Since its acquisition in 2007, Monolith Soft has become one of Nintendo’s most prolific development partners thanks to both its assistance on first-party projects and, more importantly, its work on Xenoblade Chronicles. This large-scale RPG series has become one of Nintendo’s key pillars in the RPG space and for good reason – its robust technical underpinnings, gorgeous vistas and strong storbytelling all work in tandem to create something unforgettable and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is no exception.
With its fresh cast of characters, enhanced technology and outstanding soundtrack, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 builds on the experience the team has acquired since its inception and comprehensively addresses a key weakness of the last series entry: image quality. In targeting higher end visuals, something that to give, with resolution taking a big hit. Dynamic pixel counts that could hit 540p docked and 360p in mobile mode were mitigated via a relatively simple spatial upscaler, paired with intrusive sharpening. Xenoblade 3, however, represents a colossal leap forward in that respect. Monolith has both improved the overall visual quality while greatly boosting image quality, achieving this via what looks like a temporal super-resolution solution, taking those lower pixel counts up to a passable rendition of 1080p when docked and 720p in portable play.
The drawback to this solution is that with fast motion, visible break-up can occur revealing the lower resolution nature of the image but in most cases, image quality is perceptibly sharper than anything you’ll see in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – and the implementation is particularly impressive in portable mode, delivering one of the sharpest images from all the high-end titles we’ve seen on Switch – a far cry from the exceedingly blurry Xenoblade 2. Yes, the resolution slips to similarly low levels but what you see by eye is noticeably sharper, which is what matters.
The inclusion of this technique also raises questions regarding the upcoming sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – as far as we know, Monolith Soft has provided engineering assistance to Nintendo for this game and perhaps this explains why the most recent trailer exhibited such clean image quality, exceeding our expectations. Could it be that the solution employed for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is also deployed in the next Zelda title? We’ll have to wait and see. That said, this solution to anti-aliasing is not without flaw – look closely and you may spot subtle warping of the image during movement but, honestly, it remains a vastly superior approach to anti-aliasing next to any prior Xenoblade game especially for portable players.
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Of course, there’s more to this game than the quality of its presentation and I was also impressed by character and world rendering. Xenoblade 3 aims to mimic an anime style aesthetic while retaining depth inherent in three-dimensional rendering. Eye, hair and facial features are all presented using smart visual features to achieve the desired look. Eye rendering is an interesting showcase – head-on you’ll see a typical 2D anime look, but looking in profile, it’s clear that eyes are curved, flecks of lights reflecting on their surfaces. Character movement is improved too, with more realistically proportioned characters and inverse kinematic calculations ensuring that the position of feet adapts to the undulation in the ground, as opposed to clipping through it as seen sometimes in prior series entries. The animation also more closely matches camera speed eliminating that sensation of gliding above the world – an issue with the first Xenoblade game.