@NEStalgia The heart-to-hearts in Xenoblade 2 are a lovely treat, because you can unlock them if you have the relevant people in your parties. You don't have to go out of your way to "increase the affinity" between party members, which would turn them into a major chore.
The one exception being some of them are tied to blade affinity charts, and I believe they're not viewable until you unlock previous levels of the chart. But it's not that big of a deal.
Xenoblade X's heart-to-hearts, if I remember correctly, also had affinity requirements, but they're all pretty much in one major in-game location, so they're much less of a hassle to find again.
Xenoblade 1 is like: "Nah, you have to backtrack to some random location in a field on Bionis' arm pit if you want to see this interaction, since we wouldn't let you see it when you first came across it." EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Why do I need to spend hours grinding alongside British Wakka just to see an interaction with him?!
The biggest thing about the series as a whole that bugs me is that EVERY GAME has some sort of mechanic that's either unexplained or poorly explained. Which is bad when you consider how many mechanics, systems, etc. Monolith likes to layer into these games.
@Kaile@Octane Yeah, the gibberish voices are slow and grating enough that they're approaching Yooka-Laylee levels of obnoxious.
Except, you know, Yooka-Laylee's devs actually patched the game so that you could make the voices less annoying.
@DarthNocturnal If Xenoblade X was better about telling you roughly where to find stuff for all of its collection side-quests, I'd say it handled side-quests well. It's still better than the other games, though. Xenoblade 1's quests are grindy, MMO-tier trash, and Xenoblade 2's quests just NEVER FREAKING END! They'll add, like, ten extra steps on what was seemingly a simple task.
That was so annoying for me when i was playing through okami on pc i just had the game muted and listened to some music.
I’d rather not have any “voices” at all.
Isn't there an option to turn the voices off? Okami's OST is too good to miss over something like this!
@Ralizah Yeah, I really hated those affinities in XC1. Though I'm not fond of how they work in 2 either. The thing that bugs me in 2 with rare blade quests is they often don't tell you where/who/when/what you need to actually get the quest trigger to appear. The H2H is told to you, but the actual quest start remains mysterious and kind of random.
"British Wakka" OMG I'm weeping......
"The biggest thing about the series as a whole that bugs me is that EVERY GAME has some sort of mechanic that's either unexplained or poorly explained. Which is bad when you consider how many mechanics, systems, etc. Monolith likes to layer into these games."
YES!! This right here^^. That and, like I said the busywork....all that back tracking "just because." And the fact that if you're following the narrative of 1 and 2, the back tracking makes no sense. The story tells you you've gathered what you need, you've set sail, you've arrived in a new land. You're now trapped there unable to escape due to story reasons. The only way is forward. Oh shoot I need to unlock an affinity, let me just fast travel back to all of the previous towns to look for 3 of this item I need. WHY? Why have a story that tells you you've moved on and are trapped in trouble when you are expected to transport to any random location non-stop? It's a pretend story bolted onto an MMO game world. At least with X it worked with a hub....there was no sense of "you made it farther in your journey. Onward! (But first go back and sleep in every town you've been in, and search the trees on Gormott, and salvage gears in Mor Ardain, and talk to that Nopon in Argentum to make sure you' didn't miss things And then 'Onward to our escape!') I love and hate their design. Specific to XC2 I also hate when you get a quest your first time through Gormott that you can't finish until you've gone through Morytha....so it basically doesn't pay to actually do quests until you're mostly done the game as most of them, by their later stages require either visiting places, having affinities/blades, or fighting strong enough enemies that you can't actually do it before the latter chapters. Why give quests in the second chapter that you can't resolve until the 9th chapter?!
@DarthNocturnal. Yeah, XC1's sidequests were a laughable joke. MMO sidequests without an MMO makes no sense. I skipped probably 90% of them. Go RNG fetch things is not the fun of a JRPG and is the reason I never touched WoW, Everquest, etc. X fixed the quests largely, and was based on the quests....but oddly the MMO quests would have actually worked in that game with the hub based map mirroring actual MMOs. Then XC2 trolls you making you think it's more of the same...but then gives you real quests....but then doesn't tell you how or where to actually go for them (or the 3-4 of them that are actually interconnected, and the first 2-3 need to be done to do the 4th, and those need to be done in order, because the solution for one is the needed prerequisite for the other but the game never tells you they're connected at all....) Monolith really doesn't get the whole "side quest" thing still, I think
Interplay owned the original games, not Activision. I'm sure Blizzard owns the brand/characters, but the original games....I wonder how they managed the DOS release? Maybe for free there was no rights conflict.
