Spoilers for xenogears, xenoblade 1, 2 and 3, and a lot of kinda mindless rambling because its late where I am and don't have much free time during the day

For the tldr; gameplay is really good, characters are excellent, but writing, villains and narrative are weak despite the interesting concept, and poor presentation drag it down pretty far. Doesn't live up to Xenogears or Xenoblade 1, at least for me.

As someone longing for a true followup to xenoblade 1, this....misses the mark, by quite the bit. I don't think it serves as a xenogears followup, either, contrary to the similarities shown in the trailers. I don't think the game is bad at all, far from it, I think its generally good, but I definitely find it to be a bit disappointing.

Getting the genuinely good stuff out of the way: The characters, and the gameplay. I think this game's core cast is extremely solid, and a contender for one of my favourite jrpg set of main characters - they all have great arcs, synergy, and chemistry. The gameplay is the best in the series, at least to me. I personally found 2's gameplay to be downright awful - painfully slow, even in endgame, stuff like blade management was a total chore most of the time. 3's combat is infinitely faster and engaging despite being fundamentally similar and despite being just as mechanically complex feels so much more enjoyable and allows way more room to experiment.

Other than that...the plot feels like budget xenogears. Its generally the same: two warring factions with outside influence being the root of the conflict, featuring themes of life, death, rebirth, and previous lives of the protagonists. Xenoblade 3 however lacks a few of xenogears' more poignant themes, such as religion and false gods, and doesn't execute many of the retained themes very well.

Almost every character that dies at some point in the story is brought back, is revealed to be a fakeout, or is basically just spoiled to the player by looking at the hero silouettes. Xenoblade 1 gives you time to get to know Fiora, and her ongoing relationships with Shulk, Reyn and Dunban, before she's killed off early, serving as the catalyst for the game's events and a really early plot hook. It gives a lot of time for the player to take in and accept that they're gone by the time they're revealed to be alive. Its foreshadowed that faced Mechon are piloted by (mostly, metal face/mumkhar is such a good antagonist and xenoblade 3 tries to replicate his character dynamic and fails, but I'll get to that later) brainwashed homs, but that's never blatantly obvious. In xenogears, you're shown Fei and Elly's past lives and learn of the origins of Deus, Miang, and Karellen's motives. In xenoblade 3, I felt nothing when Joran was revealed to be alive, considering I forgot he even existed. Ethel was snatched away from you as soon as she becomes playable, and Cammuravi's silhouette is in the heroes menu. Chapter 5's climax was a fantastic culmination of the game's themes and characters and a contender for one of the best moments in any jrpg, only to be undone seconds later because "It was M all along" and N was somehow stopped from cutting Noah's head off after an (admittedly cool) xenogears callback. Considering the game's themes of rebirth, I think it would've been better to genuinely kill the characters off here, and at this point confirm that killed soldiers are reborn (instead of earlier in keves castle), starting Noah or one of the other characters off in a new colony with their retained memories, and decicating the rest of the game to rounding your party members back up in preparation to storm agnus castle and then origin for the final battle ala ff6 or dq11, and maybe spending a bit of time before you get Mio back in the form of M.

The villains in this game are...generally not good. Most of the consuls are extremely campy cartoon villains with exaggerated actions and voices that I can't take seriously. N is fantastic honestly, chapter 5 alone elevates him, but I feel he falls off a bit after. Mr. Wild ride from the trailers shows up very few times and despite having an eerily similar demeanor and weapon choice to Mumkhar doesnt have nearly as much impact, which is a huge missed opportunity given the game's themes of rebirth.

