griffingalactic
2023
shutfuck of up up
1989
The movie on Apple TV+ was better.
Press A to give birth.
Endling is a game where you play as a mother fox and her four children as you explore and gather resources to keep your family healthy and safe in a world that is anything but. The interaction takes place entirely on a 2D plane but on a series of intersecting paths on the scale of a great wide world. Think Klonoa meets Shelter with an environmentalist angle. The premise alone perked my ears up, and not just because I have a sick fascination with why there are so many indie games specifically about foxes where most of what you do is walk around, perform context-sensitive actions, and be dazzled by its supposed emotional profoundness. Make no mistake, this is in many ways another one of those, but it's the first I've played that actually feels like a complete package that managed to command any amount of respect from me.
Endling's strongest element is the way it gets into the player's head. The game starts off in a (somewhat) natural space with low stakes and plentiful food to familiarize yourself with, but as each day passes, the landscape becomes more polluted, human-developed, and barren. Eventually, it becomes too dangerous to stay, and so your little fox family has no choice but to wander further and further out just to survive and scavenge amongst the concrete and trash for what dwindling scraps remain. There's an area where loggers are slowly whittling away at a forest day-by-day, and the impact is so gradual that by the time the landscape is completely bare I thought to myself: "Wait, when did it get like this?". Out of curiosity, towards the end of the game I revisited the area where I first started out and thought: "When did it get this bad?" I was constantly cursing the humans I came across whom I repeatedly wished would just leave me alone. And I loved this! It's incredibly effective gameplay that communicates exactly the message Endling is trying to get across.
What I find less compelling, however, are the non-interactive components. Pollution in the background occurs in the form of obnoxious jumpscares (or dumpscares) where waste will loudly rush into a river or garbage will tumble at your feet. The foxes visit a factory farm where you can see sick hens dangling from the ceiling and baby chicks being fed into a machine that shreds them into a fine pink paste. Failstates will always involve extended sequences of your fox mommy being gruesomely shot and sliced and ripped apart with a sickening dedication to animating just how horrible and agonizing each and every one of these deaths are. The Game Over screen also informs you that your children will definitely not survive and your whole family is dead and this is all your fault.
Does any of this go too far? These scenes are after all, background invisible realities of our present-day life whose consequences we will have increasingly less choice but to confront as humanity barrels forward to the point of no return with the inertia of a mammoth. Extinction is indeed Forever. I understand the shock value is intended to spur me into caring, but this storytelling wields all the subtlety of a hammer. It feels wrong to fault this game for simply depicting these things as they are, because they are cruelties that I should be moved by in some sense, but after seeing how deftly its messaging can be imparted in other departments, I can't help but think the rest of this was lacking in comparison. I can see this coming off as really schlocky to some, though not enough to me to completely ruin the experience.
But be warned, the ending of Endling is one of the most brazenly depressing sequences I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Nobody deserved this fate. This is all your fault.
For how much I enjoyed certain elements of this game I feel bad that I couldn't have enjoyed the overall package more, but it's still one of the better attempts I've seen so far at what it's trying to be, and for that I'm glad they attempted this and that it exists at all. Surely if we can examine a gamedev's decisions and learn from its mistakes we can learn from a whole lot more.
Endling does not make you name your babies but I chose to mentally name my fox cubs Griffin, Jerry, Shredder, and Lala. March forward, little dudes.
Endling is a game where you play as a mother fox and her four children as you explore and gather resources to keep your family healthy and safe in a world that is anything but. The interaction takes place entirely on a 2D plane but on a series of intersecting paths on the scale of a great wide world. Think Klonoa meets Shelter with an environmentalist angle. The premise alone perked my ears up, and not just because I have a sick fascination with why there are so many indie games specifically about foxes where most of what you do is walk around, perform context-sensitive actions, and be dazzled by its supposed emotional profoundness. Make no mistake, this is in many ways another one of those, but it's the first I've played that actually feels like a complete package that managed to command any amount of respect from me.
Endling's strongest element is the way it gets into the player's head. The game starts off in a (somewhat) natural space with low stakes and plentiful food to familiarize yourself with, but as each day passes, the landscape becomes more polluted, human-developed, and barren. Eventually, it becomes too dangerous to stay, and so your little fox family has no choice but to wander further and further out just to survive and scavenge amongst the concrete and trash for what dwindling scraps remain. There's an area where loggers are slowly whittling away at a forest day-by-day, and the impact is so gradual that by the time the landscape is completely bare I thought to myself: "Wait, when did it get like this?". Out of curiosity, towards the end of the game I revisited the area where I first started out and thought: "When did it get this bad?" I was constantly cursing the humans I came across whom I repeatedly wished would just leave me alone. And I loved this! It's incredibly effective gameplay that communicates exactly the message Endling is trying to get across.
What I find less compelling, however, are the non-interactive components. Pollution in the background occurs in the form of obnoxious jumpscares (or dumpscares) where waste will loudly rush into a river or garbage will tumble at your feet. The foxes visit a factory farm where you can see sick hens dangling from the ceiling and baby chicks being fed into a machine that shreds them into a fine pink paste. Failstates will always involve extended sequences of your fox mommy being gruesomely shot and sliced and ripped apart with a sickening dedication to animating just how horrible and agonizing each and every one of these deaths are. The Game Over screen also informs you that your children will definitely not survive and your whole family is dead and this is all your fault.
Does any of this go too far? These scenes are after all, background invisible realities of our present-day life whose consequences we will have increasingly less choice but to confront as humanity barrels forward to the point of no return with the inertia of a mammoth. Extinction is indeed Forever. I understand the shock value is intended to spur me into caring, but this storytelling wields all the subtlety of a hammer. It feels wrong to fault this game for simply depicting these things as they are, because they are cruelties that I should be moved by in some sense, but after seeing how deftly its messaging can be imparted in other departments, I can't help but think the rest of this was lacking in comparison. I can see this coming off as really schlocky to some, though not enough to me to completely ruin the experience.
But be warned, the ending of Endling is one of the most brazenly depressing sequences I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Nobody deserved this fate. This is all your fault.
For how much I enjoyed certain elements of this game I feel bad that I couldn't have enjoyed the overall package more, but it's still one of the better attempts I've seen so far at what it's trying to be, and for that I'm glad they attempted this and that it exists at all. Surely if we can examine a gamedev's decisions and learn from its mistakes we can learn from a whole lot more.
Endling does not make you name your babies but I chose to mentally name my fox cubs Griffin, Jerry, Shredder, and Lala. March forward, little dudes.
First they made Xenoblade Chronicles, a game for people who have sex.
Then they made Xenoblade Chronicles 2, a game for people who don’t have sex.
Now there is Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a game for people who need to stop not having sex.
Then they made Xenoblade Chronicles 2, a game for people who don’t have sex.
Now there is Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a game for people who need to stop not having sex.
2004
The McDonald's Happy Meal toy went hard.
1989
Dream big or pipe down.
2022
This review contains spoilers
I am a staunch believer that when it comes to these first-party Nintendo installments, and especially for a series as cautiously iterative as Splatoon, there should only ever be one per console generation.
One needs to look no further than the head-spinning deluge that Mario Party in the GCN/Wii era represented to peer into the alternative. This was a time when work on that series was always ongoing, and each release represented more of a "volume" of minigames than they did an individual landmark innovation, but more importantly, it was a time in Nintendo hardware when getting these updates into consumer's hands necessitated a new physical print. These days though? Not so much. At a time when Mario Kart 8 Deluxe updates are reaching all around the world and the game has doubled in size, I can't help but find myself comparing the two strategies and wondering to myself why I just paid another $80 to play Flounder Heights and Mahi Mahi Resort under a whole new numbered entry instead of simply enjoying them as additions to an existing and cared-for foundation.
Now before I proceed any further, it's worth examining what got us up to this point.
Splatoon 2's multiplayer infrastructure used a system called NEX, a technology whose origins go back nearly 20 years and include functions for Windows 98. Since then, Nintendo has finally overhauled this with a new solution: NPLN. This, to me, seems to be the true reason for the jump from 2 to 3; Retrofitting the old game simply wasn't feasible. While I don't think that's an explanation players should be asked to swallow, it is inarguable that the results have shown their merit. Splatoon 3's multiplayer is the best the series has seen. I am shocked to say that the lobby system in that game is something I look forward to using, rather than something I would always have to enjoy my way around in former entries. In this goal, Splatoon 3 has justified itself with flying yellow/blue colors.
What remains unanswered to me, however, is why larger gameplay additions couldn't have been heralded along with this. Throughout the marketing blitz leading up to the game's release, I kept waiting for that "something" that'd jump out at me to make the game feel "new". At the Splatoon 3 Direct, I thought that I finally saw that answer: The Squid Surge and the Squid Roll. Splatoon as a series has always defined itself by its movement, and on paper these felt like they could be significant additions that meaningfully shook things up. In practice though? I rarely find myself using them. They might make a difference in some tight situations but my experience does not feel shifted in any way by their presence. So, okay, If they don't want to touch the movement too much, maybe they can touch the rules. Are there any new gamemodes? Nope. Turf War is still the only casual option, every Ranked mode is a returning one, and Salmon Run is still their only side-mode. All of this was in Splatoon 2! And all they have to show for it is a card game that I still refuse to touch.
And yet for as bitter as all of this sounds, would you believe me if I said this is the part of the game I actually found myself enjoying the most?
