So, about a month or so ago, the long awaited final chapter in the “Klaus/Conduit” story arc that began with the first Xenoblade game, came out. Of course, everyone praised it, I got my copy, and now, 231 hours later, I’ve finally completed pretty much everything I feel invested in with the game (before the DLC comes out, I might update this to accommodate that later). Needless to say, the game gives me a lot to talk about. So much so, I can’t do it with a standard Discord post. And so, here we are.
Couple disclaimers. First, this is not gonna be a review. I’m not really good at that, and I don’t want it to come across like I’m some Xenoblade superfan, qualified to give an objective analysis of this game. I’m just some guy who played the entire numbered trilogy. Although, I think I have played enough of this game to know what I’m talking about.
Second, I’m gonna be spoiling this shit rotten. If you haven’t played the game, go do it. Trust me, you’ll benefit a lot from a blind playthrough.
Third, since this is a sequel to the previous two numbered entries, there will probably be some comparisons to them, some positive, some negative.
This also won’t really be in any particular order, just things I find relevant at the time. Now, let’s begin with the story.
In terms of general stuff, the idea for the setting and world is something that totally makes sense. The first two games explored two different universes, so naturally, mashing them together makes sense for this final installment. And out of the legacy characters they could have used for this game, Nia and Melia were the best choices. Melia is a High Entia, so it makes sense she’d live this long, and Nia probably had the best combination of story significance, story potential, popularity, and intrigue from the Blades in the second game. That, and this character who called Zeke a “one-eyed monster” having to use this posh accent is pretty funny. The gag did indeed land for me, and it even had a satisfying payoff in the final boss battle.
In terms of the actual plot…well, I was pretty hooked upon seeing the premise. Two warring factions, each headed by a supreme leader, who use an army of genetically engineered expendable soldiers to fight with…
This shit is just the Clone Wars. And, well, I like the Clone Wars. So I like this too. But there are some things that are unique to this universe, that I found pretty interesting. For one, while the clones were all unique in their identifier number and personality to an extent, the Agnus and Keves soldiers are the same throughout their entire fighting history, being reborn from the same tube ad nauseam when they die. That is, of course, unless they reach the Homecoming stage, a sort of extreme honorable discharge that prevents them from being resurrected. And well…I’ll talk about *that* scene a little later.
The other notable difference from the Clone Wars is that, while one side had the Jedi generals that were “supposed” to be the good guys (or at least, the lesser of two evils), and the other had the “evil” Separatist commanders, in this case the Jedi and Sith commanders are both equally massive assholes. The Consuls, as they’re known, are the big bads of this game, manipulating the soldiers on both sides to kill each other and collect life energy for the Flame Clocks, which directly sustain the lives of all the soldiers.
The Consuls themselves are pretty weak as villains, honestly. I know not every game needs to have a morally grey or tortured antagonist where you sympathize with their motivations, like Egil or Jin. Sometimes you just need a good Saturday morning bad guy to entertain you for an hour. And, some of these Consuls do that fine. Ones like D in particular are just, aggressively trying to be the biggest piece of shit imaginable, and it’s so much fun. And some Consuls do have legitimate character depth and motivation, like Shania and Irma. Shania’s story in particular was pretty moving, a tragic tale of inferiority complexes and forcing square pegs into round holes. And Irma is basically amogus that gives you the feels, so, pretty good there.
The rest of the Consuls are kinda just, there, though. They do have personality traits I guess? Consul R is a hypocritical backstabber, Consul Y has a funny voice, F was actually pretty honorable to a degree, Joran also has an inferiority complex. But for the most part, these characters can kinda just be boiled down to a couple basic traits. They’re kind of fun in the moment, but I can barely remember them 50-60 hours later. Except of course, for one Consul, but I’ll talk about him later.
Even though some of these characters are actually ones you meet earlier in the story who are turned into Consuls, not many of the emotional moments really landed for me. The entire time Joran was talking and coming to terms with the closure of his character arc, I was kinda just sitting there waiting for the next piece of gameplay to start. There are some exceptions, like the aforementioned Shania, but that’s because we actually got a fair amount of time with her to form a sort of camaraderie.
That said, the villains do their job at being antagonists serviceably. They’re massive pieces of shit that get in your way, adequately blocking progression. This, unfortunately, does not hold true for the game’s main villain, Z (or Zed, idk), who is probably the worst main villain in all of Xenoblade. Well, maybe the one from X is worse but, the worst out of the numbered trilogy. Previous villains either got in your way a lot more, or actively took a stand against you throughout the game. Zanza not as much but, at least that was the first game, and we had elements like going inside Bionis, and the landmass you were standing on literally attacking you, which added some gravitas to him. Z doesn’t really have any of that, instead opting to sit in a room for 100 hours until you waltz up to his door to start the final boss. And, to its credit, the final boss does have a nice level of impact and scale, what with the two factions throughout the entire game coming together with giant mecha castle transformer machines to shoot lasers at the Origin ball. But, that doesn’t really improve Z that much. Granted, they do sort of hand wave this by pointing out that Z is less of a person, as opposed to the concept desiring to keep the universe in limbo. So, him not having much of a personality in order to represent an all-encompassing generic desire might be a good thing. But to me, it just makes him boring. Malos and Jin, he is not.
Although, on the flip side, the group of protagonists we get might just be the best overall of the trilogy. Or at the very least, the most consistent.
