Start date: April 12, 2026
Finish date: May 24, 2026
Playtime (main game): 53 hours, 23 minutes
Playtime (DLC): 24 hours, 47 minutes
This game came out in July 2022 while I was living in Japan, and I did buy it on release (and got a nice acrylic stand of Mio). I started playing straight away and put 63 hours into the game, but I was playing in full Japanese and it was pretty hardcore. There’s a lot of military jargon and fantasy/tech babble, and the sheer amount of dialogue is insane. The voiced cutscenes were the easiest part to deal with, it always helps to have both voice and text, plus the big plot points tend to be a little lighter on the jargon. But there is so much to read outside of the cutscenes — tutorials, side quest dialogue, chat bubbles above NPCs, menu stuff… it’s never-ending.
You barely even notice it when it’s a language you don’t have to think to understand, but when it’s not, it’s very tiring. I can’t say I understood everything, but I did believe I was getting most of it — except that there was this nagging vagueness about the story that made me feel like I was missing something. I never finished the game in Japanese — I tried to come back to it multiple times, but I remembered little and was frustrated by how difficult it was to navigate the maps and clean up the side quests I had going.
Now that I’ve played it with English subtitles, however, I realise the story really is just… vague. Why did the two worlds mush together? Who is Z and what are his motivations? Who is Riku and his mentor? Are literally all Kevenes soldiers from the XB1 world and all Agnes from XB2? If so, are some of the Agnes people actually Blades? (They do have crystals.) The main game doesn’t answer any of these questions, and even if you get some answers in the DLC, I still find it weird. A better balance would be for all of the big questions to be answered by the main game and some interesting details to be added by the DLC.
The Z situation is the most annoying. JRPGs are known for their fleshed out villains with big backstories, convoluted motives, and ridiculous redemption arcs. But here, N and M got all the attention while the actual bad guy stayed a genuine mystery. We don’t know if he is or was a human or which world he might have come from, and we don’t know anything about his past, even though something clearly messed him up. All he ever says is that he just wants to exist in a neverending moment with no future. That is not a generic villain goal that can go without explanation. It very much needs explanation!
I did also find the theme of the game to be overly depressing. There will always be crazy dramatic storylines in JRPGs, but the ‘day-to-day’ quests and activities often have a lot of goofiness to them. XB2 had so much goofiness, and I loved it. But this game is so bleak! The exploration mechanics were finding dead bodies and stealing enemy supply drops, there are no towns or families or kids, and every colony is just full of the same mentally drained soldiers. The entire world (aside from the City) is just doing the same thing, and that thing includes zero fun.
Some of the gameplay was frustrating to me as well, particularly the maps, items, and fetch quests. There’s just no way to know where anything is, and it makes exploration and side questing almost impossible. Even with the internet, it was so difficult to pinpoint place names if I hadn’t been there before, and for places you have been to, you have to zoom right in for names to appear and then manually search all over for them.
Something I did love, however, was the characters and the character art. Their hair looks especially good, I love the smudgey watercolour kind of look. I played the game in boost mode on the Switch 2, which means the game plays as if it was in docked mode even when it’s not. It made the all the UI look super crisp and basically made it feel like a new game. An actual Switch 2 version of the game has been announced now, but it’s hard to imagine it can look that much better. We’ve also seen the first trailer for the next game now, Xenoblade Genesis. It’s not a Chronicles game, and it seems like it will be a completely new story. It doesn’t look quite like XB3, but there are similarities, and the characters look amazing.
Even though I don’t engage with the combat systems on that deep a level, I still miss the complexity of XB2. The Heroes in 3 are nothing in number compared to the unique blades in 2, and as I’ve said already, the heroes all just have the same story because everyone is doing the same thing. The blades, on the other hand, had so much variety. There was also Poppi, who just had a whole other levelling system to herself. And then there’s the field skills, which were like a jigsaw puzzle because different skills were tied to different blades. I know it got tiring at the time, I remember, but I miss it now, and a streamlined version would definitely be good.
I didn’t dislike XB3 by any means (I’ve sunk way over 100 hours into it altogether), but I do prefer XB2 by quite a margin. However, this post isn’t over yet, because we’ve still got the DLC to go, and Xenoblade DLCs are basically whole new games.
I loved the DLC. I was drawn in by the promise of Rex from XB2, but I loved the whole thing, especially the gameplay. So many of the things I lamented above are just casually fixed, and fixed so perfectly, in my opinion, that I’ll be really disappointed if elements of them don’t appear in Genesis.
The Affinity system is a work of genius. Maybe players who are 100% in it for the combat won’t agree, but for anyone whose play style is a bit more balanced, gaining experience and abilities through all types of gameplay just makes so much sense. It gives meaning to everything you do, and instantly makes 100%ing the game sound enticing. I almost did 100% it, too — all I have left is the high level unique monsters (the ones whose levels are way beyond where the story gets you). The items and monsters are also trackable, so you know who you’ve killed before and who you haven’t, what monsters drop what, and where different items can be found (collecting a set amount of each also gives you Affinity Points). I think the full Affinity list is: