I fucking hate this game. Biggest dissapointment in my life. A downgrade in every single way from 2 outside of lighting.

First off, the ads were extremely misleading. The fact it's a mix of 1 and 2 was highlighted as a huge deal. Every trailer had a 1 or 2 character. But they don't even have a collective 10 minutes of screentime. It was also called a "conclusion to the Klaus saga". Yeah nice job at that, he isn't fucking name dropped, and NO AEGIS APPEAR!
Other big deal is the combat. Huge downgrade from 2. 7 players makes your input negligent. I was 1 level underleveled in origin and I got through it WITHOUT TOUCHING THE CONSOLE with 3 martial artist, 1 incursor, 1 troubadour, 2 signifier. The combat has no building on top of itself like 2. 2 had an amazing pattern of auto attacks->arts->specials->blade combo->fusion combo->orbs->orb burst. Ouroboros are a panic button and worse than normal combat. Chain attacks are not rewarding and so rng focused. A massive dissapointment after 2 made rng only relevant as a punishment for being unable to break orbs.
The fucking story. Oh my god I hate this story, especially the villains. First off, this game completely fails it's military fiction setting. The war isn't even a focus, it's the main cast versus mobius #27271. And on mobius, after the amazing writing that was torna, it was so dissapointing to see the fucking power rangers fights and villains. And oh my god Zed. "It amuses me." Are you fucking serious? What the hell happened. Shania is great though. As good as mikhail for me. No wonder the tragic villain is the best character.

And then another thing is the cutscenes. They are so lame and dissapointing compared to 2. No awesome anime choreography, just repeatedly punching a scary mobius that wants to fuel it's dumb flame clock. That's it's own thing. The cast never had difficulty in combat ever. There's no good all hope is lost moment. The eclipse is good in the moment but it's saved by an outsiders 4d chess and only serves to make mobius look dumb. It does not affect the outcome of the story snd condenses Noah's arc into 10 minutes. Compare that to Rex in chapter 7.

The story also is so unambitious. Gears and 2 tackled so much. 3 only is a love story with power rangers fights sometimes. It's purely a love story. Characters don't have their own narrative relevance outside of noah and mio that really matters. In 2, everyone has the final goal of elysium, and in 1 it's revenge against mechon and then zanza.
A downgrade from 2 in every aspect except lighting I guess.
But hey, at least consul D is hot as fuck.

This is pre story DLC thoughts. There's a lot I love about this game. The gameplay and side quests are the best in the series. The main party is great. The premise has a strong hook to it, especially having played the previous entries. The biggest problem with this game is the way its narrative ends. It feels likes the game hits the peak in the end of Chapter 5/beginning of Chapter 6 and nothing really hits that mark again. Chapter 7 required some backtracking and having characters show up that make it feel like padding. The final boss battle is epic, such, but it's incredibly drawn out and dying part way through it puts you back at the beginning again. I remember being upset with how the story ended because it felt like I missed something, but this detail is mentioned exclusively in a post game quest that requires beating the game. I think it works well with the story that's being told, but it feels more like it an ends on a sizzle rather than a bang, despite trying its best to go for biggest scope possible. Despite this not being my favorite game, it's incredibly strong. Let's see how the DLC pans out.

(Ramble Ramble, these thoughts are still fresh)

A great opening hook and ending can't make up for the bloat that makes up the majority.

I have no real issues with the gameplay. It does feel more approachable from the outset, but its still Xeno. It basically feels like a mix of all the systems so far which is nice. It is strange how the game provides incentives to fight enemies above your level but then punishes you for being over-leveled by reducing your CP gains to basically zero. There were long stretches where I didn't get any class levels because I was just too overpowered. You need these levels to unlock class quests too, I don't get why it's like this.

My biggest gripes are with the pacing and story presentation. Heroes and Villians are introduced and discarded at such a rapid rate that they leave little lasting impact, and placing substantial character moments behind side-quests is such a baffling decision especially since not much happens in the main story until the last third. Several times I noticed the story would set up a plot-thread only for it for it to be completely removed from the main plot to move on the next one. They pressure you to do side-content so much I wonder why they made most of them optional in the first place. These quests usually involve Moebius in some way or another who suffer from the same issues with content bloat. Threatening at first, they are so overused that they become the least threatening set of villains in the series - did they really need to add one for each letter of the alphabet? There is one who sets up an interesting premise but he's also completely optional, truly wasted story potential.

