So as a quick introduction, Xenoblade Chronicles has basically taken over my life for the past 18 months for so. My life essentially consists of surviving to the weekend so that I can play Xenoblade for an unholy amount of time, but my love of the series as a whole will have to wait for another blog because I want to talk about the most memorable part of each Xenoblade game, the music. Specifically the music from the most recent game, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 because it’s the freshest in my mind. Now the full OST is eleven hours long, so I’ll just be highlighting the three tracks that have stood out to me the most and why I like them so much. As a final disclaimer, I have essentially zero technical knowledge of music, so all of this is just me fanboying like the nerd I am.

 

The Banger

The song that goes the hardest to me is called “The Weight of Life”. To me, the emotional baggage that this song carries brings tears to my eyes everytime I listen to it. It’s a song that plays during major cutscenes of the game, and it only plays twice out of the 50+ hrs of cutscenes. Essentially, it means that it’s tailor made to go hard in the paint when it matters most, and it delivers 120%. The initial “chorus” (I guess) is typical Xenoblade composed of violins, brass, and an electric guitar. However, once the bridge starts from the first chorus to the next chorus, the main motif of the entire game, both plot and sound track kicks in: the flute. Now the flute is super interesting. In the plot, the flute is played during “offseeing rituals”, a way of sending the dead to the next life. It is meant to hold major emotional weight, and so when the flute kicks in during the bridge, before a triumphant final chorus with the flute interjecting into the medley of guitars and violins, it actually hits different. Again, this song plays during a pretty important cutscene (here it is out of context), and when the climax matched the song, that’s when I knew that I was playing the greatest series of all time.

Me after the song starts hitting

The Vibes

Now for the most creative song on this list, “Brilliant Wings”. This song is an absolute bop. The story behind it is that it’s a remix of an older song from a previous game brought back better than ever. Meant to be played when roaming around in the game fighting various enemies, whenever it starts to kick in, it’s very much a deal of me pausing the game just to vibe out. In the previous version, the main star of the song was the flute and the violins, but because the flute is now saved for important songs as a homage to the main characters, the main instrument used in the song is the sax, and personally, I find it to be so much better. Overall, the song is jazzy, light hearted, and compared to more tense and structured battle themes used throughout the series, it feels like a great new venture and experiment in styles for the overall soundtrack. I 100% listen to this song just moving through my day because it’s a great pick me up, and with vibes that hard, how could I not.

How I visualize the Sax player going hard in the recording studio

 

The Pain

Finally, I would like to talk about the song that absolutely sold me on the series. Having played and thoroughly enjoyed the past two games, I wasn’t sure about how this new game would hold up. The trailers looked good, the reviews looked good, but I wasn’t sure whether or not the story would hold up to be as great as past entries. However, the moment this song played in the cutscene that it did, I knew that this would probably be my new favorite game of all time. The song is “A Life Sent On”, a very emotional duet using the flute (I told you it was important), and it plays at the end of the first chapter. Two “off-seers” (the ritual players) from two warring countries come together to send off the departed, and the way the two flutes play with each other hits different. I’m sure there are plenty of fancy musical terms to describe what the players are doing, but I don’t know what they are, I just know it sounds awesome and it makes me cry. Some additional background to the song is that the composers had two custom made flutes which matched the ones used in game made for the recording of the OST, and it really pays off in songs like A Life Sent On because the care taken helps to elevate the music so much, truly solidifying Xenoblade as peak fiction.

What the flutes look like in real life

Conclusion (because I wanna go play Xenoblade)

For now, those are my current top 3 OST’s from Xenoblade 3. I have yet to finish the game because I keep getting sidetracked and I know that there are some powerful songs yet to be played, so if you ask me in a few weeks what my top 3 were, I would probably give you a different answer than what I’ve written here. Other than that, this has been a complete nerd out session for me with probably very wrong information, so if you made it through and even listened to any of the songs, then I hope you liked them and that your opinion of me and my taste in music hasn’t degraded too much. If anyone wants to actually tell me what’s happening in more detail than “the sound makes my ears happy”, please do so.

At this point, my blog is turning into me ranting about my hobbies, likes, and dislikes, but when I’m running out of ideas on only the 5th blog, this is the result. 

