The best adventure games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 are Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Final Fantasy XII. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.
Filtering to adventure means the place and the story are what you want back, not the challenge. It is the right filter when the thing you remember is where you were rather than what you did.
What you get: A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.
What made Xenoblade Chronicles 3 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the adventure part of that answer, and only the adventure part.
The original, and the best-realised world of the three.
The most divisive and the one with the best combat system.
The mainline entry whose combat this is closest to.
Where this lineage of ambition starts, on the PS1.
The other hundred-hour JRPG with a cast worth the time.
Traditional turn-based storytelling from the same generation.
For the willingness to be this philosophical.
The most striking new turn-based RPG in years.
If the real-time party combat is the part you want.
Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.
The full list is on games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Xenoblade Chronicles. The original, and the best-realised world of the three.
No. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 released on the Nintendo Switch, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Anywhere the story and the place matter more than the skill ceiling — point-and-click, walking sims, narrative thrillers and most open worlds. The label alone tells you very little, which is why each pick here says what it actually is.
They split hard. Open-world adventures run to a hundred hours; the narrative ones are often finishable in an evening, and the short ones are usually the better written.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Xenoblade Chronicles 3 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is adventure — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the adventure guide for where to start in the genre generally.