36 reviews liked by strenkth


Was going to ding a star for superfluous stealth sections, but the final stretch made it all come together so well, I'm genuinely left in awe here. Going to tell my kids this was duolingo.

I’ve played Jet Set Radio. I have NOT played Jet Set Radio Future (YET). Just so you have an idea of where I’m coming from.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a mic drop / slam dunk / Cat 7 earthquake of a game. A spiritual successor in every sense of the word.

Where Jet Set Radio was floaty and imprecise, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is ultra-responsive, snappy, and butter smooth; THIS is what I dreamed of Jet Set Radio controlling like before I’d played it.

Air control is greatly improved with a “boost,” allowing players to alter their trajectory midair; half-pipes now launch you into the stratosphere; you can put away your skates and WALK.

They’re small, but all these QoL features really add up. It’s too easy to fall into a trancelike groove. The immaculate flow of BRC is mesmerizing, weaving together neo-megalopolitan favelas, monolithic hypermalls, dizzyingly tall skyscraper jungles, intersecting in a Mirror’s Edge / Sonic Adventure 2 playground; an urban obstacle course that’s as much fun to learn as it is to master.

This is the game Arcane Kids WANTED to make. In another universe, Perfect Stride would’ve been another generation’s Skate 3. Good grief, and alas.

More than nostalgia, however, I believe your enjoyment of this game hinges entirely on if you’re feeling the vibes or not. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk isn't that long (probably less than 10 hours) but if you’re in that groove – racking up combos, scouring each and every alleyway for hidden goodies, or just exploring at your own pace – chances are, you might be spending a lot more time chilling with your buds before you go All City.

I loved finishing the story mode and being able to really soak in the world and atmosphere afterwards. Your final objective: hang out. Being able to really appreciate the smaller details in the environments was a treat. Have you ever watched your crewmates after you switch characters at a Cypher? They’ll take turns dancing! Lovely Dreamcast-era janky mocap dances are the feather in this game’s proverbial cap… well, that and the low-poly cel-shaded character models. Each character design is fantastic, although that goes without saying. My favorites were Bel and Shine, although Red would be a shoo-in, too. EEASSSYYY!!!

I’ve seen many people call the story forgettable and bad, and I’m here to tell you those people are wrong – objectively. Not that Jet Set Radio’s story needs to be one-upped anyways, but the way some people talk about this game left me wondering if players were expecting Jet Set Radio or, uh… some mutant amalgamation of sixth generation action-platforming games. If you’re playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and expect a narrative as refined and tight as its traversal, you’ll be sorely disappointed. It’s still a complex, character-driven story; an important foil to the flat, nominal designs of JSR. BRC is more Ghost in the Shell, in contrast to Jet Set Radio’s FLCL-brand comic book mischief and mayhem.

One reviewer went so far as to say that BRC doesn’t add anything new to “the conversation”. Like HUH? What conversation? Does every game need to be a conversation nowadays? Not every game needs to be some intertextual response to another or needs to “push the medium forward” to be good. Games don’t need to be original or even improve upon existing iterations of a thing to be good. Everyone is allowed to criticize the game but I feel like people’s criticisms should probably also be scrutinized, because calling a game like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk bad for being derivative (or a “copycat,”) is not the revelation you’re hoping it is. Who do they think this game is for anyways?

Even so, there are some misfires that inhibit the experience overall. The combat seems like a universal complaint. Normally, I wouldn’t care too much about this, but I do feel that combat is the one lackluster component that – were it done right – would’ve bumped this game up to a perfect score. It’s disappointing because the turrets, helicopters, and [spoiler alert] METAL GEAR REX aren’t bad enemies at all! They make use of the game's core mechanics (namely, graffiti, and rail-grinding in Metal Gear Rex’s case) and can actually be a fun challenge when attempting to keep up a combo. Fighting human enemies is when it falls apart. There’s no easy way to deal with these guys besides avoiding them, which I suppose is the point. They’re supposed to be obstacles more than enemies… except for when the game forces you into unavoidable combat encounters during story events. Bogus.

