Way back in 2010, I imported a PAL copy of Xenoblade Chronicles because it wasn’t available in North America. When it arrived, I spent an afternoon homebrewing my Wii to remove the region lock and then spent about 20 hours on it before losing interest.
It wasn’t until last year, determined to play the first two Xenoblade Chronicles games before picking up the acclaimed third title, that I gave the series another shot.
I eventually did see Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 all the way through, after a grueling 150 hours combined, before starting up Xenoblade Chronicles 3 at the beginning of 2024. And after 20 hours with it, I just can’t with this series anymore despite how revered it is in the JRPG community.
I want to address what I like about the series first if only to shed a little bit of light on why I stuck with it for so long. The music, in general, is pretty great. “Gaur Plains” is a proper jam, and I’ll play any game Yasunori Mitsuda provides compositions for in an effort to relive the Chrono Trigger experience that defined my taste in games and game music. Even on the original Wii, the environments are gorgeous and fun to run around in, and I enjoy the stories and characters well enough, especially the whole meta-narrative featuring a scientist and an AI destroying the universe and becoming gods in a new one.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has more than a few positives so far, as well. I find the soft-spoken and compassionate Noah the best protagonist, and his companions have some intriguing personal conflicts going on. The overarching narrative of youth from two colonies eternally at war serves as a great setup, and I’m compelled to see how breaking that yoke of violence goes. It is, as expected from Monolith Soft, a gorgeous game that I can’t believe runs on the Nintendo Switch – seriously, Game Freak needs to hire their help for the next Pokemon game.
Yet, that all said, I can no longer stand the active combat that plays a step above an MMO without the high stakes that come from real-world teamwork. It didn’t hold up throughout the entirety of the original Xenoblade Chronicles. In fact, I’d argue that, a third of the way through, it became an absolute bore centered around breaking an enemy in order to knock them down. Sure, there are varying arts, but they had very little kinetic effect: enemies received a little debuff icon, and the damage numbers went up. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 held on a little longer with its odd gacha-like Blades, which I enjoyed rolling for and equipping, but by the admittedly great conclusion (I’m a sucker for any JRPG that takes me into space), I was done with Rex and his harem.
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I don’t even think I’m a third of the way done with Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I’ve rescued Colony 30 and went back to free Colony 9, and I’m about to continue onward to Swordsmarch, yet I dread any further combat. I’ve unlocked a handful of classes from the new job system – which I was initially excited about – but, once again, there’s no kinetic feel to the action-based combat: numbers go up, and icons appear. I even upped the difficulty in order to provide more reason to strategize, yet enemies have instead become massive sponges and turn the game into a damage check. As a result, I have no drive to unlock them and experiment when, very likely, the combat will play out similarly outside of a few boss fights for the next 50 hours, even if more classes to unlock that promise some interesting skill combinations.
When speaking with Liam Nolan – Managing Editor here at The Escapist and a fan of the series – about my gripes, he summed up my thoughts on another aspect of the game I can’t stand better than I could. “I fully admit a massive part of the reason I play it is because it’s real nice to knock out side quests while I listen to podcasts,” Liam began. “I’ve been stalled out on XC3 for, like, 8 months, because I have to move the story forward, and I just Do Not Want To. A big part of that for me is the absolutely endless stream of cutscenes. And as a JRPG fan, I love a cutscene, but XC loves a cutscene followed by walking three feet for another cutscene about, like, how Nopon like food.”
He’s right – there’s so much great in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 buried beneath tedious dialogue and combat (I haven’t even mentioned the unskippable animations during Chain Attacks and the awkward fusions) cobbled together with droll sidequests that require an outside activity to make halfway passable. While Liam finds pleasure in listening to podcasts while doing them, I’m remiss to put effort into a game that can’t hold my attention. In fact, I think I skipped the vast majority of sidequests in the first two titles.
At the moment, I plan to take an extended break and return to Xenoblade Chronicles 3 to give it another honest shot. Maybe I’m simply falling for a sunk-cost fallacy, but I do want to see how Noah’s story concludes, along with the overarching narrative that links the first two titles. Getting there may require me to drop the difficulty down and skip the vast majority of the side content, along with a healthy queue of YouTube videos and podcasts. Regardless, someone at Monolith Soft needs to rein in the frivolous content and overhaul the combat for the next entry.
But who am I kidding? Even if they don’t, I’ll probably give a hypothetical Xenoblade Chronicles 4 on the Switch HD Pro an honest try.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is available on the Nintendo Switch.
