The smaller scale of the game really helped monolift create a more cohesive and overall enjoyable experience both narratively and gameplay wise (less random garbage like merc missions or gacha systems) however the game does still have its shortcomings.

-Jin's story is still somewhat incoherent in regards to his personality shift from the end of Torna to the start of xc2.
-Malos once again gets a lot of screen time just to scream "i will destroy the world, that's what humans truly want!!!" over and over again and little else.
-Gort sucks ass and single-handedly ruined a perfect ending sequence with a needlessly drawn out and boring confrontation.
-Much of the game is still just running around trying to get some random flower or ore except this time its not optional because the game forces you to complete a whole lot of side-quests to progress the main story (all while the world is on the brink of collapse).
-The changes to blade combos and the addition of talent arts make the player a lot more powerful and the game doesn't really compensate for that resulting in everything in the game kinda just falling over without much effort.
-Jin and Mythras voice acting is still terrible (not too fond of Lora either)

Story
The general outline of the story is great, easily the most invested I've been in a Xenoblade game.

However the execution is super messy.
The game just does a pisspoor job at explaining anything
How can Noah and Mio exist? N and M are Moebius and being Moebius obviously takes you out of the cycle.
What's the deal with those Annihilation Events? It seemed like a major plot point until it was randomly dropped halfway through the game and nobody talked about it anymore.
What's up with Noah's "super special and unique" Lucky Seven/Sword of Origin and how does it relate to N's Sword of the End?
etc etc etc

Then around chapter 6 you are given an info dump/explanation regarding Aionios/Origin which somehow ends up leaving you with more questions than answers
How are Melia and Nia (as well as Shulk, Rex and Riku with DLC) just present in Aionios? How did they get there? When did they get there? Are they separate entities?
How was origin even built? It's so much more "technologically advanced" than anything present in the first 2 games and supposedly only a few decades have passed.
How was it even meant to function if the worlds themselves collide destroying everything? Can it also magically generate the planet out of thin air?
etc etc etc

The game is also super unclear about what the intended end result of origin was/is meant to be (Were they even planning on only making 1 earth or keeping the worlds separated entities coexisting in the same universe?) or what would happen to Aionios and the people from the city who were born there (this is only answered in the final cutscene where it is revealed that the lost numbers essentially fought to erase themselves but only Monica and Ghondor were aware of that (what?)).
What makes all of this even more annoying is that Nia supposedly knows everything yet the party (for plot convenience) doesn't ask her anything.

While the ending scene itself is beautiful, still not knowing what actually happpened to the worlds/world in the end left me feeling pretty unsatisfied.
All in all it feels like there is an entire game's worth of plot just kinda missing and the DLC they released barely answers anything but yet again leaves you asking more questions.

Another issue is the dialogue.
In usual Xenoblade fashion the party characters love constantly repeating the thing that was just said to them, gets a little annoying at times.
The pre/post battle cutscene dialogue that happens when the party fights a big bad guy just downright sucks, especially the one liners (noah has maybe 1 good one) and now its 6 characters saying some cheesy nonsense about the power of friendship or whatever and it just drags on and on while never adding anything.

Some of the party members also could've used some development, aside from the obvious Noah and Mio, Taion is the only other character with actual plot and a side story that both further develops the world and his character while the other characters don't really have a lot going on.
Eunie is used to set up the whole cycle plot and nothing beyond that.
Lanz has the whole guilt over Joran plotline which is alright but really overstays its welcome when they play the same Joran dying cutscene 20 times throughout the game.
Sena has confidence issues (?) which feel completely arbitrary and surface level especially when she later compares herself to Shania who actually has some depth to her character. (Side Story: Sena is barely even about Sena)
Beyond that the overall group dynamic is quite well done and i would consider it a big upgrade over the previous entries even just for the fact that no character is immensely annoying this time around.

Visuals
The game is obviously visually amazing but what makes it even more impressive is that its running on what's essentially 2 ram sticks from 2009 superglued to a piece of cardboard. Only minor complaint I'd have is that the face shadows can look a little rough at times, especially when its snapped to the middle of the face creating this harsh contrast between the lit/unlit side.

Music
Its a Xeno game.

