The original Xenoblade Chronicles, nearly a decade later, remains one of my most fondly appreciated and respected games. Its sequel, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, is one of my least. What do you get when you smash the two into each other? Evidently, Xenoblade Chronicles 3. A game that's some parts old and some parts new; A game that's some parts 1 and some parts 2.

No matter what game this turned out to be, I still had enough respect for the series in me to give this next installment a whirl. Here are my thoughts.

It's no question Monolithsoft is dripping with talent, and perhaps one of the smartest acquisitions Nintendo has ever made. From game-to-game it is instantly acknowledgeable just how much more skilled they've become at their craft over the years. I don't doubt these artists are truly capable of making something great, even 2 has its moments, but with this newest entry I begin to find myself questioning if this series continues to be the best use of this studio's abilities.

To me, the Xenoblade series is well-known for, above all, three things: Its music, its worlds, and its story. I'll chronicle my thoughts of each of these facets as we go along, starting with...

The Worlds
Something Xenoblade Chronicles wants you to know as soon as possible about its setting is the quite literal fusion of the first two games. Characters and architecture from the kingdom of Keves reflect and mimic the design sensibilities of Xenoblade 1, while the kingdom of Agnus carries forward that of 2. While it's clear they put a lot of effort into this idea, I still disagree with the attempt at doing so fundamentally.

I always looked forward to seeing what was around every corner in past Xenoblade games. You never knew what you were going to find because the scenery and the spaces were places you'd never seen before. I have such vivid memories of places like seeing nighttime in Satorl Marsh for the first time or discovering the impossibly towering Mechonis factory from Xenoblade 1. Even a jaded Xenoblade 2 disliker such as myself couldn't help but be utterly dazzled by locations like the innards of the Urayan Titan or the dizzyingly beautiful Leftherian Archipelago. Because Xenoblade 3 is only interested in bringing back old ideas instead of making new ones, there was never that sense of wonder about the places I found, only blank recognition of a little bit of Gaur Plain here or the Fallen Arm there. I kept waiting to find "that" location for me that would blow me away and leave something that would become that treasured memory, but unfortunately it never seemed to come.

From a technical level, these spaces are larger than ever before, and most impressively, Monolithsoft has now even found a way to fit multiple vast biomes into a single province, with far fewer chokepoints required to insert loading zones into than ever before. The scale on display is a significant step up compared to Xenoblade 2, which is even more impressive when you consider that these were released on the same hardware. There's a lot of verticality to appreciate these seemingly endless vistas from, and despite loading zones technically still being present they do a good job of making the world of Aionios feel remarkably cohesive. Landmarks are numerous and always visible from each other, which makes your place in the world feel very "real" in a neat little way.

With this increase in ambition however, it is clear that some sacrifices were made. While Xenoblade 2 quite infamously suffered from some memory leak issues close to launch, in my time with Xenoblade 3, this game exhibited numerous occasional "hiccups" that involved the music skipping and stuttering and the framerate freezing for up to a full second. These occurences were infrequent enough that it didn't completely ruin the experience, but when they did happen they always happened hard, and it's never something that I've had to put up with before in a Monolithsoft game before. Battles between your oversized party and the numerous hordes of enemies you'll meet along the way only serve to make this even worse. I've played through this game on three different patches and experienced this same issue all the way throughout. Bizarre stuff, I hope it's possible for this to eventually be fixed.

The Music
The sound of the Xenoblade Chronicles series is unmistakable. Created by an all-star team of legendary JRPG talent, this is another component that the series has traditionally exceeded at. Unfortunately, as time has gone on at Monolithsoft, things have shifted around a bit amongst the team. The most high-profile of these adjustments is the complete loss of Yoko Shimomura from the credits, but equally lamentable is the severely reduced role of Manami Kiyota and the utterly tragic hampering of ACE's abilities, both of which made up a large part of Xenoblade's unique audio identity.

