Review: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 continues Switch’s incredible JRPG run
Final Fantasy 16 producer, Naoki Yoshida, reckons it’d take 15 years to build an open-world FF, what with the effort required to execute their level of cinematic storytelling at that kind of scale.
Right on cue, here comes Monolith Soft, with a 140-hour bruiser of a JRPG – its fourth in 12 years. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 shows us that satisfying storytelling, embedded in a vast, not-quite-open world is doable. Though how the studio works at this rate is as big a mystery as any raised in the game’s tale of warring nations and their puppet masters.
Okay, there’s some false equivalence at play there: by working on Nintendo’s more humble hardware Monolith Soft isn’t slave to the resource-gobbling photorealism that has slowed so many of our favourite series this last generation. From XC1 on Wii, it realised that art design and concept could trump raw heft, leading to Xenoblade’s dependance on worlds set on the backs of titanic beasts. The dizzying scale of limbs and jaws blotting out the skies easily distracted from fuzzy textures and pop-in.
In XC3 this landscape is Aionios, a ring of land encircling an impassable vortex. There’s no monster beneath your feet and that limits the initial wow factor – no individual area is as conceptually funky as XC2’s swarm of jellyfish, say. Instead, it settles for awesome size and vistas that stretch far beyond the older games (and with better TV and portable performance to boot). While the world is still partitioned with loading between regions, it takes a lot longer to hit those boundaries, with a lot more variety packed within them.
Take one region, Fornis. As dry canyons segue into grassy hills (this game’s answer to XC1’s Gaur Plain) you’re able to turn from the grazing Armus to see the
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