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Spirit of Justice reeks of desperation.
Following up a game that stifled continuity so severely left the series very little room to expand. Phoenix and Apollo’s trajectories were cut off after AA4. Athena’s poor excuse for an arc was open and shut in her debut game. What ground does the series have left to stand on? Naturally, Capcom didn’t aim to slip out of the corner they backed themselves into. They raised the stakes and cornered themselves even further.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the overt orientalism present throughout the game. The original Ace Attorney trilogy centralized a family drama around a modernized depiction of spirit channeling. The ritual was used not only as a component to multiple murder mysteries but as a conduit to express generational trauma. The design aesthetics of Kurain Village and the Fey family borrowed only from traditional Japanese architecture and fashion, harmonizing with the cosmopolitan city life of Japanifornia.
Spirit of Justice not only contains uninteresting and stagnant characters that make far worse use of spirit channeling as an in-universe plot device, but the aesthetics of Khura’in (additionally a full-blown kingdom…one of this game’s many retcons) seem to broadly take design inspiration from the Middle East and South Asia without any tact or reason. The kingdom is presented as a theocratic (while also secular?) monarchy that has a ridiculous hatred of defense attorneys and wishes to execute them alongside their wrongfully charged defendants. While AA5’s only overarching theme to stand on was the pitiful and heavy-handed “dark age of the law,” completely overturning the moral argument presented to the player in AA4, Spirit of Justice’s moral argument, if you can even call it that, disavows a fictional and vaguely oriental monarchy for having a made-up law that criminalizes being a defense attorney.
I never thought I’d say this but maybe The Great Ace Attorney should learn a thing or two from this game about being anti-monarchy
AA6 continues to cast away the character drama present in the first four games to tell a story about a strawman political viewpoint and stereotyped culture that doesn’t exist, simply to raise the stakes for the player in an act of extremely misguided fanservice.
Speaking of fanservice, all of your favorite characters are back and they’re all shells of their former selves! I could go on about how The Magical Turnabout in particular is a masterclass in character assassination. In fact, I will.
Well written characters have desires. In AA4, Ema Skye was introduced to the player as a disillusioned police detective who never accomplished her goal of becoming a forensic scientist. Her grudge against the police force extends back to her debut in Rise from The Ashes, and her bias against the current justice system go hand in hand with AA4’s broader themes of disillusionment. Her viewpoint is remarkably different from the police presence in past games, and her willingness to cooperate with Apollo and Trucy (along with her past allegiance to Phoenix) subverts the player’s expectations to create a distinct web of relationships not present in newer games.
In AA6, Ema is not a police detective anymore. She achieves her goal of becoming a forensic scientist offscreen, and her disillusionment with the justice system is cast aside completely. She no longer has greater desires, and her character is no longer multidimensional. She isn’t set up to change or grow at all.
Here’s another example. Trucy was introduced in AA4 as an assistant with a lot more agency and wit than her predecessors. She frequently held her own during courtroom conversations, stalled a trial with a fake hostage, and was brave enough to confront her family trauma in Turnabout Succession. In the post-trial conversation between Phoenix and Thalassa, Phoenix mentions that he’s the only one who knows how hurt Trucy feels deep down. She puts on a face, but never truly reckons with the evil deeds done by her father, grandfather, and Valant.
In AA6, Trucy is accused of murder during her magic show. Not only does this magic show retcon a secret fourth member into Troupe Gramarye that was entirely irrelevant to the love triangle and accident that formed Trucy and Apollo’s original backstories, but this case also seems to completely rewrite and exonerate Magnifi Gramarye from his original misdeeds. Remember that original source of Trucy’s anguish? Yeah, it’s totally erased. Magnifi is genuinely portrayed as a kind and benevolent mentor here (You know, the man who blackmailed his troupe, tried coaxing one of them into murdering him, framed his suicide after that failed...). The game still tried to keep her concealed anguish as a character trait, so we’re left with a Trucy who feigns a smile for no discernable reason.
I talked about Apollo’s rewriting in my AA5 review, so I’ll keep this one short; once again, he is portrayed as a protégé who looks up to Phoenix, when his debut game had them act more like puppet and puppet master respectively. It’s the same in AA6, Apollo simply sees Phoenix as a generic mentor and the tension he felt towards Phoenix (which also fueled his desires as a character!) is completely gone.
