Cohost archives: The Xenoblade Chronicles chronicles

September 20, 2024

In 2023 I played all the Xenoblade games available on Switch. Two of them are excellent. The other is, just, like, why did they do this? Why would they do it like this? I can't stop thinking about it now and I couldn't stop posting about it then. Join me in hell. (These being very plotty games, major spoilers are hidden unless otherwise noted.)

Part 1: They say "Monado" more than 250 times, not including Shulk's thousands of identical combat barks

I have a lot of affection for sincere games full of good ideas executed imperfectly, and that's about where I'd place Xenoblade Chronicles. I'm familiar with the earlier works under Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno branding, so this was not a shocking discovery--Xenogears is a standard-bearer of 90s console RPGs and also a well-known victim of development time constraints. Make no mistake, I was deeply invested, and this is a very highly reviewed game in general, if you're concerned about that. But I'd feel dishonest if I didn't say that some of the biggest conceptual swings don't fully survive the translation into things the player has to do.

The zones are big and visually impressive, but in a few cases XC1 falls into the very common RPG pitfall of dungeons that wear out their welcome about halfway through. Dozens of fetch quests give you reasons to explore and tie into maybe the most interesting single mechanic, the giant relationship chart of almost every named minor NPC; on the other hand, they're dozens of fetch quests (some requiring you to collect items that aren't guaranteed to spawn or drop, which should be illegal). This all results in some incongruous moments--for example, at one point you end up in a city with a high-science-fantasy aesthetic that really does it for me, but then one of your first interactions with the place, if you're like me, is running up and down a three-mile-long airport concourse for a solid hour and a half making sure you don't miss any quests or NPCs with names. I'm guessing part of the problem is that this all feels less novel now than it would've in 2010. But, damn. At least you can change the time of day. And there's a lot to do, if you want reasons to stay in this world for a while.

I like stories that range widely in tone, particularly when stories with heavy themes aren't gratuitously, relentlessly grim. Illustrated media can be pretty good about this, which is a major reason I'm into it in the first place. But XC1 is so preoccupied with loss, the circumstances of history, and what these things drive people to do that moments of pure comic relief often land awkwardly. A few things about the game almost give it the vibe of a modern Chrono sequel (also not surprising considering the meta-series' development history), but it's like if Chrono Trigger had opened with 2300 AD rather than with stealing a man's lunch and fighting a 12-foot-tall singing robot your friend built.

XC1 also has one of the worst takes on fantasy "evil races" I've seen in a while. The animal-people enemies never get to speak, even when you'd expect them to. And while this is sort of, very briefly, given an in-setting explanation, the magic sword that can't harm "people" sure works on them. It sucks! Probably a result of thoughtlessness and priorities directed elsewhere more than anything else, but, still. It's at odds with all the stuff about the various peoples of the world coming together to combat a common threat and achieve shared goals. As is the sometimes grating heteronormativity, but I doubt you need me to tell you what to expect in that regard.

With all that said, there's a lot about XC1 that works, and the things that work really work for me. The plot is pure anime melodrama, with big maneuvers telegraphed in such a way that I was excited for them rather than anxious for them to be over. It's got a very strong visual aesthetic that sometimes contributes to the sense that this world and its problems are bigger than you realize and almost always is just fun to look at. The soundtrack is excellent, and while it's notable for contributions from some heavy hitters, all the area background music is very good as well--you've probably heard some of it if you've ever caught one of those YouTube playlists of chill Nintendo music before Nintendo took it down.

Despite some individual elements not always landing for me, they sometimes come together to great effect (this is late-game stuff, so click through to see it if you want/dare):

The Definitive Edition also includes an epilogue chapter, Future Connected, which provides some vague setup for the third game. Or maybe more like whetting people's appetites for it. I thought I'd have a stronger opinion about how necessary it feels as a late addition to a complete story, but I wasn't the target audience for it, really. It was, at the time of its release, more for people with years of investment in the series who hadn't seen anything new done with these characters in a while. But what it did do for me was provide insight into how the Xenoblade team's approach to telling stories in these games has changed over time. It made me excited to see more--I found the party member dialogues more engaging than most of the heart-to-heart stuff in the main game, and not just because they're voiced and have actual character animation. They feel more specific to the characters and setting, and thus more like they're contributing to the whole.

It's a bit of a shame that they don't let you import your party of max-level meat grinders, though I can understand not wanting to let people walk all over the thing you made. I'm more on the fence about getting rid of in-combat premonitions. It makes sense thematically, but then you still have to fight enemies balanced around that mechanic. The toughest fight in Future Connected largely comes down to spamming defensive abilities and hoping they're up at the right time, and while I would've liked to see how that quest resolves, I figured it was time to move on with my life.

