible fanciful spree of cutesy quick changing aesthetics and encouragement--a sugary character randomizer musically shifting between different flavors of low-stakes whimsy--and thats a vibe outline I can definitely see merit in. Sometimes this almost kind of works: a lot of the costumes are goofy and adorable! It’s genuinely kind of fun to get a new suit and wonder what it can do! There are a few rare moments where the level design and powers are in great harmony and the whacko dancing npcs appear and seem to be cheering just 4 u--u go girl!!! Unfortunately, the levels and costumes rarely feel as exuberant and symbiotic as they should to make something like this work, and the game REALLY underestimated just how meaningful any ability that overwrites your jump function needs to be in order to not feel completely disempowering. It can feel patronizing and dull, but it’s absolutely not some utter atrocity of design; The game is internally consistent and it functions coherently within its own parameters, despite them being pretty mystifying and insipid at times--it’s not some Sonic 06 level technical failure in any regard. I was let down by the mechanics, sure, but my real problem is that the game is rarely as bold and engaging an aesthetic experience as something like Nights or Chu Chu Rocket. However, there are still some bits of genuinely quirky individuality I really enjoyed.
The musical theater aesthetic is a totally bonkers camp delight. Some of the scenarios leading to these redemptive dance numbers are hysterical and charming (I particularly love “girl and her dolphin friend had a falling out (???) and need to reconcile”) Seeing the motion-captured choreo kind of poorly translated onto all these wonky deviantart original character costumes has a synthetic but silly sort of jankiness that fully circled back into an earnest and endearing place for me. The cutscenes are genuinely lovely, and the craftworld sort of cgi stuff they do is great. I kind of love the enigmatic stupidity of the Tower O’ Tims and its ever-expanding marshmallow peep Rube Goldberg device that appears to do nothing but exist for its own sake--I couldnt help but laugh when I spent 10 minutes watching the dumb little critters revolve around in their weird merry go round in order to unlock a third “tim trampoline” i literally never saw any of them use. The soundtrack is unequivocally pretty excellent, although it definitely feels a bit slight on tracks.
I have to wonder what a kid playing this would feel like, someone with a looser outlook about what the genre should do, someone with a less claustrophobic understanding of competence/quality than me--someone who can play games and not even compartmentalize them into genre expectations at all! I’m not even sure those kids exist or would care about this game, but the kind of frustrating letdown experience of Balan was still memorable to me despite itself, and playing it had me thinking about my own processing and approaches to design when playing games. And hey, my partner and I have been swinging our little terrier around and belting the game’s wannabe Idina Menzel gibberish anthems to her for the past week so that’s gotta be worth something right!!!
I think, ideally, the game’s one-button input philosophy and limited level design are intended to create a hyper-accessible fanciful spree of cutesy quick changing aesthetics and encouragement--a sugary character randomizer musically shifting between different flavors of low-stakes whimsy--and thats a vibe outline I can definitely see merit in. Sometimes this almost kind of works: a lot of the costumes are goofy and adorable! It’s genuinely kind of fun to get a new suit and wonder what it can do! There are a few rare moments where the level design and powers are in great harmony and the whacko dancing npcs appear and seem to be cheering just 4 u--u go girl!!! Unfortunately, the levels and costumes rarely feel as exuberant and symbiotic as they should to make something like this work, and the game REALLY underestimated just how meaningful any ability that overwrites your jump function needs to be in order to not feel completely disempowering. It can feel patronizing and dull, but it’s absolutely not some utter atrocity of design; The game is internally consistent and it functions coherently within its own parameters, despite them being pretty mystifying and insipid at times--it’s not some Sonic 06 level technical failure in any regard. I was let down by the mechanics, sure, but my real problem is that the game is rarely as bold and engaging an aesthetic experience as something like Nights or Chu Chu Rocket. However, there are still some bits of genuinely quirky individuality I really enjoyed.
The musical theater aesthetic is a totally bonkers camp delight. Some of the scenarios leading to these redemptive dance numbers are hysterical and charming (I particularly love “girl and her dolphin friend had a falling out (???) and need to reconcile”) Seeing the motion-captured choreo kind of poorly translated onto all these wonky deviantart original character costumes has a synthetic but silly sort of jankiness that fully circled back into an earnest and endearing place for me. The cutscenes are genuinely lovely, and the craftworld sort of cgi stuff they do is great. I kind of love the enigmatic stupidity of the Tower O’ Tims and its ever-expanding marshmallow peep Rube Goldberg device that appears to do nothing but exist for its own sake--I couldnt help but laugh when I spent 10 minutes watching the dumb little critters revolve around in their weird merry go round in order to unlock a third “tim trampoline” i literally never saw any of them use. The soundtrack is unequivocally pretty excellent, although it definitely feels a bit slight on tracks.
I have to wonder what a kid playing this would feel like, someone with a looser outlook about what the genre should do, someone with a less claustrophobic understanding of competence/quality than me--someone who can play games and not even compartmentalize them into genre expectations at all! I’m not even sure those kids exist or would care about this game, but the kind of frustrating letdown experience of Balan was still memorable to me despite itself, and playing it had me thinking about my own processing and approaches to design when playing games. And hey, my partner and I have been swinging our little terrier around and belting the game’s wannabe Idina Menzel gibberish anthems to her for the past week so that’s gotta be worth something right!!!
This review contains spoilers
I think, in theory, an rpg about wanting to live in a perpetual present because the future is scary, is a good idea. As an isolated pitch, I'm not against the ending. I'm just confused why they didn't make the first seventy five percent of the game about that too.
The themes of the early game are so raw and powerful: Kids forced into an endless cycle of pointless violence. A class of elites that literally feed off their suffering to sustain a life of absolute privilege and luxury. The entire unjust hierarchy propped up by a culture of de-education and nationalism to prevent the development of class consciousness and pit the most vulnerable against each other.
To put it mildly: Relatable.
It's so rare that a game lets you save the world by saving its people. You spend most the game going from settlement to settlement, breaking the systems of oppression, AND, most importantly, helping to build the systems that will foster peace. You help people learn to farm, you help colonies demilitarize, you build relationships between former enemies. There is a map that shows these colony relationships, and it none of them ever get worse. XC3 is revolutionary and optimistic.
