The Kevesi and Agnian protagonists of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 have been designed to battle one another, maturing instantly and then surviving for, at most, 10 years before their bodies give out. Discovering why they and all the other colonies on the planet Aionios have been locked into a war-torn cycle, fighting for the resource of time itself, is a killer hook with a powerful anti-war message. But the journey toward that reveal is also discordant with the game itself, which hinges on overlong and needlessly complex combat and exhausting exploration.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just cannot get out of its own way. This is, after all, a game that provides a tutorial on how to complete tutorials, and it keeps piling on slight mechanics well into the 20-hour range. Throughout, the large-scale maps and near-constant, grinding battles create the illusion of progress, and the class-based system suggests a greater level of control than in the series’s prior entries, but these things are really just signs of a more well-oiled time-suck. There isn’t anything more to do in the thundery floating islands of the Syra Hovering Reefs, the Fornis desert, or the Cadensian marsh beyond following a handy red navigation line to move from cutscene to cutscene, cutting down swaths of enemies along the way.
The series’s epic scale, designed to make players feel as if they’re traveling across the backs of ancient titans, ruins the pacing, since it takes forever to get just about anywhere. This is particularly galling given that Mio, one of your allies, is understandably angst-ridden about her impending death but perfectly fine to spend in-game weeks, if not months, fast-traveling around the map to farm collectibles with no real sense of purpose beyond reaching Swordmarch.
Mio isn’t the only casualty of the game’s exasperating plot-to-progress ratio. It’s not until the end of the fourth chapter that things start to pick up. By then, though, you may ask yourself why it took almost 40 hours, give or take a few hours depending on how many sidequests you’ve completed, to get at why some characters look identical and why your party members consider children and the elderly to be a “new species.” It doesn’t help that the thin, similarly structured vignettes in which the members of your makeshift alliance, gifted with a transformative power called Ouroborus, liberate their former colonies from Moebius’s rule isn’t especially compelling.
Yes, you can skip some of these events, but doing so makes Xenoblade Chronicles 3 even more repetitive, since Hero Quests are the only way to unlock new combat classes for your six core party members, lest you want to spend the entire game spamming the same three abilities. Sadly, these side stories have no impact on the plot. These hero characters are written only for their specific sidequests, so though you can have any one of them tag along as a seventh “guest” in your party, they vanish as soon at you’re put back on the path of the game’s main plot.
The whole thing is a reminder of just how non-essential these characters (and many other components of the game) are, serving a mechanical purpose more than a plot-based one, which trivializes them down to their tropiest essence. The mechanic Valdi wants to make robots do something other than fight, while the reckless warrior Ashera describes her so-called suicidal impulse as “dying to fight, not fighting to die.” Every character outside your central six is held at arm’s length, and many of your foes in Moebius are never defined any further than the unique mask they wear and the single letter of the alphabet they’re identified by.
It doesn’t matter that there’s a good story at the heart of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that delves into the purpose of life and the necessity of conflict, because these themes aren’t integrated into the majority of what you’ll actually be doing across the game. Tending the Collectopaedia—built-in fetch quests—is easier than ever in the series, but even more pointless, since you’re not actually interacting with or building bonds with those who make requests. The enemy design is great, with a real sense of escalation between tiny fodder-like creatures that you can beat down and their larger, named brethren that you’ll have to return to slay much later on in the game. But all of these enemies are dispatched in the exact same way, with your party mindlessly auto-attacking with occasional input from whichever character you’re controlling.
You’d think that the bigger an enemy is, the harder it would fall, but because the only determining factor of difficulty is the gap between your level and theirs, there’s no sense of scale to combat. The only tactic you need is that of attrition: The longer a battle drags on, the more meters you’ll fill, and the flashier the attacks that you’ll be able to unleash, like interlinking with allies to briefly enter a more powerful form, or executing a chain attack that laboriously unleashes a series of uninterruptible commands. Your sword-sponge enemies have millions of hit points not because it makes for interesting combat, but because it stretches things out long enough to make players feel as if they’re more than cogs in the system. These flashy combos are a good way to illustrate the importance of teamwork to the plot, but in terms of gameplay, they only continue to demonstrate how overly engineered every inch of the conflict is.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Golin.
