Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Ending Explained

xenoblade 3 has been out for a month now and just like with two four and a half years ago people are sort of confused as to exactly what happened in the ending of the game but unlike that time i now have a youtube channel dedicated to analyzing and discussing the series so let's clarify things to the best of my current knowledge right here right now hopefully enough people have actually finished the game already so this video will actually get views because i like being able to capitalize on new releases to make numbers get bigger while i trust my viewers to not click on a video saying ending explained without having seen the ending of the game i do still have to give you a spoiler warning because i will be discussing content from post game side quests that will only show up if you're either in new game plus or reload your cleared save after defeating the final boss so it's perfectly okay to go do that stuff first make sure to drop a subscription though so you can find the video easier and then come back once you've seen all of that because some of that content is important to clarifying everything i'm talking about here with that out of the way let us begin the unique thing about xenoblade 3 compared to the other games in the series is how subtle it is with a lot of its points several things are very understated or left entirely to subtext and it's up to the player to piece it together using additional information from potentially having played xenoblade 1 and 2 beforehand don't feel bad if you didn't completely understand the ending your first time around especially if zeno isn't like your biggest favorite series of all time or if you're just in general a more casual fan i have seen some ludicrous takes and quote-unquote explanations regarding the ending that amount to nothing more than basic media literacy failure and i think understanding at least some of the ending is a very good test to see if you have basic media literacy but understanding what the game was going for on a plot and thematic level even if you don't necessarily like it only accounts for really one of three categories of things you need to understand in order to get the ending the second category is as i've been talking about beforehand the subtly explained things or stuff that's not directly stated to the player and that's the stuff that you are very likely to miss on your first go-around and then the third category i don't really have any better way to put it it's the nia category because she has two very important exposition dumps the first one comes at the end of chapter six slash beginning of chapter seven and in between that and the ending when a lot of it becomes relevant is the origin metal hunt and the origin dungeon itself which have a few cutscenes associated with them plus you also unlock a massive amount of side quests which is probably going to side track you so you're going to forget about a lot of that exposition dump by the time you actually beat zed and then secondly her post-game exclusive hero quest contains a bit more subtext and explicit overt text that would have been really nice to know before seeing the ending for the first time so yeah that's stuff that just straight up should have been in the main story that was probably taken out of it and stuck into post game so with all that preamble out of the way let's actually get to directly explaining the ending of xenoblade chronicles 3. the ending is definitely a lot more ambiguous and a lot more bittersweet than those of 1 2 which i mean fits the rest of xenoblade 3 overwhelming melancholy is probably the best two word description for the game i can think of but it's actually a lot more on the sweet end of bittersweet than you might initially think and i'm going to just straight up say that my thesis statement for this entire video is if you think the ending is not a happy ending you did not understand it and i'm going to try and prove that throughout everything else i have to say picking up after the gameplay portion of the final boss fight the first thing that might confuse you is why n m needed to sacrifice themselves in the first place the key is the line about how they embody the same desire as zed mobius is just conglomerated human wishes to remain in the endless now formed by their fear and uncertainty as to whether or not the origin plan would actually work when the worlds were about to collide n m desire a different endless now than that just one where they can be together but because they have the same base desire as all of humanity locked in origin them even existing powers up zed so their sacrifice actually weakens him enough so that everything else that's been thrown at him for the past hour of gameplay will actually finish him off in a bit more of a speculative sense i think it also helps the noah and mio we play as activate origin properly with less risk of something like ionio's happening again we learn that everyone is a bit mobius because feeling the emotions that make up zed when you're faced with the fear and uncertainty of a future you can't possibly know anything about is a very human thing so i think a version of noah and mio that completely gave in to the endless now dying right before noah and mio have to use origin and hope it doesn't screw up and create another endless now helps that out a little bit because keep in mind the entire assault on origin was basically just taken on blind faith that things would work out somehow they did not know if defeating zed would actually work in the first place or even if they did and regain control of origin whether or not it would be able to work properly this time so i think that