The Shrine

Before I write, my experience with the game is limited to the first 20 hours of the game, and it’s more than possible the formula will change after a certain point. A good example of a game that changed drastically was Dragon Quest 9 that begins as a 40-50 hour relatively standard RPG, and then after transforms into an open world RPG with another 300-400 hours of content and some fundamental differences (the party members of the story part of the game are player created characters, like in DQ3, but in the open world part you can get established characters in your party). Anyway, I haven’t done research on the rest of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the following post is based on my initial 20 hours.


In short, the once cutting edge Wii game feels a little dated. They’ve upped the cosmetics, increases the size of the world (I believe this one’s about five times larger), and smoothed out the battle system - although I’m still not a fan of chain attacks, but they’re far less painful than in XC2. Now, with all the stuff Monolithsoft did well with this game, it doesn’t seem like they’d have a problem updating the formula.

What’s the formula I’m talking about? The railway style 3D RPG that I first saw in Quest 64, and first saw done well with Final Fantasy X over 20 years ago. Xenosaga was more egregiously a railway than FFX, and then Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii took the formula and improved it to make it feel more like a classic RPG.

Before I jump into my complaining, I do want to say I’m enjoying the game so far (at about 20 hours). Apart from what I’m about to jump into, my two other complaints would be long-winded dialogue (IMO) - it takes a long time to get to a relatively minor point. Second, the game uses too many story beats to introduce new mechanics. I’m a much bigger fan of the Breath of the Wild/Witcher 3/XCX style of just letting the player find all this stuff out for themselves and not shoehorning story into teaching me a mechanic. That said, I like the mechanics a lot, but early on in the game I was thinking “Why can’t I incorporate my Gears (called Oroboros in this game) into my chain attacks?” And then like 7 hours later they have a story beat to introduce that mechanic - I found that obnoxious; although it’s mostly my preference, many players love this spoon fed approach to learning the game.

What I like best about the game is the cast of characters and battle party - It’s a massive improvement over the second game. You have 7 characters on the field at once (your six mains plus one). It sounds like too much, but I find the battle system is smoother and easier to use than the 4 character battle parties of the original Xenoblade—the interface improvements really make this possible.

Now onto my point. I am tired of railroaded storylines - now that I’ve had a tastes of open world games where explore around and build my own sort of story out of short stories that all develop the main narrative in different ways, these railway stories feel narrow in focus. While it is true there are very well developed side quests in this game, they feel extraneous, unlike say Witcher 3, BotW (Breath of the Wild, or XCX (Xenoblade Chronicles X) that most of the time feel that whatever it is your doing, that’s the main thing you should be doing. And even the stuff that doesn’t (like Witcher quests) feel like an earned break, or a favour for the locals. It’s not like XC3 (or 1 and 2 for that matter) don’t develop the world, my problem is all of it feels like doing research on the side—like those books in Witcher 3 that feel like a chore to read unless you feel like sitting down and reading more about the world of Witcher 3. The thing about Witcher 3’s books is you don’t have to read them, their literal purpose is FOR people who want to read more on the side, like the Encyclopedia in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 (one of my favourite extra features in a game, ever).

Xenoblade Chronicles X still feels like the most advanced game Monolithsoft ever made, except it came out in 2015. A GTA Vice City sized city lands on an alien planet, you wake up about 2 months in. The city had developed 8 career paths to help the city, such as monster Hunter, resource hunter, explorer and that sort of thing. You can pick one of those and start the story by playing your part in helping it to survive.

Over time those roles fall away, and you’re kind of doing your own thing, inviting new alien species to live in the city, they integrate with the capitalistic culture of New LA, starting businesses and such. They deal with xenophobia from humans and other issues that occur when cities first become cosmopolitan. But during this time, it’s no longer about survival, but better integrating New LA into Planet Mira. Then the later part of the game is taking your integrated city and making it prosperous, you now have giant mechs to fly around and make things even easier. Mira more or less conquers the planet. And Mira is HUGE. Many times bigger than the world of Bionis in Xenoblade Chronicles. In fact, each of the five major continents are larger than all of Xenoblade Chroincles; the game itself is probably 7 or 8 times the total landmass, more if you include the ocean and floating islands and such.

BUT, rather than advancing Xenoblade Chronicles X, XC2 was more or less XC1 all over again. Although, this time with better towns, but none even close to the scale of New LA. I was like “whatever, most of the staff is working on Breath of the Wild, this is a stopgap game” - and it felt a bit like that, the game had a lot less love than the first, outside of the towns. Much of the mechanics felt over designed and clunky, rushed, unpolished. The big problem I had was how much of the world was something you walked through to get to the next area (like FFX, 13, and Xenosaga) it felt, in a way, behind XC1 in its design.