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You should be banned from metacritic, just like famitsu
Whatever it takes to get the clicks!
Why is it always Slant Magazine that has the worst takes and the worst writers…
Seriously though. Giving Breath of the wild and Sekiro a 4/10. No mans Sky a near perfect review. Can Slant Magazine get competent people the play games? Every year, same old thing. Terrible.
I am sorry your brain isn’t complex enough or your IQ isn’t high enough to understand Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Go back to your brain dead From Software games.
Huh, I guess just about everyone was wrong but you. What are the odds?
Sometimes opinions can be wrong I guess. 9/10 game for me. Best game I’ve played this year, with some minor flaws that bring it to a 9.
It’s kinda funny how this review doesn’t even mention most of the actual flaws of the game and instead hates on all the things that are completely subjective in nature.
It’s like me giving Elden Ring a 0/10 because I personally disliked it. No, if I reviewed it, I would be objective, I wouldn’t include my personal opinions.
If you think the combat is “needlessly complex” then you should’ve played on normal. Also anyone who’s played any other xeno game knew exactly what to expect. The games hinge on giant sprawling landscapes to explore and collect random things. They should really have people who understand the genre to review games, not random people who sometimes play games.
Absolute garbage take. I would be embarrassed to attach my name to something so wildly inaccurate.
Braindead fans attacking a perfectly valid review. The game is full of bloat and boring as all hell. Great review.
Braindead loser.
Completely agree with you. I adored XC2, but XC3 is terrible. The “open world” has so little to do I was yawning between plot points. I played over 50+ hours, got into Chapter 5 and was like, well… This game sucks. And, to make sure I was right I read the ending weeks after I stopped playing the game. (I waited to see if I would ever feel compelled to play it again. Spoiler Alert: I didn’t.) Anyone who thinks XC3 is a great game is blinded by their own fanaticism. This game runs poorly, has worse graphics than XC2, poor pacing and character design, and should not have been released until they actually gave the open world stuff to do. Being 41 and having played hundreds of games at this point, XC3 is the most disappointing release I have ever played because I expected much better from Monolith.
It’s frustrating, right? And I agree that I liked exploring in XC2 way more, even if the gatcha hero recruitment irked me. Uraya’s stomach, for instance? The industrial wastes of Mor Ardain and those quarries? I wouldn’t go so far as to say anything’s wrong with people who love XC3, but they’re looking for a different experience than we are, I guess.
I completely agree. The game had moments of brilliance…but they don’t last long enough to make a compelling game. I was 40 hours in and wondering “does this ever pick up?”
The pacing is terrible and they should have done more to intergrate the side quests (which were honestly the best part about the game) into the story itself. The emotional climax of the game was the end of chapter 5…everything after that point just feels completely unnecessary and boring by comparison. The characters outside of Noah and Mio simply don’t get enough time in the spotlight. You only truly get to know them through sidequests, because the main story ignores them.
The villains are honestly awful and the battle system is superficially deep…yes, you can master multiple classes, but why can’t you pick arts from those classes to build a class of your own or add on to your favorite class? Honestly, it gets tiring messing up the team’s balance to master new classes.
I’m also 41yo and I’ve played many RPGs. I normally love anything Monolithsoft does (XC2 is one of my favorite games of all time), but they dropped the ball with this game. It honestly makes me sad because it had the potential to be great.
You described every Xenoblade Chronicles game and all the reasons you listed as negatives are positives for most ppl.
Oh wow, the worst review ever? It took me over 70 hours just to reach chapter 4 and I enjoyed every second of it. Sure I may be way over levelled, but that’s the fun of xenoblade. Also grinding is very easy, you just have to spam named encounter several times and kill it with chain combo. The combat mechanic is fun as well, it took times to fill up your bar sure, but you have to pay attention to directional and combos to fill up the bar which is for me engaging.
