How many chapters are in this game? I think I’m only at chapter 4 maybe? But I’ve got like, a billion hours in.
I hit up IGN’s walk-through (like I do when I have a wonder about how far into a game I am because they have a nice spoiler free table of contents for their walk-through) and it shows 10 chapters.
If there’s one thing we know from past entries, it’s that these guys don’t fuck around when it comes to giving you your money’s worth.
If you got Poppi’s 2nd form you are at least at chapter 5. You get that at the very end of 4 (I just did).
It says I’ve played 60 hours but I think that’s wrong. The Switch must have been left on or something, I think I’m probably closer to 40 hours. But if you are at 70+ I might just be misremembering.
I think I did the same thing with mine. The game says I’ve played 61 hours (which is definitely not true) but the system says over 20 so somewhere between 20 and 30 hours (which feels about right). I just started chapter 4 but I’ve been taking my time with side quests and some grinding.
A good general rule is - if you hate spoilers, don’t watch Dunkey. :P
The video shows environment footage from Chapter 5 almost right off the bat. Pretty sure it’s stock since he didn’t get that far.
Yeah… the system shows over 70 hours, the game shows 90. Up to Chapter 6. Still playing. :)
I’m liking this game, but it is so very disappointing. The game feels like a beta. This oculd have been a great game if they had spent more time finishing it. As it is, it is my least favorite xenoblade chronicles, but admittedly i think i liked the Wii U one more than most.
Bugs. The game just hard froze. The game does not auto save unless you do things that you could cheat at (ie opening blades), so i lost hours of progress. Obviously i was too reliant on auto saving and stability, i won’t make the mistake of not manually saving every 15 minutes again. One time my switch reported the game crashed and this time the game just stopped responding but i could end it via the switch. Save Frequently!
Non working mechanics. The game relies on many complex chains of actions, but your party is stupid as hell. Unless you way overpower an encounter, your tank must have all tank blades, your healer all healer blades (or you must control them yourself). If you don’t do this, the stupid AI will change your healer to an attacker or your tank to an attacker. The AI randomly changes their blade. This also does a great job of ruining any combos you’re trying to do.
The game also encourages you to have dozens of low quality blades with various skills to help in tasks, but the UI does’t support this AT ALL. You have no way to find the skills/criteria you want short of manually scrolling through dozens upon dozens of blades.
Blades are random. When you open up a blade, you pick a driver to bind it to before you know what the blade is, so you are likely going to get that nice healer blade on your tank driver. Then you have to use an extremely limited/hard to get consumable resource to transfer them over. This is simply dumb. I can understand if they wanted to discourage changing your mind, but this is just punishing you for RNG.
Many many key elements are not explained at all, leaving players to make up guesses on how they work.
There is zero feedback. You will be doing fine in a battle and then boom, your entire party just dies.
They also went WAY overboard with high levels in lower level zones. I liked this in the previous games, but it is just too much here. I feel like they just stuck max level enemies in every zone just to troll people. This is especially bad because they tend to be flying with huge patrol areas.
The penalty for death in this game averages about 30 seconds. In the circumstances, the occasional snipe by a high-level field monster is not a big problem. And most of the time you can run away from them anyway.
It’s true that the game periodically hard-crashes, though. You have to save manually, for sure.
When fighting par-level story foes up through the point of the story where I am (chapter 5) I have had virtually no problems with off-role blades messing me up.
I do find randomly binding some rare blade with the same element and role as one I already have kind of annoying, but that’s how collectible-monster games work; you often wind up with useless draws or summons or whatever you want to call them.
This is easily my ‘most played’ game this year so I’m liking it too. It certainly has issues, but like Elex I find it highly engaging to the point I don’t much care about the negatives.
Yeah I think it did have a really quick dev cycle compared to the previous games…
It’s not that bad. I’ve had one crash so far in 150 hours, very solid otherwise.
It prompts you to save in certain spots, but yeah - there’s a single save slot and no ‘load game’ function, so I guess they didn’t want to be overwriting that all the time without consent? And it saved them writing a whole ‘save game manager’ system I suppose. :P
I’m a habitual manual saver anyway, it’s not a huge deal to me.
