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Xenoblade Chronicles Wii / 3DS / Definitive Edition
Khushrenada:
Some thoughts from past comments.
--- Quote from: Fatty The Hutt on April 10, 2012, 10:51:40 AM ---
--- Quote from: ejamer on April 10, 2012, 08:53:43 AM ---
--- Quote from: Enner on April 09, 2012, 09:19:14 PM ---This game has triggered my horrible obsessive compulsions with MMORPGs or open-world games. I spent the first three hours of the game walking around Colony 9 and the surrounding area gathering collectibles and speaking to every named non-player character in the town. I think I've only completed about 3 story quests! The last thing I did was deliver a lunch and return home. And by "return home" I mean swim to the opposite shore, walk around an island, and get my party knocked out by a high level monster that suddenly appeared when night time set.
I'm loving this game.
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This sounds exactly like my first 3 hours playing.
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Ha! This is exactly my experience so far. I'm now about 5.5 hours in and just about to enter a cave with three party members. I can actually find my way around colony 9 now and have done a LOT of swimming.
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Isn't that everybody's experience with this game? Besides XCX flashbacks for obvious reasons, I find this game reminding me of my time in Breath of the Wild. BotW is pretty much my first open world game aside from the 20 or so hours I think I spend in XCX. At the time open-worlds were growing in gaming, there weren't many that appeared on Nintendo consoles. By the time they did with Arkham City or Assassin's Creed and such, I was getting back into gaming again but primarily through the 3DS and its "smaller" offerings as well as playing older generation games. So perhaps I'd have a different view if I was more aware of other entries in the genre.
I bring it up because I remember when I played Super Mario 3D Land on 3DS. It felt like such a fresh Mario experience. A few years later, when I finally played Super Mario Galaxy 2, it was sort of like the missing link that allowed me to see how Mario games went from Galaxy 1 to 3D Land. There were elements about Galaxy 2 I recognized in 3D Land and so it no longer seemed to be this game that just came into being somehow on its own. Xenoblade Chronicles reminds me of that. It’s like the missing link to how BotW came into existence and now I feel I can see this sort of path of development on Nintendo’s side of how it came into being.
Colony 9 is like the Great Plateau region. A gentle introduction to the game and the abilities and systems in play. A large contained space that I wanted to explore all of it before moving on. Wanting to meet and talk to every NPC in town was my equivalent of climbing multiple trees and surfaces to new heights when first playing BotW. Tackling the enemies around the colony was the same as learning the various ways you could beat up Moblins. Only ready to move on once I’d fully covered the area. Taking in the views and consulting the game map with what I was seeing and exploring.
--- Quote from: Fatty The Hutt on May 11, 2012, 11:02:24 AM ---Had a big ol' 4 hour play session last night after a break from playing for a bit (life always interferes with my gaming dagnabbit).
I had stopped just after the first Mechon attack. Story says I'm supposed to head to another colony now. So what did I do? Spent the whole time in and around my hometown doing sidequests, raising affinities, gem crafting, leveling up some different arts and swapping out gear.
THOROUGHLY enjoyed myself. I'm getting better at the craziness of combat. And thank-you to gbuell about the suggestion to switch to the classic controller. I broke down and sprung for a CCPro (had a regular one that has become sticky with myriad "children-juice"). It has made a huge difference.
You know, I think this Xenoblade Chronicles thing just might be a pretty darn good game. ;D
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Heck yeah! I find it hard to tear myself away from Colony 9 even when I return to it now. Still trying to connect a few people on the affinity chart and the music is just so inviting.
Khushrenada:
--- Quote from: ejamer on June 24, 2020, 01:40:53 PM ---"... However, it was also a case of now getting two new characters I needed to learn about... "
One fun question: which characters are you actually playing as during the game?
My first time through, I don't remember changing up my lineup at all for the first 2/3 of the game, so I learned to use a few characters really well and then spent the rest of the game experimenting with the others as supplementary/specialty characters in my party.
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I've been sort of patting myself on the back a bit after reading through these older comments as there seems to be a lot of things I've been staying aware and trying to keep up with or doing that a few others missed or learned about until much later in the game when it become more necessary. I think a big part of that is the affinity chart and wanting to up the affinity within my party.
After I had Sharla join and played around a bit with her on the party, it was soon after that her and Reyn were learning more arts than could actually be used in battle. I began figuring out what options I wanted them to perform in battle and starting to see how some arts connected. Doing that made me see how they offered different tactics in battle. This did lead to me switching up who was the leader for a bit to see how that might go and what the AI might do with Shulk. I wondered if I might learn something there that I was not doing or missing while controlling Shulk. However, I didn’t really notice much change in tactics with Reyn and I felt constrained with Sharla who has limited attacks nor did I require much healing. Didn’t notice anything special from AI Shulk either. Soon I encountered a bunch of Mechon through the end of Bionis Leg into the Ether Mine thus went back to Shulk and just kept refining how I used him and the Monado.
After though, I did switch to Dunban as party leader to try and start building affinity with him and the other members. Shulk and Reyn were maxed in their affinity and Sharla was mid-level with both of them leaving Dunban starting from the bottom with all. I’m pretty sure I went through the Marsh completely as Dunban exploring it all with Sharla for all the flying enemies and swapping in Shulk and Reyn a bit. I went back to Shulk though once I had Riki and Melia join in order to build up affinity with him and them. I feel that it is probably Shulk have good affinity with all members for chain attacks since the Monado should be important in most battles and he is the main character. Plus, Shulk gets more Experience with completing quests thanks to a skill tree unlock so with all the Frontier Village questing I began doing with Riki and Melia along (plus return trips to previous areas), I wanted him in the lead.