And then a magic queen tells you that actually it's about alternate universes converging and time magic.
Of all the very stupid XC endings, why does this one deny its characters a happy ending? Why is this world - the only world that was measurably improved by the actions of the protagonists - wiped out? Why do the main characters talk about moebius' fear of the future as if its a flaw they also share? These kids are the victims of moebius, and saying that both groups deserve the same punishment is... bad.
These disconnected themes really hurt the pacing of the final acts. In typical rpg fashion, you're flooded with a zillion side quests you can use to delay heading to the final dungeon, but why bother? Why continue working to better this soon-to-be-deleted world? I've seen people hoping for a dlc epilogue where everyone reestablishes contact across the dimensions. But undoing the consequences of the ending wouldn't make it good, just completely pointless.
also lmao they accidentally made a kingdom hearts game
The themes of the early game are so raw and powerful: Kids forced into an endless cycle of pointless violence. A class of elites that literally feed off their suffering to sustain a life of absolute privilege and luxury. The entire unjust hierarchy propped up by a culture of de-education and nationalism to prevent the development of class consciousness and pit the most vulnerable against each other.
To put it mildly: Relatable.
It's so rare that a game lets you save the world by saving its people. You spend most the game going from settlement to settlement, breaking the systems of oppression, AND, most importantly, helping to build the systems that will foster peace. You help people learn to farm, you help colonies demilitarize, you build relationships between former enemies. There is a map that shows these colony relationships, and it none of them ever get worse. XC3 is revolutionary and optimistic.
And then a magic queen tells you that actually it's about alternate universes converging and time magic.
Of all the very stupid XC endings, why does this one deny its characters a happy ending? Why is this world - the only world that was measurably improved by the actions of the protagonists - wiped out? Why do the main characters talk about moebius' fear of the future as if its a flaw they also share? These kids are the victims of moebius, and saying that both groups deserve the same punishment is... bad.
These disconnected themes really hurt the pacing of the final acts. In typical rpg fashion, you're flooded with a zillion side quests you can use to delay heading to the final dungeon, but why bother? Why continue working to better this soon-to-be-deleted world? I've seen people hoping for a dlc epilogue where everyone reestablishes contact across the dimensions. But undoing the consequences of the ending wouldn't make it good, just completely pointless.
also lmao they accidentally made a kingdom hearts game
This review contains spoilers
This contains spoilers for AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative and the original AI: The Somnium Files.
This going to be very rambly
Story:
I’m going to start with the negatives I have with the story.
The HB serial killings is an interesting mystery from the start but it doesn’t keep the interest by the end. This is due to the game’s biggest twist: the timeline you are shown is inaccurate, and the events are actually switching between Ryuki and Mizuki each day in both the present and the past. This twist ruins the mystery for me since it makes the mystery of how half of someone’s body shows up 6 years later not a mystery. Why is it a mystery in the first place? No reason is given for why you are told the story in a way to make you think half a body travelled in time; it’s a mystery that only exists for the player, which is unsatisfying.
The game’s way of hiding this twist creates problems in other areas as well, including some of its characters. Due to this twist, Bibi, a character who has a completely different upbringing, age, and circumstances, is a carbon copy of Mizuki beyond just physical appearance. She has to be a copy so the player doesn’t know that when they are playing as Mizuki, it is actually Bibi at some points. Bibi does show slight differences in personality when she is the masked woman and after the twist is revealed, but it still isn’t satisfying. Ultimately, I like Bibi, but she is hurt by the story. Shoma also has a similar issue where he does not physically age to hide the twist, which really isn’t an issue with the explanation given, but it still feels weird.
I don’t know how to feel about the revelation that Mizuki was actually a genetic experiment and that Renju and Shoko are not her real parents. I feel like it takes a bit of the bite out of how badly Shoko treated Mizuki. I am fine with Mizuki being an experiment, but I wish they found a way to keep Renju and Shoko as her real parents, as I feel that was important to the found family/blood not being as important as bonds theme that exists in the previous title with her and Date as well as Iris and Hitomi.
Other minor issues include the treatment of the legacy characters. It's a stretch for Boss to have a secret daughter, but it's fine; however, the fact that she looks exactly like Mizuki and it's never brought up is where it crosses the line into stupidity. Date being missing for 6 years due to memory loss by itself isn’t great, but it becomes dumb when you remember that Date having memory loss was already a plot point in the original AI: The Somnium Files. They also give Aiba memory loss, which, like many parts of this game, is intended to hide the twist of Bibi and the actual timeline of events. I’m really not a fan of this over-reliance on amnesia as a plot device here, especially since I’m not too hot on the twist. On the topic of old characters that return, So Sejima should not have been in this game. He is barely in this game and is given a similar plot point of an illegitimate child like he had in the original AI: The Somnium Files, and it doesn’t really add anything. Also, why the fuck was the old Psync machine still in the abandoned factory? Why didn’t the police confiscate it? It's a secret technology. My only real problem with the ending is that it repeats the Aiba "dying" and coming back part from the last game with Ryuki "dying" and coming back.
Now I’m going to talk about the story parts I like
As I said earlier, the HB serial killings is an interesting mystery from the start. You are given a lot to chew on as you try to solve the serial killings. I never felt like I knew where this game was going until around ¾ in.
Characters play off each other really well, especially the dynamics of Ryuki and Tama and Mizuki and Aiba. The game does a really good job of making you want to click on the environmental items just so you can hear all the characters talk more. Naix was really interesting to deal with as a cult built around the idea of simulation theory. It’s an interesting spin on something overdone, like a regular old death cult.
Not all of the returning characters had issues; one was even given substantial development: Amame. Amame goes from being a borderline background character with a cute design in the original AI: The Somnium Files to one of the most fleshed-out characters in Nirvana Initiative.
All the new characters are fun and interesting. Many of the characters are very sympathetic, like Amame, Komeji, Shoma, and Gen. The dynamic between Kizuna and Lien was something I expected to despise or at least find annoying, but it turned out to be a highlight of the game. It's also entertaining learning over time how much of an abject piece of shit Chikawa was.
