Going back to school? The Switch is your destination for RPG-powered procrastination

techcrunch.com:

As the new school year starts, a fresh cohort of students will soon be hard at work finding ways to avoid writing papers and watching lectures they slept through, and just generally finding ways to waste the hours as effectively as possible. Fortunately the Switch is currently an absolute treasure trove of time sinks of the RPG variety.

If you’re thinking of putting off that assignment for a little longer — say, 80 to 100 hours or more — take a look at some of the most recent games that are making the Switch a procrastinator’s paradise despite its age.

Image Credits: Nintendo/Monolithsoft

As someone who wasn’t really intrigued by the first in this series and basically squicked out by the anime excesses of the second (and I say this as a Genshin Impact player), I can’t say I was really that hyped for Xenoblade Chronicles 3. But this game has its hooks in me and I’m in it for the long haul.

A large open-world RPG with rather MMO-like combat and perhaps more systems than I’ve seen in any game except Horizon: Forbidden West, XC3 is overwhelming from the start and continues piling new things on you for dozens of hours. The difference is many are optional, streamlined, or impossible to get wrong, meaning it’s piling up opportunities for you to engage, not pitfalls if you don’t.

Developer Monolithsoft is clearly taking the Switch to its absolute limits, and there are times you’ll forget that you’re playing on five-year-old hardware that was a bit out of date when it made its debut. But compared with its open-world peers it’s certainly lacking in fidelity, so if that’s important for you, I’m afraid it’s not going to work out — next-gen this ain’t.

But the real star of the game is its characters, writing, and story — I was afraid the