Still one of the best things ever. My second playthrough of this was a breeze. I did all the hero quests and most side quests my first time, wanted to see how the game felt without going too much out of my way to finish side content; honestly surprised how beautifully balanced the game felt without the bonus EXP from side content. This is easily the best cast of characters in the trilogy and the pacing of the story is wonderful. There’s so many places you might never see in this world too which I love, it feels huge and open. I miss having more conventional towns outside of the city, but the way this world functions alleviates that as a big problem. It’s not a JRPG where chilling and hanging out in towns is a priority, it’s a bleak and stressful world to be in at times, if often beautiful and quiet in the right moments. Visiting colonies still has a town-hopping charm to it, all due to the people within them. The game is littered with nice quests and dialogue to experience. The ability to obtain intel and discuss them at rest stops is such a brilliant mechanic that I want every RPG to have. The colonies may not be much in terms of level design, but as big checkpoints where you can catch up with your buds and gather some quests is such a brilliant substitute.

I love how insanely dramatic Xenoblade 3 is as well. Character dialogue is likely 50% motivational speeches and I love it. The game drowns in its concepts and ideas. Drowning might be a bad comparison, it really just dives in and gracefully swims through its concepts. I love Final Fantasy XIII, but I think Xenoblade 3 is a great contrast to it in which it gracefully introduced terminology, world building, language, and conflict in a coherent way that doesn’t require reading a wiki.

Xenoblade 3 is devastatingly beautiful. It’s hope, love, anxiety, fear, and any other important emotion anthropomorphized into a piece of narrative art. Not to mention it has one of the best combat systems in anything I’ve ever played. The whole series is a pure blast to play, but 3 is on another level of snappiness and customization. I can’t comprehend where a 4th game could go with its mechanics. Xenoblade combat pulls off a wonderful trick of feeling familiar in each game without sacrificing new ideas. On the surface all 3 games are completely different systems at their core, but they all retain the wonderful flow and problem solving of the first game.

It’s a masterpiece. It’s probably the best game on the Nintendo switch and it’s my personal favorite of the trilogy. I don’t need xenoblade to last forever, but I’ll follow Monolith Soft wherever they decide to go next.