It´s been some time that Monolith Soft released the Future Redeemed expansion, to be more specific, the 4th wave DLC of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a game I loved past year, it was my goty tho. Let´s be real, I hate DLC´s and I think they are cancer but I can´t deny that there are some companies out there that make good content as DLC, one of these companies are Monolith Soft, they actually have a good reputation for that because their Dlc stories feel like newest games with all of the content they have, for example, I finished this expansion DLC within 30 hours, there is a lot of content here as past expansion DLC as Torna The Golden Country (Xenoblade Chronicles 2).
It´s a DLC so Future Redeemed looks exactly right as the base Xenoblade Chronicles 3: same combat system, same interface, etc, but there a few differences between this dlc and the base which I´ll elaborate right now.
In this DLC content, everything is related to getting AP, said AP means Affinity Points, you can get these Affinity Points by interacting through the world of the game, like exploring it. There is something I love about Xenoblade, they actually reward you for exploring the world and that´s something I see many open world games won´t even do, but Xenoblade Chronicles does, in past game, you were rewarded with EXP, this time, not only you get EXP but Affinity Points which is great, once you get to a new or secret zone, you will be given EXP + Affinity Points, take into account that exploring the world is not the only way to get Affinity Points, you can get theme through other activities as well live discovering new monsters, doing side quests and so on.
What can you do with these Affinity Points? Once you get them, you can use them to increase your status or getting newest skills, they are like three channels of everything you can upgrade with the affinity points, it´s a lot of stuff you can upgrade so it´s recommendable to do a lot of activities.
One of the best ways to get Affinity Points is by increasing your Community, the Community can be increased by doing saving people who are lost in the world, you can guide them to the colony, then completing their respective side quest, this way you can get a lot of AP, you can get to know their stories and some of the side quests are actually interesting. In Torna The Golden Country, doing sidequest was mandatory if you wanted to follow the main story, but it´s not mandatory in Future Redeemed, it´s up to you if you want to do these side quests, but you´ll get rewarded if you decide to do so.
What about the combat system? I mean, it remains the same but with a few differences, you can do Unity combos now, an unity combos is when you do certain chain of hits like Break>Topple>Launch, once the enemy is launched we can do an Unity attack which does a lot of damage if done right, it´s important to say that levels are not everything, so upgrade your skills by the Affinity Points, sometimes it doesn´t matter if you are on a higher level, if you haven´t upgrades your skills most probably you´ll have a bad time.
Chain Attacks are also back again, they are the same but with few differences, nothing really important tho, just you can see some things clearly now, in the base game the chain attack could be a little confusing if you didn´t have any idea of whathever you were doing.
Besides all of this skills and AP stuff, you can get yourself some equipment like gems, said gems are made by the mix of many materials, they are useful in combat and there are a lot of use to them if you are an attacker, healer or deffender depending on your class, not only gems but you can equip some accessories as well, all of this to increase your status.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Future Redeemed serves as a way to fill some plot holes on the base game and then doing the definitive closure of the franchise, does this mean there won´t be more Xenoblade? No, it means this arc story is done so we won´t see these characters even again and I´m talking about Xenobolade 1, 2 or 3, no more of these games, Xenoblade Chronicles will continue into the future but with newest characters and a new story, so this is the goodbye to the trilogy. The expansion does a cool job because it gives some fanservice moments if you are an old follower of the franchise, but the game doesn´t base entirely on nostalgia or fanservice, it really is a good expansion by itself, at the ending credits, there will be shown all kind of scenes from Xenoblade 1, 2 and 3, it brought good memories to see all of that.
All of the screenshots were taken by me