the fact that the queens gave the option of whether or not to do that or become mobius to the party instead of just using the keys they had themselves was also based on the fact that they had more mobe in them than noah and mio at the time in addition to the usual giving the next generation a chance to seize the future for themselves thing that is really xenoblade in a nutshell the entire scene that takes place on the big grassy bluff of the queens talking to the party and the images of the two earths up in the sky that is not real now i know there's a conversation earlier in the game about how ionios itself might not actually be real and there is actually some wiggle room that's worth another video in and of itself but it's not entirely certain as to whether or not ionios is literally the worlds of xenoblade 1 and 2 frozen mid collision or a patchwork recreation of the two of them after zed took control of origin but that's not what i'm talking about here i mean very similar to the dreamscape elysium or all of the space things albus shows shulk this is just a simulated environment that everyone was pulled into by the queens to talk and allow the party members to safely make their decision because right after noah says the choice is easy it cuts back to the arena that zed was fought on with everything else exactly as it was before n m sacrificed themselves and then the core of origin changes color from the mobiusy pinky color to a better looking blue thing so i think that even within the endless now that is ionios time didn't pass while that entire vision was happening and yeah origen was designed to recreate worlds after they were destroyed it's not a stretch to say that it also has the ability to do something like that especially because some of its construction was probably heavily inspired by the trinity processors and well that's a thing elvis pyra mithra and malos were all able to do most of the conversation itself isn't super important but we will get back to monica and gondor's lines later as far as i can tell the sunrise just means the usual metaphorical stuff it means when something like that happens near the end of a piece of media and it also seems like the two sets of protagonists went to their respective nations castle for a bit because while the time of day seems roughly the same it does look like there is at least a small time at least relative to ionia's skip in between that part of the scene and noah chucking lucky 7 off the side of the castle him doing that is just for symbolism it is symbolic of the guy who literally never wanted to fight in the first place not having to fight anymore sure freeing people from the flame clocks meant that the people of ionios were able to choose not to continue fighting each other but noah was still oro boros which meant that he was one of the few people in the world capable of freeing people from the flame clocks and taking the fight to mobius in the first place plus he's a decent enough guy so he wouldn't leave the rest of the world to its fate so it did take until now before the final people who were stuck in the system were capable of choosing the path they themselves wanted yes he could still summon his blade back to his hand whenever he wanted after he does this but he doesn't need it anymore so he never would then we cut to everyone together again the ending theme starts playing and we get something that blindsided way more people than i thought it would the fact that everyone is now saying goodbye to each other as the endless now stopping means the two worlds will be separate once again this was actually telegraphed very very hard earlier in the game there is some greater elaboration on this locks behind nia's post-game hero quest but it is outright stated in her speech earlier on when she explains origen for the first time that its purpose was not to merge the two worlds together all origin was supposed to do was reboot the world to their previous states after they collided and destroyed each other in a massive annihilation event it was not designed to merge the two worlds together whatsoever simply recreate them as they were prior to destroying each other and it was this process of rebooting the worlds that was halted and interrupted by mobius creating the endless now so when mobius was eliminated origin was restarted and the reboot process was allowed to carry out as intended which means the two worlds finished annihilating each other but then as time began to tick again origen properly recreated them and they basically continued existing as they were prior to the collision with no loss of continuity there is of course the existential conundrum that arises in certain things like this in sci-fi where people are destroyed and recreated seemingly exactly the same as they were where just because someone has the same dna and memories of a previous version of themself doesn't necessarily mean they're the exact same person but even that doesn't seem to be an issue in this case as it is explicitly stated that origin also contained people's souls so at worst this is someone's memory and soul being completely removed from their previous body and stored in origin when the worlds destroyed each other and then replaced into an exact replica of that same body and this does not contradict soldiers coming out of their cradles without any previous memories as why very clearly states in the required mia side story that most soldiers go through basic conditioning before they're awoken which would scrub them of all memories both of their previous lives on ionios and of their original lives in one of the two split worlds taking this a step further the final scene of nia's hero quest which while it is locked the