In the past two titles, while they had mostly great protagonist casts, I did feel there was always that one who either fell into the background (Sharla) or just wasn’t that good (Tora). And apparently that also happened with X.
By contrast, I found every one of the main characters likable or interesting in their own right. Noah slots right in with the other Xenoblade protagonists and I like him about as much as the other 2, Lanz is like Reyn again and I like that, Sena is kind of adorable and is in a couple of my favorite side quests in the game because of her, Taion is literally just me and that’s cool, Mio is so cute and I love her dynamic with Noah (they make a great pair), and Eunie is just the chaotic bitch and has probably some of the best facial expressions in the game. Even the characters I thought would be my least favorites shifted back around to becoming great again. Sena kinda lost me at one point, but doing sidequests like the Segiri story near the end really changed my viewpoint. It honestly does a much better job at fleshing out Sena than her own side-story (which is ironically more focused on Ghondor), but details.
What really helps is that, while there are no heart to hearts in this game (no party affinity either, actually, strange omission), we still do get a lot of characterization for the party. Whenever you take a rest stop or go to a canteen and eat, Monolith threw in a lot of little touches as the party interacts with each other. Scenes like Taion playing with his Mondo while Sena tries to catch it, or Noah and Mio doing off-seeing flute playing together, or Riku and Manana helping increase the difficulty of Lanz and Sena’s pushups.
Actually, speaking of Riku, he might be my favorite Noon in the series. Past Nopon companions were very hit or miss, with Riki being a fun character, Tora being very questionable, and the Nopon party members from FC being just kinda there. But Riku is a party member I very much enjoyed. Firstly, he’s around for the entire game and gets plenty of screen time in cutscenes, so we get to know a lot about him. We know his secret desires, his fun little character quirks, and even his embarrassment. We see how the others rely on him a lot as a source of almost sagely advice, but there’s also a lot of lighthearted ribbing and jabs that make the characters definitely feel like they’re a group of friends. It was really nice to see. And Manana was, alright. She’s definitely kind of an acquired taste, and I didn’t find myself entertained by her as much as the others, but I can’t personally call her bad. If I had to pick the one character that was the weakest, it would be her, though.
It’s not even just the main characters, though. A lot of the side characters, and especially the Heroes, get a lot of time to shine, and a lot of great scenes. Outside the Heroes, characters like Dorin and Bambam, the shipwright Nopon (Simopon or Sinopon I think), and Fox have a couple great scenes, and sometimes even develop as characters. But the Heroes are the real stars of the show. Most of them come in the form of the colony leaders dotted throughout the world, and most of the time you unlock them by completing their requisite Hero quests, most of which ending with smashing the colony’s flame clock and “freeing” them, allowing you to increase colony affinity. I do really like this system, actually. It’s a nice way to tie in the story with the gameplay, and the fact that a lot of these Hero Quests end with a Consul battle do make them feel more important in the overall narrative.
Which reminds me, try to do as many Hero Quests as you can before you fight the final boss, there’s a nice little bonus if you do. That, and since a lot of these quests are really good at fleshing out the world and directly striking back against the main antagonist group, they almost feel necessary to get the full story experience. It does kind of suck having to grind out Class Points to get a specific class to level 10, but at least you have Nopon coins to speed up the process, and class point boosting food items that ACTUALLY WORK NOW, hallelujah.
That said, it’s still worth doing all these Hero Quests, as a lot of them are really interesting. We get to explore new parts of the world, fight exclusive bosses, and delve into the personalities of these Heroes, which really run the gambit. In spite of that, a lot of them are memorable, in a good way. Zeon, Teach, Ghondor, Segiri, Valdi, Juniper, they’re all great. But I wanna highlight two in particular.
Ashera, the Undying Blade, is a character that seems kinda off when you first meet her. She’s a very suicidal type of character, recklessly charging into combat, thirsty to meet her end on the field of war, to the point she’s earned a reputation of being insane. And, yeah, that reputation makes sense as you go through the questline, she is kind of wacko. To the point Eunie just snaps at her in an emotional outburst, perceiving Ashera as no different than the Consuls throwing away the lives of soldiers in battle. The first part of the questline has kind of an ambiguous ending, but when you play the second part everything clicks together. You see that Ashera’s troops are just as blood hungry and vicious as she is, but we also get backstory that reveals why Ashera is the way she is. Her first death had her go out with a whimper, decapitated by a Consul in a cruel precursor to the Homecoming ceremony, and as such she doesn’t want to die in a way as pathetic as that ever again. It adds a whole new dimension to the character and Colony 11 as a whole, and is one of my favorite quests because of it. We even get some wholesome conversations between Eunie and Ashera at the end, with both promising to kill each other the second the other asks for it.
Well, as wholesome as you can get for the “Undying Blade”.