On the topic of xenoblade 1 characters, there's a shocking lack of closure on xenoblade 1's main cast. 2's cast is shown to be fine and dandy with a really jarring ending cutscene showing that rex railed pyra, mythra and nia..for some reason? I get that its tying into the game's theme of life with the babies but it just feels so out of place considering we see nothing of the cast post future connected and 1 they're all just lost to history I guess. Aside from the ouroborus founder statues depicting them, nobody knows who they were. Melia doesn't even reference them or her past experiences in a cutscene explicitly talking about seizing the future and shaping the world. Also...doesn't that image totally invalidate part of Nia's arc? Wasn't it about accepting who she was, finding her own place in the world, admitting her love for rex while acknowledging and accepting that Rex didn't return romantic feelings? But she just banged rex in a threeway anyway?? Bah, whatever.

I've been droning on quite a bit this point about stuff others would probably find inconsequential, so let's get the rest out of the way, those being the presentation and the soundtrack.

Xenoblade games typically have two types of cutscenes, storyboarded and unstoryboarded ones. What this basically means is that there are cutscenes for important story moments are fully animated with flashy moves and camera angles, and cutscenes for simple dialogue exchanges between characters. Starting with 2, it always felt that monolith were kinda cutting corners in this regard. The flashy cutscenes were better than ever, but there were a lot where characters kinda just...stood in place during what should be important scenes while stock animations play out. While xc1 did this, it didn't notice it to the extent that 2 did, and its ever present in 3. A lot of hero quests have this issue, including story mandatory ones. I think Valdi's is easily the worst example: Big, fully animated cutscene plays out, consul boss fight ensues, you beat him, segways into a cutscene of him angry, before suddenly explosion gifs and the screen fades to white, with it implied that he died off screen. There's a lot of cutscenes that for me have totally had their weight removed by using stock animations when they should've been fully animated, possibly moreso than 2.

My issues with the soundtrack tie into presentation issues. Despite being 11 hours long apparently, there's an overabundance of tracks that get reused ad-nauseum, or barely get used at all, with the better tracks falling in the latter category and the more forgettable ones ironically appearing in the former. Lategame cutscenes almost primarily use the two same tracks, whereas this game's counterpart to engage the enemy or counterattack, "the weight of life", plays a grand total of twice throughout the whole game. Unfinished battle playing once in xc1 honestly has nothing on this, considering gems like the aforementioned engage the enemy, tragic decision, thoughts enshrined, and once we part ways. Considering this was done by a composer as legendary as Yasunori Mitsuda, also reprising his role for Xeno game for the first time since xenogears, this soundtrack was beyond disappointing for me.

In summary, gameplay is really good, characters are excellent, but writing, villains and narrative are weak despite the interesting concept, and poor presentation drag it down pretty far. Doesn't live up to Xenogears or Xenoblade 1, at least for me.

It's taken me a while to sort out my feelings about this game because it's a game i really want to love.

The gameplay is easily the best in the series, taking mechanics and ideas from 1 and 2 and polishing them to near perfection. The combat is complex and engaging, the exploration feels rewarding and the class system is amazing overall.
There are still some annoyances here and there (terrible equipment menus, level lowering being a postgame unlock, Healer AI being pretty bad to name a few), but overall this is one of very few JRPGs i can see myself replaying just for the gameplay.

The story on the other hand can best be described as "wasted potential". It's great up until Chapter 6, where the narrative reaches the most memorable emotional climax in the series and then stumbles the rest of the way to an oddly unsatisfying conclusion that fails to wrap up both the lingering plot threads left over from the previous games and most of the open questions within its own arc. It wasn't enough to ruin the experience for me, but it was still disappointing to say the least. It almost feels rushed.
Here's hoping the DLC story can turn it back around, because XB3 really is a fantastic game otherwise!

