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eRonin

Xenoblade Chronicles X - good bye Earth

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So i just got a Skell finally, and it's... I mean, it was hugely liberating after dozens of hours of slowly trekking across that world from a minuscule perspective to be able to race around quickly in a sweet transforming robot bike. There's a lot to say about the dramatic shift in scale that both opens up and closes off paths, how the game suddenly opens up this entire second parallel progression system in customizing your robots, and how the additional and distinct combat layer they provide exists in tandem with the already established mechanics, but... I really just want to talk about how fucking cool those robots are, you know? I love the awkward standing transformation and how they animate the stowed bike frame rattling as you run around in the biped form, etc, etc. I am fully sold on Xenoblade X. This game is for me.

 

Just skimmed these posts but cool to see some enthusiasm for this. It's joint top on my to-get list. I've still got a couple of hours left of GB's mammoth goty 'casts, but so far there seems to be absolutely zero Xenoblade talk, like they've forgotten it. They've discussed EVERYTHING in the final debate, so it's weird that this slipped through the net.

 

Austin made a few comments about not having played enough of it to really make any judgements, and he seemed to be the only one among them that had played it or really had any interest in it, and also didn't actually seem all too hot on the game anyways.

 


Next week I'm planning on getting Xenoblade or Splatoon. I'm leaning towards Splatoon because I feel like the multiplayer focus is more time-sensitive than this. If I didn't get to this until next year, would the play experience differ at all? Are they changing it on the fly a la Dark Souls 2 or does the multiplayer rely on having a super active player base?

 

Xenoblade X has a bunch of Dark Souls/Dragon's Dogma-esque online systems, but your experience shouldn't be too severely impacted if you come to it late, it's all very passive. You probably won't find any co-op games happening with level appropriate groups later on though, but that's already an issue, and it's ultimately a smallish corner of an absolutely enormous game. (You can totally ignore it if you want to.)

 

Splatoon on the other hand, i'd say right now is actually a pretty good time to dive into it. After Christmas landed, i rocketed up to A+ rank for the first time after being stuck in B+ limbo for months. Basically, it feels like there's a lot of new blood figuring the game out right now and it's probably a good time to jump in.

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I finally got the ability to fly in my Skell yesterday, and annoyances with the music changing every time you jump aside, it is GLORIOUS.

 

I took a few shots for your viewing pleasure:

 

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My only real concern with flying is that it completely removes the ability to jump normally. As soon as you touch that ZR button, you're off and away, and your fuel will start to get used up. Free-falling feels great though; flying high up and then diving to your target location looks and feels amazing. I've been led to believe that there is a large jump in difficulty starting chapters 9-12 (I had to use the feature to reduce boss level for the chapter 9 boss) so I might hold off on continuing to chapter 10. Finding rare skell weapons has been rather difficult. BTW don't neglect your ground gear once you do get a skell, or you might suddenly find yourself in an unwinnable fight should your skell get wrecked on the field.

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I've seen quite a few people complain about the flight theme in the game. Mostly that it is, like you're saying, just kind of an annoying interruption to the world themes when all you're trying to do is make small leaps, but also i guess it's one of the less well liked themes in the game. Is there no way to disable the flight pack once it's obtained or anything? It's strange that it would override the jump when there are actually still unused buttons on the controller. (All ZL seems to ever be used for is reversing in vehicle form and as part of the bind input.)

 

Anyways, my player character just hit level 30, so now i'm able to purchase skells freely, i'm no longer limited to the starter Urban, though i guess my party members still need to hit 30 themselves before i can stick them in any skells?

 

I had so much money so i ended up buying a bunch of skells to play around with them and get a feel for stats and vehicle handling and really just to gawk at how cool they are. I broke them down to their basic components, stripped out all their gear to see what their core stats are, and it generally seems like you get potential with the light skells, a ton of GP with the mediums, and loads of HP and fuel with the heavies, all with ranged/melee biases on individual robots inside of those groupings. For the time being, I've settled on the range-focused heavy, the Mastema, for my player character. (In part because i think it looks really, really cool.) Its vehicle physics are very strange though, it turns super sharply and oversteers like crazy. Took a while to get a handle on it and not be flying all over the place.

 

(Also, i ended up finally having to look it up, but potential determines how much health you regain from soul voice combos and repair arts, as well as conferring bonus damage to TP arts.)