I think it’s funny that spirit seances were chosen as the new big mechanic for this game even though the video analysis minigames in past entries were like, universally hated among fans.
Look, I could go on about how the Ace Attorney series effectively backed itself into a corner with stagnant characters and childish shonen writing (…and I probably will in a separate review for the Trilogy release), but in short, this series is left with nowhere to go. Phoenix Wright as a character is a husk of his former self, Apollo Justice is whatever the hell each game wants him to be, and Athena Cykes is a focus grouped cookie cutter “new protagonist” whose goal of exonerating Simon has been accomplished, leaving her with no more desires as well, effectively also making her a husk of what little depth she had.
Also I’ll say it as many times as necessary: DLC cases in this manner are inherently depraved. Remember when RPGs were sold as full games? Oh right, that means there has to be an actual cohesive story arc.
The stakes have been maxed out, and we’re 6 numerical entries in. This is unsustainable. What next, yet another hostage situation?
Following up a game that stifled continuity so severely left the series very little room to expand. Phoenix and Apollo’s trajectories were cut off after AA4. Athena’s poor excuse for an arc was open and shut in her debut game. What ground does the series have left to stand on? Naturally, Capcom didn’t aim to slip out of the corner they backed themselves into. They raised the stakes and cornered themselves even further.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the overt orientalism present throughout the game. The original Ace Attorney trilogy centralized a family drama around a modernized depiction of spirit channeling. The ritual was used not only as a component to multiple murder mysteries but as a conduit to express generational trauma. The design aesthetics of Kurain Village and the Fey family borrowed only from traditional Japanese architecture and fashion, harmonizing with the cosmopolitan city life of Japanifornia.
Spirit of Justice not only contains uninteresting and stagnant characters that make far worse use of spirit channeling as an in-universe plot device, but the aesthetics of Khura’in (additionally a full-blown kingdom…one of this game’s many retcons) seem to broadly take design inspiration from the Middle East and South Asia without any tact or reason. The kingdom is presented as a theocratic (while also secular?) monarchy that has a ridiculous hatred of defense attorneys and wishes to execute them alongside their wrongfully charged defendants. While AA5’s only overarching theme to stand on was the pitiful and heavy-handed “dark age of the law,” completely overturning the moral argument presented to the player in AA4, Spirit of Justice’s moral argument, if you can even call it that, disavows a fictional and vaguely oriental monarchy for having a made-up law that criminalizes being a defense attorney.
AA6 continues to cast away the character drama present in the first four games to tell a story about a strawman political viewpoint and stereotyped culture that doesn’t exist, simply to raise the stakes for the player in an act of extremely misguided fanservice.
Speaking of fanservice, all of your favorite characters are back and they’re all shells of their former selves! I could go on about how The Magical Turnabout in particular is a masterclass in character assassination. In fact, I will.
Well written characters have desires. In AA4, Ema Skye was introduced to the player as a disillusioned police detective who never accomplished her goal of becoming a forensic scientist. Her grudge against the police force extends back to her debut in Rise from The Ashes, and her bias against the current justice system go hand in hand with AA4’s broader themes of disillusionment. Her viewpoint is remarkably different from the police presence in past games, and her willingness to cooperate with Apollo and Trucy (along with her past allegiance to Phoenix) subverts the player’s expectations to create a distinct web of relationships not present in newer games.
In AA6, Ema is not a police detective anymore. She achieves her goal of becoming a forensic scientist offscreen, and her disillusionment with the justice system is cast aside completely. She no longer has greater desires, and her character is no longer multidimensional. She isn’t set up to change or grow at all.
Here’s another example. Trucy was introduced in AA4 as an assistant with a lot more agency and wit than her predecessors. She frequently held her own during courtroom conversations, stalled a trial with a fake hostage, and was brave enough to confront her family trauma in Turnabout Succession. In the post-trial conversation between Phoenix and Thalassa, Phoenix mentions that he’s the only one who knows how hurt Trucy feels deep down. She puts on a face, but never truly reckons with the evil deeds done by her father, grandfather, and Valant.