We had vastly different experiences, but I’m glad you had fun. I don’t think there’s enough plot or gameplay to fill the slight amount of narrative urging you on to Swordmarch that you get through Chapter 4, and you don’t–at least on the standard difficulty–HAVE to pay attention to directions or combos for anything other than elite or boss enemies. You *can*, but that’s my point: it’s empty, needlessly complex (not complicated) combat that’s trying to disguise the repetition and make the game way longer than it ought to be.
At the end of the day, saying that you were able to spend 70 hours getting to point where the plot PICKS UP is not really a compliment so much as confirmation that the game is inflated. Surely you can see that if someone *doesn’t* enjoy the systems you lingered so long on, the game’s going to frustrate them.
Well another racist sony pony who is five years old and does not know anything about videogames, why don’t you play a lesser game like elden ring which is like a cheap knock off of dark souls. You are too stupid to play a hard-core game like Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
These comments are pretty funny. The game is an absolute turd. 0/10, for wasting 35 hours of my life and fuel and time driving to trade it in.
XCDE is one of my fav games ever but this completely missed the mark on everything. At 35 hours I couldn’t stand any more.
Graphically. As this was no3, I expected something great. What did I get. Characters humping scenery every 10 seconds. How 3 issues in on Switch, Nintendo still can’t get it to look a fraction as nice as Xenoblade X on WiiU.
OST. Excellent production but nothing memorable.
Story. 35 hours in and practically nothing happened. I had to listen to ridiculous conversation after conversation about food with those annoying little Noppon sh*ts. One of which was the 35 hour final straw for me.
It felt very fetch questy.
The characters are absolutely awful. It was hard to decide who was more in need of a punch in the face. Lanz, or the Noppon’s. Why would you make such an irritating character? He just reminded me of Rez from Valkyria Chronicles 4, who completely ruined that game for me.
Gameplay was just bad because I realised quite soon it became a very uninspiring loop. I’m happy to rinse and repeat in games but this just wasn’t fun. Kill nameless, story less bad guy. Break clock. Traipse all over on crappy colony quests. Listen to meh, meh BS over and over from Noppon’s. Listen to childish conversations over and over. Repeat.
The standard of dialogue is on a par with Peppa Pig, except I’m not 4 years old, so it is far from entertaining. More often than not, cringe and embarrassing. I had to pause it every time my 15 year old step son walked through because he would have had years of ammo to take the piss out of me with, for playing kids games.
It was boring and childish.
I am now playing XC2 which is slightly better it kind of brings some good bits from XCDE and some bad bits of XC3. So it looks like XC2 was just the start of the downward spiral.
XC2 over this any day and XCDE if you actually want a good game.
Damn, literal dogshit take, embarrasment of a journalist you are
Read this in Quantum TV’s voice and cadence and suddenly these takes make a lot more sense
Garbage clickbait review. You’re an awful writer and an even worse player.
The game is a masterpiece, surpassing even the first one. It’s gonna sell even more than the second.
“and it keeps piling on slight mechanics well into the 20-hour range”
The mechanics all have a reason to exist and all adds layers of depth that have to be understood to tackle the most otugh challenges, specially superbosses.
“There isn’t anything more to do in the thundery floating islands of the Syra Hovering Reefs, the Fornis desert, or the Cadensian marsh beyond following a handy red navigation line to move from cutscene to cutscene, cutting down swaths of enemies along the way.”
1) Ether fountains to harvest (to use on gem crafting and bulting up pçd ferronises).
2) Finding old ferronises and activating then, creating a new camp site, new fast travel site, new nopon store and new item generation machine.
3) Skirmishes/enemies fighting, something that makes the world feel more a live. A source of valuable Silver Nopon coins and of colonies affinity.
4) dead soldiers to send – off, valuable affinity with colonies.
5) Supply drops, with useful itens and bringing some fight encounters, also something to add value to previous explored areas as even them can get supplies.