post game does canonically take place before the final battle shows that everyone is aware that the world will separate again and people will lose their memories of ionios prior to going in and taking the fight to zed which means the result we see was not an unintended side effect of reactivating origin it was a sacrifice at least the party and possibly everyone fighting against mobius was intentionally trying to make as while the quote-unquote good ending that does happen is far from the perfect resolution to this situation the alternative is far worse if the party lost everyone still alive would have gotten wiped out by mobius who would then go on to use cradles to make more soldiers and start the endless war again to sustain themselves but this time there wouldn't even be a city to provide a third faction and help create oro boros so the fighting would continue uninterrupted until annihilation events slowly ate away at what remained of ionios land area and everything ceased to be because even mobius cannot have eternity with that additional context the whole goodbye scene probably makes a lot more sense to you now and the only things that might be confusing to you are seeing heroes that you did not necessarily unlock in your playthrough when it pans over people from both nations with the most confusing one being an adult ethel basically the ending is a pre-rendered cutscene which means if they wanted to have variations of it to reflect the amount of side content you did they would need to render every single different version of it and have each version of it take up different file space which would make the game massive and be a ridiculous undertaking to do because you can unlock any amount of optional heroes in any permutation you want which means there are literally thousands of different combinations that they would need to render which is extremely unfeasible to do on many levels so they're just going to assume you did all the side content if you are confused about silver coat showing back up doing kamaravi's quest involves the first termer ethel that was in a cradle taken to the city from kevis castle by the lost numbers get released and after doing all of that questline you can also unlock a small event at colony omega where ethel will then use a cradle that was left over there to accelerate her aging back to a tenth termer so she can fight alongside the heroes again which will unlock the ascension for her class and allow you to finally add her back into the party so this is not a plot hole this scene specifically assumes you did all the side content and if you have done all the side content there will be a 10th term or version of ethel running around the world again and so the party members say their heartfelt goodbyes the queens offer a few words and as origin kicks into gear the worlds begin to separate again and soon everything fades into light time begins to flow again and we're returned back to the rest of the opening cut scene as a young noah the original noah and his friends carry on with their lives in the world of xenoblade chronicles 1 a world still steadily marching towards the future shulk and his companions envisioned for it none the wiser that there was another world so similar and yet so different from their own only a step away this seems like a cop-out it was all a dream ending and i can forgive you for thinking that your first go-around but that is definitely not the case and i made a lot of omissions when describing some of that stuff before so let's go in depth and show why there really isn't a lot to worry about when it comes to the worlds being separate a phrase you might be tempted to throw around when it comes to what happened to ionios at the end of the game is retconned out of existence because it ceases to exist and the two separate worlds that existed prior to its creation come back however that is not the case in no sense of the word was time reset or rewritten it was simply paused by mobius at the moment of origin's activation and allowed to flow again after mopius's defeat it just so happened that the thing that happened next after the moment time was paused in for so long was the original worlds coming back into existence because that's what origen was supposed to do melia sums this point up quite nicely in the cut scene after you rescue her where tion begins to question basically everything saying that because ionios is a creation of mobius then that means the world and everyone living in it is false and the response given by melia someone who came from the original world someone who remembers things as they used to be is very telling everything that exists is reality ionios was real everything that took place there did happen ionios was a real place that did exist and did have its own history and struggles the events of xenoblade 3 and story of ionios are things that took place in the past just as the events of xenoblade 1 and 2 were the only difference being all of those events were condensed within one endless now one moment of eternity moreover just because ionios wasn't supposed to exist and just because it occupies a singular point on the timeline doesn't mean that it doesn't matter everything that existed there was reality and it all mattered every single life both brought over from origin or created new new and ionios every victory every triumph every small joy that could be won with great sacrifice from such an oppressive world still mattered those centuries upon endless centuries of death and of rebirth of heroism and heartbreak of life and of loss of sorrow and song defined by a hope for the future that still persists in spite of everything that all still happened between two ticks of the clock now