That's right, it's time to get into Hero Mode.
The history of Splatoon singleplayer campaigns started off with a bang. If you were around in the 2015 Nintendosphere, it seemed unanimous that the original game's campaign was gloriously-designed, especially when it came to the final boss. Still, it didn't take long for this shining star to lose its lustre. By 2017, with the release of the second game, discussion felt just as unanimous that the level design felt uninspired, repetitive, and forgettable. Even the final boss, which was once a crown jewel, was regarded as a snoozer. So imagine everyone's surprise when a year later, the Octo Expansion came along and blew the world away. Here was a campaign with playable Octolings, really punchy writing, and a freer mission structure than ever before! This is the narrative that has metastasized into canon about the series, but I'm here to tell you the secret nobody else will: All of these campaigns are about the same. Not that they're bad, or even average, but that the quality has pretty much always been around a 7 or an 8 and not really wavered as dramatically as folks might have you believe. Yet, in my eyes, Return of the Mammalians commits the one sin that every past Hero Mode made sure to avoid: It lost the sense of surprise. There are only two new assets across the entire campaign: Ink Wheels and Soaker Blocks. Every single other asset is reused. Some stages might introduce a new objective, like an especially-cheeky volleyball challenge which I enjoyed, but on the whole even the majority of these are rehashed from Octo Expansion. The way in which the entire game's ending subverts its own structure in the exact beat-for-beat nature that Octo Expansion does, however, is perhaps RotM's greatest insult. Not even this could stay sacred for long.
The story, I'm afraid, is an even grander disappointment.
The Splatoon series has a terribly-kept secret: It is post-apocalyptic. The world of the Inklings and Octolings takes place 10,000 years after climate change and war destroyed humanity. Up until this point, this information only ever communicated through optional collectibles and secrets, but never something to be directly confronted as the subject of the story, until now. The world of Alterna has the squids interacting with the ruins of humanity in a more direct manner than ever before. Unfortunately, while each island is reasonably thematically compelling, it never seems to be what anybody wants to talk about. Instead, the squids are concerned with "finding Gramps" or fighting over treasure, the typical Saturday-morning fare these story modes usually entail. It feels like the game is desperate to reach for something loftier than it ever has, but nobody in the story is allowed to regard it that way. Only at the very end of the story does a mammal return, and it is the most embarrassing sequence the series has ever seen. It took three games of buildup to get to this point and it fizzles out so spectacularly it leaves me completely scratching my head as to what the series could possibly have left to explore at this point. This was their one chance to do something a little more special than usual and they completely dropped the ball. With the promise of a fifth campaign on the way in the form of another expansion pass in the future, we'll see where things are a year from now, but the suggestion that it'll be centered around Pearl and Marina AGAIN does not inspire confidence that this is an issue that they'll fix.
Conclusion
Coming into Splatoon 3, I was expecting two things: To be underwhelmed by the multiplayer, and impressed by the singleplayer. As it turns out, what I got was the complete opposite, and yet all the same still not enough.
All around me my friends talk about this game as though it seems to have followed through and delivered on its promises in exactly the way I had been unsure of all this time, yet despite the fact that I bought Splatoon 2 physically and Splatoon 3 digitally, (meaning it should be easier for me to fire this up and spend more time with it with more ease than ever before) I find nothing compelling me to spend a significant amount of time with this game now that I've taken a cursory stroll around everything it has to offer. We'll see how I feel in another two years when this game receives more updates but if it's anything like Splatoon 2's update cycle I feel like these are already pretty much my final thoughts.
TL;DR: The best Splatoon game yet, but as the series matures, 'the best' iteration of a 2015 formula still isn't enough in 2022.
One needs to look no further than the head-spinning deluge that Mario Party in the GCN/Wii era represented to peer into the alternative. This was a time when work on that series was always ongoing, and each release represented more of a "volume" of minigames than they did an individual landmark innovation, but more importantly, it was a time in Nintendo hardware when getting these updates into consumer's hands necessitated a new physical print. These days though? Not so much. At a time when Mario Kart 8 Deluxe updates are reaching all around the world and the game has doubled in size, I can't help but find myself comparing the two strategies and wondering to myself why I just paid another $80 to play Flounder Heights and Mahi Mahi Resort under a whole new numbered entry instead of simply enjoying them as additions to an existing and cared-for foundation.
Now before I proceed any further, it's worth examining what got us up to this point.
Splatoon 2's multiplayer infrastructure used a system called NEX, a technology whose origins go back nearly 20 years and include functions for Windows 98. Since then, Nintendo has finally overhauled this with a new solution: NPLN. This, to me, seems to be the true reason for the jump from 2 to 3; Retrofitting the old game simply wasn't feasible. While I don't think that's an explanation players should be asked to swallow, it is inarguable that the results have shown their merit. Splatoon 3's multiplayer is the best the series has seen. I am shocked to say that the lobby system in that game is something I look forward to using, rather than something I would always have to enjoy my way around in former entries. In this goal, Splatoon 3 has justified itself with flying yellow/blue colors.
What remains unanswered to me, however, is why larger gameplay additions couldn't have been heralded along with this. Throughout the marketing blitz leading up to the game's release, I kept waiting for that "something" that'd jump out at me to make the game feel "new". At the Splatoon 3 Direct, I thought that I finally saw that answer: The Squid Surge and the Squid Roll. Splatoon as a series has always defined itself by its movement, and on paper these felt like they could be significant additions that meaningfully shook things up. In practice though? I rarely find myself using them. They might make a difference in some tight situations but my experience does not feel shifted in any way by their presence. So, okay, If they don't want to touch the movement too much, maybe they can touch the rules. Are there any new gamemodes? Nope. Turf War is still the only casual option, every Ranked mode is a returning one, and Salmon Run is still their only side-mode. All of this was in Splatoon 2! And all they have to show for it is a card game that I still refuse to touch.
And yet for as bitter as all of this sounds, would you believe me if I said this is the part of the game I actually found myself enjoying the most?
That's right, it's time to get into Hero Mode.
The history of Splatoon singleplayer campaigns started off with a bang. If you were around in the 2015 Nintendosphere, it seemed unanimous that the original game's campaign was gloriously-designed, especially when it came to the final boss. Still, it didn't take long for this shining star to lose its lustre. By 2017, with the release of the second game, discussion felt just as unanimous that the level design felt uninspired, repetitive, and forgettable. Even the final boss, which was once a crown jewel, was regarded as a snoozer. So imagine everyone's surprise when a year later, the Octo Expansion came along and blew the world away. Here was a campaign with playable Octolings, really punchy writing, and a freer mission structure than ever before! This is the narrative that has metastasized into canon about the series, but I'm here to tell you the secret nobody else will: All of these campaigns are about the same. Not that they're bad, or even average, but that the quality has pretty much always been around a 7 or an 8 and not really wavered as dramatically as folks might have you believe. Yet, in my eyes, Return of the Mammalians commits the one sin that every past Hero Mode made sure to avoid: It lost the sense of surprise. There are only two new assets across the entire campaign: Ink Wheels and Soaker Blocks. Every single other asset is reused. Some stages might introduce a new objective, like an especially-cheeky volleyball challenge which I enjoyed, but on the whole even the majority of these are rehashed from Octo Expansion. The way in which the entire game's ending subverts its own structure in the exact beat-for-beat nature that Octo Expansion does, however, is perhaps RotM's greatest insult. Not even this could stay sacred for long.
The story, I'm afraid, is an even grander disappointment.
The Splatoon series has a terribly-kept secret: It is post-apocalyptic. The world of the Inklings and Octolings takes place 10,000 years after climate change and war destroyed humanity. Up until this point, this information only ever communicated through optional collectibles and secrets, but never something to be directly confronted as the subject of the story, until now. The world of Alterna has the squids interacting with the ruins of humanity in a more direct manner than ever before. Unfortunately, while each island is reasonably thematically compelling, it never seems to be what anybody wants to talk about. Instead, the squids are concerned with "finding Gramps" or fighting over treasure, the typical Saturday-morning fare these story modes usually entail. It feels like the game is desperate to reach for something loftier than it ever has, but nobody in the story is allowed to regard it that way. Only at the very end of the story does a mammal return, and it is the most embarrassing sequence the series has ever seen. It took three games of buildup to get to this point and it fizzles out so spectacularly it leaves me completely scratching my head as to what the series could possibly have left to explore at this point. This was their one chance to do something a little more special than usual and they completely dropped the ball. With the promise of a fifth campaign on the way in the form of another expansion pass in the future, we'll see where things are a year from now, but the suggestion that it'll be centered around Pearl and Marina AGAIN does not inspire confidence that this is an issue that they'll fix.
Conclusion
Coming into Splatoon 3, I was expecting two things: To be underwhelmed by the multiplayer, and impressed by the singleplayer. As it turns out, what I got was the complete opposite, and yet all the same still not enough.
All around me my friends talk about this game as though it seems to have followed through and delivered on its promises in exactly the way I had been unsure of all this time, yet despite the fact that I bought Splatoon 2 physically and Splatoon 3 digitally, (meaning it should be easier for me to fire this up and spend more time with it with more ease than ever before) I find nothing compelling me to spend a significant amount of time with this game now that I've taken a cursory stroll around everything it has to offer. We'll see how I feel in another two years when this game receives more updates but if it's anything like Splatoon 2's update cycle I feel like these are already pretty much my final thoughts.