6) Quests that can be triggered in the world, considerably more quests of this style than any previous Xenoblade, and we are talking about good quests here, that add to the lore of the game and can provide even new heros, making the world a source of quests, rather than it just being locked to cities.
7) Find and liberaty optional colonies
8) Containers, equivalente to bau treasures, all if useful items.
9) Find secret ares, that provide new fast travel point, exp and beautiful vistas
“This is particularly galling given that Mio, one of your allies, is understandably angst-ridden about her impending death but perfectly fine to spend in-game weeks, if not months, fast-traveling around the map to farm collectibles with no real sense of purpose beyond reaching Swordmarch.”
So does Zelda BOTW and several other big open worlds because fun and exploration is more importante the history consistency.
“It’s not until the end of the fourth chapter that things start to pick up”
The game immediatly starts at an all out war, anda t chapter 1 we get to meet the main opposing Enemy faction Moebius all while also learning about Ouroborous.
“Sadly, these side stories have no impact on the plot”
Many of the heroes quest deal with Moebius and the effects that the flame clock system had on each colony. The dialogue of many characters is updated to reflect what happens after certain quests are cmpleted.
“these hero characters are written only for their specific sidequests”
Ascension quests envolve more than one hero, showing hiw colonies start to interwine and trade culture, good and technology, plus how they are dealing with the changes after the flame clock was broken.
“The mechanic Valdi wants to make robots do something other than fight, while the reckless warrior Ashera describes her so-called suicidal impulse as “dying to fight, not fighting to die.”
Valdi/Alexandra ascenson quests shows how colony 30 managed to defeat colony Iota, and then how now they have to set past events aside and share technology (machine creations and the collectopedia system). Ashera assension quest shows also why her wish to die and her connection to the consul. These queston also elaborate on the motivaton of some of the consuls.
“but even more pointless, since you’re not actually interacting with or building bonds with those who make requests.”
You certainly are through the standard, hero na ascencion quests.
“with your party mindlessly auto-attacking with occasional input from whichever character you’re controlling”
Blatant lie, you would be playing overwheming suboptimal. Through proper positioning, arts cancelling, activating Ouroborous and Chain attack at the best moments, and making the best use of chain attack, is how you beat fights fast, and the Only way to tacle tough fight like high level unique monsters and superbosses.
“but because the only determining factor of difficulty is the gap between your level and theirs, there’s no sense of scale to combat”
Blatant lie, if only level gap was the defining fator, it would not be possible to beat mosters many levels above your party by using proper builds, positioning and maing good use of chain attacks, but it out it is 100% possible, and exactly what you have to do to deal with superbosses.
I am sorry sir Aaron Riccio, but you wrote one of the worst reviews I have ever read, full of false claims and mistakes.
you should’ve wrote the review lol.
Holy shit they should be embarrassed after reading this
I didn’t say anybody else was wrong. I said what my response to the game was. If you look at the user reviews, you will see that some of the people who played the game honestly did not like it. Given a representative population, odds were actually pretty high that one of us wouldn’t.
Seriously? I am sure you know exclusive high profile games tends to get review bombs from people from other platforms on meta. This happens almost all the damn time, trying to meta user score review bombs to justify this thing you call review is an all new low, lmao.
There will always be someone who doesn’t like something, therefore the few people make the majority. Um ok.
Not to mention, a lot of what you said was unfactual and hella innacurate. Like I’m baffled this site even allowed this review.
Joey, I already went through all of Wisehunter’s post point-by-point on Twitter, since he pinged me there, too, but if you genuinely think I said something inaccurate, I’m happy to address it.
As for your previous statement, I’m not saying I’m in the majority. I’m saying that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is not a universally praised game. It is not statistically unusual that at least one of the critics to play it did not love it.
I took a look at his review history, and noticed that he gave Call of Duty: Vanguard a higher rating than XC3.
Nothing more to add, the ridicule is done alone.
Looks like Nintendo didn’t pay.
