Christi Junior on Nostr: 4/5 With all that said, I do have some serious reservations when it comes to ...
4/5
With all that said, I do have some serious reservations when it comes to Xenoblade 3’s world as a whole. Simply put, despite Aionios being a beautiful world, even stunning in many ways, it simply isn’t as visually or conceptually interesting as either Bionis-Mechonis or Alrest. Its areas, while big, good-looking and well-designed, just never blew me away the way places like Satorl Marsh (night) and the Leftherian Archipelago did.
In fact, looking at the first few Xenoblade 3 chapters, we are limited to valleys, fields, forests, wastelands and deserts – the kind of environments that you could find in any number of other JRPGs and even Western RPGs, albeit about as impressive and well-designed as such areas could possibly be. And while later on there are some increasingly interesting, imaginative locations, they never match the peaks of past games.
Basically, every Xenoblade game until now has had at least one area that’s just so beautiful, unique and creative, such a stunning masterpiece in terms of fantasy game design and world building that it could ONLY be found in a Xenoblade game. Hell, I’d say Xenoblade 1 had at least 3-4 areas like that. Xenoblade 3? Not even one – though there are admittedly a couple of areas that come close, they just always end up missing something crucial.
Part of it is that Xenoblade 3 areas on the whole just feel a lot more Vanilla than the ones in past games. Take the late-game snow area, Captocorn Peak. In isolation, this place is really cool, looks great, is huge, expansive, very well-designed etc. But compare it to 1’s Valak Mountain, with its myriad of crystals that light up the night and its insane ice physics (and accompanying jumps!), or 2’s Tantal, with its multiple levels, stunning vistas, intriguing environmental storytelling and unforgettable surprises (Ether Fog summoning a bunch of giant squid monsters in the high level 80s anyone?), and it suddenly jus looks SO bland and forgettable.
The lack of truly vibrant, inviting colors is another big problem. Xenoblade 3 areas offer plenty of green, yellow and brown, but stronger, bolder colors are rare, generally limited to specific, smaller locations. Given the nature of Aionios, plenty of areas from past games make their return, but all returning areas that used to be really colorful now have a much more limited, boring color palette, seemingly having been largely drained of color and vibrancy. It seems to be a conscious choice by the developers, maybe intended to reflect that status of Aionios as this unhappy, dysfunctional hybrid – but it certainly ends up producing a less visually pleasing world.
Aionios on a conceptual level just can’t match the previous two mainline Xenoblade games either. This fusion of two worlds just isn’t as interesting as either of those worlds originally were on its own, and while you certainly get some impressive landmarks out of it (like the Uraya Mountains being the remains of Uraya’s Titan, or the 10 miles long Mechonis Sword being stuck in the Cadensia Region), it still can’t match the worlds and civilizations that organically sprang up on the bodies of Titans.
Also, and I’m not sure if many people have actually complained about this before, but the weather just fucking SUCKS! Seriously, it rains or is cloudy so often – making a world already lacking in vibrant colors that much more grey and drab – and unlike past games, there’s no easy, convenient way to manually change the weather (Future Redeemed actually DOES let you unlock such a feature, but base Xenoblade 3, nope). The only reliable weather-changing seems to occur after a cutscene – which truly is bizarre creative decision, because having the weather during a cutscene be completely different from what it is when you get back control over your characters is nonsensical and immersion-breaking.
And as if to taunt you, the game does eventually introduce a couple of Nopon characters that can change the weather, for the right price – but they can only make it RAIN…
Something Xenoblade 3 trailers showed off that did delight me was the return of Item Orbs, collectibles you can pick up just while running around the various areas. While present in Xenoblade 1 and X, they were replaced with Collection Spots in Xenoblade 2 – a totally inferior system that brings exploration to a screeching halt, forcing you to stop at various designated collection spots to pick up collectibles, compared to the Item Orbs just naturally rewarding you for basic exploration. Xenoblade 3 bringing back Item Orbs is wonderful, but it somehow still managed to screw up the Collectibles system badly, by forcing you to trade in whole Sets of *different* collectibles in order to get the rewards you want. And this system just creates constant bottlenecks, where you’ll literally be unable to do the trades you want because you have 99 of one collectible, 30 of another, but 0 of the final one. As a completionist who has explored this world extensively, I STILL ended up missing a bunch of collectibles. The game seemingly addresses this issue by having various stores that let you purchase area collectibles at a high price – but somehow, they always seem to just sell you the collectibles that you already have 99 of! The bottleneck problem is NEVER solved – unless Future Redeemed counts, because that DLC campaign couldn’t have handled Collectibles better.
The Collectible shops being so worthless is especially aggravating, since they could have partly addressed another issue with Xenoblade 3, namely money being fucking worthless! Seriously, I struggle to come up with a JRPG where there was a greater mismatch between all the money you get, and how little worthwhile stuff there is to actually spend said money on. This is actually a bigger problem than you’d think, because the game frequently relies on money as a reward for exploring, doing quests etc – and that money is fucking worthless to you! Of course, you also get rewarded with all sorts of items, but many of those are so situational or outright bad that you’ll never use them, and since you have literally have NO need extra cash, you don’t actually have any incentive to sell them, meaning that your (surprisingly basic) item menu can quickly get really clogged up if you’re not sufficiently disciplined.
