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Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (Switch): COMPLETED!

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This is actually half of a double pack along with The Missing Heir, as they were released together but are actually separate downloads. It’s obviously very similar to the other Detective Club game, and has some of the same characters. This one is set a few years before the other, however, at the start of your private detective career, and centres around investigating a murder in a high school (where you meet the girl who will become your partner in the other game).

The Girl Who Stands Behind of the title is one of those Japanese High School “7 wonders” things (a common Japanese trope), referencing a girl who some of the students swear they’ve seen or heard muttering behind them and are saying they’re the murderer. As with the previous game, there’s nothing supernatural here – it just seems like it might be. Also as before (or after, if you’re chronologicaling it) the plot hooks you, the art and acting are both great, and the slightly annoying choose-every-option story progression exists. Still well worth a play, though.

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’d seen a number of reviews comparing this series of games to the Phoenix Wright games and let me tell you this – they’re not really much alike at all. Phoenix Wright has humour and puzzles and magic and stupidity and nonsense, whereas Famicom Detective Club is (despite appearances) rooted in reality with no magic or ghosts or stuff like that. And there’s no trial – just investigations. Which play out mostly like a visual novel.

The Missing Heir is one of two updated Switch versions of the very old series on the Famicom, and so previously only appeared in Japan in impenetrable Japanese. This game is about you – a young private detective who is suffering from amnesia following an attack – trying to figure out who he is, why he was attacked, and continuing the murder investigation that he was in the middle of when he lost his memory.

Although the game wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I did really enjoy the story, The plot really makes you want to find the killer, so it works as a proper murder mystery. The artwork and voice acting (Japanese only) were both great too. The “gameplay”, such as it is, was a bit frustrating however: Progression is mostly just making sure you say the right things to the right people in the right orders, and it’s here the game fall down a bit – you have to pretty much exhaust all your dialogue and action options, sometimes multiple times, in order to trigger the next action or event. It isn’t always clear which thing you need to say or do as often the reaction to what you do is unexpected. Thankfully, it’s worth it.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’m a little sad now that the whole Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy has come to an end. This feature-length DLC for XC3 might be the last time we see the worlds created for the series, as although it did manage to forge some links with Xenoblade Chronicles X, I understand that’s not really related and the “links” are really little more than Easter eggs. Sad.

But the good things! Future Redeemed is set about 500 years before Xenoblade Chronicles 3, in an area of the same world that is somewhat missing from the main game for reasons which are clear in that game. You play as Matthew, a very familiar looking human who is from The City (no, not the same one as the main game) rather than Agnus or Keves. Agnus and Keves are about, nearer the start of their never-ending campaign to wipe each other out. Matthew, a mysterious woman called A, two “rescued” soldiers from the war, and – what? – both Shulk and Rex from XC1 and XC2 make up your party.

Gameplay is much the same as the main story, although there’s no Ouroborosing here (instead you have team-up attacks that effectively serve the same purpose). A few minor mechanic changes, like clearing out waves of baddies, change things a bit, but really what you’re here for is the plot and the further exposition of how Aionios came to be, how the hell grownup Rex and Shulk are here, and why Matthew looks like, well, spoiler. That, and a very familiar location from XC1 makes a major reappearance.

For a series that I wasn’t too sure I’d get into at the start, I have certainly spent one hell of a lot of time on it these last couple of years!

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch)

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I went back after completing the main story, as there was still A Lot To Do. Not least completing the story unlocks two more Heroes – the Queens of Agnus and Keves themselves – but also because I had loads of other side missions and stuff I wanted to look into.

There’s quite a lot more exposition on how the world of Aionios came to be, as well as more backstory on both the main characters and all of the Heroes. Completing quests for your characters also eventually leads to them “ascending”, which unlocks more CP levels for them and some bonuses.

There’s a Nopon you meet fairly early on in the game who tells you to come back once you’ve completed the game, so I did that and he wanted stories of my adventures. Each completed story unlocks something – mostly cosmetic items and skins of characters from earlier Xenoblade games – and to complete them generally means 100%ing something. One I thought I’d go for was to unlock everything on everyone’s Interlink skill trees. To do this requires a lot of SP, and the only ways to get SP are by exploring the world (new areas unlock SP), opening containers (which might contain some), beating big ol’ baddies, and completing quests. Ascension quests unlock 10 SP each upon completion, and were the main things left for me to do, so I focussed on them. Oh boy.

