Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Fans of this series went on a real journey. I can see how someone would play XC2 and decide, based on *gestures at that entire game*, that it didn't warrant another five years of emotional investment. Though I also get how you could come away from it hoping Monolith would replicate the good things without so much of the bad. As a conciliatory move and indication that they hadn't totally lost interest in what XC1 was doing, XC1DE probably happened at the right time.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 kicks a multitude of asses. A panoply of asses. Almost every ass set in front of it, it kicks. Without exaggeration, it's one of my favorite console RPGs now.
"Lanz wants something a bit meatier"
My pitch would be to spoil some things from the first three hours or so. That's about 2% of the total length, so I'd encourage you not to worry about it, but I can't tell you what to do. I will say this is the kind of information that would've made me more excited to try it, if this whole project wasn't based on "I already have Xenoblade 1 and 2 and should probably get around to playing them."
Spoilers(?) for the first chapter of XC3
- The grim war-world stuff doesn't do much for me on its own--you have to show me somebody hanging laundry or baking bread. It doesn't take long to get to the laundry/bread material, though, and it's good. There's an early scene in a mixed-gender bath that tells us something about how these characters think about their bodies, lets us see into a space where characters relax and shoot the shit, and gets out in front of at least a few tiring tropes re: the essential, inviolable nature of boys vs. girls.
- I like to imagine Tetsuya Takahashi showing up 15 minutes late to a meeting, clearly on the back of an all-nighter, unshaven, his tie crooked, and saying, "Okay, yeah, we all like the giant robots, but ... what if it's Ultraman?"
- Two of the main characters, from opposing sides of the forever war, perform the job of seeing off the dead via flute music. When the party assembles we get a scene in which it turns out that the two sides' off-seeing songs are similar enough that they can be played as a totally impromptu duet, and while I don't think "it'll make you cry" is a very compelling recommendation and would rather point out how this plugs into the themes or whatever, you'll probably want to keep yourself hydrated for this one.
- In a world in which the FF16 team spent half their time inventing reasons why only white Europeans were allowed in their pretend fantasy setting and the other half lifting ideas from Hinduism and Muslim culture, it's nice that the main cast of a Xenoblade game can include Taion.
- Speaking of the sixteenth Final Fantasy and the many reasons why I refuse to play it until it's on sale for $10 or less, XC3 manages to convey a world high in grunge and short on hope while still having a color palette that extends beyond brown and gray.
- There's a nopon cosplaying as store-brand Cloud Strife.
I find myself wondering why I don't have five paragraphs to say about these things the way I did whenever XC2 was accidentally fascist. I don't buy the idea that you can learn how to make or appreciate good things by studying bad things, but I guess messiness, good or bad, is fascinating, while straightforward success is just ... successful, doing the things you expect it to do. It's also very much the case that when I like something, I don't want you to sit here and read about it, I want you to experience it for yourself. And practically speaking, I didn't take as many notes throughout XC3 because I didn't want to stop.
It's just fun
It starts fun and doesn't stop being fun. There are some big moments of tension and pathos, but moment to moment the priority is fun. If you're doing sidequests, it has kind of a monster of the week structure as you run around liberating regions from their consuls, essentially members of a tokusatsu villain squad--each represents a different kind of exaggerated evil and is exquisitely punchable in their own unique way. Along the way, you recruit local leaders to fill out a roster of heroes who occupy your seventh party slot. This unlocks the hero's class for use by the main cast, adding to the variety of strategies and playstyles available to you, and represents the start of what tend to be several subplots in and around the hero's home region. You could in theory do very little of this, but so much of the game lives in these digressions that they all feel essential.
XC3's combat follows up on what XC2 was doing, but it's both more complex in execution and less obtuse. A character build combines skills from a few of the two dozen or so classes, providing a granular enough level of control over how you want to approach fights, and it's generally clear what the effect will be when you swap skills and equipment in or out, in contrast to XC2 requiring you to compare several discrete equipment menus that you can't quickly switch between. Chain attacks are still a good way of letting you achieve satisfyingly enormous damage numbers, and they feel more meaningful in a context in which they aren't required in every fight because every trash enemy has literal millions of HP.