In AA6, Trucy is accused of murder during her magic show. Not only does this magic show retcon a secret fourth member into Troupe Gramarye that was entirely irrelevant to the love triangle and accident that formed Trucy and Apollo’s original backstories, but this case also seems to completely rewrite and exonerate Magnifi Gramarye from his original misdeeds. Remember that original source of Trucy’s anguish? Yeah, it’s totally erased. Magnifi is genuinely portrayed as a kind and benevolent mentor here (You know, the man who blackmailed his troupe, tried coaxing one of them into murdering him, framed his suicide after that failed...). The game still tried to keep her concealed anguish as a character trait, so we’re left with a Trucy who feigns a smile for no discernable reason.
I talked about Apollo’s rewriting in my AA5 review, so I’ll keep this one short; once again, he is portrayed as a protégé who looks up to Phoenix, when his debut game had them act more like puppet and puppet master respectively. It’s the same in AA6, Apollo simply sees Phoenix as a generic mentor and the tension he felt towards Phoenix (which also fueled his desires as a character!) is completely gone.
I think it’s funny that spirit seances were chosen as the new big mechanic for this game even though the video analysis minigames in past entries were like, universally hated among fans.
Look, I could go on about how the Ace Attorney series effectively backed itself into a corner with stagnant characters and childish shonen writing (…and I probably will in a separate review for the Trilogy release), but in short, this series is left with nowhere to go. Phoenix Wright as a character is a husk of his former self, Apollo Justice is whatever the hell each game wants him to be, and Athena Cykes is a focus grouped cookie cutter “new protagonist” whose goal of exonerating Simon has been accomplished, leaving her with no more desires as well, effectively also making her a husk of what little depth she had.
Also I’ll say it as many times as necessary: DLC cases in this manner are inherently depraved. Remember when RPGs were sold as full games? Oh right, that means there has to be an actual cohesive story arc.
The stakes have been maxed out, and we’re 6 numerical entries in. This is unsustainable. What next, yet another hostage situation?
"I am no one. I am nothing but an endless abyss."
- The Phantom, Turnabout for Tomorrow
Dual Destinies is poorly written and creatively bankrupt. I'm honestly impressed by how the game simultaneously derailed the existing continuity and character arcs established in previous games, while also delivering a half baked and childish new storyline that leaves the series nowhere to go in the future.
The “dark age of the law” was a comically awful overarching theme and having villains like Aristotle Means, a guy who genuinely believes lawyers are supposed to lie and forge evidence, is proof of how allergic the writers are from creating actual interesting or thought provoking character drama and moral arguments.
Do we not see the hypocrisy of this story when Phoenix Wright himself used underhanded means (forging evidence, rigging a jury) to justify the end goal of beating Kristoph Gavin and absolving himself in AA4? Like we literally had an interesting “does the end justify the means” moral argument set up for us in the previous game and we throw it all away for this 4Kids ass good vs evil plot line that is resolved by exposing a nameless, faceless villain whose goals were never explained?
Speaking of, the actions of the "phantom" in Dual Destinies was motivated by his desire to cover up his previous crimes from 7 years prior. You might be asking, "what motivated him to commit the crimes of 7 years ago, like disrupting the first rocket launch?" Too bad! There's no explanation! But don't worry, catching him ended the dark age of the law anyways!
There are so many “gags” that just fall back on moments from past games like Trucy only showing up with the panties, turning Apollo’s “I’m fine” into an actual character trait (wtf bro😭), and Phoenix being regressed to a compulsive bluffer. Apollo as a whole is literally a completely different character who shares none of the same motivations and thoughts he did in the previous game. You know how he was consistently at odds with the way Phoenix carried himself and raised Trucy? And how he trusts his clients less? Now, Apollo sees him as a mentor and gets complimented on how similar he is to him. Phoenix also has no reason to exist in this game, he appears to be way less capable, completely undoing the ultimatum he dealt with at the end of Bridge to the Turnabout.
Athena and Blackquill's story is by far the most competent part of this game but it still feels underwhelming given the shared screentime with the other protags, filler cases, and terrible phantom story. Why couldn’t we have had a story about the immorality of Blackquill’s death penalty?
