Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts. I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by our first guest to do three episodes. So, Katharine, reintroduce yourself. Hello, everyone. Yeah, I’m Katharine Castle, editor-in-chief of Rock Paper Shotgun. I’m very honored to be a three-time guest on this podcast. Thank you for having me back again. No, of course, we’re glad to have you. I mean, we had to have you because this is a Japanese RPG-focused episode. It’s a subject that I know is close to both of your hearts, but it’s all about Xenoblade Chronicles. So the third game in the series on Nintendo Switch has just dropped, this RPG series from Monolithsoft and Nintendo. And yes, it’s an interesting one in the sense that Matthew Castle likes it, which is not the case with many other Japanese RPGs, or at least, you know, has captured your imagination the way that a few of them have. So yeah, Katharine, we’re delighted to be joined by you again. How are things going on the Rock Paper Shotgun side? Are you enjoying life with a Steam Deck? If anything, I’ve been neglecting my Switch because, yeah, I can just play all my PC games away from the big screen now, which is, yeah, I feel like I need to, I’m due, or rather my Switch is due a lot of love, particularly, yeah, with Xenoblade 3 having just come out. Time to get back to my Switch and, yeah, pop the Steam Deck away for a little bit, but it is very good. I am enjoying it a lot. That’s cool. How’s RPS these days as well? Doing pretty well. I think the lack of games coming out could be better. It’d be nice to have some interesting things to write about, but I think we’re in a kind of quite handy position in that we do write about a lot of indie games as well, which are, they are coming thick and fast. So there is still plenty to write about. That’s maybe misrepresenting the situation, but yeah, I think as many other people are probably failing in games media right now, the lack of big games is, yeah, I wish things would stop getting delayed. Please have something come out at the end of the year, games industry, that would be much appreciated. Hey, you got Gotham Knights and some other stuff I can’t remember. I thought you were going to say Chaos Gate or whatever it’s called. That’s already out, Matthew. You could get that shameless. I don’t cross the streams here, I try and keep them separately. But yeah, what about Symphony of War, Katharine? Is that cross paths with you? That seems like something you’d like. Oh, I don’t know. Which one is that? That’s a Fire Emblemy one that’s out on Steam. Oh, the Fire Emblem. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve put you under intense pressure by asking you about a game I didn’t put in our plan. So I was just making small talk, but it’s not meant to be genuinely perplexing. So it’s all good. But no, I just got Xenocode for that one. It seems particularly Steam Deck friendly. Interesting. Yeah, like the latest in me. I do know the game that you’re talking about now. Yes, sorry. I was getting confused. And I think literally today, there is a game by the Fire Emblem creator out on Steam, which is sort of something like this Vistaria Saga 2, the Sword of Sylvanistra or something. There are too many S’s in the title, basically. So yeah, no, I was getting confused with that, but yes, I have heard very good things about and yes, I do have a code for that. And I have yet to delve into it. Yeah, I’ll be honest. I did mention it thinking this is the sort of thing Katharine will surely know about and I didn’t hope to turn it here across the bars with you. Okay, what’s going great so far, which is good. But yes, this episode is all about Xenoblade Chronicles and to start with Matthew, I want to ask how the devil are you and how are you after playing 140 hours of the third game in this series? Do you get a good hourly rate on that freelance buddy? I mean, I won’t reveal my rate, but it was bad in the end. Entirely self-inflicted, because I chose to play the game as I would a punter, you know, this is a series I really love and, you know, I wanted to do a big thorough playthrough, not just for the sake of the review, but I wanted to enjoy the game as if I would anew, because, you know, if I just rushed through the campaign and then went back and mined it, I think it would be slightly diminished. So yeah, 140 hours. I think that’s probably the most, that is definitely the most I’ve ever played a game for review. But I did finish it, which isn’t true of the one I reviewed Xenoblade 2 for Games Master, and I just couldn’t complete that in time. I just didn’t have time to do it. But yeah, this time did it properly. Yeah, it means a lot of hours of RPG during some quite hot weather in the UK. It’s, I imagine those two things will be tied together forever for you now. It was okay, actually, because I just enjoy little hours of it here and there. And it’s quite a portable friendly game because I kind of chipped away at it on the train and on lunch breaks. And even in like, if I had a spare 10 minutes because of, you know, meeting fell through or something, I was waiting for something I could sort of hop on. It was nice. Yeah, it was a good time, actually, a very happy time, less so when I had to write the review at the end. Sorry, I had a fly in my flat and I just managed to get out that second. But that’s why there was a pause because I was precariously closing the door. Like, I got the fly the fuck out so I couldn’t talk about it as anybody. That’s fine. This has got very chaotic energy, this one. I think it’s because I’ve got a week off and I’m a bit more like, hey, pull up a seat about the podcast than I normally am, rather than like, you know, a solid on it kind of guy. But I want to establish a quick pronunciation ground rule. I’m hearing you’re saying Xeno. Right. I say Xenoblade, but that’s fine. I don’t know what it is. I think it’s, I think, I don’t know. I just wanted to flag that I am going to be saying Xenoblade, Xenasaga and Xenagears. I’m not going to be saying Xenogears. Right. I had another good ground rules question for you, Matthew, which is, I think people are really curious about how much will spoil the series in general or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 specifically on this episode. So how do you see that going? Just so people kind of know as a sort of content warning, as it were. I can’t spoil it because Katharine hasn’t played it. And, you know, unlike the people on the Discord, if I spoil it for Katharine, she’s physically able to give me a dead arm or whatever, you know, where the people on Discord, you know, whatever. But the people in my house, I am scared of. So no, we’ll keep it spoiler free. That makes sense. Relatively spoiler free. I’ll tell you enough to get excited, but not enough to rob you of any excitement. Yeah, I suppose like as a good sort of a sort of good background here, Katharine, like why don’t you talk about your history with this series? And have you had to spend time in another room to avoid having this game spoil for yourself? I sort of had to basically self isolate the last month, you know, not through having COVID or anything, but I’d imagine it’s a very similar kind of situation in that, yes, I’ve basically just had to not be in the same room as Matthew for quite a long time, it feels like. This has a better soundtrack than COVID. That’s a key difference. Yeah, you know, I’ve sort of had to if Matthew’s been playing in the living room, you know, I sort of had to like, you know, he’ll shut the door, I’ll have to sort of knock to make sure that I’m not kind of walking into some kind of like massive spoiler zone. I think like a couple of times when Matthew’s just kind of been like noodling around the map, like, you know, I have seen snippets of it here and there just kind of, you know, fairly innocuous kind of biffing monsters on an inner field sort of thing. But yeah, there have been a couple of times where, yeah, sort of Matthew has literally asked me to close my eyes so that I don’t see names on a map, maybe, I don’t really know. But I mean, it was a similar thing when Matthew reviewed Xenoblade Chronicles 2, like, it was very similar. But yeah, I just sort of had to go and entertain myself for several weeks before I came out. So yeah, I’m sort of used to it, but I am very much looking forward to actually finding them. Seasoned review Widow. Yeah, so what about your own sort of personal connection to Xenoblade, Katharine? Have you always just followed them in the, I guess, played them in the wake of Matthew reviewing these sequels or like, I guess, did you come to the series sort of like, I suppose I can explain the origins of you coming to the series, essentially, like, did the Wii original, did you kind of like pick that up at the time? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’ve been with the series since the start, really. Not really sure exactly why it caught my attention. I was very aware at the time that I think whether it was through games magazines or websites or whatever it was, I was very aware, obviously, of the Operation Rainfall campaign that sort of because these this game released in Japan in 2010 came to Europe a year later in 2011. But like, there was just no US release on on on schedule for it. And I think Americans were, you know, they they well, yeah, they basically kicked off an entire fan campaign to get Nintendo to release that The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower, which were all three quite big, or it felt at the time, big, you know, JRPGs. But yeah, were were scheduled to release in Europe, but not in America for reasons, I guess. I don’t know. So I was aware of that. And I think it certainly fed into my curiosity of Xenoblade Chronicles. It’s like, you know, what is this game that is everyone’s kicking off about? But I think, you know, it just sort of got crazy reviews at the time. It just sort of. So yeah, I just because I was sort of into Final Fantasy and other JRPGs around that sort of era. Yeah, I just kind of I bought it, played it at a time, absolutely loved it. Because I think this was sort of the year either sort of around the same time as Skyward Sword, but maybe sort of slightly before, but sort of right at the end of the sort of Wii era lifespan, and it just like it just felt, you know, I think together with that and Skyward Sword a couple of, you know, a couple of months later, I think at the time, just like, oh, yes, finally, the Wii is no longer like a bit of a laughing stock. Like it has, you know, it really felt like a kind of crowning achievement for the Wii. And you know, something to like be proud of as a Wii owner. And it’s like, yes, this is this is great. Yeah, I just really fell in love with the story. The music was absolutely amazing and still is, you know, I think like that that really, you know, I would say now that I mean, until Breath of the Wild came along, that the original Xenoblade Chronicles was probably my favourite game of all time, I think, you know, kind of like at that point. It’s yeah, it’s definitely like, you know, I think Breath of the World would now be, I would say that’s now my favourite game ever. But Xenoblade is, yeah, pretty, pretty close second. So yeah, I really dig it. Yeah, enormously significant. Okay, great. Well, how are we going to do this episode is we’ve got basically like a section where we’re going to talk about the origins of the game, the series and also a bit about what makes a Xenoblade game. We’ve got the old kind of like classic thing of taking Iwata-as and pretending it’s our own research as we kind of like retell the sort of origins of the games. It’s not a shame in it. And the Iwata-as, well they are universally excellent but these ones I found them like so insightful about the granular sort of like process of how this game came to be and the sort of how the scope of it sort of happened. That’s some pretty interesting stuff. But I suppose after that we’re going to dive into, well Matthew has a really fun sounding game, which just says in our show notes, will lead into a little game for Samuel and Katharine to play Xenoblade Crafting Ingredient on 90s drug slang. Now I’m excited, I know the listeners are excited. That’s going to be one minute of the podcast, I just want to give people a heads up. Not to over egg it then. And then section 2 will be like a brisk overview of the series, so all four games, the three kind of core games and then Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I’ve heard Matthew talk a bit about before but I’m definitely excited to hear Katharine talk about too. And that’s when you’ll get the bulk of our Xenoblade Chronicles 3 chatter. So I suppose to talk about the origins of this game and Monolithsoft as more widely. So my understanding is that this is basically some Xsquaresoft veterans who spun off to form their own company, hired a lot of new people to shuttle out this series Xenosaga and not quite being ready to kind of like be up to the task of making a great Japanese RPG then for whatever reason ends up being acquired by Nintendo in 2007 makes this game Disaster Day of Crisis which is a somewhat throwaway kind of like cinematic sort of like very silly cinematic action game we’ve discussed previously but then this kind of feels like the big thing they build up to but I suppose like that’s kind of zooming through it quite quickly the first of all to start with I suppose Katharine like who is Tetsuya Takahashi and what does he represent across the course of Japanese RPG history to you? The whole formation of Monolithsoft is quite sort of strange in that yeah he sort of this This figure who was quite instrumental in a lot of the early Square RPGs sort of took such a kind of key role in I think the making of Final Fantasy VI that sort of Square came to him. And I think his then wife, you know, they sort of formed this kind of like super pair of like just game designers, storytellers to more