5. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Future Redeemed - [Switch]
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 left something of an odd aftertaste. Amazing game though it was, on paper its additions and enhancements to the series should make it the greatest Xenoblade of all time. It had a ton of classes, great new combat features like dashing around the battlefield and fighting in water, and the ability to swap party members mid-battle. It had a superb version of chain attacks, and many other great features besides, along with interesting characters, story themes, and twists.
So how come instead of giddy obsession, my usual response upon completing a Xenoblade game, I instead put the controller down with a kind of thoughtful nose pick? How did a game set in the combined futures of both Shulk
and Rex's worlds not leave me in awe?
Well, first let me assure you that I totally mostly understood the story, somewhat. Okay, maybe a few things went over my head and I had to get a little help from lore videos on youtube. But even when I understood the depth of what was happening, it didn't exactly answer all the burning questions that come with Aionios being the future of both past games. In fact, rather than the resolution of what went before,
XC3 created new burning questions and chose not to answer those either.
Consider
Xenoblade Chronicles 2. While
XC3 carries the implication and subsequent burden of being the ultimate Xenoblade that ties all things Xeno together, I actually believe
XC2 kinda deserves this title. Think about it. It's got Shulk. It's got Rex, obviously. But it also has Fiora, it has Kosmos and Telos, it has Elma. And none of them are breaking lore by being there - the way blades work in
XC2 means their core crystal contains data of their being but not their memories, so anyone from anywhere could be a blade and it would make perfect sense within the rich world of
XC2. Yeah, Elma's
Full Metal Jaguar class is in
XC3, but
XC2 has Elma herself, and more - you can even rock out to
Wir Fliegen while she enters overdrive mode.
But there's something else
XC2 has.
Boundless imagination.
Everything about
XC2, from living on gigantic walking titans, to its baffling but brilliant battle system and using gacha to acquire its 50 bizarre blade characters, to Pyra's cup size, is wild, unrestrained, reckless even. Risky. You could say the same of
Xenoblade Chronicles X. It's pretty nutty for a Jrpg to take on open world exploration, custom character design and multiplayer elements, but the result is something truly special.
These games are polarizing, but when you just trust Monolift Soft and dive in, you have an incredible journey. After a bustling trade hub, a charming cat people village and getting swallowed by a massive titan only to discover a magical kingdom hidden in its honestly
gorgeous guts, I didn't know what the wonderful world of
XC2 had in store for me next, but I was super engrossed. Compared to
XC2, XC3 is sensible, formulaic...restrained, even. Playing
XC3 I did know what was in store, I even felt a little bit like I was in a loop. I know I'm gonna go to a small colony, meet its colourful commander, recruit them and learn their class, just like I've been doing. That's the endless now for you I guess. Sure, along the way I'll get to explore some neat environments that look like areas from
XC1 and
XC2, but you know what's better than that? Playing a totally new Xenoblade and seeing its totally new areas.
In committing to connecting the futures of
XC1 and
XC2 to tell a new story with a new cast in
XC3, Monolift Soft are kind of stuck with the worst of both worlds, being unable to continue directly the adventures of each game's beloved cast and unable to take Noah and his crew in some completely fresh, wild, unfettered direction. So instead of crazy stuff like gacha blades and big anime tiddies, development effort got focused on finding ways to fit things from
XC1 and
XC2 together, and refining and improving already existing systems and ideas. It's not like that sort of sensible use of resources is a bad thing, but it may explain why
XC3 alone is the only Xenoblade game that doesn't give me the
endless wow.
I don't want to sound too critical, because Monolift Soft's creative brilliance is still on display within these confines, but I just feel like they make something even more impactful when they don't have such baggage. There's a serious flaw in this
XC2 vs
XC3 comparison, though. When I played
XC3, I had to constantly manually swap my party's setups. It got super annoying. But as I was wrapping up my 1st playthrough, a patch came out that allows players to instantly switch between a variety of setups, so anyone playing today won't experience the hassles that I did playing the game at launch.
