been brooding on this since release, overall i feel real conflicted about the game. the battle system and general gameplay is my favorite in the trilogy and the characters and music are on par, but the story is such a let down. as a standalone story it has some fantastic ideas and plot points, i was incredibly invested in the first 3 chapters and then again at the end of 5 but otherwise the game really lost me. chapters 6 and 7 feel short and lacking in tension for the end game and the final hours of the game don't at all compare to climbing the world tree in 2 nor confronting egil in 1. noah's ascension quest in particular was shockingly bad to me, i like how it ended but crys' motivation for fighting being that he wanted to test noah was incredibly dumb. moebius D and K made for good early game bosses and joran was probably my favorite villian out of the bunch, but otherwise the moebius are weak villians and even though Z gets a decently cool final battle it doesn't hit too hard because the explanation behind his existence and the conflict of ainios just isn't very compelling.

i specified 'as a standalone story' because this game doesn't act as an amazing continuation of 1&2/as a finale either. while the base concept that both worlds inevitably will collide with each other again after initially being split apart is cool, again the central thing that throws this all off being moebius somehow coming into existence because of the public's fear of oblivion (almost like a computer virus inside origin from my understanding?) isn't very satisfying and there was not enough information given about the worlds pre-merge, like what kind of societies were established and how they communicated through worlds. not satisfied with how the old characters are handled either, most everyone is implied dead but the game doesn't feel like answering any natural questions you might have about them. its great to see nia and melia and i think their ascension quests are both pretty sweet but they deliberately are vague about their past and generally seem more unphased than i'd assume they'd be after losing all their found family for hundreds of years now. wish poppi would've come out of her little jail cell before the credits though, and idk why the xb1 didn't get a photo as well.

anyways the game does end on an decent note, the final cutscene is sweet and thee vocal track is my favorite in the series. i've got mixed feelings about the dlc as well, i'm sure some of my gripes with the story will be explained better in the dlc (riku is smugly winking at the camera throughout the game telling you to pay up the $40 fee to see what his deal is) but i'm worried if they do just make another prequel story about the founders it's not going to have anywhere near the same impact as torna. xb2's whole deal is having a rich, fucked up world and characters who are held up on the past, 3's world isn't even fully real and i'm not too convinced it'll make me care about any characters anymore than i do now but we'll see. anyways still a good game lol just the weakest out of the trilogy atm and it let me down even though i tried to keep expectations in check. sorry for long review vomit 👍