Xenoblade chronicles 3 is a game with a lot of potential. The character drama is some of the best in the entire franchise, and the sequence in chapter 5 is pretty much the peak of the entire series. However, while the character writing is solid up until that point, the scenario writing, especially near the ending (chapters 6 and 7), is horrid. The main issue is that elements of the world feel like they were only designed to set up specific elements of the melodrama involving Mio. Under scrutiny, the worldbuilding sort of falls apart, and along with some events in the finale, (like nia and melia pulling out giant mechs the size of uraya out of their ass, the same nia who tells you that she has no clue how to get to the origin btw, and also riku and lucky 7 and the sword of the end bs) the scenario writing is left with an extremely flimsily backbone. Concepts are either extremely convoluted or kept vague, which further cripples the scenario writing. Examples include: there is supposed to be a massive war going on but they completely drop it after chapter 1, the colonies that are freed from the flame clock are supposed to be enemies of the nation they come from but this is never brought up outside of colony 4 and ethel, the nopons are allowed to live outside of the cycle of reincarnation but somehow none of them have ever figured out people are being cloned/dont care enough to tell anyone (how the fuck did riku not know this). The story completely breaks down into nonsense after the melodrama ends in chapter 6, since the melodrama was really the only thing that provided substance to the writing. The villains are all extremely one dimensional, and they all feel like arguing the same flavor of anime philosophy with Noah and the party, which lacks the nuance that the character drama holds and boils down into arguments about vague concepts like 'hope' and 'the future' and 'despair'. Basically everything out of Noah's mouth in chapter 6 and 7 is a bunch of nonsense, and the villains outside of N all have the exact same motivation: they enjoy being evil. This creates a lot of lines of dialogue that don't really mean anything; the heroes are 'good' and the villains are 'evil', the black and white morality of the struggle between the heroes and villains reduces any philosophical arguments to a bunch of pointless yelling. They do try to paint Noah as morally grey by making Joran spout lines about how 'the bird never considers the worm's feelings' or something but it just comes off as bullshit when all of the villains literally eat people for fun. Even characters like Melia have been reduced to spouting pesudo philosophical nonene like 'Morbius is inside of you' and 'everything that exists is reality'.

Its a shame that the scenario features such bad anime philosophy, because the nuanced topics covered in the character drama over Mio's upcoming death are really well done, but are completely abandoned after M's death when the scenario takes full control of the screen time. They also revive... basically the entire cast in chapter 6, which, while making sense in universe in a contrived way, clashes with the themes of the game. What is the point of learning to cherish the time you have, learning to carry on the memories of the dead, and figuring out how to choose your own passing if the dead can be revived by JRPG bullshit magic. This is especially bad with miyabi, who gets a full revive after her character arc with Mio is OVER via the power of fluteship, and crys, who returns as a morbius to spout bullshit lines about how he wanted to 'hear Noah's Melody (???????)' along with some crap about the 'weak' or whatever and then randomly dies. So many characters come back to life that I've taken to calling this game 'negative deaths 3'. The game takes itself way too seriously

Even before chapter 6, the scenario writing isn't anything special. Both chapters 2 and 3, while having good character drama scenes, feature pretty cliché mind control writing and ouroboros 'I enjoy murder haha I am soo evil' villains that didn't really do anything for me. There's a lot of other issues I have with stuff like Z, N, and the origin but they just boil down to 'what was the point of this', and 'wow this lore was contrived'. It really doesn't help that the way they go about explaining things like morbius and other concepts is very vague and its hard to get invested. I really dont understand the 10/10's.

Story aside, the game itself is definitely somewhat of an improvement over XC1 and XC2. The graphics are much better than both games, with the cutscene animations being a massive improvement over 2's jank animations, and there's a lot more animation in the story itself. The world is much nicer looking than 2's in terms of graphical quality, but the world design itself pales in comparison to the environments found in the rest of the series.

The gameplay is also an improvement over XC2's, although the hard mode was a bit frustrating. The morbius bosses were especially frustrating on hard, since they all have massive HP bars and can have some weird mechanics. The final boss is especially bad with this.

Overall, I really enjoyed the first half of the game, but the padding in chapter 5 and the total nosedive in the quality of the writing in chapter 6 really soured my opinion of it. My biggest issue is that it doesn't really feel like a culmination of the previous 2 games, especially since the ending and the lore leave many things unexplained. It feels like it's generally doing its own thing, and I was expecting there to be much, much more fanservice but alas, I must wait until the DLC.