All right, I’ve gotten the exploration bug out of my system so it’s time to progress the story.

Heh, you actually believe that? Nope, what happened was I explored and explored until Xenoblade Chronicles 3 itself intervened and stopped me with a Genshin-style “Let’s explore the area ahead later.” I laughed my head off at that point, I was like “Finally! Finally, I got you to admit defeat!” Not so open world now, are ya? 😀 If you want to experience a similar stoppage, try exploring up to Dow Dolmen when you’re supposed to go through Maktha Wildwood.

When I eventually did do Maktha Wildwood, I found out the reason why they don’t let you go through Dow Dolmen. It’s because that route leads to the end of Maktha Wildwood where there’s a major cutscene waiting for you, and they didn’t want any sequence breaking. What major cutscene? Ehehe… I don’t know. [spoilers follow, non-players stop reading]

Thing is, when I got to the end of the woods, there were bosses waiting for me. I mean, they didn’t show up as bosses but I knew we would end up fighting. I was already fed up with all the talking and the boss battles where we never ever manage to defeat the enemies, so I did a little skippity-doo, and another little one… and next thing I knew, Ethel and Cammuravi were dead. Oops, tee hee! So, uhh, if anyone knows what happened there and wants to share, be my guest.

I wish I could say I’ve been faithfully watching the cutscenes ever since, but they seriously talk too much. Blah blah meaning of life, blah why are we fighting, blahhy blah blah. Just get on with it already! I blame Square-Enix first and the Xenosaga series second for making every developer think they’re a movie studio. But I’m LOVING the vast spaces I get to explore, so Xenoblade Chronicles 3 gets a slight pass from me. Slight.

Speaking of slight, I have a slight complaint about the maps. There are too many palette swaps! Not enough enemy variety. Same old bunnits, Gogols, Volffs, Ropls. They just change their names and levels slightly but they look almost identical. That’s lazy programming. It doesn’t make fighting exciting, so I avoid it as much as I can these days. Besides, cowardly me always goes where the enemies are at my level or slightly below so I can explore and grab items in peace without hassle. More maps! More areas! And hopefully more variety later?

It’s the same with the colonies – every new place looks the same, the people dress the same, live in the same tents. So boring. However I believe – or I want to believe – that the colony thing is deliberate on the writers’ part. The bad guys have stripped people of individuality and sentenced them to an eternity of killing and being killed, so they had no time or leisure to develop different cultures. Once I free them of their living hells, things will surely change. Unfortunately it will almost certainly change after the credits roll, so I’m not getting my hopes up too much.

Time to spoil the story~ No special reason, just musing to myself. So there’s these guys in white and these guys in black (like chess pieces) and they have to fight to absorb each others’ life force to go on living. Eventually some of them find a way to break free of this cycle of fighting. The people who were making them fight don’t like that very much, so now the escapees, i.e. our party, are on the run to a safe haven while liberating other people as we go. Things are slightly more complicated than that, but not by much.

Where I’m at right now, the bad guys have gotten an evil superweapon they’re menacing the whole world with, so we’re fixing to storm their stronghold and destroy it. Never mind that they could just build another one, never mind that this whole thing is a huge and obvious trap and we would be better off heading for safety ASAP. The characters even admit it’s a trap, but the game has already established that Noah is a massive goody-goody and the rest of the party likes it that way, so *shrug.* Don’t blame me if you all end up “Sol Triggered,” is all I can say.

Credit where credit is due: Taion hasn’t betrayed me yet. Doesn’t seem like he’s going to either, with all the focus on his backstory and character development. It’s almost like they’re setting him up to be a replacement protagonist for when Noah betrays us… or dies.

Hmm? You think I’m trippin’? The seeds have already been sown, first with how ridiculously “good” Noah is shown to be and secondly with the reveal of his evil alter ago on the bad guys’ side. BTW I don’t know why I bothered to specify “evil” alter ego, it’s not like there’s ever a good alter ego. Said alter ego wears a mask like it’s some big secret or something, but it’s so obviously Alter-Noah. I wonder if there’s some significance to naming him Noah, like in Noah’s Ark? 🤔

Anyway, for all my complaining about the story, I’m quite interested in where things go from here. Us storming the bad guys’ castle 50 hours into a 200-hour game is obviously not going to end well. Total Party Kill? And then we start over with a fresh set of “reborn” characters? Might be fun, but it would reset all of our affinity progress with the colonies, so that’s out. Maybe we’ll succeed by the skin of our teeth and continue on our merry way. Hmm, it’s faster to play it than speculate – though speculating is more fun than the hour-long cutscene I’m shortly going to be subjected to. I’ll get to it and report back later. See ya~

What it said in the title. The downside of playing a story-heavy RPG like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is that you’re limited in where you can go and what you can do for much of the game. It isn’t a true “open world” for now, though I know for sure the whole world will open up eventually, usually right before I’m supposed to kill the very patient final boss.