Valdi, the young engineer commander of one of the Colonies, has a quest which involves collecting loads of items. Some are very rare. And only seem to come out of the item generators. Sometimes. I spent probably two whole hours on this tiny bit of one part of one of hundreds of quests, eventually completing it when the RNG Gods allowed it. That gave me enough SP to unlock the final bit of an Interlink tree, which in turn let me go and see the Nopon to get my prize. Only, it turns out, that I’d already got the same “prize” by scanning an Amiibo months ago. Angry? I nearly exploded.

I did, however, mop up some more stuff afterwards until I was satisfied I’d managed to rinse as much information and entertainment as I could out of the game, and with 130 hours on the clock, I called it a day.

Fantastic game. I see the remaster of Xenoblade Chronicles X is out now too, but as it has no ties to the 1, 2 or 3 (bar a single character cameo in a secret mode in XC2), I feel sad I won’t see any more of this amazing world. Or rather, set of worlds. Xenoblade 4 soon please and thanks?

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’ve been playing a lot of Huge RPGs in the last year or so, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 might be the longest one yet. I’ve completed it, but of course There’s Still More To Do, so it’s not over yet. Just 85 or so hours in.

It’s hard to talk about everything in the game without spoilers. Normally, a spoiler in an RPG like this would just spoil the ending of this game, but in the case of Xenoblade 3 it would actually spoil enjoyment of the previous two games in the series too.

What I can say, hopefully ruining nothing for you, is that the whole existence of the world of Aionios, the setting for the game, is directly related to Xenoblade 1 and 2. This becomes clearer as you play, especially if you remember locations from those games as places you visit in Xenoblade 3 are somewhat familiar, either in look or in name (or both). There are a few “wait, what?” revelations related to it too, but I won’t go into them.

Hung on the front of this is the “day to day” story of the game. Two factions, Keves and Agnus, are locked in perpetual war. Soldiers, when defeated in battle, release some sort of life essence which is used to sustain the Flame Clock of their enemy, and this clock is essential to the existence of that army. For centuries, this life force has bounced back and forth, with no overall victor – intentionally, as it turns out. To add to this, soldiers are “born” as children and only live for 10 years – assuming they’ve not KIA.

You start out as a small group of Keves soldiers, and because of $event, you end up fighting alongside some Agnus soldiers rather than (or perhaps, as well as) against them. This starts off a chain of events which ultimately reveals that this entire war is orchestrated by a higher, malevolent, power and surprise – you have to team up permanently and Become Greater Together and other tropes in order to prevent (or cause?) the end of the world. This mostly involves going round all the colonies, from both sides of the war, and destroying their flame clocks to release them from the endless fighting.

I’m amazed that the three games in the series can be so similar, but somehow still have completely different worlds and events and still be linked in ways that I couldn’t ever have imagined. It’s really clever.

But, that’s the plot. How is the gameplay? Well, it’s similar to what came before, really. You still have a party of heroes, you still have “arts” and other special moves and attacks, and it’s still real-time-ish battles as before. There’s no “foresight” power like in Xenoblade 1, and you don’t have “blades” as such like Xenoblade 2, and there whole upgrading and buffing your party and stats has been streamlined and polished, but it’s still played and controlled in essentially the same way. Battles feel quicker than they did in 2, which was one of my only negative points on that game.

Voice acting is, again, excellent. It took a while for the new characters to grow on me, but I can’t complain about how good their actors are. As before, it’s mostly regional accents – Welsh cat ladies, Australian rebels, etc. – which really adds something. There’s a big variety of characters, loads of heroes you can add to your party (only one at a time, though) each with their own missions and stories too.

And that’s it. There’s a lot more I could say, but spoilers, right? Is it better than 1 and 2? No. But the thing is, I’m seeing all three games as one massive game now, and it’s certainly not a disappointment or a dip in quality. Now, if only Xenoblade Chronicles X was also linked in to the series properly!