Could be improved in a few ways: 1) Just weighter impact SFX. Seriously. I think a lot of it boils down to how unsatisfying it feels to hit enemies. Hitting turrets and helicopters and bouncing off ‘em like a pinball is great as is. 2) Human enemies maybe need to be weaker? They feel way too spongy. There’s no actual combat ”combos” you can pull off when fighting so it’s all button mashing anyways. It shouldn’t take ten hits to defeat one! At least give them a health bar. 3) I know it’s already piss easy to keep a combo going, but maybe the game should keep your combo going while you’ve got heat on you, even if you’re not doing a manual… actually, I don’t know. Maybe that would make it TOO easy. There’s gotta be a better way to marry the immaculate flow of combos and the heat system. I don't really know about this one.

Smaller gripes / suggestions:

1. The phone camera is hilarious and fun, but I would still love a traditional photo mode!
2. It would be nice if you could zoom out when looking at the map.
3. Markers for collectibles post-story would be greatly appreciated!
4. You should be able to turn off the cutscenes for when your heat level goes up.
5. You should also be able to change skates/skateboards/bikes at Cypher squares.
6. I’d like a button to fast-forward or replay songs without navigating to the phone first.
7. An option to make your own in-game playlist would be appreciated.
8. More of a wish than a suggestion, but people are already making a mod that allows cooperative online play, and I think it would be super dope if that was officially supported and implemented by the devs.

I’ve had the soundtrack on repeat for days. I like the song that goes ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS.

I bestow Bomb Rush Cyberfunk with the highest of accolades: a game I keep installed on my PC and play every now and again because I like how the movement feels.

I consider Breath of the Wild to be one of my favorite games of all time, which is a rotating 3-5 game list. The experience I had playing through that game in 2017 was like almost nothing I had had in media up to that point. That feeling is something I can and will always look back fondly on. Even if I recognized some of Breath of the Wild's shortcomings, it still is one of the easiest '10s' I've ever given anything.

Tears of the Kingdom had the behemoth task of following up a game that many consider to be one of the greatest of all time, one that is a landmark in gaming history and left many lasting effects on the industry as a whole. While I'm not entirely surprised by the outcome, it still is impressive that it managed to do this successfully, albeit with some certainly noticeable missteps.

I looked at Tears through a much more critical lens throughout my playthrough than I did with Breath of the Wild six years ago, for the simple reason that I somewhat knew what to expect with the game, and since a lot of the foundation is the same, I was going to need quite a bit to blow me away in the same way Breath of the Wild did. I do think that Tears is absolutely a better game than its predecessor. The vast majority of the complaints from the first game—such as enemy variety, rewards for exploring, weapon durability, and dungeon design—were addressed, and the new mechanics blow many of the older ones out of the water. There are however, enough underlying issues that make this game very difficult to wholly evaluate for me.

On one hand, the vast majority of Tears is truly phenomenal. The weapon fuse mechanic is nearly perfect, adding a significant incentive to exploration and combat that makes the weapon durability system work as best as I think it could. You no longer have to hoard high power weapons, instead you can gather as many strong monster materials as possible and bring out the weapons' power, using them as desired. This mechanic might be my favorite overall addition to the game as compared to Breath of the Wild, and is a genius way to 'solve' the weapon durability 'problem' (I didn't really mind it in BotW but that's besides the point). The Depths are another excellent new part of the game, an entire parallel world to the above ground Hyrule we are familiar with that brings an extremely addicting gameplay loop that you can easily lose yourself in for hours upon hours at a time, something that happened to me in multiple play sessions. The Depths, in contrary to what we were expecting with the Sky Islands, are the best part of the game's exploration, as they are both extremely rewarding and full of surprises.

Each of the game's abilities are significantly more interesting than the runes of BotW, and open up the gameplay more than I think I have seen in any game—sandbox or not—before. Between Recall, Ascend, and of course the almighty, perplexingly impressive, all-encompassing abilities of Ultrahand, I've never felt so free to both solve puzzles however I like, but also traverse and explore the entirety of the game with so few limits. I highly doubt we'll see a game of this size with this much freedom for a long time again, and it is truly a spectacular feat what the Zelda team developers managed to pull off. It shows the potential of what a game can be that is built on top of an already existing one, to the fullest extent.

