Xenoblade Chronicles

I'm pretty sure it works for both, yeah.

Yggralith's have their lifecycle detailed in the artbook that came with the X special edition. But yeah, they basically land on a planet, kill everything they can to consume its Ether, and then use that to fire a giant death ray into the core, blowing up the planet and using the explosion to launch themselves into space where they seek a new planet to annihilate.

I like to imagine Pharsis the Everqueen tried to that on Mira, only for Telethia to whoop its ass and force it into Sylvalum, where it chills soaking up the limitless Ether in the Noctilucent Sphere.

I would find a certain irony to the telethia managing t stop the yggdralith precisely because he knows exactly how to do what the yggdrath intends to do and just went "not today, friendo".

Replaying the first game with the DE and I forgot how fun it was to work together with teammates to topple enemies and bring even the toughest monsters 5 levels above you down. It feels so satisfying. But holy crap! Run from that Territorial Ramphart! You can see him coming a mile away, but you're still grinding Ponio's for a sidequest and he's getting closer! HEART POUNDING! lol

Thankfully on Bionis he's as slow as molasses. It's his cousins on Mira and Gormott that you need to worry about.

Whoo, beat the level 99 Demon King Dragonia while only level 79. Melia, Dunban, and Riki don't care.

I haven't fought that one yet, but I beat up that rabbit in the mid 90s in Tephra Cave while in the low 70s and Final Marcus in the upper 70s using Melia/Riki/Shulk very soon after clearing Mechonis Core (before I had rank 6 gems).

So on Definitive Edition just beat Xord and immediately went back to Colony 9 to talk to Desiree, can now confirm that she will reveal the thing as soon as you get Dunban as a party member.

Xenoblade Definitive Edition is the next Tetris 99 Theme event, coming this edit:Sorry, next weekend.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Jun 24th 2020 at 8:21:55 AM

So, still no luck with KOS-MOS. I'm gonna complete the final quests I have, and then probably start New Game Plus. Maybe starting fresh and having other things to do will help.

That being said, I managed to kill Pernicious Benf using the Legendary Core farming strategy of constant break topple launch and smash, until I was able to build up the party gauge and finish him off with a team attack. I'm quite proud of that.

Took down Final Marcus at level 90. Since I've beaten all side quests I guess the only things left to do are beat all unique monsters and grind nopon stones till I get bored.

Just finished the first Prison Island sequence. Gotta say, that was some good drama. The visions leading up to this climatic set piece were a bit too many for my liking. They could have knocked out about 2-3 repeat visions and been just fine. Still, it was exciting and very much worth the buildup.

Alright, done with Future connected. That was... Entirely dispensable, to be honest.

I guess it does set up for future sequels, but until said sequels rolls around, it's an entirely unnecessary story added to a story that felt pretty conclusive to begin with. I liked some things about it, but I couldn't wait to see it end so I can jump ships and move on to playing P 4 G.

Things I liked :

-The two nopons were honestly pretty cool characters and I really enjoyed the effort that went into their writing.

-The area absolutely kicked asses visually and was pretty cool to explore.

-No refrences to 2, that's a plus for me.

-Some neat design ideas. the quarry in particular felt like how dungeon areas in the original should've been designed. For a moment, it really felt like I had to make some decisions about how to proceed to the end of the place because how many fucking ennemies were there and how many of them could join the fight in a split second.

-Ponspectors was a neat idea to tie the power of the chain attack to sidequest completion.

Things I didn't like :

-Holy shit that human antagonist is so terrible, how did you even fuck up this hard ? And why did you Made a Mumkhar deathagain without any the the things that made it work ?

-The early plot feels like it faceplants into the Poor Communication Kills issues the first game had beautifully sidestepped. It gets it's act together later on but the opening segment felt like nobody wanted to even try to make this work.

-Monolith apparently had no idea they were developing a game on switch and made the ponspectors turn the final battle into a slideshow. Why.

-Terrible pacing. You spend the entire exploration of the area with only half a dozen of quests to do, and when the plot actually picks up and starts moving forward, that's when the entire lot of sidequests is dropped on your face to really hold your horses. The original sorta had this issue with the endgame and you didn't had to do it again.

-By the way, removing the affinity chart is STILL a bad idea. Had a lot more difficulties to invest myself in the sidequests as a result.