or less, you know, set down the concept for Final Fantasy VII at the time. And, you know, it was deemed too dark, looking at what Final Fantasy VII became. I mean, it was still pretty dark by Final Fantasy standards. But yeah, it’s sort of that sort of concept was rejected. But, you know, they then, that then became the basis for a game called Xenogears instead. And, you know, if obviously Final Fantasy VII went on to do its thing. But yeah, sort of he’s this figure that sort of probably because Square were, you know, not funding these, you know, I think after the completion of Xenogears, weren’t funding these sort of smaller projects. I think, you know, they were funneling just money into, I think, you know, obviously their mainline Final Fantasy games, but also their burgeoning slash failing or about to fail film business. This was around the time that they made that classic movie, Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, that bombed horribly. And, you know, I think he was just sort of frustrated with kind of the way things were convinced a bunch of his other mates to kind of go off and form a different company with him. So he could sort of do his own thing. It was with Namco money. They’re sort of a Namco subsidiary, weirdly. This is before Namco become Namco Bandai. So they do start working with Nintendo in that period. Yeah, Batmokytas. You know, they’re making Namco games for GameCube, basically. And while they’re there, they start making Xeno Saga, which is intended to be this six part JRPG epic. Not a direct continuation of Xenoguiz, obviously that’s Square’s game, but kind of operating in the same ballpark, dealing with a lot of the themes. That’s really what the sort of Xeno bit of these game titles is. The connective tissue is more the sort of philosophies and the grander ideas rather than they are all part of a coherent universe. But over the course of making the first three, like this series doesn’t really explode and they end up kind of having to hurriedly wrap up Xeno Saga in part three. I would say the history of Takahashi, just to zoom out a little bit, is quite weird for us in the UK in that a lot of his big formative games weren’t released here. I think we only ever had like one Xeno Saga actually came out here. I think it was like number two. Yeah, with a DVD that gave you a recap of the first one and I, Matthew, I watched that DVD. But like, but like, but you know, Xenoguise is, you know, often appears in the list of like the greatest RPGs of all time, but I don’t know if it has a huge, huge rep here. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose like a larger point, Matthew, I don’t want to step on your toes, so I think it’s a really good one is that kind of good dialing back in further. Xenoguise is a game that is famously unfinished, that essentially in its, I think its second disc is basically the story is told, you know, through text, essentially. And like, it’s not, they don’t, they lack the, you know, resources or time to fully tell that story. So what do you think is the sort of wider story of his career here? If you want a really neat narrative, you have a man who has an incredible vision for games, a really clear idea of what he wants to do, and he’s constantly stuck with partners who basically don’t want to see through those ideas or are working to such fixed budgets or time scales that they can never be delivered. So yes, you know, Xenoguiz, you have Disc 2, which is famously very sort of dialogue driven. And then when you get to Xenosauga, you have a six part series that basically the last four entries get crammed into three. And what happens when he goes to Nintendo, not to jump too far ahead into that stuff, is that they finally have a partner that wants to see his through his ideas. And there’s a very, like sounds like a very important moment when they start to cut Xenoblade Chronicles and it’s Nintendo that says, well, no, you know, we like the whole vision for this. We have to see this through. And that’s why it has quite a long sort of gestation period to become made. But, you know, I don’t want to say it’s as simple as like Nintendo, get him and give him the space. I think also the projects he works on with the Xenoblade series is a little simpler in scope in some ways. You know, like, Xenisaga is this very sort of naughty piece of work full of philosophy and theology and like mad scientific theory and, you know, it is a chewy, quite hard text. And a lot of that gets dulled back in Xenoblade Chronicles. So I think, you know, I think they’re in a better place to kind of execute and deliver that. But definitely, you know, you get the impression that he is now making the games as they should be and has he as he imagines them. Sort of like some really good insight that came out of one of the Iwata Rass, which covers the the 3D version of Xenoblade Chronicles is him at Square Enix and how he felt about all the Squaresoft and how he felt things were going. So to him, he basically thinks there needs to be a permanent, sorry, a perfect harmony between game systems and storytelling in Japanese RPGs. So if you imagine them on a graph, it’s basically a diagonal line. And he felt that Square Enix was moving towards the story side of things more than the game system side of things. So I was quite surprised to see that level of honesty, actually, because, you know, as someone who works in PR now, I would put in a document somewhere, don’t slag off other devs. But it was like, yeah. And he also in Xenossaga made entries which had, you know, 30 hours of cutscenes in them. You know, he himself was very guilty of this. Yeah. And what’s really interesting about reading those interviews with Uata is that you can track how he changes as a creator over time. So he was renowned as quite a scary and cold figure or like a bit adrift. Maybe cold is the wrong word, but definitely scary, that is the word that is used. And you get the sense that he picked this up from the slightly unknowable quality of his managers at Square, including Sakaguchi, that they were kind of like people you had to study from, study from, from afar, essentially, rather than getting that close knit interaction with them. But then it sort of suggested that by the time you get to the start of the the development of Xenoblade, that he has changed into a much more collaborative figure who will walk up to people and share ideas and be much more like talking to individual dev teams all the time. So it seems like he just softens a little bit with age, maybe. Yeah, really interesting, though. If you read around the studio, and some of this stuff is quite hard to pinpoint where it comes from, but they have this reputation as being quite well managed in terms of like not crazy into crunch, like very fixed working hours. Apparently it’s a very well behaved job that also something they really value is kind of training up juniors. You know, he says in several interviews, several Isawata Art interviews, that there are points where he worries it’s becoming too top heavy with like senior people and old people and you almost get the impression that he doesn’t want it to just become what he had at Square again. And so he deliberately goes out of his way to kind of maybe work with some like rougher diamonds, which is, which is, you know, a very cool and admirable thing. But like I say, some of that is hard to work out where that comes from. Yeah, and it’s certainly reading between the lines on those interviews seems to trip them up with Xenosauga when they don’t quite feel like they’ve got, I think that they say that he says in the interview that he they only like had the graphics engine ready in the last six months of development of the first game or something like that. So it was chaotic and they didn’t feel they were quite ready for it. In fact, I think what he says is that at that stage, he knew that the studio in that form could not make the masterpiece that he saw in his head as being that this is the game that our studio exists for essentially. So that takes longer and comes along later. Katharine, I want to ask you a bit about Monolith Soft before Xenoblade. So, Baton Kytos, Disaster Day of Crisis. Like I suppose, what’s your history with those games and do you think they were a natural fit for Nintendo when they were acquired in 2007 or a bit of a strange one? I would say quite a strange one. I mean, I haven’t played Disaster Day of Crisis, but I did play Baton Kytos. I actually went through three copies of that game because I encountered two like actual game breaking bugs in the disc and I was that invested in it that I bought it three times to try and get to the end. Were those every copy of it sold in the UK? Probably, yes, I would imagine. That’s one way of shifting more copies. Yeah, just make it terribly buggy so that people have to buy more copies to get through it. But yeah, so I played Baton Kytos at the time, really liked it. It was a very strange JRPG. It has a card-based battle system. I was refreshing my memory about how it worked and it is bonkers. Like, you have a dedicated attack and defensive turns. There’s a timer, so you have to like, it’s really kind of quick fire, kind of like decision making on what card you want to play. There’s elemental systems at work that you can’t play two cars of the opposite effect because they’ll cancel each other out. What was the rotting fruit card thing? Everything is basically a card, including like all your items. But it had this mad system where things would age over time, particularly kind of food and healing item cards. They, berries would rot, milk would sour, you know, you’d either have to just throw them away or, you know, some super rare cards you could only get by either, you know, combining certain things at a certain like point in time, you know, that they’d aged so much that you could combine them into something else. Yeah, it’s like absolutely bonkers. But like, I think it that kind of level of detail also speaks, I think, to just the level of, you know, there is so it’s stuffed, absolutely stuffed with effects, details, you know, the world that it has is so lush. And I sort of look looking back on it, I can barely believe that it was a GameCube game. It looks so much more advanced than that. Yeah, got like loads of sort of graphical effects going on in the map and the overworld and stuff. Considering that Takahashi wasn’t really involved in this, I think, you know, he was busy making Xenasaga at the time. When you actually look at look at it and look back at it, there is a surprising amount of kind of Xenoblade DNA to be found there. Like, you know, the game takes place on a series of floating islands that you have to sail between. There’s a giant mythical whale, you know, not unlike the titans that you would go on to see in Xenoblade. Yeah, it’s sort of there’s this there’s even like one of the islands that you visit. It’s sort of it’s it’s sort of like an illusion type world that throws together all sorts of sort of different visual styles. There’s like a kind of caked land up. There’s a picture book thing, you know, it’s sort of probably reading a little bit too much into it, but it did sort of remind me of how Xenoblade 2, all the different blade designs, you know, they’re all made by different artists. But, you know, even though there are so many different things happening and things looking different, it all manages to sort of cohere into a, you know, a kind of unified whole in a sense. For all those similarities, it is still like a very a JRPG of its time. It sort of looks and feels very much like like Chrono Cross and kind of Final Fantasy X. It’s that kind of 3D character models on 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. You know, a lot of the environments are only a couple of screens big, you know, most of the villages and towns are three or four screens. Quite a, you know, a much smaller prospect, I would say, than what Xenoblade would go on to become. As I say, I didn’t sort of really play Disaster Day of Crisis at the time, but… Disaster was a weird one because it feels like, basically, Nintendo got them in to do some, like, graphics. Like, the idea was it was going to be like a big cinematic action game, and it is a cinematic action game, and was going to show what the Wii could do sort of visually, which is a bit of a cruel task to set someone, because it’s just not like you can do masses. It also had kind of masses of motion controls in it as well. It was one of those kind of, like, really big motion control games. I think by the time it came out, I think, was it 2008, everyone had sort of fallen out of love with motion control. So it sort of felt a bit old hat, even at that point. I reviewed Wii music and Alex Dale was reviewing Disaster Day of Crisis sitting next to me. I can remember it was a really weird review session because he was playing this semi-serious disaster game where a man’s running around the city, which is basically being inundated with, like, every natural disaster imaginable. It’s like tornadoes, earthquakes. I think a volcano goes off, it’s really dumb. And I was there, parping away like my grandfather’s clock or whatever on Wii music. And just a very jarring experience for both of us. That’s funny. So do you think, Matthew, there’s anything from Disaster that filters down into Xenoblade or is it just a completely different track thereon? Like, you know, the director of, well, Xenoblade has quite a few directors, it’s a bit confusing, but this guy, Ko Kojima, is like quite a key figure. I think he worked on it. So, you know, it’s definitely like a lot of people who’d go on to work on this game or working there, but you did get the sense that there were times where the company was doing sort of work for hire or work that they’d been set by their, you know, new owners while they were probably brewing up like what their main game was going to be. Because, you know, alongside Xenoblade, like they are doing other