Gameplay
Loads of improvements across the board, load times, map design, menu design, navigation etc etc. Game just simply feels so much better to play and monolith's growth as a studio with each entry is quite noticeable.
However it wouldn't be a Xenoblade game without a bunch of silly mistakes!
The game has an overleveling issue, even if you don't eat any food that gives an XP bonus and never use the rest XP, you're going to be noticeably overleveled just from doing the hero quests. Not sure why they chose not to include the "expert mode" function from DE or make downleveling available from the start.
Somehow the currencies in the game are completely useless, Gold 100% Useless, Gemstones largely useless and throughout the game are constantly invalidated by a higher tier being introduced. Even if you're diligent with gathering/slaying, gemstones will never be the thing you lack to craft a gem, they might as well not exist (this applies to ether as well).
The only currency that matters are Nopon Coins.
Also I think the game would've been fine without the addition of stuff like trailing missions.

Combat
Don't like the class system, while it does offer you complete control over party composition it results in the party members not having any gameplay identity that sets them apart from one another beyond minor, honestly insignificant base stat differences. The characters do have affinities for classes but that only impacts how quickly they learn the class and has its own issue of being horribly balanced across the roster (Noah has awful affinities overall, Taion has godlike affinities in pretty much everything and Lanz somehow has the best overall support affinity (?)).
Combat as well simply feels so much smoother, even just for the fact that there is no more snail movement like in 2 and the newly added dash ability. The AI controlled party members also feel more reliable and the ability to take control of any character at any point is a neat touch albeit not all that useful.
Their approach to melding the combat of xc1 and xc2 is also done quite well despite the Keves characters kinda getting the short end of the stick.
Xenoblade 3's "flagship" combat mechanic, the Ouroboros forms, while cool visually, end up being somewhat invalidated by chain attacks due to the fact that the chain gauge will fill up before you reach lvl 3.
Speaking of which...
Chain attacks simply ruin the game.
No idea how the developers thought the damage was fine, especially when you unlock the Ouroboros orders (for which you don't even have to be in the Ouroboros form) you will simply kill anything from any hp% without much effort or party optimization as soon as your chain gauge is full. Like why do Hero orders not take up a charge of the chain attack?
This essentially invalidates the whole Enraged mechanic all the bosses have because it does nothing while you're in a chain attack (therefore also invalidating burst as a status).
Chain attacks also feature pretty lengthy animations for the Ouroboros orders, which at first are pretty cool to watch but after watching them play a hundred times they definitely lose their luster and you start wishing for a skip option.
The music doesn't help chain attacks either, the chain attack theme itself is fine but unfortunately it cuts off any music that was playing, including boss music, which is just really annoying (this doesn't apply to the final boss for whatever reason, meaning the functionality is already there and giving you the option to outright disable it or just disable it for all boss themes wouldn't have required much effort).
Speaking of annoying...
I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier! I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier! I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier! I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier! I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier! I'm the girl with the gall! Hear that Noah? Lanz wants something a bit meatier!
Post battle dialogue on the level of the previous games just wasn't in the budget i guess.

TLDR Xenoblade Moment
Nail all the big aspects but fuck up a bunch of silly things that end up preventing the game from achieving greatness.

The most obvious change from previous game is the stylistic shift in character designs, more realism and less weird doll anime look. Realism with ps2 hardware was no easy feat and this is not a Capcom game so unfortunately these models do not end up looking great. For some reason the characters look like they have a lower overall polycount than they did in the first game (hands with fingers are replaced by these ps1 era blocks, no teeth in mouth etc) which results in the ingame cutscenes really not being a pleasure to look at.
While the art style does hold up better in the pre-rendered cutscenes, those are few and far between and despite me not liking 1's look either, I'd say this is kind of a downgrade.

Maybe to go along with the new aesthetic, half the game's Voice Actors were recast and its also just a complete downgrade across the board, went from honestly great all around voice acting to the classic robotic English JRPG voice acting with chaos' nasal voice being probably worst offender.

The combat changes essentially boil down to 1's combat being boring and 2's being tedious, pick your poison.
The combat simply lasts too long during random encounters due to you dealing 0 damage if the enemy is an neutral state and combos requiring you to first charge for multiple turns.
It does have its moments during more drawn out boss fights but the game will still find ways to piss you off. The returning roulette wheel ends up feeling completely out of place in this game, trying to sync your multi turn combo so you land on the bonus points when you finish the enemy while also playing around the newly added random slot which can roll into reverse boost!!! giving boost to the enemy instead ends up being really annoying.
Enemies naturally have a boost gauge of their own which they seemingly use randomly so even if you get the perfect set up the boss can just boost before you knock him up (this also overrides whatever boost was already used by the player) and ruin your plan.

On the plus side, Xenosaga 2 has by far the most robust side content out of the 3, it offers an actual quest log (crazy!!) with 36 quests some of which are really fleshed out and some that are complete dogshit (4 and 32 especially) alongside 3 pretty lengthy post game dungeons.