@DarthNocturnal For the record, as flawed as it is, I thought XC2 was a ton of fun, and easily my favorite game in the series. I'd still highly recommend it to almost anyone who loves JRPGs.
@electrolite77 I think 1st party content is what drives Nintendo's decisions to have a general Direct and that's still rather limited at this point. You have the Torna DLC in September, Super Mario Party in October, Pokemon Let's Go in November, Smash in December and Luigi's Mansion (3DS) for sometime in 2018.
So I think still a September Direct but it will have some early 2019 reveals like the rumoured NSMBU + NSLU port.
@NEStalgia Yeah, the heart to heart system is imperfect in XC2 thanks to the weird requirements needed to see story content related to rare blades, but it's still a vast improvement over the other games in this respect. And, to be fair, most of the blade heart-to-hearts are hidden unless you're grinding their affinity charts in the first place, so the implementation rarely annoyed me. I'll take 5% annoying over 95% annoying.
Side-quests are worse. The biggest hurdle I ran into early on, by far, was field skill walls. It's really annoying to get into a side-quest only to have to set it aside for 30 hours because you can't muster lvl 8 of some random skill with your available blades.
But yeah, in general I'm of the opinion that side-quests should always be able to be completed as soon as you get them.
It's funny. I just finished Ys VIII and, while I still like XC2 more (I really, really like certain aspects of XC2, so I'm willing to forgive a lot), the game's implementation of social features and side-quests is SO MUCH better. Side-quests are a blast in Ys VIII: they're plot or character-relevant most of the time, and there's no weird skill walls keeping you from beating them. Once in a while a sidequest isn't completable AS SOON AS you get it, but you never have to advance the story far to unlock the ability to beat it.
Crucially, collection quests either tell you what area to find an item in, or they point you in the right direction. Which is all I want. I hate scouring a huge set of maps to find one thing because the game won't throw me a bone.
Meanwhile, gifting items and completing side-quests organically levels up your affinity with people, which makes seeing that game's equivalent of "heart-to-hearts" a breeze while still making you work for them. The interplay of systems in Ys VIII is so well done.
Can Switch continue downloading a game in sleep mode?
I just bought Okami HD (my first digital purchase of such size) and am planning on letting it download while I'm at work, but I don't know how safe it is to leave the system in it's fully on state for such a long time.
On the other hand, when I put it into sleep mode it often disconnects from the internet & doesn't reconnect until I wake it up... (Never put it in sleep mode while downloading something before, so I don't know if that would change things).
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
For VC fans: NES is the only confirmed system. It's launching with 20 games and a promise of continual support. I'm holding out hope we'll see other systems supported.
Gah Sorry @DarthNocturnal I typed a reply, hit quite for Ralizah, and it wiped my reply to you!
TL;DR : XC2 quests are real multipart quests that don't tell you how to activate them or progress with them in a meaningful way. They're good quests badly implemented. XC2 frustrates me that I had to use a guide to do most quests and many quests tied to rare (RNG) blades I'll never even see. XC1 frustrates me to the point I had no interest in doing the quests at all
@Raliza Since quote refuses to work right, I'll do this the long way.
"Yeah, the heart to heart system is imperfect in XC2 thanks to the weird requirements needed to see story content related to rare blades, but it's still a vast improvement over the other games in this respect. And, to be fair, most of the blade heart-to-hearts are hidden unless you're grinding their affinity charts in the first place, so the implementation rarely annoyed me. I'll take 5% annoying over 95% annoying."
The real nightmare is the rare blade quests in general. They should have their quests active immediately. "Get the blade, grind their affinity to an unknown level, sleep at a specific inn (not listed until you get it), get told to go to a nondescript place for a heart to heart (good luck finding it if it's not an obvious landmark and worse if they troll you and put it somewhere where you need to follow a winding ramp from an unrelated section that travels across 3 zones underground to get to that tiny platform in the middle of the water but you can't tell due to the Monster Hunter map zones.) H2H ends....and then you have nothing at all. The internet tells you that you have to stand in town x near location y with a, b, and c in your party and, h, i, j blades assigned, only during dusk and the quest marker will activate. How would I know this?
