it's 2:30 am after fighting the final boss for like an hour and a half straight, because its fight is just that long, and this sort of feels like it perfectly sums up my second-biggest issue with xenoblade 3, which is that it doesn't respect your time. sidequests are filler, dialogue and animations and battles in general are all plodding and drag their feet, much moreso than the previous two games despite those being similar "80-hour jrpg" affairs. xenoblade 3 just feels like it's 20 hours longer than it has to be because of fluff and because of thoughtless design.

speaking of thoughtless - that's my biggest complaint. so much of the world is just sort of, put forward as a given, in ways that make me wonder what's going on at monolith soft. i don't think anyone needs me to tell them why the tirkin are weird, but this game is just FULL of shit like that. bizarre worldbuilding decisions where the writers desperately want to have their cakes and eat them too. no one MADE them write it like this. i can't say much more without spoilers but so much of this is fumbled royally.

and yet, at the core of everything there is a certain refined xenoblade charm that remains there. i know i've front loaded this review with negative things i have to say. i dropped this game for like a year halfway through before i could finally finish it in 2024, and that's not for no reason. playing this game on hard mode is pretty miserable. but i came back for that certain something, and i don't regret doing so either. the thing about how much of this they Fumbled is that in saying so i'm intentionally implying they had something with potential here. and in a lot of cases they really get the most out of the concepts they're playing with. sena's side story is just really good, dude! i'm outta steam but yeah it's a Pretty Good Game provided you have a tolerance for those long-stretching 60+ hour jrpgs.