TL;DR: The best Splatoon game yet, but as the series matures, 'the best' iteration of a 2015 formula still isn't enough in 2022.
2019
God bless this casino I hope they never stop making N alts
This review contains spoilers
The original Xenoblade Chronicles, nearly a decade later, remains one of my most fondly appreciated and respected games. Its sequel, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, is one of my least. What do you get when you smash the two into each other? Evidently, Xenoblade Chronicles 3. A game that's some parts old and some parts new; A game that's some parts 1 and some parts 2.
No matter what game this turned out to be, I still had enough respect for the series in me to give this next installment a whirl. Here are my thoughts.
It's no question Monolithsoft is dripping with talent, and perhaps one of the smartest acquisitions Nintendo has ever made. From game-to-game it is instantly acknowledgeable just how much more skilled they've become at their craft over the years. I don't doubt these artists are truly capable of making something great, even 2 has its moments, but with this newest entry I begin to find myself questioning if this series continues to be the best use of this studio's abilities.
To me, the Xenoblade series is well-known for, above all, three things: Its music, its worlds, and its story. I'll chronicle my thoughts of each of these facets as we go along, starting with...
The Worlds
Something Xenoblade Chronicles wants you to know as soon as possible about its setting is the quite literal fusion of the first two games. Characters and architecture from the kingdom of Keves reflect and mimic the design sensibilities of Xenoblade 1, while the kingdom of Agnus carries forward that of 2. While it's clear they put a lot of effort into this idea, I still disagree with the attempt at doing so fundamentally.
I always looked forward to seeing what was around every corner in past Xenoblade games. You never knew what you were going to find because the scenery and the spaces were places you'd never seen before. I have such vivid memories of places like seeing nighttime in Satorl Marsh for the first time or discovering the impossibly towering Mechonis factory from Xenoblade 1. Even a jaded Xenoblade 2 disliker such as myself couldn't help but be utterly dazzled by locations like the innards of the Urayan Titan or the dizzyingly beautiful Leftherian Archipelago. Because Xenoblade 3 is only interested in bringing back old ideas instead of making new ones, there was never that sense of wonder about the places I found, only blank recognition of a little bit of Gaur Plain here or the Fallen Arm there. I kept waiting to find "that" location for me that would blow me away and leave something that would become that treasured memory, but unfortunately it never seemed to come.
From a technical level, these spaces are larger than ever before, and most impressively, Monolithsoft has now even found a way to fit multiple vast biomes into a single province, with far fewer chokepoints required to insert loading zones into than ever before. The scale on display is a significant step up compared to Xenoblade 2, which is even more impressive when you consider that these were released on the same hardware. There's a lot of verticality to appreciate these seemingly endless vistas from, and despite loading zones technically still being present they do a good job of making the world of Aionios feel remarkably cohesive. Landmarks are numerous and always visible from each other, which makes your place in the world feel very "real" in a neat little way.
With this increase in ambition however, it is clear that some sacrifices were made. While Xenoblade 2 quite infamously suffered from some memory leak issues close to launch, in my time with Xenoblade 3, this game exhibited numerous occasional "hiccups" that involved the music skipping and stuttering and the framerate freezing for up to a full second. These occurences were infrequent enough that it didn't completely ruin the experience, but when they did happen they always happened hard, and it's never something that I've had to put up with before in a Monolithsoft game before. Battles between your oversized party and the numerous hordes of enemies you'll meet along the way only serve to make this even worse. I've played through this game on three different patches and experienced this same issue all the way throughout. Bizarre stuff, I hope it's possible for this to eventually be fixed.
The Music
The sound of the Xenoblade Chronicles series is unmistakable. Created by an all-star team of legendary JRPG talent, this is another component that the series has traditionally exceeded at. Unfortunately, as time has gone on at Monolithsoft, things have shifted around a bit amongst the team. The most high-profile of these adjustments is the complete loss of Yoko Shimomura from the credits, but equally lamentable is the severely reduced role of Manami Kiyota and the utterly tragic hampering of ACE's abilities, both of which made up a large part of Xenoblade's unique audio identity.
Early on, the game starts on one of its strongest notes: the main battle theme. Kenji Hiramatsu has really began to stand out over the last few years with some of the original battle themes that were put together for Torna: The Golden Country and Future Connected. Unbelievable funk and jazz that feels right at home in this series. Hearing that he'd finally be heading up the battle theme for a mainline game is an extremely exciting prospect, and it delivers on this promise for a little, but its presence is soon erased by about a dozen other forgettable battle themes that keep replacing one another as you progress through the story. I have no idea what the YiiK they were thinking but there's no excuse to throw out such a winner in service of so much nothingness. Especially disappointing is that both Xenoblade 1 and 2 had critical plot moments that also changed the default battle music, but those kicked ass, while these went right through one ear and out the other. From the sound effects, to the cutscenes, to the battles, this game has some serious Hollywood-ass action-movie-ass sounding music and that is NOT a good thing. At every turn, Xenoblade 3 feels like it's so afraid to sound like itself anymore, and when it does it's only ever in meek, half-hearted ways that still feel like they're always trying not to be too "weird" lest they stray too far from anything you'd hear in a Marvel movie. There are remarkably few times when electric guitars even show up at all, and when they do they're more to provide a little bit of grit or texture rather than ever getting the chance to truly take the lead and give you something to tap your foot or bang your head to. A ridiculous shame, and as far as I can tell, a 100% self-inflicted wound. These guys deserved to have made something better.
I fear the area themes as well, for the most part will not be sticking around with me. A few notable exceptions to me were Alfeto Valley, Eagus Wilderness, and Agnus Colony (Day), but even these areas still feel very subdued and laid back compared to the series' usual output. Nothing like Xenoblade 2's Mor Ardain here, that's for sure!
For a soundtrack with so many cooks at the helm, it's tricky to nail down exactly what went wrong here, but it feels like enormous wasted potential. No matter how bad or good Xenoblade 3 turned out to be, it could at least be guaranteed the music would have some knockout moments to keep coming back to listen to over the years, right? I'm sorry to say that for me, this was not the case.
The Story
Despite the 3 of the title, Xenoblade 3 wants you to absorb it for the most part as an original, standalone story; Something to engage with on its own terms. In the words of its own director, it may be the thematic conclusion to the series, but crucially, not narratively. It is especially confusing to me then, as a returning Xenoblade player, just how much is ripped in this department from previous games, even when compared to the other aspects of this game that already borrows so much that it doesn't need. A new character in Chapter 1 is introduced and dies immediately. For no reason at all, the nature of their blaze-of-glory death is the exact same of a certain beloved Xenoblade 1 character... but we just met this guy like a minute ago, so it doesn't mean anything. A certain character is defeated in a mech and dies by the main character's own hand. The cinematography of this scene is a shot-for-shot recreation of the part in Xenoblade 1 where Shulk defeats Egil aboard Yaldabaoth. I'm sure there are more moments than these to pick out, but they proved insanely distracting when I happened to clue into them. Melia from Xenoblade 1 and Nia from Xenoblade 2 are just... back. Not reimagined. Just literally the same characters. There's nothing outright offensive that they do with their presence here but I can't imagine new players will get much out of them considering how pointless their presence feels. The reuse of all this imagery is utterly devoid of meaning. They were important moments from the previous games, so putting them here will make this game important too, right? Quite the opposite, in fact it makes these moments feel cheapened.
As for what's new in Xenoblade 3, the core cast of characters who are taking in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world are who you're going to be experiencing the bulk of this story through. The English voice-acting early on shows itself to be a welcome improvement compared to the complete embarrassment that 2's dub turned out to be, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see unique English lip-synching for all of the dialog. The performances aren't the best the series has seen, but it's definitely passable, and the effort that went into achieving even that that is undeniably present. The new tools used to create these cutscenes and give these characters more realistic expressions and movements is some of their best technical work yet. The stage is set to tell a fantastic Xenoblade story here, and that's made apparent rather early on. In spite of the misfired old, perhaps the original elements of the game will get the chance to take the lead and show me somewhere new that the series has never taken me before!
The plot's focus bounces around between a few genres of scene, be it an unusually-punctual bath scene where we're treated to Lanz's immaculately toned back muscles, anime action scenes, slice-of-life getting-to-know-the-characters-antics, and perhaps... ahem... most overtly... romance... Early on it becomes very apparent that between the six of you, each Keves party member has an opposite-sex Agnus counterpart for them to be romantically paired off with, and vice versa. That these pairings will eventually form relationships is heavily implied throughout, but it never feels like there's very much chemistry there to justify it. Each particular couple hangs out together because that's what the game design of the Ouroboros pairings demand, and it feels like this happens for little reason more than "because it's supposed to." The compulsory heterosexuality doesn't stop there of course, because the characters later discover a whole sparking city that teaches them about the ways of love, marriage, and most importantly, child-rearing. For characters who have already been fed a "meaning of life" by their military higher-ups, I understand why providing them this as an alternative is important, but in all the cutscenes I couldn't help but notice that even all the background couples in this location were male and female. Are gay people allowed to exist in this world? If the meaning of life is reproduction between a man and a woman, am I as a gay man a "waste" of life by that definition? Of course not, because this part of the game is scared-straight propaganda for otaku, but it's a slog to sit through nonetheless until the story gets back to its other interests. I should note that in spite of my utter distaste for anything romantic in Xenoblade 2, Shulk and Fiora from Xenoblade 1 are a couple I truly found myself rooting for all throughout that game. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the very idea of male/female chemistry, but it's completely missing here in Xenoblade 3 and it only feels like so much time is spent on it because it's been mandated by the powers that be.
