No, haven't tried nakey Dunban yet. However, I did notice the last time I played that his Skill Tree includes skills that power him up when armor-less. Interesting...
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
LTTP: Xenoblade Chronicles is EXCELLENT (Playthrough ongoing; please mark spoilers!)
- Thread starter Neiteio
- Start date
Melia also has one that powers people up when they are gemless, which isn't far off when you're nekkid already. I think you see where this is going.
SoraanTribal
Member
100% DISAGREE!
Homs Fiora is great, too, but I just love how she looks in her default mechon outfit personally.
100% DISAGREE!
Homs Fiora is great, too, but I just love how she looks in her default mechon outfit personally.
Let's see, do I have a gif to explain it?
I do!
Huh... So how over-powered can armor-less Dunban become?
Huh... So how over-powered can armor-less Dunban become?
Pretty much the best until you get the best gems and a lot of skill links.
Elfforkusu
Member
Let's put this in simple terms:Huh... So how over-powered can armor-less Dunban become?
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS
MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS
Rebel Leader
THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
Whoa, is this real?! How can someone dodge like that??Let me translate that into a gif:
(And I assume it is real since it says "Muhammad Ali" in the URL)
100% DISAGREE!
Homs Fiora is great, too, but I just love how she looks in her default mechon outfit personally.
Well,
Homs Fiora in a two-piece bikini is better than her Mech outfit lol
foxuzamaki
Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
Yes dude, thats Muhammad Ali lol
QuixoticNeutral
Member
The neat thing about playing Xenoblade and reading NeoGAF is that in any given week, there's an LTTP thread with an active discussion just waiting for new players to join in the fun. This post turned out to be much longer than I foresaw, so I hope nobody minds if I dump it in this thread instead of starting a separate one, since I'm halfway responding to much of the discussion about the game that is already ongoing.
I hit the end credits this week after playing on and off in a series of minor binges over the past three months, completing it at
. It's a game to remember, and I've been listening to the music all day. Game music in the style of composers like Uematsu and Mitsuda was the main catalyst for me to start playing JRPGs at all over a decade ago, so I recognized the collaborative score of Xenoblade as one that stuck closely to all the genre's familiar conventions of instrumentation and harmonic structureand I adored it. The delivery of it was so melodious, so energetic and hummable, that while it didn't break any ground it was like all the tropes of JRPG music composition got together and ascended into a complete and ideal state. It was so appropriate to look up the Iwata Asks interview for the game today and discover that it began with the musicians, just as any conversation about Xenoblade should begin. I played the game on a borrowed disc so I doubt I'll be running through the New Game+ or running through it again for years, if ever again (the time one budgets to play this game is far from trivial), but above all else I think the score will linger.
In other respects I'm not as head-over-heels in love with the game as a lot of people here. Don't misunderstand me: I enjoyed it, it's impressive, and were I partial to ranking things it would seriously contend to edge its way into my top five of the genre. The Bionis and Mechonis are the most elegant organizing concept for a game world I can remember, always giving you a purposive sense of place, a landmark to admire from afar, a conviction that all of the locations are indeed connected.
was a moment unlike any other and an experience I fear will not be duplicated when Xenoblade X delivers the power of flight. The only factor that held the game back from overwhelming me with sheer scale is that I arrived at it as a veteran of WoW and had already been immunized to the experience of being totally enveloped by game world that grows and grows right up until you've seen all of it, when it suddenly seems much smaller. I knew roughly what to expect. I can only imagine what it would have been like for Xenoblade to be a player's first point of contact with that sense of vastness.
The game commits its share of stumbles, however, and I think they merit attention.
The battle system
I ordinarily prefer the perfectionism, control, and patience of turn-based combat; I'm one of the people who will make the case Bravely Default as one of the best games of 2014. I'm not so fond of automated squad management with your companions left at the behest of the AI, with no opportunity to tab between characters as in KOTOR and Dragon Age. So Xenoblade deserves some praise for pressing the case for its combat system: I was ultimately convinced of its depth, though it took about half the game for me to come around on this. The various stats were somewhat opaque and could have used a few tooltips describing what they affected so I didn't have to infer it all myself. I still don't know if Ether affects healing power or only ether damage, and it wasn't until I read about agility tanking here that I knew Agility affected dodge chance as opposed to auto-attack speed.
