writing a more detailed log on this since the more i think about this game the more i hate it.

this game is really bad! its an algorithmically generated heap of mediocrity designed to appeal to series/develop dickriders on twitter who are the only people on the planet to actually give a shit about the game awards. the story is utter dogshit that feels like a first draft and is written like an early 2010s anime for 12 year old girls to cry over.
almost everything about this game is worse than its predecessors by a mile. the world is mostly reused ideas from 1 and 2 so it feels incredibly stale, with a lack of original impressive locales. a good amount of the game is walking through empty space with nothing interesting going on. the scale is so big for no reason at all. its all shit i have seen before and it doesn't wow me, its boring. notable sections of the game are an uninteresting walking simulator that thinks its environments are far more interesting than they actually are.

moebius are terrible villains. J, Z and especially C are lazily written and feel like a parody. i almost forgot to mention S when writing this. Z's motive or lack there of is that he finds everything he does funny and the game just decides he's a "concept" instead of a character because the writers stopped caring. Z and S are strawman parodies of the bad writing you would expect from a persona game. this isn't the only instance of blatantly lazy writing either. the game uses riku to pass off lazy writing and a lack of worldbuilding as quirky and funny because a nopon has a legendary sword for no fucking reason.
C is the worst character in a jrpg that isn't called final fantasy 13. i could get into a review in itself about how horrible he is and how there was no reason to be here. being the conclusion to a fucking triforce quest is an insult to players. his dialogue with noah is utter nonsense, like a parody of 1 and 2's dialogue.
despite fandom hype, it does not actually resolve much of xenoblade 1 or 2. nia is the queen of alrest for reasons the writers didn't care enough to explain. its pointless fanservice and the first dlc character is a perfect example of this shit.
the games ending is fine on its own i guess, but the buildup feels nonexistent and it doesn't feel like a rewarding or satisfying ending as a result. by that point in the game i had stopped caring because the story was completely unsalvageable. i had no attachment to anything because the game had not earnt it.
the music is worse than the previous three games, though its still good. too bad you never hear a lot of it because the game handles its music very poorly. theres lots of instances that lead to the music being reset (eg fast travel resetting the clock. which you will be doing a lot), the pause music and the infamous chain attack theme that ensures you will never hear the unique boss themes all the way through.

the combat is almost as much of a shitshow as the story. 1 didn't have good combat either but at least it was simplistic. almost every boss is a final fantasy 7 remake-style damage sponge and it is a slog. you can tell the bosses are like this because the game is designed around six party members and spamming chain attacks with them. fusing is an annoying gimmick that isn't very fun past the initial novelty and the game devolves into chain attack spam at a certain point since the bosses are so bulky. i'm not sure why they didn't make a turn based rpg instead of this, would have probably worked out better than this mess.

on the positive side of things i can say i think N is a compelling antagonist. his decision is something i could see myself choosing in that situation and the delivery on his lines by the VA is superb. however, he also inherently makes noah less interesting since theres no room for noah to make the same mistakes as him.

xenoblade 3 is the most mediocre jrpg on the switch and to see it become the most highly received xenoblade game feels like a slap in the face when it is inferior to its predecessors in almost every way. soulless.

Perspective is important when it comes to JRPGs, for most people the first few JRPGs that they tackle will always hold a special value. Those who have played 10s or 100s of JRPGs know that a lot of these stories commonly share the same elements, some people become jaded about JRPGs some people work around it. I think something I really appreciate about having played a lot of JRPGs is that my respect for the genre is on a new level. I always look forward to how a game tackles a similar subject compared to how another game did it. I want to say Xenoblade 3 was no exception, there were things I genuinely really liked in this game. Like how it explains why the world was like it is, this game reminded me of a few games I really like with similar worlds and in a few ways this game managed to hone in on aspects that those other games didn’t or were just weaker parts, the Mio execution part was a great idea and scene that I’d love to see in another game and maybe even brought further, I also really enjoyed the battle system, the chain attacks were my favourite part of the battle system and I loved how much strategy went into them. Other than that, honestly XB3 probably has my least favorite battle system out of the main 3 Xenoblade's but I didn’t really go out of my way to go into the depths of it like 1 or 2 and nonetheless I appreciated it anyways.

I don't care about this game. Even the good parts.
Nowadays, A cast and overall charm are very much a make or break in a JRPG for me. I found these guys to be an all-around good cast in the end but, I couldn't ever really feel them. Something I loved in Xenoblade 1 and 2 or even other games I love is that I can understand someone's character from the environment that they came from or their strong personalities or backstory. I didn't get a feel for this cast ever because they mostly felt really boring or their backstory was just Joran. I can't really just come on here and shit on the game for this because that was kind of the point that it was going for, these guys don't have a lot of life behind them because they are mostly vessels for battle.

I think one thing that really fucked this game over for me was once I saw that ethel was in the party, I realized that the game was just going to do a lot of focusing on one-note side characters. I feel like this was such a bad decision and it kind of took away fire that could have been used to flesh out the main cast more, I can't even name a single hero I liked lol.

I won’t get into too much, but I seriously think this might be one of the ugliest JRPGs worlds I’ve played in recent memory and this series I love for how pretty the worlds are. The chain attack theme is good, but that’s about all I have to say about the ost. Its kind of just washed over me.

I think my main issue is how the game handled its messages, for one, I felt like it shared messages with the second game, 2 had vague meaning of life messages flowing in the background for the cast because a lot of them were trying to find a place in their dying world. Xenoblade 3 was a lot louder with its messaging but I seriously disliked how it was handled. Alot of the messages were relegated to side characters or the main villains who would be on screen for like 30 minutes say their thing and then die or join your party then it feels like we move on to the next thing and the topic is dropped. I found a lot of these characters reasonings were super dumb and not relatable in any sense. N is fine but I think he's super close to what they were trying to do with Jin and for that, Idk I just don't care. I don't even want to get into the stupid villains so I'll just leave it at that lol.

The reason I talked about perspective at the beginning is because in a weird way regardless of all the problems or just personal nitpicks I have with this game, I kind of understand why people are like BROOOOO IT’S THE GREATEST OR I LOVE IT. I think that the messages in this game are very important to those who are Young, Lost or Even just need a reminder maybe if I had played this game when I was much younger it might have had a massive impact on me and maybe I would have had an undying love for it, Most of my dislike for the game just basically comes down to me knowing what I like from how many JRPGs I’ve played in the past and Xenoblade 3 just didn’t do it for me, regardless I’m glad people are getting something out of this game even though I didn’t. For me there’s one game I’ve played in the past that just did what Xenoblade 3 was trying to do, and that was the one that ended up having an impact on me.

I think there's some fundamental quality missing here that I personally came to love the Xenoblade series for and made me hold it in such high regard like plot, characters, story, worlds, music, and narrative. Just worked so well together in 1 and 2 and for many, it made an engaging unforgettable experience, that I seriously couldn't find in 3.

The gameplay was great, the music was great. But sadly that's where it ends for me. I didn't really find the story that engaging or find the characters that interesting to me. The dialogue made me cringe sometimes and characters would make choices that made little to no sense. The villains were very sub par and only one or two were fleshed out. There were many characters that felt there only to push certain characters forward and were underdeveloped, specifically Crys. Z was a very stereotypical end of the world villain with no real substance. I will say though that the imagery with the theater scenes were very cinematic and cool. The lack of sexualization was a great improvement on the second game and was very welcomed. I should note that I love the concept of the games story, the idea of flame clocks was extremely interesting, it's just the writing was very mediocre at best. Overall this game has good story concepts and gameplay, but is held to mediocrity by questionable writing and story decisions.