I’m a bit baffled by Xenoblade Chronicles 3. What’s set to be a climax for a trilogy that started off so spectacularly with the 2010 original – and following on from the stuttering start of creator Tetsuya Takahashi’s infamously stunted Xenosaga series – this JRPG epic has an awfully slow start all of its own. The dozen hour mark is fast creeping up and the training wheels remain firmly in place, while perhaps more frustratingly so too are embargo restrictions that mean I can’t tell you much about the really interesting stuff.
Still, I can tell you some of the pertinent stuff. If you’re a returning fan, know this: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes the best bits of the preceding games, folding in a fascinating evolution of Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s broad and brilliant combat, the more defined fantasy of the original (and ditching some of the more embarrassing anime excesses) and some of the more open-ended elements of Xenoblade Chronicles X (though sadly I can’t really go into any detail on them just yet).
Perhaps most importantly, it’s technically far more impressive than the clearly compromised Xenoblade Chronicles 2. That was a launch year title for the Switch way back at the tail-end of 2017, of course, and in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 you can feel the five years of progress and familiarity that Monolith Soft have built up with the hardware – this looks simply sublime playing either handheld or docked, with the impossible vistas of the world of Aionios stretching to the distance (it bodes well for Breath of the Wild 2, too, with Monolith Soft’s epic topography so key to the success of Zelda’s open world outings). It’s seriously impressive stuff, and Digital Foundry will have a deeper dive on the details closer to launch.
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