Unfortunately, XC3 (so far) feels a bit like it’s full of areas I’m walking through never to return. The world is massive in scale, but again segmented like XC1 and 2, not open like XCX or Breath of the Wild, or even Witcher 3. The story is once again “reach this really really far away place” rather than feeling like the immediate location was the important place to be.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing gets a lot of positive feedback, because Xenoblade Chronicles attracted a lot of new fans, and while many of the older Xeno fans seem open to change, and desire it, many of those that jumped onboard with XC1 on Wii just want Monolithsoft to make games like that over and over again. Unfortunately, they’re the loudest group. That said, I understand why they feel that way, the game I’d love them to make the most is a remake of Xenogears—literally 25 years old next year—but XCX is the one that impressed me the most since that game.

Eunie's the boss.

That is all.

Yeah, this game has some really good female characters. I’m invested in all their stories. I’m now in chapter 5, and holy hell did this game get so much better. How often do games have emotional stuff like that? Xenoblade Chronicles with the reunification of Shulk and Fiora had that (in a way, that one was similar to the raft scene with Fei and Elly in Xenogears, or the spaceship scene with Squall and Rinoa, Daccat’s Island Skies of Arcadia). This was a game that did it without a romantic or friendship angle—romantic/friendship angles are my soft spot... XC3 was about life.

Eunie (not Lanz) is the Rein of this game.

Noah isn’t Shulk or Fei (at least, so far where I am) he’s more like a much more involved Vaan from FF12. I don’t really feel the urgency of his motivation in the way I do the other characters (especially Mio).

I’ve noticed the game has a lot of smart writing, and almost all of my problems with it seem to vanish during chapter 3 or so. But yeah, this game went from “Uh oh, maybe this isn’t all I thought it was going to be?” To “Damn! This got good.”

For the record, without giving away plot details: I just got to the open sea.

I've done a couple hundred hours on two playthroughs.... I really enjoyed the game

Glad you are coming around. Ya, game starts off a bit slow and almost seems like a B-grade JRPG as far as development and content.... Then oh, shit gets real and the story drops its B-grade facade. The chapter 5 events, to me, are better than the ending of the game itself.

I enjoyed the melding of the XC1 and XC2 combat styles, and I enjoy that they didn't seem to include something as overpowered as Rex's Mythra-style-spamming. Don't get me wrong, chain attack mode with slam can be exploited pretty heavily (almost a necessity for some post game), but I always felt way more in control of the hard battles in XBC2. Class system is interesting, if not a bit tedious.

Eunie is one of the best-(English)acted JRPG characters I've encountered in a long time. Funny, smart, human writing. The voice actor delivery is excellent (and from what I saw on Twitter, she got a lot of praise for her work on this).

I honestly like how this game focused more on story than it did on Waifu's. Loved XBC2, but ya

I really hope the XCX world is re-introduced at some point. That's honestly the universe I'm more interested in right now. Especially after the creators hinted this is it for a while for the XBC 1, 2, & 3 'universe'.

I started thinking about this game after this weekend’s launch of the series Silo. It’s a dystopian world along the lines of Logan’s run, except there’s a major difference (which I won’t spoil). The Silo design reminds me a lot of XC3’s City.

I liked XC2’s story toward the end. But, for me, there were a few things with the second game that wore on me.

First: the chain attacks got old, fast—maybe in the future they’ll put an auto-chain mode in, I’m a big fan of automating the battle system as much as possible (which, luckily, the FF Pixel Remasters allow).

Second: I found exploring XC2 to be obnoxious. While the other games are fairly open, XC2 is filled with mazes. It reminds me of a really blown up version of old RPGs that had a lot of maze stuff in them, FF1-2 in particular, but they smoothed out dungeon design between FF2 and FF4. In FF4, the whole maze thing was gone except for special areas like Sylph and Monster Cave in the underworld. Otherwise, dungeons were paths with some side areas where treasure was located. XC2 had mazes all over the place, and they were WAY bigger because of 3D, and therefore much more annoying than they were in FF1 and 2. Another issue I had with XC2 were there were shortcuts designed for NG+, but it wasn’t obvious: they were sealed, requiring field skills, and it wasn’t clear if the player was supposed to grind those out or not because it wasn’t always obvious that there were other paths to take.

Not saying XC2 didn’t have positives - the towns were mostly great. The end of the game seems to have been made by a completely different designer (after getting Pneuma), no more mazes, just standard RPG design, and the story was significantly better. Although, the battles were worse because this is where it was necessary to use a chain attack every single time.

I’ll be playing XC3 again after I finish the Final Fantasy games. My year is stacked: I also have Dragon Quest 11 to play - and I’ve been recommended it a lot. There’s also Suikoden at some point. I tried Tales of Vesperia (bought it really cheap a year or two ago) and it’s not really for me. Tears of the Kingdom I’m holding off on just in case Nintendo doesn’t carry the library through to the next generation - I mean, it’s a small chance, but in the small chance they don’t I’d prefer to get the Switch 2 version. As soon as I hear they will, with a performance upgrade when played on Switch 2, I’ll be on that game ASAP.

Last DLC just came out for XC3 a couple weeks ago. Future Redeemed. I have been enjoying it. Much fan service to be had, including more discussions/lore/explanation about Logos, Pneuma, and Ontos.