Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles 2

@link3710

The easiest and obvious thing to do is to just wait until you've toppled an enemy before using the chain attack. It slows down time so you can get through most of the chain while they're still toppled. They receive more damage whilst toppled.

Do other blades in your party not the AI blades do damage to the enemy while you're fighting with an active blade? Or do you just damage the enemy with an active blade and your other blades don't do damage until you switch to them.

Which is a better healer blade kora or ursula. I was thinking of replacing kora with ursula because I heard she is a very good healer. Thing is I read ursula does not fight so well and relies on her good healing. So what do you think I should do.

@Fujin I used Ursula and I felt she's pretty much the best once you trained her up for sure. Especially when you get her heal x% hp when you switch blade to her. And she also is no slouch in the hitting department XD

Otherwise she's not much of a healer, good for a mixture of damage + emergency heal though.

I dunno if that's true. Has anyone counted? There are more quests that become available over time. And each rare blade has their own special side quest.

@StephanDLW

Fair enough. I'm guessing that doesn't take into account the length of them though. So a single fetch quest and a long chain of story-heavy tasks are both just considered a single sidequest.

And aren't the rare blade quests technically part of merc missions? So maybe not counted?

Any advice on how to get more rare core crystals. I'm in chapter 7 right now.

@Fujin

Bear in mind, there's a certain number of rare blades that you can get from regular core crystals.

Just use equipment on your character that increases the Luck stat, and then keep awakening regular core crystals. You'll get a rare blade like 1 in every 10 tries, or something like that.

@Dezzy Thanks I'll try this out.

Are there any better ways to get boosters besides selling salvage.

@King-X Are boosters used only to get a specific element or do they help get rare blades as well like having high luck. My idea levels are pretty good so far.

@King-X Do my equipped inactive blades passively heal while I'm fighting with an active blade?

So basically the AI heals on its own and to heal manually you have to switch to a heal blade during battle. Am I correct.

Yep, as you can see from the difference in completionist time between the 2 games. Howlongtobeat.com has XC1 at 165 hours for completionists whereas XC2 is at 250 hours.
So something's causing that difference.

X still reigns as the hardest of them all. For me that took like 200 hours. The superbosses in that game can kick your ass real hard and there are MUCH more sidequests/terrible grinding that's worse than 1's.

2 honestly feels one the least grindy ones imo. I beat Xenoblade 2 100% within 120 hours but I enjoyed it overall quite a bit, despite the mediocre sidequests taken as a whole. 1, being my first game, took me around 150.

I honestly never finished X1 myself...so XC2 is my only reference, though I didn't do a majority of the side quests...and I didn't own XCX unfortunately. Really wanting to do a second play through at some point.

How do I do specials with mythra because it seems the light element is not that easy to combine with other elements for specials.

@Fujin there are combos with fire and dark off of the top of my head. There are charts with all possible combos you can do - try searching up one of those.

@Fujin

All the combos are listed on the Wiki:
https://xenoblade.fandom.com/wiki/Blade_Combo

@StephanDLW I think "side quests are the best of the 3 games" is kind of like saying "The Zelda games were the least terrible of CDi's games." The side quests were a horrendous disaster with some fun story, but nothing in the game indicating that you needed some McGuffin from completing some other quest in order to do this quest, and that McGuffin can't be obtained until the last chapter of the game even though you've had the quest since chapter 2. So you spend half the game trying to do a quest you can't do until you've completed multiple other connected quests (that you don't know are connected), without ever knowing you can't actually do that until you've nearly beaten the game. A quest you can't actually complete when you get it, and there's nothing to indicate you can't is just a design fail.

And of course "HM Slaves" with the Blades sucked. But the battle system was actually fun. My problem with it is they never adequately explained the system....if they explained it better it was great. Monolith has a massive Bionis-sized hole in their tutorial department.

I loved the villains though. The villains are exceedingly complex. They didn't really flesh out the narrative very well in terms of what's going on, but when you examine the villains, they are actually fantastic. More literary than comic book, actually. I've said before but the strong point of the story is there are, in actuality, no actual villains at all in the game. Both sides have their reasons, and both are valid reasons. At times I agree with the "villains" more than I do Rex and "the power of friendship!" malarkey. I find myself rooting for the villains frequently...because they're not evil. And they're not necessarily wrong. Destructive...but also kind of right. Opponents that aren't evil/villains make the most interesting kind of foe. XC1 isn't too far off that mark either however, and that also ties into the XC2 story. BUT they didn't fully explain some things either, and Torna is really necessary to get a complete picture.

Monolith excels at world building, but I have to say Falcom and Bandai Namco walk all over them in narrative pacing and exposition, even if Monolith has more intricate overall stories.

Comparing XC1 and XC2, personally, I'd say the villains are interesting in both, though more intricately complex in 2 (though it's interrelated with 1), XC1 had the better overarching narrative, but XC2 has much more developed and interesting characters. Combat is much superior in 2, but they never fully explained the system so you hit a difficulty spike until you actually learn it half-way though. Blades/HM Slaves really ding it though. XC1 is a product of having been such an "experience" the first time through with tons of narrative twists and turns.