This review shows why it’s important to have somebody that actually know something about video games review them. I’ve played through Xenoblade 3 myself, and it’s without question the best RPG I’ve put my hands on in a decade.
Get better reviewers.
Lol really. Picking this as your best rpg of the decade only shows you have played nothing else. The game was a boring grind fest. I ended up after 30 or so hours just watching the plot on YouTube. Battle system is terrible, unskillful and looooong. Long enough to make a 10 hour game a 120 hour game.
You shouldn’t be allowed to review games….
Sounds like the writer was just too dumb or lazy to engage into the game. All the side content is just that – side content. I never actually had to grind. Just changed my characters classes to suit the enemy I was fighting. It was never too complex. Just.a little learning from the brain dead simple tutorials anyone can understand. All in all, it just sounds like this dude sucks as a gamer, writer, and person. Foh.
There’s a difference between universal praise and just looking for things to criticize to justify what you have determined your position is. The side quests, for example.
They’re absolutely better than anything in a previous Xeno game and far better than most RPGs I can think of. They add a ton of context, lore, and world building to the universe, while also thematically fitting into the game by showing the team connecting the world and various groups coming together for the common good.
Do they fit into the main plot as you insanely declare a problem? No, but that’s why they’re side quests. Of course they seemed thinly drawn when you put in the bare minimum.
“By then, though, you may ask yourself why it took almost 40 hours, give or take a few hours depending on how many sidequests you’ve completed, to get at why some characters look identical and why your party members consider children and the elderly to be a “new species.””
Your latter point is literally explained in the game’s first 15 minutes and the former point is the biggest plot point in the game (stick with me here…usually a plot will involve set up and payoff,which you don’t do in the first act). What an absurd observation that shows your lack of engagement and critical analysis.
You can’t hide behind “But other people didn’t like it!” There’s legitimate criticisms to be made. A better reviewer would’ve written about them.
On the subject of side quests, which is a pretty obvious point of nonsensical criticism this guy made, I touched on the same thing in the destruction I did to his twitter review, and in response he said “It’s not like in FF6 that the secondary characters that are recruited can have relevance in the plot”.
In short, the guy is seeing as a “bad” point of the game that the secondary content of this game does not work in the same way as in the games that he does like haha
Really the level of argumentation of this reviewer is very medicre.
“Destruction”? We’re not at war.
At any rate, you don’t see it as an issue that there is arguably more side-quest content than story? You don’t think the game would’ve been better served finding ways to fully incorporate those liberations into the main plot? Or that the agents of Moebius deserved more, on the whole (obvious exceptions aside), than being relegated to a single letter of the alphabet each? I mentioned FF6–a classic for a reason–because it does a great job of integrating and imbuing most plots (Umaro, Mog, Gogo aside) into the game and making them a key part of the game’s second half and raid on the tower. If you want a more recent example, look at Mass Effect 2; where were the stakes of the party you put together and found the backstories of when heading to Origin?
Yes, I’m calling the way the plot was handled a “bad” point. I’m giving clear examples as to why. You’re welcome to explain why this was the *best* way the game could’ve handled things–by making them optional and distinct from the main game, almost like the new hero DLC we’ll be getting.
Well, you conveniently responded to him instead of me to avoid acknowledging where you made suspect remarks about the main plot (missing the early discussion on terms and wondering why they didn’t tear apart standard dramatic art structure to put end of Act 2 revelations in Act 1).
But here’s the reason: because the game is about the six main characters, who are all really well written, acted, and animated. They are all distinct and given full stories and motivations.
Your insistence that optional side characters should be treated the same is silly. And notice that they do come into play to join the battle at the end as well–the more work you’ve done to investigate and build the world, the more meaningful their appearance is, even if they don’t stop to each deliver lengthy monologues to satisfy you.
Again, the game doesn’t need or require universal praise. But your criticisms just show a distinct lack of engagement with the game at hand. It’s not a bad review because I disagree with it, it’s a bad review because you based nearly all your criticisms on an obsessive point that almost no other game actually satisfies, leading to a myopic and shallow observation that clearly doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people (based on player and critic reviews).