In general, the game really could have benefited from a tighter focus, stripping back the number of Heroes in particular to give them greater focus in the story. It really is the strangest case of a game doing too much and too little I think I've ever played.

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

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

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

For its seventh mainline game, Final Fantasy produced Final Fantasy 7 – an actual, honest-to-goodness Landmark of spectacle and storytelling techniques for both RPGs and AAA video games.

For its seventh mainline game, the Xeno series produced, uh, this.

That’s not a roast, I swear. The two series are, at their core, interested in doing different things. Final Fantasy is here to reinvent itself with every new installment, even if these constant reinventions seem to be asymptotically approaching a AAA character action game. The Xeno series is here to Talk About Big Stuff and repackage weepy-ass German anti-philosophers for terminally isolated suburban teenage males.

(That last bit was a roast.)

Easy jokes and/or personal politics aside, you might see the problem here. For all their flaws, Final Fantasy games are at least primarily interested in being video games. That’s good, because they’re video games. Xeno games are not primarily interested in being video games. That’s a problem, because they’re video games.

That said, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is pretty enjoyable and successful when it wants to be a video game. Hell, it’s probably better than a YouTube video essay about Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

At long last, here’s a Xeno game with a simple back-of-the-envelope concept: A world comprised almost entirely of two nations locked in an eternal war. The only thing the teenage tank-bred citizen soldiers of these nations can look forward to is a personal visit from their queen and a peaceful public execution if they can survive for 10 years. (I can’t imagine a more metal death than a dozen flautists playing so hard at a person that they dissolve into orbs of light. Monolith is, if nothing else, far ahead of Danganronpa.)

The concept is expanded upon with enough skill to pleasantly surprise after the storytelling of Xenoblade 1 and 2. We meet our six heroes and breathe a sigh of relief as we learn that at least four of them have more than one dimension to their personalities. As they fight to liberate the world from the forever war, they learn about things they never encountered in the Logan’s Run war machine: aging, families, and – gasp – human reproduction. They visit other military outposts and learn precisely how hundreds of years of war have robbed people of meaningful choice and reduced them into a spectrum of coping mechanisms. Prominent side content is self-aware enough to dodge easy answers: even as the party visits a city where people start families and live full-length human lives outside of the 10-year time limit, they quickly learn that a self-interested ruling class and the war outside can still combine to eliminate choice and create real, meaningful suffering. Whether or not you are interested in the war, the war is interested in you.

So here you are, wandering around a world so massive and explorable that the Nintendo Switch audibly (and visually) groans under the strain of it all. You realize that you don’t miss the worst excesses of the previous games – the interface streamlining here is welcome, even if the accessories menu is somehow worse than Xenoblade 2’s. You’re kinda baffled but entertained by the Chain Attack system, which allows you to stop playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for the Switch and start playing the indie RPG version of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that you bought for 20 bucks on Steam. Maybe you’re noticing that, in a snazzy thematic parallel, your own arsenal of choices in combat and world traversal are expanding as the party grants the choice of a life outside of the forever war to more and more people. The game is Talking About Big Stuff without Talking About Big Stuff, and it’s a pretty good time.

And then, about two-thirds of the way in, in an hour-long cutscene complex, the back-of-the-envelope concept that was meticulously built out into the interesting world that your party had a hand in creating is shoved aside. In a blob of villainous mustache-twirling, anime fighting, and a time-passing montage set to a J-pop song, the video game is over. The Talking About Big Stuff has begun.

To be fair, maybe you’re into that sort of thing. Maybe the things that a lot of people don’t like about JRPG stories are the things you love. If so, you’re in heaven. And even if you’re not into that sort of thing, there are one or two well-executed bits to be found in the home stretch. But if people standing stock still in the middle of an intense fight to plan their strategy and talk shop isn’t your bag, you sprint right back into what’s been working: a moderately functional job system, pachinko-machine optimization combat, and character-focused side quest chains whose narratives feel feather-light compared to the main story.

The plot kind of wobbles to its conclusion. There’s a fetch quest and a movie theater. The final sequence does The JRPG Things and even earns a real emotional response to one or two of them. But once you’ve finished Killing A Concept, you realize you just played a game that either lacks confidence in itself or doesn’t value its strengths. It’s good at a lot of things, but for whatever reason, it’s here to do something very different. (More than one character in this game struggles with this very issue, by the way.) That doesn’t erase or cancel out the good stuff by any means. But since the game stops caring, you have to work hard not to follow suit.