The narrative puts a lot of focus on Jr and Albedo's relationship (to a point where Shion and KOS-MOS become background characters) but it doesn't really end up adding much to what I would consider the least interesting part of episode 1.
The pacing also feels really weird with the events of the story unfolding in this somewhat abrupt fashion. You're jumping from place to place and it all feels kind of disjointed and nothing really gets any room to breathe. This especially applies to the "main" antagonist who shows up -> speaks like 2 lines of dialogue -> fights -> dies.

Due to the focus shift, it isn't until the final cutscene where we get actual development on some of the things Episode 1 set up and this pretty much leaves Episode 3 to do all the heavy lifting.

In reality this game is more like Xenosaga 4 because between 2 and this game you have to play Pied Piper (Japanese only mobile game for which only the script is available in English) and watch A Missing Year (free flash movie originally only released in Japanese but at least there is a full fan translation) and only then can you (maybe) understand what is happening in this game!


Probably the biggest issue with the narrative is that Shion is downright insufferable throughout this entire game. Her irrational and erratic actions are what end up driving the plot for basically the entire old Miltia section and when she insists on going back to her ex-boyfriend whom had been shown to be an evil manipulator and little else. Beyond that she is also insanely rude to all her allies for no reason while they're risking their lives trying to save her dumbass while also giving her no pushback whatsoever.
All of this resulted in me really not caring about the character or her "happy" ending, Allen deserved better....

Because of the series shrunk down nature (and Xenosaga 2 barely developing the overall story), 3 is left with the herculean task of having to explain everything and resolving this gargantuan story and naturally this does result in some issues.
The pacing on disc 2 is the obvious one.
The series 2 main antagonists, Yuriev and Wilhelm, who were shrouded in mystery for the first 2 games, pretty much get dealt with immediately as they step into the spotlight.
Yuriev, for one, overall ended up being a very one dimensional character and his death was just kind of anticlimactic especially when Albedo randomly shows up reincarnated as a Testament only to die again 30 seconds later.
Wilhelm ends up being the big bad string puller who is really behind EVERYTHING but he only reveals his cards in the last hour where he gives you a 30 minute mega info dump which is downright impossible to comprehend due to how much stuff is being unveiled. Once you wrap your head around it after reading the wiki/Xenosaga III Perfect Guide for an hour, it is pretty cool. :)

While you're going through the final planet, Michtam, all of the series' minor antagonist conveniently come flying at you 1 by 1 wanting to fight you to the death (even Hermann and Richard show up lol). It ends up feeling a bit too forced especially when Margulis and Pellegri have no reason to fight you anymore after Willhelm told them the truth.
Some aspects of the story are also just outright dropped, Jin's backstory with Margulis and Pellegri, for one, is never elaborated on despite it being heavily teased throughout episode 2 and 3. Maybe they were planning to make another pied pipper type game idk.
Considering it was initially planned to be a 6 game series, this is probably the best they could've wrapped it up.

The game's presentation ends up being both visually and audibly the peak of the series.
After both 1 and 2 made some rather questionable stylistic decisions in regards to character designs, 3 really nails it with a more expressive stylized approach than 2 while not looking as nightmare inducing as 1. The addition of character portraits to ingame cutscene textboxes also allows them to better communicate emotions however due to budget/hardware limitations the game will often abruptly swap between pre-rendered and ingame cutscenes mid scene via an awkward fade to black transition load screen. The most jarring instance of this is during the final pre-boss cutscene where it ends up swapping back and forth every ~30 seconds and it ends up kinda killing the tension of the scene.
A bunch of voice actors change once again, some returning from 1, some new and it again reinforces what a massive downgrade 2's cast was.
The OST also has by far the most amount of memorable tracks on it.

Another game another combat rework!
And it is passable...
Erde Kaiser just runs the game (even the first version which is very easy to get)
Random encounters amount to just Erde Kaiser -> get boost gauge -> aoe special to finish enemies for bonus points!
Erde Kaiser breaks pretty much everything and the EP cost is irrelevant because the game gives you so many ways of regaining it. Its so efficient that past a certain point you're better off having a character with low EATK use Erde Kaiser so it doesn't outright kill the enemies. Doing anything else just ends up feeling silly especially when the enemies do hurt and can break your characters within ~2/3 hits IF they are given the chance to attack.
At least there is no more roulette wheel and the random encounters don't last minutes like they did in 2, so i guess its an improvement!
The boss fights aren't great either, they all follow the same pattern of doing literally nothing until they're ~25% hp where they get mad and if you're not careful, straight up 1-shot a character/the entire party (if you have higher tiers of Erde Kaiser, which are not hard to get, you can completely ignore bosses).
The mech fights however are definitely the best they've been and while that's kind of a low bar to clear, after Lv3 anima and getting ample energy for attacks, I ended up preferring it over the on-foot combat. The customization ends up being really impactful and some of the later fights can at least get somewhat engaging.