Despite the immaculate peaks of Tears, there were a number of shortcomings and question marks that bothered me to enough to question if I could really consider this game a 'masterpiece', a powerful word that gets thrown around a bit too much. Perhaps the most frustrating issue is the presentation of the game's story. The scattered memories structure of BotW is one of the few universal complaints that did not really see any changes in Tears. It is considerably more frustrating in this game due to the fact that, without spoiling anything, the big major plot twist can and will be revealed to people at completely different times, in random orders, completely changing the experience of the story from one person to the next. The game kind of expects you to do everything in a certain order that is only really clear near the end of the game, and it is an order that does not really make much sense if you just play the game by exploring in a normal manner. The story told through the memories is also much more important to understand in a linear sense, and so it is terribly frustrating that it is impossible to do just that. I enjoyed the concept for the story even if a lot of the writing and voice acting was not great (I particularly am not a fan of Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf at all), but they really shot themselves in the foot presenting it in the way they did.

I'm also not a big fan of most of the game's dungeons or bosses unfortunately. While the aesthetic differences are nice, I ultimately do still miss the more concentrated, linear format of older Zelda dungeons, and I can't really say that puzzle-wise the dungeons were all that much better than the Divine Beasts. I did enjoy the Thunder Temple in particular, as that felt the most like a more 'traditional' Zelda dungeon, but the rest were kind of whatever, and every one was the exact same format of 'do 4 or 5 things and fight boss' which was disappointing, especially when you are given the exact same cutscene and explanation after every single one of them. In general the dungeons felt like a bit of an afterthought that were thrown into the game because people wanted them. The parts leading up to the dungeons were often better than the dungeons themselves. Most of the boss fights were kind of lame or annoying, a couple of them I did like such as the Wind Temple boss, but many were forgettable. The soundtrack for the game overall, while not bad, was not much of an improvement from Breath of the Wild, and I feel both games in the series have the least memorable OSTs of any games in the series.

I find it very difficult to score this game, as I do think it is a better game than Breath of the Wild, yet it feels unfair even to compare them, as Breath of the Wild was built from scratch, while this was built on top of that, which has a different set of expectations attached to it. It's far from a perfect game, but there is so much that is genuinely so impressive, that I feel like it is unfair to expect everything to reach that level of quality in a game that is so massive. I'm not sure what is next for the Zelda franchise, and while it seems they will not be going back to the linear style of the older games, I think after Tears I would prefer a bit of a change of pace, perhaps an open game that is smaller and more concentrated, focusing on quality over quantity. Ultimately, I was not blown away by Tears in the same way I was when I played Breath of the Wild at launch back in March 2017, and I don't know if the game really could have done much to have changed that really. As much as the new additions to the game are genuinely phenomenal, I still somewhat knew what to expect going into the game, particularly going through the mainland of Hyrule for the second time, hearing much of the same music in the same areas and getting most of the same gear, and some of the new things I was really hoping to be blown away by such as the story and Sky Islands even were lackluster.

Regardless, both BotW and Tears will be, deservedly, looked upon as landmarks of the open-world genre that have brought about a number of memorable and spectacularly implemented mechanics that many developers would only dream of.

This is a great recommendation for everyone who always wanted to try a city building strategy game, but was too deterred by their complexity or did not want to spend so much time getting behind the mechanics. It takes virtually no time to understand Terra Nil and how to get around. Usual playtime will be 5-8 hours and it is very much worth it for everyone who looks to get into a cozy game that has a low difficulty scale.
I enjoyed my time very much so far and got to 100% quickly. Even compared to other strategy games, there is nothing like it and I look forward to any updates in the future.

A game seemingly misremembered by many, moments such as Storming Athens, Slaying the Hydra and journeying through the Desert come up often in discussion but in truth make up little of the game's actual run time.

Once the game reaches Pandora's temple all sense of pacing collapses to never return leaving only a bloated boring parody of its opening hours in its wake.

this like if a fidget spinner had an upgrade system

Like a Dante or a Sonic, Bayonetta exemplifies the hallmarks from which all the greatest videogame characters are built from, with a characterization and raison d'etre easily expressed and inferred from the moment you pick up the controller. Bayonetta is a constant controllable blitz of unwavering and cathartic violence presented with all the female bravado and sexuality that the character is able to exude, which made Bayonetta 3's relentless propensity to rob the world of what defines the character so disappointing.