For the first few dozen hoursfar too longI thought the system locked me into an inflexible range of party configurations that were clearly better than the alternatives and therefore resisted experimentation. This could largely be pinned on three factors: a) the necessity of playing as Shulk given the lack of alternatives to the Monado Arts for damaging Mechon or mitigating imminent lethal damage, b) the Break/Topple/Daze trinity that heavily favoured corresponding character placements in slots 1/2/3 based on their available Arts, and c) the tank/healer/DPS trinity that is conventionally the best way to mitigate party damage and survive a long fight. In other words, Shulk/Reyn/Sharla, or similar trios like Riki/Dunban/Sharla.
I know what all the experienced players are thinking (and have indeed already said in this thread): learn to use Melia (which I did eventually) or build Dunban as the agility-based dodge tank suggested by his skill trees. I take it that the theory behind it is that if you avoid damage altogether with dodging, that frees up the healing slot. As I didn't play around with an agility tank, however, and I was often under-levelled for bosses or optional elites thanks to not pursuing too many side quests, I wound up using Sharla more than any other party member as nobody else provided the healing throughput to get me through a long fight with spiky incoming damage.
But as I said, I did come around on the depth of the system and really began to explore its versatility
, which is ironic as
Much of it was due to the game accumulating the range of party members, Arts, and skill links to make experimentation viable. I played through much of the late game as
, and its surprising viability assuaged most of the concerns I had in the early game. Shulk/Dunban/Riki was fun as well, scraping by with sporadic healing and filling the metre quickly to deliver one Chain Attack after another.
I didn't take on any of the
so I don't know what kind of demands they place on the battle system, but in the main quest I only had trouble with two boss fights, and only the first of them was one that came off as a little unfair.
The second one,
, was challenging for my level but ultimately fair: when I wiped I could tell it was a failure that could be addressed with better tactics, gem decisions, and timing. This was also where the automation of uncontrolled companions finally cohered for me, as the battle forced me to think about the Chain Attack metre as a risk-reward system: I knew I had to keep Monado Shield available
so to mitigate other attacks, I always had to think about the range of available decisionsexpend one bar to activate an ally's defensive aura, or stall for time with a Chain Attack at risk of not having a revival available afterwards.
It's a bit unfortunate that you can only play reactively and activate an ally's Arts if Shulk foresees fatal damage, as late in the game there are so many non-fatal attacks that come with no warning yet are still debilitating enough to put your party on the edge of defeat, like attacks that topple or daze you just long enough to mop the floor with you afterwards. I don't think the game would have been too easy if it flagged non-lethal attacks in advance (with a longer cast bar, say) and made them interruptible, as cooldowns still imposed a limit on how much you could reasonably do to change the future, and mitigating a non-lethal attack would put you at risk of having no response to a lethal one.
The story
I'm a mechanics-first player who has never liked much of anything in video game storytelling, not even the examples many like to flaunt as the best, and the strange thing about Xenoblade is that for once I find myself praising the richness of the characters in the adventuring party. Somebody in one of the threads here praised it as their maturity, and that's the best word for it: these are characters who, even at the height of folksiness or melodrama, confront every obstacle with composure and grit. And this was exactly what the finale demanded in order to sell me on
Everyone gets his or her due, their personal arcs developed and resolved, a chance to convey to the player how the adventure looks from their own eyes.
The British voice cast played no small part in making this work. I loved the banter and the range of registers, from Melia's articulate RP to the working-class tenor given to Reyn or Dickson, and it's hard to imagine this effect coming through with American equivalents from Harvard transatlantic to Southern drawl. (Far better, too, to have genuine British voice acting than the American imitations one hears in so many western games, which to someone familiar with the range of English accents and dialects always sound slightly off.)
I do have reservations. The story suffered the same problem I found with BioShock Infinite (in kind if mercifully not in degree), where every big revelation was either a) so obvious that it's a bit silly the characters never thought of it themselves or b) so deliberately withheld as a Big Twist that it wasn't justified by anything that came before itone extreme or the other, too well flagged or too poorly, without much in betweenall capped with an ending gambit that, while tremendous to behold in the moment, loses its power as soon as you think about it.
The optional bloat
Aside from that, it's at least encouraging that some of the rougher elements in Xenoblade's design are at heart easily solved, and I do hope they will be addressed in XCX, which I am now likely to obtain on the day of release. Others on these forums have already noted the tedium of the side quests, which boils down to how collectibles/materials were handled.