Happily enough, XC3 has eliminated the biggest issue I had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is that the whole map was open so I couldn’t tell where I had been before and where I hadn’t explored yet. XC3 has also helpfully added a “show route” option, a marker which will lead you straight to your objective if you get lost, but I haven’t used it yet because the map layout is a lot less confusing this time.

I have used the Auto Battle option a few times, mainly for weak mobs that insist on attacking you. In general though, I don’t want to see auto-battle in a game where I’m supposed to be enjoying the combat. Which I kind of am, kind of amn’t. My tastes have shifted heavily towards “Unga Bunga Me Cut You Die” kind of action RPGs, so this auto-attacking with skills stuff feels a bit sluggish. But to XC3’s credit, they’re trying to keep things fresh with a variety of classes.

I’ve already used a sword, a pair of chakrams and a greatsword in 12 hours, with the promise of many more classes on the way. Usually I dislike class systems in an RPG because I get stressed out about optimum builds, but here you can change quite freely, the benefits aren’t that great and it keeps combat from falling into a rut, so I’m enjoying the changes.

Next the story and characters, which I also complained heavily about in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’d already accepted that the Xenoblade series is one I enjoyed for the exploration and combat (sorta) while holding my nose at the story, but this time it’s not that bad at all.

The hero Noah is the sickeningly sweet goody-goody kind of hero mainly seen in the kind of isekai manga where the hero forgives all the bad guys and quickly ends up with a harem of slaves… Hmm, now there’s a thought… On the plus side he isn’t slavering all over a random pretty girl, he thinks things through when he can, and he questions the status quo even more than those around him. He’s a sap, but he’s a promising sap.

There’s also the obligatory bulky best friend, the fiesty chick, the Nopons, the possible love interest, etc etc. I’m mainly playing to find out what shady secret Taion is hiding, I know that dude is up to something… But this isn’t a spoiler post (for now) so we’ll leave it here for now. All I can say is I like the characters (except Eunie) and the story-I-won’t-spoil is quite fine, though the cutscenes are a little long. And they still do that thing where I beat up the enemy fair and square but the cutscene afterwards shows us struggling helplessly against a mighty foe. I HATE that trope, but I guess it’s just a Xenoblade thing, so I must helplessly accept it.

Speaking of helplessness, Monolithsoft stopped letting players warp back to town to save and chillax in the midst of a crisis. If you’re persona non grata somewhere, you can’t just waltz back in. If you’re on the run, you can’t teleport your way away from your pursuers because that would be cheating. It adds tension and makes sense so I like it, though it probably won’t be so cute if I ever get stuck on a hard boss for lack of grinding.

Last word for this initial post: I kind of like what they’ve done with sidequests. They’ve shoved all the petty collection and fetch quests into a category where you don’t even have to meet the quest giver to get or finish the quest. They post their request “online,” you find their stuff and submit it “online” which totally doesn’t make sense but we can assume the Nopons delivered the goods. Then you get your rewards. That means there are fewer sidequests, but the ones that do exist are higher quality and more closely related to the story and the characters. Quantity vs. quality.

I lean towards the “quantity” side myself, though. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful in a videogame. In particular I wish there were more “Kill X monsters” kind of quests, but it’s early days yet. In any case XC2 had too many lazybones NPCs so this is a bit refreshing.

That’s enough for quick first impressions. I studiously avoided all Xenoblade Chronicles 3 trailers to the extent that the only things I knew going in were the title, the release date and the face of the main character. That makes every area and every twist and turn fresh and exciting now. I even avoided looking at the poster image, so I didn’t know who would be joining the party until they actually joined. I’m thinking of doing the same thing with Genshin Impact from now on. Now I think of it, it’s self-defeating to play a game about exploration and have everything exposed before you even buy the game. Right?

Anyway, that’s it for now, see you guys in another 13 hours or so!