Aspect Analysis: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Padding the Length of a Game

Okay, this game I ended up stopping around the end of chapter six. I ended up getting a few errors and losing some progress, and I ended up just saying screw it. It wasn't a lot of lost progress each time, but I realized I just didn't care anymore at that point. This is going to be a largely negative review if you can't tell from that, but just know I didn't see the actual end of the game, but I did play for about eighty-ninety hours. That said, the reason this isn't a full review isn't so much because I didn't finish the game, it's that I realized most of what I wanted to talk about centered almost entirely around the aspect of why this game is as long as it is. I am going to go way too in detail on this one aspect for it to make it into a full review, yet if I take this out the review would be missing almost the entirety of why I ended up not liking the game. So this is what I'll be doing in place of a full review.

What I am going to say is that the sheer vastness of the game hurts it in a lot of ways. I will say I do think the game is too long, but it's not for the reasons a lot of reviews are saying. It's not because the game can take 100+ hours to complete, it's because a lot of that time is needless padding. So many of the extra unique fights are just there for the sake of it. I don't know if it's because it's been so long since I played through the last two games, but it feels like it opens up so much more much earlier. If you are like me and will take the time to explore and see what the game has to offer, there will be long periods where almost nothing is happening and you find yourself just mindlessly grabbing materials and fighting random enemies until you get back to the main story. And by then you are so vastly over-leveled for the coming plot that the majority of the game will become mindless. Mind you, I didn't go out of my way to grind, I just went exploring which the vastness of the game actively encourages. I was playing on hard, but I still ended up feeling like I was putting in little to no effort. It would be fine if there was at least some kind of interesting things going on, or some actual variety, but all you are doing is fighting and gathering. And quite honestly non-boss fights/Unique in this game are pretty mindless even if you aren't over-leveled.

Then there are a fair number of quests that involve you having to follow someone, and this is usually a very slow process, and many times through areas with either no encounters or encounters low enough level they don't attack you. You can't go ahead because they will stop moving, you just have to go at that rate. The same applies to many quests where you are just following tracks. Then there are the item gather quests which can be turned in from anywhere, but you can only turn them in one at a time. So if you are turning in the same one multiple times, which happens a lot, you are just sitting there holding and releasing A over and over again.

Then there is the bonus XP system which is rewarding you for seeing how long you can drag your nuts across your opponent's dead face. During a chain attack, if the enemy dies during an earlier attack, every attack after in the chain builds up an XP bonus gauge. To make the most out of it, you will sit there launching attack after attack long after the enemy has died. Meaning if you want to get the most out of all the unique bosses, the game incentive you to drag out the confrontation far longer than is needed to win it. This is especially annoying when you realize the Ouroborus orders are long attacks that you will end up sitting through several times over.

And then there is the Hero that gives you the Soul Hacker class. Unique in concept, you get the ability for every unique enemy you defeat rather than mixing and matching other classes' skills and arts. You can change its roll as well, so theoretically Soul Hacker as a class on its own is the most versatile class in the game. Here is the thing, you get this well over halfway into the game, and if you are like me and already cleared a bunch of unique fights, fights you already did will not count. This means you will have to go back and re-fight all the Unique Monsters, or at the very least sit down and look through all the abilities and decide what ones you are going to want to use. Even in a good scenario, this class takes some time to make usable. Re-fighting weak monsters you've already dealt with is not interesting or all that fun to do.

And the actual variety in what you do for quests in this game is practically non-existent. Gather materials, kill enemies, and wander back and forth between points. This game is so heavily padded out with this and pretty much none of the paddings is enjoyable. I will sit down and play a game for 100+ hours and have a blast with it, but that time needs to be doing something interesting or engaging. The sheer volume of excess fluff could have been cut down drastically without taking anything away.

There are things to like about this game, and I understand why people do enjoy it. But such a huge portion of the game I find so uninteresting that the great bits the game does have don't make up for the time I felt was just there for the developers to say 'look at all the shit we managed to cram into this one.