I’m at chapter 7. The class system helps keep the gameplay fresh enough and the story is working for me, but there are really too many side quests, at least half of which will end up trivial because you’ll outlevel them without trying.
As a person who must do all the side quests here, and especially will do all hero quests immediately, I know what you mean. I’m ten levels above the main story content at this point and about to start several chapter 4 side quests. Plus am about leveled enough to go back and do other content I couldn’t do before.
I’m still playing the first Xenoblade Chronicles!
Still playing here as well. Just got to chapter 3 after about 11 hours. Still strong tutorial feels. The side quests pull is strong but much like the first 2 games they’re mostly pointless
I had fun laughing at dunkey’s video. Though I have no idea if this has spoilers for the people actually playing the game or not.
I think people would be upset if a Xenoblade came out that didn’t have dialog like that! The repeated phrases are iconic!
And yeah, there are some spoilers in there. Turning it off after 6 minutes because it’s starting to show things I haven’t seen yet.
The collectible lines irritate me as a developer too, because I know from experience that it’s about half a day’s work for a decent programmer to prevent that from getting so repetitive and annoying. They just didn’t give a damn.
Battle lines are a lot more complex because they’re giving the player information that would become muddled if there were too many different lines or if they get skipped periodically. But for callouts running around doing nothing there’s no excuse. (It’s even worse when you realize that those “rare” pickup items are almost never what you need anyway, as most things of value are locked behind monster drops)
After 70 hours I just got to chapter 6. Along with that chapter transition came a couple of tutorial pop-ups! Now, I’ve taken my time getting to this point but still happy to see that the tradition of late tutorials is intact.
I’ve been making my way slowly through this game while I work out on the elliptical. It’s brilliant for that because I’ll set a goal to exercise for, say, 30 minutes, and then at minute 28, there’s a ten-minute boss fight, followed by a fifteen-minute cutscene, followed by some other fight, and the next thing I know, I’ve been working out for an hour or more. I guess that’s probably true of a lot of JRPGs, but this one especially.
I just finished Chapter 5, and holy cow. That’s got to be one of the most beautiful sequences I’ve seen in a JRPG.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been ready to end my play session when I stumble into a 45 minute stretch with no opportunity to save. When it strings multiple fights together as part of that I get really annoyed.
Still need to finish this one. I’m basically right at the end but have found the last area way too long, so I essentially have to force myself to finish it. Dumb choice on the designers part.
I should say something nice since it was one of my favorite games of 2022! That sequence at the end of chapter 5 and the start of chapter 6 was very good and very surprising.
Well, being Switch you can still suspend your play session at any time, as long as you’re not paranoid about saving the game at that point… ;)
Great game, also in my top picks for 2022. I made two attempts at it since it launched, and still nowhere near finishing!
It’s a shared system so I always am a little paranoid that somebody else will decide to play something before I get back to it.
The last dungeon and end of the story are really the only major problems I had with the game, but I didn’t feel like it ruined the outstanding rest of it.
It’s not so much that it’s long - huge final dungeons are a JRPG staple - but rather that it’s a constant repetition of the same few layouts and enemies. In particular the symmetric areas where you have to do the same thing twice get really annoying really fast.
The story DLC is out today, promising a Torna-esque prequel experience. I spent about an hour with it this morning, and I’m honestly just happy to be back in this world for a while while I work out.
I really gotta go finish this out. The last area is so damn tedious I never made it through. I’m really close, though, and would like to see the end.
Will be curious to know what your experiences with the DLC are!
I’m about ten hours in, which I spitball as maybe a little more than a third of the way through it, based on the number of locked skills I still have.
And largely, I like it. I think it does demand, at a minimum, familiarity with both other games, not only so you can appreciate the cameos and the roles that Rex and Shulk play but also because the main story really does seem like it’s going to fill in a lot of gaps in the lore, particularly the specifics around the “world-splitting” aspects near the ends of XC1 and XC2. Someone who has only played XC3 will be lost here.
But the standalone nature of this DLC episode has non-story-related benefits, as well. There are (as of yet, and maybe forever) no hero classes and no class-switching. Which means character builds are limited to skills/arts that are unlocked per-character. And while it’s maybe a downside that you don’t have the sheer freedom of mixing and matching that you do in the base game, it’s replaced with the upside of feeling like a much more focused, curated experience.
The other thing I consider as an upside is that your characters’ progression is tied to “affinity points,” which are earned from going out in the world and doing stuff. This might feel like Ubishit a little bit, as each region has essentially a checklist of things to do in order to get affinity points, but I find the experience of getting points to be a good balance between guided hand-holding and open, aimless exploration. This creates a kind of framework where, if you’re struggling against a particular boss or area, the answer is “go do things” instead of “go grind some battles”. Which I also appreciate.
I’m trying to play 1-3. Pausing for Zelda. I figure I should get through it all in about 3-4 years.