Outside of the romantic factors, my enjoyment of the party as individuals felt fairly uneven. Some I found incredibly annoying and had no interest in learning more about, like Sena (if perhaps only for the Xenoblade 2 stink that her character design clearly reeks of) and Eunie (for the more literal stink that she won't stop talking about via various bathing references that she doesn't stop making for the first 15 hours), to appreciable but unremarkable average-Joes like Noah and Lanz (who perhaps would become significantly more interesting to me if they could "find the meaning of life" with each other instead), to the final two who I find to be the true standouts: Taion and Mio.
I'll start with Taion, as he's my #2 favorite. Throughout the game, the player is treated to several flashbacks of the characters in their childhoods. For convoluted reasons I dare not get into for the sake of brevity, the characters are born at 10 and die at 20, and throughout that time they are trained as child soldiers before being sent off to war. On the Keves side, between Noah, Eunie, and Lanz, I always found these scenes dreadfully uninteresting, and dare I say even RWBY-like. It feels like watching other people do homework, which is to say ruinously boring... The history of the Agnus characters, I found, surprisingly, to be quite the opposite. When it comes to the idea of exploring these childhood pasts, it was refreshing to see the connections Taion formed and lost with the people he knew back then, and how those experiences affected who he turned out to be in the present. Because Noah is the player surrogate, you're inherently going to have more familiarity with Keves, but when you visit Taion's colony at Great Cotte Falls as an adult and have to hang out with him for a funeral there, it felt like a very sincere tone that represented one of the few times I felt the need to sit up and really absorb the weight of a scene, even if it wasn't anything especially flashy. They did this guy alright. It's also really funny when he says "I lied" during that one scene with M. You'll know the one.
Mio, of course, is blowaway. As a twenty-something there's a certain feeling of "never getting enough done" for my age that I feel in my day-to-day life... Thinking about the things that I want to achieve and then feeling like I'm running out of time for not achieving them when I see people with "more time" in their youth doing them better or faster. I get the sense that this represents somewhat of a larger generational ennui at the moment, so I find it really fascinating to make a character who is faced with this dread in a more literal sense, knowing exactly just how little time she has left. Despite my earlier expressed distaste for the obligatory heterosexual pairings, there's a sizeable collection of scenes where Mio and Noah exchange their perspectives and worldviews about this sort of thing, and they always feel like very surprisingly real and honest conversations compared to how silly the rest of the game can sometimes feel. As the story of the game progresses, so too does the passage of the dwindling time that these characters have left in the game, and it gradually becomes clearer just how heavy that weighs upon Mio's shoulders. There's just something about a character who has to figure out how to come to terms with unavoidable yet slowly approaching tragedy that I always find ravenously compelling. Eventually, this comes to a head when the gang gets imprisoned by Noah's sexy bad-boy doppelgänger, and a montage shows what used to be the rather sluggish passage of time getting faster and faster, flushing away everyone's precious time with a deliciously devastating disregard. As Mio's final days approach, she shares a conversation with Noah through their cell walls, and we see some gorgeously animated quiet weeping. Men crying is always another plus so this part of the game was really blowing me away in all respects. Truly, I had found my Griffin Winning Moment. Finally, Mio's last day arrives, and she is put to death in what is absolutely the most emotionally brutal moment in the entire game. It is stunningly powerful, and I was completely taken off-guard by how suddenly and deeply I started to care about this game for such a huge stretch. Had Monolithsoft regained their groove? Were these games good again? Are these questions rhetorical? What the Flames were they thinking... In the next scene Mio immediately and effectively comes back to life through some absolute bullshit anime superpower shenanigans that completely undoes all of the goodwill of this arc. It makes me so upset that it feels like Mio no longer deserves this #1 spot from me, but I'll always remember how this game made me feel when it seemed like they were on the right track to commit for a little bit there. One of the game's highest highs quickly brought down to one of its most disappointing lows.
Xenoblade 3's story in general has a debilitating issue of never putting its money where its mouth is. Plot threads, themes, and character arcs will often suggest one direction only to do something that completely undoes whatever weight its initial momentum was suggesting it was going to have. Characters will dramatically lose limbs and then inexplicably regain them back, only to begin to start doing it over and over again so many times it becomes almost comedic. Nearly every major "good-guy" character who is supposed to have died comes back, short of the one or two who literally die in a nuclear explosion. Anything slightly less than a nuke is grounds for revival though, I guess. So much time is wasted on this sort of back-and-forth doing and undoing of ideas that I'm utterly shocked that this is actually the fastest I've ever completed a Xenoblade game (~100 hours for 1 ~90 for 2, ~70 for 3), considering how dull most of the story is between the seas of boring and confusing exposition and emotional whiplash. It really does everything it can do to feel longer in spite of its actual length.
The weakest part of the story, to me, was the villains. Xenoblade 3 has more of them than ever, but the majority of them fail to leave a lasting impression. Everybody wears the same red outfits with slightly different design motifs, (one is shaped like an owl, one is shaped like the letter X, etc.), but their presence quickly becomes repetitive and monotonous. Nobody knows why anybody is doing anything for reasons besides "because they're the bad guys", and when directly asked this question, both N and X both answer with "because it amuses me." Well shit! It sure doesn't amuse me! For how many of these snuffing things there are you may as well replace them with Goombas because they have exactly as much nuance as video game antagonists. Deeply disappointing for a JRPG to specifically drop the ball in this department. I like N a little bit more than the rest, but I'll be honest, I'm a simple man, and it's only because of his design and I want a man like that to bully me. It is NOT because he is well-written.
Miscellaneous
I found myself really let down by the final dungeon. Both 1 and 2 did a great job in this regard both visually and musically, and yet despite having completed this game four hours ago I already cannot tell you how the music here goes. Way too purple, not nearly enough palette variety, copy-pasted assets as far as the eye can see, and every single enemy you meet here is just a purple lazer-reskin of something you've fought before. For how long it is it is absolutely astonishing that there's not a single new encounter you'll find here. This is where it feels the game really could spent some more time in the workshop. It leaves me to wonder if its release being swapped with Splatoon 3 hurt it in this regard.
The final boss fight takes an hour and has no checkpoints. If you die, you're booted back to the title screen and have to start all the way back from the start, including the early scripted battle with a countless barrage of in-battle cutscenes that you can't skip and three back-to-back mandatory chain attacks that you have no choice but to do and then watch. Especially confusing given the series' history of rather generous final boss checkpoints... I am not joking when I say having to go back that far significantly soured my opinion of this game. I cannot believe they thought it was okay to ship something that egregious. Extremely disrespectful of the player's time and I really hope they patch it.
Were my experience with the final boss not already a slap in the face, there's a certain nod to Xenoblade 2 that certainly slaps as hard as it can possibly muster at the last possible moment. You'll know it when you see it.
Conclusion
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 proves it can occasionally strive for greater heights than its lowest lows, but fails to stay up consistently long enough to truly become great. Would be a much better experience if it pulled its own head out of its ass. If they do another one of these I probably won't feel the need to pick it up right away since my curiosity regarding the sporadic quality of these releases has likely been sated, but if the end of this trilogy finally allows them to set off on new, wholly original ventures, I wish them all the best.
It is strange to think though that this is like, Nintendo's biggest JRPG series now. Humble beginnings for sure, but considering the increasingly middling quality of these games it really feels like it oughtn't be the only game in town when it comes to Nintendo's output. Wishful thinking.
No matter what game this turned out to be, I still had enough respect for the series in me to give this next installment a whirl. Here are my thoughts.
It's no question Monolithsoft is dripping with talent, and perhaps one of the smartest acquisitions Nintendo has ever made. From game-to-game it is instantly acknowledgeable just how much more skilled they've become at their craft over the years. I don't doubt these artists are truly capable of making something great, even 2 has its moments, but with this newest entry I begin to find myself questioning if this series continues to be the best use of this studio's abilities.
To me, the Xenoblade series is well-known for, above all, three things: Its music, its worlds, and its story. I'll chronicle my thoughts of each of these facets as we go along, starting with...
The Worlds
Something Xenoblade Chronicles wants you to know as soon as possible about its setting is the quite literal fusion of the first two games. Characters and architecture from the kingdom of Keves reflect and mimic the design sensibilities of Xenoblade 1, while the kingdom of Agnus carries forward that of 2. While it's clear they put a lot of effort into this idea, I still disagree with the attempt at doing so fundamentally.
I always looked forward to seeing what was around every corner in past Xenoblade games. You never knew what you were going to find because the scenery and the spaces were places you'd never seen before. I have such vivid memories of places like seeing nighttime in Satorl Marsh for the first time or discovering the impossibly towering Mechonis factory from Xenoblade 1. Even a jaded Xenoblade 2 disliker such as myself couldn't help but be utterly dazzled by locations like the innards of the Urayan Titan or the dizzyingly beautiful Leftherian Archipelago. Because Xenoblade 3 is only interested in bringing back old ideas instead of making new ones, there was never that sense of wonder about the places I found, only blank recognition of a little bit of Gaur Plain here or the Fallen Arm there. I kept waiting to find "that" location for me that would blow me away and leave something that would become that treasured memory, but unfortunately it never seemed to come.
