The Endless Now: A retrospective on Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and its themes.
I gotta say…there’s too many good games this year. I feel somewhat bombarded by it, but among all of the big releases this year the one game that captured my heart is none other than Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
It honestly might be one of, if not the best piece of media I have experienced this year, so I feel like I have to write something about it, I guess. This game is said to be the culmination of the series’ themes by its producer Tetsuya Takahashi in Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” series of interviews, so I would like to talk about the story and its themes that I have noticed while going through the game and especially about the characters. Might get a little bit personal later on because…It’s just that kind of game, to me.
Also, obvious spoiler alert as I will try to explore the themes of this game in detail, so beware if you plan to play the game any time soon.
The world of Aionios
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is set on the world of Aionios, a world full of conflict and endless war between two factions: Keves and Agnus.
In this world, the citizens of each nation are fully comprised of soldiers, bar the Queen and their Consuls. Each and every one of them, including our protagonists, has a fleeting lifespan of 10 years, or ‘terms’ as they call it. If they make it to the end of their term, they will be greeted with a Homecoming Ceremony, where their life will be released as a reward (or more like, public execution) after 10 years of fighting…that is, if they make it in the war without dying early.
It should be obvious at this point, but Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a game about war. It examines it through the eyes of characters where all they know in their whole life is fighting. Fighting in this world becomes as necessary as eating or sleeping, as in this world, you need literal life energies from the other faction to fuel their own ability to survive. There’s really no…political or logical basis for this war either as when asked to why she fights, Mio, one of the protagonists, answers with: “Because there are enemies to kill.”. All the years of fighting is normalized so much that it’s just accepted as the natural state of the world, which makes the protagonists encounter in the story with an unknown man, who gives them the power to break from the shackles of this perpetual conflict and discover the truth of this world even more important.
The relationship between foreign things.
The Xeno series, at its core, always talks about the relationship between foreign things, hence the use of the prefix Xeno in their names. Tetsuya Takahashi in his interview with Nintendo said:
A person’s life is basically built up of relationships with other people. A relationship with foreign things. I’m always conscious of this perspective when I’m making things.
Which I think shows through a lot in his works, especially Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Picking up from where we left off before, the characters in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 are soldiers from both sides of the war: Noah, Lanz and Eunie are Kevesi soldiers, and Mio, Sena, and Taion are Agni soldiers. Both sides are essentially foreign to each other, as they only see the other as enemies to kill, never thinking about who they are as a person. Even so, through the course of the story they learn a lot about each other, their struggles, and discovers that…maybe they are not so different from each other as they thought.
At the beginning of the story, the party had a fateful encounter who changed their lives entirely: They meet Guernica Vandham, a 61 years old man who at the time, was fighting for an unknown faction outside of the two nations the characters are from. He is very foreign to them, as their entire lives, they have never seen anyone who has lived over their 10th term (or physically 20 years old). Their perspective of the world they live in changed entirely because of this encounter, as they have discovered that there is life beyond their 10th term, beyond their Homecoming Ceremony that they all aim for.
In Chapter 5 of the story, as per Vandham’s instruction during their encounter at the beginning of the game, the party finally found The City: A hidden city full of people who are out of the cycle of perpetual conflict, full of people who just lives…normally. It has children running about, playing around in their neighborhood. Elders, looking over those children. And most importantly young people their age falling in love, getting married, and have kids.
As child soldiers with mere 10 years to live with, all of it are concepts that are so incredibly foreign to them. That there is life outside of constant war and beyond their terrifyingly short lifespan. There’s this really heartwarming scene in the game where they witnessed a woman giving birth to a baby. They are all so excited to see the birth of a new life.
They finally realized the natural order of things, how humans should be living, which is better said by The City’s leader, Monica:
This is how it should be. This is human nature. We are born defenseless, grow up, then those who find spouse create new life together…age, then return to the earth.
There’s just something really beautiful, I think, about these kids who are essentially just war machines until recently, learning about the essence of life. Seeing them react to concepts that are familiar to us, but very foreign to them.
The characters, and their choices.
I would like to talk about literally everyone in this games’ cast, but instead I feel like it’s better to focus on the two main leads: Noah and Mio, alongside with their antagonistic counterparts, Consul N and Consul M.