Then there’s Triton, who might just be my favorite Hero in the game. A Consul in charge of Colony 15 on the Erythia Sea, you expect that when you meet him he’s gonna be a huge douche like the other Consuls, and you’ll have to fight him. And, you do fight him, but the game completely flips the script and makes Consul T, Triton, an actually pretty cool dude, who just wants to hang out and challenge you to seafaring competitions. Sure, he’s kind of a sore loser and he does sucker punch Lanz in the gut before starting the boss fight with him, but at the end it’s clear that both parties were just letting off steam and have a good hearty laugh about it. Well, Triton does, the party just kind of sits there with what I would imagine is the shocked Pikachu face as Triton asks to join the team. Honestly, kind of a badass concept, having one of the villain group members join you as a player character. I loved it with Fiora and Morag/Zeke in the previous games, and I love it just as much here. And the second part of his quest is just, so great. You have this wild goose chase around the world trying to help this old man recover his memory about his traveling buddy, and in the end it turns out it was all to get some miso bean paste from a monster’s claw. That’s just really funny, especially with how Eunie wants to punch Triton a couple times throughout the quest, and you can just feel Noah restraining himself with every fiber of his being. Great questline, especially with how it ties into another quest series of Colony 15 settling into the City and doing kind of a piss-poor job at it.
It’s good that the cast is as well-rounded as it is, because this game absolutely throws them through the wringer, the shitter, and every other -er you can imagine. Right at the start, they’re wanted by the entire world for being Ouroboros, and literally everyone is out to kill you. This sequence was actually pretty dope, having you run away from the Colony 4, Gamma, and 9 armies as they try to hunt you down, having intense fights against Colony Lambda and its Commander Isurd, stuff like that. I do wish it lasted a little longer, though, because by the time you finish Colony Lambda this tension largely disappears and the world is essentially normal again. Still, great moment while it lasted.
Then you have this really cool moment where you finally reach the City, and you think you’re nearing the end of the game because that’s where you were told to go by Guernica near the start, but nah you’ve got like 3 chapters of gameplay left to go fuckos. And you learn all about this ancient house dichotomy like this is Fire Emblem, and one of the house ancestors kinda looks like Reyn I think (maybe that’s just me). And you get a boat to go out and explore Erythia Sea and there are WAY too many landmarks like god how are you supposed to finish the map without a guide-
Er, and then you have a sequence where you’re in jail and you try to stage a prison break which is this cool Shawshank Redemption type atmosphere, except Morgan Freeman is a small girl with the most incredible swear words you’ll ever see, and then you get your ass beat by more Consuls and thrown in actual jail and…
Yeah, you’ve probably seen a lot of the “Chapter 5” talk going around, and how it emotionally destroyed a lot of people playing this game. And to throw my two cents in…yes, Chapter 5 is indeed an emotional gut kick in the gonads, and the sole reason why I’m glad that this is the one game where I tried really fucking hard to avoid any kind of spoilers. Usually I don’t care, but I 100% believe this moment would have lost basically all its impact if I knew about it going in. Everything about this sequence of events was honestly done perfectly. The lead in with you getting completely destroyed by the Consuls, the small but ultimately fruitless bit of hope you get as Lanz and Sena almost take down N in a sacrifice play before getting your powers stripped away by another Consul, the fact you actually wait a whole month of in-universe time in your cell, with the day and night changing in accordance, while you do absolutely nothing, the fact that this is the characters’ absolute lowest point in the entire story, the score??? Like, straight up, good music is the most surefire way to tug on my heartstrings, and the background OST in this scene is absolutely excellent, just like in most of the game.
And just when you think the game has messed you up enough, you’re dragged, kicking and screaming, out into the castle pavilion, and forced to your knees as you watch Mio (who was currently on the last day of her life), escorted in front of her “queen”, before being slowly disintegrated to the tune of the beautiful flute music. The same flute music you’ve used throughout the entire game, the one that set dead soldiers spirits to rest with ease, the music you’ve used throughout gameplay so many times to boost colony affinity and make you stronger, is now used to deliver the most emotionally resonant scene in the game.
I’ll admit, it actually got me to shed a couple tears. Hell, even as I’m writing this I kinda wanna drop a couple more. Which is really impressive, I so very rarely actually cry at media. The only other thing I can recall right now where I consistently get choked up is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, one of my most nostalgic movies of all time. That speaks volumes to me, on how great this scene is.
Even leading into Chapter 6 is cool, we get this trippy scene where Noah walks down these paths and find the history of his past lives and how they turned into the N and M Consuls and it’s just, kinda cool. It offers a new dimension to N’s character and, makes his turn to the villain side more understandable. Although, the entire time this happened I was thinking “wait, I’m not dead?”
You know, because a guy did just swing a sword down on Noah’s neck.
And then it’s revealed that, in a shocking turn of events, Mio isn’t actually dead. Except, she is dead. So like apparently Mio and Consul M switched bodies during the boss fight with her (because she can sort of control people’s movements), so the Mio that died was actually M, and the Consul was the Mio you were playing as up to this point. It’s honestly a pretty good use of the fakeout death trope, as there was actually a death so to speak, so it doesn’t feel like a cheap way to drum up emotions. I just wish M was a bit more of a character. But, it’s fine, she serves her purpose to get N super upset, and whatnot. Classic soundbite that I even heard used for a Mario Party edit on Twitter.
Then you fight robot Queen Nia and she explodes and, you have this decision on whether you wanna keep Mio’s hair long like the Consul, or short like it was for the rest of the game. I wanted to be fair, so I picked long. Sacrilege, I know, but I thought this would only be for like half the game. I was sort of right, because the second half was with long hair, but it only lasted like two chapters of in-game time. Weird how the post-game works.