Look, I get that it’s hard to make a really good work of art about philosophy. (That’s probably because people can just read philosophy if they really want to.) But you could make an entire RPG out of the Small Stuff. Maybe you could even use the Small Stuff to meticulously outline Big Stuff with a minimum of self-conscious explanations and lectures. It wouldn’t be as good as Chrono Trigger because Chrono Trigger is about People Doing Things, but it would be a good time. If not a utopia, then maybe a shining land of small things that make up something bigger. A golden country, you might even call it. Someone should make an RPG like that.

Perspective is important when it comes to JRPGs, for most people the first few JRPGs that they tackle will always hold a special value. Those who have played 10s or 100s of JRPGs know that a lot of these stories commonly share the same elements, some people become jaded about JRPGs some people work around it. I think something I really appreciate about having played a lot of JRPGs is that my respect for the genre is on a new level. I always look forward to how a game tackles a similar subject compared to how another game did it. I want to say Xenoblade 3 was no exception, there were things I genuinely really liked in this game. Like how it explains why the world was like it is, this game reminded me of a few games I really like with similar worlds and in a few ways this game managed to hone in on aspects that those other games didn’t or were just weaker parts, the Mio execution part was a great idea and scene that I’d love to see in another game and maybe even brought further, I also really enjoyed the battle system, the chain attacks were my favourite part of the battle system and I loved how much strategy went into them. Other than that, honestly XB3 probably has my least favorite battle system out of the main 3 Xenoblade's but I didn’t really go out of my way to go into the depths of it like 1 or 2 and nonetheless I appreciated it anyways.

I don't care about this game. Even the good parts.
Nowadays, A cast and overall charm are very much a make or break in a JRPG for me. I found these guys to be an all-around good cast in the end but, I couldn't ever really feel them. Something I loved in Xenoblade 1 and 2 or even other games I love is that I can understand someone's character from the environment that they came from or their strong personalities or backstory. I didn't get a feel for this cast ever because they mostly felt really boring or their backstory was just Joran. I can't really just come on here and shit on the game for this because that was kind of the point that it was going for, these guys don't have a lot of life behind them because they are mostly vessels for battle.

I think one thing that really fucked this game over for me was once I saw that ethel was in the party, I realized that the game was just going to do a lot of focusing on one-note side characters. I feel like this was such a bad decision and it kind of took away fire that could have been used to flesh out the main cast more, I can't even name a single hero I liked lol.

I won’t get into too much, but I seriously think this might be one of the ugliest JRPGs worlds I’ve played in recent memory and this series I love for how pretty the worlds are. The chain attack theme is good, but that’s about all I have to say about the ost. Its kind of just washed over me.

I think my main issue is how the game handled its messages, for one, I felt like it shared messages with the second game, 2 had vague meaning of life messages flowing in the background for the cast because a lot of them were trying to find a place in their dying world. Xenoblade 3 was a lot louder with its messaging but I seriously disliked how it was handled. Alot of the messages were relegated to side characters or the main villains who would be on screen for like 30 minutes say their thing and then die or join your party then it feels like we move on to the next thing and the topic is dropped. I found a lot of these characters reasonings were super dumb and not relatable in any sense. N is fine but I think he's super close to what they were trying to do with Jin and for that, Idk I just don't care. I don't even want to get into the stupid villains so I'll just leave it at that lol.

The reason I talked about perspective at the beginning is because in a weird way regardless of all the problems or just personal nitpicks I have with this game, I kind of understand why people are like BROOOOO IT’S THE GREATEST OR I LOVE IT. I think that the messages in this game are very important to those who are Young, Lost or Even just need a reminder maybe if I had played this game when I was much younger it might have had a massive impact on me and maybe I would have had an undying love for it, Most of my dislike for the game just basically comes down to me knowing what I like from how many JRPGs I’ve played in the past and Xenoblade 3 just didn’t do it for me, regardless I’m glad people are getting something out of this game even though I didn’t. For me there’s one game I’ve played in the past that just did what Xenoblade 3 was trying to do, and that was the one that ended up having an impact on me.

I think there's some fundamental quality missing here that I personally came to love the Xenoblade series for and made me hold it in such high regard like plot, characters, story, worlds, music, and narrative. Just worked so well together in 1 and 2 and for many, it made an engaging unforgettable experience, that I seriously couldn't find in 3.

xeno3 has, like, the inverse problem as xenoblade 2--the first 2/3s are really fun and good, but man is the ending underwhelming. After chapter 5, the game's story pretty much devolves into JRPG trope sludge, and it begins to feel like a haphazard collage of a bunch of ideas plucked from other games of its ilk instead of an actually cohesive narrative.

