I recently picked up a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in a sale and don’t have enough time to play all the previous titles at the moment. I know that playing the games in a chronological order would be beneficial in terms of background story and lore, but is it possible to follow the story without having played one and two before?
It basically comes down to the class system and overall level scaling. I like to do a lot of side content, which meant I was always overleveled. I also like to max out all classes. Since class EXP is tied to the level difference between you and your enemy I didn’t want to waste any class EXP and never used a maxed class again. I could have fought even stronger optional enemies to max out all available classes first, but then I’d be even more overleveld. In combination this resulted in me running the most janky class combinations possible all throughout the game up until the very last boss fight. I know that’s kinda on me, but the game basically punished me for my play style since it would have been more fun to plan and use an actual party setup with enemies around my level.
The worst part is that all of this could have been solved by leveling down my party, which was an option in the Xenoblade 1 remake.
Also, while I liked the story overall, unlike the other two games the final boss was kind of a let down. 1 and 2 kind of peaked in the final stretch while 3 peaked during a certain sequence before that.
spoiler
Namely the prison sequence. I’m also not the biggest fan of erasing everything that happened in 3 by the end of it. It’s kind of a “It was all a dream” resolution since we’ve gone back and other games couldn’t possibly refer to anything that happened. All people born after the merge ceased to exist and any character development was for nothing. While Future Redeemed has the best gameplay overall, it did not address any of the open questions and future stories like it would have to omit Xenoblade 3 characters since the iterations we know of don’t exist. It’s frustrating, especially since 3 was supposed to be the final conclusion for the Klaus arc but we are left with the same state as before 3.
Yes that’s a fair point - I did find myself overleveled quite a lot, and it was sometimes frustrating having to balance class options between characters (personally I was trying to level classes with the characters that got the most benefit from that particular class, which became a juggling act). I find that all the Xenoblade games struggle with overleveling (like you say, 1 remake had the option to level down). My initial thought would be to tie side content to your current level (i.e. the quests level up with you) so it’s always the correct level of difficulty, but that makes levelling up pretty pointless. Instead maybe level caps until you reach certain parts of the game? Hopefully it’s something future games can improve upon.
I feel like they have this already solved, they just don’t want to do it. Either give me the option to level down or to bank a percentage of all EXP and not just quest EXP. If they don’t want us to cheese the system to power level, just lock this EXP away until the post game.
It’s really annoying that there IS a level down option, but it only unlocks after beating the main story. :/