 Xenoblade 3. This is a really big RPG with a lot of things to do. And for the most part I enjoyed what I've played of it. This is a very story oriented adventure game about self discovery and friendship. In this game you play as a man. With a man bun. The main party consists of these characters from two different kingdoms who were raised as child soldiers to fight a meaningless war against each other. They were basically trained from birth to be these killing machines, but one day the main character Noa meets a woman with cat ears on the opposite side and all of a sudden decides hmm you know what guys I think war is bad actually. Maybe we should stop all this fighting and give peace a chance. Yes this game's main theme is that war is bad which honestly is a very original idea that I don't think has ever been done before. This game is about people from two opposing sides uniting towards common journey. It's a very character driven adventure and I like the characters a lot. Well most of them at least. You start off with the main characters. Noa, the simp, Lance, the big buff robot man and by far the best character in the entire game, Yuni, a perfect woman who has pigeon wings on her head for some reason. They end up befriending people from the opposing kingdom. Mio, the cat lady, Senna also known as the girl with the girl and you even team up with the main character of Persona 5. This game is really story heavy and there's a huge emphasis on these characters and their journey together. They all start off on opposite sides against each other but soon realize that there's a bigger threat that they all need to band together to face. One of my biggest deciding factors for whether or not an RPG is good is if it can answer this simple question. Do the main party members feel like actual friends? In this case, yeah they really do. These characters are very lovable and unique and they have a lot of chemistry with each other. They all interact with each other, the game gives them each their own little spotlight at certain points and character development moments. There's a lot of dialogue from everyone and they even talk to each other on the field. They even have these ridiculous fake curse words that they all say because Nintendo didn't want this game getting an M rating. And while the characters are mostly great you have a few doozies. The game also has these talking avocados that speak like cavemen for some reason. These are the worst characters in the entire game and I hate them. I can't take them seriously at all. Like why is this one of hair? Why are they naked? They are just ridiculous looking and they're pretty useless. An interesting thing about this game is that Noah isn't really the main character. The main character could feasibly be anyone you want since they all have just about equal attention given to them. This story really belongs to all of them and it's up to you to decide who to play as and lead your party. I honestly just ran around as uni and I completely forgot about Noah and this works because the game has a really good class system where any character can switch to any class in the game stealing their friends jacket in the process. So you really have a lot of freedom in this game to customize your team down to every detail. You even meet these special characters along your journey called heroes who can join you as a seventh party member while also allowing you to take on their class. The first one you meet in the game is Ethel who is just a great character. She has a really nice pair of swords that you can actually give to any of your party members by signing them her class. Although Noah looks especially ridiculous wearing her outfit because of how much it emphasizes his assets. Thankfully you can change in basically any outfit you want regardless of your class. Throughout the game you just keep unlocking these new classes by meeting new characters which constantly shakes up your strategy in battle. And the battle system is fine. It takes a while to get used to though especially since they're constantly throwing tutorials at you every five minutes so you have so much to learn. Like there are so many tutorials in the game it's absurd. They are just constantly introducing new mechanics and right when you think they're done boom another mechanic that you have to worry about. And honestly I don't think the game really needed a lot of them. Like does this game really need a crafting system? And I don't think I even visited any of the vendors even once in the game. It just seemed pointless. Sometimes it just feels like there's too much going on and I think the game would have been better if they just sort of honed in on just a few mechanics and really tried to perfect them. So this constant barrage of tutorials goes on for the first 10 hours of the game and when you finally make it past the extremely long prologue section with its extremely long cutscenes that would even make Kideo Kojima go to sleep you get to explore Xenoblade 3's massive world full of monsters to fight and useless shit to collect. In this game you can actually have all six of your party members beat up the enemies at the same time on the field. See that's nice. It never makes sense to me how in most RPGs you have to bench excess party members and only have four on the field. Like what's the point of that? If I was fighting giant lobsters on the road I wouldn't tell some of my friends to just stand up to the side and stare at me. I'd have everyone beat the shit out of the bad guys and that's what you do in this game. You can have six characters gang up on one enemy if you want. Is it fair? No, but who cares? The combat system likes to use the special R2U sign depending on your class which can stun enemies if executed in the proper order and all the music when you're battling is so good. Actually the entire soundtrack in this game is great. And what is that? Is that a giant baboon? What? No no no. And he killed me. Nice. I like the combat system especially the chaining minigame which I didn't understand at first because they do a terrible job explaining things in this game but it eventually made sense and it is just plain addicting bullying the crap out of one enemy with everyone and if you wait right until the enemy is almost dead before using your chain attack you enter an overkill mode where you earn an EXP multiplayer. So if you're fighting a boss and you wait right until he's almost dead to do your attack you can get a 500% EXP boost meaning it'll be like you fought five bosses instead of one. There's so many little tricks you can discover in the game and it's really cool and one of my favorite things about the game is how minimalistic and unintrusive the UI is. It's really important that adventure games let you experience the game world organically by giving us a user interface that isn't too busy and doesn't interfere with the game. I just love how clean and simple it is not too much going on it's not like there's a million things on the screen with all these random numbers and shapes and status effects and random shit cluttering up the space or anything like that look like every single assassin game overlaid and copied to her. I'm so glad this game has a clean UI it's a very good use of screen space. So this game is a really huge intimidating action RPG with a ton of things to do and a really engaging story even if the cutscenes make you feel like you're at the Sundance Film Festival with how long they are. This is the kind of game a person plays for over a hundred hours with how much content there is packed into this package so keep that in mind. It has a very slow start and it has almost everything I hate about modern games from the user interface to the amount of tutorials it embars you with which would normally make me call it a bad game. However the game also has uni which I believe cancels out all the bad things about the game so with that said I would highly recommend it.