stuff. There’s like a Dragon Ball RPG they do for Bandai Namco. They do some of the Super Robot Tizen RPGs for DS. There’s a Japanese only RPG called Soma Bringer, which is actually quite sad that that’s not out over here. I’ve not played it, but that has got Takahashi design on it. It’s meant to be more of an action RPG, kind of his take on sort of Diablo type or Diablo type thing. So yeah, that never made it over here. So, you know, they are busy, but you know, I feel like particularly with this group of people, whether rightly or wrongly, people are waiting for Takahashi to do something. You know, like he is the sort of the, when he’s involved, it is like the main event. Yeah, Xenoblade 1 and 2 for DS is another thing that happened around that time too. So yeah, very productive studio. So, all right, let’s move on to the creation of Xenoblade itself, the model. All right. So, it all seems to start here. Basically Disaster Day of Christ development is still spinning on, but there is essentially the first discussion about laying the groundwork for the next project that the studio would work on. And what essentially happened was, and I am kind of recording it from my notes here, is that Takahashi had the idea of these two gods that were fighting, and then, or these Titans, rather, and then essentially these vast lands where people would live were built around the Titans, and the different sort of like weather and sort of like identities of the locations were shaped by where they were relative to their location to these like frozen giants. So if you’re in the shadow, it’s really kind of icy down there, for example, but this was kind of used as the basis for a surprisingly large amount of pitching this game, conceiving this game. Do you want to pick it up from there, Matthew? Yeah, so he comes back sort of, he apparently has this idea on like a bus or a train, comes back to the studio, starts telling people about it, and then they were like, oh yeah, this sounds great. Everyone keeps saying how energized they are by the idea. And yeah, he sends out one of his other colleagues to like get a load of model making stuff and they build like a physical model to start kind of building the game out from there. This coincides with Nintendo coming to them for like, well, what next after the disaster death crisis? And they have this sort of like early idea, which sort of instantly captures the imagination. This really is the thing. You should read this interview. It’s absolutely brilliant. But everyone in it has a moment where they say, oh, when the idea was pitched to me, I was instantly like into it. You know, like I really love the idea of this world, exploring a world set on the bodies of these two giants. You know, that just captured my sort of sense of imagination and sense of adventure, which I think is quite a key word for the Xenoblade series. Yeah. And then they start working this up. He works with an anime writer. He gets like an anime writer in to sort of work alongside him. I think this is quite an interesting thing. Like, considering that the big criticism of his other games is that as, as, as like naughty and clever and highbrow as they are, they could also be too much so of all of those things. You know, they were just a bit of a slog. Simon Parkin reviewed Xenia Saga 2 and 3, definitely, if you’re a gamer. And his reviews are, they’re really, they’re really great, actually. The way he kind of like unpicks how, how much, like they’re just too much work to kind of get into. And you get this idea that, you know, working with this sort of anime writer, they get a bit more punch. And then the script also then goes through Nintendo, who edit it down. And really, I think, why things start kind of clicking into place for Monolithsoft now than before is just that they have not just a partner who can see his vision through, but a partner who can kind of edit him and tell him where it’s going a bit overboard and where he’s losing the thread a bit. And I would say that’s an incredibly important part of all of these games. One of the things I love particularly about 1, 2 and 3 less so X is that I find the stories are really complete and coherent in a way that often JRPGs, I think, can go a bit galaxy brain. I always think of them as they’re the opposite of Nomura stories. You know, when you play Kingdom Hearts or you see what happens at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake and it’s just incomprehensible bullshit unless you know you’ve read like all these extra texts or whatever. These are the exact opposite even to the degree that you don’t need to have played the other games in Xenoblade to enjoy it, you know, they’re very self contained. I think it’s one of the great successes of this series is that it kind of brings it all in, but it’s still harnessing like the intelligence of the guy. It’s like the best version of Takahashi, I would say. Yeah, the other key thing I got from the What to Ask Matthew is that Yuri Hattori essentially functions Nintendo Planner comes in and basically functions as the editor of the scenario and ask these searching questions about the plotting and certain things being incoherent and essentially polishing it up. And I think that a lot of what you’re saying about how that all clicks together comes from her influence based on that interview. It’s really interesting. So I suppose from there, the other interesting thing is that the… So Ko Kojima tells a story about how they were asked by Nintendo to essentially create one near complete level of the game in order to properly sell the pitch. And they found that really stressful because they had always worked on the basis of set the scope first and very slowly build everything up as you go. But they did actually eventually like this way of working, but it kind of forced them to change the way they worked in order to appease Nintendo. So I suppose from there, let’s talk about the games themselves. So Katharine, what do you think are the core ingredients of Xenoblade? What has to exist for it to earn that name? And I suppose like, what is it as a Japanese RPG, you know, to play essentially? I’m probably going to have a slightly cop-out answer here, because they are so different. Trying to find the common threads between all of them is actually kind of surprisingly hard. I mean, I think the main bit of connective tissue is that they all have these vast worlds. That sense of scale and scope is certainly like one of the key ingredients. Not just in that these aren’t huge environments, they take place on the back of huge creatures in various shapes and forms. I think one other thing I always wanted to throw into the mix in terms of a couple of other things in terms of like, I think when it has this, it is Xenoblade is like the real time action system, which is very like MMO-y in terms of like you auto attack, and then you’re managing a hot bar of arts that I think is very, you know, I’m not a big MMO guy myself, but I know that that is basically what World of Warcraft. What’s kind of interesting about the battle system is that I don’t think that comes as much from Takahashi. Like in the interviews, the people who tend to talk about that are the directors, and I almost get the impression that Takahashi is the executive director, kind of in charge of the overall scope, particularly the story, the themes, the characters. And then he almost has like a sort of mechanic squad underneath him, which is headed up by this Kojima. And the other guy’s name I’ve forgotten, he’s from Nintendo. I mean, hilariously, the Nintendo guy is a huge Takahashi fanboy. There’s stuff in those interviews where he’s saying to like the other Nintendo people who come into the project, sort of like, this is the guy, you know, this is like Mr. Senegiz. I can’t believe I get to work with this guy. This is unbelievable. And she, you know, she’s like, well, I know he must be a big deal because this guy was excited. And the other thing, and I think you mentioned it earlier when you talked about trying to find that balance between story and gameplay. And again, this is a little bit nebulous, but I think these games do an amazing job of tying like big mechanical breakthroughs or developments to story developments. You know, it’s very, very good at like this big dramatic thing has happened in the story and there’s a tangible change to the combat system or it’s unlocked a new level of the sword or I’ve got an innate power I didn’t know I had before. And that may sound pretty standard, but they are especially good at it so that everything kind of hits at once. You know, there’s a lot of, oh no, I’m about to get fucked in a boss fight in a boss fight and then, you know, the character will awaken in the cut scene and then you get to have like five minutes of unleashing some amazing new power in the fight. He’s very good at sort of matching those two things. Yeah. So just to correct myself slightly Matthews, there’s Genki Yokota, who is the most recent producer on the games from the Nintendo side. And then there’s Hitoshi Yamagami as well from Nintendo. Yeah, so yeah, Yamagami thinks like the supervising guy from Nintendo, but it must be the other Yokota guy who’s the other sort of brain. He’s in the most recent Aster developer thing from the Nintendo side. So I assume it’s him, but nonetheless, getting in the weeds there of research. Yeah. So I actually did want to ask about this because I have been playing the game this week. So when it comes to the combat, what do you think it is about that that makes it Xenoblade versus other Japanese RPGs? That’s a weird way of phrasing it. But I suppose what I’m saying is when I played it, it’s this mix of real time, quite meaningful interactions between party members seemingly, and also an incorporation of a kind of story mechanic of foresight to essentially like sort of shape the combat system a little bit too. And it feels like maybe it lives adjacent to Final Fantasy XII, but I suppose from that combat side, maybe start with you, Katharine, what do you think the DNA of the series is? I do still feel it’s quite different to other RPGs out there. It was different at the time. And I don’t feel like many other RPGs have sort of tried to ape it since. I mean, in the first, in the first Xenoblade, yeah, there’s this sort of really engaging mix of you can play as kind of any party member, which really changes up kind of, you know, how you play, how you approach battles. I always quite liked playing as Shulk, which is the main, the main guy, maybe a slightly boring choice. But I just really liked the way that his, his entire deal was was based around his positioning. So you know, you’re constantly trying to move around these enormous monsters to, you know, to backslash them, to get them in the side, to, you know, to inflict these status effects depending on, yeah, kind of where you are in relation to everyone else. That that in itself is really engaging because, you know, you’re really sort of concentrating on what’s happening, what everyone else is doing, you know, and then the way that everything interacts together, you know, if someone sort of it falls over, you know, there’s this break topple days system that, you know, you can inflict on enemies, they can also inflict on you. You know, you can just go, you know, if someone’s fallen, you can go and pick them up and encourage them and then you both get a little burst of kind of like encouragement. Your own affinity kind of grows, you know, through battle, there is a lot to take into account and kind of, you know, for ages, I was just, you know, at the time, I was just completely stumped by like, why are all these kind of, you know, prompts coming up to press B? You know, what is that doing? Why are these things being triggered? It did take me a long time to work out what was going on there. But you know, I think just in the thick of it, you’re just like, oh, yeah, you know, kind of like, there are so many things kind of reacting against each other that it just feels really engaging. In X, it’s quite a strange, you know, again, it’s sort of very reactive to what everyone else is doing. It is quite different to the others, to the mainline series. But yeah, it’s just even with the way that you’re sort of swapping out blades, keeping track of elemental attacks and kind of building up these massive combos and then, you know, you’re sort of setting up, setting everything up and then knocking it all down when you sort of initiate a chain attack, kind of pop these elemental bubbles, you know, using the blades that you’ve just sort of been activating to set all that up in the first place. There’s just, yeah, there’s just loads of stuff going on that is just, you know, just files all the right, you know, synapses in my brain to kind of like, I don’t think there’s anything else like it. This is going to sound quite nerdy. One of the things that I do really like about Xenoblade is, as a series, is its huge affinity charts of NPC relationships, it sort of does this kind of mad thing, whereas, you know, I think in a lot of other JRPGs, you know, every town is filled with, you know, hundreds of characters that you sort of, you know, speak to once and then sort of never, never sort of see again. Xenoblade obviously still has that as well. But there’s a surprising number of named characters who are all, when you meet them, they’re all charted and mapped in this sort of separate sort of menu system. And you can see, you know, a lot of the side quests are built around these relationships and these characters. And you can see how their, their friendships, their, their, you know, mortal enemies, you know, chained over time. And that, that I think is, is another sort of key, you know, it really makes the most of its, of everything that is in it, which I don’t think, you know, a lot of other JRPGs. It’s not something I’ve seen in a lot of other JRPGs. It’s like a weird, it’s like weirdly simulated the world in that sense. Like, you