Running over indistinguishable blue dots is a problem in this game simply because of how many there arefar too many randomly spawning items with absolutely no identity, impossible to remember by name without taking notes or consulting a guide, and worst of all, unable to fit in the inventory at once. Thank goodness some of them are marked as required for quests. I found myself dumping items with low sale value just to clear space, not noticing that some items were marked with a shiny glow in the corner in place of a red exclamation mark, with the consequence that I was unable to rebuild much of Colony 6 past the first or second level and somehow finished the game without ever obtaining the portable gem forge. The grinding involved wasn't worth it, especially when Juju wouldn't even dispense a complete set of hints about where everything could be found.
The Collectibles scrapbook has some flavour text, at least, like who named the oddities filed under Strange and why, but the profusion of materials and variety of functionally equivalent item drops was out of control. There needed to be a button to dump all the vendor trash with a single click, or better yet, no pointless vendor trash at all. At the very least, however, I would have welcomed the simple change of providing more inventory slots for materials than the types available in the game such that I would never have to comb through the grid and sell or dump things indiscriminately.
This is the heart of the issue with the item drops and optional quests: underneath them are systems that give a profusion of optional content a reason to existthe affinity system, the vast landscape that begs for exploration, the minute hints that flesh out the tale or illuminate how the main plot has affected the denizens of Bionis and Mechonis. All of this makes Xenoblade a game that would feel empty if there were no side quests or collectible blue dots at all. The trouble is that the actual implementation fills this emptiness with an overwhelming density of information for its own sake: NPC names and timetables, enemy drops and locations, reams of data that are impossible to remember and difficult to look up within the game. The smokescreen of raw information detracts from the impression that the game otherwise leaves so successfully, the sense of interacting with the world.
One side quest in the Nopon Village that asks you to sprinkle compost on the mushroom clocks had more character and purpose than twenty other quests put together: it gave the world character, it provided a good reason to run up and down the place and see what it's like at that time of day, and it didn't make demands on memorization (which effectively amounts to looking things up in guides, something I never do on the first pass through a game purely on principle). Yes, it amounted to hitting marked checkpoints, but at least it was an interaction with the environment and not with the text attached to identical blobs on the inventory screen.
The endgame glitch
This seems like a rare occurrence that few others on the Internet have reported, but I ran into it, lost an hour of progress, and thought I should point it out. It comes near the very end.
Not that I minded this, as it meant I had a chance to try out some other party setups, but it's an argument in favour of the ability to save after the point of no return, especially when
I hit the end credits this week after playing on and off in a series of minor binges over the past three months, completing it at
84 hours, level 77/78
In other respects I'm not as head-over-heels in love with the game as a lot of people here. Don't misunderstand me: I enjoyed it, it's impressive, and were I partial to ranking things it would seriously contend to edge its way into my top five of the genre. The Bionis and Mechonis are the most elegant organizing concept for a game world I can remember, always giving you a purposive sense of place, a landmark to admire from afar, a conviction that all of the locations are indeed connected.
The ascent to the Distant Fingertip
The game commits its share of stumbles, however, and I think they merit attention.
The battle system
I ordinarily prefer the perfectionism, control, and patience of turn-based combat; I'm one of the people who will make the case Bravely Default as one of the best games of 2014. I'm not so fond of automated squad management with your companions left at the behest of the AI, with no opportunity to tab between characters as in KOTOR and Dragon Age. So Xenoblade deserves some praise for pressing the case for its combat system: I was ultimately convinced of its depth, though it took about half the game for me to come around on this. The various stats were somewhat opaque and could have used a few tooltips describing what they affected so I didn't have to infer it all myself. I still don't know if Ether affects healing power or only ether damage, and it wasn't until I read about agility tanking here that I knew Agility affected dodge chance as opposed to auto-attack speed.
For the first few dozen hoursfar too longI thought the system locked me into an inflexible range of party configurations that were clearly better than the alternatives and therefore resisted experimentation. This could largely be pinned on three factors: a) the necessity of playing as Shulk given the lack of alternatives to the Monado Arts for damaging Mechon or mitigating imminent lethal damage, b) the Break/Topple/Daze trinity that heavily favoured corresponding character placements in slots 1/2/3 based on their available Arts, and c) the tank/healer/DPS trinity that is conventionally the best way to mitigate party damage and survive a long fight. In other words, Shulk/Reyn/Sharla, or similar trios like Riki/Dunban/Sharla.
