Board 8 > XenoblaDE Topic #2 - WE MEASURE! FIND TREASURE! PONSPECTORS TILL WE DIE!

(+) Yeah! (+)

wheee going through UM list complete, Avalanche Abaasy beated... lmao eternal topple lock start to fin

... 254 Affinity Coins noooooo I missed something D:

next up to go through the world on a final quest and affinity double-check and then I can finally finish off main-story and start FC

*edit* also all artbooks get... I'll probably work on maxing arts levels in a NG+ run, but I still also gotta finish h2hs and max party affinity

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Got to chapter 16

the story is dumb

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if ch16 is too dumb for you you're not gonna like the ending tbqh

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EVERYONE GETS SUPERPOWERS AND IS A SAVIOR or something

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It reminds me of TTGL which I also didnt like

at some point it just gets too absurd. I was with the story until the Monado was sentient and it all started going downhill from there

which is too bad because I think the world was kind of cool

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masterplum posted...

It reminds me of TTGL which I also didnt like

Big oof

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lmao holy shit the lv99 Restricted Challenge, like when I initially took this challenge in Free I first shit my pants seeing the final wave but then woah this is just super easymode revenge funtimes, but hrm maybe the restricted is tougher

... now beating it in Restricted Mode... and holy shit if you get a Chain Attack to max and then get Melia to use Freeze....... the Freeze DoT alone basically killed Blizzard Belagia from almost full health in a matter of seconds.

I was soooo caught off-guard by that ending so quickly, I just started the wave Chain Attacking Avalanch Abaasy, he was left 1/4 health + Blaze and Freeze. Quickly switched to BB to build chain attack back up to finish off AA... and by the time I get around BB to do a Backslash.................. both monsters just collapse and I'm like wait what huh?

I wanna upload the vid but it has Seven so :|... watching the freeze ticks on BB gradually tearing down his full health bar is quite a sight though, literally Freeze is the only debuff/dot on him

... now to get back to trying to S He of the Metal Face Restricted since it's all I have left A...

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there we are Metal Face S, that's all of 'em for main-story availables

... god 20 seconds left as my last Chain Attack failed to provide a single fucking Chain Link ffs I thought I was doomed... and then it was followed up by a Vision slowly taking up a bunch of time but I somehow pulled it off with 3 seconds to spare: 4:57.38

do I finally finish the game now or farm Noponstone for the remaining special gear?... I'm betting on noponstone

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alright yeah i'm not farming 39000 x 4 noponstones without just continuing to FC first to see if the other mission is easier to do so with

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WE MEASURE! FIND TREASURE! PONSPECTORS TlLL WE DIE!

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x12

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Grimlyn posted...

alright yeah i'm not farming 39000 x 4 noponstones without just continuing to FC first to see if the other mission is easier to do so with

I felt like it was.
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man the ending scene to XB1 warms me up so much <3

[XB2 related commentary]
... also the final lines taking on such a different context coinciding with the ending of XB2...

Alvis: [...] I can see it. In this world, all life will walk towards the future. hand in hand.
Shulk [remembering this]: One day I hope I can meet them all. The people of this endless world.
Fiora: Me too. We will. I know it.
Shulk: We'll meet them. And whatever happens, we'll face our future together.
[camera pans off]

... whatever FC may bring and beyond, it's really hard not to relate this to XB2's ending. Also an aside Definitive Edition Klaus best looking Klaus.. why was the XB2 scene so drab...
[end of XB2 related comments]

also AAAAAAA THE TITLE SCREEN MY LOVE <3

starts FC... heh I see you Shulk's initial gear name. And boy I'm really loving this music, battle theme's reminding me of Torna and the field day theme simply of XB2. Stopping right away after the little introductory scenes though, I'd rather truly kick this off from the morning.

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starts FC back up

boy really am on XB2's Leftheria, this music right away hitting that vibe

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[FC] man I really liked this silent transition along Whisperwind Crossing leading into the Eryth Sea music just for this callback to Soltnar Seal Island which is now an entrance to Alcamoth. It's a small thing but it's really nice.

Also heh Alcamoth Revisited aesthetically is like a Zelda temple now, awesome

and once more a new battle theme and it once again makes me think of Torna's music, fitting for a XB1 add-on chapter.

*edit* gonna finish up here for today just after Alcamoth visit but oh god wait what Ponspector Display can be toggled off?! who would do thissssss

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haters

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWmSWwpTqLc

this is probably my favourite steamed hams

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Who hating?

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all FC sidequests beated annnd that's where I'm stopping for tonight, double-check Unique Enemies and Fogbeasts tomorrow, test out some max level & AP farmings, and should then finish of the story by tomorrow~

then back to some main-story completion grind and do a NG+ run woot woot

I've been liking FC very well for what it is, a bonus post-game chapter with its own mechanics and focus on a grand new and gorgeous map to explore with a new community of quests. Ofc it's not Torna although it has a lot of flavours from it but it's not like FC was set-up as strongly as the XB2 prequel story (heck even with Torna there's quite a few XB2 threads left unresolved).

Nene top tier nopon, kino can eat dirt, give me all the tyrea content thx u future connected... one thing kinda unsatisfying is the plot thread for Gael'gar... his initial spying and ominous monologues made me think he'd be more of a driving personality relating to the actual rift events, even going on to comment on it! he seemed to maybe no something but nah he's just left to his half-blood supremacy plotline? bit of a waste. always however gotta enjoy Bana plots! At first I wasn't sure about Bama since there Bionis Shoulder residents are some doppelgangers like Winnie/Minnie. I always loved the Frontier Village Bana chain quest and XB2's continuance of evil Banas really makes him a staple for me, a worthy final funsies quest! tho gotta miss Bana on a wheel punishments but I haven't actually found punished FC Bana yet so were see.. also all the Melia fashion equips oh boy, particularly happy to get Tyrea's mask~ that'll be good for NG+

tomorrow hypee

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yeahhh the final sequence is certainly brief and anti-climactic, not much more to say to it than that... back to Xenoblade series future speculations until next project announcement

oh wow and this final bonus Time Trial really is minimal too, welp this'll indeed be noponstone grinding bait. still enjoy the novelty of a Bionis Shoulder time trial tho!

*edit* Restricted still tought ofc... I think I just got lucky now by uh... not having much visions disrupting my time keeping me from S

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working on main-story file's achievements now

https://twitter.com/B8Grimlyn/status/1282892650736054273

... felt good how well Riki worked for Down But Not Out, wasn't looking up any strat just looked up which monsters have Area Spike and which skills dealt with party gauge or incapacitation

just a buncha daunting tasks left now: 5k enemies, 1k Chain Attacks, 2k Burst Affinities, and 366 sunrises... frustrating when all you can do is start counting up to a high target without knowing how much left you even need, they really should've added a stats page counting these

...*checks the math on sunrises...*.... 2 minutes to manually cycle a "day"... 732 minutes total aka 12.2 hours with perfect attention oh god xb why couldn't you show the current count, i need a progress bar on these twelve hours

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Felt like a giant power gap between end game side quests. I was level 80 and all the side quests seemed to be level 90+ which were unhittable. So I just beat the game.

considered new game + but noped hard when it said side quests wouldnt carry over. Screw that.

I had serious issues with the story, mostly around the final boss suddenly being a raging ass out of the blue but I did like the world building. It felt like it took big swings and even though it whiffed a lot at least it wasnt boring.

Final rating: 8/10. Hard to go lower on a game I ended up playing for 70 hours, but of those 70 hours how often was I actually having fun vs just doing things?

Remove 80% of the side quests and I think its a great game. Unfortunately they were so tedious that they really brought everything down.

I downloaded CrossCode because it had great reviews and groaned when I got to the first few side quests, and was shocked when I realized quite a few of them were actually interesting. It reminded me side quests can be something other than kill 15 wolves.

