xenoblade 3 is probably the most conflicted i've ever felt about a game. for the first half of the game, i was absolutely loving every moment. they made sidequests feel meaningful! they brought back a lot of gameplay concepts from torna! they introduced all these little tchotchkes to get you to explore the map more thoroughly! sure, the combat is kind of dull compared to 2, but torna was like that too, and torna was great! i felt so strongly that i wanted to do EVERYTHING i could before moving on, and for the most part, i did! but while i was doing this, some cracks started showing. huh, a lot of these classes i'm unlocking feel kinda similar. hm, i'm so overleveled that i can't make hardly any progress on the class system anymore. hey, it's pretty cool and all that moebius members appear even in the sidequests, but why do they basically all say the same stuff? but hey, the exploration and gameplay loop was just so good that i wasn't going to fault the game on a lot of this stuff. what i appreciated about xenoblade 3 was that it was, like torna before it, a game built out of smaller moments of community, where the grander ambitions of the plot are set aside in favor of showcasing different ways of life without explicitly portraying them as superior or inferior to each other. i appreciated that 3 had a very genuine sense of community... until it didn't.

STORY SPOILERS
chapter 5 is where all the strong notes of xc3's storytelling start to disappear for me. upon reaching swordmarch, we're told that their way of life Is Just How Humans Are Supposed To Be, with really awkward and overt messaging about the importance of childbirth. i don't particularly disagree with what this section of the game is saying, but the way it espouses it's views on the subject feels at odds with what i had liked about the game previously, and the sudden forced romantic tension for the entire party just made me really uncomfortable. the way this reveal happens also made me reconsider my feelings about the worldbuilding as a whole. concepts like love and childbirth being completely alien to kevesian and agnian people makes the entire world feel incredibly contrived. you're really telling me that nobody noticed that everything else in the world, including nopon, has a natural birth? nobody ever thought about the concept of aging until now? really? it doesn't help that at this point, the game gives you your last main area, and it's uhhh.. a couple hundred miles of disconnected islands. when i thought about it more, i realized none of the areas had really had the majesty of some of the stand out areas in the first two games. it's honestly a little bewildering to me that monolith had the most freedom they've had since XCX in determining the shape and theme of these areas.. and they just didn't really do much at all with them? the maktha wildwood is pretty cool and inspired, but otherwise these zones pretty much all pale in comparison to areas like uraya, satorl marsh, or even frontier village. the scenes at the end of chapter 5 are still excellent, and are probably the closest thing you get to payoff in this game.. but it just keeps going. chapter 6 is where stuff really starts to fall apart. a lot of xenoblade 3 likes to preach the sanctity of life; how there's beauty in it's impermanence, how it's not wrong to live for things that go beyond you, etc etc. all of this kind of goes out the window, though, because in chapter 6, xc3 becomes a narrative in which death has no meaning. you get several cutscenes in which dead characters get their importance restated, then they get revived. yay! how satisfying! the revival of miyabi, in particular, makes literally no sense, in-universe or otherwise. we get to see noah and mio state that keeping souls away from their peace in death is Wrong, then that immediately doesn't matter because we just recruit those guys instead of seeing them off. this is also where the connections to 1 and 2 start to become more present, and those are also really underwhelming. nia just exposition dumps at you, melia only shows up at pretty much the very end of the game, and the "connection" doesn't really feel as though it brings any sense of finality into the fold. both moebius and the protagonists just kind of deteriorate from this point on, shouting platitudes at each other that don't really mean much. the plot becomes more and more dependent on stuff that doesn't have proper setup or justification. pretty much everything falls off a cliff. i like the ending cutscene, but that's about all i can praise in the last quarter of xc3. even the combat, at this point, is pretty dreadfully boring and repetitive. it's shocking that in a franchise that has handled both narrative and mechanical pay-off so well in the past, xenoblade 3 just doesn't deliver.