Like the gags, the music is super derivative of past games. So many tracks are uninspired remixes (or straight up ports like guilty love?) although there were a few original bangers like the cross examination themes.
The DLC was mid filler. The fact that they decided to make DLC filler cases at all, in what's supposed to be a narrative-driven mystery series, should tell you how depraved this game truly is.
The mood matrix doubles down on the childish dialogue with conversations like "My sources are telling me you were thinking happy thoughts when you should be thinking sad thoughts." Actual elementary school dialogue, and it pervades through the entire game's writing too, drenched in incredibly cringy anime tropes.
It really feels like the devs wrote themselves into a corner here. They wanted to tell their own story with Athena and Blackquill, but they wanted to bring Phoenix back too. So they had to bring Trucy back. Which meant they also had to bring Apollo back. Oh, and why not give Pearl and Edgeworth a couple seconds of screentime too? Since Athena and Blackquill's story resolved at the end of this game, there is literally no way any of these characters can grow. Dual Destinies toppled the reputation of Ace Attorney in one fell swoop.
Please, by all means, explain to me why having a villain with no name, no face, no backstory, and no clear motivations somehow isn't enough to instantly classify this game as garbage.
- The Phantom, Turnabout for Tomorrow
Dual Destinies is poorly written and creatively bankrupt. I'm honestly impressed by how the game simultaneously derailed the existing continuity and character arcs established in previous games, while also delivering a half baked and childish new storyline that leaves the series nowhere to go in the future.
The “dark age of the law” was a comically awful overarching theme and having villains like Aristotle Means, a guy who genuinely believes lawyers are supposed to lie and forge evidence, is proof of how allergic the writers are from creating actual interesting or thought provoking character drama and moral arguments.
Do we not see the hypocrisy of this story when Phoenix Wright himself used underhanded means (forging evidence, rigging a jury) to justify the end goal of beating Kristoph Gavin and absolving himself in AA4? Like we literally had an interesting “does the end justify the means” moral argument set up for us in the previous game and we throw it all away for this 4Kids ass good vs evil plot line that is resolved by exposing a nameless, faceless villain whose goals were never explained?
Speaking of, the actions of the "phantom" in Dual Destinies was motivated by his desire to cover up his previous crimes from 7 years prior. You might be asking, "what motivated him to commit the crimes of 7 years ago, like disrupting the first rocket launch?" Too bad! There's no explanation! But don't worry, catching him ended the dark age of the law anyways!
There are so many “gags” that just fall back on moments from past games like Trucy only showing up with the panties, turning Apollo’s “I’m fine” into an actual character trait (wtf bro😭), and Phoenix being regressed to a compulsive bluffer. Apollo as a whole is literally a completely different character who shares none of the same motivations and thoughts he did in the previous game. You know how he was consistently at odds with the way Phoenix carried himself and raised Trucy? And how he trusts his clients less? Now, Apollo sees him as a mentor and gets complimented on how similar he is to him. Phoenix also has no reason to exist in this game, he appears to be way less capable, completely undoing the ultimatum he dealt with at the end of Bridge to the Turnabout.
Athena and Blackquill's story is by far the most competent part of this game but it still feels underwhelming given the shared screentime with the other protags, filler cases, and terrible phantom story. Why couldn’t we have had a story about the immorality of Blackquill’s death penalty?
Like the gags, the music is super derivative of past games. So many tracks are uninspired remixes (or straight up ports like guilty love?) although there were a few original bangers like the cross examination themes.
The DLC was mid filler. The fact that they decided to make DLC filler cases at all, in what's supposed to be a narrative-driven mystery series, should tell you how depraved this game truly is.
The mood matrix doubles down on the childish dialogue with conversations like "My sources are telling me you were thinking happy thoughts when you should be thinking sad thoughts." Actual elementary school dialogue, and it pervades through the entire game's writing too, drenched in incredibly cringy anime tropes.
It really feels like the devs wrote themselves into a corner here. They wanted to tell their own story with Athena and Blackquill, but they wanted to bring Phoenix back too. So they had to bring Trucy back. Which meant they also had to bring Apollo back. Oh, and why not give Pearl and Edgeworth a couple seconds of screentime too? Since Athena and Blackquill's story resolved at the end of this game, there is literally no way any of these characters can grow. Dual Destinies toppled the reputation of Ace Attorney in one fell swoop.
