Whew, it’s been awhile since I’ve written one of these, hasn’t it? Been having trouble getting motivated. But shockingly, of all games to get me motivated, it’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that we’re gonna take a look at today. While I certainly got very excited over Xenoblade Chronicles 2 when it initially came out, my opinion on it soured quite a bit with time, though being ambivalent to the story from the off probably hasn’t helped. But Xenoblade Chronicles 3 fixes that particular gripe with a narrative that’s gripping from the very start, and helps power this game into what might be my favourite in the series, and a culmination of the past games’ successes into one massive explosion of excellence.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes place in the world of Aionios. Here, two nations, Keves and Agnus, duke it out for supremacy at the behest of their Queens. Every citizen in these nations is a soldier – every soldier born from their Queen. Over ten years, or “terms” as they’re called, they train, they fight, and they kill in order to fuel their Flame Clocks. Slaying another soldier with your Blades releases their Flames and allows you to take them for yourself, with each Colony on both sides trying to keep the Flame Clocks of their massive Ferronises fueled through the deaths of their opponents. If you survive for all ten terms, you return to your home castle to pass away in a Homecoming, a highly-regarded honour among soldiers.
We join a battle already in progress between two warring colonies, in a field permanently scorched by war. Noah, Eunie, Lanz, and Mwamba are all soldiers of Keves, fighting Agnian troops to keep their Flame Clocks going. Noah is an off-seer – his job is to perform a ceremony over fallen soldiers where he plays a special tune on his flute that changes their leaking red motes to blue in order to send their essences off. This war is all the four have ever known. But still, we see the inklings of wondering if there’s anything else besides endless conflict from Noah, even as he’s driven to fight… or die, should his Flame Clock expire.
Back home in Colony 9 after a decisive victory, they learn of a strange transport carrying a massive source of ether energy… that belongs to neither Keves nor Agnus. Mwamba is transferred to the vanguard as Noah, Eunie, and Lanz work their way through the ensuing battlefield caused by both Keves and Agnus trying to intercept this mysterious third party. The trio encounter an Agnian troop similar to theirs, made up of Mio, Taion, and Sena, and they clash, desperately fighting to live and extend their lives, even if it’s at the cost of their opponents’. The pilot of the mysterious craft, however, activates the ether source, which captures the six soldiers in a strange field of energy that cuts them off from their Colony Flame Clocks, and indeed, removes theirs, replacing them with the symbol of Ouroborous – they’ve been transformed.
At this moment, a strange monster appears, holding Mwamba and an Agnian soldier, killing them both, and cheering on for Noah and Mio’s groups to continue fighting. Instead, they fight the monster, with Noah and Mio unlocking a strange new ability allowing them to fuse into a single being – Interlinking. The monster, called a Moebius, is forced to leave, though not before killing the pilot, a man named Guernica Vandham, and marking the Ouroborous soldiers as “enemies of the world.” Vandham explains before his death that the world shouldn’t be the way it is, and reveals that he’s far, far older than the ten years every soldier gets. It’s up to the Ouroborous to get to the “City” at the base of a massive sword plunged into the ground, and fight to free the world of Aionios from the endless war they’re trapped in. With the Ouroborous now being hunted by their home nations, they see no other option but to combine their efforts and head for the City, and learn the truth of the world. Along the way, freed from the need to kill and take another’s Flames for their own, they may even learn a few things about themselves they would’ve otherwise never had the time to truly think about…
Already, from the word “go,” Xenoblade Chronicles 3 creates an interesting and compelling world with interesting and compelling characters. It does an excellent job making you feel bad for these soldiers, trapped in an endless war, without feeling depressing. Instead, as they treat this war and these fights as “just another day at the office,” things feel just a little off-kilter. Noah wonders if there’s more to life than fighting – and yet, he is just as ready as Eunie or Lanz, who do not question it at all, to take the lives of the Agnian soldiers that he must in order to continue living. So it followed that, once freed from the chains of the Flame Clocks, he’s the first to suggest that they should subdue, rather than kill, opposing soldiers they run into. Now that he’s “allowed” to have the thought, he can truly follow through on it. Each member of the Ouroborous gradually grows and evolves as a person now that they’re no longer trapped in the loop of kill, take Flames, kill again. And indeed, some of the epiphanies and discoveries they have only serve to make their former lives even more disturbing and cruel in retrospect, making it clear that they weren’t intended to be anything more than sacrificial lambs to someone’s else’s benefit.
