I see that Monolith Soft finally got tired of people treating optional content as what it is, because Future Redeemed is designed like a god damn collectathon. You are rewarded with "affinity points" for doing damn near anything, and the game always blares this fanfare. Every. Single. Time. You could at least make the popup more subtle if it's going to show up so frequently. It bothers me more that this kind of design is innately attuned to the part of my brain that wants to see everything completed. The menus are covered in "x/y found" or "x% complete", so I run around not necessarily because I want to see every inch of this world, but moreso because my characters' abilities depend on it.

There's a ton of blatant callbacks to XC1/XC2, but it's done in good taste. They wrap up the sci-fi aspects of the Xenoblade universe quite nicely with this story. Matthew says "I'm full of beans" quite a lot, and while I have no clue what that means, I am too after playing this game. Also, Rex is kind of a gigachad in this game. It almost makes up for XC3's ending implying that he impregnated three women.