What mechanics aren’t working? And I don’t get how they’re ruining combos? The windows are pretty big and I can pull them off pretty regularly, driver combos, blade combos, the 3-element breaks on tougher enemies.
But yeah I do try specialise each driver anyway (Nia is all heals, Tora all tanks) so maybe that’s why I’m not noticing as much.
I think they will swap to try use driver combos, or the appropriate counter elements for whatever you’re fighting? If you’re having trouble you could try removing breaks and what-not from the off-class blades, see if that helps.
The most annoying AI thing to me is they’re always falling off the environment, or standing in poison! :)
Yep those skill checks should maybe automatically work out how you could engage blades to meet those field criteria and just apply I reckon. Merc management in particular is quite painful due to this.
Yeah I think it’s artificially extending playtime, getting you to dismiss and try re-roll rare blades. Those Overdrives are like hen’s teeth!
To be honest this annoyed me early on too, but now I don’t care so much. Where I am now my party is starting to come together, so I guess it’s all about the ‘long game’. Building towards the expansion and ‘new game+’ maybe? :P
I’d recommend at least ‘cheating’ with some of the quest blades, checking their class/elements and then getting someone appropriate to open them. The Beastly core is one example.
Also, not sure how far you are but a late game event may affect your binding strategy (Rex can eventually bind all other drivers’ blades)
The only thing not really explained so far is the idea system and how that factors into boosting chances at rare baldes.
Most everything esle is in there, just a lot is scattered in the world through NPC conversations and the ‘informants’’ and requires work to uncover. I actually quite like this, as I love discovering and figuring things out about a game as I play, rather than be told up-front.
Yeah I think this relates to ‘spike damage’ on some bosses, which you can slot against, esp. when they do their ‘team specials’. However I wouldn’t say there’s ‘zero’ feedback.
I guess I just plain disagree with this, seems okay to me. Death penalty is not particularly egregious. :)
I’m 45 hours in and the more I play the more I miss XCX. I would rather collect and upgrade mechs than play pokewaifu. I would rather explore an open world than press A to see the next 45m cutscene. Both the story and world are far more cohesive. I would rather deal with saving the remnant of humanity on a hostile alien world than watch cartoon girls take hot baths.
I am looking forward to replay XCX HD hour by hour. The game SAYS I’ve PLAYED 45h but I expect actual gameplay is about 10 hours - the rest are cutscenes.
Combat is great though.
The window for Break => Topple => Launch => Smash is extremely small, even with items to boost times.
Maybe it gets better (level 45), but right now, the only way i’ve been able to even semi reliably do it is to remove every other blade from my party members, just leaving them with a single break capable blade each. Then i do everything else.
The biggest problem by far is Npcs changing roles. I don’t feel i can mix roles at all in this game because i know it will screw me over if i am not controlling them myself.
Party members can generally accomplish a blade combo that you start, but if you don’t start it, you can get stuck with them not wanting to do the starter you want. party members are also a lot worse than you at generating affinity. This is going to be a big part of anyone’s game, attempting to exploit the AI’s desire to complete your combo to keep them from changing to the wrong blade.
If they really want to support this game, their number one objective needs to be an option to not allow npcs to change their active blade unless specifically requested to. Ideally also with the ability to pause in combat and tell an npc to change. The map (which is still not very good) is far behind this.
Npc positioning can also be annoying as you point out. The worse thing for me here is that when you tell everyone to retreat to get your tank off a ledge, you lose all of your ability charge.
It is just annoying and serves no purpose to have level 80 hawks flying patrol everywhere. This is probably just another thing they did to extend the game length. They place uber high level enemies right next to quest enemies and have high level patrols just so you die instantly and have to run back, frequently.
I think it gets better as you go - they don’t even tutorial that system until a good 20 hours or so in. :)
Break is a huge window for me, but topple is quite small and the topple arts do take a while to perform. The driver skills to boost those times are buried under quite the expenditure of SP too, and I haven’t reached most of them yet.
But still, I do often get the party to do break/topple, then I handle launch/smash myself.
