Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is finally out, and it turns out that you’re probably going to be doing a lot more walking than in the last one.
The term JRPG will generally elicit a response of ‘oh, this game is gonna be big’ in most people. But big can mean different things, like how long the game actually is, or the amount of side quests there are. For Xenoblade Chronicles 3, that comes in the form of the world being essentially five times bigger than the previous entry, at least according to one of the game’s directors, Koh Kojima.
Nintendo recently shared an interview with three of the lead developers of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, including Kojima, fellow director Genki Yokota, and writer Tetsuya Takahashi. And in the interview, the three dished out various details about the latest game in the series, as well as the series as a whole.
Notably, Kojima spoke about how big the game is. “So I actually did the math, and it turns out that the total walkable area in this game is over five times larger than in the second title,” said Kojima while noting he hoped the third game would be the last one such a huge amount of content, but the interviewer noting Kojima had hoped the same for the second game.
Interestingly, as part of the same interview Yokota noted that the game will be getting some more story via an expansion pass. “We will be adding a new story at the end of the Expansion Pass, and we are thinking of making its volume of content as large as Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country,” said Yokota. “It will be quite a high volume of content that will not let you down.”
An expansion pass hadn’t previously been confirmed, but it isn’t particularly surprising considering Xenoblade Chronicles 2 also received one.
In VG247’s review of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, we weren’t quite ready to give it a score, saying “Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is such a slow burn that I’m not yet ready to put a score on it. I’ve got more to play, more to see, and more to do. Yet at the same time, I can already unreservedly recommend it, and already happily say that it’s now my favorite entry in the series.”