From a technical level, these spaces are larger than ever before, and most impressively, Monolithsoft has now even found a way to fit multiple vast biomes into a single province, with far fewer chokepoints required to insert loading zones into than ever before. The scale on display is a significant step up compared to Xenoblade 2, which is even more impressive when you consider that these were released on the same hardware. There's a lot of verticality to appreciate these seemingly endless vistas from, and despite loading zones technically still being present they do a good job of making the world of Aionios feel remarkably cohesive. Landmarks are numerous and always visible from each other, which makes your place in the world feel very "real" in a neat little way.
With this increase in ambition however, it is clear that some sacrifices were made. While Xenoblade 2 quite infamously suffered from some memory leak issues close to launch, in my time with Xenoblade 3, this game exhibited numerous occasional "hiccups" that involved the music skipping and stuttering and the framerate freezing for up to a full second. These occurences were infrequent enough that it didn't completely ruin the experience, but when they did happen they always happened hard, and it's never something that I've had to put up with before in a Monolithsoft game before. Battles between your oversized party and the numerous hordes of enemies you'll meet along the way only serve to make this even worse. I've played through this game on three different patches and experienced this same issue all the way throughout. Bizarre stuff, I hope it's possible for this to eventually be fixed.
The Music
The sound of the Xenoblade Chronicles series is unmistakable. Created by an all-star team of legendary JRPG talent, this is another component that the series has traditionally exceeded at. Unfortunately, as time has gone on at Monolithsoft, things have shifted around a bit amongst the team. The most high-profile of these adjustments is the complete loss of Yoko Shimomura from the credits, but equally lamentable is the severely reduced role of Manami Kiyota and the utterly tragic hampering of ACE's abilities, both of which made up a large part of Xenoblade's unique audio identity.
Early on, the game starts on one of its strongest notes: the main battle theme. Kenji Hiramatsu has really began to stand out over the last few years with some of the original battle themes that were put together for Torna: The Golden Country and Future Connected. Unbelievable funk and jazz that feels right at home in this series. Hearing that he'd finally be heading up the battle theme for a mainline game is an extremely exciting prospect, and it delivers on this promise for a little, but its presence is soon erased by about a dozen other forgettable battle themes that keep replacing one another as you progress through the story. I have no idea what the YiiK they were thinking but there's no excuse to throw out such a winner in service of so much nothingness. Especially disappointing is that both Xenoblade 1 and 2 had critical plot moments that also changed the default battle music, but those kicked ass, while these went right through one ear and out the other. From the sound effects, to the cutscenes, to the battles, this game has some serious Hollywood-ass action-movie-ass sounding music and that is NOT a good thing. At every turn, Xenoblade 3 feels like it's so afraid to sound like itself anymore, and when it does it's only ever in meek, half-hearted ways that still feel like they're always trying not to be too "weird" lest they stray too far from anything you'd hear in a Marvel movie. There are remarkably few times when electric guitars even show up at all, and when they do they're more to provide a little bit of grit or texture rather than ever getting the chance to truly take the lead and give you something to tap your foot or bang your head to. A ridiculous shame, and as far as I can tell, a 100% self-inflicted wound. These guys deserved to have made something better.
I fear the area themes as well, for the most part will not be sticking around with me. A few notable exceptions to me were Alfeto Valley, Eagus Wilderness, and Agnus Colony (Day), but even these areas still feel very subdued and laid back compared to the series' usual output. Nothing like Xenoblade 2's Mor Ardain here, that's for sure!
For a soundtrack with so many cooks at the helm, it's tricky to nail down exactly what went wrong here, but it feels like enormous wasted potential. No matter how bad or good Xenoblade 3 turned out to be, it could at least be guaranteed the music would have some knockout moments to keep coming back to listen to over the years, right? I'm sorry to say that for me, this was not the case.
The Story
Despite the 3 of the title, Xenoblade 3 wants you to absorb it for the most part as an original, standalone story; Something to engage with on its own terms. In the words of its own director, it may be the thematic conclusion to the series, but crucially, not narratively. It is especially confusing to me then, as a returning Xenoblade player, just how much is ripped in this department from previous games, even when compared to the other aspects of this game that already borrows so much that it doesn't need. A new character in Chapter 1 is introduced and dies immediately. For no reason at all, the nature of their blaze-of-glory death is the exact same of a certain beloved Xenoblade 1 character... but we just met this guy like a minute ago, so it doesn't mean anything. A certain character is defeated in a mech and dies by the main character's own hand. The cinematography of this scene is a shot-for-shot recreation of the part in Xenoblade 1 where Shulk defeats Egil aboard Yaldabaoth. I'm sure there are more moments than these to pick out, but they proved insanely distracting when I happened to clue into them. Melia from Xenoblade 1 and Nia from Xenoblade 2 are just... back. Not reimagined. Just literally the same characters. There's nothing outright offensive that they do with their presence here but I can't imagine new players will get much out of them considering how pointless their presence feels. The reuse of all this imagery is utterly devoid of meaning. They were important moments from the previous games, so putting them here will make this game important too, right? Quite the opposite, in fact it makes these moments feel cheapened.
As for what's new in Xenoblade 3, the core cast of characters who are taking in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world are who you're going to be experiencing the bulk of this story through. The English voice-acting early on shows itself to be a welcome improvement compared to the complete embarrassment that 2's dub turned out to be, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see unique English lip-synching for all of the dialog. The performances aren't the best the series has seen, but it's definitely passable, and the effort that went into achieving even that that is undeniably present. The new tools used to create these cutscenes and give these characters more realistic expressions and movements is some of their best technical work yet. The stage is set to tell a fantastic Xenoblade story here, and that's made apparent rather early on. In spite of the misfired old, perhaps the original elements of the game will get the chance to take the lead and show me somewhere new that the series has never taken me before!
The plot's focus bounces around between a few genres of scene, be it an unusually-punctual bath scene where we're treated to Lanz's immaculately toned back muscles, anime action scenes, slice-of-life getting-to-know-the-characters-antics, and perhaps... ahem... most overtly... romance... Early on it becomes very apparent that between the six of you, each Keves party member has an opposite-sex Agnus counterpart for them to be romantically paired off with, and vice versa. That these pairings will eventually form relationships is heavily implied throughout, but it never feels like there's very much chemistry there to justify it. Each particular couple hangs out together because that's what the game design of the Ouroboros pairings demand, and it feels like this happens for little reason more than "because it's supposed to." The compulsory heterosexuality doesn't stop there of course, because the characters later discover a whole sparking city that teaches them about the ways of love, marriage, and most importantly, child-rearing. For characters who have already been fed a "meaning of life" by their military higher-ups, I understand why providing them this as an alternative is important, but in all the cutscenes I couldn't help but notice that even all the background couples in this location were male and female. Are gay people allowed to exist in this world? If the meaning of life is reproduction between a man and a woman, am I as a gay man a "waste" of life by that definition? Of course not, because this part of the game is scared-straight propaganda for otaku, but it's a slog to sit through nonetheless until the story gets back to its other interests. I should note that in spite of my utter distaste for anything romantic in Xenoblade 2, Shulk and Fiora from Xenoblade 1 are a couple I truly found myself rooting for all throughout that game. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the very idea of male/female chemistry, but it's completely missing here in Xenoblade 3 and it only feels like so much time is spent on it because it's been mandated by the powers that be.
Outside of the romantic factors, my enjoyment of the party as individuals felt fairly uneven. Some I found incredibly annoying and had no interest in learning more about, like Sena (if perhaps only for the Xenoblade 2 stink that her character design clearly reeks of) and Eunie (for the more literal stink that she won't stop talking about via various bathing references that she doesn't stop making for the first 15 hours), to appreciable but unremarkable average-Joes like Noah and Lanz (who perhaps would become significantly more interesting to me if they could "find the meaning of life" with each other instead), to the final two who I find to be the true standouts: Taion and Mio.
I'll start with Taion, as he's my #2 favorite. Throughout the game, the player is treated to several flashbacks of the characters in their childhoods. For convoluted reasons I dare not get into for the sake of brevity, the characters are born at 10 and die at 20, and throughout that time they are trained as child soldiers before being sent off to war. On the Keves side, between Noah, Eunie, and Lanz, I always found these scenes dreadfully uninteresting, and dare I say even RWBY-like. It feels like watching other people do homework, which is to say ruinously boring... The history of the Agnus characters, I found, surprisingly, to be quite the opposite. When it comes to the idea of exploring these childhood pasts, it was refreshing to see the connections Taion formed and lost with the people he knew back then, and how those experiences affected who he turned out to be in the present. Because Noah is the player surrogate, you're inherently going to have more familiarity with Keves, but when you visit Taion's colony at Great Cotte Falls as an adult and have to hang out with him for a funeral there, it felt like a very sincere tone that represented one of the few times I felt the need to sit up and really absorb the weight of a scene, even if it wasn't anything especially flashy. They did this guy alright. It's also really funny when he says "I lied" during that one scene with M. You'll know the one.
