Xenoblade Chronicles X

[Maryokutai]

It's pretty good, I've also been playing this quite a bit, I think I'm at around 35 hours. It took me a bit to find its rhythm despite roughly knowing what I was into as I did play it on the WiiU. I gave up relatively quickly back then though because of how it forced you to use the Gamepad to use FrontierNav.

 

The Switch version I'm enjoying a lot though, even if it can be hard to say why precisely. I'm still unsure if it's genuinely a well-designed game or if it's just very good at dangling the carrot in front of you, though I suppose the end result is the same. 

 

The level requirements/recommendations can be a bit all over the place for quests, I just ran around planting probes for quite a while until I really started engaging with its Affinity and Story Missions. 

[spatular]

yeah i've mostly been running around trying to do the map mission stuff (not sure what it's called), got to a level where i could do a proper mission but struggled then the game asks me if i want to turn the difficulty down (just for that boss) which i did to get it done, but it shows i've not got a hang of the combat yet, despite playing the other games so have a vague idea what to do.

[Maryokutai]

What class did you pick? I went for the upper path at first – I forget the name but the final one is Samurai Gunner – which felt rather straightforward to play because it's designed around the classic Break-Stagger-Topple combo from XB1. But I also sometimes have Psychocorrupters as party members and those guys die all the time due to their low HP pools and the AI doing a bad job of saving their very few healing arts for when it matters. So I imagine the difficulty varying quite a bit depending on which path you're on.

 

Unfortunately I can't really give any tips for the battle system because I just use what is apparent at face value anyway. You might want to double-check if you levelled up some arts and skills yet though, I kept forgetting that early on and it can make quite the difference. The first two upgrades are really cheap, too, so you don't have to worry about wasting too many points on a class you might not stick with.

[spatular]

Thanks, yeah I did level up some stuff near the start but then forgot about that. I’m on the bottom path for classes, that top one sounds better though so maybe I’ll swap over to that.

[Maryokutai]

Yeah, I can imagine that class being rather fragile in the early-ish game when the rest of your party can't reliably pull aggro or benefit from the buffs and debuffs you're applying. Probably pretty good later on though, I was planning to switch to it after I've maxed out the two at the top. Or maybe I go for the one that wields a Javelin because that also sounds cool.

 

Speaking of cool, I unlocked my Skell yesterday. It's interesting how it basically shrinks the world map if you walk around in it, a really clever way of portraying scale by manipulating it through nothing else but camera positioning and movement speed. I do agree with Handsomedead's decade-old sentiment that it's not that big of a deal though, and I also find Skell combat is a bit weird so I'm still mostly running about on foot.

Spoiler

Worth noting that the one I have right now can't fly, I imagine that aspect being quite the game changer whenever it gets unlocked.

 

[spatular]

nice one, the skells do look cool!

 

i think i picked the bottom path because the first class along that route sounded good, but now i'm onto the next one and struggling, so yeah will definitely try changing class

[Maryokutai]

Found out today that hopping in your Skell and murdering peaceful animals roughly 5 levels beyond you is a quite efficient way of levelling up classes. Which up to this point felt like a drag as switching them meant you either have to use baby arts for a while or go back to your tried and tested setup you mastered, which seems a bit counter-intuitive considering you wanted away from that by switching. 

 

I also recruited, at least from what I can tell, two characters who are new to this version. Their character models look more detailed and they get longer and more interesting introductions, though I'm not sure if I had picked up on that if I hadn't known they added something. Not been making any story progress whatsoever though, so I don't know if they add anything in that regard or not (though there are some hints). It's definitely a massive game though, I'm around 50 hours now and it feels like the half-way point at best.

[Maryokutai]

 

Weeeeee~~ 


 

I'm really impressed by the way this game handles scale. As in you can almost zoom in to RE4 shoulder perspective and run around town, playing this like a foot-on-the-ground RPG but seconds later you might be flying through the clouds and looking down at what you've just experienced on foot and see it as this massive diorama from above. The only other games I can think of that managed to pull off this shift in scale in a believable fashion are No Man's Sky and Assassin's Creed Odyssey – but both of them, crucially, have been designed and made for systems significantly more powerful than a WiiU/Switch.

 

In extension of this, I think I've also come to appreciate how much of a slow burner this is. I unlocked flight just now at the 70 hour mark and it suddenly gives you the opportunity of literally seeing the whole game from a new perspective after all this time on terra firma, giving the player new energy to get motivated and get over the finish line.

 

And IIRC some people found the flight music cheesy but it love it. It's this super trope-y anime opening song but it's very uplifting, pun intended. Definitely a top gaming moment the first time you take to the air. 

[Maryokutai]

Finally saw this through today, at least the original ending. Funnily enough ended up taking roughly 100 hours, so my prediction of 50 being the halfway point was pretty accurate. They added a bit of stuff in this version so I'll go for that next. The last couple of hours soured my experience a little. Firstly I took a really long break because despite fulfilling the level recommendations, the first time I tackled the last mission I couldn't do anything because my Skells weren't up to the task. The whole balance is kind of out of whack from the moment you get your Skells because the game only every gives you one number but a Level 50 human can't keep up with Level 50 late-game enemies whereas a Level 50 Skell just wipes the floor with them. And then there's this weird progress blocks where you are limited to Level 30 Skells up until you reach Level 50, so by the time you're Level 45-ish you can't really keep up either as a human or a Skell and it's quite the grind for a bit.

 

Anyway, by the time I went to the last boss for my second try he could barely damage me until he was at 5% health and almost wiped my team with one attack. Hello, game, I see you went to the school of JRPG bullshittery. The ending was also rather dumb I think, except maybe for one reveal. I hope the new postgame content fixes some of that and I'm glad in hindsight I didn't play through this on WiiU.

 

With those negatives out of the way this was a super fun experience though. One thing I came to enjoy a lot are the subquests, which could easily have been random filer content mixed with fetch quests, but a lot of them ended up telling quite neat little stories that add to the overall experience of making the world feel alive through not only the characters you see in every cutscene, but a lot of side characters as well.

 

(Also, off-topic, but anyone know if spatular is alright? Hasn't posted in a while.)

[spatular]

Hello! I’m still reading what’s going on on here, trying to cut down on internet browsing so not posting much, I’m so slow at posting stuff it takes me ages. Hope everyone’s doing well

 

nice work finishing the game!

 

I did play some more of this but got distracted by other stuff. Need to go back to it at some point.

[Maryokutai]

Nice, nothing wrong with living in the real world, we're only ever just a click away from facepalm-inducing nonsense these days.

 

The new postgame stuff seems expansive. I haven't looked up how long it goes but just the first act has a ton of dialogue and cutscenes. Wouldn't be surprised if I end up playing this another ten-ish hours or so to see that part concluded.

 

It does feel a bit tacked on in multiple ways though. Introduces a character that some NPCs know from before the starting point of the game but who didn't appear in the original story. Also, Elma's voice actress hits a noticeably different tone than she did in the main game, which obviously can happen when there's a ten-year gap between projects.