Christi Junior on Nostr: 3/5 Besides being the chapter where we fully familiarize ourselves with the main ...
3/5
Besides being the chapter where we fully familiarize ourselves with the main party, Chapter 2 also lets you freely explore some properly massive, open Xenoblade 3 areas. And since Chapter 3 will already give me A LOT to talk about, I might as well address exploration in Xenoblade 3 right now, as well as the world of Aionios itself.
As expected, Xenoblade 3 delivers a gigantic world, full of massive and varied open areas, wild and untamed nature with lots of elevated terrain and steep cliffs, and pretty much NO invisible walls once you get past Chapter 1. Despite its gargantuan size however, everything still feels handcrafted and carefully thought out. Every nook and cranny in an area seems to have SOMETHING going for it, whether it be collectibles and treasure, rare enemies, Unique Monsters or just a stunning view. And if there’s a conspicuous location that seems to offer the player nothing of note, chances are that it will be utilized in a sidequest later down the line.
In terms of size, Xenoblade 3 boasts a far bigger world than Xenoblade 2, though (wisely) it’s still smaller than Xenoblade X’s Mira, which was so monstrous that it was in large part designed to be traversed by its trademark Skells (huge, flying mechs). Outside of one standout sea area that can be explored using a boat, you will be traveling these places exclusively on foot, like in the previous mainline Xenoblade entries. I for one don’t mind this, because exploration is so consistently fun and rewarding, and you can just lose yourself for hours exploring any given area while having a grand old time. At the same time, quick travel points aplenty ensure that you never need to waste a lot of time just aimlessly wandering this vast world.
Part of what makes any location in Xenoblade so exciting is its tendency to contain all sorts of monsters, ranging from small fry slightly lower-leveled than your early-game party, monsters around their level, a bit stronger monsters, much stronger monsters and hell, some monsters so strong that you won’t be able to tackle them before the postgame! This is perfectly exemplified by the trademark Giant Monkey that you’ll encounter in any Xenoblade game in one of the starting areas – in Xenoblade 3 you’ll come across him in Chapter 2, and he’s level 80. Meanwhile, the game’s final boss is level 75…
Part of what makes this mishmash of enemy levels such a great feature is not just that each area feel more real, lived-in and unpredictable, but also that it incentives you to repeatedly revisit old areas, whenever you’ve become strong enough to take on monsters you actively needed to avoid and hide from the first time you encountered them. Furthermore, Xenoblade 3 has plenty of interesting locations that you’ll only be able to tackle during the postgame, including one colorful cave crawling with enemies in the high level 90s.
Xenoblade 3 does offer a number of changes and new additions compared to past games when it comes to exploration. The much-derided Field Skills from Xenoblade 2 are gone, and while I always considered the problems with that mechanic way overblown, getting rid of it does remove an obvious potential source of player frustration. You do get this unexpected Metroidvania-like mechanic of Traversal Skills, where some methods of traversing an area have to be unlocked. I think that’s fair enough for fancy abilities like using zip line cables and neutralizing hazards, but this party of elite soldiers not being able to climb up walls covered by vines from the start is a bit of a stretch. I don’t particularly mind this new mechanic, but I also don’t think it really adds anything special to the Xenoblade experience.
One new mechanic I do find kind of neat is how various monsters can now generate collectibles in the wild, by actions like digging stuff out of the ground, ramming into trees, or just tripping and losing collectibles they had gathered. It’s a tiny addition overall, but still worthwhile, and helps the world come alive. The way you’ll at various spots encounter groups on enemies fighting also seems pretty cool at first, though the fact that these conflicts can’t happen organically between different monsters wandering onto each other’s territory makes the feature way less cool than it could have been. Oh, and since Aionios is such a terrible fucking place to live, you’ll find the corpses of Kevesi and Agnian soldiers all over the world, which Noah and Mio can send off to increase affinity with the affiliated colonies.
