I played Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed
[Finished September 29th, 2023. Rating: 5/10]
Xenoblade Chronicles has been a fascinating series to me for many years. That being said, the reasoning behind my fascination has shifted a lot over time. When I got into it back in 2019 with Xenoblade 1, I was totally enamored with its worldbuilding and how authentic the characters’ lives felt from a pure realism perspective. Then, reflecting on how I enjoyed Xenoblade 2 even more in 2021, I realized that I preferred a greater degree of character and thematic focus. And when I got around to Xenoblade 3 this year, I finally understood that I preferred stories with a lot of depth and potential for analysis of their characters/themes, rather than simply being surface-level entertaining. The funny thing is: it feels like over the years, the priorities of the series have shifted almost parallel to my own. Xenoblade 1 is a very lore-focused story, while Xenoblade 2 tries to be more about themes and writes its characters around that to sorta mixed results, while Xenoblade 3 goes all-in on being a deep character study with incredibly well developed themes.
While this certainly made following along with the series a treat for me as I was still developing media literacy, it does make it a bit confusing to evaluate in retrospect. The writing focus shifting all over the place makes it feel a little messy as a collection of stories, and while most of that is excusable due to them being largely self-contained adventures, it does make the fact that they’re supposed to have connections between entries feel weird. That’s why I was so intrigued to see how Future Redeemed would turn out, as a story intended to conclude the current Xenoblade saga. Where would its priorities lie? How much would it build on the material of its predecessors, and how much would it do its own thing? And, in juggling all of the things it could do, how good would it actually end up being?
In the end, it turned out to be a perfect snapshot of my feelings about Xenoblade as a whole. Future Redeemed is a thoroughly mixed bag of a final entry, with bizarrely uneven storytelling priorities and just as much brilliance as missed potential. In that way it’s almost… perfect? Feels funny to be saying that, but it is weirdly perhaps the most fitting send-off to the series they could’ve written. That doesn’t make me love it, but it does make me respect it.
I think the easiest way to explain this is by covering the lopsided character writing. Future Redeemed is capable of writing a really compelling central drama with the conflict between Matthew and Na’el — up until the very end, their struggles with their traditions and finding happy ways of life are written with remarkable care and intricacy, forming a strong emotional core with moral complexity on both sides. The ending then awkwardly rushes to resolve it in the simplest way possible, leaving it feeling a little unfinished. Na’el has the logical problem with her ideal world pointed out by the protagonists, but that’s pretty much it; her deeper emotional turmoil isn’t quite resolved, and she more or less ends up accepting she’s wrong without argument. Matthew’s flawed heroism gets him into some trouble, but it mostly remains an implicit shortcoming of his, rather than a conflict with a satisfying resolution. It’s underwhelming for the dynamic that the DLC largely defines its themes around.
More underwhelming is the writing for Ontos. (FR represents them as the separate entities Alvis, A, and Alpha, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to refer to them as the collective entity ‘Ontos’ that these personas all partially comprise). I did actually end up liking what writing they got, but it also felt so underdeveloped that I was left yearning for more — and, funnily enough, in the exact opposite way when compared to Matthew and Na’el. As opposed to well-developed buildup contrasted by an aimless ending, Ontos’s contributions to the story are largely relegated to cryptic implications and unexplained motivations… until the ending suddenly decides that the plot should revolve around them. I’m not necessarily opposed to stories that make ample use of subtext, but it was really hard for me to feel attached to Ontos when their entire story is composed purely of it. Plus, I feel like a lot of moments related to their depersonalization and detachment could’ve been greatly enhanced if the story was willing to get more explicit about it, rather than leaving it for the audience to read into. That’s the real tragedy of Ontos to me in this DLC: there are a lot of theoretically awesome things about their character which feel unnaturally stunted just to be able to present them as more ambiguous and open to interpretation.
Finally, the writing of Shulk, Rex, and their kids is by far the most disappointing out of the main characters. At least there was an attempt with Matthew, Na’el, and Ontos, even if it didn’t end up being the most impressive. The prior protagonists and their kids feel like they’re just around for nostalgia fanservice without adding anything to the narrative — they technically fulfill a purpose in reinforcing the idea of learning from the past to move into the future, but practically no development is given to any of them outside of making them bland thematic mouthpieces. I think the story could work just as well if not better if they weren’t there. And don’t get me wrong: I’d have loved to see proper culminations of their stories if they were done right, but their inclusion in Future Redeemed seems to detract more than it adds by bloating the main cast enough that the character writing focus is diluted.
Future Redeemed is a story of solid ideas with incredibly middling execution. It works much better as the sum of its parts, with all the pieces coming together to form a cohesive narrative about the dangers of dehumanization and the importance of learning from history. It’s just very confused in how it chooses to go about this. Still, I think it’s more than worth playing if you’ve already come far enough in the series play order to get to it, and the level of storytelling consistency it still has compared to earlier Xenoblade games makes me optimistic for what future Xeno series entries could bring. In a perfect encapsulation of its series, this is a story I have conflicting feelings on, but it’s one I’m glad I chose to stick around for.