know, people have routines and they’re going to be at a certain place at a certain time. Yeah. But it’s so buried in that like affinity menu that, you know, I think it’s there so that you go, I have this very deep bond with this world, this idea of like growing affinity between you and the villages. But at the same time, it’s quite an unusual sort of side feature. It’s not front and centre ever. No, no, it is sort of hidden away. I mean, I sort of spent, you know, particularly with Xenoblade 1, I was fascinated by that chart. The connections that it makes between certain characters, you know, seemingly in kind of completely disparate locations is just incredible. I was really struck. That was one of the things that impressed me most about the first game. There’s almost a hint of madness in some of Takahashi’s thinking. Like with the affinity charts, in Xenoblade 2, it sort of simulates the tides of this cloud sea. So the idea is that the clouds that all the islands float in will go up and down at different points in the day, and that will make some of the land reachable or not based on the time. There’s a super strange mechanic where there’s one character in Xenoblade 2 who, instead of leveling up via traditional means, you have to repeatedly play an 8-bit arcade game to win new components for them. So you have to grind this quite bad game, but I think those are almost the things I got. I think they are part of the key DNA. It’s not a specific feature, but it’s more like what mad thing has happened in this one, like where they sort of lost the plot, but Nintendo has allowed them to see it through. Yeah, but it is sort of quite like that, grinding that particular mini game, I think it is sort of quite atypical of what Xenoblade does in terms of, you know, sort of speaking of grinding in that, you know, these are huge JRPGs where I wouldn’t say that you really do need to grind. Like, you know, you get XP for, it encourages exploration, you know, every time you hit a landmark or you discover a new area, you know, you get this great big wadge of XP, which, you know, other JRPGs just kind of don’t do. So it’s sort of constantly pushing you to kind of like, you know, find these strange nooks and crannies in the map, just, you know, to level yourself up, as well as, as well as obviously fighting the monsters. But I think because there’s this sort of double whammy of just XP kind of pouring in from everywhere, it is a game that doesn’t, you know, it is very kind of, I feel respectful of your time. Yeah, it doesn’t really kind of ask you to, to even though, yeah, they are 150 hours, you can spend upwards of 150 to 200 hours playing them, which maybe sounds as contradictory. But yeah, it never asks you to grind in the same way that other JRPGs do. I think a really key thing that emerges from that, from those interviews is that, Matthew, you alluded to earlier, but when it came down to hitting the projected deadline for the game and them having to decide between cutting the scope of it or keeping the scope of it, they were encouraged to keep the scope and that, it seems like in turn, has influenced the DNA of the series permanently in that nothing is off limits in that respect, do you mean that’s fair? Yeah, absolutely. When we talk about the individual games later, there’s some really quite mad, very, very unusual choices in these games that I like. Okay, cool, so yeah, I think that the success of this game internationally did surprise the first game did surprise the developers, so I think that it’s like not necessarily a it’s not a rare example of a success story in the recent Japanese RPG history, but it’s certainly like probably the most notable success out of the out of the recent kind of like crop of newer series that popped up. Matthew, this is where we’re going to play your little game. So should we should we get to that? So one of the things I was going to say that is part of the DNA of this game is that it has a big collecting system in all of the games. There’s something called a collect-a-pedia, which is like in Xenoblade 1 where you kind of collect these little glints of light off the ground and they are random objects that you then sort of sort of stamp almost like stamp collecting and then you get prizes for collecting them and there’s variations of this across the series but what has always made me laugh is that I think the names of the collectibles are very sort of evocative, very sort of suggestive and I’ve often joked that I think they sound like drug terminology and so I wanted to test this out by seeing if you could work out what was a Xenoblade collectible and what was a piece of drug slang. I say 90s drug slang. I actually took these from an official DEA document that listed like all this drug slang. Amazing. So the FBI are watching you now then. Yeah. So this is DEA versus Xenoblade slang quiz. Amazing. This is very much like my Destiny Exotical Craft Bear Quiz. I’ll be interested to see. Maybe you’ll see right through it and my theory will be disproved. So, okay, so number one, dance apple. Is that who’s guessing me or Katharine? Well, Katharine probably knows some of these so I’ll let you go first, Samuel. All right. Thank you. I think that’s Xenoblade. That is Xenoblade. Yeah. Off to a good start. This could be a disastrous section. Question two, Skag. The next one is Ha Ha Ha. Gonna go with Xenoblade again. I’ll also go with Xenoblade. Oh, yeah, you’re right. Number three, Hummincat. Gonna risk it on drugs. I’m gonna say Xenoblade. I don’t know what drug I thought it was, but my mushrooms maybe. I don’t know. But yeah. Blackbird. I think that’s a drug reference. Yeah, I’m gonna go drug reference. Yeah, that’s drugs. This is difficult because Katharine really knows Xenoblade and you really know drugs. But I don’t really, you know. It’s all just learned from Breaking Bad, you know. Wibbleweed. It’s got Xenoblade all over it. Shit, this is a terrible question. No, I take it back. This should have been the whole podcast. You should have had 200 of them. That would have been great. There’s a few more. Tasty Sausage. Oh, shit. This is how the real game is upsetting Matthew Castle about his own idea. That’s terrible. Whiffle Dust. Sorry, say it again. Whiffle Dust. God, that’s got like Harry Potter energy. I’m gonna guess Xenoblade again. That’s real. That’s a drug. A very whimsical name for a drug. That should have been better. Do you know which drug? No. Well, it’s something that can be, is a powder, I guess. Cocaine, I guess. I don’t know. I’m a very good boy. I don’t really do drugs. Double Yolk. That really does sound like it could be either. I’m gonna go for drug reference there. It’s a drug reference. Secret Turf. Secret Turf. I’m gonna go with Xenoblade for that. Yeah, Xenoblade. But that definitely could have been like a drug basically. Yeah, that’s what I was going for. Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. I got a couple more. Yeah, sure. Neon Grape. Gonna say Xenoblade again. Yes. Rainbow Crystal. Oh, what do you think, Katharine? I think a 50-50 on that one. Yeah, I’m gonna say drug slang. Yeah, drug slang. Ah, Xenoblade. So, I don’t know what I got at the end. I think it was something like 8 out of 10, 7 out of 10. It’s pretty good. Yeah. That was fun. I enjoyed that. What a disastrous segment. All that’s proved is that I don’t know what drugs are like. Well, the fact that I had to Google what are drug names, it would indicate that I’m probably not the best person to be commenting on such things. It would be our podcast if we didn’t debut a segment we were excited about beforehand and then talk about the ways in which it went wrong after the segment aired but live on the podcast so people can listen to us self-critiquing. Okay, I think we should take a quick break there then come back and talk about the games because I did have some other points to discuss here but I think we’ll cover them all in our talking about the games themselves. So take a quick break, come back. Mm-hmm. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to have a brisk series history of Xenoblade Chronicles or Xenoblade Chronicles. We probably should have looked at that beforehand. That’s poor research, isn’t it? So most of the focus is going to go on Xenoblade Chronicles 3 because Matthew’s played a load of it, and we want to hear him talk about this new shiny game that he has dedicated his entire summer to. So excited to do that. But let’s start with Xenoblade Chronicles then, the game that kicks it off. Where to start? Matthew, do you want to set the groundwork, then Katharine, you weigh in with your thoughts on the first game, looking back? As we said, it’s set on the back of these two giant titans, the Bionis and the Mechonis, who have sort of struck each other a sort of death blow and are now sort of frozen in time. We follow kind of the adventures of the people who live on these structures. I would say this is like the most traditional of all of them in that you play a kind of like, you know, generic village boy called Shulk, who is pulled into a much grander adventure when robots who come from the Mechonis fly over and attack his village and rob him of someone very important. I would say what like instantly gripped me about this one is that even though it does feel a little bit meat and potatoes in terms of it’s a revenge quest and you were just making a big trip up this giant to try and kind of basically collect allies and get to the place where you want to have revenge. The kind of like the warmth of the characters, the relatability of the characters, the kind of lore that does sort of expand out from this story. I found all that very, very compelling. I think, you know, they talked a lot about working with this anime writer and him making sure it had this sort of satisfying kind of like a lot of kind of cliffhangers and surprises and twists. I think it’s a really, really well paced game. Maybe a little small feeling now, given that it was this huge mammoth project for them to begin with. Compared to the rest of the series, it maybe does feel, you know, not diminished, but like a much simpler story, you know, much easier to get your head around. But I kind of like the kind of classic sort of, you know, Star Wars-iness of it, I guess. The kind of, you know, farm boy made good, made hero. The one thing that I really liked about the story, as you say, it is sort of a classic revenge story. But I think, you know, whereas other JRPGs might start with something like that, and then, you know, it all kind of balloons out with, I would say that sort of Xenoblade, it never loses sight of that revenge quest. Like that is always a kind of really clear, constant kind of objective in everyone’s minds. Like it’s sort of, other stuff does happen, but it’s all, it is all sort of funnelled through this revenge lens. And as Matthew says, like it is really well paced. There are so many twists and turns in this story that, you know, even 80, you know, 80 hours later, things are still happening in this story to kind of change the situation and sort of, you know, shift the goalposts. So yeah, they really know when to kind of, how to kick it up a notch and to kind of, you know, introduce these other, yeah, kind of, I mean, it does still go pretty galaxy-brain, I would say, but you know, to all the ends. It ends with some like pretty like intergalactic scenery, which I really like. The triad nature of it did seem deliberate as well. I think like, he was maybe suggesting Takahashi that he was pushing back on the Western trends of overpowered heroes who just knew what they were doing all the time, and that maybe like RPGs needed a hero like this again. But yeah, I just, I think the fact that you always know what the stakes are. That’s something I was saying earlier. Like it’s a really coherent adventure. You always know like what you’re doing or where you’re going and why you’re going there. And you meet some really great characters along the way. One of the really great things about this is while you only control one character at a time, you can obviously change party members and each one handles very differently. Like if you’re playing as Sharla, who’s this sort of a medic who sort of shoots people with healing bullets from a massive great sniper rifle, the pace of battle for her and keeping people alive is obviously very different to playing as Shulk, who’s running around doing all these positional attacks like Katharine was saying, you know, or you’ve got like tanks in this game are very important, like drawing aggro and then letting your attacker do all those positional attacks is like basically the heart of what the combat’s about. But I would say that like, there is a lot, you know, it’s a huge game. You can play this for well over a hundred hours if you get into all the side quest stuff. And that is time to kind of like play as other characters and get your head around them. And it’s got a really good, I mean, it’s not very sexy and fortunate, it’s got a really good like character build game. Like there’s loads of different equipment you can give. Like there’s lots of different, you know, body parts and the amount of stuff you can equip is huge. So you can start creating quite different sort of character builds that way. And then you also get this very deep gem system where you craft gems which have various stat boosts. And you can quite sort of change the dynamics of how some of the characters function or draw out certain parts of them. And there’s characters in this game who I definitely dismissed on my first play through. And then by getting into Xenoblade YouTube, you begin hearing people champion, go actually like, this character sucks when they’re controlled by the AI. I’m talking about there’s a character in this called Melia, voiced by Jenna Coleman from Doctor Who. She’s got a very strange system where she sort of summons these sort of elemental orbs which she can then throw out as spells or use the orbs