My relationship with Xenoblade Chronicles, as a series, is complicated.

The original is my favorite game of all time, and has been ever since 2014, when my fifteen-year-old self was ravenously keeping up with prerelease leaks for Super Smash Bros. 4; the so-called Gematsu leaks were adding up far too much to be fake, so I figured I ought to learn more about this Shulk guy I wasn't familiar with in advance. I asked for the game for my birthday, my local GameStop miraculously actually had a copy, and going in nearly blind I was instantly grabbed by it in a way no other single piece of media has ever really done before or since. It became my world for years, which eventually tapered off to give way to other all-encompassing interests... until I got a gaming laptop this year that could actually run the dang thing, and it all came flooding right on back like nothing had changed.

Xenoblade X is an odd one; it's an unconnected spinoff that came out 2015, well within the peak of my obsession, and I ate it up. But its appeal was all in the open world design and it didn't really have any of the narrative staying power of the first, which has been explicitly stated was a side effect of the introduction of a customizable silent avatar to tie into an online portion of the game that nobody really played, gutting the original story concept. Its writing strength comes in the form of its more fleshed-out sidequests, but even those don't really stand out as much without a greater narrative to back it up; years later, I could only tell you a very basic outline of the plot and a handful of major story beats, but the majority of it really is just "you meet a new alien and they either want to kill you or be your friend", and then it ends on a twist clearly intended to be a sequel hook. Due to its nature as a niche game released on an unpopular system, it underperformed and Nintendo has largely ignored its existence ever since. It was never continued and all those loose ends were just never tied up.

Then, in early 2017, it happened. They announced Xenoblade Chronicles 2, for Nintendo's brand-new Switch console.

After the initial wave of excitement, I was cautiously optimistic; the game had a new artstyle which was significantly more traditionally (and generically) anime, and the first game was considerably less in need of a sequel than X was, but the series as it stood had already established itself as very experimental and I could understand where the shift had come from. The first two games had consistently received criticism for their characters' faces; the first had a problem with low resolution textures making close-up shots look muddy and bad, a sacrifice made for the sake of the massive world, and X translated that style into HD in a way that most people thought felt kind of lifeless and creepy. While 1's story ended very nicely and left no remaining plot threads to tie up, its ending's entire point was that there was a boundless new world to explore, leaving infinite potential for more stories. Hell, given the pattern established by X, it could very well have been its own thing entirely despite the name, going for the Final Fantasy approach of unconnected worlds linked by common themes and aesthetics. If they stuck the landing here, this could be a worthy successor.

But as more information began to surface, more and more red flags kept popping up. The lead character artist had previously worked primarily on hentai. A script page in the background of a trailer shot was unmistakably for a hot spring scene. Oversexualized female designs (which were already the first game's most glaring flaw—poor Sharla deserved better) had been radically exacerbated with leering shot composition and exaggerated anatomy. They gradually became less in-line with what I had come to expect and more uncomfortable to look at, pandering to the same demographic of men that dime-a-dozen shows about harems of big-boobed anime girls are designed to suck money out of. I was becoming hesitant about it, having just watched similar problems affect the Fire Emblem series with the then-recent Fates.

The game came out later that year. I didn't have a Switch at the time, so I couldn't play it myself.

Instead, I just saw the familiar tags and spaces I used to browse become flooded with suggestive art of the new girls, as the significantly greater accessibility invited in just those demographics I was worried about and drowned out the small, tight-knight community of tumblr gays that I had made my home. An infamous screenshot made the rounds of a rabbit-woman with breasts bigger than her head and her back bent at a wildly uncomfortable-looking 90 degree angle. The obligatory romance subplot is between a fifteen-year-old and three immortal women. There were three writers on the game who had minimal communication and rushed hard enough that there was no time for editing, leading the writing to feel disjointed and given a new tone that buried interesting plot threads in awkward, overdone comic relief tropes. Following up the first game's beloved Nopon party member, a recurring race of fuzzy, egg-shaped critters, came a guy with a maid fetish who builds a little girl robot to be weird about. It's fully unconnected until the finale, which retcons the depiction of a key player in the original's ending. Ardent defenders began coming out of the woodwork and made criticizing its many flaws insufferable.

I still had some interest in playing it at first, but by the time I actually had the console myself, it had waned to the point where I really just resented it more than anything for what it had done to my favorite game's mainstream reputation. I just ended up skipping it. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet. I limited my fandom exposure to a walled garden of a handful of other jaded 1 purists and pretended the series ended at X.

It had been three years, and I moved onto other things.

In the following time they released a paid DLC prequel to 2, which is also released as its own standalone package and supposedly improves on most things, and Definitive Edition, an HD remaster of the original that redoes the major characters to match the more anime artstyle and introduces a new epilogue chapter called Future Connected, finally making use of an infamous unused map from the original.

I got DE on launch, but real-world events distracted me before I got very far. It does have some much-appreciated quality of life updates! But I don't care for the character redesigns: many of their skintones are noticeably lightened, and the more minor characters just looking like their old selves in higher resolution both creates inconsistency and makes it feel like they put little care into preserving the original aesthetic when it was very easy to. A minor character design element that previously served as subtly symbolic, the key Alvis wears around his neck, is replaced with a direct reference to 2 that spoils his true nature—literally one of the final reveals—if you happened to play that one first. I never got around to Future Connected, but hear that it is unanimously considered aggressively okay and plagued by the same anime comedy writing and mediocre voice direction 2 has.

A couple more years have passed, and now I stand yet again at a crossroads—as of this writing, we are mere days from the release of Xenoblade 3, which purports to connect the two stories further as a direct continuation of the same timeline. (For reference, 2 happens concurrently with the original and its ending builds off of a piece of lore established in a guidebook for 1: that the first game's world is set in a sort of pocket dimension sealed away from the greater universe, and Shulk's wish for a new world rewrites existence to remove the boundary.)

On the one hand, it seems to have taken quite a few notes from common criticisms of 2. Mercifully, the women are finally all dressed in normal, functional outfits, thank god. The original game's voice director is back. The writing seems to be going back to the darker, more serious tone of the first game. The music is killer as always.

But of course, there's still that baggage. A review mentions shower scenes. The original face style seems entirely abandoned, and the outfits, while miles better than 2's, still don't really feel anything like the distinctive visual identity the first game establishes. Machina have lost their uniquely goth look, with their towering, elongated proportions and black outfits with ornamental headdresses, pointed high heels, and talon-like nails, and now boringly just look like normal humans in gray bodypaint. There's a leaked image floating around showing the aftermath of 2's dumb love triangle, and it sucks to look at. The whole premise of a neverending war between nations runs directly counter to the previous endings promising of a world where all life will walk towards the future hand-in-hand, and it makes the whole thing feel nihilistic and like the effort was pointless. Melia is apparently still around, acting as a figurehead leading one side of the war despite everything she previously fought for. What??

As it stands, I currently place this game in the exact same mental spot reserved for weird edgy fanfiction, and it'll have to fight real hard to make me acknowledge it as canon to a story so sacred to me... but, at the same time, reviews coming in are glowing. Perhaps my approach to 2 is a little unfair; I'll admit that. I suppose actually giving this one a shot and playing through it myself to form a more educated opinion is only natural, and it would help to serve as a more direct means to come to terms with how I feel about this franchise in its current state. Who knows if maybe they happened to hit upon that lightning in a bottle again.

The game is not out yet, but when I've had my fill I'll be back to update this page with my (likely very extensive) thoughts. Watch this space.