Xenoblade Chronicles 3

• Genre: RPG
• Time Played: 154 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Far too long. One of the longest games I've played that did not deserve it's running time.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I didn't dislike the game as a whole, but I'm the length and abundance just wore on me so much that it's hard to say I'm "pleased" at the end of everything.
• Why I played: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just seemed like it would appeal to me far more than the 2nd, I want to say I saw something earlier this year that made me really want to dig into it, maybe the Ouroboros forms and such? It's not quite what I expected.
• Recommend to others: I can't really recommend it unless you think More=Better and just want to stick with one game for awhile. If that's what you like, that this might have greater appeal.

I did like this game it - overall - it's just so hard to overlook how much there is to the game that doesn't need to be here.

Everything is just unnecessarily big or too much, the environment, the amount of areas, the amount of superfluous mechanics, the amount dialog. Everything could have been better scaled back. The amount of time you spend running around these huge environments is just ridiculous, and they're gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but there isn't enough diversity to warrant there being absolutely so much of it. Same for the monsters. It's great seeing so many different monsters of different sizes, but there are so many just everywhere. I avoided the vast majority of wild encounters and still ended up massively over leveled for end game, and I know I could raise the difficulty settings, but damn near all they do is inflate the HP bars of already overinflated enemies. It can take 5+ minutes in a battle to defeat something you out level by a dozen levels that literally does not have enough attack power to wipe out your party. You don't even need to participate in a lot of the combat, you can just let it play out - if you have the time.

Early game that's not so much the case, but later on - it's a little ridiculous, and maybe this isn't the case for someone who ONLY runs story content and isn't as good at optimizing their party, but I found it it very - not engaging, and I feel like the easiest solution to would have just been for there to be less of everything. Smaller world - that still could have been gigantic, because the sheer size of this world is just - It's immense. I don't think there is a game with more area to walk on where you can only walk.

There might be big open world games that have cars and aircraft that have bigger worlds, but this one did not. It had a boat for it's one area that is mostly water with scatter islands, but everywhere else you had to hoof it at excruciatingly slow running speeds. You get some upgrades to your running speed, but the most upgraded running speed feels like it should have been the early game default. At the very least we should have gotten like a 2x speed dash, especially because every single area is just so unnecessarily large and so long. I just don't feel I can convey this without repeating it multiple times.

...and that's exactly how the writers of this game felt too. The game is just so overly verbose, constantly reiterating the same points over and over, making poor attempts to wax poetic that fall flat if not only because if you have to say it so many times, than who are you trying to make a point to? Who are you telling? Who are you trying to convince your story is so deep an emotional? Because I certainly may have thought so if you showed me, but it felt like I was watching a crappy anime adaption of a shonen manga that had unique fighting mechanics, so in the manga they explain everything that's happening - also to give you some dialog to spend on the pages. But they keep all that dialog in the anime adaption where you can better show the movement. "Wow he turns and punched the guy"offsides character says after I watch MC turn and punch a guy.

This is what the story of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was like, to the nth degree, because, just incase I forgot the first three times they told me, they had to tell me again. And there are side quests that tell me, and there are hero quests that tell me, and there is random npc dialog that tells me. Why say what you can in 10 words, when you can in 1000? Were they trying to hit the word count on a term paper?

It's enough. I'm done the game is done. I didn't hate it, but I'm glad it's done. I just wish it were half the length/size in all aspects. And now it's time to play the DLC which has none of the same characters/areas/story/etc and can even be purchased as a stand alone title so I'm going to count it as a different game.