But yeah, you actually go and find the real queens of these nations who you’ve been working under for most of your life, and yeah it’s obviously Melia and Nia from Xenoblade 1 and 2 respectively, the game’s marketing didn’t hide it that much, but it’s still a great callback regardless. You actually go and rescue Nia first, from this great castle in the sky. It’s a beautiful setting, you use the key to unlock her sleeping chamber, she wakes up, and
Bam, gets shot.
You start thinking the game is gonna pull another Chapter 5 ending on you, but nah. After giving the D some of your S and send him plummeting into the…sky?, along with Joran, it turns out Nia is still alive and just as feisty as ever. We don’t get any of her Welsh sarcasm, which is a shame, but it does lead to the great payoff to this whole stuffy talking bit I mentioned earlier.
Yadda yadda, exposition, you go on the equivalent of the Triforce Quest from Wind Waker before using the shards to modify your ship to break into the Ganon’s Castle Origin Sphere and stop the “endless now” these dumbass villains keep yammering on about. We get a real Avengers Endgame type moment where all the colonies team up to assault Origin as you blast your way through, annihilating all the enemies (which actually automatically aggro to you even if you don’t target them and you’re way over leveled, nice touch), rescue Melia by kicking the shit out of N and bringing things full circle by absorbing him like Mio absorbed M’s power, and having Ghondor and her mother Monica (the City’s leader) show up to help you deliver the wham bam thank you slam to Z. Interesting note, if you finished Eunie’s side story you actually fight an extra boss in the form of Consul X, who vanished after you finished the side story without defeating her. Needless to say, considering how much of a bitch she is, it’s very satisfying to lay the smackdown.
More exposition crap, and the final boss starts. This is more on the gameplay side, but I do find it kind of interesting how the boss strips away the Interlink mechanic you’ve become so reliant on for most of the game. The only other enemy that does this is the Conquering Kings superboss, so Z is at least unique in that regard. Unfortunately, the scenes of the characters seeing past events and having cheesy speeches to shatter the Interlink bonds are kind of cringe, but otherwise this final boss works really well. It’s cool how all the Heroes show up to help you out and even have tangible gameplay effects, it’s long enough to feel satisfying without dragging on for an eternity, and the music is pretty solid.
Once you beat Z he starts flipping the fuck out, N and M peace out of your bodies to have a wild three-way with him (source: trust me), and the universes start unmerging to return to how they were in the very beginning of the game. Oh yeah, game takes place pretty much in medias res, kinda neat. We get the last couple interactions from each Ouroboros pair, with Sena and Lanz remaining exercise buddies to the end, Taion giving his tea recipe to Eunie and being a little jelly that he’s not in the top 3 of her friends (never change, man), and Mio and Noah sharing a passionate kiss (for real). And then finally we snap back to the Keves trio (Riku isn’t in the new universe, sad!) in some kind of festival, and we hear some off-seer flute music. What that’s about, maybe the DLC campaign will resolve.
As the grand finale of the Xenoblade trilogy, 3 does a pretty decent job. There aren’t really any major twists or big reveals (at least, not any that you won’t see coming from a mile away), and the story doesn’t really get going until around Chapter 4 or 5 out of 7, but what the story does well, it arguably does better than either of the previous games. And the amount of callbacks is just right. Not so many that it overshadows the new elements present, but enough that it feels like a satisfying, cohesive end to the series as it is now. I compare it to Mega Man X5 and what it did for the X series, but Xenoblade 3 is a lot better of a game in general so, yeah.
Of course, that’s just the story of this video game, there is still gameplay to cover.
Functionally, this is a Xenoblade Chronicles game at its core, and if you’ve played either of the previous games you should be able to jump right in. The game is an action RPG with a massive open world, where you walk around, collect items, find landmarks to increase your EXP stores, battle monsters on the field to gain experience, fight unique monsters, increase affinity with all the different locations on the map to get extra side quests and field benefits, all that good shit. There are some differences, and some holdovers though.
Starting with the overworld stuff, not much has really changed from the previous games. You can still fast travel to a lot of different points on the map to speed up backtracking, you still pick up item orbs to use for things like gem crafting, food items, collectapaedia cards, etc., you still fill out the entire map upon finding every landmark in an area, you still have multiple usually nonlinear areas to explore (Keves Castle and Origin are pretty straightforward), all that jazz. There are a couple snags though.
For one, Xenoblade 3 carries over a kind of annoying feature from 2, where you have to use special skills in order to access parts of the overworld, kind of like a Metroidvania. In 2, this system was kind of annoying, as you needed to grind out certain blade to a high enough level to get the field skill to activate, and if you didn’t have the proper blade you’d have to go through gacha hell to get it. 3 mostly fixed this system by making the skills permanently usable once they were unlocked, limiting the number of skills down to 4, and making 3 of them unlocked through the story. However, it introduces a new issue by making previously standard abilities unlockable. As an example, you have to unlock the ability to climb vines. A standard feature since the first game in the trilogy, is now something you don’t get until you reach pretty much the end of the Fornis region (which is a decent ways through the game, mind you). As a result, because there are areas in previous parts of the world that require vine climbing, you have to backtrack to them to get the goodies.
I’m fine with this when it comes to new abilities, like zipline traversal, but having to wait to do a basic ability that was standard to the characters in the previous games feels like it just exists to add unnecessary backtracking. Again, the system works fine as it is, but I wish the unlockable abilities featured substantially different gameplay to justify their unlock status. The only ability that really fits in that camp is Segiri’s power to walk across poison. Unfortunately, this upgrade comes so late in the game, that by the time you unlock it it becomes underutilized. Only three areas in the entire game use some kind of poison hazard, so there was a lot of wasted potential here.
