Xenoblade 3: Future Redeemed
☞ In the interest of summary, this post talks about Xenoblade 1-3 without tagging spoilers.
It's been a while since I read fanfic regularly, not counting one-shot comics. But I used to read a fair amount of Square RPG stuff, and you'd see a few common setups in longer fic. Maybe they're still around? Stop me if you've heard this one before: some of the heroes and their kids are pulled into a strange new world that resembles their home setting except ground up and reconstituted, and once again they're called upon to right wrongs and beat asses.
I don't know how else to describe Future Redeemed. It definitely reads as self-indulgent. And like, I want to be clear about this: I'm entirely fine with self-indulgence in art. Self-indulgence is maybe just how you make art at all, but also, any criticism from me about this would sound like hypocrisy. The thing is, when something's self-indulgent, it feels a lot more authentic when you can trace it back to a particular self. This is maybe one reason why we get so wound up in the fool's errand of auteur fascination, why we want to blame credit Kojima for Metal Gear--it sucks to erase the hundreds of other people who've worked on those games, but it's also horrible to think that this idiosyncratic thing that's very personal for a lot of people is not one artist's interiority turned outward through a painful process of confronting and reckoning with the self and the self's several fetishes, but a company's cynical attempt to appeal to as many people as it can. Which, with something like 59 million copies sold, Konami demonstrably did do that.
The fact is both things are always true to varying degrees, when you're talking about media made by large teams and published by larger companies, and maybe it's not that deep--Future Redeemed represents the end of a Xenoblade trilogy, and with most things that needed to be said having been said before XC3 rolled credits, it's a victory lap more than a chapter that feels particularly weighty. That doesn't mean it's totally vapid; there's some nice stuff in there about being the kind of elder figure who, instead of jealously holding onto power, trains younger generations for leadership and then gracefully passes the torch. I'm also not claiming to be immune to fanservice, e.g., it's very funny to me that Zeke and Pandoria's kid is perfectly well-adjusted, and this time instead of fighting one ferronis you get to fight two stuck together, and that's cool. Sometimes you'll end up in locations lifted from a previous game, and you can supply the character banter yourself--"Yeah, this really takes me back, this horrible tomb where my friends and I were murdered by a giant lizardman." I'm just pointing out that fanservice is high on the list of priorities.
Maybe Xenoblade 3 was always like this. I could just be reiterating my complaint that it leans too heavily on lore brain. I do think fanservice feels more warranted here, though, in this finale that's also a prologue that's also an epilogue to the first two games. It took Monolith close to 17 years to get to this point, counting from the initial idea about people living on two giants, and it took us hundreds of our finite life hours. And it's DLC for a game you should've played beforehand anyway. I think we can have this now. We can make Shulk and Rex do chain attacks together. And then kiss.
In some ways it's not just cutting and pasting, but demonstrating a good grasp of what made the previous games appealing. The approach to level design in particular is very XC1-like in a way that works; whereas XC3 is all about breadth, huge vistas and so on, the FR areas are relatively narrow but dense with things to do. Once again the game prompts you to kill three of every living thing you see, but not in the form of tedious quests--practically everything you do provides points to spend on character skills. I didn't dislike running around in XC3, but it did sometimes feel like I was hauling ass from point A to point B through areas that were big but shallow and gave me no particular reason to poke around, and this isn't the case in FR.
Re: A, you should read this whole article by Autumn Wright, but here's an excerpt:
Both A and Juniper, a nonbinary character in the base game of XC3, are simply never gendered. And while many trans people in our world do simply not use pronouns, the pattern is already clear: This omission, which would’ve taken conscious effort among writers and translators, maintains a plausible deniabilty for conservative fans that has become the dominant (and they’ll hate me for saying this) headcanon among Xenoblade fandom.
A is nonbinary because if the legendary swords that come from different parts of a super computer that harnesses the power of a fantastical cross-shaped power source each representing different perspectives on life are going to be represented by gender, then everything sure seems set up for A to be neither male nor female, but positively something else. And yes, in a better world, we would not need to reclaim characters, because among the dozens of characters in Xenoblade’s cast there would be more to latch onto than the hints of queerness in Morag, the coming out allegory of Nia, or the coding values behind Juniper.
Juniper is referred to as "they" maybe twice, despite being in quite a lot of quests as far as the heroes go; A never is. Talking about this almost feels redundant because 1. the text is nevertheless pretty clear about those characters not being women or men, and there's not much point to the cowardly equivocation when going even this far positions Nintendo as a culture war enemy of the worst people on the planet, and 2. we're not obligated to abide by any reading prescribed by megacorps and fascists anyway. It's irritating, though, not just because XC3 tees up the theme of gender/body stuff in literally the first hour and then sort of shrugs, but also because it's part of a thread of nonsense that makes all these games less coherent. It's a series about people from different backgrounds coming together, hashing out their grievances, and resisting regressive forces that want them dead. But not all people, because the bird guys and the lizard guys are mere savages, according to everyone except maybe half a dozen characters across all three games, and it's deliberately unclear whether you'd be welcome in these hopeful new worlds you're creating if you aren't for sure a boy or a girl because Nintendo, the company that does Pokemon, the most profitable IP on Earth by a margin of like $35 billion in revenue, apparently has an urgent need for the money and attention of right-wing stooges on Twitter, I guess? So many things about these games are so good that it stings especially hard when they miss these landings.
Still, XC1 couldn't have done even this much. And this is the end, so let's finish with the good things in mind. XC3 makes me feel hopeful, and not just in terms of whatever Monolith does next under the Nintendo yoke. I'm eager to see what aspiring devs and storytellers of all kinds who grew up with these games, or are growing up with them now, get up to using the Xenoblades in their heads as raw material.