Mio, of course, is blowaway. As a twenty-something there's a certain feeling of "never getting enough done" for my age that I feel in my day-to-day life... Thinking about the things that I want to achieve and then feeling like I'm running out of time for not achieving them when I see people with "more time" in their youth doing them better or faster. I get the sense that this represents somewhat of a larger generational ennui at the moment, so I find it really fascinating to make a character who is faced with this dread in a more literal sense, knowing exactly just how little time she has left. Despite my earlier expressed distaste for the obligatory heterosexual pairings, there's a sizeable collection of scenes where Mio and Noah exchange their perspectives and worldviews about this sort of thing, and they always feel like very surprisingly real and honest conversations compared to how silly the rest of the game can sometimes feel. As the story of the game progresses, so too does the passage of the dwindling time that these characters have left in the game, and it gradually becomes clearer just how heavy that weighs upon Mio's shoulders. There's just something about a character who has to figure out how to come to terms with unavoidable yet slowly approaching tragedy that I always find ravenously compelling. Eventually, this comes to a head when the gang gets imprisoned by Noah's sexy bad-boy doppelgänger, and a montage shows what used to be the rather sluggish passage of time getting faster and faster, flushing away everyone's precious time with a deliciously devastating disregard. As Mio's final days approach, she shares a conversation with Noah through their cell walls, and we see some gorgeously animated quiet weeping. Men crying is always another plus so this part of the game was really blowing me away in all respects. Truly, I had found my Griffin Winning Moment. Finally, Mio's last day arrives, and she is put to death in what is absolutely the most emotionally brutal moment in the entire game. It is stunningly powerful, and I was completely taken off-guard by how suddenly and deeply I started to care about this game for such a huge stretch. Had Monolithsoft regained their groove? Were these games good again? Are these questions rhetorical? What the Flames were they thinking... In the next scene Mio immediately and effectively comes back to life through some absolute bullshit anime superpower shenanigans that completely undoes all of the goodwill of this arc. It makes me so upset that it feels like Mio no longer deserves this #1 spot from me, but I'll always remember how this game made me feel when it seemed like they were on the right track to commit for a little bit there. One of the game's highest highs quickly brought down to one of its most disappointing lows.
Xenoblade 3's story in general has a debilitating issue of never putting its money where its mouth is. Plot threads, themes, and character arcs will often suggest one direction only to do something that completely undoes whatever weight its initial momentum was suggesting it was going to have. Characters will dramatically lose limbs and then inexplicably regain them back, only to begin to start doing it over and over again so many times it becomes almost comedic. Nearly every major "good-guy" character who is supposed to have died comes back, short of the one or two who literally die in a nuclear explosion. Anything slightly less than a nuke is grounds for revival though, I guess. So much time is wasted on this sort of back-and-forth doing and undoing of ideas that I'm utterly shocked that this is actually the fastest I've ever completed a Xenoblade game (~100 hours for 1 ~90 for 2, ~70 for 3), considering how dull most of the story is between the seas of boring and confusing exposition and emotional whiplash. It really does everything it can do to feel longer in spite of its actual length.
The weakest part of the story, to me, was the villains. Xenoblade 3 has more of them than ever, but the majority of them fail to leave a lasting impression. Everybody wears the same red outfits with slightly different design motifs, (one is shaped like an owl, one is shaped like the letter X, etc.), but their presence quickly becomes repetitive and monotonous. Nobody knows why anybody is doing anything for reasons besides "because they're the bad guys", and when directly asked this question, both N and X both answer with "because it amuses me." Well shit! It sure doesn't amuse me! For how many of these snuffing things there are you may as well replace them with Goombas because they have exactly as much nuance as video game antagonists. Deeply disappointing for a JRPG to specifically drop the ball in this department. I like N a little bit more than the rest, but I'll be honest, I'm a simple man, and it's only because of his design and I want a man like that to bully me. It is NOT because he is well-written.
Miscellaneous
I found myself really let down by the final dungeon. Both 1 and 2 did a great job in this regard both visually and musically, and yet despite having completed this game four hours ago I already cannot tell you how the music here goes. Way too purple, not nearly enough palette variety, copy-pasted assets as far as the eye can see, and every single enemy you meet here is just a purple lazer-reskin of something you've fought before. For how long it is it is absolutely astonishing that there's not a single new encounter you'll find here. This is where it feels the game really could spent some more time in the workshop. It leaves me to wonder if its release being swapped with Splatoon 3 hurt it in this regard.
The final boss fight takes an hour and has no checkpoints. If you die, you're booted back to the title screen and have to start all the way back from the start, including the early scripted battle with a countless barrage of in-battle cutscenes that you can't skip and three back-to-back mandatory chain attacks that you have no choice but to do and then watch. Especially confusing given the series' history of rather generous final boss checkpoints... I am not joking when I say having to go back that far significantly soured my opinion of this game. I cannot believe they thought it was okay to ship something that egregious. Extremely disrespectful of the player's time and I really hope they patch it.
Were my experience with the final boss not already a slap in the face, there's a certain nod to Xenoblade 2 that certainly slaps as hard as it can possibly muster at the last possible moment. You'll know it when you see it.
Conclusion
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 proves it can occasionally strive for greater heights than its lowest lows, but fails to stay up consistently long enough to truly become great. Would be a much better experience if it pulled its own head out of its ass. If they do another one of these I probably won't feel the need to pick it up right away since my curiosity regarding the sporadic quality of these releases has likely been sated, but if the end of this trilogy finally allows them to set off on new, wholly original ventures, I wish them all the best.
It is strange to think though that this is like, Nintendo's biggest JRPG series now. Humble beginnings for sure, but considering the increasingly middling quality of these games it really feels like it oughtn't be the only game in town when it comes to Nintendo's output. Wishful thinking.
Do you ever yearn? I yearn. Oh yes, yes, I yearn. Often I sit, and yearn... Have you yearned?
I played this game back in 2021, so apologies if my memories of this game are a bit murky. I'd like to dive into this game a bit more thoroughly, but that would require a second playthrough, the time investment of which this game does not deserve.
Sea of Solitude was the sort of game that, as someone who only has access to games on Switch and Mac for the time being, repeatedly taunted me from the corner of my eye for a couple of years before its eventual port to the Switch with this version of the game. In that time, I heard lots of good buzz surrounding it! The fuzzy impressions I got was that it was one of those narratively deep, gameplay-lite, emotionally rich experiences that indie games so love to attempt. While the phrase many might associate with this category would be "walking simulator", for this specific sub-category I tend towards "Journey-like. The sort of game that shoots for the ceiling, that you know for a fact will make you cry. So with this in mind, I followed up on the studio's socials, and patiently waited for a few years, knowing that eventually a good game would wash up at my feet.
When I finally booted it up for the first time, I was immediately met with about the harshest slap to the face an unassuming gamer like me could expect: The QUANTIC DREAM logo. I had just given $25 to David Cage and I didn't even know it. I later discovered the director is a "big fan" of his work. For a game so primarily about abuse it's a bizarre thing to read.
As someone who somewhat actively seeks out games that I think will make me cry, I can pretty quickly pick up on a particular tone where I can tell that this effect is something that the game really wants to achieve, but doesn't have too much experience or confidence in delivering it. Sea of Solitude wants to touch on quite a few heavy topics (divorce, bullying, and bad relationships to name a few!), and while these ostensibly seem to be drawn from personal experience from the game's writer, the final product, disappointingly does not hit a single one of these notes correctly when their times come.
It seems that its creators almost completely lacked the self-reflection to realize that, as it stands, the depictions of these subjects range from goofy to outright offensive. A giant lizard that represents the main character's father speaks in the most pedestrian voice imaginable about how unhappy he is with his completely adequate marriage and his shitty kids who he hates. A swarm of shadow-children chase you through a school and repeatedly call you a "sissy". I didn't cry. I laughed. The harder this game thought it was hitting me with its deepest moments, the harder I kept laughing.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is the sort of stuff that doesn't deserve to be laughed at, but Sea of Solitude's execution is so wildly mishandled it didn't really leave me with any other possibly appropriate human reaction. I felt like I was experiencing something about as nuanced as the ABC direct-to-TV film "Cyberbu//y", if not worse.
What I find especially curious is that what I played is "The Director's Cut". After the original release, the developers rewrote the game's script, and this is supposedly the improved version of what they originally shipped. Jesus Christ! I shudder to imagine how much worse it was before if this is what they did with a few years of hindsight and the opportunity to redo some of their worst mistakes...
I'll end my review with one more slap in the face just as I had at the start. Did you know that the mother in this game is directly modelled after US Vice President Kamala Harris? I am not joking. Apparently the director is a "big fan" of her work as well, though what that could possibly mean aside from heinous cop shit I can't remotely imagine. For those looking for a game that explores the themes that Sea of Solitude does, you're not going to find it on the other side of anything starts with a Quantic Dream logo. When that day comes, shoot those guys $25 instead of these clowns.
Sea of Solitude was the sort of game that, as someone who only has access to games on Switch and Mac for the time being, repeatedly taunted me from the corner of my eye for a couple of years before its eventual port to the Switch with this version of the game. In that time, I heard lots of good buzz surrounding it! The fuzzy impressions I got was that it was one of those narratively deep, gameplay-lite, emotionally rich experiences that indie games so love to attempt. While the phrase many might associate with this category would be "walking simulator", for this specific sub-category I tend towards "Journey-like. The sort of game that shoots for the ceiling, that you know for a fact will make you cry. So with this in mind, I followed up on the studio's socials, and patiently waited for a few years, knowing that eventually a good game would wash up at my feet.
