Christi Junior on Nostr: 2/5 Over to the Agnian side of things, we obviously have to start with Mio the ...
2/5
Over to the Agnian side of things, we obviously have to start with Mio the Catgirl. This Agnian off-seer is ferocious in battle, but as a character she might seem a bit plain at first. However, Miss Meow has quite some hidden depth to her: despite being the oldest character in the party (which she is acutely aware of) and prone to acting like the Team Mom, especially to Sena, Mio can actually be surprisingly emotional and even childish, which we see multiple examples of throughout the game.
Indeed, Mio has made it a habit to put on a brave face and hide her true feelings – including her feelings about having just a few months left to live. Mio’s way of coping is to have become emotionally detached from her own life, to the point of even claiming that she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. However, the sudden prospects of potentially being able to actually escape her dismal fate, as well as her growing romantic feelings for Noah, gradually cause the catgirl to let her guard down and become willing to fully embrace life and all it can offer, despite risking hurt and heartache. The culmination of this character arc would end up breaking many gamers, including me – we don’t call Chapter 5 Peak Fiction for nothing…
Taion is obviously the most controversial Xenoblade 3 party member on our corner of Fedi, not only due to being black, but for being another example of the wildly unrealistic “Big Brained Black character” trope. I’ll be addressing topic among many others once we get to Chapter 5 and I finally tackle how Xenoblade 3 stacks up in terms of Based Morality, so I won’t spend more time on it here beyond simply acknowledging the issue.
Strictly as a character however, I think Taion works very well. Being the Nerd character in a party consisting of two Jocks and one Eunie, Taion ensures that we see plenty of fun personality clashes, and he plays a good (if intentionally stiff and socially awkward) straight man to Lanz, Sena AND Eunie. Another interesting thing about Taion is that while someone like Lanz became markedly kinder in response to losing a dear friend, Taion’s backstory sees him growing colder and more distant because of a similar event – as a young boy he was stated to have been exceptionally kind, and at various points of the story there will be moments where we do see undeniable flashes of that side of Taion, examples of how considerate and full of empathy this seemingly asocial Tactician really is.
Sena is the plucky heroine girl, the one-track musclehead – at least, that’s how she WANTS to be perceived. Truth is, this tiny tomboy with superhuman strength is both lonely and lacking in confidence – and she makes up for this by trying to be constantly cheerful and obsessed with training/improving herself. Sena is VERY close to Mio, who’s both a role model and a big sister/mother figure to her, but she also very quickly becomes good friends with Lanz, with whom she has a lot in common.
Somewhat infamous in the Xenoblade fandom for her “15 TP brain”, Sena is indeed somewhat dim, but always well-intentioned, always does her best, and can be surprisingly insightful and strong-willed at times. She’s overall a lovely character, and though I’ve noticed that various Best Girl polls consistently show her to be a distant 3rd to Mio and Eunie, that’s all due to Mio’s heartrending character arc and Eunie’s irresistible personality, rather than Sena herself being a weak character. Sena is no Sharla, she’s an irreplaceable part of the main party.
Indeed, I’d argue that this is perhaps the strongest, most well-balanced Xenoblade party overall, with no weak links. All 6 characters get plenty of spotlight, development and strong story moments, and each even have a major sidequest dedicated to them to further flesh them out (more on that once we get to Chapter 3). One interesting fact to note is that Eunie, Lanz and Sena all work really well as comic relief characters, with Taion often being unwillingly drawn into their goofiness, which not only provides welcome moments of relief from the overall bleak world of Xenoblade 3, but avoids the slightly forced dynamic of Xenoblade 1’s party, where it’s almost always either Reyn or Riki that act as comic relief. Again, it just feels way better balanced in Xenoblade 3.
The Xenoblade 3 party’s biggest (and perhaps only real) shortcoming is due to Xenoblade 3 itself, namely the game doing away with Heart-to-Hearts. These optional conversations between every conceivable pairing of party characters, which even let you choose whether to give serious answers or joke/jerk answers, were such a great Xenoblade staple, and I have no idea why they were removed, especially after Xenoblade 2 absolutely perfected them.
