Reviews VideoGame / Xenoblade Chronicles 3

The best and worst of its genre

I've played this game for 100 hours, and considering it's a JRPG, I know there are gameplay mechanics I've yet to unlock such as better traversal mechanics, but that's enough time to review basically anything, and I can't think of anything that could ameliorate something like the lack of a sprint button for such a long period.

The music and art design continues its excellence, the best in the field at this point. The former is slightly more contemplative with a focus on ambience and woodwinds, but unlike some other Switch games has no lack of memorable melodies, with the battle themes in particular being excellent.

As many reviews mentioned for the previous game (which I did not play, but I did the first), the series seems to have two teams of writers, one which pens all the most interesting and thought-provoking dialogue in the game, treating with surprising tact themes like PTSD and how even a life cut cruelly short can find meaning and make a difference in the world. Then there's the team that incorporates the unfunny humor (not universally and partially from localization surely, but striking out more than I'd like), inane Toku villains, annoying companions (though the Heroes system I praise later circumvents this issue), and the usual never-ending friendship speeches. Still, any story that even tries to tackle the themes mentioned above gets credit from me, considering I didn't exactly go into this expecting The Hurt Locker.

Quest design is much better than XCI, with the Heroes from the last game being very smartly incorporated directly into sidequests, allowing both more interesting companions and much more interesting quests. I played on Hard, and I'm pretty sure anyone on Normal could skip basically any quests that bore them and not have a single problem.

The MMORPG combat will always be an inherent turn-off for some people, and it does look silly as characters stand ten feet away from each other swinging swords, but outside some specific fights involving platforms or lots of enemies, I mostly think it's a very fun and surprisingly combo-intensive fighting system, sacrificing a slight amount of the complexity of something like FFXII for the infinitely more fun Tales-style button layout.

Moreover, the game's Job System is incredibly flexible, allowing an in-arguably vast level of customization than almost any of its competitors, even games I'd otherwise praise to high-heavens. Considering the direction some... other RPG series has taken with its most recent numerical entry, playing an RPG with an actual mind-boggling amount of customization and build potential is, at least for a player like me, a bonus, not a detriment.

Simply put, if you can stand intensely over-dramatic cutscenes that are easily skippable and MMORPG combat, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a deep, vast, and surprisingly thoughtful game that easily entertained me for 100 hours, and I plan to pick up (after a break...) for more.