Xenoblade Chronicles 3: This is the worst popular game I have ever played

In my search of replacing the love that I had for Octopath Traveler 2 I have been going down a lot of roads and searching for an RPG that can take up my time the way that Octopath did.

I go through this every time I finish a game that I really loved and I expected to encounter some difficulty in finding something that really captivates me. What I didn't expect was for games that are on "top" lists to be so unbelievably awful.

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This is one of those games that I had heard about for quite some time and since there is a 3rd installment I just kind of presumed that there must be something really great about it. The fact that it was on a lot of people's top lists piqued my interest as well so when I got it and the opening sequence looked pretty good and the story looked alright I got excited.

Wow did I ever get let down after just a little while.

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This RPG functions only in theory like a turn-based RPG because the action doesn't stop, just your ability to actually attack does. Your positioning on the map makes some difference as far as your attacks are concerned but for the most part, at least early on, it doesn't really matter. You hit a button that initiates combat and then your crew of people start to auto-attack in the way that you programmed them to do. There really isn't anything to it and mostly you just spend your time waiting for your better skills to come off of cooldown so you can use them again. Obviously, this becomes a lot more involved later but in the early stages you are really just standing there and occasionally you will swing your sword and do a bit of damage.

Too many interruptions

I get that this game is attempting to appeal to an anime audience and the game being interrupted for cutscenes is something I expected. What I didn't expect was this to be happening for more time than not.

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It seems like every 20 steps or so the action is being interrupted so that some lengthy animated sequence can take place, often with long and drawn out dialogue that doesn't really to much to advance the story. At the very start of the game your actions are mostly "go here, get that thing, bring it back, talk talk talk, then go and do something else very similar" rinse, repeat. It's fucking boring, but it is made worse by my next point.

Atrocious voice acting

Now this is something that can often happen when a popular Japanese game gets translated into English. It happens more often than not actually but in the case of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, it is some of the worst that I have heard since the first Resident Evil game. At least in RE the voice acting was so bad that it was funny but in XC3 you can tell that the voice actors are dead serious with their delivery but it is just really really bad.

Of course I don't speak Japanese so maybe the Japanese is really bad also. I don't like that the characters have these really thick accents that are difficult to decipher for a lot of us too. The dialogue is cringe and also teen-hero-oriented and they even make up their own swear words instead of actually swearing, which is something that I have always hated about anything other than when Battlestar Galactica invented the word "frack."

I still trudged on for a few hours though, hoping that maybe the start was just a hump you had to get past in order to get to the good stuff but if there even is good stuff later on in this game, I am unwilling to sit through the grind in order to get there. For the first 2 hours I would enter these field battles, basically do nothing other than wait for cooldowns to expire, do that ability, and then wait again. All the while everything is being interrupted by what I have to imagine is hours of cutscenes. I started skipping all of them and just started to get annoyed by the characters that have wings growing out of their heads.

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is this some anime trope that I am just not nerdy enough to understand and appreciate? I'm pretty nerdy but this is just annoying to me.

There are a lot of people that claim that this game killed the franchise but I wouldn't know because I never played the other 2 or however many more there are. To me this game is damn-near-unplayable because you don't actually do anything. You honestly could enter all of the fights that I did and emerge victorious if you just left the room. Your pressing of the cooldown skills simply make this happen faster. The constant and annoying banter between the people in your crew during fights encouraged me to look for a option in the settings to turn that off but alas, it is not possible.

If you liked this game I am genuinely curious as to how that is possible. How is standing somewhere and waiting for cooldowns interesting? I am reminded while playing it of early age MMO's where that was the norm but we understood that it had to be that way because it was an online game sort of thing that had never been attempted before. This game was released in 2022 and because of that I don't feel as though this is excusable anymore.

I can't imagine what audience this sort of game is for but it definitely isn't me. Between the excessive interruptions, that absolutely horrid voice-acting, and the extremely repetitive gameplay, this one was a complete dud to me and it is the first game that I have felt confident enough that I will never return to that I fully deleted it off my SD card. Just pure trash.

The search goes on!