Noah and Mio are both an off-seer from their respective nations, which is a role given to a soldier whose task is send off their dead comrades (or, enemies alike) via music. I REALLY like the relationship between this two. They were the first ones to get Interlinked into their Ouroboros forms, forcing them to share their memories and feelings right at that moment, making them try to understand each other when everyone else in their groups was at each other’s throats. I find this parallel between Noah and Mio’s accepting attitude at the beginning compared to the rest of the group quite compelling, because while the mechanics of Ouroboros might seem like a cheap writing trick to make them closer instantly, it didn’t do all of the heavy lifting for the relationship to grow. They were still cautious about each other at first, though much more willing to cooperate than the others. We still see the both of them get closer over the course of the game and build up trust with each other.
Albeit having the same roles, their perspective on it is…a little bit different. Noah is devoted to being an off-seer since the beginning, unlike Mio who thought of it as a burden when she was first assigned to it because she feels like she’s more suited to be on the front lines. As the game progresses, it’s subtly shown that Noah’s ideals resonate with Mio a lot, as it also echoes the ideals of her off-seeing partner in her old Colony, Miyabi. As the game progresses, she becomes more and more in sync with Noah when they both play the off-seeing tune in a duet. I love the “show, don’t tell” approach they took with this because it really is a joy to see their relationship grow over time. I think the effect Noah (and Miyabi, to be fair) has on Mio’s views about being an off-seer peaked during her Side Story at the end of the game, as she was saving Miyabi from Consul Y with the melody they have always played.
“An off-seer’s melody, it’s more than a sequence of notes. It is shaped by feelings. Those of the player and of the ones being played for.”
Before talking more about Noah, I feel like it’s more appropriate to talk about Noah and Mio’s counterparts: Consul N and M. Before turning this article into a convoluted explanation about them, they’re basically past incarnations of Noah and Mio who failed to end the cycle of endless war, with Noah succumbing to despair after losing Mio and accepted Z’s offer to become a Moebius in order to be with Mio again. We’ve always seen Noah as someone who’s calm and composed, often lost in his thoughts, but through Consul N I feel like we get to see him at his worst.
I…really like how Xenoblade Chronicles 3 uses reincarnation as a part of its story here. Noah and Mio, in every iteration of their lives always ends up meeting each other and eventually Mio will always be the one who dies early and leave Noah behind. After Noah and Mio becomes Moebiuses, this cycle should’ve stopped…but instead, an amalgamation of their hope for the future becomes the Noah and Mio that we know of, who finally breaks the cycle that their previous incarnations never been able to. It’s…amazing to me that the constants are always there (Noah, Mio, and Mio having a shorter lifespan than Noah.) but the difference is: they met their past selves. They understand their own shortcomings from meeting them, and from there, it always acts as a…self-reminder for them to not go there and repeat the same thing again.
That was a little bit off tangent, but about Noah: he can’t bear the thought of a world without Mio, which we see in full during the end of Chapter 5 where Noah, who’s usually calm and composed breaks down at the thought of Mio dying and he can’t do anything about it. Exactly the same as his ‘evil’ counterpart, given the chance, he might even choose the same path as Consul N in that position. I really love that Noah acknowledges this, and that he’s saved by Mio being there for him at his lowest at the start of Chapter 6.
Oh yeah, speaking of Chapter 5, I loved the sheer feeling of…hopelessness in that ending scene, where the party can’t do ANYTHING but wait for Mio’s death in their cell. Mio’s fleeting time left in this world was always a topic the characters talks or laments about throughout the game before this, either if it’s lamenting how one feels when they’re nearing their life’s end, or talking about the legacies that someone leave after they die. In Chapter 5 though, Mio’s death feels…so close. So real. Usually in a situation like this in other anime or games the characters will try to find a solution to their friend’s impending death, but here? They can’t do anything about it but wait. Even though Mio cheated her death by the end by swapping with Consul M’s body, the build up to that Homecoming scene was among the best scenes in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 to me.