Ultimately Xenosaga as a series is marred by Unfulfilled Potential. Over-ambition and creative ideas meet the harsh reality of budgets and hardware limitations (and a few silly design mistakes).

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is a really special experience.
Vanillaware's 2D aesthetic (beyond the questionable female designs) very much speaks for itself but the real selling point here is the story.
While the over the top narrative itself is really engaging (albeit somewhat confusing and impossible to summarize), the more interesting part here is the structure and how it's presented.
The idea of splitting the story between the 13 protagonists and having each of them be their own separate story mode that can be played in (almost) any order seems silly but it's executed extremely well and its becomes really fun seeing the pieces slowly fall in place.
Thankfully the game also has an extensive database and an event theatre that let's you rewatch things and (most importantly) see the events ordered chronologically (the timeline might be the most confusing aspect of this story).

My issues with the story are fairly minor.
For one, it's pretty obvious they had to really cut corners, the game is about 30 hours long but it feels like the developers were initially planning something twice the length.
This is most noticeable towards the end of the game where things just happen way too quickly with some character events awkwardly going from climax to ending abruptly within like a minute. Some aspects of the story are also just never really explained or just kinda glossed over (basically all the 2188 stuff).
There's also some issues with character relationships where, due to story reasons, all the protagonists need a romantic partner and some of the pairings just end up feeling really forced with them having 0 chemistry together (Fuyusaka/Sekigahara or Yakushiji/Kurabe) or straight up 0 screen-time whatsoever (Shinonome/Gouto).
They still somewhat manage to stick the landing but its definitely not graceful.

When it comes to gameplay, you get a 2 for 1 combo deal:
1. The "story" mode which features some VN-esque gameplay while you go through the events of the 13 protagonists.
The events themselves are either completely linear or have branching paths (which still end up being pretty linear and simple to get through). One could definitely say it's a bit underdeveloped but I think it's fine, the story itself is complicated enough.
2. The RTS Mech Combat.
Due to Okino being extra silly and copying code from a simulation game called "Mighty Kaiju Deimo" and putting it in the program that's "humanity's last hope" (still can't decide if this plot point is genius or moronic) you now have to defend the planet from "Kaijus" using your mechs.
Beyond the intro, the mech stuff is split from the rest of the game and mostly serves as a nice change of pace while also occasionally providing some minor info.
The mechs themselves have a great amount of customizability (which can definitely be pretty overwhelming at first) but are still able to maintain a strong identity thanks to them being split in different gens and each pilot having unique passives.
The actual mech combat is decently enjoyable albeit too easy, even on the highest difficulty I almost always got S rank first try and never had a character die.

While there's definitely things to criticize, with the sheer amount of creativity present here, I can't help but feel deep appreciation for this game.

One of my bigger gripes with the first game was how a lot of the humour was pretty unfunny and occasionally really out of place and while that still applies here I'd say it's at least somewhat improved although it could just be because Date isn't the protag anymore (they still make sure to include some unfunny porno mag jokes).

Beyond that though, the writing took a massive nosedive.
First of all, the story here is held together by plot conveniences and superglue, for example, Tearer gets knocked out but uh oh, turns out his mask is rigged with explosives and therefore can not be taken off so i guess we have to psync with him. Thankfully the Prototype Psync Machine (very expensive and dangerous device) was left in the abandoned factory because apparently it would break if transported (?) AND it also randomly got upgraded at some point so now you don't have to remove Tearer's eyeball.
Man that sure is convenient!!
Tearer also has absolutely 0 presence as an antagonist (he's straight up dead for half the game) and all the nirvana stuff just amounts to 2 or 3 cool abstract videos that you watch in the first few hours of the game and nothing else. Feels like they were trying to go for something more "grand" than a standard murder mystery whodunit but it just kinda falls flat.
Beyond that the simulation theory is also moronic, if the world itself were nothing but a simulation, we would be a part of the simulation and therefore fundamentally incapable of escaping it (they compare it to video game glitches but even if you go out of bounds in a video game, you are still in the video game, you haven't somehow transcended).