In place of Heart-to-Heart conversations you get Rest Spot Discussions, where the entire party talks about all sorts of random subjects. This is a nice feature and a lot of the conversations are quite compelling, but they’re not satisfactory replacements for Heart-to-Hearts, because instead of actually showing wholly unique conversations between often-unexpected character pairings, you just yet more group interactions. The game itself seems to recognize how the removal of this core Xenoblade feature deprives the characters of something important, and so the story actually does make sure that we get some good, meaningful conversations out of unlikely character pairings like Noah/Sena and Lanz/Taion. However, those are also some pretty heavy conversations – part of the magic of Heart-to-Hearts was just how silly they could be, like Morag and Brighid’s struggle with a dead fish, or Tora mistaking Morag for a man (again, Xenoblade 2 fucking PERFECTED Heart-to-Hearts). I’d have loved to see stuff like Lanz teasing Eunie about her clover-collecting hobby, Sena trying (and failing) to learn battle tactics from Noah, and Mio and Taion reminiscing about fallen friends (yeah, Heart-to-Hearts could also be quite emotional).
That’s another thing I appreciate about Xenoblade 3’s party btw – every character has lost at least one important, named and notable friend to the Keves-Agnus war, making the death toll of the conflict come across as more real and meaningful than it otherwise would have. The characters have also been genuinely shaped and changed by what they’ve gone through, and their rich backstory helps further establish them as deep and three-dimensional characters.
In addition to our main six characters, we also have our obligatory Nopon, two of them in fact – Riku from Keves and Manana from Agnus. These guys are fine, better than someone like Azurda from Xenoblade 2, though they naturally pale in comparison to the main party. Manana is almost purely comic relief (as well as the party Cook), while Riku is the Mechanic, and randomly turns out to be such a mysterious character that pre-Future Redeemed, plenty of people genuinely thought he was actually Alvis! And even before Future Redeemed showed this guy being around over 1000 years ago, it sure raised some questions when Chapter 2 reveals to us that this is the guy who gave Noah his sword – his REAL sword, covered by the Red Monado shell. Bearing the bizarre name Lucky Seven, this indestructible blade, once unsheathed, can cut through ANYTHING. I sure wonder if that will end up coming in handy…
Over to the Agnian side of things, we obviously have to start with Mio the Catgirl. This Agnian off-seer is ferocious in battle, but as a character she might seem a bit plain at first. However, Miss Meow has quite some hidden depth to her: despite being the oldest character in the party (which she is acutely aware of) and prone to acting like the Team Mom, especially to Sena, Mio can actually be surprisingly emotional and even childish, which we see multiple examples of throughout the game.
Indeed, Mio has made it a habit to put on a brave face and hide her true feelings – including her feelings about having just a few months left to live. Mio’s way of coping is to have become emotionally detached from her own life, to the point of even claiming that she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. However, the sudden prospects of potentially being able to actually escape her dismal fate, as well as her growing romantic feelings for Noah, gradually cause the catgirl to let her guard down and become willing to fully embrace life and all it can offer, despite risking hurt and heartache. The culmination of this character arc would end up breaking many gamers, including me – we don’t call Chapter 5 Peak Fiction for nothing…
Taion is obviously the most controversial Xenoblade 3 party member on our corner of Fedi, not only due to being black, but for being another example of the wildly unrealistic “Big Brained Black character” trope. I’ll be addressing topic among many others once we get to Chapter 5 and I finally tackle how Xenoblade 3 stacks up in terms of Based Morality, so I won’t spend more time on it here beyond simply acknowledging the issue.
Strictly as a character however, I think Taion works very well. Being the Nerd character in a party consisting of two Jocks and one Eunie, Taion ensures that we see plenty of fun personality clashes, and he plays a good (if intentionally stiff and socially awkward) straight man to Lanz, Sena AND Eunie. Another interesting thing about Taion is that while someone like Lanz became markedly kinder in response to losing a dear friend, Taion’s backstory sees him growing colder and more distant because of a similar event – as a young boy he was stated to have been exceptionally kind, and at various points of the story there will be moments where we do see undeniable flashes of that side of Taion, examples of how considerate and full of empathy this seemingly asocial Tactician really is.