Speaking of landmarks, I feel like this game is kind of bad at pacing them out. These areas you explore are huge, arguably the biggest of any game in the series (Erythia Sea), but for the most part it feels like these areas are a little too spaced out for what the landmarks can offer on their own. In that sense, I’d argue it’s almost a necessity for convenience sake to go out and defeat the unique monsters, as their gravestones are also fast travel points. This speeds up the pace of moment-to-moment gameplay, but as you’ll discover when you go down the route of hero quests, taking out unique monsters early leads to its own problems in a scenario that could have very easily been tweaked. Still, the convenience of unique grave fast travel points makes it worth it.
As you go through the game, you’ll encounter several rest stop points, allowing you to do a variety of things, from gem crafting to cooking to level ups, to discussing current events with your party, to the (ultimately useless) act of cleaning clothes. These are a nice distraction, and in particular I do appreciate that all of these elements are found in these relatively consistent locations, which also function as fast travel points. In 2, level ups using bonus experience had to be done at specific inns, which were only found in the game’s towns. While I never had an issue skip traveling back to a town to go to the inn and level up, having these relegated to more common rest stop points is a nice improvement.
Gem crafting has also undergone a change. As opposed to the previous games, where you had to craft individual gems, and you had to craft gems of the same level and attribute multiple times if you wanted multiple characters to get the gem benefit, here a gem can be equipped multiple times to multiple characters when it’s crafted once, meaning you only have to craft a gem of a certain level 1 time to use its effects for every character simultaneously, if you want that. This speeds up farming for gem items exponentially, and makes reaching level 10 for all the gems far more convenient. It also helps there’s only 20 different gem types in this game, so the gem grinding process for completionists is far more streamlined.
Cooking essentially works like it did in 2. You make a food item, it gives you benefits. However, these benefits are far more pronounced and don’t factor into any sort of party affinity, which is my preferred way of handling things. Food offers elements like more experience, more class points, etc. And as mentioned earlier, the bug where food failed to activate its effects was patched out, so nom nom away. It’s not even a field skill anymore. You can even make onigiri with Sena (basically a requirement).
In terms of the colonies, they essentially serve the same purpose as the towns from the previous games. You can go there to get a bunch of quests, talk to NPCs to change their affinity and map out the global affinity relationship chart, buy items and equipment (although I personally found far more useful items from just exploring the environment), and soaking in the general atmosphere. Not much to say on the colonies themselves, but around them in the regions you explore, you’ll occasionally find the husks of dead soldiers from those colonies. If you get to them and play the off-seer tune, you’ll send them off, and boost the affinity you have with a specified colony. Sometimes you’ll get a massive pile of soldiers, which gives you even more affinity. However, this affinity boost only takes effect after destroying the Flame Clock for that specified colony, so make sure to get that done ASAP.
As another minor critique, I don’t really understand why they highlight Flame Clocks in a gameplay tutorial. It talks about how the flame clock measures the strength of the colony, but you pretty much stop having to deal with that by the end of chapter 1 for your party, and you never have enough battles with the temporary party members from each colony to feel a substantial drop in effectiveness. It’s not a major problem, just kind of confusing.
Although, on the note of tutorials, it does feel like the game has a problem with pacing out new abilities. Although, the problem is kind of the opposite of 2. In that game, you were thrown so many new mechanics at once it was hard to get adjusted to them. In 3, the mechanics are much better tutorialized, but it takes so long to unlock all of them. You legitimately get new major mechanics as far in as Chapter 6 out of, again, 7. And sometimes the game tutorializes things that didn’t need it, like the aforementioned vine climbing. I get that 2 had a tutorial problem, but this feels like too much course-correcting.
As for the areas you explore, they’re pretty memorable and fun to traverse. There’s still tons of secrets to find, chests to unlock (most of which containing equipment, money, and Nopon coins I’ll talk about later), Ferronis Hulks to discover to unlock more rest points and shops, and secret areas that give you tons of experience. So, not much to say there. It was fun to explore in the previous two games, and it’s still fun here. There is also light platforming, but it’s pretty basic stuff, just like the first two games. It does add some nice seasoning to the levels, though.
Of course, this is an RPG, and as such you will have to engage in battles eventually. Much like the first two games, battles take place in real time and start upon either an enemy attacking you, or you attacking them. Combat is still very similar to the previous games in the aspects of you using auto attacks to build up arts to deal more damage or activate special effects, using an art immediately after an auto attack or previous art to drastically shorten the time to complete the art, reviving characters by going up to them and hitting the proper button, and chain attacks. However, the combat is arguably the most changed aspect of the game as well.
In terms of the characters, it feels like sort of a hybrid between the first game and the second. Like the first game, the characters start out with specific roles, and are better suited for specific roles compared to others. You also only have the one party member doing combat, they aren’t assisted by any Blade equivalents. However, as a sort of middle ground with 2, you actually can have 7 party members out in combat at one time. At first, this seems pretty broken, given you can have so many more combat options at once. However, the game tweaks certain mechanics to balance things.