-The combat feels like they didn't wanted to give it more than half a thought about it. Removing visions but keeping the mechanics of monado shield as is was a bad idea because now my only iwarning that an attack that can only be mitigated by it is coming is the slightly longer windup animation of the enemy, so if you don't have monado ready yet, you can kiss the fight bye bye. Especially egregious agaisnt the unique enemy in the depths of the quarry. Also, not a fan of getting one-shotted by the first attack of a sidequest boss before having the opportunity to do a single art while the formation gauge was empty.

-Shaking up a bit the gameplay of the characters would have been a good idea instead of going as far as to make them exactly the same again.

-more of a personnal pet peeve, but really, That's the state you leave world in, Shulk ? You could have at least created more livable land and turned the telethias back, man.

I feel like it's not too different in quality from torna, but unlike torna it doesn't benefit from coming after a game I hated on several aspects and improving on every single one of those.

Am I the only one who absolutely hated Torna, gameplay wise? It took everything I liked about 2's battle system and just fucked it all up.

Yes.

I mean. I geninunely don't remember anyone in this thread sharing that opinion, and neither do any of the people i know, at least.

Edited by Yumil on Jun 26th 2020 at 5:29:18 PM

They say that no man is an island, but most men don't hate Torna.

I know people hate the gacha system, and I completely understand why. But the static party composition is just the beginning of the many faults I have for that game. 1 and X had party members you could switch in and out out of battle for some variety. Here, it's the same nine people, and you only have control over the elements of three. The lack of any Electric or Earth blades means that you need to dedicate two of your drivers to those elements anyway for a full elemental chain.

• There's hardly any healing, aside from the switch-out system. Which feels more like a gun to your head telling you to switch or get hurt, all the while trying to execute blade or driver combos on your own behalf. It doesn't help that Haze is the only dedicated healer. This is probably the biggest thing that kills the combat in this game for me. At least X had reliable soul voices; those didn't force you to abandon your plans on a constant basis.

• The arts from the blades were pretty much uninteresting to me. It's probably because they all lack direct driver combo arts, which I've sworn by religiously.

• Talent arts are forgettable at best and detrimental at worst. Lora's art in particular is like Battle Soul, but it doesn't have the excuse for powering up the Monado.

• Tougher bosses have Ether Awakenings. It was bad enough in the base game's challenges, but here, you don't have any means to undo that.

• The rear guard arts take WP to upgrade. The blade arts in 2, meanwhile, were free. And without merc missions to shower you in WP boosters, here, they're Too Awesome to Use since they only come with completing party member charts.

• 20 Bear Asses is back with a vengeance. You can no longer just buy pouch items, you need to make them. Gathering materials dropped from monsters is something I did not miss from 1 and X.

• The nature of the setting means that anything you do for the sake of lore building will be tossed away at the end. Which kills a lot of the motivation for me to give a crap about doing the things I would normally like doing in sidequests. A shame, because the community system gave purpose to NPCs unlike the main game.

I won't deny that it has its redeemable factors such as the music, characters, and lore-wise, its sidequests. But when you drop the ball on the battle system this hard, it results in the Xenoblade work that I've played the least by far; two playthroughs, no New Game Plus, and that will almost certainly never change. I'd feel just as fulfilled by simply watching the cutscenes.

No wonder the Tornan titan sank.

Edited by RainingMetal on Jun 26th 2020 at 8:59:23 AM

I've seen you talk about it for long enough and I think I have an idea of why you feel that way when we don't. You seem to place a lot of importance in customization and optimization, for which torna certainly lacks of.

The reason i personally don't care is that I'm much more interested in whether the gameplay is fun and engaging. I don't care if I do the same thing over and over for 120 hours if I like doing it. If anything, making it fun without me needing to find out how to optimize it sorely to beat something is a plus in my book.

that's what's great about X's gameplay, as far as I'm concerned. Not the five thousands differents ways you can break the game given an unlimited amount of time and resources, but the fact that ether blossom dance makes taking on fights stacked against you insanely fun and means you can fight for the right to explore areas despite being only reiant on skills and arts to work.

Torna's gameplay is fun. Switching characters is fun. I didn't stick around for long enough to diagnose what wasn't working in it because the game didn't gave me a reason to. I fought the superbosses, took them down, felt pretty satisfied and didn't came back to it.

Edited by Yumil on Jun 26th 2020 at 6:07:29 PM

I understand that optimization isn't everyone's forte. It isn't even my priority either at some times. Why else would you think I avoid elitists like Enel like the plague, and always scoffed at people using Ghostwalker in X?

