With Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just 3 months away, let’s look at all we know so far and see if we can craft up some theories!
On February 9th, 2022, Nintendo surprised fans of Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles series with the announcement of the fourth mainline installment, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 with a release set for September. Two months later, they once again blew people’s minds by announcing a release date of July 29, 2022, two months earlier than originally planned. Along with making Xenoblade Twitter lose their collective minds, the trailer for this announcement was also jampacked with new footage for starving fans, like me, to scroll through frame-by-frame. Among this footage, we get our first look at the gameplay, new mechanics, and plenty of vague story details for us to theorize about. With much of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 still in mystery for us, let’s take some time to break down what we know, and throw some theories out there.
Gameplay
Within the first few seconds of gameplay in the trailer, anyone that has played the past games will see plenty they’ll be familiar with, like its real-time action-based combat system, the beautiful wide-open landscapes you’ll no doubt be able to freely explore, and a HUD system that would even make an MMO player feel intimidated. When closely looking at the moves on the HUD, we can see descriptions like “Side Break,” “Back Attack,” and “Dazed.” With this, we know that the attack positioning and topple mechanics will be coming back, which isn’t too surprising given that’s been a mainstay of the series’ gameplay since the first game, but it is nice to get that confirmation.
What doesn’t seem to be returning is the elemental mechanic of Xenoblade 2, which allowed you to create different reactions when using different elemental attacks in succession. At least in the trailer, I couldn’t find any moves with an elemental description like you would see in 2. Most likely it isn’t returning since characters probably won’t be able to change their elements and move lists on the fly like they could with the Blades in 2. Of course, while some things might not be returning, Monolith Soft is implementing new mechanics and gameplay changes to spice things up.
The first change that is noteworthy is players will now have their full party active in battles, meaning you’ll generally have six party members on the screen at all times, all acting independently. This is a huge jump from the 3 party members who would be active in 1 and 2. This will hopefully lead to more complex and action-packed battles. At a few points in the trailer, we can see a seventh character in the party. I’m going to assume these characters act like the extra party members you sometimes see in Xenoblade 1, like Dickson, where you can’t control anything about them but they’ll join in battles for short periods. The other changes we see in the trailer come in the form of the new class change and interlink systems.
With the class change system, characters will be able to use weapons from their fellow party members. We see a few examples of this in the trailer such as one character: Mio, using Noah’s sword while sporting a new character design that looks a lot like Noah’s. During my frame-by-frame, I don’t think I could see any instances where two characters had the same class at the same time, nor did I notice any characters using any classes that aren’t from the base six the party originally has, so I am curious about how much freedom we’ll see when it comes to these classes and if we’ll get any additional classes not available at the start.
The interlink system seems to be the most important new addition as it will most likely play a huge part in how some of the tougher battles in the game will play out and seems to have a huge part in the story. With this mechanic, characters are able to fuse together into a new purple giant form that is 100% not inspired by Evangelion at all. In a press release by Nintendo, it is explained that this new form is called Ouroboros, and can only be formed by specific parings within your parties. There is no word yet if you’ll be able to fuse characters outside of these specific pairings but I wouldn’t be too surprised if, as the story develops, the characters end up learning how to fuse in different pairings.
Story
While we’ve only seen collectively four to five minutes of the game, there’s surprisingly a lot to discuss when it comes to Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s story. At the same time, much of the information we know mainly just leaves us with questions. From what we know, the story takes place in the world of Aionis, the same setting of Xenoblade 1 consisting of the Bionis and Mechonis, has merged with the world of Xenoblade 2, Alrest. Both worlds do canonically exist at the same time, both being the byproducts of the scientist Klaus’ use of the conduit that would destroy the futuristic version of Earth and its universe, but the two exist in separate universes. This begs the question of how the two worlds merged, and while Shulk and Rex, the protagonists of 1 and 2, have crossed paths before, that was a non-canon update to 2 (at least I’m pretty sure it was non-canon), so we probably can’t find any clues from that.