Early on, the game starts on one of its strongest notes: the main battle theme. Kenji Hiramatsu has really began to stand out over the last few years with some of the original battle themes that were put together for Torna: The Golden Country and Future Connected. Unbelievable funk and jazz that feels right at home in this series. Hearing that he'd finally be heading up the battle theme for a mainline game is an extremely exciting prospect, and it delivers on this promise for a little, but its presence is soon erased by about a dozen other forgettable battle themes that keep replacing one another as you progress through the story. I have no idea what the YiiK they were thinking but there's no excuse to throw out such a winner in service of so much nothingness. Especially disappointing is that both Xenoblade 1 and 2 had critical plot moments that also changed the default battle music, but those kicked ass, while these went right through one ear and out the other. From the sound effects, to the cutscenes, to the battles, this game has some serious Hollywood-ass action-movie-ass sounding music and that is NOT a good thing. At every turn, Xenoblade 3 feels like it's so afraid to sound like itself anymore, and when it does it's only ever in meek, half-hearted ways that still feel like they're always trying not to be too "weird" lest they stray too far from anything you'd hear in a Marvel movie. There are remarkably few times when electric guitars even show up at all, and when they do they're more to provide a little bit of grit or texture rather than ever getting the chance to truly take the lead and give you something to tap your foot or bang your head to. A ridiculous shame, and as far as I can tell, a 100% self-inflicted wound. These guys deserved to have made something better.

I fear the area themes as well, for the most part will not be sticking around with me. A few notable exceptions to me were Alfeto Valley, Eagus Wilderness, and Agnus Colony (Day), but even these areas still feel very subdued and laid back compared to the series' usual output. Nothing like Xenoblade 2's Mor Ardain here, that's for sure!

For a soundtrack with so many cooks at the helm, it's tricky to nail down exactly what went wrong here, but it feels like enormous wasted potential. No matter how bad or good Xenoblade 3 turned out to be, it could at least be guaranteed the music would have some knockout moments to keep coming back to listen to over the years, right? I'm sorry to say that for me, this was not the case.

The Story
Despite the 3 of the title, Xenoblade 3 wants you to absorb it for the most part as an original, standalone story; Something to engage with on its own terms. In the words of its own director, it may be the thematic conclusion to the series, but crucially, not narratively. It is especially confusing to me then, as a returning Xenoblade player, just how much is ripped in this department from previous games, even when compared to the other aspects of this game that already borrows so much that it doesn't need. A new character in Chapter 1 is introduced and dies immediately. For no reason at all, the nature of their blaze-of-glory death is the exact same of a certain beloved Xenoblade 1 character... but we just met this guy like a minute ago, so it doesn't mean anything. A certain character is defeated in a mech and dies by the main character's own hand. The cinematography of this scene is a shot-for-shot recreation of the part in Xenoblade 1 where Shulk defeats Egil aboard Yaldabaoth. I'm sure there are more moments than these to pick out, but they proved insanely distracting when I happened to clue into them. Melia from Xenoblade 1 and Nia from Xenoblade 2 are just... back. Not reimagined. Just literally the same characters. There's nothing outright offensive that they do with their presence here but I can't imagine new players will get much out of them considering how pointless their presence feels. The reuse of all this imagery is utterly devoid of meaning. They were important moments from the previous games, so putting them here will make this game important too, right? Quite the opposite, in fact it makes these moments feel cheapened.

As for what's new in Xenoblade 3, the core cast of characters who are taking in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world are who you're going to be experiencing the bulk of this story through. The English voice-acting early on shows itself to be a welcome improvement compared to the complete embarrassment that 2's dub turned out to be, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see unique English lip-synching for all of the dialog. The performances aren't the best the series has seen, but it's definitely passable, and the effort that went into achieving even that that is undeniably present. The new tools used to create these cutscenes and give these characters more realistic expressions and movements is some of their best technical work yet. The stage is set to tell a fantastic Xenoblade story here, and that's made apparent rather early on. In spite of the misfired old, perhaps the original elements of the game will get the chance to take the lead and show me somewhere new that the series has never taken me before!

