We’ve had one crash that I know of in probably 120 or more hours between three saves. The kids and I are mostly playing docked. Are you playing handheld more? I wonder if the crashes happen in one mode or the other more?
i am playing 99% docked.
I’ve had two, both in docked mode. Luckily the second was while opening a core so zero progress lost!
Damn. I’d been saving often, but I’ll make sure the kids are too then. Thanks!
I usually save often but I lost an hour and a half of progress when I crashed the other day so I"m back in my habit of saving every 10-15 minutes.
I have played all but maybe 60 minutes in docked (out of around 140 hours so far), no crashes at all.
The save system is one of my annoyances with the game, though, as it is in all games that don’t allow you to save anywhere. Too many times I’ve had to go start from the very beginning of a highly annoying area just to get back to where I screwed up or died. I save at least every 15 minutes.
Having said that, I am not far into chapter 9, and I mostly really like the game. This and Pinball are all I’ve played on the Switch since the game was released, and that is definitely saying something.
I made it all the way through this area, and I’m still not sure what their use is, unless you are specifically referring to the skill bonuses. I’ve only just made it to the third area, and Rex has five rares, and Nia has two.
I’m not particularly compelled to shuffle Blades around and level them up for specific treasure caches – I assume I can hit them all at the end of the game, or that the rewards within them aren’t necessary for the completion of the game.
What? I can save anywhere at all, it seems.
Yeah, I don’t recall it ever stopping me from saving.
You can save anytime, but there are definitely ‘save points’. I have tried saving many times after passing through an annoying section, then I die, and right back to the start of the annoying section.
You can also choose to increase the frequency that it automatically saves.
Well yeah, but when you die the game doesn’t reload - it fast travels you to the last point visited (which as you know respawns enemies/collection points). That’s the death penalty, rather than losing progress.
If you really wanted to you could reload your save after you die to go back exactly where you were instead. I did this during the one frustrating section I encountered, in the old factory - reload, rather than have to fight through all the enemies again… (mind you, in this section I had accidentally removed the other drivers from my party and was trying to do it with a single character. Thought it was by design - didn’t even realise you could do that at the time!)
Oh sorry, I misremembered. It is triggered from that area but it actually becomes available at the start of chapter 4.
And no I’m not specifically talking about leveling skills for treasure caches, though that is a side effect when they level up. You will start hitting points where the field skills gate quest/story progression as well as treasure caches though.
I gave up on it around the 45-hour mark. My 14-year-old daughter finished it and prefers the open world feel of the postgame to the campaign. Took her 70 hours. She figured out this combo that lets her do damage in the millions (sometimes hundreds of millions). Potential indirect spoilers due to blade names being used.
I just realized the reason I’m so low on aux cores is because for half of them you have to click into the right menu and use the R buttons to add parts to make full cores :-/
It’s notable too that when you go into that right menu, you can often make a core with four of the same item. If you have like 30 of Deez Nutz (or whatever the billion types are…) you can use four if a core needs four from that list.
How did she do this? I finished it, and after the credits it saves then goes back to the start screen - but from there ‘continue’ just seems to restore the save that was prior to the final battle.
I don’t want to try ‘New Game’ in case it wipes everything, and I hear there’s a ‘New Game+’ coming later in the year!
edit: NM, I see my save has a little medal next to it so I figure it’s actually saved after that final battle after all.
I just finished it. I enjoyed it but i felt it was the worst entry in the xenoblade series.
I would rate them as getting worse with every entry. More less good than worse though as i liked each of them a great deal.
The game does feel rushed. I felt this throughout the whole game dealing with the party AI and MANY UI elements, but the end of the story also supports this, feeling like a huge data dump at times.
I know that X2 kind of pretends chronicles did not exist, but i do not. I fault X2 for not having some of the GUI/UX improvements that chronicles had. Xenoblade was a great game and (in my opinion) the best in the series, but it still wasn’t very user friendly. X2 does almost nothing to make that better and in fact feels less friendly in some ways.
Man, the further I get into this game the more information it seems to want me to remember at every instance. Between field skills, affinity chart upgrade requirements, what starting colors cause combos that I can’t pull off with my current blades, what starting element allows me to do a specific effect, which QTE segment is about to come up, what blades have the skills for merc missions (you know, so I don’t send blades with full affinity or maxed out field skills when others would be better), which blade I need to be on to do the next in the break/topple/launch chain, which aux cores are best for the upcoming situation, am I indoors or not (due to aux cores and some specials), etc…
I don’t feel it’s expanding the depth in a positive direction as I play the game and just seems to be adding depth to say “hey look how deep and complex this is!” and it’s definitely grate on me a bit. That being said I’ve put 38 hours in so far (though only on chapter 4) so I feel pretty committed to seeing it through at this point.
I do wish there was an in-game way to view the elemental chains. I know the ones that start with fire and light pretty well, but I know none of the others even after seeing them a hundred times.