It may seem like I’m more negative than positive on the Nirvana Initiative so far, but that’s because the positives can be more easily summarised as good vibes, dialogue and characters.
Gameplay:
Gameplay-wise I think Nirvana Initiative blows the original out of the water with improvements and new modes of gameplay.
Somniums have vastly been improved, a problem with the original AI: The Somnium Files was that Somniums relied heavily on dream logic. A lot of the solutions felt random and could only be solved through trial and error. Nirvana Initiative doesn’t abandon the dream-like weirdness of a somnium but gives you the logic within a somnium to help you solve it. Every solution makes sense; you never left with the feeling of "how the fuck was I supposed to know that?" Also in a Somnium, you are given hints to help you solve the current lock you are on, and interacting with more things within a Somnium can expand on the given hint if you are still having trouble. All of this makes the Somnium sections a much more enjoyable experience.
Nirvana Initiative introduces a new feature: virtual reality investigations. This is a welcome addition as it allows something closer to more traditional investigating outside of just point-and-clicking around a scene. Being able to use functions like thermal and x-ray are also nice additions. A straight up great edition to the series.
The QTE sequences are pretty much the same as the previous game; they are better directed and animated, though. There is not really much to say; they are pretty much excuses to have long action sequences while keeping the player involved. The only real nitpick I have is that some of them can be pretty long, and if you make a mistake, you've got to start from the beginning.
In short, AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative is a massive improvement in gameplay in every way from the previous title.
Characters:
These are just more general thoughts about some characters. Not everyone, just characters I feel I have more to say than like or dislike (mostly).
Mizuki Date:
By the end of the game, I ended up liking Mizuki as a protagonist more than even Date. She plays off great with Aiba and is just all around cool while being just as much of a major weirdo as the rest of the cast. You can sense Date's influence on her because, like him, she is capable of being extremely stupid, albeit without the Date brand horiness. I think her English VA does a great job with performance and delivery, and I hope I hear her in more things. Mizuki’s new design is great too, yellow and black always work great together. The fact that I like her so much means I was disappointed to discover that you were actually playing as Bibi at multiple points instead of Mizuki. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as Bibi is pretty much a carbon copy of Mizuki, so she probably would have acted in the same way in the same situations. I would love it if the next AI game had you play as Mizuki again.
Aiba:
Aiba is pretty much the same as in the last game, meaning that she is still one of the best characters.
Kuruto Ryuki:
I like Ryuki, even though he won’t shut up about My Hero Academia. It is interesting playing as a character that mentally unwell. Sadly, I think he places third when it comes to AI protagonists. I think the game’s structure hurts him a little, as he pretty much spends the second half of the game clearly unwell and not really contributing to the main plot until around the end. It makes sense, but I think it still makes him the weakest of the three. Also, I hate his orange sweater thing; take it off.
Tama:
Tama works really well with Ryuki; there really isn't that much more to say. I was worried she was going to just be talking about horny and S&M stuff the whole time, but no, she has plenty more to her character. She’s a great character, but, like Ryuki, she doesn’t really contribute that much in the second half.
Kaname Date:
It makes sense why his presence isn’t as big in this game but I really wish that they came up with a better reason for him vanishing for 6 years. He's still a fantastic character, a living cringe compilation.
Iris Sagan:
She’s still a manic-pixie QAnon dream girl (positive). I think her time-skip design is great, and I like her hair more than the original.
Kizuna Chieda:
I like her dynamic with Lien, both pre- and post-mutual affection. I’m a fan of the character, who is very proper, friendly, and relatively harmless while being mean by being just really blunt. She kind of loses this trait after her accident, becoming a much more somber character. But, with Lien's assistance, she appears to regain some of her former self by the end.
Andes Komeji:
A lot of the Komeji stuff hurts, even if a lot of his situation was created by his own hands, I just feel really bad for him. They really twist the knife by giving you an early route where you see him and Shoma happy and on the verge of reconciling.
Amame Doi:
As I previously stated, she develops into a much more developed character in Nirvana Initiative. Her being one of the culprits works well, and I really like her somnium, where you see her torturing herself over "what-ifs."
Gen Ishiyagane:
I really like Gen, especially his relationship with Amame. He’s just a nice guy who deserved better.
Shoma Enda:
I was worried they'd insert a romance subplot involving him and Mizuki, which thankfully they didn't. I do like how, at the end, they make it clear that the death of his father is still an open wound, rather than him being over it and moving on.
Tokiko Shigure:
She’s so hot—one of the hottest 50-year-olds I’ve ever encountered in fiction. I don’t care that she is part of a weird simulation cult; I can work with that. I won’t fix her; whatever’s wrong with her adds to her attractiveness.
Chikara Horadori:
Fucking sixhead ass
Lien Twining:
I really didn’t expect to like Lien as much as I did since he’s the type of character that I usually have a hard time liking. I found myself growing endeared to him as I learned more about him. By the end, I just wanted him to be happy with Kizuna. The scene where he dances with/for Kizuna is really sweet.
Bibi:
I like Bibi mainly due to her just being Mizuki again. I wish she had more to make her stand out from Mizuki, like they should have made her really get along with Date or something. But why did she have to be barefoot?
Ota Matsushita:
Get a haircut
Boss:
Personality-wise, Boss is still Boss, but she does some really odd stuff in this game. I have already mentioned the stuff with her having a daughter, but there is stuff like letting Ryuki continue to be a cop while being clearly mentally unwell; Ryuki even shoots at a civilian at one point. There is also the case in the Gen and Amame route where she sends the SAT after Gen and Mizuki, which leads to that route ending tragically. I feel that there was missing context or information that should have been given other than that Gen and Mizuki are really strong.
Hitomi Sagan:
She’s in this so little that I don’t even know why she's there at all. The relationship between her and Date feels like it hasn’t developed at all; it may have gone backwards even.
Moma Kumakura:
He’s more of a freak in this one.
Conclusion:
While AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative's story is not as strong as the previous title, it makes massive improvements to its gameplay and is loaded with a variety of fun characters, old and new, which help make up for some of the story’s shortcomings.
