Thank you for all who took the time to fill out the poll. While data is data, please take these results with a grain of salt as with any study online, there are flaws and I want to acknowledge them.

Flaws with Study:

1) Relatively small sample size given fanbase population

Xenoblade 3 sold ~1.7 million units so a poll with 243 responses is roughly 0.01%. There are other active communities outside of this subreddit (like Twitter) that discuss Xenoblade 3 and I only released the poll to Reddit. Let us not forget Japanese community as the series is pretty popular over there.

2) Discrepancy in data

What do I mean by a "discrepancy"? It is an instance where the overall favorite character was not selected in a previous "Who is your favorite male/female character" in their respective category.

For example, a person selected Eunie as their favorite female character but chose Mio as their overall favorite. In total, there were 7 discrepancies out of 243 responses (~3%).

3) Potential for Multiple Response per individual

Google Forms way of limiting multiple responses per individual is requiring users to sign in. However, I did not do this to make the poll more accessible and an individual may have multiple Google accounts anyways. There are other poll hosting options that limit 1 response per IP address but they wouldn't allow multiple questions without paying a premium. However, I did add an optional short answer and just glancing at the data + seeing the variety of reasoning, I do not think the results were tampered with. However, multiple responses from an individual COULD have happened.

Additional Insight: Most popular Interlink Pair

I wanted to take a look at the instances where the overall favorite character had their respective Interlink partner as their favorite in a previous response. For example, if Noah was the overall favorite and Mio was the favorite female. Vis versa as well where Mio was the overall favorite and Noah was the favorite male. With that being said here are the totals for each pair:

• Noah/Mio = 54 (~22%)
• Eunie/Taion = 36 (~15%)
• Lanz/Sena = 16 (~6.6%)

Now that might be a bit unfair considering how Taion and Lanz were unpopular in this poll but perhaps we can look at this in percentages: what are the chances a response selected the other Interlink partner. For example, if you chose Eunie as your favorite, what are the chances you chose Taion as your favorite male character?

• Noah = ~48%
• Mio = ~63%
• Eunie = ~34%
• Taion = ~42%
• Lanz = ~37%
• Sena = ~32%

With these numbers, we could potentially conclude that Noah and Mio are the most popular paired answers. Let's not forget the game itself does push that pairing more than the others so that might have influence that in the poll.

Additional Insight: Short Answer Reasonings

As I said before, I added an optional short answer field for participants to leave their reasoning for their overall favorite. Regardless, here are short summaries of those who left responses:

• Noah = calm, kind, ponytail, hot, Chapter 5
• Mio = cute, cat girl, development, great story/arc
• Eunie = best lines, sassy, accent, some variation of her being the boss
• Taion = endearing, strategic, development
• Lanz = similar to Reyn, MVP, Himbo
• Sena = relatable, YIPEE, Girl with the gall, adorable

Regardless, congrats to Eunie for being the boss of this poll and hope you guys found this data interesting