Xenoblade 3's class system was its only saving grace, and it was only just good.

The story is incomprehensible natalist propaganda which has no actual backbone. The xenoblade series has a huge issue with talking big but never taking actual moral positions other than "let's create our own fate" and "bad guys are bad!" Moebius is an awful villain with a terrible amount of contradictions. Literally none of the consuls made any sense except for Shania who actually had some semblance of good writing. Unfortunately, XC3 loves to paste dramatically evil faces on the character models of villains and give them the most horribly written scripts which essentially take away whatever semblance of nuance existed in favor of cartoonishly evil stereotypes. Joran's desire to be Moebius is completely contradictory to his past and his aspirations. Z's "because it amused me" line was an absolute slap in the face to players and erased any hint of good writing the story had. The final dungeon and boss fight took an eternity and I was begging for it to end. The amount of natalism and forced shipping that the game has can seriously be sickening at points.

As an anecdote, 5-ish years ago, I had watched Little Witch Academia on Netflix. I thought it was a really charming and funny anime, and I really liked the animation. Upon completing it, I looked up what other projects Studio Trigger had made and came across an anime called "Darling In The Franxx". I tried it, because the synopsis made it out to be a post-apocalyptic mecha anime, but I was appalled with what I saw. The entire show was about young children in a huge allegory for having sex. The mechs were piloted by the "stamen" and the "pistil," the boys sat in thrones while the girls laid out in front of them, and there were super on-the-nose moments where these kids were so interested in how babies were made. All of the characters were shipped with each other, and it overall made me feel sick to my stomach.

While albeit a little more age-appropriate, Xenoblade 3 reignited the feelings of disgust I harbored. The entire story revolves around combatting a hegemonic cabal of leaders in power who control the status quo: which is war. What's so short-sighted about this, is that Xenoblade's gender politics and treatment of women is just as hegemonic. XC3 isn't the first time the series has devalued the treatment of women to being babymakers and wives, or relied on straight relationships as crutches for bad character writing...everyone who knows anything about the series' history is aware of that. I'll make a short list:

- Sharla's entire character revolves around her role as a wife and maternal figure
- Devs outright said that Melia felt incomplete because she didn't end up with a romantic partner and that's why she was in Future Connected
- Obvious awful objectification in XC2 like Pyra's outfit that doesn't match her character at all, cringe perverted cutscenes, and ogling camera
- A majority of XC2 blades being women and hypersexualized
- Multiple XC2 blades being literal little girls like Electra
- Poppi and her maid outfit, and the fact that the names of her forms in Japanese correspond to middle school, high school, and college
- XC2 female characters who are characterized as "strong" or authoritative given masculine features or being desexualized entirely (and only the masculine characters)
- The fact that robots are gendered at all 🤷
- Forced shipping of every XC3 main character
- "who wants to learn how babies are made?"
- N's incel-y tirade on how he's entitled to M, and Noah's lack of reconciliation with the fact that him and N are the same person (Mio did this just fine though)

Romantic relationships are commonly portrayed as the end goal for pretty much every prominent character in the Xenoblade series, so it's not hard to see why there's a hegemonic status quo revolving gender and family structure. It's so ironic how this game's story has a milquetoast message telling the player to fight the hegemonic status quo of "the endless now" despite upholding a rigorous standard of gender and family itself. And before anyone says it, Juniper's existence is not a proper rebuttal to any of this.

Noah initially appealed to me because he was instantly less annoying than Shulk or Rex. His role as an off-seer made him seem pretty emotionally intelligent, and he never seemed like a happy-go-lucky golden boy who could do no wrong and make bad decisions unlike Shulk and Rex. Unfortunately, I thought his history with Chrys was out of the blue and weak, and I especially hated how he never properly came to terms with N or his past selves. In one of his past selves, he literally abandoned the rest of his friends to be with Mio, and he never truly understood that he and N were the same - that he was just as capable of being evil. It didn't help that N was written to act like a completely different character.

Mio was actually pretty cool. Her status as the oldest party member and concern with running out of time was a good way to bring out depth in her character. I liked how she actually had a mutual understanding with M, and the side story with Miyabi wasn't terrible.

Eunie was probably my favorite of the main 6. Her personal arc being about herself rather than some random hero or dead character made her instantly more likeable, and she had a lot of backbone.

I just did not care for Taion's arc at all. His backstory bored me and his changes in character basically just turned him from being mean into being a little less mean.

As much as they tried to subvert the meathead trope with Lanz, they failed. I do think it certainly didn't help that Joran was already poorly written, so it's not fully his fault that his side arc sucked, I guess.

Sena had potential to be a really cool character due to her proximity to Shania, but they opted to focus instead on tropey personality quirks, like how she...copies Mio or something. It's too bad, because Shania being a girl from the City who supported Moebius due to her grievances with mortal living was the closest thing that this story got to actual nuance in its plot.

Let's talk about gameplay. First of all, traversal in the world SUCKED. Filling in the map was a chore and would have functioned much better on a grid system or something. The world was just way too big without any tools to effectively traverse it. Speed boosts in walking and swimming were seen as small bonuses from affinity, rather than actual exploration scaling mechanics. Xenoblade X was the only game to do this right, as the skells increased the scale of exploration tenfold and let players revisit old areas with a totally new lens. XC3 was cumbersome to walk through and wasted players' time. Sidequests are better than in previous games because Class Points give proper incentive, but they still kinda suck. Especially the "follow the footprints" sidequests and collecting items that you couldn't access the map for. Horrible game design. Hero quests felt like they were diluting the story into one-note characters, but I still liked doing them because I got classes.

Speaking of classes, the battle system was...good. The biggest problem by far was the padding of enemy HP especially in the late game. But the class system was really neat. I especially enjoyed the Zephyr, Signifer, and Martial Artist classes. Overall, Agnus classes felt more fun because you could really get into a rhythm by chaining cancels. Soulhacker was a super neat idea but the game basically said "fuck you" to players by making them re-fight unique monsters they already beat if they didn't equip the soul hack skill or have the class. Finding out what unique monsters you needed to fight was also way too difficult. Gem crafting was...less bad than in XC1, I guess. Mixing and matching classes and arts was very fun, but I thought it was annoying that the game incentivized you to switch classes around but also make sure others can learn it by having it equipped in the party.

Despite its marginal improvements in the gameplay department, I still think the Xenoblade series kinda sucks as a whole. 3's story was in some ways incomprehensible, in other ways reprehensible. The game has a hegemonic portrayal of gender and family, and its villains are cartoonishly evil with next to no depth. The series prefers to pander to cliches and platitudes regarding fate and the future rather than making any actual societal commentary or critique (as opposed to something like Final Fantasy X or even Danganronpa V3), and uses dumb literary tropes such as false gods and multiverse theory in order to make the most uncontroversial yet confusing JRPG ending possible. Soundtrack was good.

Oh, and it still looks like shit in handheld mode. Crazy that after 5 years Monolith still don't know how to make their games presentable.

TLDR; it's not "kino," you're just a depraved straight 13-year-old boy who licks Nintendo's boots and fetishizes and objectifies women as a result of the fucked up media you consume.