The irony, of course, is that the symbol of breaking this loop is in and of itself a loop – the Ouroborous. But what the Ouroborous represents – death and rebirth – neatly ties in the “death” of their lives as soldiers and the “birth” of their new lives as free agents. The Moebius, in contrast, have the lemniscate, or the sideways-eight, as their symbol, similarly representing infinity, but instead as permanence and unending. The theme of cycles, pasts and futures, and stagnation runs thick through the narrative, and almost every single smaller story within follows that thread. It’s very similar to the themes of the other two Xenoblade titles, but while Xenoblade Chronicles focused on the characters trying to build a better future and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 focused on the characters resolving mistakes and mysteries of the past, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 firmly plants its foot in a focus on the present. The short, fleeting lives of the soldiers of both nations, forced to fight in order to live, prevents them from being able to focus on anything but the here and now, with the Moebius seeming to have an investment in keeping this eternal, endless conflict burning, and it’s the Ouroborous who are able to take charge in trying to build a future, and learn of what happened in the past that led to this now.
What helps this along is that the world is very much affected by what your party does throughout the game. Though early on they learn that destroying a Colony’s Flame Clock will similarly free all the soldiers there from having to steal other people’s Flames, it also introduces the brand new burdens of having to think and survive on their own, as it also cuts them off from their country’s support completely. For people who are bred and raised to fight and do nothing but fight and keep fighting, with every skill they ever obtain intended to do nothing but further that goal, newly freed Colonies tend to struggle. Every Colony you free has an ongoing story fed through side-quests that focus on how that Colony has decided to adapt to the new paradigm, and completing these stories often has palpable consequences. Side-quests and the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 could often feel as though they weren’t actually doing anything – you were often told things were happening but not shown the results. Xenoblade Chronicles had better quests and smaller storylines, but it also had a lot of unimportant “collect X amount of Y” quests that clearly served to fill out the runtime.
While 3 still has quite a few collection quests (and indeed, the newly reworked Collectopaedia Cards essentially replace them), most of what you do during a side-quest has an in-universe reason for doing it, and in-universe consequences for seeing it through. You’re encouraged to keep up with the people of the Colonies as you continue to support them and solve their new problems, and it all adds up to create an astonishingly realistic-feeling universe in this very fantastical setting. Relationships between freed Colonies can be forged, and previously hostile soldiers, now freed, begin to mingle – and not always for the better, either. Seeing how everything plays out is immensely satisfying and its own reward – I was encouraged to complete the side-quests not just for the bonuses of experience and treasures, but because I wanted to see the story continue. It even served as a bit distracting from the main quest, which, considering it is on a bit of a time-limit much like Batman: Arkham City, might strain one’s disbelief a bit, depending on how flexible they are to that sort of thing.
The world of Aionios is also immediately engaging, though you will probably only find it so if you’ve played the previous two games. Right off the bat, you have the two nations having very distinct styles and character designs, which are clearly meant to represent either game. Keves is made up of Homs, High Entia, and Machina from the first game, with equipment clearly inspired by Mechon. Meanwhile, Agnus enjoys a smattering of humans, including the more unique ones such as Gormotti, Urayan, and Indoline, with both Blades and Flesh Eaters, and equipment based on the Artifices. This even extends to their gameplay styles, if I may get ahead of myself, with the Kevesi soldiers featuring Timed Cooldowns straight out of the first game, and Agnian soldiers having Auto-Attack Cooldowns like the second. The environment is made of areas and landmarks from the two games smashed together, and not always cohesively, lending further weight to the idea that this world is not as it should be.
It’s a stunning feast for the eyes, with excellent visuals that stand side-by-side with the Definitive Edition of the first game released not too long ago. The game also manages to avoid the massive pitfalls of dynamic resolution that the second game struggled with, and puts its best foot forward in both docked and portable mode. The end result is some stunning vistas and spectacular effects, though the framerate can start to chug when you have enough happening on screen at once. While it again isn’t quite as severe as it was in the second game, it’s not quite as consistent as Definitive Edition.