When I finally booted it up for the first time, I was immediately met with about the harshest slap to the face an unassuming gamer like me could expect: The QUANTIC DREAM logo. I had just given $25 to David Cage and I didn't even know it. I later discovered the director is a "big fan" of his work. For a game so primarily about abuse it's a bizarre thing to read.
As someone who somewhat actively seeks out games that I think will make me cry, I can pretty quickly pick up on a particular tone where I can tell that this effect is something that the game really wants to achieve, but doesn't have too much experience or confidence in delivering it. Sea of Solitude wants to touch on quite a few heavy topics (divorce, bullying, and bad relationships to name a few!), and while these ostensibly seem to be drawn from personal experience from the game's writer, the final product, disappointingly does not hit a single one of these notes correctly when their times come.
It seems that its creators almost completely lacked the self-reflection to realize that, as it stands, the depictions of these subjects range from goofy to outright offensive. A giant lizard that represents the main character's father speaks in the most pedestrian voice imaginable about how unhappy he is with his completely adequate marriage and his shitty kids who he hates. A swarm of shadow-children chase you through a school and repeatedly call you a "sissy". I didn't cry. I laughed. The harder this game thought it was hitting me with its deepest moments, the harder I kept laughing.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is the sort of stuff that doesn't deserve to be laughed at, but Sea of Solitude's execution is so wildly mishandled it didn't really leave me with any other possibly appropriate human reaction. I felt like I was experiencing something about as nuanced as the ABC direct-to-TV film "Cyberbu//y", if not worse.
What I find especially curious is that what I played is "The Director's Cut". After the original release, the developers rewrote the game's script, and this is supposedly the improved version of what they originally shipped. Jesus Christ! I shudder to imagine how much worse it was before if this is what they did with a few years of hindsight and the opportunity to redo some of their worst mistakes...
I'll end my review with one more slap in the face just as I had at the start. Did you know that the mother in this game is directly modelled after US Vice President Kamala Harris? I am not joking. Apparently the director is a "big fan" of her work as well, though what that could possibly mean aside from heinous cop shit I can't remotely imagine. For those looking for a game that explores the themes that Sea of Solitude does, you're not going to find it on the other side of anything starts with a Quantic Dream logo. When that day comes, shoot those guys $25 instead of these clowns.
2016
This game gave me a crippling Toad Rally addiction.
2019
I initially purchased Regina & Mac with the intent to play it on Wii U, but quickly discovered that I would never be doing so any time soon. The developer released an unfinished version that didn't support TV Play. At all. Best you're getting is a black screen. Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
Before they could patch this, the developer supposedly did something to lose their license to continue developing for Wii U, and so any chance of the game being playable on that console seemed to disappear for good. Later, Diplodocus Games re-released it for Nintendo Switch, and I bought it a second time. Another Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
There's a very real possibility that I may have invested more time, money, and mental energy into Regina & Mac than any other person in the world. What is it that draws me to this strange little game like a siren destined to forsake me? Was it the novelty of a Wii U game released years after its console of choice was discontinued? The kitschy Grant-Kirkhope-cover-band music? The feeling I felt when staring directly into Mac's dead eyes? Or maybe it was the way his perfectly still, clumsily-sculpted clay-like corpse glided robotically above his spherical Rayman extremities across vast landscapes comprised of hundreds of resized variations of a single cube model.
If anybody reading has ever grown up with Roblox, the way this game is assembled may begin to jog some fuzzy memories. Back in the early days of that platform, kids used the primitive blocky building tools available at their disposal to try to create their best fuzzy facsimiles of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. "Adventure games", they were categorized as. These 3D platformers for the most part fell very short of their lofty ambitions, but sometimes the greater the gap between intent and outcome grew, the brighter they shone. There are real pieces of shit from back in the day that I would still be cheering on if you sat me in front of them today. Nowadays, these sorts of endeavors are painstakingly-polished affairs made by teams of professional Roblox devs, but Regina and Mac feels exactly like the sort of clunky, improvisational mess that only 2008 could bless/curse upon us.
Despite the way this game begs me to eviscerate it, I can't help but want to be kinder. As I glitched my way through platforms, repeatedly gave myself headaches from the obnoxious sound design with every play session, and at one point fell out the world only to loop back around the sky into a duplicate, slightly-different version of the world, still, I couldn't muster the strength to flat-out reject Regina and Mac as the utter refuse it ought to be regarded as. Perhaps it's the resemblance to the sort of thing kids like me would have been making all those years ago. It'd feel unfair, like striking a mirror image of my younger self. However, as much as I wish to follow through on such a mercy, it certainly wasn't a troupe of tykes who obtained a Nintendo Developer license and published a game on Wii U and Nintendo Switch. This is not a free game you can launch from a browser. I paid in totality Thirty Canadian Dollars for this. That's fifteen toonies!
The sort of Roblox magic I described earlier was often born from the wild, messy, impulsive dreams of the children who were making them. They were bizarre, risky, and unpredictable in the way only games that look like this could and should. The reality, unfortunately, is that this game is an unimaginative retread. A game whose gap between intent and outcome results in no unexpected jazzy flashes of brilliance, but rather an inescapable dullness. It is the product of risk-averse adults with access to far more sophisticated development tools and resources who used all their might to make the bird say "hell" sometimes. The potential nostalgic feelings that this game bubbles up that would turn me into an unabashed Regina & Mac Lover fail to ever make it to a boil, never paying off in any sort of way that would have made it worth my time or money in retrospect. Undeniably, it is half-baked.
The final boss of Regina & Mac is a Sonic-Colors-Terminal-Velocity-styled mad dash towards the camera as you're chased by a giant red cube. It comes so close to the sort of thing I'd be cheering on in a Roblox game, but instead here I only felt tired, just ready to get it over with so I could put the game down already. The deeper you delve into the bottomless pit that is Regina & Mac, the further the light fades, and the more of your soul you lose. Perhaps in the end it's befitting that the bird makes reference to the eponymously hellish fiery realm of eternal suffering. If past the first few worlds still you do not yield and burrow deeper past the surface, its fabric becomes ever more loosely-knit, coming apart at its seams until it ultimately rips itself to shreds completely and fails to resemble anything it was designed to do.
I came out the other side of Regina & Mac to live to tell the tale, but I don't think I came away with as much to say about the game as I did myself. Perhaps you will come away with this sort of growth too, if only you have the fortitude and the Canadian Dollars to do what I did. Sometimes you just need a bad game like this every now and again to appreciate what you have.
Before they could patch this, the developer supposedly did something to lose their license to continue developing for Wii U, and so any chance of the game being playable on that console seemed to disappear for good. Later, Diplodocus Games re-released it for Nintendo Switch, and I bought it a second time. Another Fifteen Canadian Dollars.
There's a very real possibility that I may have invested more time, money, and mental energy into Regina & Mac than any other person in the world. What is it that draws me to this strange little game like a siren destined to forsake me? Was it the novelty of a Wii U game released years after its console of choice was discontinued? The kitschy Grant-Kirkhope-cover-band music? The feeling I felt when staring directly into Mac's dead eyes? Or maybe it was the way his perfectly still, clumsily-sculpted clay-like corpse glided robotically above his spherical Rayman extremities across vast landscapes comprised of hundreds of resized variations of a single cube model.
If anybody reading has ever grown up with Roblox, the way this game is assembled may begin to jog some fuzzy memories. Back in the early days of that platform, kids used the primitive blocky building tools available at their disposal to try to create their best fuzzy facsimiles of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. "Adventure games", they were categorized as. These 3D platformers for the most part fell very short of their lofty ambitions, but sometimes the greater the gap between intent and outcome grew, the brighter they shone. There are real pieces of shit from back in the day that I would still be cheering on if you sat me in front of them today. Nowadays, these sorts of endeavors are painstakingly-polished affairs made by teams of professional Roblox devs, but Regina and Mac feels exactly like the sort of clunky, improvisational mess that only 2008 could bless/curse upon us.
Despite the way this game begs me to eviscerate it, I can't help but want to be kinder. As I glitched my way through platforms, repeatedly gave myself headaches from the obnoxious sound design with every play session, and at one point fell out the world only to loop back around the sky into a duplicate, slightly-different version of the world, still, I couldn't muster the strength to flat-out reject Regina and Mac as the utter refuse it ought to be regarded as. Perhaps it's the resemblance to the sort of thing kids like me would have been making all those years ago. It'd feel unfair, like striking a mirror image of my younger self. However, as much as I wish to follow through on such a mercy, it certainly wasn't a troupe of tykes who obtained a Nintendo Developer license and published a game on Wii U and Nintendo Switch. This is not a free game you can launch from a browser. I paid in totality Thirty Canadian Dollars for this. That's fifteen toonies!
The sort of Roblox magic I described earlier was often born from the wild, messy, impulsive dreams of the children who were making them. They were bizarre, risky, and unpredictable in the way only games that look like this could and should. The reality, unfortunately, is that this game is an unimaginative retread. A game whose gap between intent and outcome results in no unexpected jazzy flashes of brilliance, but rather an inescapable dullness. It is the product of risk-averse adults with access to far more sophisticated development tools and resources who used all their might to make the bird say "hell" sometimes. The potential nostalgic feelings that this game bubbles up that would turn me into an unabashed Regina & Mac Lover fail to ever make it to a boil, never paying off in any sort of way that would have made it worth my time or money in retrospect. Undeniably, it is half-baked.