 

It's kind of crazy that this whole massive second layer to the game is buried basically a minimum of 30 hours into the game. This isn't just some additional combat system being thrown into the mix, it sort of makes it a pretty fundamentally different game.

 

At the same time though, i hope people aren't rushing through that main story to get to the skells. Or more specifically, i hope people are doing side quests. For myself, taking the game slowly, it's clear to me that all of the side content was a big emphasis for Monolith. Many of the affinity quests are as fleshed out as any of the main story missions, and even the normal side quests are often quite elaborate. It's a huge improvement from the first Xenoblade where the side quests were frequently just painfully simple resource grinds. (Those are still here though, they're just clearly separated out as the stuff you get from the quest board.)

 

I will reiterate though: Everybody should be careful about bringing under-leveled party members into story quests or affinity quests, that can lead to some misery.

 

Edit: About not neglecting ground gear and on-foot art/skill loadouts, i've seen people argue that some of the more difficult fights in the game can be hugely mitigated by mixing skell and on-foot arts. Either yourself disembarking to fire off a few useful on-foot arts before getting back in your skell, or having one of your party members stay on foot while your skells are set up to synergize with on-foot arts. (These strats are reinforced by the fact that for each active skell in your party, the remaining on-foot party members gain a 20% defense buff. So three skells and one on-foot party member is apparently intensely viable.)

 

(At this point, it would be good to note that in the list of party commands for battle, you can tell party members to disembark from their skells.)

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The ZL button when in flight is used to descend, while ZR is naturally used to ascend. Pressing both at the same time sends you into free-fall, which is useful since it you can still glide without using up fuel. I would definitely say that the flight theme ("Don't Worry") is one of the weaker songs in the soundtrack, but mostly I dislike it for interrupting the many world themes and replacing it with a single forgettable track. 

 

It sounds like you bought a lot of skells for yourself, so once your party members are level 30, you can register all your spare skells to them. I haven't gotten any heavy skells since I didn't actually have that much money at the time (I was buying a lot of ground gear since I wasn't finding good stuff), but now that Lin's max HP is approaching 5 digits, I think it'll be worth sticking her in a heavy Skell so she can continue to be an effective tank. I've recently reorganised my FrontierNav probes and now I'm making 85K revenue per tick, so I suppose I'm going to save up for a level 50 skell once I hit level 50. Apparently they require Sakuraba Industries AM to be at level 5, so investing in that one is highly recommended. They also cost over a million credits each sooo I'm probably gonna need to start saving now (I'm level 40 atm).

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So i am led to understand that each type of Skell also has a distinct overdrive mechanic with its own biases and benefits. My player character's Mastema, for example, benefits from and provides benefits to ranged arts while in overdrive. (The specifics of which i should look up, i guess.) Overdrive for the Skells also thankfully seems a little more straightforward than its on-foot equivalent. (Which is... I've read multiple overviews of how on-foot overdrive works, and it... Still doesn't make sense, it's so convoluted.)

 

Also, i'm starting to notice this trend where a lot of the post-skell quests are clearly designed for you not having a skell. It usually results in a lot of quests where big dramatic battles have you literally one-shotting huge groups of enemies with one aoe attack. (To be clear, i'm not even over-leveled for these, though skells seem to put you on even ground with enemies as many as 10 levels ahead of you.) It all feels like a weird concession to the fact they made getting a skell license an optional set of quests, and It really seems like they should have just made the skell license thing an unavoidable part of the main progression and built quests more around having one.

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I think the chapter 7 and 8 bosses more or less are designed for if you don't have a skell, but 9-onwards definitely expects it of you. Chapter 10's boss especially is so large that I believe it is the only enemy whose lifeless body remains on the map after you defeat it, and it's impossible to target the higher-up appendages without flight.

 

Anyway, after doing a couple of normal missions last night, it really strikes me as interesting how much xenophobia is addressed in this game. The responses of humans to the different xenoforms are very varied, ranging from working as partners in BLADE teams on the positive end, to barring them from shops and even several cases of murder on the opposite end of the spectrum. I really didn't expect the latter extreme going into this game, though I probably should have realised that humans being hunted to extinction by aliens would harbour some strong feelings towards aliens. Xenophobia from the other direction mostly exists in the whole "Ganglion trying to wipe out humanity no matter what" (I haven't finished the game so I don't actually know exactly why they want humans wiped out", but also in smaller examples like several xenoform species being dismissive of human emotions. Even then this small example alone exists in different ways, for example one Ma-non is interested in learning different emotions but goes about it in a rather offensive way, while others seem to belittle humans for being irrational. 

