Xenoblade 1-3 (Coda)
It can't be entirely deliberate that JRPG heroes so often fight for some kind of positive structural change, especially considering the political conservatives lodged in these games' DNA. That's just how it works out when the villains are analogues of the Christian god, people who aspire to be analogues of the Christian god, literally the Christian god, imperialist autocrats, and/or various bootlickers and petty tyrants. Xenoblade at its best leans way into this, though, using every storytelling tool available to popular media to make you feel like a supreme badass for smashing through a procession of increasingly malignant reactionaries.
It's not rigorous materialist analysis or whatever; it is, again, popular media. It gives you all the tropes you crave. Catgirls are there. What happens is that, by combining a focus on characters precision-engineered to be lovable with plots about resisting the impulse to look backward, these become stories about the characters' personal relationships with that impulse. Shulk sets out for revenge after being wronged by a traumatized villain, only to realize later that he's being driven to self-destruction by his own trauma. Noah is confronted with the knowledge that, with different friends and in different circumstances, he could've been a much worse person. Sena and Taion have let past events become crushing weights preventing them from moving forward; Mio stubbornly moves forward regardless, dragging the weight behind her. Everybody in Xenoblade 3 has PTSD, and all the sidequests are about turning forever war military camps into farming communes. If we want to be charitable to XC2, I guess we could say Morag and Zeke are in their own ways torn between duty/tradition and the undeniable fact that all the people they meet are as human as they are, and there's a message in there about self-loathing as a dead end, first with Nia's whole deal, then with some of the antagonists. The only person who should be ashamed of themself is Tora.
I don't think playing a game published by Nintendo will solve the problem of conservatism. I do think the specific alchemy of these games gives them the potential to be very personally meaningful to people otherwise concerned about that problem--I mean, I know they are, I've heard from people for whom they are, and they also mean something to me. I sometimes think about this essay by comics writer and artist Sarah Horrocks, in which she says:
Art doesn’t exist for you to just go be a fan of it. It exists to reflect back to you the projection of yourself funneled through a controlled artifice. Art allows you to understand yourself and your place in the world better, and experience awe at the elasticity of the human experience you enjoy. It is a magic of lines and sequences that allow you to attain an altered state of being, and evolve your experience.
Xenoblade is pretty receptive to the stuff we're bringing to it here in the 2020s. But I think part of the appeal of JRPGs for me is that the best of them have felt like that for a long time. Also I did 42069 damage with a chain attack in XC1 and nobody can take that from me.