8/10
This going to be very rambly
Story:
I’m going to start with the negatives I have with the story.
The HB serial killings is an interesting mystery from the start but it doesn’t keep the interest by the end. This is due to the game’s biggest twist: the timeline you are shown is inaccurate, and the events are actually switching between Ryuki and Mizuki each day in both the present and the past. This twist ruins the mystery for me since it makes the mystery of how half of someone’s body shows up 6 years later not a mystery. Why is it a mystery in the first place? No reason is given for why you are told the story in a way to make you think half a body travelled in time; it’s a mystery that only exists for the player, which is unsatisfying.
The game’s way of hiding this twist creates problems in other areas as well, including some of its characters. Due to this twist, Bibi, a character who has a completely different upbringing, age, and circumstances, is a carbon copy of Mizuki beyond just physical appearance. She has to be a copy so the player doesn’t know that when they are playing as Mizuki, it is actually Bibi at some points. Bibi does show slight differences in personality when she is the masked woman and after the twist is revealed, but it still isn’t satisfying. Ultimately, I like Bibi, but she is hurt by the story. Shoma also has a similar issue where he does not physically age to hide the twist, which really isn’t an issue with the explanation given, but it still feels weird.
I don’t know how to feel about the revelation that Mizuki was actually a genetic experiment and that Renju and Shoko are not her real parents. I feel like it takes a bit of the bite out of how badly Shoko treated Mizuki. I am fine with Mizuki being an experiment, but I wish they found a way to keep Renju and Shoko as her real parents, as I feel that was important to the found family/blood not being as important as bonds theme that exists in the previous title with her and Date as well as Iris and Hitomi.
Other minor issues include the treatment of the legacy characters. It's a stretch for Boss to have a secret daughter, but it's fine; however, the fact that she looks exactly like Mizuki and it's never brought up is where it crosses the line into stupidity. Date being missing for 6 years due to memory loss by itself isn’t great, but it becomes dumb when you remember that Date having memory loss was already a plot point in the original AI: The Somnium Files. They also give Aiba memory loss, which, like many parts of this game, is intended to hide the twist of Bibi and the actual timeline of events. I’m really not a fan of this over-reliance on amnesia as a plot device here, especially since I’m not too hot on the twist. On the topic of old characters that return, So Sejima should not have been in this game. He is barely in this game and is given a similar plot point of an illegitimate child like he had in the original AI: The Somnium Files, and it doesn’t really add anything. Also, why the fuck was the old Psync machine still in the abandoned factory? Why didn’t the police confiscate it? It's a secret technology. My only real problem with the ending is that it repeats the Aiba "dying" and coming back part from the last game with Ryuki "dying" and coming back.
Now I’m going to talk about the story parts I like
As I said earlier, the HB serial killings is an interesting mystery from the start. You are given a lot to chew on as you try to solve the serial killings. I never felt like I knew where this game was going until around ¾ in.
Characters play off each other really well, especially the dynamics of Ryuki and Tama and Mizuki and Aiba. The game does a really good job of making you want to click on the environmental items just so you can hear all the characters talk more. Naix was really interesting to deal with as a cult built around the idea of simulation theory. It’s an interesting spin on something overdone, like a regular old death cult.
Not all of the returning characters had issues; one was even given substantial development: Amame. Amame goes from being a borderline background character with a cute design in the original AI: The Somnium Files to one of the most fleshed-out characters in Nirvana Initiative.
All the new characters are fun and interesting. Many of the characters are very sympathetic, like Amame, Komeji, Shoma, and Gen. The dynamic between Kizuna and Lien was something I expected to despise or at least find annoying, but it turned out to be a highlight of the game. It's also entertaining learning over time how much of an abject piece of shit Chikawa was.
It may seem like I’m more negative than positive on the Nirvana Initiative so far, but that’s because the positives can be more easily summarised as good vibes, dialogue and characters.
Gameplay:
Gameplay-wise I think Nirvana Initiative blows the original out of the water with improvements and new modes of gameplay.
Somniums have vastly been improved, a problem with the original AI: The Somnium Files was that Somniums relied heavily on dream logic. A lot of the solutions felt random and could only be solved through trial and error. Nirvana Initiative doesn’t abandon the dream-like weirdness of a somnium but gives you the logic within a somnium to help you solve it. Every solution makes sense; you never left with the feeling of "how the fuck was I supposed to know that?" Also in a Somnium, you are given hints to help you solve the current lock you are on, and interacting with more things within a Somnium can expand on the given hint if you are still having trouble. All of this makes the Somnium sections a much more enjoyable experience.
Nirvana Initiative introduces a new feature: virtual reality investigations. This is a welcome addition as it allows something closer to more traditional investigating outside of just point-and-clicking around a scene. Being able to use functions like thermal and x-ray are also nice additions. A straight up great edition to the series.
The QTE sequences are pretty much the same as the previous game; they are better directed and animated, though. There is not really much to say; they are pretty much excuses to have long action sequences while keeping the player involved. The only real nitpick I have is that some of them can be pretty long, and if you make a mistake, you've got to start from the beginning.
In short, AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative is a massive improvement in gameplay in every way from the previous title.
Characters:
These are just more general thoughts about some characters. Not everyone, just characters I feel I have more to say than like or dislike (mostly).
Mizuki Date:
By the end of the game, I ended up liking Mizuki as a protagonist more than even Date. She plays off great with Aiba and is just all around cool while being just as much of a major weirdo as the rest of the cast. You can sense Date's influence on her because, like him, she is capable of being extremely stupid, albeit without the Date brand horiness. I think her English VA does a great job with performance and delivery, and I hope I hear her in more things. Mizuki’s new design is great too, yellow and black always work great together. The fact that I like her so much means I was disappointed to discover that you were actually playing as Bibi at multiple points instead of Mizuki. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as Bibi is pretty much a carbon copy of Mizuki, so she probably would have acted in the same way in the same situations. I would love it if the next AI game had you play as Mizuki again.
Aiba:
Aiba is pretty much the same as in the last game, meaning that she is still one of the best characters.
