So far, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is everything I needed it to be

destructoid.com:

If it wasn’t for the efforts of people like the folks behind Operation Rainfall, a lot of us may have never experienced the original Xenoblade Chronicles. Which, in turn, means we may have never played its sequels. Now there’s a lot of “what ifs” in there, as Nintendo and Monolith Soft could have collectively decided to localize the series at any point: but I’m happy that everything played out the way it has so far. That includes the road that led to Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which could end up becoming my favorite of the series.

[This article contains no major spoilers for the storyline, but you may want to go in completely blind.]

So we can’t talk about much at the moment (I’ll be brief!), but suffice to say I’m really pleased with what I’ve seen so far.

Combat takes a bit to get going (you really need an array of abilities, and even the class-change system to rev things up beyond an auto-attack-fest). The initial landscapes are more pointed, meant to draw you toward story beats. But in the grand scheme of things, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 doesn’t take that long to crescendo into something a lot of JRPG fans will find themselves heavily invested in. As more and more game systems unlock, things get more interesting from a micro and macro standpoint. We’ll talk about that more in the review.

The main thing I wanted to touch on today is the world itself, as the beating heart of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is the cast. You get some backstory on Noah and his crew woven into the game as period cutscene interludes, then meet another faction a few hours into the game: kicking off the crux of the conflict, and adding even more drama into the mix. That faction has their own set of flashbacks, cleverly filling in portions of their personal