One core Xenoblade feature that this latest entry utterly perfects is Unique Monsters. This has been a phenomenal, underrated aspect of the series since day 1, as it essentially provides you with dozens and dozens of optional boss battles, from the opening hours the game to late into the postgame, and consistently makes exploration that much more interesting and exciting. In fact, until the introduction of Hard Mode in Xenoblade 3, pretty much all my most thrilling Xenoblade fights involved Unique Monsters.
However, Monolith Soft didn’t quite nail the Unique Monsters at first: Xenoblade 1 features a number of permanently missable UM battles, and once you’ve beaten a UM it can respawn, but only 30% of the time, so if you want a rematch you may have to repeatedly skip travel or save/reload in order to get the monster to show up. Xenoblade 2 fixed these issues, with only one missable UM (don’t kill the baby elephant!), and Tomb Stones appearing for every UM you slay, which enable you to rematch the UM in question whenever you want. However, you yourself had to remember the various Tomb Stone locations, because they didn’t appear on the map, and the number of Unique Monsters was way lower than in the first game, dropping from 157 (!) to “only” 85.
Xenoblade 3 however does EVERYTHING right when it comes to Unique Monsters: The Tombstone system from Xenoblade 2 (which the Xenoblade 1 Switch remaster failed to implement) is back, but much improved – not only does every Tombstone now appear on the map, but they’re also Quick Travel points! This in itself makes for a great additional reward for defeating a UM, outside of their actual item drops. Furthermore, Xenoblade 3 has A LOT of them – 141 in total, as well as some interesting gimmicks like pairs or even groups of Unique Monsters.
In addition to Unique Monsters, Xenoblade 3 also offers up a couple of new special monster types, like Elite Monsters (stronger than regular monsters, not as strong as Unique Monsters of similar levels), as well as Lucky Monsters that give more and better drops when you kill them, making them a really useful addition for completionists. As always in Xenoblade, the enemy variety is absolutely outstanding, ranging from bats and bunnies to dragons, dinosaurs, colossal mechs and Moebius monsters. I also really like how certain enemies of the same type can vary greatly in size, like this massive Brog UM you can take on by Chapter 2 absolutely dwarfing his fellow frog beasts.
Besides being the chapter where we fully familiarize ourselves with the main party, Chapter 2 also lets you freely explore some properly massive, open Xenoblade 3 areas. And since Chapter 3 will already give me A LOT to talk about, I might as well address exploration in Xenoblade 3 right now, as well as the world of Aionios itself.
As expected, Xenoblade 3 delivers a gigantic world, full of massive and varied open areas, wild and untamed nature with lots of elevated terrain and steep cliffs, and pretty much NO invisible walls once you get past Chapter 1. Despite its gargantuan size however, everything still feels handcrafted and carefully thought out. Every nook and cranny in an area seems to have SOMETHING going for it, whether it be collectibles and treasure, rare enemies, Unique Monsters or just a stunning view. And if there’s a conspicuous location that seems to offer the player nothing of note, chances are that it will be utilized in a sidequest later down the line.
In terms of size, Xenoblade 3 boasts a far bigger world than Xenoblade 2, though (wisely) it’s still smaller than Xenoblade X’s Mira, which was so monstrous that it was in large part designed to be traversed by its trademark Skells (huge, flying mechs). Outside of one standout sea area that can be explored using a boat, you will be traveling these places exclusively on foot, like in the previous mainline Xenoblade entries. I for one don’t mind this, because exploration is so consistently fun and rewarding, and you can just lose yourself for hours exploring any given area while having a grand old time. At the same time, quick travel points aplenty ensure that you never need to waste a lot of time just aimlessly wandering this vast world.