I know what all the experienced players are thinking (and have indeed already said in this thread): learn to use Melia (which I did eventually) or build Dunban as the agility-based dodge tank suggested by his skill trees. I take it that the theory behind it is that if you avoid damage altogether with dodging, that frees up the healing slot. As I didn't play around with an agility tank, however, and I was often under-levelled for bosses or optional elites thanks to not pursuing too many side quests, I wound up using Sharla more than any other party member as nobody else provided the healing throughput to get me through a long fight with spiky incoming damage.
But as I said, I did come around on the depth of the system and really began to explore its versatility
from the Fallen Arm onwards
it's in the ascent up Mechonis that the game's environments start to falter, mostly due to the aesthetic sameness between three consecutive zones (Mechonis Field, Central Factory, Agniratha) and the sense of padding one gets in running around hitting X switches. So the world held my interest in the first half of the game when the battle system was tiresome, and the battle system carried me through Mechonis when the world was tiresome.
Fiora/Melia/Sharla, with Fiora in a tank set full of aggro gems
I didn't take on any of the
endgame level 100+ superbosses
I'm speaking of Gadolt and his Laser Bullet. It was an unexpected difficulty spike, and for a while I couldn't consistently build up a Chain Attack to topple him out of it as I was expending the metre on reviving allies. Ultimately I got through him after about ten attempts by changing out my gems to stack Ether Defence, which made the fight feel like a gear check instead of anything tactical.
The second one,
Zanza's second phase in the final battle
for the Titan Bazooka
It's a bit unfortunate that you can only play reactively and activate an ally's Arts if Shulk foresees fatal damage, as late in the game there are so many non-fatal attacks that come with no warning yet are still debilitating enough to put your party on the edge of defeat, like attacks that topple or daze you just long enough to mop the floor with you afterwards. I don't think the game would have been too easy if it flagged non-lethal attacks in advance (with a longer cast bar, say) and made them interruptible, as cooldowns still imposed a limit on how much you could reasonably do to change the future, and mitigating a non-lethal attack would put you at risk of having no response to a lethal one.
The story
I'm a mechanics-first player who has never liked much of anything in video game storytelling, not even the examples many like to flaunt as the best, and the strange thing about Xenoblade is that for once I find myself praising the richness of the characters in the adventuring party. Somebody in one of the threads here praised it as their maturity, and that's the best word for it: these are characters who, even at the height of folksiness or melodrama, confront every obstacle with composure and grit. And this was exactly what the finale demanded in order to sell me on
the notion of the True Monado manifesting itself (manifest yourself!) from the party's determination to survive. When Shulk declares his answer to Alvis about what to do with his power"That was a decision I made long ago!"it is completely believable in the spirit of the character because it is true to who he was all along, right from the starting act with the simple, honest motive of revenge.
Well, Riki seemed a bit left out of the fun, and I hoped there would be more to the Heropon's story that the main quest carried through to the end just as Gadolt's reappearance did for Sharla and Kallian's fate did for Melia. Perhaps I'm missing something. I didn't know the Nopon Kingpin quest chain existed until I had finished the game, so there might be a lot to the Nopon that I simply never saw.
The British voice cast played no small part in making this work. I loved the banter and the range of registers, from Melia's articulate RP to the working-class tenor given to Reyn or Dickson, and it's hard to imagine this effect coming through with American equivalents from Harvard transatlantic to Southern drawl. (Far better, too, to have genuine British voice acting than the American imitations one hears in so many western games, which to someone familiar with the range of English accents and dialects always sound slightly off.)
I do have reservations. The story suffered the same problem I found with BioShock Infinite (in kind if mercifully not in degree), where every big revelation was either a) so obvious that it's a bit silly the characters never thought of it themselves or b) so deliberately withheld as a Big Twist that it wasn't justified by anything that came before itone extreme or the other, too well flagged or too poorly, without much in betweenall capped with an ending gambit that, while tremendous to behold in the moment, loses its power as soon as you think about it.
The Monado can't cut people; the Monado can't damage Faced Mechon; Faced Mechon behave and speak with Homs-like sentience and personality; gee, I wonder what's going on. And the Homs all know the bodies of the living return to the Bionis, so I don't know why anyone suddenly thinks it's a big deal for the Bionis to subsist on them as food. Then there are scenes where the script loses track of who knows what: when Kallian comes to the rescue after Dickson's double-cross, Shulk warns him that the villains are working for the Bionis, and Kallian understands this as a bad thing right away in spite of not being party to the whole conversation with Egil.