It certainly doesn't help that the solid 5-10 hours spent collecting metal for the ship and treking through Origin are the most legitimately miserable portions in the entire game, stringing minutes long fights after fights with minimal exposition, leaving the entire conclusion shoved into the final hour or so.

But this game will convince you of quality for a good share of its runtime. It goes down exceedingly easy, the combat is better than either of the previous games and I think the hero quests are the best way they've implemented "somewhat mandatory side content" yet. Exploration is generally pretty fun and the intermediary banter between party members is good enough to not be trying (like in xenoblade 2, lol), but maybe a little lacking in terms of what could have been. During the sequence with M's homecoming I was ready to call this game better than Xenoblade 1--but this thought was with the assumption that the narrative would be wrapped up cohesively and competently. But there are so many questions left at the conclusion, so many loose ends that thinking about this game as anything past an excellent timewaster will just lead to disappointment. Who was Z, really? What was with the annihilation events? Adding onto that, what was with the fog? Was it just, like, a glitch in the system or was there something more to it? Why did the worlds have to separate at the end?

Why was this game 55 god damn hours long?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before I get into it, vague spoiler warning for most other Xeno series games in this review (especially Xenogears).

Xenoblade Chronicles 3, as any game, has a lot of different aspects to it. Some parts hit hard, and some parts are a miss. I don't want to sound too negative about a game that I genuinely enjoyed my time with, especially being part of my favorite series in the world, so I'll go over some positives first.

The cast of characters were all highly lovable and enjoyable. The Xenoblade series in particular often has some aspect of its main party lacking; in Xenoblade 1, the party were all united in their feelings of revenge and felt like a team, however as individual characters some are not as fleshed out as they could have been; in Xenoblade 2, most of the cast feels three dimensional with great writing, but the dynamic between them was simply lacking. Xenoblade 3 rectifies this by taking the best of both worlds: the strong interparty dynamic of 1 and the great character writing of 2. All of the flavor text present in 3, the dialogue when entering a new area, unique interactions with NPCs, banter with the hero characters, serves to make the cast feel that much more alive and like a real group of friends. The post-battle dialogue is a little lacking, but everything else more than makes up for it. Even throughout the story, it truly feels like everyone gets some chance to shine. Of course, there are some that get the spotlight slightly more than others, but Takahashi did not lie when he said that he intended for the final script count from the main six to be about equal. I think the only other game(s) in the Xeno series that have a party which nails both of these points is Xenosaga, especially since we have multiple protagonists throughout it, so it’s certainly impressive that 20 years later we finally get something similar.

I'm also very glad that the story does not seem to be very pushy about its romantic pairings. Xeno has had issues with that in the past (we do not talk about the photograph of the cast of 2 at the ending, that is proof enough of the problems), but in this game that's very much a nonissue. Taion and Eunie only have a couple throwaway lines that could be interpreted as such, and Lanz and Sena have practically nothing at all. It's just nice to see everyone as friends instead. Noah and Mio, the main romance, have a genuinely good dynamic as well. I'll admit, they aren't my favorite canon Xeno romance (Fei and Elly FTW, plus I consider Shion/KOS-MOS to be real as hell), but for what they are they're very cute; much better than whatever was going on in XBC1 and 2, to say the least.

On the topic of Xenogears, I also want to make a side note that I absolutely adore the callbacks. N and M paralleling Grahf and Miang to Noah and Mio's Fei and Elly was awesome. Chapter 5 revealing that they are alternate versions of each other, with M having Miang's body hopping powers (albeit executed differently) and N retaining his memories from his past lives made me super excited; the Contact and the Antitype much, anybody? Even at the end, when N and M sacrifice themselves to protect the party/the world, I was reminded of Grahf's sacrifice. (I might be a little biased though because Grahf/Lacan and Elly are some of my favorite characters, haha).

I briefly also want to mention the gameplay. Gameplay is usually not make-or-break for me, as I find the story and its characters to be what I care most about, but I just can’t not praise it. Genuinely, this is the best gameplay that the Xenoblade series has ever had. It is a perfect combination of 1 and 2’s battle systems which takes the best aspects of both. The hero system is really fun, a much improved version of the Blade system from XBC2 without the infamous gacha, and the classes are super fun to mix and match and experiment with.