to sort of like buff other people. So it’s a sort of balance of kind of strengthening yourself and knowing like when to use these orbs. But if you start mixing up like the gems with her, you can just do some crazy damage. Like I think there’s actually like a really nice mechanical experimental streak in this, which is also like very, very important for the series going forwards. But I maybe didn’t appreciate that the first time around I would say. Okay, interesting. So really just so much depth to this system that even after you could play it two or three times and miss entire bits of it, if you’re not focusing on the right things necessarily. Yeah, I mean, also like in addition to that, that there is the affinity system does kind of go even deeper than that in that there are each character kind of has, they’re not like classes or jobs as such, but they kind of have three sort of, and eventually five kind of like extra tracks of extra abilities that they can learn. They sort of all kind of fit into these different sort of shapes. And you can plug other characters affinity abilities into those shapes. And sort of everyone can kind of use everyone else’s skills, which is something that just like, yeah, kind of also slightly blew my mind when it happened, because it was just like, oh, you know, it just really feels like this is a party of people who are, you know, not only do they get better as they, you know, their relationships kind of get kind of improved and they kind of get bigger stat bonuses. But yeah, they sort of, you know, they do help and learn each other. I mean, maybe that sort of sounds a little bit kind of, you know, kind of romantic and sort of silly, but it’s sort of, you know, it does feel like they’ve really thought hard about how these, all of these characters interact with each other and yeah, sort of a crazy, crazy deep system to dig into. In terms of like the actual sort of like writing and characterisation side of it, like just because I think that the affinity system on the level in which it relates to the NPCs you meet in the world is supposed to make them seem kind of well rounded. Do you kind of like, just is the writing good enough, Katharine, that it kind of it pulls you into the characters sort of like regardless of the in-game systems? Yeah, I think so. As I say, I think like one of the things that really did strike me at the time and on repeat visits in the various different versions of One that the writing isn’t, it isn’t kind of overly stuffed with, yeah, you know, it doesn’t pull, you know, arguably as an Asaga, but you know, just kind of bombard you with all these kind of mad concepts. It is just kind of a lot of straight talking people kind of just trying to muddle along figuring stuff out. And yeah, it just, just feels like a very relatable cast of characters. Yeah, the writing outside of the party, like the NPC stuff is definitely less livelier in this. Like one of the big complaints about this game is that it has like a huge number of side quests, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of side quests. And they’re not very attractively presented. You know, they’re quite bare bones. You just go and it’s very like static text boxes, you know, which compared to the kind of like electric cut scenes where you have, you know, very, I would say very vivid character voices because they use these, they use British voice actors. And so they don’t sound like any other characters. They don’t sound like your traditional sort of JRPG, sort of American anime actors. It’s got a very, you know, maybe that’s where that sort of slightly down to earth vibe comes from just because I associate that with like nice regional British accents. But they definitely like, I love the amount of side quests in this because basically wherever you are in the world, you’re always chipping away at something. But that’s why I like them is because there’s always something to do rather than what you’re doing isn’t necessarily particularly interesting in those side quests. You know, they’re very bare bones and the evolution of this series, or the thing it most has to improve and does improve as it goes along is improving, like bringing up the quality of all that side stuff so that it’s a bit closer to what you’re doing in the main story. Okay, interesting. Well, I suppose then like from there, weirdly there is no Xenoblade Chronicles X, there is Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U in 2015, I believe, at least in the West. Matthew, set the base for this one and let me know what your sort of feelings are on this. I feel like it’s come up before and you’re mixed on it. Is that right? Yeah, so, you know, I’ll be upfront. This is the one I’ve played the least amount of. I haven’t actually finished it. As much as I roll my eyes at other fans throwing their toys out the pram, like this wasn’t particularly what I wanted from Xenoblade at the time. You know, they’d just given me a JRPG that kind of got me into JRPGs, often never really finding one that I really clicked with. And then you had this, which basically abandons, I would say a lot of the story that made Xenoblade Chronicles 1 really great. And it becomes a lot more about open world exploration. And it is a huge open world, like the pitch of this or the kind of idea that got it spinning in the same way that they built those two models was when they were playing Xenoblade Chronicles 1, they kept thinking to themselves, wouldn’t it be great if this was one world? It wasn’t split into regions with loading between, it was just one big coherent world. And so that’s what they set out to do with this. It’s a huge alien planet called Mira. It’s vast. I think it’s something like 400 kilometers squared. I think it’s like several breath of the worlds big, like a huge, huge space for you to explore. And the pitch of this is, isn’t it exciting and wondrous to explore this open world. And so mechanically certainly very interesting, but story-wise there’s not really a lot there. It’s very systems driven, which I think is then amplified by the fact that it’s science fiction as opposed to the sort of fantasy with a few sciency elements that you get in the rest of the Xenoblade series. It’s quite hard sci-fi. Like this to me feels more like the Takahashi of Xenis Saga, I would say. It’s very abstract alien worlds. It’s giant mechs. He loves a fucking mech. And I would say the other games all have mechs or robot elements to them, but in a kind of quite judicious amount. And I liked them there. Here, like I’m not a big mech guy, as I’ve said before. So I didn’t have that natural affinity or excitement for these, for these scales as they’re called here. So yeah, really with this one, what you have to wrestle with is that it is just a very different game. And I kind of see it outside of the Xenoblade Chronicles series. Like it’s unhelpful in a way that it’s called that. Cause I don’t think it’s, you know, what its values are and why, why, you know, what is good about this doesn’t necessarily fit with the, with the rest. That’s interesting. What about you, Katharine, what was your, your first response to this versus playing the original? So I’ve sort of had, have a slightly traumatic relationship with this game in that I ended up reviewing it for, I think Games Master at the time. And I maybe had less than a week to turn it around, had a minor breakdown at the end before handing the review in. Cause again, like Matthew, I haven’t ever finished this. Even, even after sort of the fact, just I think cause I was, I just, yeah, had to, had to step away. I was, I was sort of trying to, yeah, cram, cram through this, this massive, yeah, it is properly vast X. And I sort of got to the point where, you know, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to finish it, but I had to, had to get to the, to the scales. I had to unlock it. The mechs aren’t at the outset. You have to work reasonably hard to get there. Yeah. And yeah, there, there’s sort of a lot of quests that involve to get your, your skill license, which doesn’t even, you know, it’s not really even unlocking them fully. You have to do even further quests to actually be able to fly. I’ve never flown a scale in Xenoblade Chronicles X. I have just run, you know, run and jumps. And they do do very big jumps, but I’ve never actually kind of fully seen the full potential of this thing. But yeah, because there were sort of so many quests, one of which was a, yeah, collect the magic orbs to, yeah, get a kind of particular number of this item. And I just, I just didn’t know where that item was. I couldn’t figure it out. And I was just, yeah, I had a minor meltdown because at that point it was just, you know, that there weren’t any guides. It was all, you know, I think I eventually sort of did some Google translate on some Japanese web pages from some obscure corner of the internet. And yeah, sort of after that, I just sort of like, say I did eventually get one and they, the skills do, you know, it does open up that world like to an incredible degree. You know, I think on foot X is, you know, the planet of Mira is just enormous. But then when you step into this, yeah, even larger mech, the places that, you know, you once dreamed of going in, you know, say the first Xenoblade, the kind of, you know, the big stone arches, you know, those now have monsters on top of them as well. You’re like, you know, those areas are fully, fully explorable, have stuff to do on them. And so that kind of blew my mind a little bit, but yeah, I just sort of, after sort of that review experience, just had to step away because, yeah, I sort of had just played so much of it in such a short space of time. And sort of to say I had a minor meltdown at the end, so I have to get to it, I have to be able to talk about it. And yeah, I sort of have sort of gone back to it a little bit in the intervening years, but never, you know, never to the extent where I sort of could really remember how it all worked, because it is quite different. But yeah, I think like Matthew, like I was very, you know, when it was first revealed, I was like, the world just looked like, yes, this is exactly what I want. It’s an even bigger, prettier version of what, you know, Xenoblade Chronicles was. I was really up for it. Like, you know, the monsters looked enormous. You know, unlike Matthew, I do quite like mechs. I’ve watched many series of Gundam and other sort of mech anime. So I was really up for the robot side of it. But yeah, in practice, I think that it is a much colder, more clinical kind of game in that, yes, you know, the character that you play, you know, it’s not a predefined character. You create your character when you first boot up the game, Earth is under attack by these sort of like mysterious kind of alien robot force. You leave on this ship, kind of, I think it’s, of all the cities that, from Earth, that managed to kind of get through this alien invasion and basically Earth being destroyed. It is New Los Angeles, you know. I didn’t get the impression that New Los Angeles was on board the ship. I got the impression that they crash land on the planet and then they’re like, what do we do? Let’s build Los Angeles. Which is just such a bad call. Yeah, I thought it was like, they tried to kind of basically lift these cities up, or I don’t know. Oh, right, okay, maybe I got that wrong. I must admit, I would need to check that. I also can’t remember. But yeah, they sort of crash land on this alien planet and a large part of the game is that all the life pods of the actual people have been sort of flung across this planet. And a lot of the characters that you encounter are all a bit like robots. Like their actual consciousness is inside these kind of synth bodies. But the actual bodies, or the actual people that need rescuing are still in these pods out there in the world. And that’s kind of part of, a big part of what the story and what you’re working towards is to rescue these people, to bring them back to the, to the, to new LA. And they’re like, no, please don’t. Let me die in this toxic swamp. Anything but that. Yeah. You know, as I say, you’re not even like playing, not real people, but yeah, it is a much harder sci-fi, as Matthew was saying, start of game. I will say that like, you know, I’m giving it a proper second go now, just because I’m like, oh, my brain’s gone Xenoblade mad. And actually, I think playing it now that there are more traditional Xenoblades, I’m a bit more open to it being good. Because you know, at the time it was like, oh no, there’s never going to be another Xenoblades, it’s this instead. And now you’re like, well, actually, there’s loads of traditional Xenoblades, so it really doesn’t matter. And while I do miss the story, mechanically, like, it may be the deepest of them. Like, weirdly, a lot of a lot of its ideas are in Xenoblade 3. Like a lot of its stuff about character classes and the way it handles side characters. Like this game does have a lot of story, but it’s like buried inside characters, who as you improve your affinity with them, you kind of do big story missions with them. So while the central storyline is kind of like very, it’s just there to sort of hang most of the systems on. I think there are big character beats, which are quite similar to how they handle those characters in 3. So you know, there’s like interesting groundwork being laid for sure. Also the soundtrack, which is a really divisive one. We’ll talk about music when we talk about Xenoblade 2, but you know, they have a set of group of composers who make the soundtrack for the series across 1, 2 and 3. This one is the anime composer Hiroyuki Sawano, who did Attack on Titan, I think is one of the big ones he’s done, and Gundam Unicorn, which when this was announced, he said music by this guy. And I googled him and everyone was like, the Gundam Unicorn soundtrack rocks. And then I got super into that soundtrack. I got like obsessed with it and Katharine bought