This isn't an original observation, but the game XC1 most reminds me of is Final Fantasy XII. Maybe not everyone would mean this as a compliment, but I love FF12. It combines some of my favorite things about JRPGs in the DQ lineage and western PC RPGs, and I've had a very hard time finding anything that scratches the same itch.

Part 2: "Oh man, did I come up with a load of guff again?"

I feel a little bad about all my minor complaints re: XC1. They're true to how I felt while playing it the first time, but most are indicative of ambition more than anything else, and maybe listing them all here obscures how much I like that game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has some good high-level ideas and some satisfying moments. The space between these moments is occupied by a strange and fascinating procession of fumbles and missteps, or what look like as much to me, anyway. At 1/4 as many hours played as I put into XC1, I had already written as many words about XC2 as I did about the whole first game, so let that be a warning, I guess.

What do I know?

Here's a summary from Wikipedia about how XC2 was received:

Upon release, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 received "generally favorable reviews" according to review aggregator website Metacritic, which gave it an overall score of 83% on 93 reviews. The game's story, characters, complex combat system, soundtrack, amount of content, and the beauty and size of the environments were largely praised. John Rairdin of Nintendo World Report considered the game "one of the finest JRPGs of the generation and perhaps of all time" and was highly praising the music, "diverse world", "fresh and engaging combat", and "thrilling storyline". He also expressed doubt that there would be a better JRPG for the Switch. Game Revolution's Jason Faulkner called the game "a joy to review", stating that it was "full of wonder, exploration, and character". Hiroshi Noguchi writing for IGN Japan gave a very positive review, stating that it "offers a timeless tale of adventure and an incredibly deep battle system." Alex Fuller for RPGamer was enthusiastically supportive of the game, saying "2017 has been one of the greatest years in RPG history; Xenoblade Chronicles 2 caps that off in mesmerising fashion by being one of the finest titles of the year".

I'm including this because I don't want to mislead anybody. The game got pretty good reviews. I have no more authority than anyone else you've never heard of and don't claim to understand anything except my own reactions, if I understand even that much. I'm doing this for my own edification, not to tell you whether you should buy a game or not.

With that said,

lol

Some of the things I like most about XC2 are things you may love or hate depending on what you're looking for. In contrast to XC1, in which Riki fits awkwardly into a party of characters otherwise defined in terms of the things they've lost, XC2 is driven by pure cartoon sensibilities. It has what I can only think of as Sega CD energy reinforced by a chaotic English dub. There's a little dragon friend like the one that follows you around in Lunar, except weirder, and intelligent humanoid robots who come to exist not through a confluence of science fiction conceits but for the same reason Nano exists in Nichijou, i.e., because robots make good punchlines (in theory; more on this below) and the universe runs on punchlines. In a general sense, or as a concept, I think this is great. This is one way that fiction can act like fiction rather than pretending at the logic of history. I wish more games with big publishers and obscene budgets would do this rather than twist themselves into self-important knots. For all that Nintendo is as fundamentally soulless as any other company, this is a mode their creative teams are especially good at.

In keeping with this, I liked the nopon in XC1. I've always liked moogles, and whatever other Little Guys these RPG settings come up with. I think it's delightful--in theory--that both XC1 and XC2 have nopon party members, and a travesty that Final Fantasy takes itself too seriously now to have playable stuffed animals. At least FF7R can't weasel out of it ...

No, but here's where things start to go wrong. Because the reason I like the nopon is because they're, you know, just Little Guys (not strictly guys, of course, but I mean in the memetic sense). While they might be a victim of some tonal whiplash in XC1, they perform the important function of upholding the essential, subatomic goofiness of the fantasy world, no matter how many righteous assholes come along with their very serious concerns and try to deny this one core truth. They have a certain way of talking, but it's anime cuteness signifiers and not mockery of any real dialect or accent, as far as I know. Riki is a husband and dad not to convey shitty boomer takes about marriage, but because it's funny to think about.

In XC2, the first important nopon character we see is a corrupt merchant/moneylender type. The punchline of the comedy manga robots is that the nopon who built them, including the one who joins the party, have 21st-century Earth otaku proclivities, for some reason. The nopon cease to be an expression of the joy threaded through the setting and become vessels for tropes that are sometimes tired and unfunny and sometimes plain old bad.

Something I had to come to terms with very early on is that many of XC2's maneuvers are self-defeating. Funny logic isn't encyclopedia logic, but it does still need a kind of consistency. That the game falls apart so often is especially frustrating to me because, on its face, it's exactly the kind of lighthearted thing I'd like to see succeed.