Because I played
XC2 years after launch with its patches and generous helpings of extra content already accessible, who knows how many problems that the base game had were non-issues for me? Instead of functioning as "bonus" "optional" content, a lot of these extras really fix or fill in lacking gameplay and story areas, resulting in a more satisfying, complete experience. For me,
XC2 was a game that just kept on giving with its enormous base adventure tightened up and expanded on with awesome DLC challenge modes, extra quests and extra characters that I had access to right away. And then of course there's
Torna The Golden Country...Or rather the golden standard for DLC.
Torna is a DLC prequel adventure for
XC2 that's absurdly large for a DLC, really it's more of a small standalone Jrpg. And it's
very good.
Future Redeemed is to
XC3 what
Torna is to
XC2, but better and more. This prequel's protagonist is Matthew, a big hearted, small brained, reckless anime style hero. Along with party members like A, a femme variant of Alvis, the Mythra-mouthed Glimmer, and Nikol, an awkward teen constantly rearranging his backpack like some high school nerd, I liked Matthew. I wish the game was longer so I could get to know this crew more. But it's hard for any of these characters to hold the spotlight once the chad dads Shulk and Rex show up and join the party. Rex in particular really gets his due in this game.
I mean,
is this guy freakin' for real? The type of boulder that Chris Redfield would punch, adult Rex would catch between his teeth, crush and then spit out like bullets into the skulls of his enemies. I know he's the Master Driver, but how the hell is he
THIS powerful? He does way more damage than anyone else in the party could ever dream of, dominating dragons and crushing consuls. Rex is such an omegachad in
Future Redeemed that you finally understand how this harem having hulk of a hero wakes up in a bed crowded with f-cup angels and feisty catgirls.
To think that the pint-sized pipsqueak who dreamed of climbing the world tree is now in a world where the population is mostly descended from his family tree, I don't know, is that somehow ironic? And while we're on that subject, I see a lot of Pandy in Linka, but I'm not really seeing that much of Zeke in her features. Just.
Sayin'. The man is a God-damned sexual Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Oh, and Shulk? He has long hair now.
So
anyways
Future Redeemed doesn't have the huge variety of classes that
XC3 has, in fact aside from new pair-up moves and talent arts, each character only has 6 arts. But the game alters
XC3's battle system to add extra effects when combining them into fusion arts. So when Matthew uses
Energy Boost together with
Backspin Punch, he also gets a crit bonus. But if he instead fuses
Energy Boost with
Revolt Uppercut, it gets an AoE effect so he can buff the whole party. Each character has 9 fusion bonus effects in total, which on top of the game's other systems is more than enough to play around and experiment with for the duration of this short n' sweet Jrpg. And that's really the main complaint I keep coming back to for
Future Redeemed, I wish it was a larger game. There's already plenty here, especially for a DLC, but it's cramming so much into this small adventure that things can feel rushed at times, so why not make it a big adventure and add even more stuff?
It's not as if this is a perfect send off for Shulk and Rex.
But it is a good one. In fact, the closure and context that
Future Redeemed brings adequately wraps up the whole Klaus story. Remember Klaus? Honestly, of all the delusional idiots presuming to play god and rule the world who end up getting everybody killed with their hubris named "Klaus," this guy is
easily the 2nd worst. But while Xenoblade could end here forever and things would be wrapped up nicely enough, the DLC's ending also excites the mind with hope for the future thanks to the retcon radio playing in the background, name dropping and connecting everything from
Xenoblade X to the Namco owned
Xenosaga together. It's a big Xeno-verse out there, with hope for exciting games in the future.
I'm not crying, you're crying! BAKA
But honestly, I'm now kinda excited to replay
XC3 somewhere down the line, hopefully on new hardware with a sharper resolution, so I can reassess it as a full package. Because it feels like it's not just the future that this DLC is redeeming with the answers and closure it provides, but
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 itself.
