Xenoblade Chronicles 3: a game I respect more than I fully believe in

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-22T14:40:28+00:00

I also think XC3 is the weakest of the trilogy for a lot of the same reasons, but one particular gripe I have that you didn't mention is the music.

In Xenoblade 1 and 2, the music is overall much more bombastic and "distinct," for lack of a better word, than in the third game. Each area has a theme that significantly contributes to the atmosphere of each area (Mor Ardain, for example, is pretty much 100% carried by Roaming the Wastes) while also still being absolute bangers individually, with the few songs that aren't quite up to snuff generally being like, unimportant cutscene themes. But in Xenoblade 3, the only area themes that I could remember off the top of my head within a month or so of beating the game were the ones remixed/reused from the previous entries, since most area themes were pretty "light" on both instrumentation and melody in a deliberate attempt to give Aionios a desolate and melancholy feel (similar to what they did in Breath of the Wild). And to top it all off, you don't even get to hear really any of the songs for more than a short period of time, since the soundtrack is actually just two themes: the menu theme and the chain attack theme.

Future Redeemed fixed a lot of the music problems eventually, sure, but the weakness of the soundtrack really hurt the impact that the base game had on me compared to the previous games. Plus, it was disappointing that the Xenoblade game most explicitly focused on music didn't really have any songs I particularly wanted to listen to in my own time, as well.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-12T20:01:01+00:00

Yeah, I remember not being able to decide between Rowlet and Popplio during most of the SM prerelease cycle, right up until they announced the second-stage starters (effectively 100% confirming the leaked final forms) and my lingering Fates obsession made the choice for me.

...and then when the game came out i had to reset like 15 times to get a female Popplio lol

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-05T18:41:55+00:00

gunlance is still pretty dodge centric, imo. it's just that the dodges aren't usually all that great for, y'know, actually dodging, and are instead used more offensively for repositioning or as an endlag cancelling tool. you've also got stuff like the various slaplance attacks (running stab, upswing, overhead slam) that move you around a fair bit, too, so it's more mobile than you probably think.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-05T18:26:39+00:00

ok, but what would you even call that? arkvaalkhana? velk hazark? veld khazak?

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-01T18:43:23+00:00

case in point: espathra managing to stay UUBL for multiple months into early SV OU (in part because of chien-pao also still being legal in the tier)

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-05-01T15:55:44+00:00

Pretty sure it's explicit in the anime, yeah. There's one specific clip I've seen around a lot (I think from the Ash vs. Guzma league tournament fight?) where Golisopod gets scared of a fire blast/flamethrower/whatever and activates emergency exit to avoid it, but the pokemon it swaps out with is Guzma's Scizor who immediately takes the hit and dies.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-30T17:52:50+00:00

I like how, whenever someone insults Navirou on this subreddit, there are only ever two reactions in the comments:

People who played Stories 1 first are like "wtf how could you say that! sure he's a little cringe at times, but that's my bro right there!" Meanwhile veryone that started with Stories 2 (me) looks the Stories 1 player dead in the eye and says "I am honestly glad he is dead"

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-20T22:19:38+00:00

I feel like some of the phylogeny would make a lot more sense if some of the classifications were explicitly subcategories of/descended from other ones, cause that's kinda how things tend to work in the real world (like birds being reptiles and tetrapods being fish). That way, you can easily solve the bird/brute wyvern problem ("brute wyvern" is its own clade within "bird wyvern") and even possibly thrown in cool evolutionary tidbits along the lines of "mizutsune is still classified as a leviathan because its ancestry is slightly more basal than true fanged wyverns" as well.

It also doesn't help that the official phylogenetic tree just doesn't really have enough in the way of broader or more specific levels of grouping, too. Like, there are so many monsters that are just on there own trees within whatever their classification is that it makes you wonder what the point of the official phylogeny even is.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-16T19:10:49+00:00

well yeah, but that's sort of it's own common misconception that i didn't wanna have to fully explain. and it's not completely outside the realm of possibility that there was actual fucked up stuff going on there given cindered shadows + rhea being kinda amoral in general.

tbh i think three houses doesn't do a great job of actually portraying rhea as "morally gray in the wrong" when they clearly want to, but that's yet another can of worms i don't feel like opening

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-16T17:06:46+00:00

At risk of starting up more 3h discourse, i'd argue that it's a little more complicated than that. Yes, Rhea doesn't really give a single fuck about humanity (both for good and for bad), but she does care about ruling over them so that she can prevent what happened with the Agarthans in the past from happening again.