Reckless driving

The game systems themselves present more opportunities for XC2 to get in its own way, and on that note I guess I'd better address Rex. Out of context, I wouldn't mind him as the hero of a story like this. He's just a shounen manga guy, but he's funny and basically decent. The problem is that there is context, a lot of context, just no end of fuckin context. The driver/blade concept is ... not an unfun idea from a character customization perspective. But this is the problem--as far as gameplay is concerned, a blade is character customization, a thing you put into an equipment slot. The game wants you to believe Pyra has her own stuff going on and Rex considers her a friend rather than a tool, but then she's some gear he puts on. The only attempt at working around this is that you can't unequip her. Sometimes you'll get a core crystal from a blade who was at odds with the party and clearly not fond of them, and then you can reawaken that blade as a perfectly compliant inventory item, and it does not feel great.

There's an overused term from late 00s/early 10s discourse having to do with a particular kind of, you know, dissonance, but I'm getting at something more general and hopefully obvious: just that gameplay, like illustration or dialogue or music, means things. Accidentally or otherwise, it means something when a game presents you with an enemy type that clearly looks like people with society and culture, and then has you slay hundreds of them without the slightest pause for introspection (to be entirely fair, there are a few NPCs in XC2 who pause for introspection at this; the Tirkin even get to talk a little, though it's debatable whether this makes it any better). You feel a certain way when a Fire Emblem game gives you advantages for developing relationships between characters and then having them stand next to each other on the battlefield, and also when XC2 has you wear half its major characters like armor.

So when people say Rex sucks and Pyra should've been the main character, I get where that comes from. The game could've benefited from giving the blades more of an equal functional status, at least. It's also weird that we're supposed to buy twelve-year-old-looking-ass Rex as a plausible love interest for Pyra, whose design is bafflingly horny for a Nintendo product (rest asssured that I'm aware of the relevant doujin trope). Really, though, Nia should've been the main character. Why not? She's in a fine position to be the vehicle for all the necessary background information. Let me be a belligerent Welsh catgirl, cowards.

It'd be fair to ask what, then, I'd want all this to look like. Torna - The Golden Country uses some of the same systems in different ways, and we'll get to that, but it's several dozen game-hours ahead of us at this point.

Autosaving is overrated

So much about XC2 feels like it was designed with convenience as a low priority, and since it's not a one-person experimental indie effort or a product of devs inventing ways to express themselves within the capabilities of the NES, the friction doesn't do anything but irritate. The sidequests have more involved premises than those in the first game, but quest items having a low chance to drop is still not fun and should still be illegal (FFXIV was half a year into Stormblood when XC2 released, so I'm confident we were already in the era of real MMOs backing away from this). Now there's the added snag of having to do a QTE minigame to get the items sometimes, and they aren't guaranteed to drop through that method, either. The zones are still impressive-looking, but after the first time you have to run across one for an hour or more looking for gathering nodes that might contain the last quest item you need but probably won't, all sense of wonder at the place will be stone-cold dead. They've added a compass bar, but the way it decides where to show quest objectives relative to your facing is, in the most generous possible terms, not very legible. There are so many other little things I could complain about, but you get the idea.

The sense of being jerked around improves a little when you decipher the vague explanation of combos and get access to chain attacks (at about hour 15). After this, fights are less deadly, enemies don't feel as damage-spongy, and exploration therefore becomes less frustrating. If you find the slow-motion plate-spinning act of the combat exhausting, this may not be much of an improvement. But it's something.

And then you start seeing things gated by blades' non-combat skills. There's a dungeon like this in chapter 4--like, not an optional dungeon, a dungeon on the critical path. If you don't have enough levels in one of the relevant skills, the game screeches to a halt while you fiddle with systems that up to this point have demanded very little of your attention. I can't decide whether this is a bad move or a daring incorporation of the kind of problem-solving you'd expect out of a much more niche sort of game. You be the judge. (I will grant that you're guaranteed access to blades with enough cumulative skill levels without leveling anything up, but I was saving one of the necessary core crystals, so I didn't know this until later. And this is definitely not the case in later chapters.)

There are sidequests like this, too. You haven't rolled for blades with the right skills or stumbled across the means of leveling those skills up, or the blades you need happen to be on mercenary missions right now, or they aren't available for plot reasons? You can recall blades from mercenary assignments if you don't mind losing the invested time, but otherwise, you're out of luck. Of course a lot of PC RPGs include non-combat skill challenges, and I play enough of those to be used to it, but generally these are stats you have some control over how to allocate to your characters and not things you're praying to get from the magic gacha.

They maid it wrong

Toward the end of chapter 3, I was starting to feel hopeful. My issues with how some things are handled wouldn't spontaneously fix themselves, but I was getting into the plot, and I like what that chapter built up to.

It's possible to write humorous fiction that takes its characters seriously and invites you to do the same. Plenty of things do it, but my go-to example is Discworld. In particular, if you've read any post-9/11 Discworld novels, from after Pratchett became acutely interested in geopolitics and power, you'll be well prepared for some of the nonsense XC2 serves up later.