At the other extreme, the finale's revelation of Zanza and Meyneth as earthling scientists who destroyed the universe, and Alvis as their AI, is all good fun as a big shocking premise for why the world of the Bionis and Mechonis existed in its mythic state, and a fine excuse for that brilliant cosmic journey through the solar system, but it's information that arrives so late and has so little precedent that it seems superfluous, dumped there to impress with shock value alone. Meanwhile, one can't help noticing that Shulk hitting the reset button and recreating the world trivializes all of his side quests in a single stroke, like the reconstruction of Colony 6. What's the point of everything off the main path if you are just remaking it all in a newfound colony on the sea?
The optional bloat
Aside from that, it's at least encouraging that some of the rougher elements in Xenoblade's design are at heart easily solved, and I do hope they will be addressed in XCX, which I am now likely to obtain on the day of release. Others on these forums have already noted the tedium of the side quests, which boils down to how collectibles/materials were handled.
Running over indistinguishable blue dots is a problem in this game simply because of how many there arefar too many randomly spawning items with absolutely no identity, impossible to remember by name without taking notes or consulting a guide, and worst of all, unable to fit in the inventory at once. Thank goodness some of them are marked as required for quests. I found myself dumping items with low sale value just to clear space, not noticing that some items were marked with a shiny glow in the corner in place of a red exclamation mark, with the consequence that I was unable to rebuild much of Colony 6 past the first or second level and somehow finished the game without ever obtaining the portable gem forge. The grinding involved wasn't worth it, especially when Juju wouldn't even dispense a complete set of hints about where everything could be found.
The Collectibles scrapbook has some flavour text, at least, like who named the oddities filed under Strange and why, but the profusion of materials and variety of functionally equivalent item drops was out of control. There needed to be a button to dump all the vendor trash with a single click, or better yet, no pointless vendor trash at all. At the very least, however, I would have welcomed the simple change of providing more inventory slots for materials than the types available in the game such that I would never have to comb through the grid and sell or dump things indiscriminately.
This is the heart of the issue with the item drops and optional quests: underneath them are systems that give a profusion of optional content a reason to existthe affinity system, the vast landscape that begs for exploration, the minute hints that flesh out the tale or illuminate how the main plot has affected the denizens of Bionis and Mechonis. All of this makes Xenoblade a game that would feel empty if there were no side quests or collectible blue dots at all. The trouble is that the actual implementation fills this emptiness with an overwhelming density of information for its own sake: NPC names and timetables, enemy drops and locations, reams of data that are impossible to remember and difficult to look up within the game. The smokescreen of raw information detracts from the impression that the game otherwise leaves so successfully, the sense of interacting with the world.
One side quest in the Nopon Village that asks you to sprinkle compost on the mushroom clocks had more character and purpose than twenty other quests put together: it gave the world character, it provided a good reason to run up and down the place and see what it's like at that time of day, and it didn't make demands on memorization (which effectively amounts to looking things up in guides, something I never do on the first pass through a game purely on principle). Yes, it amounted to hitting marked checkpoints, but at least it was an interaction with the environment and not with the text attached to identical blobs on the inventory screen.
The endgame glitch
This seems like a rare occurrence that few others on the Internet have reported, but I ran into it, lost an hour of progress, and thought I should point it out. It comes near the very end.
I broke the game when landing the killing blow on Zanza's first phase, leaving me stranded in space in the empty hurtling vortex where the fight took place, with the quest-marker arrow going haywire and no way to get back out. As this was past the point of no return, and there was no way to save, I had to fight Dickson all over again and sit through the surrounding cutscenes.
the endgame sequence can take about two hours depending on many attempts it takes to bring down Zanza.
Kaneda Shotaro
Member
What carries over in new game plus?
I remember at least a powered-up completely broken blue Monado for Shulk, don't remember if the other characters had other stuff.
To the OP, try the naked Dunban build, it's absolutely glorious and fun to play. I completed the game by playing tank Dunban and changing to Shulk and Sharla for specific occassions mid-combat. Once you go naked, you don't turn back!
I have to replay the game and try a Riki-Melia-Shulk/Dunban team.
