The heroes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 comprise one of the title's most defining mechanics, helping to breath life into the open world of Aionios. With both combat and story-based features that tie into the game's hero roster, future role-playing games should take some pointers.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 features a bevy of heroes willing to lend a hand in the player's cause. Strewn about the continent's lands, each character is as varied as the colony they hail from; with a host of personalities and backstories, many born from the strife between the dissenting sides of Agnian and Kevesi forces, these heroes help to cement Aionios as a believable world, providing depth through their stories and combat abilities.
The Heroes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3
The heroes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 find themselves a byproduct of a calculated war that they no longer need to fight; much of their struggles involve looking into their pasts while moving towards a brighter future. Though this realization serves as the diving-off point for their stories, each character deals with the fallback of living a lie in different ways. Some, like Kevesi commander Ashera, continue to find reason in bloodshed, while others, like Agnian commander Juniper, learn to stray from their resigned attitudes toward death. Through the use of hero quests, the game imparts the personalities and world-views of each of these characters, showcasing the range of depth in the ways that their perceptions of the world have either changed or stayed the same.
The hero quests and their 'ascension' counterparts play nicely into Xenoblade Chronicle 3's 'discuss' mechanic, where heroes can chat with the core team at rest areas, talking over quest findings that tie into progression. This helps to provide further backstory and banter that aids in character development. Beyond the discuss mechanic lies the class rank system, where players can utilize a hero's moveset in battle in order to unlock the second part of their substory. Ascension quests make unlocking class ranks a worthy endeavor, as they work to anchor the backstories of the heroes and provide further growth in their character arcs. The game sometimes relies on these to showcase the clever use of overlapping heroes, as is the case with Colony 9's defending commander Zeon.
Agnus and Keves Working Together
Zeon's first hero quest deals with the realization of the war's circumstances and the desires for his colony to survive without fighting, a decision that will cut them off from Moebius' assistance. While his goals are admirable, his ascension quest marks the realities of how difficult it is to procure food for the colony given the land's infertile soil. With help from Colony Tau's Juniper, an Agnian commander that was once seen as their enemy, the quest involves Zeon and the rest of Colony 9 learning how to make proper use of the land to harvest potatoes, helping them to break free from the struggles of hunger.
The storytelling acts not just in service to Colony 9's difficulties, but as character progression for Juniper as well. It helps to demonstrate her colony's newfound reliance on others, showing that the world of Aionios has shifted. Though Tau was once fraught with isolation, it ascended through the use of support between enemies-turned-allies. The same sentiments are true of Colony 30 commander Valdi and Colony Iota commander Alexandria, with the latter learning to trust the former through mutual trades in technology. The results from these hero quests show the impact of the core Xenoblade Chronicles 3 team in their quest to put an end to the war, bringing together the once rivaled factions of Agnus and Keves to unite in the common goal of creating a future where people are free to follow their own aspirations.
The Heroes' Impact on Xenoblade Chronicles 3's Combat
Of course, the heroes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 provide a layer of nuance to the game's combat system as well. Each character from the roster pulls from Xenoblade Chronicles 3's core class types -- attacker, defender, and healer -- while providing added depth through their distinct weaponry and Talent Arts. This allows for a range of versatility in regard to which hero might be most suitable for a particular battle.
Colony Mu's Fiona focuses on healing and buffs, making her a wise choice for long and arduous boss fights, while Ethel's high agility and formidable attack power make her fit for felling weaker enemies quickly. Beyond that, the class skills of heroes work well in conjunction with their movesets, as is the case with Cammuravi; his devastating art attacks that trade health for high damage help to activate his class skill, further boosting his damage output after a certain threshold of health has been lost.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3's core protagonists can inherit the skills and abilities of the hero roster for their own use, which means that heroes who aren't active in the party can still have reverberating effects on combat. Noah and Sena aren't tied only to attacker-based movesets. Because of the ability to mix and match roles among the team, combat can become as varied as the player likes, allowing them to stick with optimal formations or branch out for different strategies and layers of challenge.
Taion, who begins the game as a tactical healer, has a surprising amount of versatility in Gray's attacker class, dealing a barrage of ether blows through the use of dual pistols. Lanz on the other hand, who is introduced as a Heavy Guard, can easily trade his Blade for Fiona's Signifer flag, demonstrating that his character is just as adept at tanking enemy attacks as he is in providing support. The game's hero roster forms the foundations of this strategy, helping to imbue Xenoblade Chronicles 3's combat with enough variation to keep its battles feeling fresh and exciting through hours of gameplay.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is available now for the Nintendo Switch.
