Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is surprisingly good and has a fairly engaging scenario and initial party setup. More scifi a premise than any Xenoblade really (yes I include X in this – launching ‘L.A.’ onto an alien planet was played in such a dull way).
Liking the military dystopia in this style and it gives me anEnder’s Game vibe even though it’s nothing like that. The idea is you have two ‘nations’, although they’re more like superorganisms, fighting each other in an endless zero-sum game. Humanoid ants and termites endlessly siphoning life force off of the others’ dead. Everyone lives for ten years and is hyper-grown from foetus to full adult like the weird cultureless insects they get trained to be.
I think the difference between this and 2 (and even 1 and X) is the tone is generally much more focused and fits the premise well. It’s morbid and bittersweet without descending into edginess. Meanwhile 2 was far more wacky crazy harem comedy half the time and I wanted to leave every time someone comments on how warm or heavy someone’s body was. There’s a scene early on in 3 where the characters have a mixed bath and they don’t even wink at a pervy joke, the bath is them cleaning the blood and dirt off their soldier ant bodies.
The game is also saved by strong cutscene direction which keeps things feeling structured and interesting in a way that 2 and X never really managed. The cutscenes are long but fuck it, this is a big JRPG, let the cinematics roll, my hands can take the break and generally what I’m shown at least has good music underscoring action and dialogue.
It’s also just refreshing to play a game with British dialects again. It’s a funny feeling when the American accent stands out as unusual.
Set up of the party is good. There’s a junk party member early on who’s given just the right amount of characterisation to make you kinda pretend he isn’t just gonna be killed 3 hours in – but you know he will be. The real strength here is setting up a party of 3 with a proper backstory in their YA novel military academy complete with Ender’s Game rituals and jargon. When we meet the other three party members (that we know exist because of the boxart), we’re primed to imagine what they’ve also been through to get to this point but that they’re also clearly different people. A nice one-two character development which sets up the first and second party as meaningfully similar and distinct at the same time.
The music hits just right to sell certain parts of the plot so far and it squeezes a lot out of the flute as a central motif. Even to the point of the initial alliance being spurred along by FLUTE KNOWLEDGE. The MC of the first party and the MC of the second party initially fight and our first MC realises how to dodge the second MC’s dancing fighting style based on the rhythm of the opposing force’s flute music. It’s goofy but it works to link the theme to the plot development in a way that means the action can also carry meaning without just being endless pointless fight scenes.
A Lord Zedd-looking mech shows up and starts muay thai-ing the party. Some older guy with an Australian accent activates the twin-henshin engine and our two parties that hate each other are stuck; soul-bonded together. And then the giant heaven smile man shows up and shines his infinity vision into the sky so everyone in the world magically hates us (literally convinced to kill us on sight).
This is my favourite conceit for a JRPG party since Yakuza 7 since the team have a natural rift and are put in a difficult situation you can easily root for now they’re outlaws. It’s frequently implied that they likely killed each other’s friends at one point or another.
There’s an odd visual glitch where the terrain occasionally baffles the camera and I’m not sure if it’s the game or my setup. The camera doesn’t always appear to be colliding with the ground, but it isn’t too frequent that it ruins things.