QuixoticNeutral
Member
Your level, everything you're wearing on completing the game (including
Shulk's powered-up Monado III
SoraanTribal
Member
Well, I'm gay so that doesn't really interest me that much! I guess that's why I prefer her mechon body, lol. Now a Dunban-in-only-swim-trunks outfit.. that's something I could get behind.
I guess that's why I prefer her mechon body, lol. Now a Dunban-in-only-swim-trunks outfit.. that's something I could get behind.LaunchpadMcQ
Banned
Huh... So how over-powered can armor-less Dunban become?
Let's put it this way... When I finally did it, I was pretty certain I'd broken the game.
hurricanes
Member
You wrote one of the best personal review I've read for this game. Bravo
On the "who know what" issue though:
Kallian knows Bionis(Zana's) plan to some degree because most members of the royal High Entia family know some facts of the Bionis as well as their own origin. ( that they evolved from Telethia and that they might return to that form when the Monado reappear) The only royal High Entia who doesn't know this is Melia due to... reasons (Because she's half Hom maybe?) The problem which cause the confusion is that the game did not successfully inform the player in the main quest. Only a side quest of killing an unique Telithia could give deeper insights of what Anitqua family once knew and reasons of the first concert's (Yumea) action.
Ah, neat, my daughter and I have been playing through Xenoblade together (over a period of weeks) and we're at Mechonis Field as well.
Still haven't bothered to learn how the skill trees and links work though. Maybe we should do that, hah. Every now and then we just go and see if there is something new that can be turned on. Unlike Arts/Gems it doesn't seem to matter as much.
Aaronrules380
Member
You wrote one of the best personal review I've read for this game. Bravo
On the "who know what" issue though:So this is more like a problem cause by bad story-telling in the second-half of the game.Kallian knows Bionis(Zana's) plan to some degree because most members of the royal High Entia family know some facts of the Bionis as well as their own origin. ( that they evolved from Telethia and that they might return to that form when the Monado reappear) The only royal High Entia who doesn't know this is Melia due to... reasons (Because she's half Hom maybe?) The problem which cause the confusion is that the game did not successfully inform the player in the main quest. Only a side quest of killing an unique Telithia could give deeper insights of what Anitqua family once knew and reasons of the first concert's (Yumea) action.
I think
Melia not knowing that stuff is because she's young. Plus, the emperor probably told Kallian about it sooner because he wanted him to understand why he would choose Melia as the heir to the throne over him
Edit:
On the same note, I never did that quest, but I thought it was pretty obviously implied that the royal family, or at least Kallian and Sorean, both knew about the telethia gene to some extent. It became pretty obvious that was why they both propped up Melia as the successor instead of Kallian, even if it was never explicitly stated
chaosblade
Unconfirmed Member
I inferred that as well, it seems pretty obvious. I don't really think it's a bad thing that they didn't insult the player's intelligence by having a 15 minute cutscene explaining it.
Gotdatmoney
Member
There are tons of hints in Xenoblade about the telethia and the story. For example in one of the cutscenes in the high entia tomb, the group is being attacked by a Telethia and Alvis just magically contains it. Didn't realize it had significance until later in the game where it made sense. Another is when you go to prison island there is a statue that refers to what the high entia looked like in the very beginning of their existence and it looks like a Telethia. It's apparent Sorean and Kallian are well aware of their history and are not letting Melia know since she is young and still learning about how to be a ruler. Also, Kallian is pretty brotherly even if he doesn't show it, he is trying to protect Melia from the truth regardless of whether it's misguided or not.
What I do agree with though is how silly the final twist of the game was with it being a science experiment gone wrong. To be honest, I didn't even really enjoy anything relating to Zanza after Dickson shoots Shulk. It was too out of tone imo.
What I do agree with though is how silly the final twist of the game was with it being a science experiment gone wrong. To be honest, I didn't even really enjoy anything relating to Zanza after Dickson shoots Shulk. It was too out of tone imo.
I'm about 20 hours into the game and I'm at the
or whatever it's called. I've been doing basically every side quest so I'm going sort of slow through the story.
In any event, I need some gameplay clarification because at this point I'm of the opinion that the whole "Vision" mechanic of enemy talent arts is utter BS. I'm level 30 and trying to fight this
he's also level 30.
