1/8 Xenoblade 3 Writeup - My second playthrough and the Paid DLC Link to my magnum opus:

Discussion - Xenoblade 3 Titan-sized deep dive Writeup

Hello varis! I'm Christi Junior from the Fediverse, where some of you might already be familiar with my mix of racist and anti-tranny edgy pos...

Despite coming out so much later than the other 9 parts, this represents a continuation of my giant Xenoblade 3 Writeup from last year, essentially being the TRUE epilogue. It will cover both my updated thoughts on the game after now having replayed it, as well as a review of the Paid DLC. Speaking of the DLC, you could of course argue that the TRULY true final part of this giga-writeup is my review of Future Redeemed – but of course, that was written way before I began the work on my actual Xenoblade 3 writeup. Then again, Future Redeemed itself is set over a thousand years before the main Xenoblade 3 story, so you could argue that wonky chronology is thematically fitting. Either way, on Varis I will be uploading my Future Redeemed posts as a separate Vars writeup, since while FR itself might not necessarily be a standalone story, my writeup doesn’t actually demand intense familiarity with all things Xenoblade going into it. Now, I wasn’t actually planning to replay Xenoblade 3 this soon after the game first came out, but as I was working on the writeup, I definitely felt the urge to revisit the game in a more active way. Then it turned out that the game which I had planned to spend much of May and June 2024 on had been ruined by NoA trannylators (NOW they suddenly want to be faithful to the Japanese version- except that Vivian being a Trap and Femboy is still not the same thing as him being a Troon, so not even that excuse holds), which cleared up schedule nicely for a second Xenoblade 3 playthrough. Gameplay Revisited I gotta say, the game did an impressive job keeping me hooked from start to finish, especially considering how I nowadays seem more prone to getting burned out or struggling to maintain interest in long, story-heavy games. And yet Xenoblade 3, despite not even being a new experience (save for the DLC) had me playing for over 200 hours over the course of several months. Despite my gripes, the world is still so amazing and fun to explore, the story is still so gripping and well-written, and the cast of characters so likable and compelling that it becomes a game that you thoroughly enjoy spending time with, and it crafts a world that you can lose yourself in for countless hours. And perhaps most important of all in the case of a second playthrough, the combat system remains spectacularly entertaining and rewarding. That said, my experiences with the battle system were uniformly positive during this playthrough. Replaying Xenoblade 3, I came into the game with a number of questions that I wanted to find the answer to myself, all of them combat-related. For starters, due to naturally being much better at Xenoblade 3 now than when I first started playing the game, I wanted to find out if Chapter 1 on Hard Mode truly was as brutal as I remembered it, or if it was simply my inexperience and lack of knowledge that had been my downfall during the first playthrough. Turns out that no, Hard Mode really IS that bullshit during Chapter 1. A big problem is that both that motherfucking Ropl and Mr. Wild Ride are capable of inflicting you with the damage over time Blaze effect, which is absolutely DEVASTATING at such an early stage of your adventure, when Eunie’s healing is still pitiful. Even when maximizing Lanz’s survivability at the expense of his ability to draw Aggro (and his damage output shouldn’t even be a consideration at this point), he still wasn’t able to win the war of attrition with the Ropl at his normal level even after ALL the sidequests and available exploration has been tackled, meaning that this nigger remains the only Xenoblade story boss that I’ve ever had to actively level grind for. As for Wild Ride, he certainly didn’t feel any easier on my second playthrough – Chapter 1 combat is just too damn restricted for my new knowledge to make any meaningful impact. The one Chapter 1 boss fight that felt way easier was the battle against Team Mio – and only because I went into the battle knowing that I had to prioritize taking out Sena, because of just how much damage she dishes out. As I mentioned in the main writeup, it’s such a crying shame that Chapter 1 forces you to ONLY control your team leader in battle, because simply the ability to control Eunie would almost certainly have enabled me to reliably activate her OP Talent Art before the party bites it, and at that point the battle will pretty much be won – Eunie’s Healing Ring just provides such outstanding, ongoing HP generation that even Blaze will be completely neutralized. Without grinding ahead of the Ropl, as well as refraining from using some of your Bonus EXP at the camp site ahead of the Wild Ride battle, you’d still have some decently challenging fights on your hand, but it would actually feel fair and balanced, while teaching the player invaluable lessons about the importance of switching characters during battle. It’s just SUCH a terrible design choice to restrict the player to going Noah-Only for all the Chapter 1 story bosses, because the AI characters are simply unable to pick up the slack. After Chapter 1 however, my experience, knowledge and skills actually began increasingly paying off, and by Chapter 3, I know for a fact that I was defeating numerous Unique Monsters earlier and at lower levels that I had been capable of during my first playthrough. There were a lot of reasons for this, but a huge one was definitely me actually knowing what I was doing when it came to Chain Attacks, how to extend them as much as possible and how to optimize my damage output. And when I finally became about to Launch enemies the potential for monstrous chain attack damage absolutely skyrocketed, enabling me to defeat a bunch of Unique Monsters that I under normal circumstances had no business beating. Far better utilization of the party’s various Ouroboros forms was also something of a gamechanger, as during my first playthrough I’d only gotten around to taking full control of those transformations during the postgame, which meant that that the CPU party members would frequently be morbin’ out when I didn’t want them to. And the Ouroboros transformation have so many uses, whether it’s giving you access to all sorts of exclusive, extremely useful moves, covering the battlefield in helpful party buffs and enemy debuffs, or just providing you with added longevity if you pull too much aggro. And as I mentioned during the main writeup, the way your characters can have Classes that stand in stark contrast to their Ouroboros form adds so many additional layers to teambuilding and battle tactics. Some of my Unique Monster fights (and yes, my best battles were all against Unique Monsters as opposed to story bosses, more on the reason for that shortly) were almost unbelievably fun and epic, requiring me to use every trick in the book to eventually come out on top: chain attacks, party-wide revives, frequent character switches, all sorts of Ouroboros forms being used for a wide variety of different purposes, the works. As much as I love Xenoblade 2’s combat, by now I’ve pretty much fully come around to considering Xenoblade 3’s battle system to be superior. #Xenoblade3Writeup