The plot's focus bounces around between a few genres of scene, be it an unusually-punctual bath scene where we're treated to Lanz's immaculately toned back muscles, anime action scenes, slice-of-life getting-to-know-the-characters-antics, and perhaps... ahem... most overtly... romance... Early on it becomes very apparent that between the six of you, each Keves party member has an opposite-sex Agnus counterpart for them to be romantically paired off with, and vice versa. That these pairings will eventually form relationships is heavily implied throughout, but it never feels like there's very much chemistry there to justify it. Each particular couple hangs out together because that's what the game design of the Ouroboros pairings demand, and it feels like this happens for little reason more than "because it's supposed to." The compulsory heterosexuality doesn't stop there of course, because the characters later discover a whole sparking city that teaches them about the ways of love, marriage, and most importantly, child-rearing. For characters who have already been fed a "meaning of life" by their military higher-ups, I understand why providing them this as an alternative is important, but in all the cutscenes I couldn't help but notice that even all the background couples in this location were male and female. Are gay people allowed to exist in this world? If the meaning of life is reproduction between a man and a woman, am I as a gay man a "waste" of life by that definition? Of course not, because this part of the game is scared-straight propaganda for otaku, but it's a slog to sit through nonetheless until the story gets back to its other interests. I should note that in spite of my utter distaste for anything romantic in Xenoblade 2, Shulk and Fiora from Xenoblade 1 are a couple I truly found myself rooting for all throughout that game. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the very idea of male/female chemistry, but it's completely missing here in Xenoblade 3 and it only feels like so much time is spent on it because it's been mandated by the powers that be.

Outside of the romantic factors, my enjoyment of the party as individuals felt fairly uneven. Some I found incredibly annoying and had no interest in learning more about, like Sena (if perhaps only for the Xenoblade 2 stink that her character design clearly reeks of) and Eunie (for the more literal stink that she won't stop talking about via various bathing references that she doesn't stop making for the first 15 hours), to appreciable but unremarkable average-Joes like Noah and Lanz (who perhaps would become significantly more interesting to me if they could "find the meaning of life" with each other instead), to the final two who I find to be the true standouts: Taion and Mio.

I'll start with Taion, as he's my #2 favorite. Throughout the game, the player is treated to several flashbacks of the characters in their childhoods. For convoluted reasons I dare not get into for the sake of brevity, the characters are born at 10 and die at 20, and throughout that time they are trained as child soldiers before being sent off to war. On the Keves side, between Noah, Eunie, and Lanz, I always found these scenes dreadfully uninteresting, and dare I say even RWBY-like. It feels like watching other people do homework, which is to say ruinously boring... The history of the Agnus characters, I found, surprisingly, to be quite the opposite. When it comes to the idea of exploring these childhood pasts, it was refreshing to see the connections Taion formed and lost with the people he knew back then, and how those experiences affected who he turned out to be in the present. Because Noah is the player surrogate, you're inherently going to have more familiarity with Keves, but when you visit Taion's colony at Great Cotte Falls as an adult and have to hang out with him for a funeral there, it felt like a very sincere tone that represented one of the few times I felt the need to sit up and really absorb the weight of a scene, even if it wasn't anything especially flashy. They did this guy alright. It's also really funny when he says "I lied" during that one scene with M. You'll know the one.

Mio, of course, is blowaway. As a twenty-something there's a certain feeling of "never getting enough done" for my age that I feel in my day-to-day life... Thinking about the things that I want to achieve and then feeling like I'm running out of time for not achieving them when I see people with "more time" in their youth doing them better or faster. I get the sense that this represents somewhat of a larger generational ennui at the moment, so I find it really fascinating to make a character who is faced with this dread in a more literal sense, knowing exactly just how little time she has left. Despite my earlier expressed distaste for the obligatory heterosexual pairings, there's a sizeable collection of scenes where Mio and Noah exchange their perspectives and worldviews about this sort of thing, and they always feel like very surprisingly real and honest conversations compared to how silly the rest of the game can sometimes feel. As the story of the game progresses, so too does the passage of the dwindling time that these characters have left in the game, and it gradually becomes clearer just how heavy that weighs upon Mio's shoulders. There's just something about a character who has to figure out how to come to terms with unavoidable yet slowly approaching tragedy that I always find ravenously compelling. Eventually, this comes to a head when the gang gets imprisoned by Noah's sexy bad-boy doppelgänger, and a montage shows what used to be the rather sluggish passage of time getting faster and faster, flushing away everyone's precious time with a deliciously devastating disregard. As Mio's final days approach, she shares a conversation with Noah through their cell walls, and we see some gorgeously animated quiet weeping. Men crying is always another plus so this part of the game was really blowing me away in all respects. Truly, I had found my Griffin Winning Moment. Finally, Mio's last day arrives, and she is put to death in what is absolutely the most emotionally brutal moment in the entire game. It is stunningly powerful, and I was completely taken off-guard by how suddenly and deeply I started to care about this game for such a huge stretch. Had Monolithsoft regained their groove? Were these games good again? Are these questions rhetorical? What the Flames were they thinking... In the next scene Mio immediately and effectively comes back to life through some absolute bullshit anime superpower shenanigans that completely undoes all of the goodwill of this arc. It makes me so upset that it feels like Mio no longer deserves this #1 spot from me, but I'll always remember how this game made me feel when it seemed like they were on the right track to commit for a little bit there. One of the game's highest highs quickly brought down to one of its most disappointing lows.