You can defend it all you want, or just admit you had the wrong headspace for this and ended up on an island.
I responded to him because we’d already had a larger conversation on Twitter. To your points:
I mention Mass Effect 2 as a better example of side plots in a sci-fi RPG; better world-building, better characterization, more surprises, more impact (to a degree) on the plot. They also felt better integrated into the game than the wash-and-repeat “smash a Flame Clock, almost always by beating a Consul about whom you know nothing.” The structure turns these side-quests into vignettes, and saying they’re better than content in a previous Xeno game isn’t high praise. I’ve been playing the mobile Octopath game, which has at least sixty “hero” quests, and it’s the same issue, but at least that game is honest about what it’s doing.
Here’s another way to think about it: if XBC3 were a newspaper article, it would be one that has more sidebars than main story. Outside of something written by David Foster Wallace, that’s not the best format for relaying a concept. I’ve engaged with the game; I’ve bounced off it, as I did with Star Oceans (but not the most recent Tales of Arise) because the Hero characters were not sufficiently developed in due time–and how could they be, since they weren’t a part of the main game? If the narrative dissonance of having a core party of six tightly bonding and learning to work together against all odds . . . while there’s a phantom seventh person they all just keep forgetting about during camp sequences . . . I don’t know what to tell you.
As for your note about children/elderly–the game hints at “we’re born like this” at the start, but I don’t recall it actually showing you (certainly not from the character’s POV) until Chapter 5. They’ve never seen an old (or young) person before, and that’s what I’m talking about. If you understood this to be all about biological engineering from the start, great, but in that case, I’d be even more infuriated that the game babies you–pun intended–to that same “obvious” conclusion for the next fifty hours. I dug neither the set up nor the payoff, and explained why. This isn’t South Park, setting up a cliffhanger to the first season and then interrupting it at the start of the second to deliberately troll audiences. This is a game padding out a three-episode plot with twenty episodes of episode-of-the-week filler.
I’m also not hiding behind anyone or anything. I legitimately didn’t enjoy parts of the game, and I explained why. Maybe there’s only a minority of us who care about those things, but hey, we deserve a review that represents those concerns, and you’re allowed to disagree with them, ideally respectfully.
Won’t let me respond to your subsequent comment, so I’ll say here: you’re empirically wrong again. They meet Guernica within the first couple hours. And we see them in the pods by that time as well.
But your point about the later scene in regard to this is just nonsense–it’s really not about learning the science of what happens. It’s a character-driven moment driving home the absolute innocence robbed from these child soldiers and opening their eyes to romantic partnerships–key to subsequent developments.
Just take the L here, my guy. You didn’t pay attention to the main story, thus you were baffled by the thematic relevance of the side stories and didn’t play them enough to understand how they tie together as colonies interact with each other and the one dimensional characters you saw evolve.
You chose the wrong nitpick to make the centerpiece of your review, as it only exposed your lack of engagement and understanding. Oh well, you had an off day, no big deal, it’s just really apparent to the rest of us who played it or reviewed it.
I think there’s a lot of different threads right now, but the point of my review was that the game does not get into what’s fundamentally going on–“why some characters look identical and why your party members consider children and the elderly to be a ‘new species'”–until the end of the fourth chapter. You get glimpses in the prologue and Guernica powers you up with Ouroborousian power in Chapter 1 but the game itself does not address this in any meaningful way for at least forty hours. There’s an uncuriousness and unurgency to the game, which I discussed, that does more for the emptiness of the world than its potential richness, and the skirmishes, the unique monsters, the cargo drops, the off-seeing, etc., felt like things to check off rather than to accomplish (and if you’ve played any open-world game, you know the difference).
