Poll of the Day > Xenoblade Chronicles 3 comes out next week...are you getting it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Xenoblade Chronicles is in a weird spot for me. The premise of each of the games is exactly what I look for. But the most interest part for me is the concept that ties the games together with XenoGears and XenoSaga. From what I understand there's a scientist doing something that divided him and makes him several Gods in different universes (or something like that). The problem is I don't see myself playing the games to see how much of that gets explained.

Okay... though I'm not even sure how accurate it is.

Well, if you truly don't care about being spoiled on XC1 and XC2 (don't read if you ever plan to play them)...

You kind of inadvertently, albeit very broadly, described the major end-game plot-twists of both games, lol
XC1: You find out the god you defeated to save the world was actually originally a scientist and mortal
XC2: You find out your world is what remains of the earth after the above-mentioned scientist opened a portal to another dimension, creating the world of XC1 and taking half of his body with it.

Nah. I tried playing the first one twice and came to the conclusion I don't like it. Second looks worse. Never seen anything about X

streamofthesky posted...

Well, if you truly don't care about being spoiled on XC1 and XC2 (don't read if you ever plan to play them)...

I misunderstood what the series is about then. I thought you were expected to know that going into it from the previous Xeno games.

I've played all the Xenoblade games so far and enjoyed each of them despite their flaws. I did get 3 and am a couple hours in. The pacing in this one is absolutely atrocious to the point where I feel like I've sat through 2 movies already, and the game keeps putting up invisible walls to keep me on rails, but I am just starting so hopefully that problem does not continue. Other than that it seems like a marked improvement from XC2, and I think the characters so far have solid foundations to make the story good. Gameplay seems fine, too, and they've added more layers to enemy mechanics and combos, which is inarguably good (I still miss being able to change enemies by targeting limbs like in XCX, but alas). We'll see.

Edit: Btw, by all accounts overleveling in XC3 is very ill-advised. It causes other things to become much more grindy until you reach NG+ and can de-level the characters, so if you do get the game, try to avoid overleveling. :(

Entity13 posted...

Whereas so much of the first game was, "Are there machines? If yes, waste time on the one ability so everyone else can do basically anything

Literally over half the party has all or most of their important attacks pierce all that anyway (Shulk, Melia, Riki, Seven).

your face gets pounded by the mobs because neither tank can take aggro.

I didn't even use the tanks most of the time in XC1, tbh.
NGL, XC1 has problems but your complaints are pretty weak. If you don't want to use the mechon weapons or Enchant, you don't have to; just use the other options given to you.

shipwreckers posted...

I know some people hated it, but I REALLY wish they'd do a remaster ("definitive edition") of Xenoblade Chronicles X. Somehow that "filler" was bearable to me (at least more than the BLATANT time-gating filler in Torna). XCX's biggest crime was that it released on a doomed console. (The western censorship didn't help XCX either.) But, I think it would look and play phenomenally on a Switch!

That absolutely was not the weakest part of XCX. X is my favorite of the -blade games that I've finished, but its story is absolute trash because it's not complete. And I don't mean in a "we had to really rush the late-game story content so it's poorly paced." I mean that it's actually fucking incomplete. It literally ends on "There's something about this planet." Cool, you gonna let us find out what that is? No? Not even in optional post-game content? Great. :-/

Game needs a ton of QoL features (especially audio sliders, a faster way to change party members, and maybe making the text bigger because I had a hell of a time reading large chunks of the menu settings) but that's basically a given with any proper remake, one would hope.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I misunderstood what the series is about then. I thought you were expected to know that going into it from the previous Xeno games.

Well, I never played prior Xeno- games and they were huge plot twists for me, and are held until literally end of game reveals, so I'm pretty sure they're intended to be surprises/twists.
Xenoblade is also one of my favorite series of all time and I like watching Let's Play'ers reacting to the major plot twists, and they have all in my experience also not expected the aforementioned twists. Of course, none of them had played -gears or -saga, either.

streamofthesky posted...

Well, if you truly don't care about being spoiled on XC1 and XC2 (don't read if you ever plan to play them)...

You kind of inadvertently, albeit very broadly, described the major end-game plot-twists of both games, lol
XC1: You find out the god you defeated to save the world was actually originally a scientist and mortal
XC2: You find out your world is what remains of the earth after the above-mentioned scientist opened a portal to another dimension, creating the world of XC1 and taking half of his body with it.

Is it the scientist from the introduction cutscene from Xenosaga 1?

streamofthesky posted...

Well, I never played prior Xeno- games and they were huge plot twists for me

I haven't played them either. They looked interesting and I like to have more information about the plot before I determine if I want to experience it myself. For me what would be the main draw doesn't seem to be involved in the majority of the story so I didn't.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Xenoblade Chronicles is in a weird spot for me. The premise of each of the games is exactly what I look for. But the most interest part for me is the concept that ties the games together with XenoGears and XenoSaga. From what I understand there's a scientist doing something that divided him and makes him several Gods in different universes (or something like that). The problem is I don't see myself playing the games to see how much of that gets explained.

Massive spoilers for both Xenoblade 1 and 2, along with how those relate to information about 3 that was available pre-launch:

There haven't been any explicit tie-ins to previous Xeno games, but 1 and 2 were connected by way of a cutscene that occurs at/near the end of both games. In that scene, a scientist named Klaus makes use of an artifact called the Conduit (not explicit shown in 1, but retconned in 2. This bears considerable physical resemblance to the Zohar and may end up being a tie-in to Gears as the series plot develops) to try creating a new universe. The results are apocalyptic. Most life on Earth is wiped out, the handful of human survivors are mutated into twisted creatures roaming the shattered remnants of their former world (which is visited in 2 as the Land of Morytha), Klaus himself is granted the power of a god, but has half of his body transported to another dimension. In this initial world, Klaus takes on the role of The Architect and creates what comes to be known as the world of Alrest, in which all of Xenoblade 2 is set, including establishing the circle of life that ultimately results in Titans being born to act as landmasses for smaller creatures.

The other half of Klaus, along with the colleague that tried to stop him (Galea, only named in 2) end up in a completely new, parallel dimension, consisting of a world that's just an endless sea (at least, that's all we ever see of it). In this world, the two create the Bionis and Mechonis and respectively become Zanza and Meyneth, gods of their respective titans. The events of that game all follow the conflict between the titans, ultimately culminating in the death of both gods and Shulk using the power of the Monado (his magic sword, to grossly oversimplify matters) to create a new world with no need for gods. This new world is briefly explored in 1's epilogue cutscene and in Future Connected (the epilogue campaign included with the Definitive Edition), and as far as we see there, consists mostly of locations from Bionis and Mechonis laid out as part of a more traditional landscape that expands beyond that and explicitly exists as just one planet in an otherwise normal universe.

At the end of Xenoblade 2, just before the party is fights the big bad guy to prevent Alrest from being destroyed, Klaus warns them that his time is nearly up and the Conduit will be leaving the world soon, taking all of his power and the power of anything else that depends on it with it. During the final cutscene, we see Klaus performing one final act of divine intervention to preserve all of Alrest's existing Titans and life in the new world that is forming, all of which happens at the same time as Xenoblade 1's ending (we hear Shulk's voice from that ending cutscene echo through the dimensional vortex that forms Klaus' left half, and there's a considerable chance that the Conduit left because Shulk wanted to create a world without gods). Once the final boss is defeated and the party returns to Alrest, they see the Cloud Sea retreating and find themselves looking at a new, more traditional landscape. The old titans all make their way to the shores of this new continent and crash into it to become part of the land, forming a new world for everyone to live in.

It was implied that this new land and the new world formed at the end of 1 were the same place, and that 1's world had merged back into the dimension from which it came, but that wasn't explicitly confirmed until 3 was announced. 3 includes many elements from both worlds, from landscape elements (the Mechonis' Sword and Urayan titan are both pictured on the game's cover art, title screen, and seen in the landscape of the game very early on) to creatures, to the people that live there (the two warring nations seem to consist of people that resemble the inhabitants of 1's world and people that resemble the inhabitants of 2's). I can't speak to exactly how 3 shows this connection beyond that, since I'm still pretty early in the game, but it definitely seems to be set in this combined world, many years later.

There's more nuance to it than that, but that's the gist of it all. There's also Xenoblade X in there somewhere, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the other games yet. People have half-joked that the title might be a roman numeral and that Takahashi opted to release #10 before #2, which may yet prove to be true, but as of now (again, speaking without knowing how 3 ends), there doesn't seem to be a connection. If you want to see how it's all actually portrayed without playing through multiple 100+ hour games to do so (though they are excellent games and I quite recommend them), compilations of all of their cutscenes are available on Youtube (1 is ~10.5 hours long, 2 is 14) and there's a substantial number of analysis and lore videos that explore/explain things further, so it may be worth your time to dive into those if you're interested. There still isn't any definite connection to Gears/Saga, but a lot of those lore videos explore potential connections, and depending on what comes out of 3, that may change.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Okay... though I'm not even sure how accurate it is.

It's not unheard of for speculation - even inaccurate speculation - about spoiler content to be modded as spoilers. Bear in mind that a lot of the time, the mods haven't actually played/seen whatever's being allegedly spoiled, so they can't verify the accuracy of a spoiler (and might not even want to read it for the sake of avoiding spoilers themselves) and instead have to take the word of whoever marked it at face value.

Gaawa_chan posted...

The pacing in this one is absolutely atrocious to the point where I feel like I've sat through 2 movies already, and the game keeps putting up invisible walls to keep me on rails, but I am just starting so hopefully that problem does not continue.

It remains very cutscene-heavy (at least through to Chapter 3, where I am now), but it ditches the invisible walls thing pretty quickly outside of some story sequences where it just makes sense (like if you're literally running away from a giant tank, you can't go backwards until you finish that sequence). You're still limited in where you can go by enemy levels, but you can still explore about as freely as you could in either of the others.

Gaawa_chan posted...

Literally over half the party has all or most of their important attacks pierce all that anyway (Shulk, Melia, Riki, Seven).

I wouldn't necessarily recommend using Riki against Mechon because his autoattacks (which his AI will try to use) will bounce and tank his tension level, but yeah, there are quite a few ways around it that don't have to rely on anti-mechon weapons.

That said, if she was just getting to Sword Valley, Seven wasn't an option yet.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I didn't even use the tanks most of the time in XC1, tbh.

You can get away with eschewing a dedicated healer pretty comfortably, but ditching a tank generally means you've either managed to build one of your attackers to be tanky enough to fill the role or you've built all of your attackers to be so strong that the enemy dies before they can kill you. Both are very possible, but neither are really what you'd expect from somebody on their first trip through the game, pre-Sword Valley (which also means pre-Monado Armour, which is a particularly useful tool for setting up beefy attackers).

Gaawa_chan posted...

That absolutely was not the weakest part of XCX. X is my favorite of the -blade games that I've finished, but its story is absolute trash because it's not complete.

Eeyup. It's blatant sequel bait, but there's been no sequel, and the story really had no excuse for being that limited.

adjl posted...

there's a substantial number of analysis and lore videos that explore/explain things further, so it may be worth your time to dive into those if you're interested.

I think that's what I did. I learned about it in the first place from some retrospective / recap / "what happens in" video.

I watched the full collection of cutscenes. Like once you get past the 1/3 mark the narrative pacing improves, but that is a rough way to start. I can't say I like the ending: Hey, after building up to creating a singular world that moves forward through time, and potentially allows everyone to live, we're going to just separate the worlds that had been on a collision course and still will be if they separate? Maybe? Wait, all that talk of everyone trying to remember one another goes out the window moments later when time reverts to before the start of the collision and... Ugh. Sure, the cutscenes I watched might have left something out, but that's just a mess.

I will say, though, that I like how a certain couple characters from previous games retained their personalities, leading to one of my favorite exchanges between the two of them.

@adjl I started it last night. Had a hard time putting it down but had to since I needed sleep for work.

Revelation34 posted...

@adjl I started it last night. Had a hard time putting it down but had to since I needed sleep for work.

Great! I hope you enjoy it. It's a bit of a slow start, mechanically, but new arts roll in in due course so you don't spend as long autoattacking.

adjl posted...

Great! I hope you enjoy it. It's a bit of a slow start, mechanically, but new arts roll in in due course so you don't spend as long autoattacking.

I messed up a little since I didn't know affinity would go up by just accepting quests and I had soloed a lot of them before getting my party members.

I took off yesterday through Monday just to have a long weekend for playing it

Plot's been unimpressive thus far, but combat and exploration I end up just losing track of time, lol

Revelation34 posted...