Another thing that I think is present in a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s characters is choices, or rather their inability to make one due to the nature of their world. They have no choice but to fight instead of having a ‘normal’ life like you would expect them to have. Noah and Mio’s seemingly locked fate of meeting each other in every incarnation, only to lose each other in the end is also part of this, in my opinion. Interestingly in The City, which is supposed to be a place that’s out of Aionios’ endless cycle where most of its citizens live inside of its walls peacefully…there’s Shania: A member of the resistance corps who feels like she has no choice but to fight due to her family’s legacy and her mother’s pressure. I really think she’s affected by the nature of this world of constant fighting as well, because even though The City is relatively “safe” compared to the rest of the world, Shania’s hobby — Painting — is seen as useless in this world of fighting, because most people think it’s more urgent to deal with the Moebius threat than indulging in mundane things like that. Even though her father and her best friend told her to pursue her talent in painting instead of forcing herself to fight, she still continued on which ultimately resulted in her feeling like she made the wrong choice and cursed the nature of the world while admiring the life cycle of Agnus and Keves soldiers where they can die and be reborn right after — effectively having a second chance in life. I think Shania’s story showcased this theme of freedom of choice’s importance the most, out of all characters.
The endless now.
There is a feeling that (I assume) is familiar to most people: The desire for stagnancy. The feeling of wanting to stay in the now, the unwillingness to move forward. We humans are…naturally afraid of the unknown, sometimes deliberately choosing to reside in the present that’s full of comfort and security, away from the uncertainties that comes with the future.
It’s terrifying. Not knowing how the world will turn out. How YOU will.
-Eunie
But of course, as we all know we have to move forward. If we don’t take that step forward, we can never change for the better. Or if I put it in Mio’s words: “You can never change the world like that.”. This, in my opinion, is the strongest core theme of Xenoblade Chronicle 3: the courage to break out of ‘The Endless Now’, to be optimistic and move forward to an uncertain future no matter how bleak it may look like.
It’s just…simply everywhere in the game’s narrative. During the course of the game, Noah and the gang “liberates” a lot of Agni and Kevesi colonies from Moebius’ control, freeing them from the obligation to fight each other. Despite that, in every colony’s side story after they are liberated there is always the question of “What are we going to do now?”. It is natural for them to question that because their whole lives all they’ve known is to fight in an endless war, stuck in time, basically. When they have the option to move forward and do something else, they’re frozen and didn’t know what to do with their newly earned freedom. That’s why in most of these side quests it’s always about helping these colonies find their new goal.
In the main story itself, there’s Z. The main antagonist of this game who is the literal manifestation of humanity’s fear towards an uncertain future. He created Aionios in a state of perpetual war to keep The Endless Now, believing that it is the desire of all humanity…and when I played the game, seeing him say that, I feel like I get it. There is moments in my life where I wish time would stop, fearing that it would get worse any moment in the future. But that is also why I think this game’s message through the main characters so encouraging. The main party wants to shape the future for themselves, to be courageous enough to look forward. To be true to themselves even though the entire world is against them.
This optimism, I think, is what Tetsuya Takahashi wanted to convey through this game. In Nintendo’s interview with him, he said that he “wanted to convey to younger generations nowadays, through my story, that they can create their own path however they want and that they should not give up on their dreams and goals.” along with Koh Kojima saying that he especially wants people around the same age of the main characters to play it. As someone who is in that age range, I feel like I understand why they say that. I obviously don’t speak for everyone here but for me, the post-pandemic life kinda…sucks right now. Real bad. College moving towards online lectures because of COVID-19 for around 2 years kinda destroyed my social life in my university. Heck, killed one of my opportunities to take an exchange program to Japan, even. Now, despite the pandemic dying down and I started to move back into face to face lectures again, the teaching atmosphere is really different to me that my grades dived down to oblivion and I’ve been trying to recover from that until now. Everything feels uncertain to me, even the future dreams I had hoped to reach before. Playing this game and seeing Z’s motives for freezing Aionios in time really speaks to me, in some way, and hearing the main characters determination to move forward knowing their future is uncertain is REALLY encouraging.
I think Tetsuya Takahashi understands that, and wants to somehow encourage the younger generations through his work. This game honestly feels really personal to me because of this whole theme, and will always be my favorite in the series because of that too.
Okay, that is all I wanted to rant about Xenoblade Chronicles 3. It’s a really good game with really grounded themes despite it’s spectacular setting, and to me, is a game that made me have a more positive outlook in life after playing it. I’m sorry I got kinda personal there in the end but I really need to put that to make the point I was trying to make.
Thanks for reading, if you do get to this point! Please play the game if you haven’t even after I spoiled basically everything to you.
See you another time!