Kuruto Ryuki:
I like Ryuki, even though he won’t shut up about My Hero Academia. It is interesting playing as a character that mentally unwell. Sadly, I think he places third when it comes to AI protagonists. I think the game’s structure hurts him a little, as he pretty much spends the second half of the game clearly unwell and not really contributing to the main plot until around the end. It makes sense, but I think it still makes him the weakest of the three. Also, I hate his orange sweater thing; take it off.
Tama:
Tama works really well with Ryuki; there really isn't that much more to say. I was worried she was going to just be talking about horny and S&M stuff the whole time, but no, she has plenty more to her character. She’s a great character, but, like Ryuki, she doesn’t really contribute that much in the second half.
Kaname Date:
It makes sense why his presence isn’t as big in this game but I really wish that they came up with a better reason for him vanishing for 6 years. He's still a fantastic character, a living cringe compilation.
Iris Sagan:
She’s still a manic-pixie QAnon dream girl (positive). I think her time-skip design is great, and I like her hair more than the original.
Kizuna Chieda:
I like her dynamic with Lien, both pre- and post-mutual affection. I’m a fan of the character, who is very proper, friendly, and relatively harmless while being mean by being just really blunt. She kind of loses this trait after her accident, becoming a much more somber character. But, with Lien's assistance, she appears to regain some of her former self by the end.
Andes Komeji:
A lot of the Komeji stuff hurts, even if a lot of his situation was created by his own hands, I just feel really bad for him. They really twist the knife by giving you an early route where you see him and Shoma happy and on the verge of reconciling.
Amame Doi:
As I previously stated, she develops into a much more developed character in Nirvana Initiative. Her being one of the culprits works well, and I really like her somnium, where you see her torturing herself over "what-ifs."
Gen Ishiyagane:
I really like Gen, especially his relationship with Amame. He’s just a nice guy who deserved better.
Shoma Enda:
I was worried they'd insert a romance subplot involving him and Mizuki, which thankfully they didn't. I do like how, at the end, they make it clear that the death of his father is still an open wound, rather than him being over it and moving on.
Tokiko Shigure:
She’s so hot—one of the hottest 50-year-olds I’ve ever encountered in fiction. I don’t care that she is part of a weird simulation cult; I can work with that. I won’t fix her; whatever’s wrong with her adds to her attractiveness.
Chikara Horadori:
Fucking sixhead ass
Lien Twining:
I really didn’t expect to like Lien as much as I did since he’s the type of character that I usually have a hard time liking. I found myself growing endeared to him as I learned more about him. By the end, I just wanted him to be happy with Kizuna. The scene where he dances with/for Kizuna is really sweet.
Bibi:
I like Bibi mainly due to her just being Mizuki again. I wish she had more to make her stand out from Mizuki, like they should have made her really get along with Date or something. But why did she have to be barefoot?
Ota Matsushita:
Get a haircut
Boss:
Personality-wise, Boss is still Boss, but she does some really odd stuff in this game. I have already mentioned the stuff with her having a daughter, but there is stuff like letting Ryuki continue to be a cop while being clearly mentally unwell; Ryuki even shoots at a civilian at one point. There is also the case in the Gen and Amame route where she sends the SAT after Gen and Mizuki, which leads to that route ending tragically. I feel that there was missing context or information that should have been given other than that Gen and Mizuki are really strong.
Hitomi Sagan:
She’s in this so little that I don’t even know why she's there at all. The relationship between her and Date feels like it hasn’t developed at all; it may have gone backwards even.
Moma Kumakura:
He’s more of a freak in this one.
Conclusion:
While AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative's story is not as strong as the previous title, it makes massive improvements to its gameplay and is loaded with a variety of fun characters, old and new, which help make up for some of the story’s shortcomings.
8/10
Man, I just feel so disappointed by this game. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is one of my all time favorite games, and although I was somewhat mixed on it at first, I've gained a soft spot for Xenoblade 2. But something about Xenoblade 3 just doesn't do it as much for me. To get the positives out of the way, I think that the gameplay is some of the best the series has to offer. Combat actually feels fun, and movement is infinitely better than the predecessors. The game's world is also pretty enjoyable to explore, although in my opinion the loss of the titan format for the world was a disappointment, the fact that living beings acted as the setting was a neat trait of the series up until this point. But this game lost me in its most major aspect: the story. I'm not going to go into explicit detail for the sake of spoilers (and if I went full-spoiler mode I'd be here all day typing this), but this game has one of the most undercooked, boring stories I have ever seen in a JRPG. I've never felt so burnt out from a game just because of how unmotivating a story was, but it's definitely applicable here. My major complaint is just the lack of actual character development. With the introduction of 6 different protagonists all at once, none of the characters really get their chance to shine early on, leaving you with empty shells who have to be haphazardly fleshed out towards the very end of this 100+ hour experience. Don't even get me started on the villains. This game's villains are some of the worst, most generic, forgettable villains I've ever seen in any piece of media. They're terrible. And you fight them all the time, making all of them blend together. I can go on and on with my story complaints, but you get the point. I can only hope that the story DLC isn't nearly as disappointing, like Torna was for Xenoblade 2, but as of right now, my expectations aren't super high. Overall, I think Xenoblade 3 has the framework of a really solid game, but the story underdelivers, and that really hurts a game like this. If given more time to cook in the oven, I think this game could've been a masterpiece, but it just underdelivers. Feeling very similar feelings to Shin Megami Tensei V when that first released. Both games I was really looking forward to, but underdelivered in the story aspect when everything else was so great.
This review contains spoilers
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.
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.
Having to micromanage 6 characters in real-time with no way to pause or slow down combat (outside of chain attacks) makes Xenoblade 3 one of the most chaotic and execution-heavy JRPGs I've ever played! Pair that with a strong emphasis on spacing/positioning, and Xeno3 easily has the BEST combat system in the series.
However, there are 3 massive design flaws that hold it back from being truly great instead of just relatively better than other JRPGs.
First is its poor implementation of cooldown combat -- most games that rely entirely on cooldowns are built so that playing efficiently means spamming every ability as frequently as possible. Every second an ability is spent off of cooldown is a second of wasted healing or damage.