I messed up a little since I didn't know affinity would go up by just accepting quests and I had soloed a lot of them before getting my party members.

That's not a huge deal. The affinity boost from quests is handy, but there are like 500 quests in the game, so failing to min/max 5-10 of them isn't going to cripple you in the long run. However diligent you are about rotating party members to maximize affinity gain from quests, you're still going to end up grinding some if you want to max everyone out, and the best way to do that opens up around level 85-90.

You also don't really need to max out everyone's affinity. You should max it out for the party you're using, since it's massively helpful for chain attacks, but that happens pretty naturally just by playing the game with the same party, and otherwise it's only really useful for gem crafting (you won't need to min/max until you're into postgame stuff).

Been playing it when I can and LOVING it. Still in chapter 4 after a week

Can't wait. Wanna wait until my next payday before I buy it

adjl posted...

That's not a huge deal. The affinity boost from quests is handy, but there are like 500 quests in the game, so failing to min/max 5-10 of them isn't going to cripple you in the long run. However diligent you are about rotating party members to maximize affinity gain from quests, you're still going to end up grinding some if you want to max everyone out, and the best way to do that opens up around level 85-90.

You also don't really need to max out everyone's affinity. You should max it out for the party you're using, since it's massively helpful for chain attacks, but that happens pretty naturally just by playing the game with the same party, and otherwise it's only really useful for gem crafting (you won't need to min/max until you're into postgame stuff).

A lot of the "pick a side" skirmishes on the field have a choice between affinity for a colony or nopon silver coins.
I have no clue how hard it is to max affinity w/ each colony (I know you can spam the same collectopedia quest over and over, but those give tiny affinity for the amount of materials), so I always choose the affinity side. It'd be nice to know if that's wise or not, b/c the nopon coins aren't that common, either...
(also doesn't help that all the early ones where it's xp and gold vs. nopon coins I chose the former.... didn't realize at the time that gold was useless and bonus xp was a trap)

I've ordered a copy off Amazon and should be getting it next Thursday (because overly complicated reasons).

I also booted up XC1 and climbed the first few floors of Mechonis Field. My party is 61, halfway to 62.

streamofthesky posted...

A lot of the "pick a side" skirmishes on the field have a choice between affinity for a colony or nopon silver coins.
I have no clue how hard it is to max affinity w/ each colony (I know you can spam the same collectopedia quest over and over, but those give tiny affinity for the amount of materials), so I always choose the affinity side. It'd be nice to know if that's wise or not, b/c the nopon coins aren't that common, either...
(also doesn't help that all the early ones where it's xp and gold vs. nopon coins I chose the former.... didn't realize at the time that gold was useless and bonus xp was a trap)

He's playing XC1, so I was talking about affinity there.

I'm not sure how to pick between Affinity and Nopon Coins in skirmishes in 3. I pretty quickly opted for Nopon Coins over bonus exp, especially once I heard how much being overlevelled sucks, but I don't know how feasible getting further affinity is going to be or how much their respective sidequests will offer (I've generally just done the hero quest and moved on, mostly to avoid overlevelling). So far, I've mostly just used Nopon Coins to get meals for free and that still hasn't kept me from almost capping them, so affinity will probably be the way to go in most cases. I think the cost to use them to buy gems scales up too quickly to make them a viable option for rank X ones, but admittedly my hoarder instincts have kept me from seriously considering that and I don't remember off-hand what that would cost. Given that I'm almost capped and there seem to be plenty around, I might splurge and buy a high-rank copy of the gem that gives extra damage on attack cancels, since that's near-universally helpful and the Rank X boost is a whopping 70% for a very easy condition.

On the overlevelling front, it sounds like the best way to grind CP is to overkill unique monsters near your level, and I don't think there's much risk of ever not being able to find one of those, so those concerns might be a bit overblown. It would, however, interfere with making meaningful class gains while playing through the game normally, and given that I'm really enjoying that process (I've basically stuck to controlling Noah and then just played as whatever class he's currently working on, rather than switching between characters for some variety), I'm not exactly rushing out to spend my bonus exp.

PK_Spam posted...

Been playing it when I can and LOVING it. Still in chapter 4 after a week

Same, pretty much exactly.