FUTURE REDEEMED IS PEAK XENOBLADE

RAHM JETHANI - Writer, 3rd Year, English

I've seen that look before...

SPOILERS FOR XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3 AND XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3: FUTURE REDEEMED!

The Xenoblade Chronicles series, as well as the entire Xeno series for that matter, is one that is very close to my heart. Its explorations of what it means to live, how to adhere to what you believe, and how to overcome overwhelming odds have deeply affected its many players across the years. Future Redeemed, Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s final and largest piece of downloadable story content, is a beautiful culmination of what the series has come to represent. Miraculously, it strikes the perfect balance of being a love letter to previous installments of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 while honoring the themes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and it is also able to bring everything together in a hopeful look to the future. And, being a Xenoblade game, of course it had to be hype as all hell.

In terms of action-JRPGs, Xenoblade has always had an extremely unique combat system, closer to that of an MMO than to a portable Nintendo game. While Xenoblade Chronicles 3 mixed the best combat elements from 1 and 2, Future Redeemed goes a step further. Like Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s prequel DLC, Torna – The Golden Country, Future Redeemed uses a “community” system, where players are forced to interact with the growing Colony 9 in order to unlock elements of progression. However, thanks to the feedback the developers received on Torna, Future Redeemed’s community system retains all the benefits while getting rid of nearly all the drawbacks. In essence, Future Redeemed uses positive reinforcement to motivate players to engage with its community aspect. Exploration means that you can get more items to unlock more moves to defeat bigger monsters to receive bigger rewards from the community system.

Nothing in this loop feels insignificant either; every gameplay feature here feeds into multiple other ones, making engagement with the community and the world a joy rather than a requirement. With Future Redeemed, a player is now able to feel genuine happiness about bringing more life to Colony 9, rather than an exhausted relief about meeting the minimum requirements for taking on a main story quest. Combat is also expanded upon in FR, with more customizability and more creative ways being offered to take down certain encounters. Xenoblade combat has never felt this good.

The characters are great in Future Redeemed, too. Of course we have the returning characters of Shulk and Rex, whose presences are still able to create inspiration in many forms. Both characters dealing with the fact that they are fathers is a nice moment of bonding, with their advice offered to each other showcasing the well-rounded people they’ve become.

This is a level of fanservice that I’m willing to tolerate, because these moments build meaningfully upon previous ones rather than just calling back. Shulk’s wistful “to you” at Colony 9 hits, man. The other standout returning character is N, who gets a lot more development in this prequel than I was expecting. We see his destruction of the old City, and we see him wrestle with his selfish desire for eternity against his feelings of immeasurable guilt. His conversation with Ghondor before the old City’s destruction and with Matthew before the final showdown against Alpha show the final embers of N’s human consciousness rebelling against the empty promise of Mobius. The writers of this story handled this moment perfectly, creating sympathy for such a deeply despicable character.

The new characters are brilliant too, albeit slightly archetypical. Most of the new cast work well because of their relationship to already existing characters. For example, Matthew is interesting because of how his personality subverts the audience’s expectations of who Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s Noah is supposed to be descended from. Having Matthew be a hot-headed idiot pugilist with a big heart, in comparison to Noah being a soft-spoken and deeply serious sword-wielding musician creates a very interesting dynamic in a metatextual sense. Likewise, A’s relationship to Alvis benefits her in a similar way, with her more human qualities being the result of Shulk and his friends’ humanity rubbing off on Alvis. Glimmer and Nikol unfortunately get very little development, with the bulk of it just playing off of their relationship with their parents.

What truly shines above all else in Future Redeemed, though, is the fulfillment of philosophical concepts and journeys that have taken place across the series, as well as the moments of hype spread along to help this aspect resonate with players. The concept from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 of Origin being a collective-unconscious-powered supercomputer is already fascinating, but the ways this idea is built upon in FR creates naturally stemming consequences of their world birthed between the two others. Despite it being a philosophical battle between Alpha’s and Mobius’ solutions, neither is perfect. Having grappled with the latter in the base game, addressing the former in this prequel also provides an opportunity for the Xenoblade franchise to reflect on itself, due to both Alpha and the Xenoblade series intending to move on to a wholly new future. This is why the multiple references to Xenosaga, while being a completely wild direction, are cohesive to the journey of the Xenoblade series. The solution that both the protagonists of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the writers of the series face is that no matter what direction you go, life is about continually moving forward without disregarding the past.

I can’t wait for the future of this series. Connecting the new world of post-Xenoblade-Chronicles-3 with Xenosaga is a bold move, but judging from how the philosophy of the Xenoblade series has always been preserved throughout its runtime, I have no doubt that the next installment will be spectacular.