Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Not had the chance to play X, @TheJGG .... 100 odd hours for XCDE, nearly 200 for XC2 & 30 odd for Torna!

HLTB has it listed as 57hrs for main story for XC3, so its not way off base that JGG was done around 55hrs. I'm probably going to be way past that with how much I'm exploring though.

Ya, I'm at 69 hrs in my save file and just got to Chapter 6. I've done all but maybe 3 sidequests which I intend to come back to.

I think I typically hit around 100 hrs for Xenoblade games. Though for XCX I hit several hundred.

Man, time always flies by whenever I play this game. I played it for 2 hours last night and it felt like mere minutes! Also I know I said this somewhere already but I want to say it again: I really love how gem crafting was implemented into this game!

@Vortexeo
I agree, gem crafting is perfect in XC3.

@Mioaionios well for one thing, the game wont let me continue with the stupid Teach sidequest where Im supposed to teach the Colony Gammer soldiers but I dunno what else to do since I already did the quiz part and the training grounds battle part.

I even had Teach on my team to see if anything would happen when i checked the bulletin board at the Gamma colony but nothing.

stupid sidequest isnt that important anyway in my opinion since I already have Teach so Im moving on to the main story quest anyway.

Grey is cool for a mysterious "ninja" gun user. sort of reminds me of Vincent from Final Fantasy VII

@XandertheWise
Like I said, patience. Once you get further into the story, you'll be able to continue that side quest.

So, just finished the game and I’m very sad to say it didn’t hit any of the high notes of any of the previous games, despite my high hopes. I don’t know how spoilers are handled on this thread (dunno if there’s like little spoiler tags you can put?) so I’ll just keep it at the story being a huge letdown even if they set up so much interesting stuff, the characters somehow feel both better and worse in some places (Worse as in Noah and Mio, better as in everyone else from the main cast) but that ‘party dynamic’ just isn’t there by the end of it. Maybe it’s just me, but the game gets a little preachy about it’s themes too, feeling rather heavy-handed with how it keeps hammering the same points about the future and choice. Yes, important themes in the story, but altogether handled with little nuance or care in the writing imo.

Even the gameplay somehow didn’t click with me. I played on hard mode and the battles just dragged on for way too long, instead of giving a higher difficulty. I switched to normal and that then felt rather easy but at least the battles didn’t drag on endlessly anymore. The chain attacks quickly lose their appeal when they take so gosh darn long (and on hard mode you have to do so many that it gets ridiculous) and battles often came down to either me winning or my healers dying so everyone dies afterwards because they get no way to revive them. Maybe 6 characters fighting at once wasn’t a great idea, because battles would often devolve into visual noise where strategy just came down to hitting hard and then quickly reviving any fallen allies before the healers kick the bucket and put us in an unwinnable scenario. The exploration was alright, but with a world this flat most of the time, it just felt like they made it so much bigger without much reason to, because the speed of traversal suddenly weighs a lot more in some areas. I vastly preferred the balance between verticality and horizontality in 2.

As for purely positive things: the side quests are greatly fleshed out and feel like you’re really getting to interact with the world around you. The characters there seem to have better and more fluid interactions then the main party does at times! The class system is pretty cool too, even if constantly having to rearrange all my gems and equipment when switching got old, fast. On that note, gems are handled really great here, a lot less of a hassle than in 1.

@Takoda
If you want to add spoiler tags you have to do [ spoiler ] (text here) [ /spoiler ] make sure you delete the spaces between the square brackets and it should come out like this test

I think those are some fair criticisms. I agree with the chain attacks to an extent. In XC1 and XC2 they didn't have those lengthy fancy animations after each order you choose. (I know XC2 technically did with level 4 specials but I think the QTEs made it a bit more interactive) They were cool to watch for a while but they should've added something that allows you to either speed them up or skip them (something like the kinship skills from MHS2 would be ideal here).