I've had absolutely no problem with these "special" mobs up until now so long as they're my level or lower, but all of the ones in this zone are kicking my ass, and this guy is throwing arts left and right and aside from the ones that can be blocked using the Monado Shield having Sharla through damage immunity against physical arts does absolutely nothing. It will say I "changed the future" when I have her use it but even though I have damage immunity I'll still get hit and die. Sometimes before I'm able to run to a party member and "warn", one of my other party members will do something that will cause the "we've changed the future" voice prompt so the game no longer even lets me use the "warn" mechanic to try and do a counter even though whatever the other character did is useless because, one, the countdown is still happening and, two, lo and behold, the target dies or is toppled.
I'm absolutely annoyed with the game at this point . . . sure I could come back later, but I feel this should be doable at a matched level (and if it's not the game is balanced horribly).
Is there something I'm doing wrong with this whole "vision" thing?
Satorl Marsh
In any event, I need some gameplay clarification because at this point I'm of the opinion that the whole "Vision" mechanic of enemy talent arts is utter BS. I'm level 30 and trying to fight this
Ignas that's in a "throne room" in that fortress in the marsh
I've had absolutely no problem with these "special" mobs up until now so long as they're my level or lower, but all of the ones in this zone are kicking my ass, and this guy is throwing arts left and right and aside from the ones that can be blocked using the Monado Shield having Sharla through damage immunity against physical arts does absolutely nothing. It will say I "changed the future" when I have her use it but even though I have damage immunity I'll still get hit and die. Sometimes before I'm able to run to a party member and "warn", one of my other party members will do something that will cause the "we've changed the future" voice prompt so the game no longer even lets me use the "warn" mechanic to try and do a counter even though whatever the other character did is useless because, one, the countdown is still happening and, two, lo and behold, the target dies or is toppled.
I'm absolutely annoyed with the game at this point . . . sure I could come back later, but I feel this should be doable at a matched level (and if it's not the game is balanced horribly).
Is there something I'm doing wrong with this whole "vision" thing?
MagiusNecros
Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
Well now I know what to do when I go for the post game. Doing NG+ at the moment.
I want to make those Monado weapons that give you new skills
FlashbladeGAF
Member
Nothing beats Speed.
Just arrived at Central Factory. Mechonis Field was GORGEOUS. I have a fetish for clockwork and warm golden hues (yes I love Guillermo del Toro movies), so that along with the massive scale of these environments -- and the fact they're surprisingly navigable and easy to explore -- made that area a lot of fun. And wow at
-- great character design, great confrontation, etc. Interested to see that character show up again. And I loved the scenes with
and
, as well as
.
And wow at
Jade Face / Gadolt
Egil in his throne room
Kallian leading the allied charge
camping on the outside of the Mechonis
SoraanTribal
Member
That's really the first special/unique monster within your level that poses a serious threat. I remember being level 32 and still it was a tough fight. What party members are you using? I recommend putting an agility gem or two on Dunban and having him tank it so he'll avoid most of the damage. That's enemy is really what made me switch to Dunban as my full-time tank over Reyn - it was unbelievable the difference in how much easier the fight was with Dunban tanking (try to craft some agility gems if you can). For that particular enemy, I remember trying to keep Monado Shield up at all times and it worked out well with Dunban as a tank.
Just arrived at Central Factory. Mechonis Field was GORGEOUS. I have a fetish for clockwork and warm golden hues (yes I love Guillermo del Toro movies), so that along with the massive scale of these environments -- and the fact they're surprisingly navigable and easy to explore -- made that area a lot of fun.-- great character design, great confrontation, etc. Interested to see that character show up again. And I loved the scenes withJade Face / GadoltandEgil in his throne room, as well asKallian leading the allied charge.camping on the outside of the Mechonis
You're making nice progress. You're getting closer to some pretty epic story stuff soon.
I'm now at the capital city of Mechonis. Quite the history lesson I was just given regarding the
. Also, seeing the
has been a real treat. Although I'm surprised to see
?
At any rate, I really liked the Central Factory. Very smooth progression, and the sense of scale is jaw-dropping at times. But now I have about a dozen time-sensitive quests in the capital. Next time I play, I'll probably tend to those before activating the pillars to proceed with the main quest.
There's so much substance to this game, and such quality. Gift that keeps on giving!
battle between the Bionis and the Mechonis
ongoing war in Sword Valley
the general with the mustache -- I think he bit the bullet in Colony 9
At any rate, I really liked the Central Factory. Very smooth progression, and the sense of scale is jaw-dropping at times. But now I have about a dozen time-sensitive quests in the capital. Next time I play, I'll probably tend to those before activating the pillars to proceed with the main quest.