 

So anyway, MMA. I love it. I never practiced it, and even though I kinda want to,  I know I would get absolutely rolled, so I’m not going to talk about me practicing it, I’m gonna talk about how I found myself deep into the rabbithole of MMA, watching fights every single Saturday that they’re on.

 

Back in 2018, the most exposure I ever had to MMA were some glimpses on a TV while eating a restaurant, watching two people “clinch” each other and not doing much, so I had never really thought much about it, until my YouTube feed all of a sudden filled to the brim with UFC promotions of Conor McGregor v Khabib Nurmagomedov(not a promotion, but basically all I would see). All I knew before going down the rabbithole of promotion videos was that Conor McGregor was some famous Irish dude who boxed Floyd Mayweather and got absolutely destroyed, and so with not so baited breath, I clicked on the video, and I was instantly hooked. 

An example of a clinch.

 

Conor McGregor, the UFC’s biggest star and the first simultaneous champion of two divisions, was coming back from a lay off and was looking to reclaim his championship in the lightweight division against the current undefeated champion, Khabib Nurmagomedov. Conor, the notoriously accurate and destructive striker, would have to find a way around Khabib’s equally notorious wrestling and ground game in order to reclaim his championship. Now while this is pretty standard in terms of MMA match ups, there was an additional element of personal beef. A few months prior, Khabib had an altercation with one of Conor’s training partners, and Conor flew all the way from Dublin, Ireland to New York to get back at Khabib, and did so by throwing a dolly at a bus that Khabib was in, leading him to get arrested. The entire fight week was filled with trash talk, questions of how Conor’s time away from the Octagon would affect his ability to compete in MMA, and whether Conor, who had made history time and time again, could steal away Khabib’s unbeaten record. 

 

The entire week, all I could think about were the answers to these questions. With my very limited knowledge of MMA, I debated to myself how would a strong boxer like Conor stave off the pressure of a wrestler like Khabib. Would Khabib be able to take a shot if he got hit clear? Would Khabib be able to handle the pressure of the spotlight? The night of the fight, I tried so hard to find a way to watch the fight (I didn’t have the money nor the will to try and convince my parents to pay to watch the fight) and eventually, at around 11pm, I gave up and went to sleep, tossing and turning, debating the fight even in my dreams. So when I woke up in the morning and saw the news that Khabib had defeated Conor, I was satisfied to have learned the answers to my questions, but I was heavily disappointed because I didn’t get to see the answer play out in front of me live on a TV screen. 

The end of Conor v Khabib, I wish I could have seen this.

 

After the fight, I never thought about MMA very much at all. A few fight promotions made their way to my YouTube recommendation feed, but none got me as excited as Khabib v Conor. That was until one fateful day during the pandemic, bored as could be, when a highlights video popped up in my feed. As expected with the YouTube recommendation cycle, I went down the rabbit hole again, but this time I would not claw my way out. Because something about the beauty in brutality and the freedom of tactics that were expressed through all the promotion videos that I watched stuck in my head. Also it just looked so cool.

 

As I ventured a bit further than whatever highlights videos popped up, I really started to get pulled in by the narratives surrounding major fights. Fighters looking to make history by dominating in another performance, fighters looking to rematch each other to truly prove who was the best, fighters looking to just scap like they were in their backyards. All the narratives being built would eventually come together and clash on a single night the octagon in ways that no one can predict. The solving of questions, the conclusion of the narratives, the potential of future narratives, that pushed me to go out of my way to stay up until midnight to watch fights after waking up at 5 am to go to speech tournaments.

End of Leon Edwards v Kamaru Usman II, I almost woke up my whole family when this happened

Now that isn’t to say MMA isn’t without its faults. Fights can be pretty boring, they can end anticlimactically, or just never materialize due to injuries and such. However, when MMA peaks, it is the best sport in the world. Nothing matches the feeling of my heart pumping a thousand times per second as a fight starts, screaming when watching an explosive KO, or the sense of wonder after an absolute dog fight. because while it may look barbaric on the outside, what MMA truly is is a contest of heart, courage, and skill. It is the culmination of what makes people great and what makes people horrible at the same time. There is no other sport in the world that can give like MMA can give, and for that, I will always be a fan.