Kill 15 wolves quests need to die in the video game fires and never return

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yeah but what if it was kill 16 wolves

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I liked how XBX had the quest board to pick up most filler quest quests so you at least don't have to go through the town finding unnamed npcs for it. also a lot of its normal sidequests got their own in-game cutscenes and stuff that it's not just complete mindless tasking, and then of course there's the Affinity Quests involving individual party members stories, Like XB2's blade quests

XB2 goes the other direction though people might be more relieved to start more which is just cutting down the # of quests to like a third... I don't really remember open-ended mutually-exclusive quests or branches though... but its quests are also more focused

then Torna's a pretty community-focused game that tries to get you to pay more attention to its sidequests along with its community tracking system of separating satisfied citizens from unsatisfied ones (by whether they have quests for you or not). It's in turn a third of XB2's # of quests but then keeping in mind it's a ~20 hour main-story as opposed to the core games around ~65

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The kill 10 Wolves type quests mostly got moved to being Affinity nodes in Xenoblade 2. So they aren't exactly gone.
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hrmmm I never really considered thinking it that way but fair enough

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Sidequest complaints for specific games generally confuse me because

1. Every sidequest in every game is either a fetch quest, a 'go here kill things' quest, or a shitty minigame
2. If you don't like them, skip them

There are very rare exceptions with games that try to shake things up (only ones I can think of are Majora's Mask and maybe Skies of Arcadia) but overall sidequests are inherently uninteresting, especially in JRPGs. They're there to pad game time. If you're enjoying the core gameplay loop, you might enjoy the side quests because they amount to 'more game'. Otherwise...don't do them and play the main story?

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Like...to use an analogy, when it comes to sidequests I imagine two types of people at a buffet. Both of them like some of the food at the buffet, but not all. The first person eats the food they like, ignores the food they don't (maybe trying one or two things they have mixed feelings on). They end their meal satisfied and content. The second person absolutely has to eat a full plate of every single type of food available at the buffet, and refuses to stop even when they feel bloated and sick. They finish their meal complaining that it was too much food, and about the food they thought tasted bad, even though they that ate food knowing they wouldn't like it.

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yeah there's lots of games I don't at all care to be all sidequest completion on like Elder Scrolls games and I'm totally happy with that, I only bother to do all quests in XB because I want to keep playing the game and stay around in its world a bit longer really

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I mean the entire JRPG genre is "either a fetch quest, a 'go here kill things' quest, or a shitty minigame" so it stands to reason that sidequests wouldn't be any different. The difference is in the presentation for me.

The gold standard of side quests is the Witcher 3 because they attach a story to every sidequest and sometimes you have to make tough decisions as Geralt for how to proceed.

That werewolf you were sent to kill is actually a nice monster and he was framed by a spiteful wife? Gotta choose between fulfilling your contract or letting him go now? That's awesome!

Kill 10 wolves because uhh... that guy over there was supposed to do it but he didn't want to or something. Here's a freeze resist level 2 gem and 200 gold. That sucks

Some of the sidequests in XB are fine because of the story attached (drug dealing Nopon, army lady in first town) but most of them are complete trash. Yes I realize you can just avoid the bad ones but one of the big problems is that there's often no way to tell which quests are going to suck or not! Some of the boring normal quests unlock additional skill trees for your characters randomly.

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can't wait to get this 1500xp for hours of change time manipulation for the Happy New Year achievement

reward value is certainly an issue, part of what makes kill 10 wolfs more tolerable for XB2's Affinity Charts is that you typically do them specifically to unlock their tree skills as they progressively unlock for the Blades you're using

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skullbone posted...

I mean the entire JRPG genre is "either a fetch quest, a 'go here kill things' quest, or a shitty minigame" so it stands to reason that sidequests wouldn't be any different. The difference is in the presentation for me.

The gold standard of side quests is the Witcher 3 because they attach a story to every sidequest and sometimes you have to make tough decisions as Geralt for how to proceed.