Please, by all means, explain to me why having a villain with no name, no face, no backstory, and no clear motivations somehow isn't enough to instantly classify this game as garbage.
I'm so happy for all of the inflation lovers, I bet you all loved exploring Jeffrey Epstein's Petal Files! I'm happy for all of the people with elephant fetishes, block fetishes, stretchy fetishes, slime fetishes, worm fetishes, hippo fetishes, and people whole love captain chode!
Anyways this game was a lot of fun but it really felt like they were just throwing shit at the wall most of the time and seeing what stuck. Some wonder effects were great but were never expanded upon, some were repeated when they had no reason to be, and there was definitely some inconsistency with the break times (a lot of them were nice but the search parties were terrible).
The camera in the local co-op could really sabotage you sometimes, but I loved the implementation of the online mode.
But most importantly, I feel sorry for Toadette because she was clearly a development afterthought who doesn't appear on the box, has lame color palettes for the powerups, and has bad hidden blocks :( free my girl
Oh and the secrets lowkey sucked. I don't want to go back to playing NSMB but can't a guy get a nice invisible hole in the wall every now and then?
Anyways this game was a lot of fun but it really felt like they were just throwing shit at the wall most of the time and seeing what stuck. Some wonder effects were great but were never expanded upon, some were repeated when they had no reason to be, and there was definitely some inconsistency with the break times (a lot of them were nice but the search parties were terrible).
The camera in the local co-op could really sabotage you sometimes, but I loved the implementation of the online mode.
But most importantly, I feel sorry for Toadette because she was clearly a development afterthought who doesn't appear on the box, has lame color palettes for the powerups, and has bad hidden blocks :( free my girl
Oh and the secrets lowkey sucked. I don't want to go back to playing NSMB but can't a guy get a nice invisible hole in the wall every now and then?
Fun!!!!!! I had a smile the whole time playing this game. Second-best looking Mario game right behind Odyssey. I completed the game 100% in four-player mode with all my roommates. The updated multiplayer mode is done surprisingly well, but it does trivialize the games' difficulty. Disappointed in repeated Wonder effects and lackluster boss battles, but the variety of normal levels makes up for it.
This review contains spoilers
Xenoblade 3's class system was its only saving grace, and it was only just good.
The story is incomprehensible natalist propaganda which has no actual backbone. The xenoblade series has a huge issue with talking big but never taking actual moral positions other than "let's create our own fate" and "bad guys are bad!" Moebius is an awful villain with a terrible amount of contradictions. Literally none of the consuls made any sense except for Shania who actually had some semblance of good writing. Unfortunately, XC3 loves to paste dramatically evil faces on the character models of villains and give them the most horribly written scripts which essentially take away whatever semblance of nuance existed in favor of cartoonishly evil stereotypes. Joran's desire to be Moebius is completely contradictory to his past and his aspirations. Z's "because it amused me" line was an absolute slap in the face to players and erased any hint of good writing the story had. The final dungeon and boss fight took an eternity and I was begging for it to end. The amount of natalism and forced shipping that the game has can seriously be sickening at points.
As an anecdote, 5-ish years ago, I had watched Little Witch Academia on Netflix. I thought it was a really charming and funny anime, and I really liked the animation. Upon completing it, I looked up what other projects Studio Trigger had made and came across an anime called "Darling In The Franxx". I tried it, because the synopsis made it out to be a post-apocalyptic mecha anime, but I was appalled with what I saw. The entire show was about young children in a huge allegory for having sex. The mechs were piloted by the "stamen" and the "pistil," the boys sat in thrones while the girls laid out in front of them, and there were super on-the-nose moments where these kids were so interested in how babies were made. All of the characters were shipped with each other, and it overall made me feel sick to my stomach.