Der Wille zur Macht

"One of the finest JRPGs ... perhaps of all time"

I want to talk about this dungeon in chapter 7, the crucible whatever. I try to avoid angry gamer hyperbole in writing, but in this case it's taking everything I've got.

Benign growth

So, yeah, this game sucks, but I want to acknowledge the things that are either good throughout or grew on me before the end.

I find it genuinely remarkable that the world of XC2 is presented to the player not just as a sequence of grand vistas, but also as a huge amount of small interactions and objects. Building on the weird collectables of the first game, the pouch system is used as an excellent excuse for showing us what kinds of books people read, what kinds of instruments they play, even what kinds of beauty products they use. People talk about board games, and then you can go to a shop and buy those board games. XC2 uses the console RPG text-list inventory to convey the kind of granularity you get from the tableware in an Elder Scrolls house. And while I may not love how field skills work as a game system, rare blades' unique skills open up all kinds of interactions throughout the world, and the blades themselves have their own heart-to-heart conversations, sidequests, and even after-battle dialogue. Alrest is a very rich place, when it isn't preoccupied with weak political takes.

Another thing blades' skills let you do, eventually, is harvest massive piles of items from gathering nodes. So sidequests requiring rare pomegranates or whatever become less of a chore as the game goes on.

The people making the music for XC2 aren't any less good than they've ever been. I don't know that the a cappella chorus tracks are my favorites, but damn, what a choice for video game background music. I have to respect it. The art direction also really works for me--while XC2 hews pretty close to a certain set of anime conventions, it's a set of conventions that allows for some playing around with distinct shapes and colors in the character designs, and provides a lot of opportunities for cartoon expressiveness. There's variety in the unique blades because they're the work of a variety of guest artists, which is fun. E.g., Wulfric, designed by FFXI/FFXIV (and Xenogears) artist Ryosuke Aiba, looks like a nonexistent Final Fantasy's take on Ifrit, and he just wants to show people he's essentially kind, and he's my perfect terrifying demon son. Other blades use different sets of anime conventions from the game's standard and look like they're lifted from other games as a result, but rather than getting wound up about inconsistency, I sort of respect XC2's willingness to do this, to let you put, like, Azami and Vess next to each other.

I called the English dub chaotic, and I mostly mean that as a compliment. At times the performances for Rex and Pyra don't quite seem to align with the intent of a scene, but are in fact more interesting takes on the characters to me than whatever battle manga maneuver the game's trying to execute. The villains sound like they're from an edgy PS1 game, and are especially fun when they think they've won and start gloating. Often, in a game as directly indebted to manga/anime as this one, I'd go for the Japanese audio, but I don't mind that I didn't. Maybe if I play XC2 again ...

I hate myself, but not that much

Rex has two hands

At about 95 hours played outside the final boss room, I wasn't satisfied with the amount of things I was leaving undone, quests unfinished and blades ungotten. This attests to both how much there is to do and how it all feels like too much of a chore to bother with. I didn't see all the sidequest outcomes I would've liked to, but was I going to spend the time required to get ten total levels of whatever field skill across all my blades, and in such a configuration that I could equip them at the same time? Shit no. I was, for all the reasons mentioned here and a few not (because if I'd brought up Tiger Tiger, that would've been an entire section about minigames as a concept), beyond ready to put XC2 to bed.

I spent this whole game feeling like I was missing something or doing something wrong, but I can't imagine what. Combat-wise, I'm pretty sure I was using all the tools available to me. All the ones the game told me about, anyway. I rolled for dozens of blades and was still running into skill checks I couldn't do. Similarly, if reviewers were out here calling XC2 "a timeless tale of adventure" and whatever else, clearly some people found more to like about it as fiction than I did. In that sense I don't think I missed anything. I just wasn't getting very much of what I wanted. Or maybe the stuff I wanted came with too much stuff I didn't want.

Part 3: I started playing Xenoblade 3 and forgot I had to finish writing this part

You should assume everything in this section could be deep spoiler territory if you haven't played XC2. Skip ahead if you need to.

I don't think "course correction" is the right description for Torna - The Golden Country, which I'd imagine was developed at roughly the same time as the rest of XC2. There are some small unambiguous quality of life improvements (e.g., autosaving), but mostly what I think is happening here is that the repurposed mechanics have fewer obstacles to being actually fun versions of themselves, and it's much easier to make new or changed mechanics suit the overall goals of a game when those goals are less nebulous.