There's so much substance to this game, and such quality. Gift that keeps on giving!
TheMoon
Member
That just means you should take care of those before moving on to the next plot-related quest. Things may or may not get busy soon.
Do these sidequests. There's 14 of them and completing them all actually gives you a key from one of the quest givers that unlocks the doors to the secret area.
I am actually at the Same area, having done these quests but struggling with the boss fight against
gadolt
I had actually already switched to Dunban, but the fight went much easier once I actually remembered I had that "Speed" (or Fast?) Monado power that is much better at countering physical arts than trying to use a damage immunity art.
I can tell I'm going to spend hours just grinding with different party permutations to grow the affinity links between the party though. Do only the members in the active party grow affinity with each other at all? I swear, I've had Melina and Sharla in the party for hours doing quests and they've thrown a ton of affinity increase signs, but Melina's affinity to Sharla hasn't budged from the starting point and I'm trying to raise it for that one quest in Colony 9.
In any case, I like the game and the art direction is sublime, I do think I prefer FFXII overall just because I can have direct control over my party members in that game. I also miss the kind of esoteric and almost "occult" vibe of Xenogears that this game doesn't have (I never played Xenosaga so I don't know if Gears was a one-off in that regard).
TheMoon
Member
Affinity grows between YOUR player character and the respective active party member.
If you want to build infinity, cycle through all the character. Play Melia if you want to build affinity between Melia and Sharla and a third character. Playing Shulk with Melia and Sharla in your party will only grow affinity between Shulk x Melia and Shulk x Sharla. Not Sharla x Melia. Same for all chars.
Just a question, and I think it fits best here:
I just noticed the Tempo (or whatever they call it in english) gem which, as the description says, increases movement speed. But does it affect the battle speed as well? I just defeated the
and it felt like battle speed has doubled! And it was awesome.
I just noticed the Tempo (or whatever they call it in english) gem which, as the description says, increases movement speed. But does it affect the battle speed as well? I just defeated the
Apocryphial Core
Slight correction, but doing the circle QTEs and Chain attack will also grow affinity between the other two members of your party you are not using, but its very slow this way.
TheMoon
Member
Ah yes, forgot about those.
You probably mean Quick Step gem. Yes it also increases your movement speed in battle, as in walking/running speed. But it does not affect your auto-attack speed. Haste gem does that.
AppleSautts
Member
I finally hands on this game a couple weeks ago. I'm currently in
. So far, this game has lived up to the hype and more. I thought I would get bored of the combat quickly but fortunately that hasn't been the case. I'm really relieved that I didn't have to go through too much grinding since it can really knock me out of a game if I have to grind too much. Really enjoying the story too.
Playing this has only skyrocketed my hype for X since my concerns for the combat are gone.
the Mechonis capitol.
Playing this has only skyrocketed my hype for X since my concerns for the combat are gone.
that's the only one mob that gave me trouble in the game. I went back at level 40 and massacred everyone
Honestly I just fight against flabbergasted Jerome in Eryth Sea to build affinity. He has the ether down debuff (I think) which causes your party to hit low tension quickly which you can then encourage them over and over again.
I takes 2-3 hours maybe but you can maximize your affinity between characters. I prefer this method than switching out characters constantly. You need to be around level 40 though to do it easily.
Bring haste gems if you have any or make some double attack gems. There is also a burst affinity increased chance skill that is linkable which even makes the process quicker.
I takes 2-3 hours maybe but you can maximize your affinity between characters. I prefer this method than switching out characters constantly. You need to be around level 40 though to do it easily.
Bring haste gems if you have any or make some double attack gems. There is also a burst affinity increased chance skill that is linkable which even makes the process quicker.
The grind is slightly shorter if you wait until Valak mountains, but yeah, if you want to grind it out you'll find yourself with an even stronger party than usual. Full affinity is a wonderful thing.
Are you talking about the fire element creatures? If so I always found I had an easier time with Jerome but it's possible I didn't do it efficiently. Yeah I like my party as strong as possible early so I do it first chance I get.
Nearly naked with haste/double attack gems and your worst weapons is the most efficient way to do it. It only sucks when trying to build with Sharla as the main character.
Elfforkusu
Member
Considering how big the world map is, Quick Step is the best thing in the world. Only need it on your lead character though.