IIRC I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 around the 100-hour mark. I killed the boss, did some perfunctory extra exploration and that was it. There was a lot I didn’t like that about that game (and a lot I did), but the biggest was having the map filled in for me already so there were no fun moments trying to fill in every inch of a map and discovering fun new things along the way. I certainly didn’t spend an entire playing session swimming along the edges of an ocean in XC2 like I did in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 last night. Good times. I just need one more dead body to get Colony 15’s affinity up one star so I was scouring the map for corpses. Luckily there was no one around at 2am to hear me muttering “Here, dead body dead body dead body♪” to myself.
What have I been up to in the 45 hours since my last post on XC3? Oh you know, same old, same old. Play the story a little, explore a LOT, play the story a little. I asked for more stages in an earlier post and so far XC3 has delivered in a big way. We’ve had the jungle, we’ve had the ocean, now a big ol’ snowfield just opened up for me to prance about in. This is the way!
I’ve even shelved Genshin Impact‘s Sumeru update for now. I’ll need it to sustain me when I’m done with Xenoblade and start feeling the need… the need to… uh, what rhymes with “need” and means “explore every pixel of a game world”? Anyway, that.
But it’s not all exploring, I have made some progress with the story. Just a little, not too much. I learned my lesson from XC2 where I beat the last boss too quickly and lost the will to play, so the last boss here is gonna be waiting for me for a long, long time. The world and its timeline are a little unclear right now but evidently the baddie has been hanging out in a movie theater for aeons and aeons. Another 100 hours won’t hurt.
NGL that meat looks hella good, whatever it is.
To gather my thoughts on the story further… we got away with our stupid plan from last time. We finally reached the City we were aiming for and my party found out and easily accepted how humanity was supposed to live all along, i.e. growing up, having kids, getting old and dying, instead of living for 10 years and returning to the “Queen.” Who is a robot btw. The real queens are snoozing elsewhere and my current goal is to go wake them up.
Lessee, what else happened… oh yeah, there was another crazy hare-brained scheme of waltzing into the enemy camp. Lots of shenanigans and a couple of skipped cutscenes later, and Mio has a new body! So we don’t need to worry about her croaking for a while. Turns out Alter Noah is “Noah who made some bad choices in the past” and Alter Mio is “Mio who is suffering from Noah’s bad choices” and somehow present Noah and present Mio are in love because they have always been attracted to each other for aeons and aeons of repeated trial and failure to either kill the big bad (Z) or escape their short lifespans.
Oh they’re definitely expecting you. Y’all ain’t slick.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I hate the kind of romance where people are in love just because they are “soul mates” or their past selves were in love so somehow they also have to be in love. It’s so lazy, and I absolutely don’t see the romantic attraction between Mio and Noah beyond “the story says so.” They’re more like good off-seer buddies than anything else. I’d buy Lanz x Sena before I bought that (actually I quite like Lanz x Sena). But not Eunie x Taion, no matter how much the writers try to force it. That said, the last thing I’m playing Xenoblade 3 for is romance, so as long as they keep the new areas flowing, I’ll overlook the nonsense.
Oh yeah btw, did you shed a tear or two when Mwamba, Cammuravi or Ethel kicked the bucket? Better get a refund on those tears, because they’re all revived later. …What? It says “spoilers” right in the title of this post. All things considered, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a rather optimistic game, which is why my party can keep carrying out stupid plans without getting flattened to a paste. Or, possibly, in other timelines they did get flattened but I happen to be playing the one timeline where everything goes swimmingly. It’s all kind of vague right now, but it should get clearer as I keep playing.
Time’s a-wasting, back into the fray!