While I understand the divide it created within the fanbase, Bayo 2 was never the sore spot to me as it is with some. The indulgence in game breaking overpowered moves and gimmicky boss battle setpieces diminished much of the combat complexity expected of the series, but it was still an engaging exploration of action that still pertained to the pillars that defined the first game and the bombastic and boastful personality of its heroine. Bayo 3 taking 2's route would have been an acceptable compromise in my book, had its central shitck of devil summons not been so half-baked into it.

Bayo 3 fills most of the experience and screen with sluggish summons that disarm the player of their surroundings and control, rewarding button mashing that feels disconnected and completely at odds with the core fast paced Bayonetta gameplay, and while providing some of the most memorable and exhilirating moments of the series, be it riding demon artillery trains, fighting giant kaijus Godzilla style or witnessing the Baal Zebul recital, the inconsistent game language these setpieces demand never fail to feel like the game is being put on hold while the critters have their fun and Bayoneta stands in a corner.

Expecting Bayo 3's story to compensate this shift in protagonism spotlight, it was disheartening to follow along a nonsensical plot devoid of much of the over the top personality and cheeky endeavours Bayonetta had accustomed us to. I'm not gonna pretend that the previous two Bayonettas were bold masterpieces of storytelling, but they managed to cohesively escalate the stakes with the right dosage of stylized larger than life action and portentious melodrama, permeated by a thematically and aesthetically rich set of enemy encounters and environments that would build into a crescendo of satisfying wickedness.

Meanwhile, Bayo 3's underutilized metaverse motif has you world travelling to bland, visually disconnected civilizations meeting alternate versions of Bayonetta that absolutely fail to build any kind of fun, riveting and exciting chemistry with our protagonist, all leading up to a deflating and awkward finale that misses the mark so hard, you have to wonder how it has the Platinum name attached to it. Bayonetta is so absent from the narrative, not even the new fun hairstyle prevents her from being as boring as she was in the previous game (eat it, Bayo 2 hair nerds).

This is the part where we talk about Viola. It doesn't take long before you start to draw parallels between Viola and Nero from DMC, but while that character benefited from being the emotional core that ended up tying the whole series together through the course of 2 full games, Viola is an uncharismatic, tonally deaf, and forced protagonist that Bayo 3 expects us to receive with open arms and without earning her place, and I take personal offense that Platinum would entertain the idea that a character so irrelevant to the narrative of the series would be the one carrying the torch, and not just let it be another weapon in Bayonetta's arsenal.

My bitterness towards Bayonetta 3 stems not from thinking it's a bad game, which I don't. At its lowest, Bayonetta still represents some of the most engaging action you will ever experience, and in the few glimpses the game allows us, the umbra witch shines all the spotlights on her. It's just a shame that what should have been a celebration of one of videogame's greatest instead feel like nails in the coffin of the character and the series. And if you want a clearer indication that the people behind this project didn't understand Bayonetta at all, consider that the traditional credits verses happens during the classy old tune pole dancing and not during the "Let's Dance Boys!" musical act. That's one massive L.

Minor spoilers ahead.