me it for my birthday. So like, I absolutely love that soundtrack. But when people played this, like the music in Xenoblade 1 was so good. And this was so different. Like a very harder sci-fi edge had a lot like, like rap, rapping kind of lyrics over some of it, which is just such a different vibe that at the time I was like, fuck that, like that is just ghastly. But I think it is actually quite good. And like, like maybe it’s like an album that you want to. But there’s some pretty like epic stuff in this game. So I’m like, I’m actually like, I’m in the middle of a huge reappraisal of Xenoblade X. Right, right. That’s interesting. We’ll have to grill you about this a couple of times more as you get through it. I need to play more. I will very briefly include a little clip of one of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard in a game. Because this game has some like, like, I mean, it’s literally gibberish to me. It’s like someone going, what the fuck is this? It’s awful. So you can expect a clip of that now. And there you go. Wasn’t I bang on the money? Here’s a question then, Matthew. Do you think there’s value in excavating this and putting it on Switch? I would have said no, I will now say yes. It doesn’t have to, because the other thing’s got like a, this is the one with like online features, which are dead now on Switch. And so when you’re playing, it’s constantly offline flashing in the corner, which is just a bit of a bummer that something’s gone wrong. And I can’t speak to them because I haven’t experienced them. But on paper, they’re not dissimilar to like some of the death stranding systems. Kind of interesting, but I would say, yes, let’s get this back for Switch 2. What about you, Katharine, or too much PTSD tied up in this game? I think there is now enough difference. In fact, yeah, I sort of also sort of started it right from the beginning. I sort of did attempt to pick up where my save file was in preparation for this podcast. And I just sort of couldn’t remember enough about it. I thought, no, I need to need to start over right from scratch as traumatic as that’s going to be. But yeah, I think also very similarly, like I would very much like to kind of play this again properly at a more normal rate. Just the little time that I sort of spent with it again. The battle system is very, it is very different, but it is like, again, super reactive. You’re sort of almost waiting for sort of other abilities to trigger between your opponents or you’re sort of setting things up. They’re all kind of colour coded, you know, and sort of when someone sort of shouts something is like, oh, yeah, you know, I’ll follow this up with another attack. And it’s sort of got a very different energy to one, but it is a battle system that, yeah, like Matthew, I do and the game as a whole want to reappraise and, yeah, kind of actually actually get a skeleton fly. That’s the one thing I want to do again in this game. It’s kind of almost perfect that this very strange deep entry was tied to the Wii U. Like, yeah, yeah, it does seem like it belongs to the Wii U, it should never be allowed off. Always that offline message blinking in the corner. Yeah, this is where it lives, it dies here, humanity’s last stand on mirror. That’s amazing. Okay, we move on to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Plus it’s DLC, which I know you two played quite recently. So Matthew, lay the groundwork. Katharine, tell me what you think of it. Xenoblade, Xenoblade Chronicles X, which my hot take is I think it still might still be the best Xenoblade. But we’ll get to that with three. A whole new world instead of set on two giants who have slain one another, it’s set on a series of Titans who live in something called the Cloud Sea. And so the sort of the hook in terms of exploration is that every world is like a giant animal with a different kind of ecosystem. So it’s like a giant sort of whale with like a big grass ecosystem on it. There’s like a desert sort of industrial landscape. There’s a really stunning series of islands which is set on the backs of giant jellyfish. I think conceptually this is the most exciting one. This is the most exciting version of What If people on giant beasts. It also has a much more anime story. It’s about a diver called Rex who gets pulled into this sort of shady scheme to excavate a sword from a sort of crashed military vessel. This sword turns out to be what’s called a blade in this world, which is like a living being who is also a weapon who is bonded to a fighter. So in this game, even though you have three people in the party like you did in Xenoblade 1, they’re all bonded to these blades who kind of switch in and out. So that’s conceptually, you know, combat wise has that kind of clever gameplay story gelling that I talked about earlier in that the game is all about working with these blades battle to battle. But the story is also about the nature of your relationships with these living weapons who have quite tragic rules that dictate them. And a lot of the game is about discovering like the lore of this world and how these blades function and kind of what their whole deal is. So those two things work very nicely together. But it is definitely a lot more like anime and fanservice-y in tone. It’s a bit more cartoony looking. It’s quite hectic. I love the big dramatic swings of this. I think there’s like huge twists throughout, big exciting cast of villains. I love the world. There’s a lot going on in this one. It’s quite hard to summarize and sort of unpick. I would say the general thrust of it is like even more wilder worlds. This really great kind of weapon master relationship which is explored mechanically and narratively and a fucking unbelievably good soundtrack as is one, but this one is I think even better. How about you, Katharine? Yeah, I would definitely agree. Yeah, I think like this just felt very much like after the sort of slight sort of not really even a disappointment, it was just sort of the slight down note of X is like, okay, right, we’re getting back to what we love here. And this sort of felt like very much like a return to what was so great about the first game. Yeah, as Matthew says, kind of shares a lot more of the sort of similar themes and kind of setting. Yeah, I mean, I was just sort of ready for more Xenoblade really at the time. So yeah, sort of just absorbed all of it. The story isn’t quite as clear cut as one. It does sort of go to a lot of places and discusses and interrogates a lot of different themes. Not only just sort of the driver blade relationship, but kind of, you know, that sort of power machinations and immigration and sort of lots of, it tackles a lot. But I think overall, I would say it still kind of has that through line that ties it all together without without it going to Galaxy Brain. I think this one’s even better at the kind of revealing, like hidden layers of power within people in that sense. It is quite anime. But I think, you know, as we were discussing earlier, sort of Monolithsoft have this, yeah, just real knack for making it really exciting. Cutscenes are really good in this. Yeah. Like their choreography and everything, and because they are a bit more, like technologically humble because they’re on like Switch and not next gen, I feel like they do a lot of like in-engine cutscenes and they make just loads of them. It’s like really indulgent, but not like, not in a bad way. It’s just really fun, like how many cool action scenes and reveals there are in this game. Okay, very cool. The other big thing with this, you have the blades that are given to you in the story. You also collect blades from basically a kind of Gashapon system, which this is the big like make or break for this game and like how you get on with this system, because some people see it as there’s all these cool collectible like characters who you can only find if you luck out and crack open a magic egg. Ah, they’re crystals, I think, not eggs. If you’re a completionist, I think this game is hell, because you basically have to play hundreds and hundreds of hours cracking crystals to get these characters. You then have to level up every character, like every blade individually. But if you play it, I think, in the spirit in which it’s intended, which is just a bit more chill, being thankful for the named characters you do unlock and kind of not getting too hung up on it, I think that’s a much better way of appreciating it. I still think this is the biggest one. They’ve said the new one has more content. I think technically, like unlocking everything in this game and levelling it all up is going to take you twice as long as any others in a blade. I mean, Katharine’s brother’s played this for like 400 hours, right? Yeah, like an insane number of hours. I mean, he has sort of admitted that a lot of that is just… Because you do get so many of these kind of generic blades, you can send them off basically on these kind of reconnaissance missions or like these sort of things that happen away from the party, which is a thing that is in other JRPGs, sort of just things ticking over in the background with these expeditions. And I think he has said that he just basically has left his Switch running just idly for hours on end just so that these quests will complete, which I think is a large part of where those 400 hours come from. But yes, and I think when I went back to look at how much I’d played when we went back to doing the DLC, I spent about 150 hours playing the first one. My save file for 2, which is by no means anywhere near 100%, was definitely over 200 hours, I think. Which, yeah, has saved and surprised me. So yeah, my brothers doubled that. Because yeah, you can just spend hours and hours just endlessly doing either these expeditions or just trying to find these collectible blades by feeding crystals into a bin, basically. I mean, it sort of got so bad to a point that they actually introduced a feature. I think they sort of patched it in later where you could skip the kind of the reveal cut scene because it was so long. Oh, that was the worst when you were revealing it. Because every time one of these things hatches, you have to watch them do their weapon animation. And if it isn’t one of the named blades, it’s just this like generic gray man. You end up with basically you have a pocket. You’ve got like a hundred gray men and like three named characters. It’s brutal. Okay. That’s yeah. At least there’s no microtransactions involved. No, no, no. That’d be the entire core feedback loop for a mobile game. Yeah, right. Interesting. So what about the DLC then? How did the DLC kind of expand on this? What did they do with it that maybe they couldn’t do with the previous games, which were on less DLC friendly consoles maybe? It was originally intended as a chapter in the game. It was meant to come between like two of the last chapters. So it’s a chunk of the story related to it. It’s actually a prequel. It’s about some of the villains in it and what their deal is. And you sort of playing as them to basically sort of reveal the tragic backstory, but to behind the people you’re fighting. So I can sort of see how it would have slotted into the main game. It reuses one of the islands from the main game and then has a whole new content of its own called Torna. But that’s the name of DLC Torna Golden Country. It is a standalone game that you can buy it and play it without the main game. In some ways, it’s like the perfect entry point in that it’s like everything you want from Xenoblade. It’s like everything good about Xenoblade 3, but in a kind of 30 hour adventure, it’s like much better behaved. They’ve cut out the unlockable blades thing. So it’s much more like one in that you’ve just got a set party of set characters. They’ve simplified some of the combat, which in Xenoblade 2 is amazing. And there’s some like crazy combo and crazy like damage multipliers you can do, but it never really explains itself that well. Like you maybe have to watch like a YouTube video or two to really get your head around it. It’s a bit of a wonderful 101. This one definitely simplifies it. It takes those lessons on board. It explains the combat much more clearly. Visually, it had a bit of an engine overhaul. Like 2 is if there’s somewhere where it’s a bit flaky, it’s that it looks quite rough on handheld and quite blurry on TV still. It’s not ideal. So yeah, but I would say while it’s like kind of a beautiful nugget of Xenoblade for people to enjoy, it does also hinge on you knowing Xenoblade 2 sort of inside and out, I would say, to actually understand the story. Do you agree, Katharine? What is that? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, as you say, it does feel, yeah, they cut out all the extra kind of blade nonsense. And yeah, I think each character only has sort of two extra blades to their name, you know, rather than like, I think you had three in the original game, or, you know, at least three that you could carry with you. Obviously, you’ve got like, if you say endless pockets of these crystals sort of kicking around and in, yeah, sort of elsewhere. But yeah, kind of it also placed a much kind of greater emphasis on the blade themselves, like you could change, whereas it’s sort of in two, in the base game of two, you know, you just played as the driver. Here, you could sort of switch between both the blade and the driver, which sort of, you know, it had this sort of like forward backward mechanic of, you know, each character would have different skills in play depending on, yeah, whether they were the active attacker or the kind of, you know, behind kind of defending, which was a little bit different. And that felt like it introduced a nice sort of rhythm. And, you know, each time that you could, when you switched over, you know, they sort of would inflict a kind of special status attack, which, you know, again, feeds back into this sort of break top all days and by this point launch system. So, you know, you could really kind of like, yeah, do some really flashy kind of like combo attacks and, you know, really kind of kick up those status effects chains by switching backwards and forwards. It does move at a much faster pace. Like, you know, even though you start at like level, I don’t know, back in the kind of, you know, single digits or even sort of tens right at the start, you get up to level 50, 60 in basically half the time. Like it really sort of speeds through and sort of levels you up pretty fast. But also, at the same time, you know, it still gives you that challenge. You know, it just matches you at every point. And yeah, I think that the landscape that you’re on, even though, yeah, it is just one titan, you do move through like a lot of different landscapes. You know, there is a kind of like, you know, it’s a foresty area. There’s a desert. There’s a mountain. You know, it’s sort of, yeah, still visually looks amazing. It’s got a much jazzier sound to it than the original game. It’s almost a bit like personary. The music in a lot of these games, there’s a real impression. Some of the music is made by like basically a band called Ace. And it sounds like just a band having just an amazing jam session rather than like composed music. And it sounds mad, but there’s tracks in all of these games where you can kind of feel the music. You can like see like someone really banging away on a piano and just like freestyling it. And it just, it’s got such a good vibe to it, man. It’s so good. Oh, that’s cool. Man, you two really, really love these games. I’m obsessed. It’s cool. It’s cool. It’s like this is clearly the right episode to do with the right people. Right then, like because we have the most recent game to discuss, let’s move on to Xenoblade Chronicles 3. So Matthew, talk about this without upsetting Katharine by spoiling too much. So I guess give us a kind of like basic layout, sort of the basic rundown of what the game is and how it differs to the other two main entries. I would actually place this in terms of tone between Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2. I think it’s the word I’d use is like soulful. It’s set in this world where two nations are sort of stuck in this endless war, Keves and Agnes and endlessly fighting. And the kind of sad twist of this world is that their troops are bred in a lab. They’re born as 10 year olds and then they age for 10 years and then they die at 20. So everyone in this world only has a 10 year lifespan. And the idea is you either get killed in the war or you make it to 10 and then you have this sort of ceremony where you ascend and leave your body. So it’s naturally got this much more dour vibe to it. I thought at first it was going to have more of a sci-fi vibe. Not as heavy as Xenoblade X but the fact that it’s kind of like war and giant war machines. It felt like, oh, this is a bit harder than Xenoblade I or Xenoblade II in terms of tone. But actually, one of the things I really like about this game is it finds a softer humanity in that. And it is a bit more melancholy but it doesn’t lose itself completely. And that’s why it’s sort of sitting between the two. It hasn’t got the silliness and the hyperactivity of the Xenoblade II anime stuff. But at the same time, everyone’s a bit more with it and engaged than everyday heroes pulled into Xenoblade I. They are soldiers. They’re not just regular kids. There is a difference there. The only thing that is slightly spoilery, but it’s literally the concept of the game and I don’t think it’s a huge surprise, is that three kids from one army and three kids from another army team up. So in this game, you have a party of six. They are all in play at any one time, which is twice the number of people who are in play in the other games. It means combat is incredibly hectic because you have six people all shouting, yelling their weird British catchphrases, which the Americans seem cooler on, but British reviewers always seems to get you a couple of extra points. I don’t know why that is. They’re like, oh, it’s always just the way teenagers sound like, whoa, I’m having a bleeding great time. Yeah, that’s what’s good. That’s that’s a plus, you know, rather than like, yeah, you’re doing so well. It’s got a really good class system in that everyone has a has a class. But as you go through the game, you meet new characters who can serve as a seventh character in your squad. But you also inherit their class by spending time with them. So you end up with like 20 or so classes to play with. And for me, I mentioned that there was a big class thing in Xenoblade Chronicles X. And what I like about this is I don’t particularly like class systems or I don’t particularly react well to them. I find them a bit overwhelming. I don’t really know where to begin mixing and matching two things. I tend to get something that works, something that I understand and just trying to excel in that role. As a general rule with games. What I like about this is there’s actually only a few elements that you can kind of inherit from other classes and mix together. It’s actually like a very friendly in to customization. It’s kind of not so overwhelming that you’re like, fuck that, I don’t want anything to do with it. But it’s also deep enough that you can start going, well, you know, I want to play as a medic, but I want to kind of bring in a few skills from this sword fighting class or this gunslinger class. And I think it’s very, very well judged. It almost feels like if there’s something in this game which feels like the quote unquote Nintendo difference, it’s that they’ve kind of really tamed the kind of class system and made it very, very accessible and not scary in a way that you will want to get into it and you will lose yourself in it. That’s what really won me over. Like, considering I spent 140 hours of it, I was constantly trying new classes. Like, individually, they all handle very differently, like being an archer or a gunslinger, actually controlling them in battle is very different to controlling a medic or someone with a huge fucking hammer or whatever. And that actually reminded me of Xenoblade 1, where I felt like the different characters were very different. So it really does feel like a kind of mixture of what made the early games great, like mechanically. You know, it’s kind of like the really clear characters and how they handle differently. It’s Xenoblade X’s kind of class system. The general combat flow is much more like Xenoblade 2 in that there’s like some real… there’s even more real time elements to it. Like if you launch an attack just as your sword attacks, you can kind of combo into stuff. So there’s like a level of engagement there. But to be honest, I tried to avoid talking about combat too much in my review because the pleasure of the game is seeing it kind of like introduce you to that and talk you through it. And it does a much better job of that compared to Xenoblade 2, which, like I say, is an amazing combat system that never really explains itself properly. This one here is an amazing combat system that kind of drip feeds it and opens up quite slowly at first. But you, I don’t know, you just really feel like you can fully comprehend it and you can really engage with every element of it. So mechanically I really loved it. And where this one really excelled sort of like structurally is that the side quests are just so much better than they’ve been before. Like you’re walking around this huge land, you’re encountering like other camps of soldiers, they’re called colonies, and you’re sort of liberating them. It’s the kind of thrust of your adventure from, you know, whatever shadowy kind of puppet masters are in charge. And as you liberate them, you kind of go into those colonies and you meet the characters, you sort of learn about their commanders, like what made this colony different to this one, you know, whether they’re dealing with like, you know, there’s like problems in specific regions or sometimes the commanders have like a screw loose or they have a particular like way they want to run things. So they’re all very different. And each one tells like a little self-contained story. So instead of feeling like a couple of towns where people give you a hundred quests, there are maybe like, think of it as like 15 or whatever small towns that you go to and you get like a deeper story in each one. And through that story, you tend to earn a new hero, which in turn gives you a new class and it all just feeds into itself in this really, really satisfying way. Wow, yeah, that sounds very well rounded for a series that has kind of like always been good at being well rounded anyway. The boring take is that it’s kind of, they looked at Xenoblade 2 and kind of cut off the boring elements, the kind of grinding for crystals and also sort of just tutorialized everything a lot better, which is never very sexy, but it really does make a difference, I think. Considering like, I think these games are a lot better mechanically than people give them credit for because the games don’t explain themselves properly. This one, like, you know, maybe it over explains itself, but I just don’t think that can be a criticism when they’ve made that mistake in the past. Like, they’re safe than sorry, I think. Oh, it’s amazing game. Like, the journey you go on, the fact that you have a whole party of six from basically the start and that party doesn’t change. Like, you always have that party with you. Every time you encounter something, you have these six different perspectives. You just have a really good grasp of them. But by the end, you are so, like, embedded with these six people. Where, you know, indefinitely even the other ones, because you can only have three characters at a time. Like, I often feel like certain characters fall by the wayside in RPGs. Or there’s that weird thing where, you know, like in Final Fantasy X where there is a cut scene and then there’s like three party members who are just sort of standing there, not really doing anything, because the story isn’t written for, like, everyone at every time. Here, I actually feel like everyone does have a role to play. It’s more about, like, how is this group of six going to deal with something, which makes it just a lot more like coherent, like the character arcs are a lot sort of smoother throughout. I think if there’s one problem with it is that everyone, so all six party members and all the heroes you meet, like they’ve all got like an individual problem to overcome, which on paper you’re like, oh, amazing, like everyone’s accounted for. But actually the process of like the first half of the game is basically spent collecting everyone. Then the second half of the game is about like dealing with everyone’s individual problem. There were stretches of this where like, if I focused on that stuff too much, it could feel a little bit repetitive, even though the stories were interesting and they were all very different. You know, I could spend 10 hours where basically five characters all had a huge moment of realization one after another. And that got a little bit kind of, that is the risk with the structure they’ve taken. I didn’t talk about that in the review because I felt like it wasn’t like the clearest point to make. Hopefully it’s understandable as I’ve said it there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I kind of get the point you’re going for there. It’s a game where potentially 30 people can have a big cathartic mission in a row. Where you’re like, oh, this is odd. You know, like everyone, everyone gets their shit together. And like by the last few, and like admittedly, I am really mopping them up. You know, a little part of me is kind of like, oh man, it’s kind of mad that everyone, everyone gets their day in the sun. But maybe it’s kind of like too much of a good thing. But that’s like a very petty complaint. I also think the world doesn’t have the obvious Titan hook. Like it is just a landmass. Right, right. Like it’s just a big ring of land, which while really impressive, there’s quite a few planes in this game. There’s quite a few big fields, which like most of them have like something awesome in them to distract you from that. But maybe it’s just that after two games, three games of this, like I’m a little bit… Big fielded out. Yeah, you know, but I love the world. It’s a beautiful world. I love spending time in it, but I never quite got the same wow factor. I would also say the soundtrack amazing, but maybe not Xenoblade 2 tier. That’s obviously down to like personal taste. I think when you really love something and you get like proper mania about it, you can go a bit loopy with the rankings of individual elements like that. Yeah. You also maybe need it in the rear view mirror a bit more before you have like completely solidified your opinions on it versus the rest of the series, you know? I think that’s true. I do. You know, I gave it five stars in my review. Like I really loved it. I felt like, you know, even though I played 140 hours of it, you know, it really held my attention. I think the fact that it does have all these hero arcs means there is something dramatically interesting happening. I don’t know why I complained about it just five minutes ago. It seems churlish now to be like, well, you know, oh, there’s too many arcs, but… We played it all so close together. Yeah, that is the other thing. A question that keeps coming up in the Discord is whether you have to play the others for it. And I would say one of the interesting qualities of this series is that they are completely self-contained scenarios. Each game has a new group of heroes, like a new mythology that it’s dealing with. One and two have a connection that is revealed at the end. I don’t think that’s a spoiler to say. Like, there is… You don’t have to understand… You don’t have to have played either to understand it, but it’s like an extra layer of something. This one, again, has