While albeit a little more age-appropriate, Xenoblade 3 reignited the feelings of disgust I harbored. The entire story revolves around combatting a hegemonic cabal of leaders in power who control the status quo: which is war. What's so short-sighted about this, is that Xenoblade's gender politics and treatment of women is just as hegemonic. XC3 isn't the first time the series has devalued the treatment of women to being babymakers and wives, or relied on straight relationships as crutches for bad character writing...everyone who knows anything about the series' history is aware of that. I'll make a short list:
- Sharla's entire character revolves around her role as a wife and maternal figure
- Devs outright said that Melia felt incomplete because she didn't end up with a romantic partner and that's why she was in Future Connected
- Obvious awful objectification in XC2 like Pyra's outfit that doesn't match her character at all, cringe perverted cutscenes, and ogling camera
- A majority of XC2 blades being women and hypersexualized
- Multiple XC2 blades being literal little girls like Electra
- Poppi and her maid outfit, and the fact that the names of her forms in Japanese correspond to middle school, high school, and college
- XC2 female characters who are characterized as "strong" or authoritative given masculine features or being desexualized entirely (and only the masculine characters)
- The fact that robots are gendered at all 🤷
- Forced shipping of every XC3 main character
- "who wants to learn how babies are made?"
- N's incel-y tirade on how he's entitled to M, and Noah's lack of reconciliation with the fact that him and N are the same person (Mio did this just fine though)
Romantic relationships are commonly portrayed as the end goal for pretty much every prominent character in the Xenoblade series, so it's not hard to see why there's a hegemonic status quo revolving gender and family structure. It's so ironic how this game's story has a milquetoast message telling the player to fight the hegemonic status quo of "the endless now" despite upholding a rigorous standard of gender and family itself. And before anyone says it, Juniper's existence is not a proper rebuttal to any of this.
Noah initially appealed to me because he was instantly less annoying than Shulk or Rex. His role as an off-seer made him seem pretty emotionally intelligent, and he never seemed like a happy-go-lucky golden boy who could do no wrong and make bad decisions unlike Shulk and Rex. Unfortunately, I thought his history with Chrys was out of the blue and weak, and I especially hated how he never properly came to terms with N or his past selves. In one of his past selves, he literally abandoned the rest of his friends to be with Mio, and he never truly understood that he and N were the same - that he was just as capable of being evil. It didn't help that N was written to act like a completely different character.
Mio was actually pretty cool. Her status as the oldest party member and concern with running out of time was a good way to bring out depth in her character. I liked how she actually had a mutual understanding with M, and the side story with Miyabi wasn't terrible.
Eunie was probably my favorite of the main 6. Her personal arc being about herself rather than some random hero or dead character made her instantly more likeable, and she had a lot of backbone.
I just did not care for Taion's arc at all. His backstory bored me and his changes in character basically just turned him from being mean into being a little less mean.
As much as they tried to subvert the meathead trope with Lanz, they failed. I do think it certainly didn't help that Joran was already poorly written, so it's not fully his fault that his side arc sucked, I guess.
Sena had potential to be a really cool character due to her proximity to Shania, but they opted to focus instead on tropey personality quirks, like how she...copies Mio or something. It's too bad, because Shania being a girl from the City who supported Moebius due to her grievances with mortal living was the closest thing that this story got to actual nuance in its plot.
Let's talk about gameplay. First of all, traversal in the world SUCKED. Filling in the map was a chore and would have functioned much better on a grid system or something. The world was just way too big without any tools to effectively traverse it. Speed boosts in walking and swimming were seen as small bonuses from affinity, rather than actual exploration scaling mechanics. Xenoblade X was the only game to do this right, as the skells increased the scale of exploration tenfold and let players revisit old areas with a totally new lens. XC3 was cumbersome to walk through and wasted players' time. Sidequests are better than in previous games because Class Points give proper incentive, but they still kinda suck. Especially the "follow the footprints" sidequests and collecting items that you couldn't access the map for. Horrible game design. Hero quests felt like they were diluting the story into one-note characters, but I still liked doing them because I got classes.
Speaking of classes, the battle system was...good. The biggest problem by far was the padding of enemy HP especially in the late game. But the class system was really neat. I especially enjoyed the Zephyr, Signifer, and Martial Artist classes. Overall, Agnus classes felt more fun because you could really get into a rhythm by chaining cancels. Soulhacker was a super neat idea but the game basically said "fuck you" to players by making them re-fight unique monsters they already beat if they didn't equip the soul hack skill or have the class. Finding out what unique monsters you needed to fight was also way too difficult. Gem crafting was...less bad than in XC1, I guess. Mixing and matching classes and arts was very fun, but I thought it was annoying that the game incentivized you to switch classes around but also make sure others can learn it by having it equipped in the party.