The final boss of Regina & Mac is a Sonic-Colors-Terminal-Velocity-styled mad dash towards the camera as you're chased by a giant red cube. It comes so close to the sort of thing I'd be cheering on in a Roblox game, but instead here I only felt tired, just ready to get it over with so I could put the game down already. The deeper you delve into the bottomless pit that is Regina & Mac, the further the light fades, and the more of your soul you lose. Perhaps in the end it's befitting that the bird makes reference to the eponymously hellish fiery realm of eternal suffering. If past the first few worlds still you do not yield and burrow deeper past the surface, its fabric becomes ever more loosely-knit, coming apart at its seams until it ultimately rips itself to shreds completely and fails to resemble anything it was designed to do.
I came out the other side of Regina & Mac to live to tell the tale, but I don't think I came away with as much to say about the game as I did myself. Perhaps you will come away with this sort of growth too, if only you have the fortitude and the Canadian Dollars to do what I did. Sometimes you just need a bad game like this every now and again to appreciate what you have.
1997
For how memed-on this particular game has been for the last 20 years in the long list of Sonic games that the Internet has decided is deserving of such treatment, I was anticipating something much worse when I first jumped in. What I especially wasn't expecting was falling in love with this game.
There's somewhat of an unexplained learning curve regarding some of the control oddities (which in all fairness may have been alleviated with the inclusion of a manual as was originally intended), but once it clicks, Sonic R handles significantly better than Mario Kart 64 in my honest opinion. The incorporation of other classic Sonic elements like rings and jumping are a welcome addition to the kart racer formula, and they feel right at home in these lovingly-crafted spaces.
In spite of the short track list, this game is remarkably replayable. Revisiting areas with different characters and using their abilities to access new locations and try to work out where all the collectables are, all while trying to figure out how to do so in enough time to still win the races makes for some of the most manic fun I've ever felt in a racing game. I've never seen anything like it.
This one's always fun to bust out for an hour or two every few years and smoke a couple of laps to some of the catchiest gaming tunes of 1997. To this day, Sonic R still feels like a really fresh take on kart-racing, significantly more so than what the series offers nowadays in Sonic & Sega All-Stars/Team Sonic Racing.
This would be a five-star rating but I'm docking half a star because I consumed way too much Tails Doll creepypasta in my youth and it gave me untold nightmares.
There's somewhat of an unexplained learning curve regarding some of the control oddities (which in all fairness may have been alleviated with the inclusion of a manual as was originally intended), but once it clicks, Sonic R handles significantly better than Mario Kart 64 in my honest opinion. The incorporation of other classic Sonic elements like rings and jumping are a welcome addition to the kart racer formula, and they feel right at home in these lovingly-crafted spaces.
In spite of the short track list, this game is remarkably replayable. Revisiting areas with different characters and using their abilities to access new locations and try to work out where all the collectables are, all while trying to figure out how to do so in enough time to still win the races makes for some of the most manic fun I've ever felt in a racing game. I've never seen anything like it.
This one's always fun to bust out for an hour or two every few years and smoke a couple of laps to some of the catchiest gaming tunes of 1997. To this day, Sonic R still feels like a really fresh take on kart-racing, significantly more so than what the series offers nowadays in Sonic & Sega All-Stars/Team Sonic Racing.
This would be a five-star rating but I'm docking half a star because I consumed way too much Tails Doll creepypasta in my youth and it gave me untold nightmares.
2017
A game whose primary concern is reminding me of better GameCube games that I’ve already played. From Super Mario Sunshine to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, to Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, A Hat in Time is somehow lesser in every way than the sum of all its parts. It's the perfect example of a game made by somebody whose only life experience they have to draw upon for their art is that they played other videogames.
How very sad.
In every discipline, A Hat in Time is wildly unfocused. Each world having different rules for doling out its missions does not suit its own Act structure. Quantity of ideas does not equal the quality of them. The same goes for its moveset. Traversal options as wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle. This game would’ve been tremendously improved without the badge system in order to better hone the level design to certain flavors of movement. But of course, Paper Mario did it, so I guess this has to too for some reason.
There's an obsessive devotion on display here to replicating its own influences with no cohesive reasoning besides them being things that Jonas Kaerlev personally liked.
This is not how games should be made.
Each world is profoundly unmemorable and uninteresting.
Mafia Town is way too big and samey-looking for an introductory area to acquaint players with. Of course, the developers didn't care, because like with everything about this game, they mistook the fact that they could make every aspect of it "the most", they should make it "the most." Clearly nobody at Gears for Breakfast is familiar with the term "too much."
Dead Bird Studios is severely hampered by having little shared space between its individual Acts. These are spaces that at first look like they're designed for multiple objectives, but are thrown away too quickly to do anything with. Because of that, they fail to work as purely linear stages either. However, I'll admit that Train Rush is a decent linear setpiece.
Subcon Forest is another casualty of the terminal too-big-for-its-own-good disease that this entire game suffers from... but this time with lots of fog and invisible walls so it's even harder to tell where you're going! The massive tree you have to climb is an absolute nightmare of camera control. I'm shocked that it made it into the finished product. I immediately rolled my eyes whenever The Snatcher came on screen. Yes, the curses in The Thousand-Year Door were cute. Why should I care exactly that you're doing the same routine?
Alpine Skyline is where all of these problems come to a head and where the game just completely stops caring. You can tell this game went through absolute development hell because this is where they put all their assets for previously-scrapped ideas that had no place of their own. Unbelievably messy. Having 30-second sequences where you have to watch Hat Kid travel along the ziplines is ridiculously tedious. It's like they looked at the Launch Stars from Super Mario Galaxy and conspired to make the worst version of it that they possibly could.
Also was I the only one who raised an eyebrow at this plot?
"Hairy woman who wants to tell everybody what to do; led on by a misguided belief that she’s carrying out justice, takes things too far and starts hurting innocent people for minor offences, and is ultimately defeated by everybody yelling at her and telling her to go away." This reads to me like an anti-SJW parable that a Redditor wrote in 2013…
Oh wait, this game IS from 2013! Hmm…
Considering that JonTron is literally in this game I suspect that the right-wing messaging is not unintentional. People who complain about cancel culture will love this game.
Disappointingly, many will overlook A Hat in Time's numerous flaws because they think it’s funny that Hat Kid says “boop” and they mistake appreciation for its influences as appreciation for the game itself. One of the most frustratingly overrated games I've come across in recent years.
Play literally any other video game that this claims to be inspired by and you’ll have a much better time.
How very sad.
In every discipline, A Hat in Time is wildly unfocused. Each world having different rules for doling out its missions does not suit its own Act structure. Quantity of ideas does not equal the quality of them. The same goes for its moveset. Traversal options as wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle. This game would’ve been tremendously improved without the badge system in order to better hone the level design to certain flavors of movement. But of course, Paper Mario did it, so I guess this has to too for some reason.
There's an obsessive devotion on display here to replicating its own influences with no cohesive reasoning besides them being things that Jonas Kaerlev personally liked.
This is not how games should be made.
Each world is profoundly unmemorable and uninteresting.
Mafia Town is way too big and samey-looking for an introductory area to acquaint players with. Of course, the developers didn't care, because like with everything about this game, they mistook the fact that they could make every aspect of it "the most", they should make it "the most." Clearly nobody at Gears for Breakfast is familiar with the term "too much."
Dead Bird Studios is severely hampered by having little shared space between its individual Acts. These are spaces that at first look like they're designed for multiple objectives, but are thrown away too quickly to do anything with. Because of that, they fail to work as purely linear stages either. However, I'll admit that Train Rush is a decent linear setpiece.
Subcon Forest is another casualty of the terminal too-big-for-its-own-good disease that this entire game suffers from... but this time with lots of fog and invisible walls so it's even harder to tell where you're going! The massive tree you have to climb is an absolute nightmare of camera control. I'm shocked that it made it into the finished product. I immediately rolled my eyes whenever The Snatcher came on screen. Yes, the curses in The Thousand-Year Door were cute. Why should I care exactly that you're doing the same routine?
Alpine Skyline is where all of these problems come to a head and where the game just completely stops caring. You can tell this game went through absolute development hell because this is where they put all their assets for previously-scrapped ideas that had no place of their own. Unbelievably messy. Having 30-second sequences where you have to watch Hat Kid travel along the ziplines is ridiculously tedious. It's like they looked at the Launch Stars from Super Mario Galaxy and conspired to make the worst version of it that they possibly could.
Also was I the only one who raised an eyebrow at this plot?
"Hairy woman who wants to tell everybody what to do; led on by a misguided belief that she’s carrying out justice, takes things too far and starts hurting innocent people for minor offences, and is ultimately defeated by everybody yelling at her and telling her to go away." This reads to me like an anti-SJW parable that a Redditor wrote in 2013…
Oh wait, this game IS from 2013! Hmm…
Considering that JonTron is literally in this game I suspect that the right-wing messaging is not unintentional. People who complain about cancel culture will love this game.
Disappointingly, many will overlook A Hat in Time's numerous flaws because they think it’s funny that Hat Kid says “boop” and they mistake appreciation for its influences as appreciation for the game itself. One of the most frustratingly overrated games I've come across in recent years.
Play literally any other video game that this claims to be inspired by and you’ll have a much better time.