this self-contained, boring nations thing. It appears to be an all-new world. I say it appears, it is an all-new world. There’s definitely, like, more callbacks in this one. For story reasons, it feels like it is visually riffing on both previous games. Like, there are landscapes in this which look like, oh, a bit like that area from 1 and a bit like that area from 2, and you never really know if it’s just doing it as, like, for fun, or if there is a story reason, and I’ll let you discover that for yourselves. There are some very direct references to 1 and 2 in this, which if you haven’t played them you will still enjoy the things that happen. You won’t be like what the fuck’s going on? But if you have played it you’ll have more of a connection to some of the stuff that happens. It’s got a really fans of servicy chunk of end games content in this, which I really, really loved and appreciated. Which kind of fans servicy are we talking here, Matthew? If you’re a fan of Xenoblade, it’s serving you. Some people have beef with Xenoblade 2, because it’s got some notoriously busty character design. It’s pretty, like, it’s not subtle at all. This one is much better than for that, like, the women look like they can sort of function in this world. I mean, really, there’s one character in Xenoblade 2 who’s basically just like just a huge blue pair of breasts. Like, it’s kind of like the model looks like it’s bugged out or something, but it’s not. It’s intentional. The one kind of, you know, bad or I don’t know really what the thinking was between or behind sort of letting because the kind of the unique thing about all of the Blades in Xenoblade 2 is that they’re all designed by various different artists. You know, like Tetsuya Nomura has designed a couple of them, like including one of the main bad guys. But then, yeah, this, you know, other Blades are designed by other, you know, famous anime people or manga artists. And yeah, you’d think that especially maybe, I don’t know whether you would expect more it being a Nintendo game. But yeah, there are some yeah, some very questionable blade designs in 2. There’s a couple of the heroes so maybe a little bit like, but it’s, you know, it’s fine. I forgot the Nomura did character designs in 2, which instantly makes it the best Nomura game. Yes. What an absolute shit take that is. As in, you know, it’s the deliberate troll trolling there from Matthew Castle. Would you like to respond to that, Katharine, or do you think he’s correct? I would say he’s correct to be fair. Oh my God, what a betrayal. Maybe I overestimated how much you like Final Fantasy. No, I’m only joking. Yeah, 3 is, yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I would say definitely the smoothest ride of all of them in terms of just the way it introduces its world, the way it introduces its systems. It’s really, really complete. All the other games have something you probably have to read outside the game to understand something in it. This one isn’t like it’s a really clean Nintendo production. Okay, great. Well, I suppose then, Katharine, for you from the outside looking in, do you have any kind of like reflections on what you’ve read about it? I guess you’re just hoping to get your teeth into it at this point, right? Yeah, I mean, I’ve sort of deliberately not looked at the kind of, yeah, either the kind of the new trailers, the sort of deliberately kind of kept myself away from the interviews. I kind of want to go into it kind of completely fresh and not kind of, you know, I sort of obviously have seen kind of some of the initial things and it’s like, you know, there are there are sort of teasers that, yeah, sort of as Matthew was alluding to earlier, there do seem some quite kind of direct connections between all three of them that I’m, yeah, just sort of keen to explore. But I think, you know, in terms of the it being a single landmass and other kind of, you know, maybe not quite as fantastical as a setting, I do I do sort of think that sort of the way that one and two come, you know, that that connection between them, it does sort of make sense, I think, in the grand scheme of it. You know, if you are sort of following the law from from the very beginning, there is a very good if people do want to brush up on basically the story, there is a very good law video by the Nintendo World Report have done, which I am not ashamed to admit I did I did watch beforehand to refresh my memory. Yeah, it’s very, very clearly kind of covers all of the important ground that might you might want to know about three if you haven’t played the one and two. Mostly just, yeah, just excited to sink my teeth into it. As I say, it’s sort of having having played the TORNA DLC quite recently, sort of been playing, you know, even more so the extra chapter from Xenoblade Chronicles, the definitive edition, which is sort of like a post sort of post story chapter kind of dealing with the aftermath of that game, sort of playing that this week. And yes, even just sort of, yeah, dabbling a little bit in X over the last month. Yeah, just really excited for a new full Xenoblade game. Great stuff. It is wild, but they’ve made all these games in the, you know, they’ve released them in the course of like 10 years. Yeah. You know, they obviously started on Xenoblade earlier than that. They said they basically say 15 years in their interviews. They’ve been working on these games. But that’s like one Final Fantasy game in the same type. And I know, I brought this up in my review. I was a little bit worried framing my review with that actually, because I thought it may sound a bit snooty-doo that you’re being like, hmm, in the time it’s taken them to make one of these, they’ve made all of these, which are arguably better. No, it didn’t come across that way. It came across… It’s almost like the scope of those games is… and the detail they put into them is so vast, they just can’t do the same scope just by the nature of the challenge itself, as opposed to it being like inferior. That’s how it came across to me. There’s a tiny part of these games where Takahashi is basically making the most amazing PS2 games ever. Like now, and that’s how he can do it. Visually, they’re obviously beyond what was available on that platform, but it’s sort of what would happen if a developer got to stay in that space, but working in their genre, and actually the answer is quite amazing things can happen, and you don’t think… When you’re playing these games, you don’t think, oh man, I wish this was like 4K, or I wish these were photorealistic. You think these are really well judged artistically. You know, this game, the characters are almost like cartoon, they’re almost cell shaded in a more photorealistic world, and it’s a really beautiful effect. It’s an absolutely amazing looking game, especially in like the cut scenes and stuff look incredible in this game. Yeah, and I just think maybe we’re barking at the wrong tree. Maybe actually like if you accept that slight visual step down, like the ambition of what you can do and the number of them, like this is a great series to be a fan of. Like there are three of these things on Switch that all look great. So how many other series are this productive in this day and age? Yeah, it sort of makes it. I mean, would I swap, I probably would swap ray tracing from Final Fantasy game every three years. But that’s how it used to be. You know, I just remember the time where you were like, how the hell did they make Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX in that time? And like this is a bit longer, but this has the same quality, I would say, and the same just drive to it. It’s like my favorite thing to be a fan of. To be a fan of this. It just feels very happy. If you’re a Dark Souls fan, you’re quite well catered to. One last question about this, Matthew. I think you mentioned it to me. Does it run better in handheld mode than the second one did as well? I was watching a Digital Foundry video about this. I was curious what their tape was because it’s much better looking and much better running, which doesn’t really make a huge amount of sense unless they’ve tapped into some dark extra power of the Switch. They had this very weird visual filter on too, which is just very, very noisy. It’s not low resolution. It’s just a very busy, unpleasant image. This is definitely a lot cleaner than that. I played it half and half. There’s definitely adaptive resolution at the wazoo, and there are some areas that hammer the frame rate because they are just so big. But generally, it’s always playable, and when it does look good, you’re like, this is actually one of the best-looking Switch games on handheld, for sure. To be an open-world game and the clarity on the characters and the variety of the special effects and stuff, it’s properly good. Xenoblade 1 and 2, neither of them particularly pop on OLED either, but this one’s just like, holy moly, this is the one. This is about as good as it gets. Breath of Wild 2, we would hope, would tap into whatever they’re doing here, might be able to harness some of that, but I imagine this will be the last Xenoblade they make on this Switch, you would think. And excitingly, in today’s interview, on the Nintendo, the modern version of Awater Asks, they did say, this is a culmination, but it’s definitely not the end. We’re still going to make Xenoblade Chronicles games, we’re still interested in making them, and there is another Torner sized piece of DLC for this coming at the end of next year. So potentially another self-contained game, just a smaller one. That’s great stuff. There’s a never ending feast for the castles. It’s so good. This is how other people feel about Elden Ring. This is my Elden Ring this year. What about you, Katharine? Do you want to give us some closing thoughts on the series in general and what it means to you as a player? It’s just a series that does so much right. Whereas I think a lot of other JRPGs, as big and flashy as they are, think back on some of the JRPGs that have come out in recent years. Final Fantasy XV being the big obvious one. There are so many that start great. They sag a bit towards the middle and then they just fall apart at the end, which Final Fantasy XV did to a T. Every single Xenoblade game is just so strong throughout. They maintain their pace, they continually upping the stakes and introducing new exciting concepts. I just don’t think any other JRPG series really does to that same extent. I mean, I think the only other games that have really captured my imagination in the same way are the Bravely Default games by Square Enix. Weirdly, even though Bravely Default 2 is such a name on the Switch, there were two before that on the 3DS. They also did some mad things, kind of remixing that kind of retro style JRPG, but with some really mad plot twists and really clever things. Those are really the only ones that really come to mind as doing something equally as ambitious as Xenoblade. But even then, it’s still kind of framed through that more traditional retro lens. Whereas Xenoblade is so out there in terms of what it’s trying to do, the way its battle system works and the sheer depth of that battle system, the way that it’s evolved and changed over the course of three games and now a fourth. Yeah, it’s just, there is nothing else like it, which is a big reason why I love it so much. Matthew, any more to add or should we wrap up there? Yeah, just people play it. Pick up the third one, treat yourself, and then play all three. They’re all on Switch, just get them. It’s like one of the best trilogies of any console. Just get it. Well, it’s been a delight hearing you both talk about it. I think we’re fairly comprehensive there, I think. I’d say a two-hour podcast is pretty reasonable for four games for us. That’s a decent chunk of time. Hopefully, people have enjoyed it. I will definitely keep pushing through that first one, very slowly make my way through to the series. This is where you end up hating it. Oh, I’m so sad. I was just struck by how confidently done it was and how I wasn’t bummed out by the tropiness of some of it, but more just like, oh, the tropes it does take on, it does really well. It does feel made with love, you know what I mean? That’s my first impression. One last, actually very quick thing in those, Watara’s interview, I crossed several of them because he’s done a few now for different games. One thing I really liked about Takahashi is that he’s not afraid to say, like, yeah, this was good, like we made a good thing. We were pretty confident that this was amazing. And I’m like, that’s great. Like, that’s a really great way to be that you can make something and just be so sure of it of like, yeah, we got a feeling that we’ve actually really nailed this. And they did. Wow, fantastic. Well, yeah, good for him. A man not short on self-esteem, evidently, but very good at what he does. Okay, great. Well, that’s the end of the podcast. Katharine, where can people find you on social media? So I’m on Twitter, at Berninator, spelled B-Y-R-N-E-inator. And yeah, you can also find lots of good writing about video games over on rockpapershotgun.com. That’s awesome. Thank you so much for joining us again, Katharine. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll have you on many more times. So yeah, always good to have you on. We’ll have to arrive on the SNL5 Timer Club. We’ll talk about that inferior RPG series known as Final Fantasy at some point. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBattle UnderscorePesto. If you enjoyed this episode, we are supported on Patreon at BackPagePod, patreon.com/backpagepodrather. You can also find us on Twitter at BackPagePod. If you’d like to tweet us, follow us, see what’s new with the episodes, that sort of stuff. And we’ll be back next week with an episode about the Steam Deck. So I’m looking forward to that. Yeah, it’ll be fun. Yeah, it’ll be good. Thanks very much for listening and goodbye.