The thing that irritated me most was Mizuki's past getting retconned with her now being a cloned super soldier of Bibi and only being the adopted daughter of Renju and Shoko. This makes absolutely 0 fucking sense considering the biological relationship between Mizuki and Shoko was an integral part of the first game with Shoko constantly telling Mizuki "I wish you were never born." and Renju saying that Shoko had an equally difficult relationship with her mother. Beyond that there's numerous instances that show that this was not planned in the 1st game like Shoko complaining about her crying as a baby, Mizuki explaining that her strength comes from her grandpa etc and i mean just look at their designs.
The game even acknowledges how nonsensical this is by playing a flashback of Shoko saying "I wish you were never born." to which Mizuki responds "I guess she meant adopted". lol
The fact that Bibi is Boss' adopted daughter makes it even dumber because she had no reason to hide it from the player and the game once again acknowledges this and jokes about it so I guess being a bad writer is OK as long as you're self aware.
Furthermore, the timeline twist feels random and somewhat pointless since it doesn't fit with any of the games themes and it once again requires loads of plot conveniences to work in the first place like shoma not aging, Mizuki and Bibi looking identitcal (despite the age gap) and wearing the exact same clothes etc.
It's pretty much just a twist for the sake of having a twist.

The dialogue and how information is revealed to you is still done well although some things are teased for too long like Amame's involvement or Masked Woman's identity etc. There's also noticeably more action scenes than in the 1st game but they still kinda suck, the animation really lacks weight, the framing is bad, they go on for too long and it does the whole "bad guys can't aim and just stand around waiting to get beat up" thing. To put it bluntly, they're boring to watch and the final stadium cutscene is especially bad.

Regarding gameplay, the new VR investigation mode is pretty fun and obviously fits a detective game well but the returning Somnia still aren't a joy to play through and characters tend to now talk way more during them and often over-explain stuff which can get annoying. They also still suffer from some of the same structural issues regarding split paths where, just like in the first game, 1 path is more of a "story" path while the other focuses more on character relationships. Unlike in the first game however, the relationship path pretty much completely disregards the story while it generally tries to go for some abstract nonsensical romcom (Gen and Amame's Route specifically is so bad it almost becomes funny).
In the end the relationship paths barely even matter because nothing that happens there affects the "main timeline" so it comes off as bad fanfic.

Overall super disappointed, genuinely made me wonder if Uchikoshi feels no shame when writing this shit.

Probably some of the worst writing I have witnessed in video games, maybe even fiction.

Everything in the plot revolves around the hit back in 85 until that gets resolved by the absolutely asinine rubber bullets twist (which they reuse later where it's just as stupid) and Katsuragi is shot in the head after which it becomes irrelevant.
Issue is, now the writers had 0 idea how to wrap up this nothingburger of a story so Akiyama literally goes "fuck it let's put 100 billion yen on the top of milenium tower and see who shows up."
The story is so insanely unremarkable there's genuinely nothing to else to say about it.
The antagonists are embarrassing, what did Kido or Arai even want? why is Daigo even here? and Munakata doesn't even deserve to be mentioned.
I was thinking of just skipping the final cutscene because I could not stand listening to this drivel anymore.

Probably the best part about the game are the movesets of the playable characters, they're diverse, they suit the respective character's personality and they're all just fun to play.
However this is the only nice thing I can say about the combat.
The enemy AI is so aggressive that you can basically never combo anyone in group fights because enemies will constantly interrupt you and while they do very little damage, it's immensely annoying getting stunlocked for like 15 seconds.
The grappler enemy type is especially dogshit because they love nothing more than chain grabbing you and forcing you to mash A/X to break it (which seemingly gets harder to break with each consecutive grab), I died 3 times during Saejima's prison section because I essentially got stunlocked by one of them while 3 other enemies were pummelling me to death.
I should sue RGG because this shit has given me permanent thumb damage.
The bosses aren't really all that noteworthy and the game is overall quite easy (albeit very annoying at times) but I do have to give a special shoutout to Saito for the absurd difficulty spike he provides at the start of Kiryu's part with his annoying moveset that has almost no openings whatsoever and you have to fight twice back to back alongside a bunch of his henchmen and then Munakata, the final boss, who is nothing more than a sacred tree armor check and even with that his henchmen are still a pain in the ass to deal with and the fight as a whole remains unremarkable, up there for one of the worst bosses in the series.
Some of the sections in this game leave me genuinely 110% convinced they don't playtest these games whatsoever.
Aside from combat, Saejima sneak sections where he has to hide from the cops are noteworthy because they make no sense, police are positioned in ways you should be trapped but turns out cops can only see what's 1 foot away from them, it's just a shitty stealth game.

Yea the protags are cool, some of the the substories are kinda fun and the rooftops and underground are nice additions but beyond that Yakuza 4 is as bad as a Yakuza game could be.