Xenoblade Chronicles 3 preview: Monolith Soft’s ambition on full display

Monolith Soft is an expert at settling. Each Xeno title going back to the PS1’s XenogearsIt has been, at its core, a culmination of the idiosyncratic compromisions between technology and vision. The scope of series creator Tetsuya Takahashi’s vision has never really fit on one disc or one console. And that’s made the studio great at getting the gist of it all across in just 80 hours.

Xenoblade Chronicles has continued in this development legacy since it debuted on the Wii in 2010, each successor and rerelease regarded with measured praise for pushing the capabilities of Nintendo’s consoles. It is just part of the appeal at this stage.

If you could allow me to describe the brief moments I spent with Xenoblade Chronicles 3In a few words, it would be described as follows: Incompromise. Though not entirely up to snuff, Monolith Soft has clearly found its stride in creating a more even and altogether consistent experience befitting the Xeno series’ grand storytelling. There are autosaves, too.

Monolith Soft/Nintendo Image

Xenoblade Chronicles 3Many of these include Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition’s quality-of-life features, with simpler menu organizations, intuitive button mapping with customizable shortcuts, and a UI so efficient it feels downright modern, all of which combines to form an experience that feels like a polished, mainline Nintendo series. That all might not mean a lot to someone that hasn’t played past entries, and I’m not entirely sure it will be enough for any newcomers who haven’t spent 200 hours with the past games. It is clear that time was spent making four submenus of your quest log, four map screens and a hundred customizable pieces for your party accessible.

Set in Aionios, the titanic ruins of both previous games’ settings, opposing factions battle each other to harvest the life force of their foes in a mechanized forever war. Each side’s soldiers, Aionios’ sole inhabitants, live only to fight this battle for their brief, 10 year lifespan. Most don’t make it that long, however, and it is our twin protagonists’ responsibility as “off-seers” to oversee the ritualistic burial of their fallen comrades on the battlefield. Strangely enough, these lines bear resemblances with past games. A consolidation of peoples and races from all over the world, Keves is created. Xenoblade Chronicles, while High Entia and Machina fight alongside each other against Agnus’ Gormotti and Flesh Eaters (races seen only in Xenoblade Chronicles 2). A familiar queen leads each side. It’s as if the games themselves are warring with each other.

The conflict’s characters come together as one. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 feels like a similar marriage of the first two games’ combat styles. Kevesi soldiers such as Noah hail from the descendants the titans Bionis or Mechonis. They recharge their Arts with a timer, just like in Xenoblade Chronicles; The Agnian troops hailing from Alrest recharge their Arts, just like Mio did in, with auto-attacks. Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Monolith Soft/Nintendo Image

However Xenoblade Chronicles 3Its Class system offers a fresh approach to combat. Characters each play as a Class, like Swordsman, Medic Gunner, or Heavy Guard, that fits one of three main “Roles”: attacker, defender, and healer. Each class comes with its own rating and control rating. This is represented by a Chess Piece. In some ways, Classes resemble a job system in other JRPGs, and with their faction-defying cooperation, your team can learn how to fight with one another’s Classes.

Heroes allow you to resurrect new classes by transferring your move set and outfit to other Heroes. Each of the games’ six characters can play as any Class after fighting alongside it for long enough, and tiered level caps encourage players to mix up compositions often. And you’ll want to, as mastering Classes unlocks new abilities for your characters in the form of Master Arts. Master Arts double as both standard attacks as well as modifiers on your current Class’s move set, opening up the board for thoughtful and powerful new combinations.

Your party’s move set expands again when the team stumbles on the power of Ouroboros, a magical mecha formed by “Interlinking” two characters together. This addition to combat systems more than doubles the power of each character, making them practically invincible. Your AI team members, who are reactive to combos and attentive in their support, will smartly do this when you’re in a pinch, saving themselves from death and helping turn the tide of an encounter.

Monolith Soft/Nintendo Image

Consider that you have six members of your team, which can be swapped between during combat. It can get overwhelming. Monolith Soft clearly has made strides in improving its tutorialization. However, Monolith Soft excels at deploying complexity through customizability. This is likely to make combat feel fresh 20-40, 40 or 60 hours later. And if you don’t want to engage with all that, you can simply auto-equip Arts, gems, and equipment on your characters with the press of a single button.

Monolith Soft can help with some problems, but six characters is more than enough. The Switch is capable of handling numbers, aggro lines and AoE effects, even though they can be distracting. Monolith Soft clearly has figured out how optimizes its engine to not only improve frame rates but also graphic fidelity. There’s evidently still adaptive resolution at play (and I’m not entirely sure what the pixel count is while the console is docked), but characters and UI elements possess a level of graphic fidelity only reserved for cinematics in past games.

This is also true for handheld modes. While the resolution of handheld mode is reduced, there are no compromises to image quality. The images between backgrounds and characters, as well as particle effects, can be juggled with success, creating an even more balanced viewing experience. Moreover, the game almost always holds at 30 frames per second in combat — while docked or in handheld. We’ll have to see how the Switch holds up when, say, fighting in larger settings with more ambient particle effects against multiple foes while Interlinking. But the point is that, for perhaps the first time, it feels as if Monolith Soft’s scope and ambition aren’t constrained. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 doesn’t look like it’s straddling its hardware’s — or its developer’s — limits.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Nintendo Switch will release the update on July 29th. After using the Nintendo pre-release downloading code, these impressions were created. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions when products are purchased through affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.