The first thing we learn is how combat differs from the base game: blades and drivers participate at the same time, not sharing the blade's weapon, but taking on different roles depending on whether they're in the front or back line. That drivers and blades have the same range of actions available to them makes the relationship feel more cooperative and reciprocal out of the gate, and it isn't long before we learn that people fighting in this way is a consequence of how they feel about the driver/blade arrangement generally. Which is to say, there's some aspect of the setting that the characters have concrete opinions about, and these opinions are conveyed in how you interact with the game. This is all I was asking XC2 to do, really, even if not in this specific way--if the characters think of blades as equals, figure out a way to make them equal as game objects. (The Forrest Gump-esque implication that drivers using their blades' weapons is Lora and Jin's fault is just ... yeah, I'm choosing to ignore that. Fuck off lol)

I also just think fighting things in this one is more fun. It all seems balanced such that low-threat fights aren't needlessly long, and switching characters within the team you're controlling feels more meaningful than basically any in-combat decision XC2 ever asked me to make. It's a question of combo effectiveness vs. mitigating damage from recent attacks, but a desperate switch in the interest of survival doesn't mean your damage output is totally sunk--you can now make a blade combo out of any three elements even if it may not be as effective as one of the defined sequences.

Field skill checks are back and mostly unchanged, but they feel less like chores or needless roadblocks when designed to account for a fixed lineup of blades rather than sheer quantity and random chance. There's no more swapping your blades around at every check, and considering that every time XC2 crashed for me it happened in the character menu, that's a relief in more ways than one. Pouch item clutter is replaced by character-specific craftables, and while I liked the clutter and am not always very interested in crafting, it works as a way to use items you're probably picking up anyway that also provides a little characterization as a treat. It's a sensible consolidation of things like salvage turn-ins and aux core crafting into a system where you care a little more about the outputs.

You can buy Torna - The Golden Country independent of XC2, but I'm not sure how well it'd work as a standalone thing. The characters are written around a preexisting understanding of where they'll end up and how they'll change. Maybe too much so, even--TTGC is determined to have something to say about every 500-years-ago cutscene from XC2, and some of that stuff feels shoehorned in for the sake of thoroughness. I do, however, like that we get to see what Mythra's deal is in the absence of Pyra. I might've felt like Pyra was a little too amenable in the early hours of XC2, but lacking any desire to get along with anybody she's just a regular jerk, and you can imagine why Jin might be annoyed at having to deal with her again 500 years later. Though it'd be fairer to describe her as alien--personality-wise she's a blank slate trying to glean what she can from her driver, and her driver is a massive doofus. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

While it's about events that we know won't end well for everyone, TTGC hasn't totally dropped the XC2 cartoon logic. I don't want to spend a bunch of time explaining jokes, so I'll just say there's a scene in which a character is chopping cabbage and the cabbage output pile is bigger every time it's on camera, and it's a very simple visual gag, but I lost my entire mind at that. There's also some good after-battle dialogue, my favorite of which is Mythra and Jin very seriously talking about fighting ghosts.

There are a lot of sidequests relative to the total playtime; you even have to do a certain amount to progress. I've seen comments in various places by people annoyed at this, and that's fair, though I didn't mind it so much because sidequesting is so much less frustrating in general than in XC2. What's interesting to me about it is we know in advance what'll happen to most of these people--those who don't make it to Tantal will go down with Torna or be hunted afterward. And yet here we are, resolving their petty issues anyway. I'm tempted to look at this as part of the XC2 suite of games' broader statement about what helping people means. That it's worthwhile to help people achieve momentary happiness regardless of long-term considerations is a nice sentiment ... it's just that in XC2 proper, this intersects with the global politics such that you're doing conflict mediation for colonizers without regard for the consequences, and that's where I check out. Again, maybe it's just a symptom of too much going on.

The noblesse oblige nonsense sure is back in TTGC, though. And I mean, look, I get why fantasy writers do stories about nobles--they're convenient in that they have a higher-level view of what's going on in the world than the average peasant farmer. But doing a story about nobles doesn't mean you have to clean their boots with your tongue, and anyway, while I'd be willing to give Addam a pass for being a good excuse to show us what the Tornan royalty is up to, there's no good explanation for including yet another wise and magnanimous boy-emperor of Mor Ardain. Like, come on. We don't even go there in this one.

For all its many sins, XC2 is a lush experience with well over 100 hours of things to do, and sharing the basic structure of XC2 means that TTGC is pretty much doomed to feeling like a slice of that kind of game. Plenty of 90s console RPGs are the same length, but where they get a lot of mileage out of small but diverse locations and overworld-map-spanning plots, TTGC doesn't have those tools in its toolbox. It's definitely worth playing as a companion piece to XC2, though, given that it treats some of the base game's ideas with more care.

Part 4: Xenoblade 3 is probably the Nintendo game in which characters call each other assholes the most by volume

Fans of this series went on a real journey. I can see how someone would play XC2 and decide, based on *gestures at that entire game*, that it didn't warrant another five years of emotional investment. Though I also get how you could come away from it hoping Monolith would replicate the good things without so much of the bad. As a conciliatory move and indication that they hadn't totally lost interest in what XC1 was doing, XC1DE probably happened at the right time.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 kicks a multitude of asses. A panoply of asses. Almost every ass set in front of it, it kicks. Without exaggeration, it's one of my favorite console RPGs now.

