Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a step up even from past series highs
Shortly after the prologue’s opening war scene, a significant incident forces a squad of Kevesi soldiers and an Agnian special ops team to cooperate, after their respective nations brand them as traitors. Having your former friends want to kill you is bad, but on the bright side, the party gains the ability to fuse into mecha-monsters, which has an unexpected side effect.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 aimed to be much more than its predecessors. It’s thematically ambitious in a way the first two games, and most other RPGs, aren’t – and manages to fulfill and even surpass those ambitions. In the best case, Xenoblade’s soldiers only live for a decade - called a ‘term’. And so survivors struggle to make sense of their loss both in the wars, and once their friends’ allotted 10 years of life are up. They grapple with guilt, and the responsibility of ensuring they create a lasting legacy for those who came before, all while realizing that they may never fulfill even their own most basic dreams. There just isn’t enough time – and then they die.
It’s a rare thing to find such a boldly ambiguous central theme in media. It’s even less common in video games, which are so often built to let players feel good through resolving problems.Xenoblade 3 rises above its predecessors in combat as well. MMO-style fighting was already one of the series’ distinguishing features, with its skill cooldowns and ability hotbar, but Xenoblade 3 really makes something of that characteristic.
The major draw for me, though, is how flexible this system makes character customization. If you want to stack your defender with evasion and high-aggro skills, that’s completely viable. Thanks to equippable, stat-boosting gems and accessories, you can also give them healing skills to pop off in a pinch, or debuffs to make the fight go faster. There’s just so much to experiment with.
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