that might be a bit melodramatic but do keep in mind how many characters including nia have lines at the end saying that they're sure the people from opposite worlds will meet again someday and what we see in the post-credits scene i think this separation is going to be a lot more short term than you'd initially think so yeah about that ending scene noah's about to follow his friends off towards the castle to see the fireworks when mio's off-seeing tune begins to play and he has this wistful smile that shows he seems to be recognizing some of this now obviously everyone in the plaza isn't literally hearing this song play this is just symbolic of some form of memories of ionios kicking in in noah because before time freeze happened he just had the memories of his own childhood but when he was created after the endless now he should also now have some small undertones of his memories from ionios and that's because well it's still the same noah's soul that was stored in origin the noah we see in the opening cut scene was put in origin then he was reincarnated through ionios a bunch of times and then recreated out on the other side in the reborn xenoblade 1 world and then there are so many cases throughout the entirety of the game that show memory erasure through origin isn't nearly as absolute as say a blade returning to its core crystal people retain memories of their past lives and you have all of them returned to you when you become mobius so those memories are also stored in origin and have some clear effect on people's souls so the noah in the post-credits scene who now contains some back data from ionios is capable of at least in some subtle way remembering the connection he had with mio and recalling her song and as a really really neat touch if you go to the scene of the parties trying to run and reunite you can see that noah has miyabi's flute that mio traded to him in his hand and the melody that plays in the post-credits scene is on the flute that noah traded to mio so he's not just remembering the general concept of off-seeing he is very specifically remembering mio and the connection he has to her and then if you look at the big zoom out shot at the end of the post-credits scene and look very closely at noah and follow where he's walking when the birds fly across the screen completely obscuring everything noah disappears because in a couple seconds after that he is no longer present where he once was and once again this is a pre-rendered cutscene which means this wasn't a technical limitation of the switch or anything they intentionally made noah's model no longer present after the birds by so they made noah vanish but what could this possibly mean well what thing is noah capable of doing that causes his body to disappear interlinking with mio when you interlink you and your partner's bodies both seem to disintegrate into ether and then that then combines to form the body of the oro boros so it's possible that since tion's explanation for how to transform is you can take that form via a strong desire or emotion that noah now that he has his memories of ionios buried deep down there recalls a little bit about mio and that makes him so emotional it inadvertently triggers an interlink uniting the pair of them for the first time outside of ionios additionally if you read a transcription of the ending theme where we belongs lyrics there are some very interesting lines both this song and the insert song from the prison sequence a step away are sung by a woman but context clues make it pretty evident that the narrator of both songs is noah or rather n for a step away and the noah we play as for where we belong this means two things first off this means that noah at least indirectly wrote a song which means his dream of creating his own stuff as a musician did come to fruition and second off it means we can analyze the lyrics of where we belong from the perspective of a noah near the end of the game most of the song is about how he thought he and mio would be together forever because that's just how it feels sometimes when you're in love but then realizing that that's basically just what anne wanted and would preserve the endless now so it's better for everyone involved and the world for them to separate for a time but he has strong belief that they'll be able to see each other again because he knows their feelings for each other will never fade and that's pretty cut and dry that goes along with what i've been saying the entire time however there are some other lines that don't really track with anything that directly happens in xenoblade 3 so i think they're kind of important the first one is near the end and i think it's just important to point out in terms of the tone of the ending and not anything theory-wise or explanation-wise and that is these happy days must carry on so once again let's go back to the start and i think this is emblematic of how most of the party members are viewing the end of the game remember all of the soldiers of kevis and agnes were people that existed in the worlds of xenoblade 1 and 2 before mobius took control of origin which means with origin resetting all of those people were brought back whether or not a version of them was currently alive at the time and then you might also think that everyone born in ionios that means the people from the city and the napon were retconned out of existence but if you go back to melia's explanation she says everything that exists is reality present lives and future ones mobius aside the wills of countless people persist inside of origin and when she refers to future lives it shows the oro boros candidate squad the baby from the sex ed scene gondor monica aggie and auggie so she refers