Xenoblade actually has you make more difficult life-defining choices for people in sidequests than any other JRPG I've played. It never gets as morally grey as Witcher 3, but it's not supposed to. The games aim for different tones. It sounds like your issue is less with the sidequests specifically and more than you just prefer the tone of Witcher 3 to Xenoblade.

Some of the sidequests in XB are fine because of the story attached (drug dealing Nopon, army lady in first town) but most of them are complete trash. Yes I realize you can just avoid the bad ones but one of the big problems is that there's often no way to tell which quests are going to suck or not! Some of the boring normal quests unlock additional skill trees for your characters randomly.

Every sidequest in Xenoblade completely unconnected from story content is marked by something like Collection Quest 1 or Challenge Quest 2. It's pretty easy to tell what's interesting and what's not.

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KamikazePotato posted...

Xenoblade actually has you make more difficult life-defining choices for people in sidequests than any other JRPG I've played

Legit can't think of a single example of this from the entire game. I mean I'm not specifically drawn to Witcher 3 because making the decisions is hard; I just respect the amount of detail and story they put into even simple things like "go here, kill this monster".

XB obviously went for quantity over quality which is fine! I probably did like 80% of the quests in the game and I didn't dislike them because being the world is fun but if you were to ask me if XB had GOOD sidequests I would easily say no.

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Off the top of my head, you have to choose who a lot of people marry, whether or not someone stays in their town for the rest of their life or sets out on their own, whether a nopon resigns themselves to being a pet or lives a life of homeless freedom, who succeeds a business, whether a chef devotes themselves to their work or their family, and whether a guard captain fulfills their dream or gets sent back to square one. And there's a lot more than that! I found Xenoblades sidequests to be significantly more interesting than the average game, including a lot if WRPGs which are often built around sidequests. I haven't played Witcher 3, but Witcher 2's sidequests were much worse than Xenoblade's.

Essentially I think if they cut out all the 'collect 10 bear asses' quests, even though you can ignore them in the first place, the game's sidequests would have a much better reputation by freeing completionists from their self-imposed curse. There's a lot of good little stories there.

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Yeah, like I just had a side quest in CrossCode where there were 4 trees along the path that I had to get to, so a lot of the quest was navigating the terrain to try to figure out how to reach them.

That sort of thing is interesting. I had to think about it.

90% of xenoblades sidequests my 7 year old son could have accomplished without ever playing the game before. Go to the monster with an exclamation mark over its head. Hit the fight button, sit there for a minute and keep doing it.

Total garbage. The only category of side quests that consistently were cool were the elite monster battles. Nearly Everything else was brain dead and boring.

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https://twitter.com/B8Grimlyn/status/1283194437066084352

gotcha you god damn son of a bitch

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFD4smjY7cw

I don't know why the end made me laugh so hard

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Xenoblade had some gem sidequests. Can anyone seriously tell me they weren't surprised by the entire drug lord quest line? It was like 10 quests long and fucken hilarious.

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best boss fight in the series

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ninkendo posted...

best boss fight in the series

^

[FC] also loved Bama

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

Xenoblade had some gem sidequests. Can anyone seriously tell me they weren't surprised by the entire drug lord quest line? It was like 10 quests long and fucken hilarious.

Which one was this?

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Waluigi1 posted...

Which one was this?

The quests involving nopon merchants and red pollen orbs

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Frontier Village Gadada / Cherri chain of quests over the smuggling of Red Pollen Orbs

Sadly it is possible to miss out on if you don't clear a couple prereq Timed Quests before MC

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Ah ok I remember that one, kinda. I wouldn't necessarily call it great but it was one of the more interesting quests lines.

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Finally got around to finishing this up. Got sidetracked for a while.

Beautiful ending. Game was pretty much as good as I remembered it, a.k.a. it's either my #1 or #2 favorite game depending on the day of the week.

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Sounds about right

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Still haven't started on FC >_<

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