For me, I enjoyed having 6 party members in combat even but there were some things that could have been better. I said this in a previous post of mine but I think they should have made it easier to switch characters in combat rather than cycling through each one individually. (Maybe something like the wheel from Astral Chain when choosing a legion). I do want to point out that there actually is an item called a "memory locket" that allows you to revive party members even if you aren't a healer. I'd definitely recommend using that if you don't want to put all the pressure for reviving on the healers.

I really enjoy exploring the world, I think it's awesome how raising affinity with colonies is much more rewarding than in previous games since you gain things like increased run/swim speed, a few field skills, and other things. That being said though I wouldn't mind something a little more in line with XCX, especially with such a big world.

As for the story , I enjoyed it personally but yeah it wasn't really as twisty as the previous games and there were a few things I would like to see fleshed out a bit more. Some things towards the end felt a little bit rushed. Like the whole deal with Crys being a Moebius felt like it went by pretty quick.

I thought there would be at least some reaction to a previous post of mine where I said my next playthrough would involve the prohibition of fast travel. Weird nobody reacted to it considering how crazy time consuming it's going to be. 😅

@Takoda
I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed with XC3.
Games are subjective and they all hit us in different ways. Nothing that can be helped, unfortunately.

Did some work on my upcoming Xenoblade video. Since I beat the game there’s new stuff I learned, so I recorded five more minutes of audio. It’s 17 minutes so far…

@Mioaionios Only one thing more surprising than me beating the game in 55 hours and that is how you put double that time into the game after three weeks. Granted I didn’t have access to the game for half the time but to play it that often every day for three week… some dedication!

Field skills in 2 were a joke though. Especially since they lock story progression behind collecting potentially dozens of random Blades. But it’s testament to just how good MONOLITHSOFT is that 3 took nothing but the best elements from previous games. The stuff that didn’t work they either dropped or fixed.

@NintendoByNature Glad to hear it! I’m easily in the faster part of people. That’s not always a good thing but it means when I get into time sensitive situations it’ll help me better. But everyone goes at different paces anyhow. How far are you in?

@Mioaionios
Haha, I can see you at least liked it a lot if you’re even considering doing that! The main story without fast travelling is very doable but once you start adding in side-quests… oh boy, good luck with that!

@Mioaionios Huh I guess I just missed it lol. When I checked the forum again I was a few pages behind 😅. But man that is insanity. I don't know if I would ever do something like that lmao. You know challenge runs are pretty interesting in Xenoblade. I've seen a few people do nuzlockes in Xenoblade 2 which is crazy 😂.

I've considered doing an art inheritance run in Xenoblade 1 but I think that's the only unique type of playthrough I've thought about doing. Come to think of it though I'm lowkey tempted to do a nuzlocke run for XC3. Maybe something like if my party gets wiped I can't use the class that I was using? Lol

Random side note but it's really funny going back to the very early pages of this forum (before the game released) and seeing how wrong everyone was with their theories 😂😂😂

@TheJGG
Well, I'm unable to work because of a mental disability, which gives me a lot of free time.
So please, don't compare our situations because it's not fair to do so.

@Takoda
Yup, going for a completionist run without the use of fast travel.
Aionios is going to be my second home for the foreseeable future.

@Mioaionios I see. Sorry if you were offended, I naturally didn't mean it that way.

@Vortexeo
No worries, I had a feeling some people might have missed that post. It was posted during a busy day on this thread after all.

Challenge runs like Nuzlocke don't really interest me. Stuff like that really frustrates me. Just thinking about it raises my anxiety, lol.

@TheJGG yea for sure. I'm about 23-24hrs in and Ch. 3 still. If I had to guess, I'd say it's the tail end of Ch. 3.

@TheJGG
Oh no, I wasn't offended. Maybe I didn't use the right words, I only wanted to clarify that I'm in a situation that's not comparable to most and me playing for 130 hours in 3 weeks shouldn't be seen as an achievement. 🤗

@Mioaionios Well clarity's very important, there's no way to tell in an all text forum lol. Nothing's common knowledge by any means and misunderstanding is inevitable. Ignore it, or take from it only the purest intention, either works.

Here's to the trilogy. Or quadrology. X counts. Bring it to Switch.