Basically, cooldowns reduce combat from a series of tactical decisions to a rigid 'schedule' of button presses, hitting every attack at set intervals to maximize effectiveness.
The only way to make these systems engaging is to create situations where the player is encouraged to withhold their abilities, calculating risk/reward and waiting for the perfect opportunity instead of turning everything into a spam fest. This can be accomplished through enemies that try to disrupt your rotation with their attacks (raid bosses), stringent resource management (mp/stamina/whatever), or situationally useful abilities (extra effective when the right conditions are set).
Apart from a handful of conditional abilities, Xeno3 doesn't really do this. In fact, since the most powerful super attacks in the game are fueled by the number of abilities you use, the player is actively rewarded for constant cooldown rotations instead of deliberate decision making. You want to activate interlinks/chain attacks/talents as frequently as possible? Just spam, dude.
Most enemies can't even interrupt your attacks, so you don't have to worry about waiting for an opening before commiting to an animation ie. Monster Hunter.
It doesn't matter what class or flavor of dps you're using, whether you're a hammer wielding heavy hitter, a long-range gunslinger, a crit-based dual wielder, a bleed-based archer, a buffing healer -- you're hitting all your cooldowns as fast as you can.
The second design flaw is the godawful party a.i. that is constantly ignoring your orders, running into enemies' attacks, or placing their buffs where no one can use them. The game gives you tools to micromanage your party members, but there's only so much you can do when they randomly disobey orders like using the opposite status effect you tell them to use or randomly repositioning themselves away from where you placed them.
I imagine some of this can be fixed in upcoming patches, but I doubt Monolith can totally redesign the A.I. so they're not constantly sabotaging you. At least, not without some sort of customizable flowchart akin to FFXII or Deadfire.
The third and arguably most damaging flaw is the chain attack. This powerful super move forms the cornerstone of your strategy, letting your team safely dish out millions of points of damage, fully heal your party, and even apply status effects to enemies without fear of retaliation.
Anyone familiar with XB1 or 2 will have a decent understanding of how it works: time pauses and you will get to pick one of 3 randomly selected party members to provide a passive bonus to the chain attack (damage penetration/ aggro resets/ stat buffs/ etc.) Afterwards, every party member gets to use one attack against their target, with each attack filling an on-screen gauge.
Once the gauge is full, the character chosen for their passive bonus unleashes a powerful super attack and the chain attack starts a new round where you pick a new passive bonus and some characters are given a chance to attack again. If done properly, an efficient strategy will let you go 5 rounds in a single chain attack!
There are all sorts of secondary rules where the class of a character affects the rate at which the chain attack gauge fills, and how your optional hero characters have their own perks, or how overfilling the gauge lets more characters attack each turn… I'll admit, learning this mechanic is pretty tricky and took several hours for me to form a consistent strategy. So why is it bad???
Problem is, chain attacks RUIN the flow of combat by replacing the real-time chaos with a turn-based minigame where you spend most of your time watching flashy cutscenes.
As I said, the minigame has a lot of convoluted rules that dictate the length and effectiveness of the attack, but once you settle on a good strategy, it's just a matter of running through the motions, mindlessly picking the optimal attacks every chain attack. It quickly devolves into 'pick the same attacks in the same order you always do, watch 2 minutes of cutscenes as you wail on a defenseless enemy.'
In fact, there are some fights where the majority of an encounter is spent watching chain attack cutscenes, making me question the point of combat in the first place! For many boss fights, I feel like I'm just buying time until I can use my chain attack to chunk 40-80% of their health bar. Xenoblade's biggest strength is that it plays out in real-time! If I wanted to pause time and slowly micromanage, there are much better alternatives!
These flaws have been around since the first Xenoblade released 10 years ago. And every time Monolith makes a new entry, they come up with a bunch of convoluted combat gimmicks instead of fixing the series' shaky foundation. After XB 1 introduced Chain Attacks, later entries had Overdrives, Elemental Combos, Fusion Combos, Interlinks, Fusion Arts, Field Abilities, etc. etc.
Learning these systems is fun at first, but once you understand how they work, it's obvious that these mechanics have one or two optimal strategies that are repeated ad nauseum through hundreds of samey, repetitive battles.
Monolith is making the combat flowchart longer and longer but they aren't changing the fact that it's still a flowchart.
I would be remiss to not acknowledge Xenoblade 3's deep character customization, combining Final Fantasy 5's mix and match job system with the customizable movesets and game-changing armor that Xenoblade is known for. For people with a min-maxing mindset, you could argue that customization is the REAL game and the combat encounters are just an excuse to test out new builds.
And you know what? I can totally see that argument. Xenoblade's emphasis on optimizing numbers isn't that different from the efficiency simulators/machine building seen in city builders/tower defense/programming puzzlers.
The big difference is that these games don't make you sit through the boring stuff. In games like Monster Train or Opus Magnum or Cities: Skylines you make some decisions, speed up time, then see the results of your actions, tweaking your build based on feedback. If combat is just a means to an end, then there's no reason for me to sit through dozens of hours of it when I'm just here for the number crunching.
Despite my complaints, I still enjoyed the game in the same way I enjoyed most jrpgs, begrudgingly pushing through hours of samey combat just so I can enjoy the narrative, party customization, and beautiful presentation. I don't consider it to be peak fiction, but Xenoblade 3 hits some emotional and thematic high points that match some of my favorite PS1 jrpgs, easily cementing it as 'one of the best in the genre.'
I'm just tired and burnt out on a genre that sucks up so much of my time for no good reason. A genre where the majority of the runtime is wasted on deeply flawed combat systems that are rarely engaging. Maybe the upcoming dlc will introduce some tricky boss fights or give some QOL updates that speed up chain attacks! But for now it's a 7 for me! I hope one day I can return to this and give it something higher.
However, there are 3 massive design flaws that hold it back from being truly great instead of just relatively better than other JRPGs.
First is its poor implementation of cooldown combat -- most games that rely entirely on cooldowns are built so that playing efficiently means spamming every ability as frequently as possible. Every second an ability is spent off of cooldown is a second of wasted healing or damage.