Although these two worlds have come together, the people from them haven’t gotten along so well, as they have been divided into warring nations. Based on the machinery used, such as the Iron Giants which take the appearance of the faced Mechon of the first game, and the characters that fight for Keves we know it is formed by those from Bionis/Mechonis and is led by a mysterious masked woman that is definitely not Melia. While the Agnus, led by another masked woman that is differentially not Nia, appears to be the nation for those from Alrest since several of the Agnus characters appear to be Blades with core crystals embedded in them. Similar to what brought the two worlds together we also don’t know what brought these two nations to war.
Our main party consists of two squads from opposite sides of the war, brought together to take on a common threat. From the Keves Army, we have Noah, Lanz, and Eunie, while Mio, Sena, and Taion come from Agnus. It doesn’t seem that even these six know exactly what they’re going after, except that it is their “real enemy” as a mysterious man tells them in the announcement trailer. This man has been named Guenicia Vandham, and while he shares the same name, hairdo, and scar as the Vandham of Xenoblade 2, I doubt that this is the same man that helped guide Rex early in his adventure as that Vandham was made un-alive by Malos early on in Xenoblade 2. Following this man’s advice seems to have put our party members in a bit of trouble as they’re both now being hunted by the nations they once served, along with something that looks like the Ouroboros forms the party can fuse into, but with more teeth and freakier
From there we don’t have many concrete story details outside some minor character and world information put out on the official Xenoblade Twitter. These tweets were all in Japanese, but fortunately Twitter users @AegisFloral and @RogeTranslating created the account @XenobladeEN to translate and post all the information put on the official page, so make sure to check it out to get all the nitty-gritty details.
Theories
While we are out of hard facts, the two trailers have left us with plenty of vague, out-of-context lines and details that let us part take in one of my favorite activities when waiting for an upcoming game: coming up with theories!
Who is Vandham?
Let’s start with this mystery man Vandham. Each entry in the Xenoblade series has had a Vandham. This would make Vandham sort of like Final Fantasy’s Cid, a recurring name/character that usually fills a different role each time. With this in mind, it’s completely possible that this new one is a completely original character. However, I mention earlier Guenicia shares a lot of visual similarities with the Vandham of 2. All other iterations of Vandham up to this point have had a unique look, making me wonder why we now have one that isn’t. It could be that 2’s Vandham somehow came back from the dead, but I highly doubt that.
What I think is more likely, is that Guenicia is actually a character acting under a new identity, and I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say that it is 2’s very own protagonist: Rex. There’s not much evidence that points to this other than the similar hair color, but it would be a pretty big shock considering the huge character design change and would signify a pretty huge time skip from the end of 2. At the same time, Vandam impacted Rex’s character and was a character Rex held in high regard, so it would make sense that if for some reason, Rex needed to hide who he was, he would adopt the name and look of the long-departed Vandham.
Ouroboros
Next, I wanna address one of the biggest questions: how did these two worlds come together? While I don’t have a solid idea but I’m going to guess that it has to do with Ouroboros. Throughout the second trailer, we hear mentions of Ouroboros, such as not-Melia ordering its destruction, or Vandham saying how the fate of the world depends on its will. These two lines make me think that Ouroboros is a physical entity with some incredible, potentially godlike power.
We already know that Ouroboros is tied to fusing specific pairings of characters, but a bit of interesting information comes from a relationship chart posted on the official Xenoblade Twitter (thankfully translated by @XC_Enel). In the chart, we see who specifically pairs with who and can find that each pairing involves characters from opposite nations, such as Noah and Mio. This leads me to believe that whatever Ouroboros turns out to be, it is actively trying to connect the two worlds, whether its the actual worlds themselves or the people in them.
Closing
You can pre-order the standard edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for $60 USD from a variety of retailers, and there will be a special edition available for pre-order from Nintendo’s own store page eventually.
Like many, I am excited for the Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and can’t wait to get my hands on it on July 29th! Until then I plan on doing some homework by replaying all of the Xenoblade games. There is plenty more I want to talk about for this game, but given how long this one has turned out I’ll have to save it for future articles, so make sure to check back with Culture of Gaming for more! In the meantime, let us know down in the comments below if you’re excited about Monolift Soft’s latest game, and if you have any theories of your own.