In the first two games, you could revive any character with any character by simply expending a bar from the chain attack gauge. However, in 3, the chain attack is now a singular bar, so you can’t expend any segments from it. The game is also divided into three different overall archetypes: Attacker, Defender, and Healer, and only the Healers are capable of reviving characters. This alters the nature of combat considerably, as now you have to micromanage your Healers and keep them on a steady balance of both healing allies and reviving the dead. Granted, there is an item you can buy from the Nopon store that allows you to revive characters with non-Healers, but it costs 99 golden nopon coins to do so, so make sure to spend wisely.
Thankfully, I feel the game works well with these new systems. The AI is very competent when it comes to who you assign as healers/revivers, and will generally always pick the character that’s best to revive at any given moment. I usually liked to stick two of my defenders as revivers, along with two healers, but that might be a little excessive with late game enemies.
In terms of the main combat, it works like you’d expect. The attackers are your primary damage dealers, the defenders draw aggro to them and have appropriately beefy life bars and defenses to keep enemies focused on them, and healers can both heal the allies and apply buffs/debuffs, but are somewhat frail and draw aggro to them as they heal, so you really wanna prioritize your kit for each character around those limitations. However, in addition to the six party members, you’re allowed to take one Hero character into battle with you. These Heroes also fall into one of the three archetypes, and said archetypes are divided into 20+ different classes. Ranging from the Incursor that relies on dealing huge damage with critical hits, the Lost Vanguard that hinges on drawing aggro and having the sturdiest physical bulk, or probably the most broken class in the game with the Signifier, which prioritizes buffing your allies every second (get Fiona and do her whole Hero Quest chain ASAP). Each Hero can also grant their class to the six main party members, in order for said party members to gain the same benefits as the Hero. However, each class goes up to level 10 (20 after doing the ascension quest for the Hero), and you do need to level them up. You level up by defeating enemies and getting class points, or by expending a certain amount of silver nopon coins, which are acquired from either chests or defeating unique monsters for the first time. I didn’t mention it before, but silver coins can also be used to speed up completing collectapaedia cards, which are useful for building affinity, if you don’t want to grind for the necessary items on the card.
So, needless to say, despite not having 12 individuals in battle at one time, the level of customization you can achieve is no less than it was in 2. There are so many ways you can go into a combat scenario, while still keeping things relatively simple. If you wanted, you could go into battle with nothing but 7 attackers, or 3 attackers/defenders and 1 healer, or anything else. It’s truly astounding how repayable the events are.
This is all without factoring in what I’d consider the biggest innovation to the combat system: at any time, you can hit the left button on the d-pad to activate your Ouroboros transformation, turning you and your Ouroboros partner into a massive mecha for a limited time. The Ouroboros state has 3 different levels, and you can increase your level by doing Fusion Arts. What are Fusion Arts? Well, you actually have two sets of arts, class arts and master arts. Class Arts are unique to specific classes and usually can only be used with that class, like the Glitter Stream art for Incursors. Master Arts, by contrasts, are arts from the classes that, when you level up the class, can be transplanted into the master art combat dock, allowing you to use their effects with a different class. Do you want to do Royal Summoner element summoning with the Incursor class? You can. Want to use a Signifier art with the Lone Exile class? Feel free. Again, more customization.
Anyway, you activate a Fusion art by holding down the ZR button and pressing the face button corresponding to a class art when both it and the master art of the same direction are fully charged. With that, you execute both arts simultaneously, increasing your interlink level. The interlink level, in turn, charges up your Ouroboros attacks, causing them to increase the master Ouroboros art gauge at a faster rate, in turn allowing you to do more master Ouroboros arts before you have to exit Ouroboros mode. Getting to level 3 Ouroboros even changes some of your moves. For example, Phantom Slash for Noah becomes an instant Break at level 3, very useful. Interlink Level also boosts the damage you deal the higher it goes, so it’s worth trying to get it to a high level. However, if you’re about to die, USE IT! The nice perk about Ouroboros is that while you’re in that state, neither character involved in the transformation takes any damage, so it’s a great crutch to rely on, especially when you’re about to die. Of course, this Ouroboros transformation does stop the involved characters from doing their normal arts, so you might miss out on healing with a specific character, for example. So, there is a risk involved. However, the Ouroboros have their own exclusive arts, and there’s one Ouroboros for each character, so you have a lot of versatility in these forms as well. You can do break-topple-launch combos, you can heal with Eunie’s form, you can use Liberty Wing to revive all the characters (very useful, trust me), or you can do ludicrous damage with Noah’s Phantom Slash and Unison Strike at level 3, before doing a Mega Spinning Edge or Origin Slash. Ouroboros Noah is basically your big damage dealer, let’s say, while Ouroboros Sena is a close second and really great for getting Master Arts in particular due to her rapid art cooldown. Ouroboros Lanz is the best tank, Ouroboros Eunie is the best healer, Ouroboros Mio is…pretty worthless, honestly, and Ouroboros Taion is just okay.
And finally, we have chain attacks, which have been completely retooled from last time. In 2, you had to use elemental blade combos to stack elemental orbs on the target, the element being the last element in your combo, and you used driver combos like break-topple-launch-smash to extend the duration of elemental arts to make it easier to land the combo. Then, when you activate the chain attack, you hit the elemental orbs with the opposing element to break them and extend the duration of the chain attack.