Okay, I didn't want to do this, to keep bringing up Xenoblade 2 while trying to describe a game that doesn't deserve the baggage. I only have a few more things to say about it, so I'll try to get it out of my system quickly.
The first thing is that one of the DLC hero characters thinks she's a blade in the XC2 sense, and the degree to which the party responds to this with an attitude of "what the fuck are you even talking about" is very satisfying. When the XC2 fight music kicked in during a quest with that character, though, I felt it, which mostly speaks to how good the music in these games is.
Another thing is that I didn't talk about bonus experience re: XC2, and it's back and worth addressing. The short explanation is that these games split your earned experience into two pools, and one of the pools you can choose whether to apply and when. I didn't mind it in XC2 mainly because not using bonus XP wasn't a challenge so much as an arbitrary waste of time, and so I always used it and didn't think about it much. It worked out such that I was just about the right level when ready to fight the final boss, so I'll grant them that, at least. In XC3, though, using all the bonus XP seemed to put me way beyond the level curve for the main questline. Which is fine if that's what you want, though redundant considering that there's also an easy difficulty setting, but to me it felt like micromanaging the pacing of a story I was being told. Best to just keep an eye on local enemy levels and use bonus XP to stay even with them, if you need to.
That said, the game is huge, and I'm not sure there's a great solution to directing the player experience that wouldn't have been at odds with providing a sense of scale and freedom. The zones are big not just in that they consist of several sub-areas that would've been their own entire zones in previous games, but also in that even these sub-areas are sometimes bigger than XC1 and XC2 zones were. There's a lot of ground to cover between major plot beats, and while there may be fewer quests compared to XC1 especially, they're much more substantial in how they hook into the world and its inhabitants. So at some point you'll be overleveled for an area or trigger an event that seems like it should've happened earlier or later. In some places you'll find hostile soldiers of one faction or another long after it should be possible. I can live with it--it's only a minor distraction and probably preferable to any alternative, barring a shorter, simpler game.
Subtext is for cowards
Whereas the prior game says, in its confused way, "the powerful get to determine the direction of the world," XC3 says "the powerful get to determine the direction of the world, and that sucks." Every sidequest is a vignette about what it means to form communities in a world like this, a world in which you, your predecessors, and your kind have always been viewed as disposable instruments by the people with authority over you (in part because the system that grants authority doesn't allow for it to be otherwise), and now there's a rapidly spreading and unavoidable awareness of this fact. Some communities form connections with others in similar situations; other communities go their own way, for better or worse. Seems rough!
At least in Aionios you can turn into Ultraman and punch the bad guys into paste. And because ushering people into the afterlife, such as it is, is also your job, you can refuse to do that for them too, a level of pettiness I have to admit I find extremely satisfying. Before the spoiler break I'll just say that some of the villains get as owned as anyone has ever been.
XC3 spoilers through the end
At the top of the list is N, the most divorced man in his or possibly any universe. One of the highlights of the game is the movie-length cutscene about, among other things, how divorced N is. There's more worth saying about it--about how N and Noah's relative situations lean into the idea that good people aren't good because they were born good, but largely because of their support networks and sheer chance to some degree, and this is a kind of nuance you don't always get in games where you're meant to feel like a hero on a righteous quest. But like, damn. Dude is divorced.
