Comfy game. Comfy as hell ~30 hour RPG.

I've yet to go back and play some of the key classic titles that inspired this one, but somehow it still invoked a sense of nostalgia for me. I could practically feel the artistic passion the entire crew had making this. It's that cozy home-brewed passion that reminds me why video games are even worth playing.
Visually beautiful and the music's fantastic, nuf said there. Zale and Valere are kinda blank-slate interchangeable protags that could've used more personality and dynamic. Especially with how well that was done with Ninja in The Messenger. That said, the supporting characters are super cool and more than make up for it. Combat system takes from Mario RPG with timed attacks and adds an additional puzzle-y lock-breaking system for cancelling enemy spells with different types of physical attacks and magic. The story's nice. Simple plot about Solstice warriors stopping an evil Fleshmancer with lots of subplots that flesh out the world in ways that that keep it satisfying to explore and keep moving forward. Also lots of crazy moments. Gotta love em.

I definitely recommend playing The Messenger first. There are several moments that are fine on their own but made me pop off like a soyjak because of the connections I recognized. Especially the secret you can find post-true ending.

Overall, Banger game.


Also Daffy Duck is there.

Also PLEASE nerf the assassin in Wheels.

(This is a long, spoiler free review. Wanted to write a lot for my favorite video game series.)
I don't know when exactly this game is gonna leave my immediate brain space, but at this current point in time, I'm alright with it because this game is just that amazing.

This is probably my favorite group of main characters I've experienced in a video game. I had mixed feelings on about half of the group a few chapters in, but the more and more I played I came to love and appreciate the whole group. Noah, Mio, Lanz, Sena, Eunie, and my personal favorite Taion all strongly engage you in Xenoblade 3's story and the world around them while properly pushing strong character motivations and interesting character dynamics for the six throughout. Noah and Mio's motivations and interactions are done so well and push the narrative excellently. It took time for me to warm up to both of them, but Monolith Soft did an excellent job of getting me invested into these two, their dynamic and what they represent. Noah now is probably my 2nd favorite Xenoblade protagonist after Shulk. Lanz and Sena working as the group's protectors and muscle is so entertaining and surprisingly engaging when you get to see more into their thoughts since neither of them are just ‘meathead’ as characters. I didn't expect to like Sena much at all when going into the game and she left as one of my favorite characters of the bunch. Lanz took a while to warm up on me, especially when comparing his role in the story and gameplay of his base class largely to Reyn who I really like, but unlike Reyn, his motivations and role in the story develops much further than 'main character's best friend and shield' and he serves as a great foil for Sena, the Kevesi crew and the main six. Eunie and Taion since pre-release were going to be my favorites from what I saw of them, and their interactions with the cast and with each other throughout the game gave my early bias towards them strong merit and vindication. Both serving as the party's healers in the story as well as Taion serving as the tactician are done so tremendously. Like Lanz, Taion as foil to the rest of the group for his often skeptical and tactical outlook to the group's plans is so good. And Eunie being the party's bus is pretty nice, too. The characters are a special group that Monolith Soft wrote well, like they almost always do.

The game's story, taking ideas and themes from both Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2 while working them into a new narrative excels at hooking the audience in with an interesting premise that continues throughout the adventure with twists and turns that just made me want to keep playing more and more. Emotional investment into a story and its characters are key in storytelling and Xenoblade 3 does that so well with its exciting fights and themes on life with how Aionios works. It's not always perfect, it's not without criticisms and a couple moments that felt very obvious. I didn't personally feel as strongly moved or motivated against the antagonists of this game as I did Xenoblade 1's, but that didn't hinder my experience of this game's story at all, I found it incredible. I don’t want to say too much about it to avoid spoilers, but I love what this game does in its story.

The battle system is the best thing the Xenoblade series has to offer. A mixture of 1 and 2's systems with additions that greatly enhance the experience, such as Interlinking and fusion arts, combining your classes arts and arts mastered from an opposite nation's classes. The class system is an interesting take on character creation in this game that hasn’t been done since Xenoblade X, and while I can see why some may say that having each character able to learn every class can take away from individuality, the game's balance of needing each class to function against the difficult enemies of the game counters this by making you properly assess which of your characters should be running each class, who's mastered what, what assets you can afford to push for learning and leveling up for classes, etc. It's great and I love it. The Chain Attack in this game is my favorite in the series, as well. While Xenoblade 1's chain attacks were more RNG focused and Xenoblade 2's were about setting up the enemy before the attack, hopping directly into Xenoblade 3 chain attacks and setting up based on the chain orders that the game gives you works well to me. It's still a bit RNG based like Xenoblade 1, but it's a lot more controlled on how the RNG will work and probabilities that you can account for. I've seen complaints about how the chain attack music can come in during almost any fight which sometimes takes the emotional feel of certain fights away, and it would be nice if they added the option to turn off chain attack music. While the song is good and fun, I understand those complaints and hope they rectify that, because I didn't even personally notice this as an issue until a fight late in the game. And it was odder because earlier in said fight, the chain attack music wasn't coming up when using chain attacks! Hope they fix that.

It's a Xenoblade game, it's going to have great music. Music is very nice throughout. Hearing beats and mixes of some other Xenoblade songs in the story gained surprised reactions out of me at times, confusion at times until I put pieces together, but overall, I'm glad about the general direction of the music. Though, currently I'm still willing to say that both 1 and 2 had better music than 3. This opinion might change for me in the future, but it's how I feel one day after beating the game. Xenoblade 2 has my favorite soundtrack of all time, and I didn't feel this game hit those heights. (But the pause menu theme? Goated, can listen to that all day every day, Xenoblade 1 and 2 don't have that.)

This game is just awesome, man. I won't say what it was, but one moment in this game made me feel a swell of emotions I've not come close to experiencing since I was in elementary school, and this was my first time getting that level of emotion while playing a video game. My expectations for this game were out of this world. I wanted and was preparing for this game to be the best game of all time and for it to absolutely ruin me. It might've accomplished both, even if not quite to the admittedly impossibly high scale I put it at. I love the Xenoblade franchise and Monolith Soft for what they consistently continue to produce—on the Nintendo Switch, no less. Imagine these games being PC games. The graphics, world, etc. would just go through the roof in terms of quality (not to mention the modding scene, that would rock so much more). This is a top two game I've ever played. Before playing this game, my two favorite games were Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2, respectively. Now that top two is Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 3. The experience I had with Xenoblade 1 makes it so much more difficult for me to decide if I like 3 more than 1, so I still can't say if I like the new kid more than the old legend yet. I'll probably come back and update this when I have an answer. But for now? Play this game if you're a Xenoblade fan, a JRPG fan, anything. This game is out of this world, and I love it so much.