6. Pikmin 4 - [Switch] I've loved
Pikmin since the 1st game, I'm always down for more pikmans. I was a little shocked by how good this one is though. You play a custom designed avatar who works for the rescue corps saving cute characters with funny dialogue who crash their spaceships. With your trusty dog/mount Oatchi, you eventually recruit every single pikmin type to help you, including new ones like ice pikmin and glowing pikmin. Combat is just
better. The graphics are also prettier, taking you everywhere from yards and caves to kitchens and living rooms. And there's more amusingly mis-named objects to haul back to your spaceship than ever before!
Pikmin 4 also teaches you about
dandori, the Japanese art of not wasting time like a deadbeat
gaijin, which I guess explains why we don't have a word for that. I'll teach it to you. Let's say you're pouring more coffee from the coffee pot and it's not hot enough so you gotta put your mug in the microwave. Now you could stand next to the microwave and wait like a jack-ass,
BUT. What if, while the microwave is running, you go take a piss? Then you come back and get the coffee as it finishes heating up (wash your hands please.) Congrats! By synchronizing these tasks instead of doing them separately, you've wasted less of your life than you normally would.
That's dandori. We're all on a clock, and no one knows exactly how much time they have left, so we should be efficient with our most precious resource. Actually...you probably shouldn't be reading this.
In the game's
dandori challenges you're racing against time to collect all the treasure in an area within a strict time limit, retrying the level repeatedly until you master it, getting a little more efficient each time. But that's just one of many gameplay modes. Glow pikmin have different abilities and rules to other pikmin, and come out at night for a base defense mode against the scary monsters that eat everybody when the sun goes down. And of course there's the usual day based exploration mode before that sunset.
When you beat the game and see it's 1st soft ending, in a way you're just getting started, as you'll have seen less than half of the actual amount of game there is here to sink your teeth into at that point. I was especially surprised and impressed by one of the post game modes where Olimar "tells you stories," which feels almost like a modern remake of the first
Pikmin. You play a 15 day campaign where Olimar races to collect his 30 ship parts. I think I only got 23 on my first attempt but it was very satisfying to restart and do a perfect run the 2nd time thinking "dude this is like having
Pikmin 1 as a free bonus
WHAAAAAAT!"
This is comfortably the best
Pikmin, so if you ever enjoyed or wanted to try the series at all, pick it up sometime.
7. Final Fantasy XVI - [PS5]
Final Fantasy has been struggling with an identity crisis for a long time now. They want to be mainstream so bad that they keep stripping away Jrpg elements from the most famous Jrpg franchise in history. But while Square Enix imagined it was turned based battles that were chasing away a larger audience, I think it might have been their pretentious, wanky storytelling and absurd looking, shallow characters.
Maybe they got the memo. Final Fantasy XVI suggests Square realized westerners don't like whiny pretty boys, so they made the protagonist a raspy tongued pretty
man. And they saw Game of Thrones was a
kind of a big deal so they gave you a dog, cranked up the politics and sideboob, and killed everybody. Honestly... it's a start.
The combat is great. However, there's not a trace of Jrpg to it - this is exactly like a character action game in the spirit of
Devil May Cry or
Bayonetta. Clive keeps building an awesome array of combat moves based on the different elemental summons he conquers. When you parry enemies with Titan's rock powers or freeze them in place with Shiva's ice moves, it feels just as satisfying as it looks, and it looks absolutely dazzling with beautiful graphical effects lighting up the screen. Yeah, the combat is too easy on the game's normal setting, a consequence of Square Enix's target mainstream audience, but it's still fun to play, and there are other settings and challenging side content to mess around with.
The music kicks just as much ass as the fighting. More even. Whenever you're listening to a hype battle theme and dashing and slashing every which way while a big monster swings at you,
the music will occasionally shift gears to some uplifting, soaring tune with really hopeful energy, and then back to the battle theme again, but with extra instrumental on top. It's wonderful, capturing not just the feeling of action and conflict, but also of bravery and heroism.
Where
FFXVI starts to really run into problems is all the other gameplay besides the combat. Quests, exploration, loot...the rpg parts, you could say. They're all fairly shallow. It's utterly jarring to walk out of the spectacular sequence of setpieces that are the games opening hours, where you're running through the set of a super high budget medieval fantasy action movie, to find Clive standing awkwardly at a locked camera angle across from a shopkeeper with a text box asking you to "collect 5 gyshal greens do you accept quest yes/no?"