Once I was ready to finish exploring Makna Forest, I did make Riki leader to try him out a bit. Ended up switching to Shulk when it came time to fight the boss. Overall, not clear yet what I think of Riki. It was at this point I began reading these past comments and how Mannypon was highly praising Riki so I was excited to see the result with him in battle. By the time I got back into the story and exploring, my party was levelled pretty high for the area. Even the boss, I was 5 levels higher so it wasn’t much of a sweat thanks to all that questing before.
However, by switching to Riki, it did get me to start thinking more about Aggro and the effect it has in battle. Like Shulk, Riki has a couple attacks that do more damage on a different side of an enemy besides the front. But if I’m controlling Riki and starting battles then that usually means he’ll have the monster facing him most battle unless another character can create more aggro after awhile. So, near the end of Makna Forest, I’d often start a battle with Shulk doing a backslash on an enemy for big instant damage. Then with the enemy focused on Shulk, I’d start moving forward away from the group so that the enemy would keep turning to face me and expose its backside to Riki while Melia did… her thing. She’s helping but I still haven’t really done much in depth with her yet to know how well she’s helping.
In any case, moving around in battle seems to be making a difference both in limiting enemy damage and giving me more battle affinity attacks but, again, I was pretty overpowered at the end. I either had enemies way too strong that I wasn’t going to fight or quite a bit under that there was no challenge so I couldn’t really pick on someone my own size to accurately judge if it is the movement or just my stats. It has got me thinking about going back to Reyn though since I think that is probably the way he is meant to be used. With his high HP and increased aggro attacks, I should be using him to keep the enemies main attacks and attention on me in order to position them in ways to make it easy for the CPU to maximize their attacks and position. I don’t think Reyn has any attacks that require hitting an enemy on the side or back which means he can stay in front of an enemy.
So, while there is definitely more I have to learn with the characters and I’m sure I could be improving my battle strategies further (like tension is something I only have a theoretical understanding of still), thanks to my focus on building affinity and switching around the team to build up with chain attacks, battles and some quests, it has at least kept me mindful of testing the other members in situations.
Order.RSS:
Pretty fun to read over some of the initial impressions compared to your current ones, Khush. Do you think you'd like it as much back in the day?
The Xenoblade series is one of the great white whales in my backlog. Own two of them, Xenoblade 1 was very cheap on Virtual Console once, and Xenoblade X I have maybe 5 hours in total. Might need to turn one of these into a Summer project.
broodwars:
I have been catching up on Xenoblade in recent weeks, as I never finished the Wii version. I got up to Sword Valley & then got stuck in the reeds trying to catch up on the sidequests (particularly the Colony 6 ones). The sidequests in Xenoblade are so spectacularly boring & nigh-uncompletable in the original version, so I eventually got bored & frustrated & put it down.
Playing the Definitive Version on Switch, there's a lot of quality of life stuff I appreciate here that does a lot to negate my issues with the original release. The ability to track quests now is a godsend, since the game will now mark anywhere you need to go and what you need to interact with IF it's present in the game world at that time. This along makes the sidequests way more do-able without a Wiki, though Wiki you will still need to complete more than 1/4 of them because of their obscure unlock conditions and arbitrarily-stupidly RNG collectables.
I appreciate the rearranged soundtrack, though in most cases it's not that different from the original soundtrack. Unfinished Battle STILL should have been used a lot more than the 1 time it gets used in the main game (yes, I know Future Connect corrects this). The new models are great. The environments, though...yeah, they still kind of suck, with bland and blurry textures a lot of the time and simple geometry.
In any case, I've reached the Mechonis capital, so I'm way beyond where I originally was in the Wii version. Unfortunately, I think the game pretty much peaks with the events in Sword Valley. Xenoblade has something of the "Far Cry 3 issue", where the first 1/2 - 2/3 of the game are very strong. You traverse a wide variety of environments that THEMSELVES change greatly depending on whether it's day or night, and you have a strong narrative hook in chasing Metal Face. Then Metal Face gets Vaased, and now I have to slog through the most boring, uninspired, unchanging portion of the game to take on a new villain I do not care about at all and the game's really given me no reason to. He's just a dime a dozen "destroy everything" villain, regardless of the justification the game shoehorns in there. I don't care, and it doesn't help that the game's already made it clear that even HE'S not the big villain I have to care about.
Seriously, the Mechonis portion of the game is so obviously rushed & uninspired that it feels like it's only here because Monolith thought people would get angry if you never walked on it. You go from the open, secret-packed world of the Bionis to a series of linear corridors & and endless combat rooms.
I seem to be nearing the end of the game, and I've pretty much settled on a battle party of Shulk, Battle Angel Alita, & Sharla for general exploration & Shulk, Dunban, & Sharla for when things actually get serious. Tried other combinations over the course of the game, but Melia is too useless when not directly controlled & I prefer having a combination DPS & Tank over having a dedicated Tank when Shulk's in the party. And you need the Monado, so you're going to have Shulk.
Lemonade:
I have played this on Switch for about 13 hour so far. I definitely like it more than the 3DS version, the map and quest log improvements are really good and the casual mode is making it so battles arent a constant struggle.
It also looks significantly better than the 3DS version, especially the faces.