This time around, the driver combos serve a different purpose. The smash combo essentially decreases the amount of time it takes for the enemy to enter its desperation rage mode if it has one, and honestly, after 231 hours, I still don’t see any benefit to this. The damage dealt is pitiful, and if anything it seems like more of a hindrance, as it’s less time before the boss starts dealing heavy hits to you. By contrast, the break-topple-daze-burst combo is far more useful, as it actually takes the enemy out of their rage mode temporarily. Trust me, for Kilocorn Grandeps this is basically required to win.
So then, how do the actual chain attacks work? Well, you fill up the chain attack bar by executing auto-attacks and art canceling, and when you enter it, every party member currently alive takes part in the attack. So, it’s best to activate the move before an enemy kills your party member.
Each of the three roles has a special function in the chain attack, and it all ties into two concepts: the technical point system, and round management. Each character is assigned a specific amount of technical points, usually relating to their overall intellect level. For example, Taion and Noah have the highest of the six main members, while Sena and Lanz have the lowest, with Eunie and Mio chilling at a cool 25. When you start a round, you can activate one of three chain attack orders, each one finishing with the designated order character doing an attack flurry before activating a special bonus. For example, Taion’s lowers enemy physical defense by 50 points, while Sena’s and Noah’s are designed to either make attacks unblockable or bypass enemy defense, ensuring that your attacks deal the maximum damage they would normally. How do you activate these Ouroboros orders? You need to get to 100 TP, which you do by selecting one of the seven characters and executing one of their arts. When you do, you not only add that character’s TP to the TP gauge, but you also add extra TP by meeting special conditions, like making sure your character’s role and the chain attack role are the same archetype, or making sure the attack isn’t blocked. TP ties into the attackers and healers, with the attacker getting an extra 125% more TP when they’re the first to act in an order, and healers capping the TP at 99% if they aren’t the seventh Hero party member, allowing you to execute a massive TP attack from the maximum possible starting value. This is crucial, as you actually have three different levels you can finish the order at. 100%-149% is good, 150%-199% is bravo, and 200%+ is amazing, with these three stages determining how many of your party members are usable for the next order. Yes, as you use a party member, most of the time they will be unavailable for the next order and most of the rest of the chain attack, unless you get a high enough TP…or use a Defender as the last character in your chain attack, at which point that character is guaranteed to come back.
When you combine all these systems together, and especially late in the game, you can easily score some pretty damn high TP values and rack up the damage. Use an incursor to deal a side critical hit to get a good baseline, use a healer to get the TP up to the 90-99% range, and then bring it home with a solid defender (I like using Lone Vanguard Taion for this with either shield bash or aggro draw), and you’ll easily rack up at least a Bravo to Amazing every single time. This is important, because it’s used to determine how many rounds you go. If you’re consistent with bravos and amazings, you can actually go 4 rounds baseline without raising the gauge again, which in particular is useful to activate Ouroboros orders.
If you manage to get the chain attack to cycle through the chain attack orders of two members in an Ouroboros pair, their Ouroboros Order will appear as one of the three orders you can pick. An Ouroboros order delivers a very powerful attack and after-effect, but it immediately ends the chain attack, so you need to be careful on when you use it. However, if you skip out on the Ouroboros order for another order, that original OO doesn’t appear in the next round, so be cautious. You can also start out with an Ouroboros Order if you enter the chain attack as an Ouroboros level 3, actually allowing you to do both Ouroboros Orders for a pair in one chain attack. It is somewhat useful early game, but by the time you reach the late game and the superbosses, the damage really falls off, and it’s better to just stick with acquiring the Ouroboros Order in the attack itself.
Going back to the Heroes, they also have exclusive abilities that tie into the chain attack, and their own chain attack orders, which can be pretty strong under the right circumstances. Some are kind of situational, like Valdi’s in-order command to boost his TP by 50 against any machine, and some are pretty strong, like Ashera’s in-order increasing the TP to 200% amazing when she’s the member to get over 100% TP, or Fiona boosting the TP of all active party members by 125 or 150% when she activates her in-order. But the chain attack orders for the Heroes are where they really shine, like Valdi granting massive healing, Monica bringing back an extra character, or (continuing her pattern) Fiona’s being the most busted and raising the chain attack gauge, more often than not just flat-out giving you an extra chain attack order. This shit is broken, leading to even more damage with the right combos, often going anywhere between 2 to 4 million damage on average. I’ve even seen the numbers go to 4 HUNDRED million with the right setup which is…yeah.
When combining all these mechanics together, you can certainly rack up a lot of damage with the chain attacks. However, I do feel like there is a little bit of a repetitive dominant strategy with chain attacks, as once you figure out a pattern that works for you, you can pretty much use it for every chain attack and get roughly similar results. This didn’t happen much in 2, where I felt like every chain attack was different because of the vast variety of blade combos, and I felt more obliged to experiment with different blades in order to get different combos, more elemental orbs, and more chain attack damage. There is a lot of customization with the 3 chain attacks, of course, but I did miss the greater versatility of 2’s.
And now for all the shit that I didn’t know where to fit in earlier:
Soulhacker is a cool idea in theory, letting you steal an enemy’s unique art to use for yourself. In practice, though, while it can be really powerful, I’m not a fan of having to grind for some of the arts to master them, and I REALLY am not a fan of how, if you defeat a unique monster before getting soulhacker, you have to go back and refight the unique monster with a soulhacker in your MAIN party (Having Triton as your Hero and no other soulhackers doesn’t count, what the fuck). I don’t really get what this adds. I already defeated the unique monster, I proved that I can overcome it. Forcing me to refight it is, again, unnecessary backtracking.