I actually
don't think the archaic quest structure is unforgivably bad. I play lots of Jrpgs that are great where you do quests like this. I feel the problem here is that this isn't really a Jrpg. It's a character action style game in a Jrpg skinsuit, and a lean action game can't fill out the skin of an epic rpg, so instead of functioning like extra content in a huge game, the sidequests are instead padding and stretching the game to try and make it feel huge. The exploration is similar. You can go off the main path, but why tho? To fight enemies who drop trash loot? To open a chest with 10 gil in it? The environments are pretty, but exploring isn't really rewarding. Some side content is good like taking down marks, but marks are really just boss fights, reinforcing that the only gameplay that's done well is the action combat.
The game also has story problems. I mean, shocker, right? There's some parts that could be called good. Supporting characters like Gav and Jill are likeable enough. Cid in particular stands out as a great heroic figure who inspires others while still being human and flawed himself, making for a really impactful character. He even elevates the story after his death through his legacy and the effect his passing has on the other characters. Also, his voice is even more manly than Clive's! These guys make Adam Jensen sound like a
castrato. I like how summons in this game are like weapons of war that armies rally around, and I liked the tragic love story ending. There's some spectacular setpieces like dueling Odin at the bottom of a parted sea,
Exodus style.
But there's too much dumb and cringe stuff. Like, there's a guy who get his hands chopped off mid-battle, and instead of being sensitive about his arm stumps, or writhing in pain, he flails his stumps around like blunt weapons yelling angrily. It's supposed to be intense but it's so goofy and silly I felt embarrassed. Worse than the cringe is long, boring exposition. There's a reason game of thrones has naked people doing cartwheels in the background when characters talk politics, history and geography. But worse even than that, they didn't know where to go with it all so they fell back on the ultimate Jrpg
cliché, fancy haircut swordy guy uses friendship to kill god. I must sound like I'm making that up. I wish I was making that up.
Square Enix seem to want to tell Jrpg stories even though they don't want to make Jrpgs anymore. I kind of wish they
were making Jrpgs while telling different stories. But... it's their series. Hopefully they find a way to make it work. Otherwise, one of these days it really will be the final one.
8. Super Mario Wonder - [Switch] I'm a huge Mario fan. I thought
Super Mario Odyssey was a masterpiece and that
Mario 35 was game of the year. I always 100% every Mario game, including ones I've already played, like the re-release of
Super Mario 3D World on the Switch. I say all this to preface my hot take: I like this game a lot. But I don't love it. Something feels a bit...
off.
I know people were getting tired of the
New Super Mario Bros. games, and there was a feeling that things needed to be shaken up. Well, consider them shook.
Super Mario Wonder's wonder seeds are crazy, making piranha plants start singing or turning Mario into a balloon like he did in
Mario World. There's even rollerskating koopas and
Donkey Kong Country style silhouette levels. Hold on to your butts.
There's certainly plenty of great stuff in
Mario Wonder. I loved fun levels like the ones with coloured blocks that appear and disappear in sync with the music, with the platforming getting trickier as the music gets faster. I also enjoyed being turned into a helpless goomba as well and having to hide from hungry enemies. But I think this wonder seed stuff might actually be harming level design. Like, in most levels the goal is to basically get to the wonder seed and then when you have it, rush to the end like you're in a sonic game. The wonder seed gimmick kind of removes variety and complexity from level design.
I think the thing that bothered me the most though, is badges. Badges offer a variety of interesting powers, but annoyingly you choose your badge at the start of a level, without really being totally sure which badge would suit that level best. Plus, a lot of things that badges do would be better suited to a cool Mario suit. Yeah, yeah, swim badge, great...
but froggy suit is better. I usually enjoy the final challenge of Mario games but this one was centered around badges, including an infuriating challenge where you have to make hard jumps while wearing an invisibility badge. So...you gotta judge timing and distance while not actually being able to see where you are. If that sounds like it would be frustrating and not at all fun, then I described it correctly.
