I made a mistake in this game. After enjoying Chapter 8, I decided to save the game and then have a look at Chapter 9. Unfortunately, Chapter 9 is far too hard at my current level, and somehow the game saved during it so I can't reload to just before starting the chapter. A way to cancel the mission would have been useful.
Now that Chapter 9 is started, the amount of side quests available to help me level up is very minimal. I leveled everyone up one or two levels to level 35, but I'll probably need to be level 40 for this one.
What threw me was the required level for Chapter 9. Players only need to be level 1 or higher to start it, which is much lower than previous chapters.
@crimsonadpoles
I think that at that level, you can win the battle. Maybe it will take you a few tries, but its a good moment to try to improve your gear if you haven't (try to use some augments, even if they are just I or V class), try to buy your party level 30 skells and mainly, use overdrive. It did save my butt, and let me win the foot part of the battle.
I was maybe around 37, if I rememeber right. That battle doesn't require that much brute strengh or overleveling - just a few good battle tactics.
Well, after 140 hours, the main game is finally complete. It took me awhile, but what a blast that game was. I enjoyed every second of playing it, although I couldn't beat the final boss without lowering the level first. What a difference 5 levels can make.
And that ending, wow. I really hope they won't stop the story here and make a sequel one day. I'm always eager to get a game that can provide me a great story, lots on gameplay and a boss fight as memorable is One-Winged Angel. That's quite a feat. Well done MonolithSoft.
I levelled my characters to around level 39 or 40 and was able to do the first part of Chapter 9. Since I couldn't do side quests because I started the chapter, I instead mapped out most of the world and installed a lot of probes while levelling up. There's still a second part of Chapter 9 that I cannot yet do, but at least it now lets you use skells so it's just a case of me buying better skells.
Edit: I was very close to winning, but I was defeated, and my skell got destroyed. I was sure that I got a 'Perfect' in the skell quick time event, but my skell insurance has ran out. I might leave the game running in the background until I have enough money for a new skell, and I should probably buy my 4th character a better skell as well.
Edit: Edit: It turns out I had some great skell weapons that were unequipped. So instead of buying multiple new skells, I just caved in and paid for the skell recovery and swapped it with an identical skell frame with full insurance that a second character had, equipped the better weapons and beat the mission. Now there's talk about the skell flight module which should be very interesting. I'll do a lot of the side missions to level up before I think about starting the next chapter.
@Crimsontadpoles Yeah, Chapter 9 was... odd. Some people found it easy, others really hard. There's a trick to beating Chapter 10, which you can just look up if necessary.
I still come back to this game, from time to time, when I have nothing else on the go. I kinda burnt myself out, trying to get Mia, the last character I needed, (Didn't quite make it...) so I'm taking it slow.
Xenoblade Chronicles X soundtrack goes under my skin. It gets to me on a deep emotional level like nothing has ever done (in videogames).
After half a year of digging the game and the tunes I have to put it in my TOP 3 RPG's of all time alongside EarthBound and Chrono Trigger.
It only took 20 years and 4 console generations to get exactly the RPG I always wished for.
I played many RPGs in all this time, love outstanding titles such as Terranigma, Paper Mario, MOTHER3, Fire Emblem (Ike saga), and many others, but XenoX is a special one. If I'm to describe that feeling it's like... it's not just me loving the game, but the game kinda loving me as well, like crying out to my soul.
I'm just about to take on the final chapter. Leaving that aside, the only things I've really had a problem with in this game is the fact that the story doesn't match the world in it's scope (whereas the story in Chronicles was pretty epic) and the characters are worse across the board. And I also disliked the fact that there was only 1 town/city. Despite this game being a lot bigger than Chronicles overall, it probably has a signficantly smaller size of overall civilization. You've got NLA vs Colony 9+Colony 6+Alcamoth+Frontier Village+Machina Village. I'm guessin that's more in Chronicles overall.
I'm finally at the final level. I can defeat the enemy skell after a few tries, but I still die on the 10 enemies after that. My levels are at 50-51,so I'll level up some more and maybe save up for better skells.
I miss this game. Played it for 308 hours, completed absolutely everything there is to complete, and yet I'd like to go back to its world. I remember feeling somewhat burned out at the time of completion, but that's not the case anymore now.
Maybe I should start it up and go kill something big with my katana, for old times' sake.