But Torna didn't even provide a means of fair difficulty, let alone the usual optimization. It made certain fights absolutely unfair even on a repeated playthrough with hindsight. The raid on Auresco always gave me a problem no matter what I did because I kept on dying, even when I tried to level up as much as I could. Switching characters on your own volition is fun. Switching characters because the game forces you in order to survive isn't. This made me question if I was making the right choices even though options are intentionally limited. That's called Fake Difficulty. The superbosses were an absolute nightmare to fight and I immediately resorted to toning the difficulty down just to beat them. In no other situation would I ever do this outside of 2's challenge mode and DE's endgame quests before New Game Plus.

If the gameplay is so bad that I didn't bother playing New Game Plus on it, it's fucked. There's a difference between not having to optimize your party to get through the game, and simply not being able to get through the game without struggling immensely. I refuse to believe that there's anything redeemable about Torna's battle system.

Edited by RainingMetal on Jun 26th 2020 at 9:17:46 AM

I mean. That first paragraph right there pretty much sums up the thing.

"Why would I make fun of people using ghostwalker" Yeah, why would you ? Not everyone who uses it does so because it's the most optimal thing. what did people who enjoy having a good time with the game do to deserve to be made fun of ?

Pretty much the same applies to Enel. I don't know what's your beef with the guy and I don't watch enough videos of him to be invested in it, but what I've watched of him is great because no one else bothers to put videos that actually explains in enough depth how the game works while still being clear to people who don't have the first clue where to begin. If I ever wanted to have a damn idea where to start, I'd probably check out his channel first simply because of that. People who holds him as the gospel might be annoying but unless he's being a dick about it somewhere I'm not aware of, it's not his fault.

So, yeah. Right of the bat, it kinda shows we're not on the same page

As for the rest of your post, I can't do anything else but ask if we've played the same game because I literally didn't had any issues with any part of torna aside from like two superbosses who were actually tough (but y'know, they're superbosses, that's expected from, and I still beat them by using brute force and perseverance). You say torna makes it impossible to get through the base plot without struggling immensely, but here's the thing : that's exactly what happened to me. That's exactly what happened to a lot of people who played torna, from what I gather. We got through the game no problem.

If the person who has not a single clue what they're doing is doing better at the game than the one who knows more about it, I'm gonna conclude that it's more of a you problem than a game problem, and more specifically a refusal of your part to engage with torna's mechanics than a fault of torna being fiendishly difficult when a dumdum like me could complete it and do everything the game had to offer without running into any issues.

Edited by Yumil on Jun 26th 2020 at 6:47:01 PM

Healing isn't really relevant in Xenoblade if you are decently skilled, and Torna does give you Haze and hee AOE heal when things get dicey. I think the critheal items are there too.

I don't really think skill is the decisive factor here when the amount of my skills amounts to putting attacker blades on rex, tank blades on morag and healer blades on nia, that T-elos and zenobia are particularly good, and pushing buttons when cooldowns are up. and occasionally skimming through my list of augments to see if I have something good to work with, I guess.

well, most of that is about 2 rather than torna, but considering I got through torna without ever looking up guides with the same mindset, I'm still gonna run with that point.

Edited by Yumil on Jun 26th 2020 at 6:52:42 PM

I suppose your hatred of 2's mechanics allowed you to adapt better. I couldn't. I know it's standard to get stuck on a boss fight the first time you go through the game, but this was basically a repeated problem on my second playthrough, despite knowing what to do in advance.

Maybe I was exaggerating with the difficulty. I coped, and I didn't die too many times, but I just found Torna's battle system to be completely unintuitive and I only tolerated it throughout the game, rather than enjoyed the experience. As I went on through the story, I just wanted to get it over with sooner and sooner, despite me being a semi completionist and hoping to do every sidequest.

Again, it's me being the planner that I am where the game just throws that out the window. Meanwhile, you, not caring about 2's battle system in the slightest, were able to cope with this better than I. I tried my hardest to get used to the battle system, but it's the one in the franchise that was the weakest by far. I like to invest time into repeated playthroughs for the Xenoblade games rather than be done with it one time, but in this case, it's the total opposite, which is heartbreaking since I played through the other Xenoblade stories many times and never doubted my actions.

I do wish some of the minor changes Torna had applied to the main game, such as tombstones on the map, and faster field skill checks for collectible spots, but alas, that was never meant to be for the developers.

I actually liked Torna's system better than regular 2's specifically because the act of blade switching is a far quicker to activate heal than switching to a healer blade and then using an art.

Its like having every blade bear the best passive of Ursula.

Edited by justinkal on Jun 26th 2020 at 12:07:01 PM