Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s story blindsided me

polygon.com:

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 revels in the soft, the plodding, the unsaid. In previous Xenoblade games, there was always a moment that hooked me, and would propel me through another 40 or 60 hours. Each looked something like a spectacular character entrance, or a climactic battle atop the body of a dead god. Big drama, and big romance. But in Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I felt myself bite the lure in the Maktha Wildwood, amidst the overgrown ruins of a civilization so ancient that its memory was lost a world ago. I remember what was said on that quiet night beneath the stars, near a snuffed out campfire, the silhouette of a castle on the horizon.

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Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is about hope. It is, more explicitly than the previous titles, a revolutionary story. And in a world that comes undone before them, the inhabitants of the eternal land of Aionios find meaning in stillness and in moments of quiet — at campsites and canteens across the continent, on old battlegrounds and repurposed war machines. To pull that tone off, developer Monolith Soft has appropriately reevaluated the depiction of its characters, with dialogue that feels more human than that of its previous games, kenspeckle character designs across its cast, lively cutscene animations, and voice direction that’s worlds apart from even the best moment of Xeno games past.

Aionios is a continent composed of titanic remains, the