Despite its marginal improvements in the gameplay department, I still think the Xenoblade series kinda sucks as a whole. 3's story was in some ways incomprehensible, in other ways reprehensible. The game has a hegemonic portrayal of gender and family, and its villains are cartoonishly evil with next to no depth. The series prefers to pander to cliches and platitudes regarding fate and the future rather than making any actual societal commentary or critique (as opposed to something like Final Fantasy X or even Danganronpa V3), and uses dumb literary tropes such as false gods and multiverse theory in order to make the most uncontroversial yet confusing JRPG ending possible. Soundtrack was good.
Oh, and it still looks like shit in handheld mode. Crazy that after 5 years Monolith still don't know how to make their games presentable.
TLDR; it's not "kino," you're just a depraved straight 13-year-old boy who licks Nintendo's boots and fetishizes and objectifies women as a result of the fucked up media you consume.
The story is incomprehensible natalist propaganda which has no actual backbone. The xenoblade series has a huge issue with talking big but never taking actual moral positions other than "let's create our own fate" and "bad guys are bad!" Moebius is an awful villain with a terrible amount of contradictions. Literally none of the consuls made any sense except for Shania who actually had some semblance of good writing. Unfortunately, XC3 loves to paste dramatically evil faces on the character models of villains and give them the most horribly written scripts which essentially take away whatever semblance of nuance existed in favor of cartoonishly evil stereotypes. Joran's desire to be Moebius is completely contradictory to his past and his aspirations. Z's "because it amused me" line was an absolute slap in the face to players and erased any hint of good writing the story had. The final dungeon and boss fight took an eternity and I was begging for it to end. The amount of natalism and forced shipping that the game has can seriously be sickening at points.
As an anecdote, 5-ish years ago, I had watched Little Witch Academia on Netflix. I thought it was a really charming and funny anime, and I really liked the animation. Upon completing it, I looked up what other projects Studio Trigger had made and came across an anime called "Darling In The Franxx". I tried it, because the synopsis made it out to be a post-apocalyptic mecha anime, but I was appalled with what I saw. The entire show was about young children in a huge allegory for having sex. The mechs were piloted by the "stamen" and the "pistil," the boys sat in thrones while the girls laid out in front of them, and there were super on-the-nose moments where these kids were so interested in how babies were made. All of the characters were shipped with each other, and it overall made me feel sick to my stomach.
While albeit a little more age-appropriate, Xenoblade 3 reignited the feelings of disgust I harbored. The entire story revolves around combatting a hegemonic cabal of leaders in power who control the status quo: which is war. What's so short-sighted about this, is that Xenoblade's gender politics and treatment of women is just as hegemonic. XC3 isn't the first time the series has devalued the treatment of women to being babymakers and wives, or relied on straight relationships as crutches for bad character writing...everyone who knows anything about the series' history is aware of that. I'll make a short list:
- Sharla's entire character revolves around her role as a wife and maternal figure
- Devs outright said that Melia felt incomplete because she didn't end up with a romantic partner and that's why she was in Future Connected
- Obvious awful objectification in XC2 like Pyra's outfit that doesn't match her character at all, cringe perverted cutscenes, and ogling camera
- A majority of XC2 blades being women and hypersexualized
- Multiple XC2 blades being literal little girls like Electra
- Poppi and her maid outfit, and the fact that the names of her forms in Japanese correspond to middle school, high school, and college
- XC2 female characters who are characterized as "strong" or authoritative given masculine features or being desexualized entirely (and only the masculine characters)
- The fact that robots are gendered at all 🤷
- Forced shipping of every XC3 main character
- "who wants to learn how babies are made?"