Water combat still sucks, and unlike 1 and 2 there’s a greater emphasis placed on it. You move slow, and as such you’re actually at a disadvantage against the enemy when it comes to healing. Against normal mooks this is fine, but against the unique monsters I felt like I needed to be 5-10 levels above them just to win, especially against the Whirlpool Triumvirate and the Seal Brothers.
While it is great that you can explore areas way beyond your current level at any time, find landmarks in them, and get the overpowered items and bonus experience for that point in the game, I really don’t get why the option to level down your characters is reserved for the post-game. Granted, this is at least better than 2, where you could ONLY do it on new game+, but come on. Just patch in the option to level down at any time, please.
Unlocking Nią and Melia as Heroes was so fucking sick thank you game. Can’t wait for the new DLC Heroes.
I appreciated the option to have your character in any outfit for any class. Noah’s starting outfit has really cool drip and I probably should do a whole playthrough in that outfit at some point. I also dislike Yumsmith on Sena so, glad I could change it.
The game does have a hard mode, and I do really appreciate that, but patch in a Bringer of Chaos-esque difficulty at some point just because.
None of the characters are quite as good as Morag or Zeke but hey, still a pretty good cast.
The final boss is visually pretty neat, moreso than Artifice Aion. The bosses in general are pretty good, a lot of them having unique gimmicks like shackling healing, blocking, having sleep spells, negating interlink, etc., that makes them fun to fight. Although, Consul Y in particular is kind of a really big difficulty spike for the main story, as he’s such a massive damage sponge, to the point that even when I surpassed him in levels by a decent amount on hard mode, I could not beat him in the final area without using max level classes with the characters. Considering I was trying to grind class points, was kind of disappointing.
The issue of the chain attack music overwriting the battle themes is there, but I mostly circumvented it due to my approach of saving chain attacks for the end for most of the game to take advantage of the overkill bonus. When you kill an enemy during a chain attack, for the rest of the attack you build up an experience multiplier, and when the attack ends that multiplier gets tacked onto your EXP and CP earned from the battle. This is much more pronounced with unique monsters, so if you want to grind, I’d suggest waiting for the post game, downgrading to level 92, and fighting the Agnian unique monster near Agnus Castle. At least, that’s how I did it.
Speaking of spongy, the final super boss was kind of annoying. It did take me two tries, and about 27 minutes on the final attempt. And that was the easiest version of it, I dread imagining how much grinding and time it would take for the level 200 version on Hard. I am just not good enough to replicate the strategies in videos yet. Maybe I’ll do it as like a personal challenge at some point.
Seeing Vandham’s ancestor was neat.
The discussion mechanic is a cool idea, but in practice it just led to a bunch of running around each of the colonies, trying to find the specific NPCs at specific times who had the discussion prompt over their head. It doesn’t help that many of these prompts don’t actually lead to quests, and some discussion prompts require multiple eavesdrops to fully unlock them. They are a cute way to build up the world, but the experience benefits they give you are puny and not worth going after, so it’s just a big waste of time as you try to find the actual quest important discussions. It’s also important to note that some quests straight up won’t activate without finishing other discussion based quests, which is annoying. I just wish the next Xenoblade game cuts the fat and makes every quest available at any time. Thankfully, there are no timed quests, which I appreciate.
Holy shit why is Erythia Sea so big and empty for a lot of it-
Poppi coming back in her base form was really cute and an interaction I’m glad we got to see, a nice sort of epilogue to Poppi and Mythra’s convo in Rhadamanthus Station/World Tree.
Melia has unique dialogue when you go into her room in Keves Castle that’s so adorable, also that shit is really well hidden like, goddamn.
Supply drops are kinda neato burrito, wouldn’t mind seeing a mechanic like this again.
Why can’t you use gold coins to boost class levels, only silver. Doesn’t make sense to me, just make the cost smaller for the gold coins if they’re more rare.
I…think that’s it, until the DLC comes out. In terms of final thoughts, this game is really great. The story is engaging with a likable cast of characters, the core Xenoblade gameplay is as solid as ever, with some notable improvements from 1 and 2, the environments are fun to traverse through, the combat feels like a nice medium between the more simple 1 and the more versatile 2, the tutorialization is handled better, the bosses are fun (albeit kind of spongey), and there’s just a lot of charm and polish. There are a few minor annoyances, but nothing that stopped me from wanting to see the game through. And this game is long, like I mentioned, I got 231 hours in and still haven’t finished all the Collectapaedia cards (even though 1 or 2 were bugged) or all the gem crafting, and I have yet to level up all the classes for each party member or do New Game+. But I’ll prolly save all those for the DLC.
As for where it ranks on the Xenoblade totem, I think it’s probably better than 1, but I might like 2 slightly more due to more time spent with the game, and enjoying the combat slightly more once I got into the groove with it. Granted, 2 is not perfect, having a worse English dub and bad tutorials and bad scenes in general, but when it hits, it hits a little harder than 3 I’d say. Still, 3 is a solid end to the trilogy, and I’d highly recommend it, even as a standalone. You benefit from playing the other 2, but it works great as its own story, and that’s to be commended.
Anyway, think that’s all for rn. Catch you later.
JJ's Writing Corner 