So yeah. Not my kind of Mario, but still a weird and wonderful game that brings the zaniness.
9. Darkest Dungeon II - [PC] The 1st
Darkest Dungeon was sensational. Its Brilliant art style, now endlessly imitated by inferior indies, brought a world of cosmic horror to life in an immersive way, along with moody music and iconic narration. Who can forget hopelessly trudging through a dungeon trying to manage their inventory and hearing “packs...laden with loot...are often
low on supplies.” Or landing a critical and hearing the narrator exclaim “
a singular strike!?” And then there’s my favourite: “success so clearly in view... or is it merely...
a trick of the light?”
There was a delicious devilry to
Darkest Dungeon’s design - a gloomy, oppressive flavour that synergized perfectly with the games daunting but not indomitable gameplay. It was tough, it even made you feel hopeless at times, but that despair porn
IS the fantasy of encroaching cosmic
Cthulu-ism. And the whole time you were learning, you were growing your ranks, upgrading skills, getting stronger through treasure and trinkets.
Darkest Dungeon II is a drastic departure from the 1st game’s winning formula. Drake is pushing away the satisfying base building, dungeon delving, and roster recruiting of
DD1 like a pouting teenage girl and embracing roguelike multi-dungeon runs using a locked in team with a douchey, punchable grin on his idiot face as he contributes to the rapid decline of western civilization with his cancerous music. Are u ready for the auto-tuned horrors of the
Drake-est Dungeon?
I'm surprised how much I miss visiting the hamlet, and building up my little dudes. I also feel less inclined to experiment or take risks in
DD2 because I'm committing to 4 dungeons when I play. Sure, you could bring someone other than Man-at-Arms, hypothetically...but it's your funeral. And what's up with Bounty Hunter? He's supposed to show up at the inn randomly, right? I've beat the game and I've never seen him, he might as well not exist for me.
There is plenty to love about
DD2 though. It has a lot of crazy boss fights, and ideas like paths, which let characters specialize in one area. I especially love the hero shrines, where characters have flashbacks to their developing years that play out as a kind of puzzle battle, showing the Leper when he was a king sheltering the desperate and diseased, or the Grave Robber hiding from and plotting against her abusive husband.
It's too early to say how good
DD2 is with any certainty. I was kind of spoiled to play
DD1 on the switch, years after release with all the DLC added and many gameplay refinements, and I think I underestimated how much people playing the game in the 1st year of launch are still kind of like early access in a way. Since Redhook is continuing to improve things and add things, the future of
Darkest Dungeon II looks bright. Or is it merely...
10. Fire Emblem Engage - [Switch] I couldn’t help eye rolling at the reveal of
FEE. The protagonist’s ridiculous puffy clothes, featuring silly suspender straps on his legs, went completely unnoticed because of the absurdly jarring site of his half-red, half-blue eyes and hair. In
Fire Emblem Three Houses, they went to school, so now they’re going to clown college?
As it turns out, the “gimmick” is a completely different one this time. Magic rings hold the spirits of the legendary heroes of past Fire Emblem games. Giving a character the ring of Marth gives them cool Marth-like swordy Powers, or a ring with the spirit of Lyn from
Sacred Stones gives them powerful archery moves. I found giving a character a ring that further enhances their specialty very effective. A good wizard, for example, wielding Soren from
Path of Radiance’s ring, can cast a spell that kills 5 enemies at once! Such supermoves do have a cooldown, but dude.
Dude.
Sadly the variety of skills obtainable through wielding these rings of power replaces an extra tier of class promotion, which is a shame as getting another promotion after your 1st one, where you become some kind of super class, is one of my favourite parts of Fire Emblem. You’ll just have to make do with base classes and a single promotion. Honestly, though - the rings provide more than enough enhancements and customization to come up with powerful builds.
Story wise FEE is kinda dumb. With some noteworthy exceptions, the dialogue and events generally felt simpler and sillier, like it was speaking to a younger audience than
Fire Emblem Three Houses. But the Fire Embleming is on point, with highly enjoyable combat and character building.