The combat is excellent as always! But that does come with some caveats this time around, which is unfortunate. Thankfully though, most of the game is still the fantastic Bayonetta combat, which is largely the same from Bayonetta 2, but with a few more changes. The Umbran Climax has been removed, in favor of being able to directly summon demons and control them remotely. I found this change to be very fun! As a lifelong Kaiju fan, being able to summon a giant demon to fight mosnters at any time was a treat. The combat is a bit sluggish in comparison to the core combat, which I can definitely see as a problem for people, but I can't say it bothered me. I will stress however, that I didn't use it all that much, only bringing it out if I was in a pinch. I get the impression that if I wanted to get all Platinum ranks, I would need to use it more often, and I can see that definitely being a problem. Many of the chapters also end in massive kaiju battles, which were some of my favorite parts of the whole game. The dev team clearly loves kaiju movies, Sin Gomorrah especially is a walking tribute to both Gamera and Godzilla. You love to see it.
There are also a few chapters where you play as a brand new character, Viola. Viola is kind of rough ti get used to, especially if you're used to the dodge-heavy Bayonetta combat. Viola can still dodge, but she does not receive Witch Time from it like Bayonetta does, instead she has a new mechanic- a parry. The parry kinda sucks, to be honest. The idea is to time a parry right as the enemy attacks to activate witch time. But for some reason, the timing is completely different from Bayonetta's dodge, and is on a completely diffetent button, and I think you have to hold the button down for a little bit to get it to actually activate? I never truly got the hang of it, even after the grueling Witch Time Damage Only challenge she has in Chapter 10. I had to rewire my brain switching back to her after playing Bayonetta and vice versa. I did eventually get a bit better at it because of that terrible challenge, but I never mastered it. On the plus side, I really enjoy her use of Chesire, he gives off big Totoro energy and I am here for it. I also found her moveset to be otherwise really fun to combo with, my only gripe really is that awkward parry.
Jeanne also has occasional short side-scrolling stealth segments, which are inoffensive. They're over pretty quick, and I enjoyed them enough. I feel like my love of Jeanne kind of boosts my opinion of these stages a bit though, so your mileage may vary.

The level design continues the trend started with Bayonetta 2, being even more open and exploration-based than the previous entry. I found this delightful, exploring the environments in the new demon forms was pretty fun, and the optional challenges were (mostly) entertaining. I was compelled enough to do every challenge and find every chest, though I didn't get every Umbran Tear of Blood. Those frogs are easy to miss.
If I were just rating this based on the gameplay, i'd call it Game of the year. But sadly, this game's story really dragged things down.

Bayonetta's stories haven't been all that great to begin with, frankly. Bayo 1's story is nigh-incomprehensible, but had enough fun set pieces and likeable characters to distract from that. Bayo 2's story is half-great, the personal story of Bayonetta rescuing her closest "friend" from the pits of hell and bonding with the father she never knew were genuinely interesting, but the rest of the story fell flat. Bayo 3 goes for a different approach, by barely having a story at all while simultaneously trying to be some epic and grand conclusion to the whole saga. It's structured in an incredibly repetetive way: Bayonetta enters an alternate universe, finds an alternate version of herself, that version dies, Bayonetta has a fun kaiju battle (or rhythm game, which was awesome for the record), then that world collapses. Do that five times, spliced with occasional missions as Viola and side-scrolling spy missions as Jeanne. But during all of that, the characters get little to no development, and we seriously are never told why the hell the main villain wants to combine all universes. To make things worse, we never truly meet the guy until almost the end of the game, and it's presented as some grand twist that the villain is who he is, but since we know nothing about him whatsoever it means nothing to me. The final fight against him is spectacular though, a definite highlight of the game for sure. It doesn't beat Bayo 1's final fight, but really, what could?

And yes, the ending is really as bad as people say it is. It's not earned in the slightest, and the way it's framed makes it seem like nobody on the dev team really thought people were attached to Bayonetta as a character. It's almost like they wanted it to be like Devil May Cry 4, with a brand new character with a brand new gameplay style gets to carry the torch, but it just falls flat in comparison. Very confusing choice. Should there be a Bayonetta 4, I sincerely hope it's like Devil May Cry 5, and everyone is present once again.

I would still recommend the game overall, the gameplay is just that great, but the story is the worst in a series with already pretty mediocre stories. This is definitely the weakest Bayonetta game, but being a weak Bayonetta game still means it's pretty good.
For me, it's 2>1>3.

Bayonetta and Jeanne should have kissed. Fuck you I will die on this hill, I don't mind Bayo getting with a dude (she's always been Bi), but Luka??? Honey, Jeanne is right there. Come on, those egyptian counterparts were totally hinting at it.

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)

This review contains spoilers

Finally, after all these years, all this waiting...a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4.

Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.

So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.

The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.

This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.

And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.

The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.

I wish the rest of it did.

Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?

The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.

Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?

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