As long as there’s a good spread of elements amongst drivers, I’m not noticing too many cases where I can’t reliably get to 3 element orbs on a tough enemy - and I frequently use AI starters. Sometimes I see two of the same element starter, sure - but not a big deal, I don’t necessarily want ‘flawless’ AI that min-maxes every situation. I’m doing okay. :)
Yeah the AI is never going to be timing every art to ‘cancel’ boost affinity like a player does. Perhaps that’s the main purpose of the aux cores that increase the cancel window?
I think higher trust builds affinity faster so you need to work on all the blade affinity trees too. And the drivers need to have their cancel skills unlocked of course.
I tend to favour affinity booster aux cores, as well as use the affinity-based pouch items.
I’ve totally fallen for this game with its beautiful world, serious combat system and excellent main character. I’ve found also that turning off the subtitles helps immensely as I’m watching the cutscene staging and enjoying the voice actors far more when I’m not reading ahead. Turn it off!
I’ve only just met the Nopon dude and already I have seen some incredible sights and am immensely curious about what’s really going on. The Special Edition is lovely. Art book and music CD. Also a really beautiful box to display. My kids are hooked also. Can’t wait to play more.
Ah to be a fresh-faced new recruit again!
I’m at 150 hours and probably about three quarters through the story - and I just got a new set of tutorial screens.
The game keeps on giving… love it. :)
Got this game as a xmas present from the wife. I’ve got 7 and a half hours in roaming around Gormott. Overall I’m liking the game but there are things that are annoying me.
For starters, the game seems unresponsive. For example when salvaging half the time it claims I miss the first A button press, yet can always get excellent on the 2nd A and 3rd B button presses. I am playing on a plasma so it shouldn’t be a matter of TV latency so I’m not sure what the deal is. I"m also not sure if it even matters since even with 3 excellents I still get trash.
Speaking of salvage, there’s that quest in Gormott to fix the crane and I need winding gears. So far I’m at 30-40 salvage attempts (not exaggerating) and I’ve gotten 3 so far. Not sure what the hell I’m doing wrong but that town can deal with a broken crane as far as I am concerned.
While I think I understand the combat and am getting the feel for it, I do kind of miss the synergy and style of XC1 combat. Things like having to manually pick up hp potions (which disrupt the flow of battle which guarantees a few free hits since you can’t attack while moving), and cancels that are sometimes hard to pull off (I think I have a 10% cancel rate on the melee healer blade).
I’ve noticed this too, as have others.
This is my first switch game so I’m not sure whether it is hardware, software or shared insanity.
I am at 80 hours played (not sure how the game is calculating that), only in chapter 5, and I like the game despite some annoyances. By far, far, my main complaint is the mostly useless map. That has been my number one aggravation almost from the start. I try to get by without using it at all when possible, but whether I use it or not I have wasted a lot of time just trying to get to where I want to go.
Im not experiencing this - I can reliably hit all 3 most times.
It affects the random result, but it doesn’t guarantee a good one.
That was the biggest early pain for me too, because the drop is quite rare. Took a lot of cylinders… the Fountain salvage point is easiest. Use silver cylinders. Engage a blade with salvaging skill. Hit all 3 excellents.
I quite like this, and since potions are only one part of healing you don’t even have to use them. You can also slot for ‘evasion while moving’.
With some blades it can be difficult to judge the timing of their hit. Rex’s defaults are pretty easy. Practice with them and you’ll get it, or use the aux cores that increase cancel window.
I don’t know, man. I’m having a good time with this game but Rex is a gd moron.
Literally every cutscene,
Someone: -Thing that has been said AT LEAST three dozen times-
Rex: What?
Yeah, Rex is not quite as obnoxious as some other JRPG kid-git characters, but he’s not really a big plus either. And the surround-the-oblivious-kid-with-absurdly-sexy-girls-who-don’t-know-they’re-sexy thing is kind of old, too. But I will persevere.
By the way, did anyone think Roc (Suzaku) was female at first glance due to those enormous breastlike-bags he wears around his neck for some insane reason? What are they bags of, anyway?