Eventually, Xenoblade 3 resorts to the laziest possible fix to finally make money matter, namely a late-game Money Dump sidequest (the fact that Zelda: Twilight Princess also had one of those should really tell you something) – and STILL fails to stick the landing, because the money you end up dumping is not even half of your total earnings at that point of the game. Do I even need to mention how Future Redeemed successfully managed to beat Bidenflation and make money actually feel valuable?
And then there’s the bizarrely poorly-thought out handling of various collectibles, namely these mysterious glowing shards that you can find from early on in Chapter 1 at various carefully selected hiding spots. Throughout the game you keep picking up these conspicuous collectibles that are made out to be really important, yet never actually DO anything for you. Wanna know when you finally become able to put them to use? During the FINAL fucking chapter of the game, that’s when – and the reward isn’t even good!!! Meanwhile, collecting Ether to fill up your Ether Cylinders initially seems worthwhile enough, as these actually have several uses from Chapter 2 onwards – until you learn just how badly the supply of Ether outstrips demand. Hoarderblade 3 strikes again.
Worse still is the way the game from Chapter 3 onwards keeps bugging you about picking up Supply Drops that regularly land on various spots of the map, containing all sorts of stuff you already have way too much of if you do a lot of exploring, like I do – I’m serious, I don’t really recall ANY time a Supply Drop actually gave me something I had any real use for. And yet, Xenoblade 3 will aggressively nag you to go and collect any and all Supply Drops, with intrusive, persistent and downright obnoxious visual indicators, as if Supply Drops are super important and valuable. It’s like the game is actively pushing you to become a Hoarder – and I’m talking the truly BAD kind of hoarder here, like the Poop Lady!
Look, I’m well aware of just how negative this section of the writeup has been, so let me clarify something – this is all a result of me directly comparing Xenoblade 3 to some of my favorite games of all times, and some of the absolutely strongest aspects of those games at that. In terms of its world and exploration, Xenoblade 3 still easily blows away 95% of JRPGs (and that’s a conservative estimate), only being beaten out by the previous Xenoblade games. It’s just a shame that this latest entry ended up being a case of two steps forwards, three steps back for the series as a whole, with Future Redeemed representing the real leap forward (pretty much ALL the stuff I just complained about got fixed in FR).
With all that said, I do have some serious reservations when it comes to Xenoblade 3’s world as a whole. Simply put, despite Aionios being a beautiful world, even stunning in many ways, it simply isn’t as visually or conceptually interesting as either Bionis-Mechonis or Alrest. Its areas, while big, good-looking and well-designed, just never blew me away the way places like Satorl Marsh (night) and the Leftherian Archipelago did.
In fact, looking at the first few Xenoblade 3 chapters, we are limited to valleys, fields, forests, wastelands and deserts – the kind of environments that you could find in any number of other JRPGs and even Western RPGs, albeit about as impressive and well-designed as such areas could possibly be. And while later on there are some increasingly interesting, imaginative locations, they never match the peaks of past games.
Basically, every Xenoblade game until now has had at least one area that’s just so beautiful, unique and creative, such a stunning masterpiece in terms of fantasy game design and world building that it could ONLY be found in a Xenoblade game. Hell, I’d say Xenoblade 1 had at least 3-4 areas like that. Xenoblade 3? Not even one – though there are admittedly a couple of areas that come close, they just always end up missing something crucial.
Part of it is that Xenoblade 3 areas on the whole just feel a lot more Vanilla than the ones in past games. Take the late-game snow area, Captocorn Peak. In isolation, this place is really cool, looks great, is huge, expansive, very well-designed etc. But compare it to 1’s Valak Mountain, with its myriad of crystals that light up the night and its insane ice physics (and accompanying jumps!), or 2’s Tantal, with its multiple levels, stunning vistas, intriguing environmental storytelling and unforgettable surprises (Ether Fog summoning a bunch of giant squid monsters in the high level 80s anyone?), and it suddenly jus looks SO bland and forgettable.
The lack of truly vibrant, inviting colors is another big problem. Xenoblade 3 areas offer plenty of green, yellow and brown, but stronger, bolder colors are rare, generally limited to specific, smaller locations. Given the nature of Aionios, plenty of areas from past games make their return, but all returning areas that used to be really colorful now have a much more limited, boring color palette, seemingly having been largely drained of color and vibrancy. It seems to be a conscious choice by the developers, maybe intended to reflect that status of Aionios as this unhappy, dysfunctional hybrid – but it certainly ends up producing a less visually pleasing world.
