The Xenoblade thread (aka the Thread of the Monado)

I can see myself drifting away from it. Story and combat aren't really grabbing me, and fucking hell the opening tutorial heavy section starts to drag. Just finished a big boss fight and finally back in a camp so I'll crack on a bit anyway and see if it clicks.

Got £32 cash at CEX. Considering I paid £38 that's not bad for the 13 hours I did get out of it.

I'm new to the series having jumped on the hype. I think if they had thrown everything at me from the start it would have fried my brain

I've just got to midway through chapter 2..had it relatively simple and now I've had

Gems
Cooking
Chained special attack thing
Switching classes

All thrown at me in what feels like an hour. So feeling a bit overwhelmed.

The gems and cooking seems self explanatory, is this something like in BOTW which could be largely ignored?

In terms of class switching. What's the benefit In training everyone to lvl 10 in each class?

In terms of the chaining, again seems self explanatory although I feel like I'm just guessing when it comes to who I pick to attack etc. It seems if I pick a heal it stops the chain though?

Cooking needs better recipes to become something to watch for, the initial one is basically nothing.

Gems seem very important at higher levels, +40% higher auto-attack speed and +40% chance to hit twice with an auto-attack will charge your arts something fierce if you're an Agnian class (Mio's, Sena's and Taion's classes if you're just starting), and there's quite a few other buffs that'll change your fighting quite a bit. Definitely something to watch.

Levelling a class up is something you want to be doing in general. Gives you more skills and arts to equip later. In theory you could eventually be one class and be rocking Master Arts from three others that you've levelled up. If nothing else I'd keep swapping classes around as they cap out in levels during exploration and only grab my best setups for bosses, but that's just me not wanting to waste CP from mobs.

Also, 10 is only the initial class rank cap, the tutorial says you'll eventually get quests that raise that cap and the interface says you can master more arts and skills at ranks higher than 10. Eventually each class can give you three Arts and two skills to equip whenever, which is... a lot of options

The point of healers is to get it to the 99% threshold. Then you get a heavy hitter to finish the order at 150% or more, which "reactivates" more characters for the next round. You get 1 at 100%, 2 at 150%, and 3 at 200%.

Nah, you can get 4 chains (plus 1 evangelion one) at most. No infinites!

Lanz wants something meatier

I love the chain attacks, but god I wish you could speed them up a bit. They have real "FF7 summon cutscenes" energy.

Added to this, there are hero characters which can manipulate these outcomes towards a particular threshhold

Fuck me there's too many quests in this game. I thought they'd cut down on it with the Collectopedia shit, but there's still loads and loads and loads of regular ones that are basically "please find a thing for me".

And did you know that every main character has a side story quest, and every Hero character has not one but TWO quests? The second one to upgrade their class? At least they have cutscenes and actual stories to them.

Anyway, if you are dumb like me and did not realise this... when upgrading gems, YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE THE LOWER TIER ONES. Like, you can skip levels just fine, and not have to look up the half dozen do-dads you missed while trying to get to the next story point.

Ah FFS! Of course I've been doing level 1 and then 2 of everything! Better to find out now than after 50 hours I suppose... I like that you only need to craft once and can equip on all characters. Just unlocked the second gem slot so will dig into gem crafting a bit more later.

Didn't really have a chance to play it much recently apart from an hour in the garden and an hour last night, but seem to be over the hump of the seemingly endless tutorials at least.

The end of chapter 5 has a solid 2 hours worth of cutscenes. At least that's what it feels like.

I'm approaching about 40 hours in 2 and on chapter 6 at the moment. I've been really enjoying it, perhaps in some ways more than the first game. Some elements are beginning to grate though.

The sudden inclusion of spike damage against a boss was particularly annoying. The game offered zero indication that this was happening and it was only after a bunch of deaths and a Google could I realise what was happening. For a game that likes to drag out its tutorials, the lack of any indication of this fairly significant feature to combat was just bizarre. I'm also fairly certain there are a couple of enemies that have this ability too, but, again, it isn't really clearly.

Also, unlike 1, I'm not finding switching up characters as having a particularly noticeable effect on play style. The combat is enjoyable when you get into it, but there doesn't seem to be that much variation. Just work your way through the abilities and get those chains going. Perhaps some more varied characters will come along to mix this up a little more, but that feels a little unlikely.

I also seem to completely fall apart if I mix my team up. Perhaps I just need to sort out the extra characters with better blades and items, but my Rex, Nia and Tora combo just seems to work, whilst switching in the other characters seems to immediately cause me to struggle in fights. Which is odd, as the other two have higher levels than those core 3.

The randomness of the blade unlocking is also annoying. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I seem to constantly get the same ones, over and over again.