Part of what makes any location in Xenoblade so exciting is its tendency to contain all sorts of monsters, ranging from small fry slightly lower-leveled than your early-game party, monsters around their level, a bit stronger monsters, much stronger monsters and hell, some monsters so strong that you won’t be able to tackle them before the postgame! This is perfectly exemplified by the trademark Giant Monkey that you’ll encounter in any Xenoblade game in one of the starting areas – in Xenoblade 3 you’ll come across him in Chapter 2, and he’s level 80. Meanwhile, the game’s final boss is level 75…
Part of what makes this mishmash of enemy levels such a great feature is not just that each area feel more real, lived-in and unpredictable, but also that it incentives you to repeatedly revisit old areas, whenever you’ve become strong enough to take on monsters you actively needed to avoid and hide from the first time you encountered them. Furthermore, Xenoblade 3 has plenty of interesting locations that you’ll only be able to tackle during the postgame, including one colorful cave crawling with enemies in the high level 90s.
Xenoblade 3 does offer a number of changes and new additions compared to past games when it comes to exploration. The much-derided Field Skills from Xenoblade 2 are gone, and while I always considered the problems with that mechanic way overblown, getting rid of it does remove an obvious potential source of player frustration. You do get this unexpected Metroidvania-like mechanic of Traversal Skills, where some methods of traversing an area have to be unlocked. I think that’s fair enough for fancy abilities like using zip line cables and neutralizing hazards, but this party of elite soldiers not being able to climb up walls covered by vines from the start is a bit of a stretch. I don’t particularly mind this new mechanic, but I also don’t think it really adds anything special to the Xenoblade experience.
One new mechanic I do find kind of neat is how various monsters can now generate collectibles in the wild, by actions like digging stuff out of the ground, ramming into trees, or just tripping and losing collectibles they had gathered. It’s a tiny addition overall, but still worthwhile, and helps the world come alive. The way you’ll at various spots encounter groups on enemies fighting also seems pretty cool at first, though the fact that these conflicts can’t happen organically between different monsters wandering onto each other’s territory makes the feature way less cool than it could have been. Oh, and since Aionios is such a terrible fucking place to live, you’ll find the corpses of Kevesi and Agnian soldiers all over the world, which Noah and Mio can send off to increase affinity with the affiliated colonies.
One core Xenoblade feature that this latest entry utterly perfects is Unique Monsters. This has been a phenomenal, underrated aspect of the series since day 1, as it essentially provides you with dozens and dozens of optional boss battles, from the opening hours the game to late into the postgame, and consistently makes exploration that much more interesting and exciting. In fact, until the introduction of Hard Mode in Xenoblade 3, pretty much all my most thrilling Xenoblade fights involved Unique Monsters.
However, Monolith Soft didn’t quite nail the Unique Monsters at first: Xenoblade 1 features a number of permanently missable UM battles, and once you’ve beaten a UM it can respawn, but only 30% of the time, so if you want a rematch you may have to repeatedly skip travel or save/reload in order to get the monster to show up. Xenoblade 2 fixed these issues, with only one missable UM (don’t kill the baby elephant!), and Tomb Stones appearing for every UM you slay, which enable you to rematch the UM in question whenever you want. However, you yourself had to remember the various Tomb Stone locations, because they didn’t appear on the map, and the number of Unique Monsters was way lower than in the first game, dropping from 157 (!) to “only” 85.
Xenoblade 3 however does EVERYTHING right when it comes to Unique Monsters: The Tombstone system from Xenoblade 2 (which the Xenoblade 1 Switch remaster failed to implement) is back, but much improved – not only does every Tombstone now appear on the map, but they’re also Quick Travel points! This in itself makes for a great additional reward for defeating a UM, outside of their actual item drops. Furthermore, Xenoblade 3 has A LOT of them – 141 in total, as well as some interesting gimmicks like pairs or even groups of Unique Monsters.
In addition to Unique Monsters, Xenoblade 3 also offers up a couple of new special monster types, like Elite Monsters (stronger than regular monsters, not as strong as Unique Monsters of similar levels), as well as Lucky Monsters that give more and better drops when you kill them, making them a really useful addition for completionists. As always in Xenoblade, the enemy variety is absolutely outstanding, ranging from bats and bunnies to dragons, dinosaurs, colossal mechs and Moebius monsters. I also really like how certain enemies of the same type can vary greatly in size, like this massive Brog UM you can take on by Chapter 2 absolutely dwarfing his fellow frog beasts.