Aionios on a conceptual level just can’t match the previous two mainline Xenoblade games either. This fusion of two worlds just isn’t as interesting as either of those worlds originally were on its own, and while you certainly get some impressive landmarks out of it (like the Uraya Mountains being the remains of Uraya’s Titan, or the 10 miles long Mechonis Sword being stuck in the Cadensia Region), it still can’t match the worlds and civilizations that organically sprang up on the bodies of Titans.
Also, and I’m not sure if many people have actually complained about this before, but the weather just fucking SUCKS! Seriously, it rains or is cloudy so often – making a world already lacking in vibrant colors that much more grey and drab – and unlike past games, there’s no easy, convenient way to manually change the weather (Future Redeemed actually DOES let you unlock such a feature, but base Xenoblade 3, nope). The only reliable weather-changing seems to occur after a cutscene – which truly is bizarre creative decision, because having the weather during a cutscene be completely different from what it is when you get back control over your characters is nonsensical and immersion-breaking.
And as if to taunt you, the game does eventually introduce a couple of Nopon characters that can change the weather, for the right price – but they can only make it RAIN…
Something Xenoblade 3 trailers showed off that did delight me was the return of Item Orbs, collectibles you can pick up just while running around the various areas. While present in Xenoblade 1 and X, they were replaced with Collection Spots in Xenoblade 2 – a totally inferior system that brings exploration to a screeching halt, forcing you to stop at various designated collection spots to pick up collectibles, compared to the Item Orbs just naturally rewarding you for basic exploration. Xenoblade 3 bringing back Item Orbs is wonderful, but it somehow still managed to screw up the Collectibles system badly, by forcing you to trade in whole Sets of *different* collectibles in order to get the rewards you want. And this system just creates constant bottlenecks, where you’ll literally be unable to do the trades you want because you have 99 of one collectible, 30 of another, but 0 of the final one. As a completionist who has explored this world extensively, I STILL ended up missing a bunch of collectibles. The game seemingly addresses this issue by having various stores that let you purchase area collectibles at a high price – but somehow, they always seem to just sell you the collectibles that you already have 99 of! The bottleneck problem is NEVER solved – unless Future Redeemed counts, because that DLC campaign couldn’t have handled Collectibles better.
The Collectible shops being so worthless is especially aggravating, since they could have partly addressed another issue with Xenoblade 3, namely money being fucking worthless! Seriously, I struggle to come up with a JRPG where there was a greater mismatch between all the money you get, and how little worthwhile stuff there is to actually spend said money on. This is actually a bigger problem than you’d think, because the game frequently relies on money as a reward for exploring, doing quests etc – and that money is fucking worthless to you! Of course, you also get rewarded with all sorts of items, but many of those are so situational or outright bad that you’ll never use them, and since you have literally have NO need extra cash, you don’t actually have any incentive to sell them, meaning that your (surprisingly basic) item menu can quickly get really clogged up if you’re not sufficiently disciplined.
Eventually, Xenoblade 3 resorts to the laziest possible fix to finally make money matter, namely a late-game Money Dump sidequest (the fact that Zelda: Twilight Princess also had one of those should really tell you something) – and STILL fails to stick the landing, because the money you end up dumping is not even half of your total earnings at that point of the game. Do I even need to mention how Future Redeemed successfully managed to beat Bidenflation and make money actually feel valuable?
And then there’s the bizarrely poorly-thought out handling of various collectibles, namely these mysterious glowing shards that you can find from early on in Chapter 1 at various carefully selected hiding spots. Throughout the game you keep picking up these conspicuous collectibles that are made out to be really important, yet never actually DO anything for you. Wanna know when you finally become able to put them to use? During the FINAL fucking chapter of the game, that’s when – and the reward isn’t even good!!! Meanwhile, collecting Ether to fill up your Ether Cylinders initially seems worthwhile enough, as these actually have several uses from Chapter 2 onwards – until you learn just how badly the supply of Ether outstrips demand. Hoarderblade 3 strikes again.
Worse still is the way the game from Chapter 3 onwards keeps bugging you about picking up Supply Drops that regularly land on various spots of the map, containing all sorts of stuff you already have way too much of if you do a lot of exploring, like I do – I’m serious, I don’t really recall ANY time a Supply Drop actually gave me something I had any real use for. And yet, Xenoblade 3 will aggressively nag you to go and collect any and all Supply Drops, with intrusive, persistent and downright obnoxious visual indicators, as if Supply Drops are super important and valuable. It’s like the game is actively pushing you to become a Hoarder – and I’m talking the truly BAD kind of hoarder here, like the Poop Lady!
Look, I’m well aware of just how negative this section of the writeup has been, so let me clarify something – this is all a result of me directly comparing Xenoblade 3 to some of my favorite games of all times, and some of the absolutely strongest aspects of those games at that. In terms of its world and exploration, Xenoblade 3 still easily blows away 95% of JRPGs (and that’s a conservative estimate), only being beaten out by the previous Xenoblade games. It’s just a shame that this latest entry ended up being a case of two steps forwards, three steps back for the series as a whole, with Future Redeemed representing the real leap forward (pretty much ALL the stuff I just complained about got fixed in FR).