One annoying one is I was trying to get Theory a rare blade that has a rare field skill I needed for another vague quest. To get that blade you need to start a quest with random "be in x place at x time with x characters" requirement. It starts a new sidequest. The end result is you get a rare blade (but not that one.) You need that one's quest to get Theory, so you then have to grind affinity to lv4 to unlock the ability to start another quest that ends in getting Theory.
So to solve quest A (non blade related) that I needed a field skill before, the internet told me I would benefit from a specific blade. To get that blade I needed to complete the quest of another blade, to start it required high level affinity charts for the first blade, and to get the first blade to begin with required another quest to be completed that originated by random chance of being in the right place with the right group. How does this make sense in any way?
"Side-quests are worse. The biggest hurdle I ran into early on, by far, was field skill walls. It's really annoying to get into a side-quest only to have to set it aside for 30 hours because you can't muster lvl 8 of some random skill with your available blades.
But yeah, in general I'm of the opinion that side-quests should always be able to be completed as soon as you get them."
Agreed by far. Worse is you get quests in the beginning not possible to solve until the end. Some you can't even start. Some you can do part of but not finish. They want you babysitting the entire quest list from start to end. I could even forgive it if they explained that clearly. But then the field skills.
And the worst: They don't tell you where things are. Go defeat x or find y in location z. But location z isn't on any map. It's not a location marker for fast travel. So you have to either remember or google where location z is and what the nearest fast travel point is. Or sometimes they give you a location that is a fast travel point, but you don't know that because you don't have it and it may or may not be a secret fast travel location that's hard to find. But you wouldn't know where to look for the quest. Or it's just a nondescript place between named landmarks. How do you find these things if you haven't already found these things?
It's like they don't intend you to specifically try to resolve quests (the nopon door "find a key somewhere in Alrest...." Thanks. Great hint. If Alrest is located near Google that should help.) A quest is something with an objective you explicitly set out to do as the purpose of your journey. That's what a quest is. Quests in this game seem to be more "make a mental note of this, and if I happen to see something related while I randomly explore every crevice of every location I visit, I'll be sure to do something with this!"
Another one is one quest you find early in Gormott wants you to do something late in Morytha. In a location marker you don't have so you don't know where it is even when you're there. And you don't know it because there's a Lv8 electricity check on a random location that opens the path to get there....even if you're actively looking it takes a leap of thought to connect those items. And even if you do connect it the required spawn doesn't happen until you've left Morytha. Though you'd at least have the location marker then.
Honestly the quests themselves are fun if you have a walkthrough but otherwise I think XC2 is a far better game if your ignore that sidequests exist at all and just enjoy the campaign. Most of the games problems, other than 3 affinity check gates, crop up if you try to do sidequests.
I do love the game overall, the campaign of it...it's the sidequests and the botched handling that gets under my skin.
@RR529@Ralizah Personally I find the system is more prone to have "connection interrupted" if downloading in sleep and it never comes back to downloading. Both wireless and wired connection. Meanwhile my ps4/x1x can download 200GB in a shot, no questions asked on the same network switch.
"Fast" is a relative word with Switch. Is 8Mb/s fast? Even wired?
@Knuckles-Fajita Wasn't aware. Nintendo tweeted about it as if it were something new. Did they not add anything? Pretty misleading. Excuse the mistake.
The game, in general, is really, really slow at the beginning.
This!
I wanted to give it a go the other day just to see what it was like and I know I was tired but after the 10 minute opening story I near fell asleep. Of course I'm going to give it more then 10 minutes but some time after Octopath.
John 8:7 He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.
MERG said:
If I was only ever able to have Monster Hunter and EO games in the future, I would be a happy man.
If, like me, you're just trying to catch up on the last 5 pages or so but tl;Dr then, in a nutshell, Xenoblade Chronicles games are almost completely rubbish, but have some nice music, environments, and the occasional interesting story element.
I knew it.
When did Gear Club Unlimited 2 get announced? I missed that one (not that I'm particularly interested in that series at the price the first one went for).
If, like me, you're just trying to catch up on the last 5 pages or so but tl;Dr then, in a nutshell, Xenoblade Chronicles games are almost completely rubbish, but have some nice music, environments, and the occasional interesting story element.
"Fast" is a relative word with Switch. Is 8Mb/s fast? Even wired?
It's their servers throttling the connection not the hardware itself. Although having been on a sub 8Mbps up until early this year and now only being on only ~20Mbps? I personally struggle to see the issue.
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