"Lanz wants something a bit meatier"

My pitch would be to spoil some things from the first three hours or so. That's about 2% of the total length, so I'd encourage you not to worry about it, but I can't tell you what to do. I will say this is the kind of information that would've made me more excited to try it, if this whole project wasn't based on "I already have Xenoblade 1 and 2 and should probably get around to playing them."

I find myself wondering why I don't have five paragraphs to say about these things the way I did whenever XC2 was accidentally fascist. I don't buy the idea that you can learn how to make or appreciate good things by studying bad things, but I guess messiness, good or bad, is fascinating, while straightforward success is just ... successful, doing the things you expect it to do. It's also very much the case that when I like something, I don't want you to sit here and read about it, I want you to experience it for yourself. And practically speaking, I didn't take as many notes throughout XC3 because I didn't want to stop.

It's just fun

It starts fun and doesn't stop being fun. There are some big moments of tension and pathos, but moment to moment the priority is fun. If you're doing sidequests, it has kind of a monster of the week structure as you run around liberating regions from their consuls, essentially members of a tokusatsu villain squad--each represents a different kind of exaggerated evil and is exquisitely punchable in their own unique way. Along the way, you recruit local leaders to fill out a roster of heroes who occupy your seventh party slot. This unlocks the hero's class for use by the main cast, adding to the variety of strategies and playstyles available to you, and represents the start of what tend to be several subplots in and around the hero's home region. You could in theory do very little of this, but so much of the game lives in these digressions that they all feel essential.

XC3's combat follows up on what XC2 was doing, but it's both more complex in execution and less obtuse. A character build combines skills from a few of the two dozen or so classes, providing a granular enough level of control over how you want to approach fights, and it's generally clear what the effect will be when you swap skills and equipment in or out, in contrast to XC2 requiring you to compare several discrete equipment menus that you can't quickly switch between. Chain attacks are still a good way of letting you achieve satisfyingly enormous damage numbers, and they feel more meaningful in a context in which they aren't required in every fight because every trash enemy has literal millions of HP.

Okay, I didn't want to do this, to keep bringing up Xenoblade 2 while trying to describe a game that doesn't deserve the baggage. I only have a few more things to say about it, so I'll try to get it out of my system quickly.

The first thing is that one of the DLC hero characters thinks she's a blade in the XC2 sense, and the degree to which the party responds to this with an attitude of "what the fuck are you even talking about" is very satisfying. When the XC2 fight music kicked in during a quest with that character, though, I felt it, which mostly speaks to how good the music in these games is.

Another thing is that I didn't talk about bonus experience re: XC2, and it's back and worth addressing. The short explanation is that these games split your earned experience into two pools, and one of the pools you can choose whether to apply and when. I didn't mind it in XC2 mainly because not using bonus XP wasn't a challenge so much as an arbitrary waste of time, and so I always used it and didn't think about it much. It worked out such that I was just about the right level when ready to fight the final boss, so I'll grant them that, at least. In XC3, though, using all the bonus XP seemed to put me way beyond the level curve for the main questline. Which is fine if that's what you want, though redundant considering that there's also an easy difficulty setting, but to me it felt like micromanaging the pacing of a story I was being told. Best to just keep an eye on local enemy levels and use bonus XP to stay even with them, if you need to.

That said, the game is huge, and I'm not sure there's a great solution to directing the player experience that wouldn't have been at odds with providing a sense of scale and freedom. The zones are big not just in that they consist of several sub-areas that would've been their own entire zones in previous games, but also in that even these sub-areas are sometimes bigger than XC1 and XC2 zones were. There's a lot of ground to cover between major plot beats, and while there may be fewer quests compared to XC1 especially, they're much more substantial in how they hook into the world and its inhabitants. So at some point you'll be overleveled for an area or trigger an event that seems like it should've happened earlier or later. In some places you'll find hostile soldiers of one faction or another long after it should be possible. I can live with it--it's only a minor distraction and probably preferable to any alternative, barring a shorter, simpler game.

Subtext is for cowards

Whereas the prior game says, in its confused way, "the powerful get to determine the direction of the world," XC3 says "the powerful get to determine the direction of the world, and that sucks." Every sidequest is a vignette about what it means to form communities in a world like this, a world in which you, your predecessors, and your kind have always been viewed as disposable instruments by the people with authority over you (in part because the system that grants authority doesn't allow for it to be otherwise), and now there's a rapidly spreading and unavoidable awareness of this fact. Some communities form connections with others in similar situations; other communities go their own way, for better or worse. Seems rough!