Basically, cooldowns reduce combat from a series of tactical decisions to a rigid 'schedule' of button presses, hitting every attack at set intervals to maximize effectiveness.
The only way to make these systems engaging is to create situations where the player is encouraged to withhold their abilities, calculating risk/reward and waiting for the perfect opportunity instead of turning everything into a spam fest. This can be accomplished through enemies that try to disrupt your rotation with their attacks (raid bosses), stringent resource management (mp/stamina/whatever), or situationally useful abilities (extra effective when the right conditions are set).
Apart from a handful of conditional abilities, Xeno3 doesn't really do this. In fact, since the most powerful super attacks in the game are fueled by the number of abilities you use, the player is actively rewarded for constant cooldown rotations instead of deliberate decision making. You want to activate interlinks/chain attacks/talents as frequently as possible? Just spam, dude.
Most enemies can't even interrupt your attacks, so you don't have to worry about waiting for an opening before commiting to an animation ie. Monster Hunter.
It doesn't matter what class or flavor of dps you're using, whether you're a hammer wielding heavy hitter, a long-range gunslinger, a crit-based dual wielder, a bleed-based archer, a buffing healer -- you're hitting all your cooldowns as fast as you can.
The second design flaw is the godawful party a.i. that is constantly ignoring your orders, running into enemies' attacks, or placing their buffs where no one can use them. The game gives you tools to micromanage your party members, but there's only so much you can do when they randomly disobey orders like using the opposite status effect you tell them to use or randomly repositioning themselves away from where you placed them.
I imagine some of this can be fixed in upcoming patches, but I doubt Monolith can totally redesign the A.I. so they're not constantly sabotaging you. At least, not without some sort of customizable flowchart akin to FFXII or Deadfire.
The third and arguably most damaging flaw is the chain attack. This powerful super move forms the cornerstone of your strategy, letting your team safely dish out millions of points of damage, fully heal your party, and even apply status effects to enemies without fear of retaliation.
Anyone familiar with XB1 or 2 will have a decent understanding of how it works: time pauses and you will get to pick one of 3 randomly selected party members to provide a passive bonus to the chain attack (damage penetration/ aggro resets/ stat buffs/ etc.) Afterwards, every party member gets to use one attack against their target, with each attack filling an on-screen gauge.
Once the gauge is full, the character chosen for their passive bonus unleashes a powerful super attack and the chain attack starts a new round where you pick a new passive bonus and some characters are given a chance to attack again. If done properly, an efficient strategy will let you go 5 rounds in a single chain attack!
There are all sorts of secondary rules where the class of a character affects the rate at which the chain attack gauge fills, and how your optional hero characters have their own perks, or how overfilling the gauge lets more characters attack each turn… I'll admit, learning this mechanic is pretty tricky and took several hours for me to form a consistent strategy. So why is it bad???
Problem is, chain attacks RUIN the flow of combat by replacing the real-time chaos with a turn-based minigame where you spend most of your time watching flashy cutscenes.
As I said, the minigame has a lot of convoluted rules that dictate the length and effectiveness of the attack, but once you settle on a good strategy, it's just a matter of running through the motions, mindlessly picking the optimal attacks every chain attack. It quickly devolves into 'pick the same attacks in the same order you always do, watch 2 minutes of cutscenes as you wail on a defenseless enemy.'
In fact, there are some fights where the majority of an encounter is spent watching chain attack cutscenes, making me question the point of combat in the first place! For many boss fights, I feel like I'm just buying time until I can use my chain attack to chunk 40-80% of their health bar. Xenoblade's biggest strength is that it plays out in real-time! If I wanted to pause time and slowly micromanage, there are much better alternatives!
These flaws have been around since the first Xenoblade released 10 years ago. And every time Monolith makes a new entry, they come up with a bunch of convoluted combat gimmicks instead of fixing the series' shaky foundation. After XB 1 introduced Chain Attacks, later entries had Overdrives, Elemental Combos, Fusion Combos, Interlinks, Fusion Arts, Field Abilities, etc. etc.
Learning these systems is fun at first, but once you understand how they work, it's obvious that these mechanics have one or two optimal strategies that are repeated ad nauseum through hundreds of samey, repetitive battles.
Monolith is making the combat flowchart longer and longer but they aren't changing the fact that it's still a flowchart.
I would be remiss to not acknowledge Xenoblade 3's deep character customization, combining Final Fantasy 5's mix and match job system with the customizable movesets and game-changing armor that Xenoblade is known for. For people with a min-maxing mindset, you could argue that customization is the REAL game and the combat encounters are just an excuse to test out new builds.
And you know what? I can totally see that argument. Xenoblade's emphasis on optimizing numbers isn't that different from the efficiency simulators/machine building seen in city builders/tower defense/programming puzzlers.
The big difference is that these games don't make you sit through the boring stuff. In games like Monster Train or Opus Magnum or Cities: Skylines you make some decisions, speed up time, then see the results of your actions, tweaking your build based on feedback. If combat is just a means to an end, then there's no reason for me to sit through dozens of hours of it when I'm just here for the number crunching.
Despite my complaints, I still enjoyed the game in the same way I enjoyed most jrpgs, begrudgingly pushing through hours of samey combat just so I can enjoy the narrative, party customization, and beautiful presentation. I don't consider it to be peak fiction, but Xenoblade 3 hits some emotional and thematic high points that match some of my favorite PS1 jrpgs, easily cementing it as 'one of the best in the genre.'
I'm just tired and burnt out on a genre that sucks up so much of my time for no good reason. A genre where the majority of the runtime is wasted on deeply flawed combat systems that are rarely engaging. Maybe the upcoming dlc will introduce some tricky boss fights or give some QOL updates that speed up chain attacks! But for now it's a 7 for me! I hope one day I can return to this and give it something higher.