As much fun as it is to obliterate a bad guy, though, it's ultimately all about (self-)forgiveness and the constant struggle to be better than you were yesterday. You spend as much time developing infrastructure and trade networks as you do chasing after villains. Or at least that's the stated objective of some quests--most of this does amount to going somewhere and hitting an enemy with a sword a bunch of times, and it almost makes me wish there was some way of interacting with the game world on a more macro level. Some kind of zone control thing, maybe? But then there's the danger of elongating an already long game in a way that kills the momentum, and I'm not sure I'd cut anything to make room for it. And anyway it might've been at odds with what XC3 is trying to say. At one point the commander of a recently-freed colony asks Noah if he thinks she and her people will be useful, and his response is that he doesn't care--a very explicit contrast to this colony's consul, and really Moebius in general, given that the war is visually framed as chess to begin with. So, you know. If, after this, the colony became a brush for you to paint a map with, it may not've felt so great.
XC3 never loses sight of the things it wants to say, but even so it's generous about giving you what you want. So many of the little reveals are pleasant surprises. Basically all the party's Ouroboros abilities and Noah's goofy sword stuff fall under this category. There's a boss fight against a ferronis, which, for the benefit of anyone reading this who hasn't played the game but doesn't care about spoilers, is less of a giant robot and more of a mobile town. There's a blue mage-type class that learns skills from every unique enemy. There's a nonbinary character, and while there's maybe more plausible deniability around this subject than you'd want, Juniper is still way beyond the scope of what XC1 could imagine. While I would've liked to see more of Melia and Nia awkwardly inserting themselves into a world whose history they've mostly slept through before the credits rolled, I appreciate that stuff being in the game at all. And the Tirkin ... well, you can't have everything, but you can at least broker an alliance with them in this one.
Does the ending do a satisfying job of wrapping everything up? I don't know. This is the kind of storytelling that puts everything on the table, so the characters do just say that you shouldn't tolerate a decaying world at the mercy of a gerontocracy, that the young and downtrodden are justified in doing something about it. The villain is literally conservatism; it's not ambiguous. But at the same time, the outcome you're fighting for, and achieve, is a return to the status quo established by the first two games. Which, if you've played them, you'll know that their worlds have also recently been removed from dead-end cycles and opened to myriad possibilities. Through your own efforts, even. But what about Colony 9 and their potato farm? And all the other stuff you helped build? What about learning from past mistakes and moving forward?
No, hang on, what about Mio, Sena, and Taion? Because we slogged through XC2, we know what they are in the context of their home world--they're blades, or some variant thereof. Being a blade is not great! You're a humanoid weapon and a slave for most practical purposes. I guess we're meant to believe the situation would've improved in a world somewhat subject to Rex's opinions about these things, but 1. the ending of XC2 never suggests anything remotely like that, 2. it's a world of warring imperialist nations that wouldn't make policy decisions based on what some kid from the boonies and his polycule learned from their encounters with a group of terrorists, and 3. for all that he's an okay guy, Rex is a massive dumbass. What're the odds of Taion and Sena being the blades of some low-ranking Ardainian goons who die in a friendly fire incident three days after the worlds separate? Not to mention that, unless the red in Mio's crystal is a consequence of her being one of Rex's improbably numerous offspring, there is no good outcome for her.
I swear to you I'm going somewhere with this.
If I have an all-encompassing complaint, it's that XC3 overrelies on references to the first two. Which is a strange thing to say about the third installment in a series, I realize, but I have two points to make here. One is that XC1 and XC2 mostly stand alone, and I appreciate that about them, especially when these are 100+ hour games and therefore the cumulative time investment is truly ungodly. The other is just that the specific way in which the previous games feed into XC3 is sort of inconvenient. What it mainly draws on from its predecessors isn't plot, it's lore, and that sucks. On one hand, there are things about the setting, thematically important things and things that carry ideas from the previous games into this one, that you'll only notice and appreciate if you either play the first two or scour wikis for the relevant details; on the other hand, speculating about what'll happen to the characters mentioned above is a totally irrelevant dead end, and it would've been just as easy not to encourage the fan-theory impulse. I still think someone new to the series could enjoy XC3, and in fact I'd say anyone with the slightest curiosity about it should play it. It's fine; you'll be able to follow what's happening well enough. It's just that you might wish it was a little more coherent.