At least in Aionios you can turn into Ultraman and punch the bad guys into paste. And because ushering people into the afterlife, such as it is, is also your job, you can refuse to do that for them too, a level of pettiness I have to admit I find extremely satisfying. Before the spoiler break I'll just say that some of the villains get as owned as anyone has ever been.

If I have an all-encompassing complaint, it's that XC3 overrelies on references to the first two. Which is a strange thing to say about the third installment in a series, I realize, but I have two points to make here. One is that XC1 and XC2 mostly stand alone, and I appreciate that about them, especially when these are 100+ hour games and therefore the cumulative time investment is truly ungodly. The other is just that the specific way in which the previous games feed into XC3 is sort of inconvenient. What it mainly draws on from its predecessors isn't plot, it's lore, and that sucks. On one hand, there are things about the setting, thematically important things and things that carry ideas from the previous games into this one, that you'll only notice and appreciate if you either play the first two or scour wikis for the relevant details; on the other hand, speculating about what'll happen to the characters mentioned above is a totally irrelevant dead end, and it would've been just as easy not to encourage the fan-theory impulse. I still think someone new to the series could enjoy XC3, and in fact I'd say anyone with the slightest curiosity about it should play it. It's fine; you'll be able to follow what's happening well enough. It's just that you might wish it was a little more coherent.

Part 5: Aionios of our own

In the interest of summary, the whole Xenoblade series will be spoiled from here on.

It's been a while since I read fanfic regularly, not counting one-shot comics. But I used to read a fair amount of Square RPG stuff, and you'd see a few common setups in longer fic. Maybe they're still around? Stop me if you've heard this one before: some of the heroes and their kids are pulled into a strange new world that resembles their home setting except ground up and reconstituted, and once again they're called upon to right wrongs and beat asses.

I don't know how else to describe Future Redeemed. It definitely reads as self-indulgent. And like, I want to be clear about this: I'm entirely fine with self-indulgence in art. Self-indulgence is maybe just how you make art at all, but also, any criticism from me about this would sound like hypocrisy. The thing is, when something's self-indulgent, it feels a lot more authentic when you can trace it back to a particular self. This is maybe one reason why we get so wound up in the fool's errand of auteur fascination, why we want to blame credit Kojima for Metal Gear--it sucks to erase the hundreds of other people who've worked on those games, but it's also horrible to think that this idiosyncratic thing that's very personal for a lot of people is not one artist's interiority turned outward through a painful process of confronting and reckoning with the self and the self's several fetishes, but a company's cynical attempt to appeal to as many people as it can. Which, with something like 59 million copies sold, Konami demonstrably did do that.

The fact is both things are always true to varying degrees, when you're talking about media made by large teams and published by larger companies, and maybe it's not that deep--Future Redeemed represents the end of a Xenoblade trilogy, and with most things that needed to be said having been said before XC3 rolled credits, it's a victory lap more than a chapter that feels particularly weighty. That doesn't mean it's totally vapid; there's some nice stuff in there about being the kind of elder figure who, instead of jealously holding onto power, trains younger generations for leadership and then gracefully passes the torch. I'm also not claiming to be immune to fanservice, e.g., it's very funny to me that Zeke and Pandoria's kid is perfectly well-adjusted, and this time instead of fighting one ferronis you get to fight two stuck together, and that's cool. Sometimes you'll end up in locations lifted from a previous game, and you can supply the character banter yourself--"Yeah, this really takes me back, this horrible tomb where my friends and I were murdered by a giant lizardman." I'm just pointing out that fanservice is high on the list of priorities.

Maybe Xenoblade 3 was always like this. I could just be reiterating my complaint that it leans too heavily on lore brain. I do think fanservice feels more warranted here, though, in this finale that's also a prologue that's also an epilogue to the first two games. It took Monolith close to 17 years to get to this point, counting from the initial idea about people living on two giants, and it took us hundreds of our finite life hours. And it's DLC for a game you should've played beforehand anyway. I think we can have this now. We can make Shulk and Rex do chain attacks together. And then kiss.

In some ways it's not just cutting and pasting, but demonstrating a good grasp of what made the previous games appealing. The approach to level design in particular is very XC1-like in a way that works; whereas XC3 is all about breadth, huge vistas and so on, the FR areas are relatively narrow but dense with things to do. Once again the game prompts you to kill three of every living thing you see, but not in the form of tedious quests--practically everything you do provides points to spend on character skills. I didn't dislike running around in XC3, but it did sometimes feel like I was hauling ass from point A to point B through areas that were big but shallow and gave me no particular reason to poke around, and this isn't the case in FR.