I agree with you that the game can’t reveal everything at once. Obviously! But I disagree with you, and many others, that the way the game doles out its narrative in SUCH a slow burn is GOOD. I think the liberation Hero Quests are, for the most part, reductive and repetitive–at best shining a light on how individuals have adapted to the Flame Clock’s oppression–but they all boil down to “let’s beat the masked, one-lettered, empty Consul and smash the clock.” It is lopsided and there must have been a better way to integrate these components, which is why I mentioned games like Mass Effect 2.
My argument was never that characters don’t evolve–I did praise the story, repeatedly. It’s that I wasn’t invested in getting to the point where they finally did. It’s a lot like all those memes about “It takes two seasons for X to get good, but stick with it!” At least with television, you can skip episodes: this was, for much of the game, a slog, and as I didn’t enjoy it, I can’t forgive it as you can. Sorry!
Skill issue
Hello everyone.
If you like, you can go to his twitter where I personally already destroyed his mediocre review completely (and the guy only dedicated himself to playing with semantics and using fallacies of false equivalence to defend himself).
It really is one of the most irresponsible reviews I’ve ever seen, but hey, we all know about the “suspicious” history of notes on this mediocre site.
This game is overrated as all hell the story and characters were bland and boring. This reviewer may have had some bad takes in this review. But all the people saying his opinion is wrong just because they like this anime cliche trash are just as bad. For the record I’m a huge Xenoblade fan and have played, enjoyed and beat all the other games but just can’t see what other people are seeing in this game. The story is clearly written for preteens.
Guys. Chill! This guy has written a seriously legitimate review of XC3. I do have very similar issues with the game. Not only XC3 is my least favourite in the series, it is one of my biggest disappointments of my gaming career. Such a rushed, short and basic story wont fly by my standards as well. Chp 5 ending and some cool hero quests here and there is NOT going to carry the trilogy finale. As a huge fan of the series, Takahashi REALLY dropped the ball on this one. Im so sick of this positive toxicity everyone has towards XC3. It is only a ‘good’ game. Nowhere near as profound as XC1 and XC2.
Another game for the lowest common denominator. Just pay attention to the way the story is paced and how reward and progression mechanics are lazily thought up. Combat is literally the same from the beginning to end with no satisfying hook or peak like previous entries. You guys need to take a look at real masterclass jrpgs like Skies of Arcadia, Grandia I, and Dark Cloud series. I’m sorry but this is just another example of how games are succumbing to more corporate greed for expansion and global appeal instead of making something that pushes and evolves the genre to new heights.
After finishing the game yesterday, I am happy to read your review as one of the few not blinded by the name xenoblade. I absolutely agree with the critics on the narrative. Damn, this story was a downer. By far the most stupid and embarrassing story in a game I have ever played. The heros are pale and the so many things just make no sense. Whereby the characters of XC2 are likeable here it felt like joining a group without any humor. I never understood the motivation of the Mobius. It was just such a bad story telling with so many logical failures. I am actually shocked by all the fan boys here in the comments. What are they defending? What are their standards?? How old are they? The story sucks on so many levels as it is so incoherent and gringe and boring in comparison to so many RPGs I played in my life. So much blabla without any need. Just woke feelings the whole time. No humor. Reminded me on FF15. Also an incredible stupid story and running through useless big worlds for nothing. What was really fun for me though was the battle system and the looting. But yes, i see that this is repeatable and the open maps too wide. I would rank this part last by distance in comparison to XC and XC2. Especially XC2 I loved because of the charas, the narrative and game play (I agree there where some gringe moments too but XC3 is a 100 h gringe experience). Thx for your accurate review!
Xenoblade 3 is fucking ass bruh
It’s waste of cash and the story was basically rip-off of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number but shit writing and too long cutscene that doesn’t have any points and also ruined the ending of previous Xenoblade 1 and 2
worst game ever played
Hunt Down The Freeman was much better game
Rpg, Score and Game of the year nominee. And Mr, Aaron here put a review like this. Completely off point, never have I ever seem a reiew that missed the mark so much.
Too late response but did you already forget about Last of Us 2?
the shitty game got GOTY despite the fact of its godawful story?
60 hours into this game and i agree, it’s one hell of a grind.