to someone from one of the original worlds who has memories of all that and knows what will happen when origen is rebooted refers to the people from the city as lives from the future she also basically directly states that even people born in ionios were stored in origin which means their souls were recorded they exist too and since they're all descendants of people who existed in the previous worlds who now exist again all that needs to happen is overcoming the trivial barrier of interdimensional travel so the exact same couples can get together a second time and the exact same people will be able to be born again eventually with the only downside of course being the people from the city we meet in the game never actually getting to meet the reborn versions of the main party because they come from so many generations in the future this of course raises a few issues of the relative ages of characters as they exist outside of ionios but i personally believe that mobius explicitly chose people who were children when they were stored in origin to create as soldiers for their endless war they were all awoken as young people in the first place because younger people are livelier which means their life force is more nourishing to mobius and then there's also the general idea that the younger a person is the less memories they will have which means if you're trying to use some sort of conditioning to erase their memories and make them an obedient soldier to your cause it's a lot easier because there's less data to expunge and there's also again a line from melia where she talks about her dream of youths fighting and while this can obviously apply to just the fact that everyone awoken as a soldier is in the body of someone between 10 and 20 years old i also think this is amelia who does not look too much older from xenoblade 1 viewing these people as children relative to her so i don't think we're gonna have a particularly big issue of 18 year old mio meeting 88 year old tion and trying to start up their friendship again but it's completely awkward because he was a grandfather before she was born this is of course backed up by the fact that we see the entire kevas quartet as young children in the beginning and ending scenes and one other small thing about an agnes character i'll get to later so from the queen's perspective all of ionios and the entire fight against mobius was a two-fold reaffirmation that the future is going to be bright because they got to see both the immediate next generation that is the people who are put into origin as children and the far future descendants of those people succeed which means they both know beyond a shadow of a doubt that even long after they're gone there will always be young people with the will to shape worlds for the better to pass the torch onto then from the perspective of the party what's going on well everyone's been freed from the shackles of the flame clock and death and rebirth at the hands of mobius and the worlds will be reconstructed which will put everyone back in the life they had beforehand which means the cycle technically is going to continue for one more iteration but this is the last one basically the soldiers of kevis and agnes are going around the mobius strip one more time everyone gets one last chance at life except this time they are given a full lifespan and the freedom of choice to make it the kind of life they want to live with no fighting necessary unless they really want to pull orion and join the defense force in what seems to be a time of peace and while of course things can go wrong and those worlds are not going to be perfect you have to remember what those worlds are they're still the futures of xenoblade 1 and 2 and we know the people who were set up to shape the world after the end of those games pretty well and i'm pretty sure that they do a much better job at making a world children could grow up in safely than mobius anyone who is screwed over by eonos being ionos is getting another chance in a world that isn't actively hostile to their existence which means in the far future there will be a shania who while she might still not have the greatest mother will also not have the expectations of her family placed on her or a father and sister who died in battle and she's probably still going to have a best friend named gondor who might also have some small memories of her past life that might give her an indication she needs to change up the way she's supporting her friend and getting her through tough times so anyone who is given the short end of the stick and ionios which is going to be a lot of people because xenoblade 3 is very heavily on the nurture end of nature versus nurture and mobius are kind of the worst people to nurture children is going to have a chance in a world that is going to give them a much much kinder upbringing than they could ever find in the endless now basically from the characters perspective the ending is less well that's kind of bad we got rid of mobius and stop the endless now breaking the cycle of the flame clocks but now the worlds are gonna be separate and we're never gonna see the people we love again and more okay we're going to have to say goodbye to a lot of people we care about because we're going to be separated potentially for a long time long enough where we're going to forget almost everything about each other but we will meet again so keep the faith until then and then noah turns into the camera and says alright let's do this one more time properly so remember when this was about song lyrics because i barely do anyway i promise the other lyric i need to talk about is going back to the thread of noah potentially interlinking in the post-credits