Character designs also return to the philosophy of the first game, featuring a much more unified look and feel compared to the often disparate and out-of-place designs of the Blades from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. If any characters were designed by guest artists in this game, as they were in 2, it’s quite a bit more difficult to tell – it’s apparent that a “house style” was developed that resembles the main characters’ art from 2, but with generally far less absurd and outlandish designs, being a little more grounded, like in 1. This just helps the game feel more cohesive, and less distracting, visually.
So then. That gameplay. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 features massive, open areas filled to the brim with treasures, secrets, quests, and monsters. Much like the world’s setting, the ideas of the first two games are often mashed together, and even a little bit of the side-game Xenoblade Chronicles X manages to sneak in, with the strengths of what worked kept and the weaknesses of what didn’t trimmed, resulting in an experience that’s very low-fat, but still quite substantial. Collectables in the overworld return to their “run over them to pick them up” state from the first game, but now have shapes that represent what type they’re supposed to be like in the second. The world is massive and interconnected like it is in the first game, but navigation is made much simpler and easier like it is in the second game. Fast travel in particular sees a massive improvement, with the ability to warp to the graves of defeated Unique Monsters – allowing players who are willing to take on a challenge to make navigation easier as a side-reward.
As per usual you’ll have to manage equipment, though the game streamlines this aspect quite a bit as well. Accessories that are more effective for your character’s Class are highlighted, though you’re allowed to equip whatever you want. You never have to worry about upgrading weapons – Classes just come with their weapon, which never changes. Gems return, though you’re not amassing a massive collection that you constantly have to swap between and upgrade – instead, you craft them using materials you collect and then once you have a Gem, you can equip it to as many people as you want, and you always have it forever. Once you upgrade it by crafting a higher level – and you can skip levels, should you so choose – it simply replaces the weaker version forever. You can also cook meals that provide timed buffs to things like EXP earned or items dropped by enemies. What ties it all together is the ability to use Nopon Coins to skip certain things should you so choose. Levelling up Classes, crafting Gems, cooking Meals, and even certain Collectopaedia Cards, you can use Nopon Coins earned by fighting rare enemies or completing certain tasks to skip having to pay item or time costs. There’s even a special store hidden in the world where you can exchange them for extremely rare and powerful Accessories. This cuts down massively on the grinding and once again encourages players to explore far and wide.
Combat features a large-scale overhaul that combines aspects of all three previous games to form one, cohesive system that makes for some of the most engaging fights in the series yet. All six members of your party are on the field at once, each having a Class that’s defined as one of three broad types – Attackers who focus on positioning and direct attacks, Defenders who focus on drawing aggro and survivability, and Healers who focus on keeping the party alive and spreading buffs and debuffs. In previous entries, dedicated Healers tended to be a little underpowered compared to running certain types of builds – the notorious Crit Heal skill of 2 coming to mind. 3 attempts to balance things out by introducing a Healing stat, which tends to be terrible on Attackers and Defenders, as well as making Healers the only ones who can revive fallen allies. Combined with the relative fragility of Attackers, you are encouraged to maintain a fairly balanced party, and not overspend in one aspect.
It plays out pretty similar to how it always has, however – being close enough to an enemy has your character perform Auto-Attacks. While they still can’t perform them while moving, you no longer have a three-hit combo that you have to fight around (and ended up actually being quite useless). A handy indicator in the HUD lets you know if you’re close enough to perform Auto-Attacks, as well as what side of the enemy you’re on, removing the potential confusion from performing positional Arts that often plagued the previous games. Arts provide a number of different effects, from being just strong attacks that rely on a specific circumstance for more bang for your buck, buffing party members, healing party members, et cetera. Performing actions that relate to your Class’ role in combat fills up your Talent Art gauge, which tends to be each Class’ most powerful Art with more interesting effects. You can also choose from a variety of commands for your party members to follow – either to focus their efforts on your current target, to pull back, to try and perform Fusions whenever possible, or perform a specific type of combo.