Re: A, you should read this whole article by Autumn Wright, but here's an excerpt:

Both A and Juniper, a nonbinary character in the base game of XC3, are simply never gendered. And while many trans people in our world do simply not use pronouns, the pattern is already clear: This omission, which would’ve taken conscious effort among writers and translators, maintains a plausible deniabilty for conservative fans that has become the dominant (and they’ll hate me for saying this) headcanon among Xenoblade fandom.

A is nonbinary because if the legendary swords that come from different parts of a super computer that harnesses the power of a fantastical cross-shaped power source each representing different perspectives on life are going to be represented by gender, then everything sure seems set up for A to be neither male nor female, but positively something else. And yes, in a better world, we would not need to reclaim characters, because among the dozens of characters in Xenoblade’s cast there would be more to latch onto than the hints of queerness in Morag, the coming out allegory of Nia, or the coding values behind Juniper.

Juniper is referred to as "they" maybe twice, despite being in quite a lot of quests as far as the heroes go; A never is. Talking about this almost feels redundant because 1. the text is nevertheless pretty clear about those characters not being women or men, and there's not much point to the cowardly equivocation when going even this far positions Nintendo as a culture war enemy of the worst people on the planet, and 2. we're not obligated to abide by any reading prescribed by megacorps and fascists anyway. It's irritating, though, not just because XC3 tees up the theme of gender/body stuff in literally the first hour and then sort of shrugs, but also because it's part of a thread of nonsense that makes all these games less coherent. It's a series about people from different backgrounds coming together, hashing out their grievances, and resisting regressive forces that want them dead. But not all people, because the bird guys and the lizard guys are mere savages, according to everyone except maybe half a dozen characters across all three games, and it's deliberately unclear whether you'd be welcome in these hopeful new worlds you're creating if you aren't for sure a boy or a girl because Nintendo, the company that does Pokemon, the most profitable IP on Earth by a margin of like $35 billion in revenue, apparently has an urgent need for the money and attention of right-wing stooges on Twitter, I guess? So many things about these games are so good that it stings especially hard when they miss these landings.

Still, XC1 couldn't have done even this much. And this is the end, so let's finish with the good things in mind. XC3 makes me feel hopeful, and not just in terms of whatever Monolith does next under the Nintendo yoke. I'm eager to see what aspiring devs and storytellers of all kinds who grew up with these games, or are growing up with them now, get up to using the Xenoblades in their heads as raw material.

Coda: I played Xenoblade 1 - 3 and they reminded me of how I felt as a teenager looking up fanfic about 90s RPGs years after they were relevant

It can't be entirely deliberate that JRPG heroes so often fight for some kind of positive structural change, especially considering the political conservatives lodged in these games' DNA. That's just how it works out when the villains are analogues of the Christian god, people who aspire to be analogues of the Christian god, literally the Christian god, imperialist autocrats, and/or various bootlickers and petty tyrants. Xenoblade at its best leans way into this, though, using every storytelling tool available to popular media to make you feel like a supreme badass for smashing through a procession of increasingly malignant reactionaries.

It's not rigorous materialist analysis or whatever; it is, again, popular media. It gives you all the tropes you crave. Catgirls are there. What happens is that, by combining a focus on characters precision-engineered to be lovable with plots about resisting the impulse to look backward, these become stories about the characters' personal relationships with that impulse. Shulk sets out for revenge after being wronged by a traumatized villain, only to realize later that he's being driven to self-destruction by his own trauma. Noah is confronted with the knowledge that, with different friends and in different circumstances, he could've been a much worse person. Sena and Taion have let past events become crushing weights preventing them from moving forward; Mio stubbornly moves forward regardless, dragging the weight behind her. Everybody in Xenoblade 3 has PTSD, and all the sidequests are about turning forever war military camps into farming communes. If we want to be charitable to XC2, I guess we could say Morag and Zeke are in their own ways torn between duty/tradition and the undeniable fact that all the people they meet are as human as they are, and there's a message in there about self-loathing as a dead end, first with Nia's whole deal, then with some of the antagonists. The only person who should be ashamed of themself is Tora.

I don't think playing a game published by Nintendo will solve the problem of conservatism. I do think the specific alchemy of these games gives them the potential to be very personally meaningful to people otherwise concerned about that problem--I mean, I know they are, I've heard from people for whom they are, and they also mean something to me. I sometimes think about this essay by comics writer and artist Sarah Horrocks, in which she says:

Art doesn’t exist for you to just go be a fan of it. It exists to reflect back to you the projection of yourself funneled through a controlled artifice. Art allows you to understand yourself and your place in the world better, and experience awe at the elasticity of the human experience you enjoy. It is a magic of lines and sequences that allow you to attain an altered state of being, and evolve your experience.

Xenoblade is pretty receptive to the stuff we're bringing to it here in the 2020s. But I think part of the appeal of JRPGs for me is that the best of them have felt like that for a long time. Also I did 42069 damage with a chain attack in XC1 and nobody can take that from me.