 

So yeah that's pretty cool I think.

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When i did a side quest about how the leader of an obvious stand-in for fundamental christianity was poisoning Manon, i definitely had a "Oh yeah, the man behind this game wrote Xenogears" moment. There's some real blunt and heavy-handed weirdness in Cross.

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So I finished the main story tonight. I obviously won't write any spoilers because it seems most of the people who read this thread haven't finished it, though some of you seem close! (Or maybe have finished after your most recent post)

 

I guess instead I'll just talk about things from a gameplay perspective. While I appreciate being tasked with finding good setups for both my skell and ground gear, some of the ways that the game forces you between the two range from passable to incoherent, across the various post-skell chapters. I don't think it's much much of a spoiler that you are expected to be prepared for both skell and ground combat in the final chapter; I just didn't appreciate the way the scenario forces you out of your skell for apparently no good reason. I feel kind of lucky that my weapons happened to be strong against the enemies in the final chapter; after looking up the final boss online, it turned out it actually has a few negative resistances, i.e. takes extra damage from some weapon types. I also feel like the final area was extremely uninspired and bland, especially when you consider how grand Xenoblade Wii's final boss fight was (apologies to anyone who hasn't played that). I also found interesting ways that the final boss could be abused by the game mechanics, but I decided not to pursue them beyond what I stumbled upon. I feel if I wanted to, I could exploit that to make it a super easy fight. Oh well, sorry for being so vague, I don't know how to actually do spoiler tags on this forum.

 

I guess I'll be interested to what you all think once you're done with the game!

 

edit: Oh and once I beat chapter 12, I decided to see if I could take on a level 65 tyrant with the setup I had. Nope, even level 65 tyrants stomp all over me still, no idea how I'm going to tackle the level 90+ ones. Should have just gotten tyrants to wipe out the ganglion.

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I bought this game yesterday because I have a bunch of free time right now, and I'm honestly completely overwhelmed. I've never played a game in any way like this, so it's taking me a long time to get used to all the mechanics. Menu-based real-time combat has always been the bane of my existence; I get so overwhelmed and confused and by the time I think I know what I'm doing the battle is finished. I'm only about three hours in and just became a BLADE, so it seems like the game's starting to open up and I don't feel ready!

 

Any tips for what to focus on at the beginning to ease myself in? Be it combat tips or just how the general loop of sidequests/equipment/XP/class stuff works....thanks. 

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I bought this game yesterday because I have a bunch of free time right now, and I'm honestly completely overwhelmed. I've never played a game in any way like this, so it's taking me a long time to get used to all the mechanics. Menu-based real-time combat has always been the bane of my existence; I get so overwhelmed and confused and by the time I think I know what I'm doing the battle is finished. I'm only about three hours in and just became a BLADE, so it seems like the game's starting to open up and I don't feel ready!

 

Any tips for what to focus on at the beginning to ease myself in? Be it combat tips or just how the general loop of sidequests/equipment/XP/class stuff works....thanks. 

 

That is an incredibly broad question for a game like this, can you narrow it down? What specific things do you need answers concerning?

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Ok wow! That manual is super helpful; thanks! Sorry for the vague question; I didn't quite understand anything well enough to come up with any specific questions. That manual was pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. This game's damn complex, but I think I'm slowly getting the hang of it. 

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I'm glad that helped! One other thing I will say though is: at some point the game will tell you to level up either mechanical, biological or archaeological skills. Prioritise mechanical first; get that to level 4 before you even touch the other 2. Mechanical skill is required for planting data probes, which enable you to quick travel around the (gigantic) map, enabling you to explore better and complete quests more efficiently. Most probes require only level 1 but you don't want to run up to a probe only to find you can't plant a probe there.

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Another general quality of life suggestion for Cross: Don't take under-leveled party members into affinity quests.

 

Anyways, yeah, the digital manual is actually super useful, it explains a lot.

It might also be worth glancing through the first few pages of this topic, because we ended up going into detail on some things not covered in the manual.

 

If you still have questions after all of that, go ahead and ask.

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