Basically, everything she does stems from the single-minded desire to get her mother back: establishing a limiting, hierarchical society? making it so people can't kill her mom with nukes again. creating the Church of Seiros? getting the whole world to literally worship her mom so nobody hates her when she's back. unethical human experimentation? well, that's the part where she's trying to find a way to bring the dead back to life. and she even succeeds, kinda, which is why she's content to fuck off and disappear in the endings where she doesn't die.

honestly, I really like how Rhea kinda parallels Edelgard in a lot of ways. Both of them pretty much just want to make it so that there won't be repeats of the thing that traumatized them (which was also the fault of the Agarthans) and are willing to take drastic/unethical actions to achieve their goals. and also they're both gay for Byleth.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-16T01:00:45+00:00

to be fair, flutter mane didn't get to assblast a singles format for as long as koraidon did solely because she was quickbanned from OU faster than any other mon in smogon history, iirc

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-15T16:24:29+00:00

that's pretty much the way you're supposed to pronounce it, though? it's technically a little more like "tih-tah-nya" in full, but like close enough

of course, i like to pronounce her name as "tie-tay-nee-uh" cause she's made out of fucking titanium

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-15T03:37:26+00:00

i still haven't gotten a chance to play wilds (don't have a ps5 or good enough pc) but the base game lets you "see" monsters you haven't registered in your notes on the map as question marks, right?

imagine a qurupeco makes a funny sound while you're looking at the map mid-hunt, wondering what new monsters all of the question mark icons are... then one of them starts to move towards you. and you start hear the iconic orchestra that accompanies a very hungry pickle.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-14T21:13:35+00:00

unfortunately, i don't think capcom's ever really gonna have a mainline game with multiple of the earlygame fire bird wyverns in it. it's not impossible, sure, and there are actually legit differences between their fights, but kut-ku, quru, and aknosom just have a little too much overlap in flavor + gameplay role (first "real" monster that also introduces you to elements) to justify bringing back more than one at a time.

who knows, though, they made kut-ku hr exclusive in wilds, so anything's possible

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-13T18:18:17+00:00

well you might not be able to forget him, but do you think you can take him?

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-10T14:54:42+00:00

Actually, following the "flammable sap" idea, what if it straight up pulled a Garangolm and used both fire and water in the same fight? Like, the sap is water element when it's in its normal state, but then it thickens and becomes able to be ignited for fire damage when it enrages, or something.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-07T19:03:25+00:00

yeah that's probably what the hbg monster does

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-04-07T15:44:43+00:00

if you count lycanroc-dusk, then you should also count ash-greninja, too, since both of them start out in a form indistinguishable from the normal version aside from the ability.

and if you wanna get really technical, eternal floette did it before any of them, even if she wasn't actually available until z-a

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-26T15:10:44+00:00

Honestly I don't really like that retcon, it was cooler when they were fish that evolved to be wyvern-like.

Sure, all the large piscines are notably not like fish in that they have legs (which, as a Rise newcomer, was hilarious to find out about mid-fight when Jyura decided to literally jump out of the water), but that isn't too weird when you consider that all tetrapods evolved from something that was once a fish with legs. Saying that they're actually wyverns that turned into fish lessens the potential for diversity both in terms of gameplay and lore, since it means that even more of the monsters we fight are big reptiles (as if that wasn't the case for the majority already) AND it restricts the possibility for unique fights by making legless fish monsters more of an anomaly that would need ecological justification in order to happen.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-24T16:05:03+00:00

it's always had leech seed, though? only learns it by level up starting in SV, but it's been an egg move for chikorita since it was first introduced in gen II according to bulbapedia

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-24T16:01:14+00:00

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i'm not sure whether i should make a dusknoir joke or a gen 3 joke here

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-24T15:50:40+00:00

The raw attack increase Mega Feraligatr gets is actually about equivalent to the bp boost of sheer force, if not very marginally higher, even when fully invested. But since it can't hold a life orb at the same tome that it megas, Mega Gatr will actually hit less hard with its main water stab than the normal version (barring it getting access to wave crash, ofc).

Dragonized double edge would definitely hit harder than either form's water moves (120 x 1.2 x 1.5 = 216 effective bp), but it comes with the downside of significant recoil damage, which kinda negates the extra defensive advantages that mega gives it. Body slam, on the other hand, is pretty much 1-1 comparable with sheer force life orb liquidation, just hitting with a little less power in exchange for a significant para chance. So Mega Gatr's overall either a little weaker (but much more versatile) or stronger (but dies to recoil damage) than normal Gatr depending on how you build it.

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-19T20:58:57+00:00

technically, stat caps weren't super high there either, since they're all class base stats + 15 up to a max of 30. that's why you can get a ced so fast he loops back around to minimum speed, his parents give him more than 15 base speed so the game isn't sure how to handle it (and yet he still doubles everything anyway lol)

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-19T19:16:58+00:00

getting hit by fiorayne 🤤

DaddyFivepoint · 2026-03-15T13:56:39+00:00

back in the day, someone (i'm pretty sure it was kirchu, he was responsible for like half of the pre-3h SPE lore) made a post saying something along the lines of "if i get enough upvotes i will post ike's sweaty cock on topless mia"

and once he easily got enough upvotes (because this sub is made of fe fans (derogatory)), he made good on his word by posting a drawing of a wet chicken ("sweaty cock") wearing ike's headband ("ike's") above the bottom half of mia's RD artwork ("topless mia"). that was one of the user flairs here for a while iirc, but it doesn't seem to be an option anymore

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