It's about what it takes to get all the achievements and such, yeah. Actually the amount of time the director himself put into the game.
The most 'extreme' people I've seen around GameFAQs have played for 600-900 hours, but that's if you're into trying out a thousand different strategies to kill the big bosses and such. That's interesting, but not for me.
For the record, I got the ''hundred percent'' survey rate a little before clocking in 230 hours. But there was a lot more to the game after that and I had already gone through all the trouble of crafting a super Skell to kill the Telethia, so I just went all the way in the end.
Dang, anyone else done Yelv's four-heart affinity mission yet? If so, what did ya'll make of that ending? (In spoiler tags, of course.)
This is going to be a long one, and only the last of it needs to be spoilered....
First off, if you want to understand what is really going on, you are going to first have to understand/know that Xeno games all have two stories. The surface story, which is the moment to moment events in the narration, and then the 'Under' story, that is only made apparent by having some familiarity with the philosophies and themes the games are based off of. While X is actually vastly simpler in both regaurds compared to gears or blade, it still no exception.
However, unfortunately, the games localization was really pretty bad. No, Im not talking about things like censoring linn's itty bitty cleavage. (That one is actually more in character, and keeping the age the same is important for the story). I am talking about 8-4's complete and absolute ignorance on anything the xeno series has ever done is based off of, and thus, it was ALL left out of the localization, because they didn't understand it, thus they didnt know they were leaving it out.
See, when it comes to Translating and localizing japanese, direct translations just don't work. There is context and nuance in the japanese language that just doesnt transfer over to romantic languages. So 90% of the time, when it comes time to translate something, a literal translation leaves something out. For example, Some big gruff dude like Vandamme gets mad at some scrub loser blade. A literal translation would be say, he slams his fist on somethin and shouts 'Disappear you silly mouse!' Well now, that doesnt come across at all, so the job of the localization team is to get the INTENT of what was said across, and not just the most direct match of words. Properly, Vandamme would shout something like "Get out of my sight you worthless maggot!!!"
Now, 8-4 is really, REALLLLYYYY good at this. I am not knocking 8-4 as a localization team at large, they are actually quite good... Just, they didn't have the information needed to properly localize a XENO game.... Because literally every thing in a xeno game has layered multiple meanings.
Here is where I am going to bring up a brilliant example of localization, the original Xenoblade. This team, either already knew, or was directly told what Xenoblade was actually about, and they fit it all into the localization, so nearly nothing was lost (The only thing truly lost, was the impact of the Kanji the monado showed during cutscenes, particularly the final one, when it shows the Kanji for 'God', I cant even imagine how much impact would be lost if I didn't recognize that symbol.)
Xenoblade, has a very, very, very complicated story that runs deep under the seemingly simple disguise of a story about a boy with a magical sword. TO prove my point I only need to bring up one word, and all the meanings it has that are brought up and used in Xenoblade.
The Monado. The Monado is a name based off of the Monad. The story is Based heavily off of Leibnitze's famous philosophical work 'The Monadology'. A Monad is also an operator in functional programming... One that works exactly the way the monados future sight works... The Monad is also the prime diety or God, in Gnostic religions, and the mathematical God in Pythogorean Religions, and a powerful aspect of divine geometry.... All of which are layered into Xenoblades story, revealing what is actually going on. Without these aspects, if the Monado had been renamed to say, phaser saber, that aspect would be completely lost, and with it, any chance of deducing what the author was saying was really going on in Xenoblade. This is what happened with the Localization of X.
AND NOW WE CAN BEGIN.
The main works X is based off of is Carl Jungs philosophical and psychological works involving the collective unconcious. Works like Aspects of Transformation were heavily used throughout Xenoblade. Concepts like Archtypes, The Eros, and the Logos (Alternatively known as the Anima and Animus)... And the Shadow.
Now, Logos is the principle of Rationality, Jung's avatar for the Male Psyche, while the female avatar/principle is Eros, which is based off of objective interest. If you are thinking about the vast majority of choices you are given falling neatly into one of these two camps, you are correct.
The work of individuation for men involves becoming conscious of the anima and learning to accept it as one's own, which entails accepting Eros. This is necessary in order to see beyond the projections that initially blind the conscious ego. "Taking back the projections" is a major task in the work of individuation, which involves owning and subjectivizing unconscious forces which are initially regarded as alien.