Sena is the plucky heroine girl, the one-track musclehead – at least, that’s how she WANTS to be perceived. Truth is, this tiny tomboy with superhuman strength is both lonely and lacking in confidence – and she makes up for this by trying to be constantly cheerful and obsessed with training/improving herself. Sena is VERY close to Mio, who’s both a role model and a big sister/mother figure to her, but she also very quickly becomes good friends with Lanz, with whom she has a lot in common.
Somewhat infamous in the Xenoblade fandom for her “15 TP brain”, Sena is indeed somewhat dim, but always well-intentioned, always does her best, and can be surprisingly insightful and strong-willed at times. She’s overall a lovely character, and though I’ve noticed that various Best Girl polls consistently show her to be a distant 3rd to Mio and Eunie, that’s all due to Mio’s heartrending character arc and Eunie’s irresistible personality, rather than Sena herself being a weak character. Sena is no Sharla, she’s an irreplaceable part of the main party.
Indeed, I’d argue that this is perhaps the strongest, most well-balanced Xenoblade party overall, with no weak links. All 6 characters get plenty of spotlight, development and strong story moments, and each even have a major sidequest dedicated to them to further flesh them out (more on that once we get to Chapter 3). One interesting fact to note is that Eunie, Lanz and Sena all work really well as comic relief characters, with Taion often being unwillingly drawn into their goofiness, which not only provides welcome moments of relief from the overall bleak world of Xenoblade 3, but avoids the slightly forced dynamic of Xenoblade 1’s party, where it’s almost always either Reyn or Riki that act as comic relief. Again, it just feels way better balanced in Xenoblade 3.
The Xenoblade 3 party’s biggest (and perhaps only real) shortcoming is due to Xenoblade 3 itself, namely the game doing away with Heart-to-Hearts. These optional conversations between every conceivable pairing of party characters, which even let you choose whether to give serious answers or joke/jerk answers, were such a great Xenoblade staple, and I have no idea why they were removed, especially after Xenoblade 2 absolutely perfected them.
In place of Heart-to-Heart conversations you get Rest Spot Discussions, where the entire party talks about all sorts of random subjects. This is a nice feature and a lot of the conversations are quite compelling, but they’re not satisfactory replacements for Heart-to-Hearts, because instead of actually showing wholly unique conversations between often-unexpected character pairings, you just yet more group interactions. The game itself seems to recognize how the removal of this core Xenoblade feature deprives the characters of something important, and so the story actually does make sure that we get some good, meaningful conversations out of unlikely character pairings like Noah/Sena and Lanz/Taion. However, those are also some pretty heavy conversations – part of the magic of Heart-to-Hearts was just how silly they could be, like Morag and Brighid’s struggle with a dead fish, or Tora mistaking Morag for a man (again, Xenoblade 2 fucking PERFECTED Heart-to-Hearts). I’d have loved to see stuff like Lanz teasing Eunie about her clover-collecting hobby, Sena trying (and failing) to learn battle tactics from Noah, and Mio and Taion reminiscing about fallen friends (yeah, Heart-to-Hearts could also be quite emotional).
That’s another thing I appreciate about Xenoblade 3’s party btw – every character has lost at least one important, named and notable friend to the Keves-Agnus war, making the death toll of the conflict come across as more real and meaningful than it otherwise would have. The characters have also been genuinely shaped and changed by what they’ve gone through, and their rich backstory helps further establish them as deep and three-dimensional characters.
In addition to our main six characters, we also have our obligatory Nopon, two of them in fact – Riku from Keves and Manana from Agnus. These guys are fine, better than someone like Azurda from Xenoblade 2, though they naturally pale in comparison to the main party. Manana is almost purely comic relief (as well as the party Cook), while Riku is the Mechanic, and randomly turns out to be such a mysterious character that pre-Future Redeemed, plenty of people genuinely thought he was actually Alvis! And even before Future Redeemed showed this guy being around over 1000 years ago, it sure raised some questions when Chapter 2 reveals to us that this is the guy who gave Noah his sword – his REAL sword, covered by the Red Monado shell. Bearing the bizarre name Lucky Seven, this indestructible blade, once unsheathed, can cut through ANYTHING. I sure wonder if that will end up coming in handy…