The old Break/Topple combo returns, and much like a lot of other things, it fuses elements from 1 and 2 together. You can now choose between a Physical or Ether Combo – the Ether Combo being Break/Topple/Daze from 1 with the new Burst finisher, which forces enemies to drop items and temporarily removes their Enraged status if applicable. The Physical Combo is just as the Driver Combo from 2 was – Break/Topple/Launch/Smash, though this time around, Smash doesn’t force item drops. The idea is that the faster you execute Smash after Launch, the more damage it does to the enemy. So, in effect, you can choose between a long-term or a short-term utility. The ability to direct your party to perform the specific combos you want helps ease any potential AI problems, since the two combos are mutually exclusive – you can’t Launch or Smash an enemy that’s already Dazed, nor can you Daze or Burst an enemy that’s Launched.
In addition, after a while, you gain the ability to fuse the party pairs – Noah and Mio, Eunie and Taion, and Lanz and Sena – together into their Interlink forms, opening up a variety of other options. Interlinks are, essentially, invincible – they have no health meter, though they can still be staggered by blocks or powerful attacks. But this comes with a variety of other boons – much more powerful Arts, that tend to affect the entire field of battle at once, Skills that increase their powers ever further, and Talent Arts that devastate opponents. However, it isn’t unlimited – everything you do and damage you take fills up a heat gauge. While you can cancel the Interlink at any time, the heat gauge still has to deplete over time – and if you let it fill all the way up, you can’t Interlink again until it empties completely. Interlinks also have to be levelled up by performing Fusion Arts as the individual party members first in order to maximize their utility and even get the effects of their Arts to work. But I’ll admit – this mechanic probably didn’t get as much use from me as the game may have intended. I usually whipped out the Interlinks as a desperation move to keep party members from dying during combat. Once more, you actually have an option to let your partners decide at their own discretion whether to Interlink, or you can make it so they’ll only do so when you tell them to.
The six members of Ouroborous can change their Class at any time once the feature is unlocked, with their stats adjusting to each class as necessary – that said, some characters are better at some Classes than others no matter what. Classes are also divided by country of origin – Keves and Agnus – with Kevesi Classes having Timed Recharges for their Arts, and Agnian Classes having Auto-Attack Recharges. This sort of lets the player choose if they’d rather have the game play a bit more like the first Xenoblade, or the second. Each Class also features Skills designed to enhance their role in combat. As you level up Classes, these Arts and Skills become more powerful, but you also begin to learn their Master Arts and Skills. Master Skills can be equipped at any time to any Class, allowing for a variety of interesting combinations of effects and buffs, while Master Arts, when learned, can be equipped to an opposite Class style – the Agnian Ogre can start to equip Kevesi Master Arts, for example. They maintain their style of cooldown, but can now be combined with the Class’ standard Arts to create those Fusion Arts I mentioned earlier – and this is where the game really starts to open up with both customizability and strategy.
The Class, Master, and Fusion Arts systems hearkens back to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Fusion Arts are, conceptually, similar to the Secondary Cooldowns that X had for each of its Arts – the idea that, you can either throw out the Art as soon as it’s available, or hold back and try to see if you can get its second, and generally more powerful, effect out. With Fusion Arts, you basically get to just pick what that second effect is. They always use the Class Art as the base for the animation, simply attaching the Master Arts’ effects to it at the end. The Master Arts you learn right off the bat are designed to teach you, very quickly, how to use these simple rules to “break” a lot of things. For example, Maximum Voltage is an Art that applies an attack buff to the user, but it takes a very long time for the animation to play out and traps the character in place while they’re doing it. Learning it as a Master Art, however, you can instead fuse it with the much faster attack Air Slash – skipping the long animation Maximum Voltage would normally stick you with, but still getting the effect, while hitting the enemy for good measure. But you can still use either Art by itself, which is crucial – this small system offers a lot of interesting choices. And the more you learn the rules of it, the more you start to see how powerful Fusion Arts become.
