Christi Junior on Nostr: 2/4 Honestly, the brilliance of Xenoblade 3’s postgame did at the time cause me ...
2/4
Honestly, the brilliance of Xenoblade 3’s postgame did at the time cause me briefly to reconsider the Xenoblade ranking I had in mind after beating Z and watching the ending – but ultimately I couldn’t bring myself to rank XB3 over XB2. And so, my updated Switch JRPG ranking now looks like this:
1: Xenoblade DE
2: Xenoblade 2
3: Xenoblade 3
4: Dragon Quest XI
5: Final Fantasy VII
6: Ys VIII
7: Persona 5 Royal
8: Tales of Vesperia
9: Ys IX
10: Star Ocean: The Second Story R
11: Shin Megami Tensei V
12: Ni No Kuni
13: Final Fantasy XII (haven't finished, potential to rise.)
14: Final Fantasy X
15: Bravely Default 2 (haven't finished, probably won’t rise.)
16: Octopath Traveler
17: I Am Setsuna
.
.
.
Actual Shit: Pokemon Sword/Shield
Yeah, I’m well aware that this is probably the most boring ranking possible coming from me, but I’m not going to artificially origifag the list just for the sake of spicing it up. In the end, the core problems with Xenoblade 3’s world, story and fanservice (both kinds!) makes it impossible for me to rank it above Xenoblade 2, I game I just keep gaining more appreciation for as the years go by. Sure, there are many things Xenoblade 3 does better: It’s easily the more polished game, with better English-language voice acting, better sound mixing, overall better performance, fewer visual blemishes and glitches, way more informative tutorial, hell, Xenoblade 2 didn’t even have multiple save files!
But of course, there are also a lot of “problems” with Xenoblade 2 that 3 fixed, without that actually mattering much to me – I never actually really minded the Field Skills or the Gacha aspects of 2 much, and anyone who ever complained about XB2’s fanservice is obviously a worthless faggot who ought to have been ridiculed or ignored, not appeased. Even the tutorials in XB2, objectively dogshit though they were, are less of a problem on subsequent playthroughs than XB3’s excessive early-game handholding and numerous intrusive forced tutorials. Meanwhile, my problems with Xenoblade 3 actually DO bother me, more than any of the infamous issues with Xenoblade 2 ever did.
And yet, ranking Xenoblade 3 below even a game like Dragon Quest XI is just not happening, and was quite frankly never even considered. XB3 so utterly OUTCLASSES the Dragon Quest game when it comes to core aspects of JRPGs like music and combat that it would almost be impossible for it to recover, even before mentioning that I also think XB3 is superior in terms of characters, world/exploration, sidequests (unless you treat the entire final third of DQ XI as side content) and arguably even story (in terms of individual scenes and moments XB3 enjoys a much bigger starting lead over DQ XI than it had over its fellow Xenoblade games, and the flagship DQ entry also has some significant story issues of its own).
Dragon Quest XI is still an absolutely phenomenal game, a truly wonderful adventure and is in many ways a perfected, modernized version of the classic turn-based JRPGs of the SNES/PS1 generation. It also beats Xenoblade 3 in terms of graphics, polish and bonus features (the ability to play through the entire game as a 2D 8-bit JRPG is absolutely wild), but really, it could never compete with a worthy entry of the XenoGOAT series.
Honestly, the brilliance of Xenoblade 3’s postgame did at the time cause me briefly to reconsider the Xenoblade ranking I had in mind after beating Z and watching the ending – but ultimately I couldn’t bring myself to rank XB3 over XB2. And so, my updated Switch JRPG ranking now looks like this:
1: Xenoblade DE
2: Xenoblade 2
3: Xenoblade 3
4: Dragon Quest XI
5: Final Fantasy VII
6: Ys VIII
7: Persona 5 Royal
8: Tales of Vesperia
9: Ys IX
10: Star Ocean: The Second Story R
11: Shin Megami Tensei V
12: Ni No Kuni
13: Final Fantasy XII (haven't finished, potential to rise.)
14: Final Fantasy X
15: Bravely Default 2 (haven't finished, probably won’t rise.)
16: Octopath Traveler
17: I Am Setsuna
.
.
.
Actual Shit: Pokemon Sword/Shield
Yeah, I’m well aware that this is probably the most boring ranking possible coming from me, but I’m not going to artificially origifag the list just for the sake of spicing it up. In the end, the core problems with Xenoblade 3’s world, story and fanservice (both kinds!) makes it impossible for me to rank it above Xenoblade 2, I game I just keep gaining more appreciation for as the years go by. Sure, there are many things Xenoblade 3 does better: It’s easily the more polished game, with better English-language voice acting, better sound mixing, overall better performance, fewer visual blemishes and glitches, way more informative tutorial, hell, Xenoblade 2 didn’t even have multiple save files!
But of course, there are also a lot of “problems” with Xenoblade 2 that 3 fixed, without that actually mattering much to me – I never actually really minded the Field Skills or the Gacha aspects of 2 much, and anyone who ever complained about XB2’s fanservice is obviously a worthless faggot who ought to have been ridiculed or ignored, not appeased. Even the tutorials in XB2, objectively dogshit though they were, are less of a problem on subsequent playthroughs than XB3’s excessive early-game handholding and numerous intrusive forced tutorials. Meanwhile, my problems with Xenoblade 3 actually DO bother me, more than any of the infamous issues with Xenoblade 2 ever did.
And yet, ranking Xenoblade 3 below even a game like Dragon Quest XI is just not happening, and was quite frankly never even considered. XB3 so utterly OUTCLASSES the Dragon Quest game when it comes to core aspects of JRPGs like music and combat that it would almost be impossible for it to recover, even before mentioning that I also think XB3 is superior in terms of characters, world/exploration, sidequests (unless you treat the entire final third of DQ XI as side content) and arguably even story (in terms of individual scenes and moments XB3 enjoys a much bigger starting lead over DQ XI than it had over its fellow Xenoblade games, and the flagship DQ entry also has some significant story issues of its own).
Dragon Quest XI is still an absolutely phenomenal game, a truly wonderful adventure and is in many ways a perfected, modernized version of the classic turn-based JRPGs of the SNES/PS1 generation. It also beats Xenoblade 3 in terms of graphics, polish and bonus features (the ability to play through the entire game as a 2D 8-bit JRPG is absolutely wild), but really, it could never compete with a worthy entry of the XenoGOAT series.