- N's incel-y tirade on how he's entitled to M, and Noah's lack of reconciliation with the fact that him and N are the same person (Mio did this just fine though)
Romantic relationships are commonly portrayed as the end goal for pretty much every prominent character in the Xenoblade series, so it's not hard to see why there's a hegemonic status quo revolving gender and family structure. It's so ironic how this game's story has a milquetoast message telling the player to fight the hegemonic status quo of "the endless now" despite upholding a rigorous standard of gender and family itself. And before anyone says it, Juniper's existence is not a proper rebuttal to any of this.
Noah initially appealed to me because he was instantly less annoying than Shulk or Rex. His role as an off-seer made him seem pretty emotionally intelligent, and he never seemed like a happy-go-lucky golden boy who could do no wrong and make bad decisions unlike Shulk and Rex. Unfortunately, I thought his history with Chrys was out of the blue and weak, and I especially hated how he never properly came to terms with N or his past selves. In one of his past selves, he literally abandoned the rest of his friends to be with Mio, and he never truly understood that he and N were the same - that he was just as capable of being evil. It didn't help that N was written to act like a completely different character.
Mio was actually pretty cool. Her status as the oldest party member and concern with running out of time was a good way to bring out depth in her character. I liked how she actually had a mutual understanding with M, and the side story with Miyabi wasn't terrible.
Eunie was probably my favorite of the main 6. Her personal arc being about herself rather than some random hero or dead character made her instantly more likeable, and she had a lot of backbone.
I just did not care for Taion's arc at all. His backstory bored me and his changes in character basically just turned him from being mean into being a little less mean.
As much as they tried to subvert the meathead trope with Lanz, they failed. I do think it certainly didn't help that Joran was already poorly written, so it's not fully his fault that his side arc sucked, I guess.
Sena had potential to be a really cool character due to her proximity to Shania, but they opted to focus instead on tropey personality quirks, like how she...copies Mio or something. It's too bad, because Shania being a girl from the City who supported Moebius due to her grievances with mortal living was the closest thing that this story got to actual nuance in its plot.
Let's talk about gameplay. First of all, traversal in the world SUCKED. Filling in the map was a chore and would have functioned much better on a grid system or something. The world was just way too big without any tools to effectively traverse it. Speed boosts in walking and swimming were seen as small bonuses from affinity, rather than actual exploration scaling mechanics. Xenoblade X was the only game to do this right, as the skells increased the scale of exploration tenfold and let players revisit old areas with a totally new lens. XC3 was cumbersome to walk through and wasted players' time. Sidequests are better than in previous games because Class Points give proper incentive, but they still kinda suck. Especially the "follow the footprints" sidequests and collecting items that you couldn't access the map for. Horrible game design. Hero quests felt like they were diluting the story into one-note characters, but I still liked doing them because I got classes.
Speaking of classes, the battle system was...good. The biggest problem by far was the padding of enemy HP especially in the late game. But the class system was really neat. I especially enjoyed the Zephyr, Signifer, and Martial Artist classes. Overall, Agnus classes felt more fun because you could really get into a rhythm by chaining cancels. Soulhacker was a super neat idea but the game basically said "fuck you" to players by making them re-fight unique monsters they already beat if they didn't equip the soul hack skill or have the class. Finding out what unique monsters you needed to fight was also way too difficult. Gem crafting was...less bad than in XC1, I guess. Mixing and matching classes and arts was very fun, but I thought it was annoying that the game incentivized you to switch classes around but also make sure others can learn it by having it equipped in the party.
Despite its marginal improvements in the gameplay department, I still think the Xenoblade series kinda sucks as a whole. 3's story was in some ways incomprehensible, in other ways reprehensible. The game has a hegemonic portrayal of gender and family, and its villains are cartoonishly evil with next to no depth. The series prefers to pander to cliches and platitudes regarding fate and the future rather than making any actual societal commentary or critique (as opposed to something like Final Fantasy X or even Danganronpa V3), and uses dumb literary tropes such as false gods and multiverse theory in order to make the most uncontroversial yet confusing JRPG ending possible. Soundtrack was good.
Oh, and it still looks like shit in handheld mode. Crazy that after 5 years Monolith still don't know how to make their games presentable.
TLDR; it's not "kino," you're just a depraved straight 13-year-old boy who licks Nintendo's boots and fetishizes and objectifies women as a result of the fucked up media you consume.