Being able to combine various Class Skills, Arts, and other features brings back the massive customizability from Xenoblade Chronicles X without falling into the pitfall that 2 had with its gacha-like Blade system, which relied heavily on luck and a lot of grinding to get the most out of. In this game, you learn new Classes by completing Hero Quests and adding new Heroes to your roster of optional and additional seventh party members, again similarly to X, but you’re able, as long as they aren’t limited by story reasons, to swap between them at any time. While Heroes cannot be controlled, nor can they learn Master Arts, they still provide an extra hand during combat that can make a difference, and bring their own unique talents to the table when you start performing Chain Attacks.
With reviving allies no longer tied to the Party Gauge, it’s now entirely for performing the powerful Chain Attack, which features a massive overhaul from previous entries’. Once you enter the Chain Attack, you have to select from three different Attack Orders – each member of the team will fire off their own suggestion for what to do, with their own unique effect. Once you select the Order to execute, you now choose party members to execute attacks to build up the Tactics Gauge. Each character has their own base TP value, including the Heroes, with the amount of TP earned from the attack changing based on whether it matches the role of the Order, if they got a critical, or if they applied buffs or debuffs, or healed party members… there’s a wide variety of variables to account for. In addition, each of the six Ouroborous members have special effects depending on what role their Class is – with Attackers earning extra TP for being the first to strike, Healers preventing the Tactics Gauge from going over 99%, and Defenders making sure that the character with the most TP gets reactivated after the Order is complete.
Once the Gauge hits 100% or more, the character who gave the Order performs one more attack, the Party Gauge drains a little bit, and a number of characters who performed attacks are reactivated based on how high you were able to build the Tactics Gauge – hitting 150% and 200% gives you extra party members back. The effect of that character’s Order also takes hold for the rest of the Chain Attack. Heroes are unique when in Chain Attacks – their own Orders won’t drain the Party Gauge and tend to provide more specific and interesting effects, with the Heroes themselves not actually following the same rules of attacking that the Ouroborous do. Instead, they have a Heroic Chain ability for when you select them to attack, which can do all sorts of bizarre things. Valdi, for example, is a Hero whose Heroic Chain increases his TP by fifty points if you select him while attacking a Machine-type enemy.
Chain Attacks begin to feel a little overpowered once you learn all the ins and outs of how they work and how to get them out quickly. This doesn’t stop them from being fun to pull off, and there is still some element of strategy vs. chance involved – it’s entirely possible to flub one because you either played it too safe or tried to stretch yourself a little too much, and it didn’t pay off. Overall, the combat system and its many, many nuances and tricks help keep combat engaging. This is the most fun I’ve had with the combat in a Xenoblade title, by far.
The fun is enhanced even more by an incredible soundtrack that ties everything together with a neat little bow. Flutes play a large part in the soundtrack, no doubt thanks to our main pair of off-seers playing them quite frequently, but we once again find ourselves in the midst of orchestral highs mixed with powerful rocking guitar solos. Certain combat themes are further enhanced by a dynamic soundtrack that changes depending on the enemy’s current health – getting more and more intense and building to a crescendo as it drains. Environmental themes run the gamut from grand and sweeping to reserved and melancholy. It’s a wide and varied soundtrack as always, and features some of the best tracks the series has ever seen. It just might be a little tough to hear sometimes over your party – a party of seven characters all yelping and shouting during combat can be a little much. The voice calls are designed to let you know what everybody’s doing – shouting their combo continuations, when their Interlinks are levelling up, or when they’re low on health – but if you hated the Ardanian Soldiers from 2, you probably aren’t gonna have much of a better time here.
All-in-all, I’m really not sure there’s more I can talk about with repeating myself, or delving into spoilers. I may have made the game out to be perfect, which it by no means isn’t – there’s still a handful of objectives that aren’t quite so fun, there’s still parts of the experience that can be a drag, and there’s even a few things later on that I flat out didn’t like at all. But the overall package and experience is extremely well-crafted and tight, distilling everything that worked from the previous games of the series and providing what might as well be its magnum opus. If you’re not a fan of the previous games in the series, it’s not likely this game is going to change your mind.
But for fans of the series, this is a love letter to everything that made it great.
Kirby's Review Blog 