scene and that is the first two lines of the chorus are i see you peacefully you're in your dreams now because of poetic license i'm not sure if this means noah watches me asleep or if he's just looking at her when her head's in the clouds daydreaming but it doesn't matter because neither of those things really happens in the story or is implied to at any point so it's possible that this song might not be from the perspective of endgame noah but post game noah writing lyrics from what little snippets of memory of ionios he can recall and from the interactions across the world he is able to have with mio in the present timeline without giving away other zeno games having a faded romantic partner and memories of them in your dreams and seeing them in special ways through stuff like that is very on brand for this series so i wouldn't be surprised if noah and veo not even the queens are the two people who recall their memories from ionia's the most strongly now keep in mind from the perspective of basically anyone in either world origin worked at some point but it worked so well that we didn't even feel the moment the worlds were destroyed and recreated and okay maybe i have these weird emotions or snippets of memory in the back of my head but that's a thing people always have i'm not going to jump to conclusions about there being an endless now world in the moment it was supposed to activate and i actually lived hundreds of lives where i died in battle a bunch of times that's not gonna happen it's gonna take some convincing that ionia's even existed in the first place which means someone's going to need to dredge up enough memory to be able to confirm that it did exist and because of their connection noah and demio are almost certainly going to be the first people in either world to do that like milia and nia they're not going to remember as strongly as noah and mia are after the anniversary celebration amelia is going to finish watching the fireworks probably have dinner hang out with her friends and family then go back to her bedroom pop open the interdimensional zoom call and confirm with nia yup origin worked that was great it was wonderful working with you i hope we can stay in touch what about book clubs on fridays even the queens probably aren't going to have any strong indication that mobius happened at all and might take some convincing because let's be real if noah walked up to you and had this whole elaborate story about a world where he was the hero and had a cool girlfriend you're probably not gonna believe him so there's gonna be some process in everyone we're calling ionios but i think they will hopefully without the trauma of dying hundreds of times eventually what i say next is purely going to be based on head canon but it's a very useful tool for setting up the last point i need to make about the ending this is the story of a young man named noah he lives in the town outside the capital of alchemoth the city from which her majesty melia antuco reigns he has three best friends named uni lans and joran and looks up to an older boy named chris wanting to be a musician just like him he'd always been a kind and thoughtful boy but ever since the day of the queen's anniversary celebration the same day origen was supposed to activate he's been a little different and perhaps a little more distant even to his closest friends this is because he's been inexplicably feeling visions or beats of emotion that he can't quite understand and has small snippets of memories of dreams of another world one where people from his world had to fight against people from another to survive and where he no matter the life would always meet a girl named mio after some time and some growing he was eventually able to gain an audience with the queen herself and tell her about these visions awakening deep buried memories within her soul as well and making her recall the promise her and her friend from the other world nia made to see each other in person again someday what are they supposed to do then though clearly people from both worlds want to see each other again and no one would be opposed to the idea of at the very least making a bridge between them if not combining them outright but how exactly does one go about achieving a feat like that origin itself was a rush job combining the intellects of both worlds and pushing them to their limit and even that was only designed to recreate the two worlds not bridge them or alter them in any major way in a situation like this who exactly are you supposed to call upon well in this case the answer lies in how much time has actually passed from the endings of xenoblade 1 and 2 and the moment when the endless now occurred before i reveal that there is one very important thing that i need to bring up and that is the fact that it is probably possible for at least some time after the worlds were recreated for them to still communicate between each other and that is because the communication method itself is light it's not explained beyond that and doesn't really make physical sense but the point remains that it is explicitly stated the way melia and nia were able to communicate with each other and coordinate the construction of the two halves of origin was with light it is also definitely worth mentioning that in both noah's monologue right before the credits the one that ends with walk-on and mios over her diary in the post-game save screen they both mentioned their memories of each other fading into the morning light and well if their memories are fading away into the communication method that their two worlds use to get in contact with each other i think they're definitely going to be able to remember each other just a hunch either