Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition

I have no problem with IGN in general. Their staff seem nice enough, but they do make insane mistakes on such a regular basis.

Last year they reviewed RE2 and didn't realize there were 2 different campaigns, so they gave it 8.8/10
After everyone pointed out they'd missed the second campaign, they updated their score to a 9/10.
Lol. A whole extra campaign, that doubled the otherwise short playtime, added only 0.2 review points.

@TheLightSpirit thats great feedback thanks. I had a side quest asking to take out an enemy that was larger than the other ones. It was only level 5 but my party were 7s. That probably explains why i died 3 times in a row

@NintendoByNature Regarding combat, as the story progresses the combat system is added to. As for the quest situation, press ZR and then left or right on the dpad to change between directions for the story quest and active side quest.

@Grumblevolcano sweet, thanks for that. It probably mentioned to do that in the tutorial, but I more than likely missed it.

@TheLightSpirit This aged poorly! Are you having second thoughts?

This options doesn't show up the far later in the game. I won't say more but it's not like you get more options til later.

@SwitchForce

The "Arts Manuals" are not to learn the arts themselves. They're to learn the higher-level upgrades to the arts.

All of the arts themselves are learned just by leveling your character normally. They appear at various levels up til something like Level 30, at which point you'll have them all.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand how arts worked in conjunction with future visions. I was just brute forcing my way through for a while, haha.

I haven't spent as much time with the game as I'd like this week due to various happenings in IRL, but I did put in more time yesterday. I'm just now heading to Colony 6. Part of the slowdown is all of the side quests around Colony 9 and in the Tephra Cave area. I might move on after I turn in a couple more.

The game did have me in its grip yesterday evening. It was already somewhat late when I started playing, so I only planned to play about an hour or so. It turned into almost three hours instead lol. It was a little after one in the morning when I finally stopped.

I absolutely love using the Monado, and "Now it's Reyn time!" hasn't gotten old yet. XD

Story-wise: I admittedly had Fiora's death spoiled a bit via watching too many pre-release trailers. Still didn't kill the impact for me much after watching how her relationship played out with Shulk.

Finding those side quest Monado arts reminds me of that really annoying final battle of XC2 chapter 7 ( the one where you face Malos and Jin at the Cliffs of Morytha with Malos having the Monado ), I recognized them from that battle.

I haven't found a battle in XCDE so far that has been as unfair as that one. Honestly most of XC2 chapter 7 is an unfair difficulty spike though.

@Tyranexx I'm in a similar place. I've played further on the Wii before now but never finished the game.

"Let's not lose our heads, though!"

I'm in Gaur Plains at the moment, on my way to save Juju. It's weird how well I remember the story beats, including dialogue, as well as locations and map layouts but don't remember some of the other stuff at all. Of course it's been years since I last played it and I never finished it but it's still weird.

I know Shulk is all about changing the future but I'd forgotten the vision mechanics in battles, when picking up random items and in quests. Also, was that trial portal at the start of Gaur Plains always there? Maybe I never bothered with the trials? That maybe goes for the side quests too, the sheer amount of them took me off guard. I know I did some of them but I think I took quite a linear approach when I first played it and didn't come back to old places all that often if at all.

Eryth Sea is another area that looks awesome in docked mode, and completely awful in undocked. Lol the grass draw distance is like 2m from the character.

Seriously, how did they get Breath of the Wild running so perfectly when undocked? Given that nearly every other developer struggles with it.

I'm at Eryth Sea and suddenly it felt like the game was stuttering when running forward, the character even stopped at times. Strange, there hadn't been any issues with framerate before that... Didn't take me long to realise the L stick on my pro-controller is drifting, as it wasn't any problems with any of the directions, but up. So that sucks... The second pro-controller I have that has gone s**t (the other one had problems with the R stick getting weird). Funny thing is I haven't had any issues with the joycons.

@TheLightSpirit No, you misread my post. The game itself didn't stutter. It was the drift from my pro-controller's L stick messing the movement up, giving me that impression. I changed controller and now it's fine. So far, the game has been steady for me.

They really should make all 1st party developers use the Breath of the Wild engine. Then again maybe it’s just how smart the developing team is with regard to coding and optimization.

@JaxonH It's to do with different approaches being taken, pretty sure BotW load times are the same irrelevant of whether you're fast travelling to the other side of the map or very close to your current location meanwhile both Xenoblade games for Switch are almost instant when you're in the same region or titan but longer when you go to a different one (both load times are faster than BotW's load times).

Both approaches have their advantages. BotW's approach works for BotW because outside of shrines and divine beasts, BotW is one continuous open world with no load times. Xenoblade's approach works for Xenoblade because it isn't like that though handheld mode isn't powerful enough for quality not to take a hit by using that method.

@Grumblevolcano good explonation and I totaly agree.

I dunno, always thought BOTW was 90% grass and not much else while Xenoblade being more MMOlike with plenty of moving monsters roaming around and a more complicated map would make the game more difficult to optimise ? 🤷‍♂️

How do you get reyn to perform topple during Mechon battles? I spend a bit of time waiting for him to do so, so i can actually start damaging them