Xenoblade 3's story in general has a debilitating issue of never putting its money where its mouth is. Plot threads, themes, and character arcs will often suggest one direction only to do something that completely undoes whatever weight its initial momentum was suggesting it was going to have. Characters will dramatically lose limbs and then inexplicably regain them back, only to begin to start doing it over and over again so many times it becomes almost comedic. Nearly every major "good-guy" character who is supposed to have died comes back, short of the one or two who literally die in a nuclear explosion. Anything slightly less than a nuke is grounds for revival though, I guess. So much time is wasted on this sort of back-and-forth doing and undoing of ideas that I'm utterly shocked that this is actually the fastest I've ever completed a Xenoblade game (~100 hours for 1 ~90 for 2, ~70 for 3), considering how dull most of the story is between the seas of boring and confusing exposition and emotional whiplash. It really does everything it can do to feel longer in spite of its actual length.

The weakest part of the story, to me, was the villains. Xenoblade 3 has more of them than ever, but the majority of them fail to leave a lasting impression. Everybody wears the same red outfits with slightly different design motifs, (one is shaped like an owl, one is shaped like the letter X, etc.), but their presence quickly becomes repetitive and monotonous. Nobody knows why anybody is doing anything for reasons besides "because they're the bad guys", and when directly asked this question, both N and X both answer with "because it amuses me." Well shit! It sure doesn't amuse me! For how many of these snuffing things there are you may as well replace them with Goombas because they have exactly as much nuance as video game antagonists. Deeply disappointing for a JRPG to specifically drop the ball in this department. I like N a little bit more than the rest, but I'll be honest, I'm a simple man, and it's only because of his design and I want a man like that to bully me. It is NOT because he is well-written.

Miscellaneous
I found myself really let down by the final dungeon. Both 1 and 2 did a great job in this regard both visually and musically, and yet despite having completed this game four hours ago I already cannot tell you how the music here goes. Way too purple, not nearly enough palette variety, copy-pasted assets as far as the eye can see, and every single enemy you meet here is just a purple lazer-reskin of something you've fought before. For how long it is it is absolutely astonishing that there's not a single new encounter you'll find here. This is where it feels the game really could spent some more time in the workshop. It leaves me to wonder if its release being swapped with Splatoon 3 hurt it in this regard.

The final boss fight takes an hour and has no checkpoints. If you die, you're booted back to the title screen and have to start all the way back from the start, including the early scripted battle with a countless barrage of in-battle cutscenes that you can't skip and three back-to-back mandatory chain attacks that you have no choice but to do and then watch. Especially confusing given the series' history of rather generous final boss checkpoints... I am not joking when I say having to go back that far significantly soured my opinion of this game. I cannot believe they thought it was okay to ship something that egregious. Extremely disrespectful of the player's time and I really hope they patch it.

Were my experience with the final boss not already a slap in the face, there's a certain nod to Xenoblade 2 that certainly slaps as hard as it can possibly muster at the last possible moment. You'll know it when you see it.

Conclusion
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 proves it can occasionally strive for greater heights than its lowest lows, but fails to stay up consistently long enough to truly become great. Would be a much better experience if it pulled its own head out of its ass. If they do another one of these I probably won't feel the need to pick it up right away since my curiosity regarding the sporadic quality of these releases has likely been sated, but if the end of this trilogy finally allows them to set off on new, wholly original ventures, I wish them all the best.

It is strange to think though that this is like, Nintendo's biggest JRPG series now. Humble beginnings for sure, but considering the increasingly middling quality of these games it really feels like it oughtn't be the only game in town when it comes to Nintendo's output. Wishful thinking.