For Women, its the other way around, they already innate;y contain eros, so, they would grow by accepting the male principle/avatar of logos. Eros is not to be confused for the concept of love/passion, but more a mental love, a bond, or psychic relatedness, between beings whether they are intimate in that way or not... Like say, a line that goes out and connects them to each other. Yeah....
Then.... There is the Shadow.
The Shadow is the part of a person they refuse to let others see. THat they refuse to even allow in their concious mind to think about. The Shadow is every undesirable thought and feeling, more than that, its also the thoughts and desires and feelings people know they CANT show, because they are unacceptable to society.
Some choice bits from Jung that are relevant to X:
Carl Jung stated the shadow to be the unknown dark side of the personality.[4][5] According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognised as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections remain hidden, "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object--if it has one--or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." [6] These projections insulate and harm individuals by acting as a constantly thickening veil of illusion between the ego and the real world.
"in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity.";[9] so that for some, it may be, 'the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow...represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar
Getting chills yet? I havent even started talking about Xenoblade yet, and its already starting to come together isnt it?
One last one:
'The shadow contains, besides the personal shadow, the shadow of society ... fed by the neglected and repressed collective values'.
Now, for Xenoblade X, Yelv, and the ending:
"Yelv is a mimeosome with an artificial personality. with artificial memories... He is a completely artificial being, that thinks behaves and emotes like a human, that was his experiment. As to what exactly they were planning to do with him, we are left to speculation... But its not really someting very hard to grasp. Mimeosomes are incredibly powerful, far more powerful than flesh and blood bodies, and as some of you may have surmised, they were purposefully made to be even more powerful than the best skells if you build them right. Having a mimeosome ARMY that fully believes they are 100% devoted to you and your cause through a lifetime of perfect memories... Yeah.
There were a bunch of blank mimeosomes that were 'lost' with the crash of the white whale, prior to the players role in the game, that was pretty much Elmas sole job, finding new survivors. The only one ever found, was the avatars. Either the Mimeosomes at large where never lost... Or Elenora's secret squirrel black ops team found them and gathered them up in secret, for project grumpy dude with surfer hair.
That being said, Yelv is similar to two other characters in the game.
The Avatar, and the Shadow.
The Avatar is literally an avatar of the collective unconcious, the collective unconcious of humanity, got downloaded into the head of mimeosome, all of mankinds noblest thoughts, ideals, and ambitions given will and body. The avatar is either the Logos or the Eros, or both, literally its up to the player, either way really doesnt matter, they are a paragon of all that is great in mankind. He has no memory of being on earth, because he never was.
Similarly, the Shadow, being all of Mankinds deepest, darkest desires and unnacceptable impulses, also found its way into a body... And it doesn't take much putting two and two together to figure out the shadow is behind all the... Shadowy happenings within the human civilization on Mira. From Fostering Lao's rage to unbearable levels... And Lao surviving at the end... Probably as the first reborn flesh and blood human.
Interesting note on the Shadow... According to Jung it can never be outright dismissed, or destroyed if a person was to become psychologically whole.... The Shadow, must be accepted.
So, I finally finished this game after months of journeying across the planet. This game is the best.
Rarely, if ever, has a game touched me like this. There’s more depth to it than most give it credit for. It also highlights some of the things wrong with video game reviewing.
This game is best appreciated when played in isolation and dedication. It takes time. It’s full of artistic choices and material inherent to the entire planet mindset that makes a quick playthrough inadequate. The music strikes some as odd and it might very well be and it’s a great artistic choice. Original, memorable, differentiating - it really travels with you, even the bad ooh intro in new LA.
Symbolic and thought provoking while you explore an entire planet and simultaneously enjoy and question existence there. I’ll forgive it its awkward menu’s in favour of its awesome gameplay in the process.
@Tsurii: OOO thanks for correcting me. Yes, the evello is the most anatomically awesome creature of all time. I was overjoyed to see that it doesn't take long to meet the neck testicle creature in this game. Glorious, dangling and powerful, they really are something. The evello is great.
And I really agree, you have to approach it as a world on its own. This game is absolutely brilliant. The fun part is, you need to really immerse yourself like no other game before it to see it shine, but once it does, it shines brightest.
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