Xenoblade Chronicles 3

This is a great game. I loved the huge world to explore, the cast of characters and all their development, the soundtrack, the story, the list probably goes on. Everything is only brought down by 1 singular system: Combat. I have a bunch of little nitpicks everywhere as one usually does when playing a game as large as this (it's only natural), but at the end of the day the combat is the biggest point dragging down the entire experience. The rest of this review will be me complaining about it. (The rest of the game is awesome though.)

First things first are the difficulty settings. I started the game on hard mode and it was alright, things were definitely challenging but it all felt doable. But I couldn't help but feel like everything was a bit... dragged out. Every fight was just taking much longer than it felt it should've. I was not happy to find out how enemies get 50% more HP on hard mode. Battles are already long in this game, so the extra HP to take down would add literal hours onto my playtime by the end. I went down to normal mode around 20 hours into my playthrough and it did feel much nicer. But uh oh next problem-

The battle system in this game is actually quite boring a lot of the time. A majority of the encounters in this game can be beaten without much effort on your part. The battle system in this game basically comes down to micro-managing all the moving parts you have at your disposal, so when you have no need to move anything... what's even the point? So despite switching to normal, I still felt like I was wasting quite a lot of time, but going down to easy seemed quite extreme to me, especially since well... I don't even hate this combat system in concept, there were some genuinely fun and engaging boss battles throughout the entire adventure. Stuff where I actually had to be attentive and work with the flow of the battle, that showed me the potential of what was here. The issue is that like 95% of your battles do not hit anywhere near those highs and they just feel like stuff that gets in your way while exploring or doing some side-quests.

That 95% number sounds a bit high possibly, and I honestly think it is, but that's due to the EXP system and how it impacted my playthrough. Seeing as I really hate the average encounters in the overworld I was relieved once I started doing some side quests and built-up bonus EXP to the point that most foes would no longer automatically start fighting me. Finally I can just explore the game without mindless interruptions. But um, then the bonus EXP kept coming, and then even more came, and then by the time I realised I should stop using it, it was way too late I was well and above basically any foe within my vicinity and now even most bosses were pretty pathetic for a while. Look I know this is partially my fault, but they had a system to solve this literally already in the game. After you beat the game you unlock the ability to level down at rest spots. Why do I need to beat the game first? What. (XC1DE supposedly implemented this properly but as XC3 is my first Xenoblade I cannot verify). Oh still not done complaining about this by the way. The class points you gain are given depending on how close the level of the monster you're fighting is to your level, among probably some other stuff. Sure that makes sense, but what they never ever tell you is that you just straight up cannot unlock new classes if the monsters you're fighting are too low of a level. I kept waiting and waiting for my last classes to unlock and they just never did and I only know thanks to the internet. Hooray...

Definitely more combat stuff I could complain about, and there is other stuff I could complain about in general about this game, but this is getting too long and I'm sounding like a huge hater of this game when I do actually like it (I swear)

Review taken from my Backloggd page.