However, the game is not without its faults, as I'm sure you can gleam by my rating of it. In particular, it is the story itself that falls flat for me. Some aspects of it hit truly hard, like the fact that it looped back to the opening cutscene is fucking cool as hell. Others though, not so much.

This game was banked upon being the culmination of the numbered Xenoblade games, a combination of both 1 and 2. I don't mind it not being a direct sequel, I actually vastly prefer it that way, but I do feel somewhat cheated out of what I was expecting. After waiting for 5 years after 2's release, with the lore it expanded upon the Xenoblade series, this just feels like a let down. Where are any mentions of the Conduit? the Trinity Processor?

Furthermore, Future Connected was said to tie in directly to the future of the series, and aside from Melia having World Ender, seeing the Monado Replica EX, and hearing the remixed battle theme when in battle with her as a Hero (which is really amazing, might I add), there is barely any mention to it at all. What about the Fogbeasts? the Telethia research? It makes sense that this is not a perfect combination of the worlds given that it is stuck in a timeloop, but that conclusion is unsatisfying to me. While it does capture the Xeno vibes perfectly, if it were not a numbered Blade game I would have liked it that much more. It just feels like a tease after all that we were expecting for so many years, and the hype leading up to it.

The villains especially, I find, were largely uninteresting. Some were cool (I absolutely adore Joran, his narrative really hit hard for me), but most were very one note. Moebius in general were not as fleshed out as I would have liked them to be and left me with more questions than answers. They are the culmination of the peoples’ anxieties about the two worlds remerging, but how is it that the people even knew about the two worlds merging to begin with? As far as we know, it is only the party of XBC2 that knew the world was cut in twain, due to hearing this from the man that started it all directly. Not even in XBC1 does the party find out that there is a parallel dimension to theirs, only that Klaus reset the universe to create a new one in his hubris (I blame this on Alvis’s bastardly tendencies, but that is beside the point). Moebius—and Z, by extension—are interesting in theory, but are truly lacking in execution. They are a far cry from Xenoblade’s other villains.

This could just be my personal take, but I find that Z did not feel quite as all-encompassing as neither Zanza nor Malos. By the end of both XBC1 and XBC2, you truly feel as though you are fighting the culmination of all of your efforts in order to set things right. This is true in XBC3 as well, but it feels much more self-contained as opposed to the astronomical scale the Xenoblade series has done before. Saga and Gears have had “conceptual” final bosses as well, but the stakes did feel higher; again, it makes sense within the plot the scale on which Z is the villain, but I take issue with that in of itself. Regardless, as a character, Z had next to no substance to him aside from being what he is.

With all my criticism, I do not want to come across as too harsh. I did still tear up at the ending of the game, particularly the thematic significance of Noah throwing away Lucky Seven and moving on with his life just as he had been advocating for throughout the story (though it does bother me we do not know much of the lore behind it, still). Some parts of the game truly felt like coming home, finding the Distant Fingertip again in this game made me more emotional than anything—almost replicating the wonder I felt when I first played XBC1 as a young teen. The message XBC3 aims to convey, about moving on from trauma and looking forward to the future regardless of whatever may come, is a beautiful one. This thematic significance certainly does fit with the rest of the Blade games, what with XBC1’s narrative about seizing one’s own destiny and XBC2’s finding value in one’s life. However, as a conclusion to this sub trilogy of game, I do not find it satisfying. At its core, the numbered Xenoblade games follow the story of what happens when a mad scientist seeks the divine and destroys everything in the process, and XBC3 lacks the final conclusion by being set right before it would have happened. I definitely would have enjoyed it more if it either lost all reference to the previous games to stand on its own, or bridged that gap properly. What we are left with is a flimsy suspension connecting the two, rather than the iron road I had imagined. Perhaps it is my fault for having expectations that were too high, but Takahashi has proven time and time again that his works deserve it.

TL;DR: This is a great game, but not a great sequel. I really enjoyed my time with it (and I’m not done yet! I’m still doing the postgame, which has some really amazing content), despite all of the criticisms I have, and perhaps with time my thoughts will change. I do highly encourage anyone to play this themselves and form their own opinion on it, though. This is just my own opinion, after all. :)

I’d also like to add that I’m very excited about the upcoming story DLC. Perhaps I should temper my expectations lest I be disappointed again, but after what TTGC did to XBC2, it’s difficult not to be. If the DLC addresses that which was lost, especially given its breadth, my opinion of this game will most certainly improve. Here’s to hoping it’ll be good!