Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Is Being Held Back By The Nintendo Switch
Xenoblade Chronicles has always felt too ambitious for Nintendo platforms. Ever since the first game debuted for the Wii back in 2010, the series’ massive open worlds and bold approach to narrative have been hamstrung by technical limitations. To steal an iconic phrase from Shulk to describe the situation - ‘I’m really feeling it’.
It’s no big surprise. Nintendo’s consoles have always fallen behind the competition in terms of technical achievement, often receiving lacklustre ports fraught with compromise that aren’t worth playing unless you’ve no other option. Yet this rarely translates to first-party efforts, where games expertly crafted to work on the hardware with unrivalled optimisation.
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Of course there are some exceptions with titles like Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity chugging along awkwardly, but for the most part exclusives on the platform run beautifully and look even better. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 sadly belongs with Fire Emblem and Hyrule Warriors, as do all of its predecessors when it comes to uneven visuals and performance. The art design is almost unparalleled, with Monolith Soft clearly opting for scale instead of stability to give players an unrestricted world to explore. But the Nintendo Switch doesn’t feel worthy of it.
While I’m yet to receive the day-one patch ahead of the full review embargo, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 feels like it is pushing the Nintendo Switch as far as it can possibly go without buckling under the weight of what the JRPG is trying to achieve. This game is blurry as fuck, with distant environments often reduced to a fraction of their full majesty as the camera points miles towards the
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