100% completed in 92 hours.
An exercise in disappointment. Xenoblade 3 is worse than the previous two entries, and even X, by a large margin.
There are a lot of bizarre choices, but most of all for me were the battle system, balancing and story in general.
The battle system is questionable in that it tries to be far, far simpler than 2's but it ends up being too messy. You have easier to understand gimmicks, but the gimmicks end up taking 0 brain power and are what consist of 99% of your battles. In every single boss battle, 90% of my damage were from the gimmicks and the regular combat just felt like a waste of time. This was sort of the case in 2 as well, but in 2 there was a sense of depth to the gimmick at least.
As far as the balancing goes, it punishes you if you do side content at all. I was consistently 10-20 levels above every story boss, and I wasn't even doing all of the side content, just a bit. What's funny is I completely skipped side content in the last third of the game and I was still vastly overleveled -- even for all of the side content. Once I hit level 65~ at the end of the midgame the only things left were the superbosses. While I was occasionally overleveled in 1 and 2, it was never that off.
The story's just kinda a dumpster fire, I'm not sure what to say that hasn't already been said to death. The pacing is glacial and every single conflict is stupid, they were lazy enough to make it so 'muh macguffin' was the context for nearly every fight in the entire game.
I ended up doing every sidequest and all the superbosses, but not without plenty of regret. The only area this game shines in is content. It's packed, but that's not saying it when most of it's hollow.
Anybody telling you this game is good or worthwhile probably hasn't finished or is trolling you. I refuse to believe otherwise. This game needs plenty of patches to even become average in quality.
An exercise in disappointment. Xenoblade 3 is worse than the previous two entries, and even X, by a large margin.
There are a lot of bizarre choices, but most of all for me were the battle system, balancing and story in general.
The battle system is questionable in that it tries to be far, far simpler than 2's but it ends up being too messy. You have easier to understand gimmicks, but the gimmicks end up taking 0 brain power and are what consist of 99% of your battles. In every single boss battle, 90% of my damage were from the gimmicks and the regular combat just felt like a waste of time. This was sort of the case in 2 as well, but in 2 there was a sense of depth to the gimmick at least.
As far as the balancing goes, it punishes you if you do side content at all. I was consistently 10-20 levels above every story boss, and I wasn't even doing all of the side content, just a bit. What's funny is I completely skipped side content in the last third of the game and I was still vastly overleveled -- even for all of the side content. Once I hit level 65~ at the end of the midgame the only things left were the superbosses. While I was occasionally overleveled in 1 and 2, it was never that off.
The story's just kinda a dumpster fire, I'm not sure what to say that hasn't already been said to death. The pacing is glacial and every single conflict is stupid, they were lazy enough to make it so 'muh macguffin' was the context for nearly every fight in the entire game.
I ended up doing every sidequest and all the superbosses, but not without plenty of regret. The only area this game shines in is content. It's packed, but that's not saying it when most of it's hollow.
Anybody telling you this game is good or worthwhile probably hasn't finished or is trolling you. I refuse to believe otherwise. This game needs plenty of patches to even become average in quality.