way i can't really think of a reason why the communication line the two queens were using would be closed after origin activated it seems like the worlds were in some metaphysical sense getting physically closer to each other before they collided and the closer they got the better they could communicate and in a sense origin recreating them basically allowed them to pass through each other and keep moving in opposite directions so it is possible the communications would fade over time but again as long as they can remember their memories of ionios while they're still able to contact each other i think the process of the worlds coordinating on a new project one to bridge them together instead of recreate them separately is going to start that's all well and good but what does the duration of the time skip between the ends of one and two and three have to do with any of this well for that we need to go back to neo-related stuff starting with one of the scenes in her side quest she and mio have a one-on-one conversation in the statue room in the city that lays on a bunch of very heavy subtext suggesting that mio is in fact nia's daughter as we were initially theorizing when the first trailer came out but thought had been debunked by the way ionios worked in the first place which is honestly very very funny more importantly than that perhaps is the fact that nia says she didn't expect she'd get to talk with her like this and says that in a couple different ways that i took to mean not only did she not expect to be able to talk one-on-one with mia without the whole dynamic of being mother and daughter or the fact that she wanted to talk to this specific mayo and not just em but i also am interpreting that as the mio she knows as her daughter the one from outside of ionios is not as old as the one she's talking to right now and as such they wouldn't be able to have this adult conversation that they're having currently this is obviously a very neat change of pace for nia she might not always be around to see her daughter grow up and she gets a flash forward of what this is going to be like and again knows that the future is going to be in good hands and it also backs up first off the idea that it was only people who were young like within the 10-year term span in the previous worlds that got pooped out into the flame clock system and that in every iteration noah and mio are relative in age the one-year age gap is probably still there as was shown with n and m but it does seem like no matter what noah and demio are always exactly one year apart so there's not gonna be any weirdness with them meeting and all of a sudden having a massive age gap so that's all well and good we've got a protagonist in this game that is the child of a protagonist of a previous game which is something i think we were all expecting when we first heard that three was going to be a sequel but what does this really mean for anything well just because nia is a flesh eater and might be able to live an indeterminate amount of time doesn't mean mio was born centuries after the end of xenoblade chronicles 2. when the queens are reminiscing in the ending we get a few different fan service shots we see that melia has hung onto the monado rex from future connected as a keepsake and that poppy was actually the information gathering device in the cloud keep the most important piece of all of this though is the funny picture of the xenoblade 2 cast where we can see that the child nia specifically is holding has silver hair and cat ears that is mio she is the daughter of nia and presumably rex based on her eye color and this picture and based on everyone's ages as in morag and zeke do not look significantly older she can't possibly have been born any later than say 10 to 15 years after the end of the game as for the xenoblade 1 side in the one piece of conversation we get to see the queens have prior to the world's coming together where they're discussing the completion of origin they say that there is 300 days left to go before they collide and when they're discussing the time frame there is zero conversation about relative time scales between their world 300 days is 300 days for both of them the timelines are flowing in sync at one second per second across the two worlds which means however much time that's passed since the end of two is also the amount of time that has passed since the end of one and adding to that according to several analyses of the japanese version of the opening cutscene the text is a bit more specific about the anniversary celebration being held for queen melia and that is the phrasing used is less for a birthday or a wedding anniversary and more so the anniversary of her rule so they're actually celebrating exactly how much time has passed since the end of future connected i have seen claims say that it was the silver anniversary or 25 years but that was exactly one reddit comment that did seem to claim that someone had data mined the background voice lines from either the opening or ending and someone had said that so it is very possible that we do have an exact number though i'm not going to claim that's true and wait and see if i can hear those voice lines for myself but that much is not important because in the ending when nia is looking at the picture she says i will see you soon then presumably referring to all the people depicted in it besides poppy herself this is kind of important because in fiction there are like two contexts where a character will say something like that the first one is when they're about to die and move on to the same afterlife as the people they're talking to or when they are literally going to see someone again soon and that's kind of a big