XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3
For: Switch
From: Nintendo
★★★★+
I haven’t felt immersed in a game for quite some time. I can give you a date, actually — December 22nd last year.
It was the last time I played Dark Souls 3 before returning home from Christmas holiday. When I came back my computer’s power supply had started to fail.
Since then almost all of my gaming happens on my far more reliable Switch. It’s a great wee thing. It has an interesting range of games and a lot of utility. I recently took it on holiday with me and simply charged it with my phone charger.
That being said, the Switch never immersed me. Many of its games feel like a strange hybrid between a true console quality experience and that of a handheld game, much like the system itself. Playing on it takes me back to when I was raising Pokemon on my Nintendo DS on the school bus, not the times I would wake up early on Saturday morning and play Playstation 3 until my dad yelled at me to stop wasting the day. I’ve sunk many hours into these games, generally because of how long their storylines are, but I rarely feel immersed in them.
Xenoblade 3 is different. It’s the first game I’ve played on the system that doesn’t feel limited by the hardware. The worlds are vast, the gameplay is nuanced and the graphics hit an impeccable sweet spot between stylistic and realistic. It reminds me of playing Skyrim for the first time at 13 years old, when I would spend hours just exploring the world because of how well designed and interesting it was. Every corner has something interesting, be it some form of collectable, a quest or just the gorgeous geography itself.
I’ve never played a Xenoblade game before and thus had no idea what to expect, but the plot is self-contained and no prior knowledge is needed to follow along. A lot of that story is character-based, which is great, as your roster of six are all wonderful and flawed in interesting ways.
More interesting are the themes of the game. Two of your characters are Overseers, specially-trained military units who magically send off fallen soldiers and allow them to rest. The game never treats death as a triviality. Instead it is given quiet moments away from the bombastic action. This theme of death extends to the plot itself, as all of your party members have less than a year to live, some more than others. Yes, they want to save the world and beat the bad guys, but they also just want to enjoy the little time they have left.
All of this is brought together with stellar voice acting in a refreshing variety of accents. One party member even has a cockney accent. It’s not all perfect. The first few hours were rough, with non-stop cut-scenes and infuriatingly slow tutorials. It took me about eight hours before it clicked for me. If eight hours is too long for you, then that’s fair. But Xenoblade is in the family of JRPGs where the content is seemingly endless. Eight hours is but a drop in the bucket for the depth of this game.
That depth extends to the gameplay, with a huge amount of interesting and nuanced mechanics built around a unique real-time combat system I’ve never experienced before. Fights are all about positioning, with some classes able to do high damage from the front or side, but this might separate them from the healers. There are choices you have to make. You can swap your party’s classes between fights and train them in different styles, elements of which can be brought into different classes.
The amount of character builds you can create is insane and a lot of my time is spent purely grinding up class levels because I enjoy it so much. The level of care put into the user experience is unmatched by anything I have seen on any console. With nuanced camera controls and re-bindable shortcuts, it feels like a classic tactical RPG experience that is equal to playing on a PC.
Now that I understand Xenoblade 3, I’m going to be playing it for a long, long time. But you need to be ready for a big game that is asking a lot from you. For me it was undoubtedly worth it.
