I recently picked up a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in a sale and don’t have enough time to play all the previous titles at the moment. I know that playing the games in a chronological order would be beneficial in terms of background story and lore, but is it possible to follow the story without having played one and two before?
you can, but it’s the end of a three part arc so you might not really understand everything. Though honestly the story is fairly incoherent at the best of times so you might not understand everything anyway.
xenoblade 2 is … bad (with the occasional good moment). so honestly just jump into 3 if you want to play it.
if you just want a high level overview you can reveal this spoiler and I'll give you the basic setting - but to be clear this spoils 300 hours of the previous games
In earth’s near-future there’s a scientist on a space station who has a “destroy all life and start again” button he can press, and he presses it even though there’s another scientist in the room that says “hey don’t press that button”. Pressing the button creates a new universe that half of the bad-scientist gets sucked into and the other scientist also gets sucked into.
That event creates the world of Xenoblade Chronicles which follows a kid that gets a sword that is a special sword and he through trial and tribulation eventually gets the choice to become a God or not and decides to just go live with his friends in the world of Xenoblade Chronicles
Meanwhile, on future earth, the other half of the bad-scientist floods the earth with nano-machines to rebuild it in a “better” way. But the kid in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sets in motion events that cause the space station he lived on for millennia to explode and all the nanomachines went away which allowed all the humans to live on the land again as they couldn’t because of nanomachines
This sets the stage for Xenoblade 3, two universes, one with future earth, the other with just some other universe.