deal because well nia is not going to die when origin reactivates at worst she's going to forget ionios which means it has to be the second option she is going to see everyone again the picture was probably not taken like immediately before origin happened because in one of the flashbacks we see torah with a different outfit and he has his one from xenoblade 2 on here and i'm almost certain that mio has grown up to be a preteen probably one year older than noah when origin actually activates so this is more of a midpoint between the ending of xenoblade 2 and the start of three but that doesn't matter because let's just for argument's sake say mio is 12 when origin kicks in 12 years after this nobody depicted in this picture is going to have died of old age and nobody's significant from either this or the xenoblade one world is likely to have besides like mccall and coal so that means as long as they were put in origin and they were all put in origin they will also have been brought back when the first rumors of xenoblade 3 started coming out we were told that it would take place in the combined future of both one and two and that so much time had passed that all but the longest lived characters from previous games would have long since passed away and it turns out the answer to whether or not those rumors were valid is wrong but also right truth is complicated has a massively long time passed yes has everybody except melia and nia died yes but only in ionios in the two parallel worlds that existed both before and after the endless now they are still alive as long as they were alive when origin went into effect and since it has been at most 30 years since the end of both games pretty much everybody still will be it's worth noting that a time skip on the scale of 25 to 30 years actually makes a lot of sense if you assume that everyone born to the flame clock is a person who is already a child within the 10 to 20 age range in the previous worlds because given a quarter of a century after the ending of both games we have cultures mingling that would not have previously and we have unprecedented times of peace which means a lot of children and a lot of interracial children will be born which makes the npc designs make a lot more sense and the fact that literally every character in this game besides the two queens is someone new so then it's after the end of xenoblade 3 noah and mio have regained some of their memories of each other and realized that there is another world that people would definitely like to access it's also probably likely that senna and tion are friends of mio in that world as well like they were in ionia's and we'll throw kyrie in there because i think kairi is kind of the yoren for the agnes trio she just doesn't have as tragic things happen to her then after that what do these kids with memories do well if they remember how origin worked all they really need to do is go talk to people who are in charge of the project for mio that's very easy she literally just needs to call up her mother but for noah's end that might be a bit more difficult as far as we can tell none of the kevas gang is directly related to anyone from xenoblade 1 and if they had a close connection to queen melia they probably wouldn't be running towards alkamoth to go see the ceremony they'd have been specially invited and watching it with her that might make it very difficult for them to get an audience with melia but i have a strange feeling that as long as this world's version of noah also looks up to this world's version of chris the fact that chris seems to be descended from a certain homs engineer would very likely get noah's foot through the door and then once the queens know about all this stuff well as long as their method of communication is still open they can just re-gather all of the intellects it took to build origin and work on a new project between the two worlds this time one to bridge them together instead of recreating them and forcing them apart such intellects like thielen and tairea tatazo leonada adenine mikhol torah and shulk if you think something so simple as inter-dimensional travel is going to keep people like that down for very long once they know that they have a good reason to figure it out i don't think you've been paying much attention to this series noah and mio will meet again the casts will be reunited and they will march towards the future hand in hand it is only a matter of time and the only question that remains is whether or not we're going to get to see that directly in dlc or implied in flashbacks in a future game and that is all i've got i obviously glossed over a lot of more minor things or things that warranted their own video like how exactly the races of ionios work the way oro boros and lucky 7 actually work or stuff about riku and the founding of the city and all of that kind of stuff but this is just about the ending and basically clearing things up for the sake of people who thought it was a time reset and nothing mattered at all or thought that it was unnecessarily sad for what actually happened in the game and stuff like that and not entirely delving into all the real mysteries of ionios which i promise you i do have a lot of potential answers for so thank you to all the patrons whose names you see on screen now or did beforehand if they faded out already remember to like comment and subscribe stay tuned for more xenoblade 3 content and until next time this is luxon signing off

Channel: Luxin

Views: 130,724

Keywords: xenoblade, xenoblade chronicles, nintendo, switch, rpg, jrpg, monolithsoft, xenogears, xenosaga

Id: OXQ7X7UMVMo

Length: 46min 5sec (2765 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 10 2022