I respect what the Xenoblade 3 team was aiming to do with this third game and I think it was an interesting move on their end when making Xenoblade 2 to turn what was once just a one off game (Xenoblade 1) and span it into this epic trilogy, that doesnt feel forced at all. I personally really liked Xenoblade 2, but I feel like alot of my enjoyment of that first game in hindsight, was it's twist that I, as a newcomer to the series in 2018, did not see coming a mile away. Xenoblade 3 doesnt have the luxery of having a twist like 1 and 2 do, which is ultimately a good thing. This merging of the worlds thing was already elluded to in the ending of 2, so this is more so just a culmination of the 2 stories. All that said, something about Xenoblade 3's story feels like it was hastily put together. The major beats and premise are more than solid. Like a world where humans only live 10 years and only know war, and coming to terms with things like aging, babies and love is a really cool sci fi concept. It's just like, everything past chapter 5 kind of felt underwhelming. Like the villans are probably the weakest in the main series, it REALLY starts riding the line on being Kingdom Hearts esq with its vauge "Mobies this" and "Light that" language it employs, which is a problem I've never really felt with the series up until this game. I'm glad they have continued to stick with the whole deep psycholgical philosophy thing that the entire Xeno series is known for, thats kind of its whole calling card at this point. I just wish the Main Story was a little tighter and more interesting moment to moment. The way I played the game was to primarily experiance the main story, but I did all the Hero Quests I came across, all of the Side Storys and the ocasional side quest, but not many. Honestly, the main gameplay loop of exploring and doing Hero Quests is pretty addictive, and if I had more time and didnt want to move on to other games, I would probably still be doing some more. The world is just fun to explore and traverse. I spent a little over 52 hours in the game by the end. That said, while the combat system is VERY fleshed out, probably one of the most involved I have ever seen in a game, I could not for thr life of me understand it. I ended up playing VERY lame and didnt use 90% of the customization and combat options the game had. I kept all my party members there base class and just killed every monster I came across. It didnt feel very rewarding to play this way and I know I would feel better if I learned the systems in play, but even after watching multiple tutorials, I still couldnt understand it. Its partly like, when I come home from a day of work, thr last thing I wanted to be doing was crunching numbers and racking my brain on how this system works, I was mainly just in the game to experience the story, world and music. So I cant knock points for this at all, the game has such a rich gameplay loop, its just not for me. That said, alot of points in thr game due to the way I played, almost feel like I was walking cut scene to cut scene. There are ALOT of cut scenes in this game, which I dont personally really mind all things considered. Overall, I liked my time with the game. The world and music are top notch as always from Monilthsoft. They REALLY went to town with the increased budget Nintendo clearly gave them after the success of XC2. i just mainly hope after this next expansion finishes, they have the restraint to put a fork in the Xenoblade series and end it there. By all means, continue the Xeno series, but a fresh start with a new gimick from such a tallented studio would be incredible (or continue Xenosaga or something).
One of the best videogame experiences I have ever had. No game has made me cry so much, laugh so much, lose my mind so much, made me understand myself better, and appealed to my specific tastes so well.
I think one thing the AI series does well, is straddle the line between parody and seriousness. Like there is no other series where you can go from over the top action sequences with a character getting powered up by porno mags to experiencing a somnium where child experimentation happened. With Nirvana Initiative, I didn't expect to be bawling my eyes out over a character with a square head, or one that looks like he's in a Marshmallow man costume, or a mermaid girl but here I am, cherishing these characters with all my heart, thankful for getting to experience their stories.
The running theme of learning to love yourself and accept yourself despite your flaws, and learning to accept love from others is something that appeals to me on a deep level. It doesn't matter how bad you think you look or how much you think you disability hinders you, if someone tells you that your existence makes them happy and means the world to them, then don't push them away to try and confirm your own self doubts, accept that there are people in this world that would put your happiness above their own because seeing you happy brings them happiness.
As for the actual serial killing case, I don't think that aspect is as pronounced as it was in the first game. I feel like this game goes more for the mental aspect of the damage done rather than the more obvious gruesome damage. The twists and turns are all fantastic but this game feels more like it's about the experience of the journey rather than the conclusion of the story if that makes sense. It's something I think, that once you've beaten the game, and you take time to think back on it, the more you realise holy shit, that was really clever how did this and how this all fits together.
The somniums are much more thematically inventive here as well I feel. Trying not to spoil anything but there are a few that really appealed to me and I couldn't stop smiling until I got the information at the end of them.
There's also a really neat post game easter egg to check out if you want to and oh my gosh, it was one of the best pieces of easter egg content I have seen in a really long time.
So yeah, I adore this game with all of my heart. There are so many moments that truly made this a special experience for me and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Remember to always love yourself because no matter how bad things might be, there is always someone out there who will accept you and be the half to make you whole
I think one thing the AI series does well, is straddle the line between parody and seriousness. Like there is no other series where you can go from over the top action sequences with a character getting powered up by porno mags to experiencing a somnium where child experimentation happened. With Nirvana Initiative, I didn't expect to be bawling my eyes out over a character with a square head, or one that looks like he's in a Marshmallow man costume, or a mermaid girl but here I am, cherishing these characters with all my heart, thankful for getting to experience their stories.
The running theme of learning to love yourself and accept yourself despite your flaws, and learning to accept love from others is something that appeals to me on a deep level. It doesn't matter how bad you think you look or how much you think you disability hinders you, if someone tells you that your existence makes them happy and means the world to them, then don't push them away to try and confirm your own self doubts, accept that there are people in this world that would put your happiness above their own because seeing you happy brings them happiness.
As for the actual serial killing case, I don't think that aspect is as pronounced as it was in the first game. I feel like this game goes more for the mental aspect of the damage done rather than the more obvious gruesome damage. The twists and turns are all fantastic but this game feels more like it's about the experience of the journey rather than the conclusion of the story if that makes sense. It's something I think, that once you've beaten the game, and you take time to think back on it, the more you realise holy shit, that was really clever how did this and how this all fits together.
The somniums are much more thematically inventive here as well I feel. Trying not to spoil anything but there are a few that really appealed to me and I couldn't stop smiling until I got the information at the end of them.
There's also a really neat post game easter egg to check out if you want to and oh my gosh, it was one of the best pieces of easter egg content I have seen in a really long time.
So yeah, I adore this game with all of my heart. There are so many moments that truly made this a special experience for me and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Remember to always love yourself because no matter how bad things might be, there is always someone out there who will accept you and be the half to make you whole
