@razzuel: @forcen:

I went big with my second Skell and saved up the credit for the Amdusias Frame Level 30. It has a large fuel tank that I've never seen run low yet. However, it's important to know that destroying appendages refuels Skells for some unknown reason. Also, Soul Challenges, Binding, and wearing Skell gear on your character contribute to saving fuel.

The main feature of the Amdusias is that it is the earliest (that I've seen) in getting the E-Scythe right shoulder exclusive weapon. It performs two devastating slashes and does bonus damage to the back. Taking chunks off a big foe after dashing to their rear is very satisfying.

I've been hanging between Chapters 6 and 7 these past few days. Maybe this is the cognitive dissonance of a buyer and a fan working, but I'm enjoying the bits of story from Normal missions and Affinity missions. The Normal missions appear to be as quick and one-note as they were with the Colony-6-related quest in Xenoblade Chronicles, but I feel that I'm getting vital world-building and personality from.

@eribuster: E Scythe with an augment that boosts opening art damage is a quick way to power level other characters + help contribute to squad tasks. The less time you have to spend fighting enemies, the quicker the tasks get done. I soloed a squad task with just my main in an Amdusias [LV 50] in about 8 minutes

Question for you guys and gals, was up by Floating Reef in Oblivia for a quest (around FN 320) and saw a character with a quest marker inside a stone cage, along with a field action node, but I have 0 clue how to get in there. How the hell? I managed to land my skell, but when I get out I just fall until I hit return to skell. What's really weird is I saw no entrance in the floor, ceiling, or that I could tell in the opposite wall either. Do I need to do another quest line first?

@westernwizard: On the side of one of the platforms is a tunnel that goes straight through and then has a pit into that cage. It kinda looks like the tunnel on the bottom of that reef that goes nowhere.

Finally found it, thank you. Sadly I don't have Arch 5 yet haha (I have the quest, but haven't done it, may have to correct that soon)

The 200 hour mark ticked by. This is a problem and I don't care.

I've just finished Chapter 10 and have been doing Normal Missions as they pop up. My biggest disappointment with the game initially was the lacking narrative. Since then, the game has dramatically improved in that regard for me. The Story and Affinity Missions are still a little flat, which is a real shame because want to love Elma, Nagi, Irina, Hope, Celica, and a few other major characters. But the Normal Missions you come across in the game truly and literally bring life to NLA. And then you have characters bouncing off each other in amusing or tragic ways, creating an odd and fun canvas of story lines that you can only get from a Japanese sci-fi geek interpreting the American melting pot. The mission to take back an ice cream cake was the first shot to hit. The game finally had me when it literally dropped a quest out of the sky in front of my feet.

I'm somewhat angry at the game's narrative for being so dull in it's front half. But as with going from your feet, to your Skell, to flying, the game slowly and painstakingly built its story to become something special to me.

I finished up the game over the weekend and wrote up my thoughts here.

This was a really tough game to review and not touch on spoilers, as so many issues I have with the game involve specific content. I was not expecting an amazing narrative after reading enough people saying it was rather weak, but I couldn't begin to anticipate how bad this story was. In many ways, it feels like elements of the game are either amazing or terrible with very little of it just being average. At some point I might revisit it to explore more of the end-game content and unfinished side quests I had, but for now, it's on to XCom and other games on my backlog.

I still really wanted to see it as a better game in the end. I love this game's ambition, but hate much of its execution.

@cav829: Hmm, I don't know how many Normal Missions you've done, but I've found they are consistently more involving and engaging than the Story and Affinity Missions. I was down on the narrative(s) of Xenoblade Chronicles X until I had seen through some hefty Normal Missions. It might be too little, too late at this point.

As for the ending of the game, I've gotten the sense it is a sight to behold. I've gotten the read from some tweets that it is a video gaming highlight of 2015. Some Giant Bomb users have expressed the opposite. As for making sense of Mira, I've heard that wrapping up Affinity Mission chains really help in that regard. If you ever do go back to the game, just go to the Network Console in the BLADE Barracks to run the Affinity boosting Support Mission.

One thing I will agree on is that this is a game that you wish you could make time for, would make time for you.

@eribuster: I would tend to agree a lot of the random normal missions had better content than the primary story missions or a lot of the affinity missions. Some of them even end up going off in some rather surprising directions given the rest of the game. Even some of the affinity missions were interesting. I just hate the way they're trapped behind the need to grind both levels and affinity with each individual squad member you have. Now I do know the reason that may not have been paced properly was about half of your party members were actually DLC in Japan. But still, I don't understand what benefit there is to the player to need to grind levels with characters individually for instance. That's something many of the better JRPGs have solved for over time. Also, a lot of character development is tied up in the heart-to-heart events, which are not really something that is intuitive to the player.

I did not know you could boost affinity that way. Having just looked it up, I'm not sure why they didn't make that available sooner. It's still not really a great solution, but it would have helped. I mean, I might go back at some point to see a bit of the post-end game content, but I've got a lot of games on my backlog right now.

I don't mean to sound so negative toward the game btw. I did enjoy it far more than I disliked it. It's hard to talk about a lot of things without spoiling the game, of course.

@cav829: There are four characters that were previously DLC characters for Japan. That is quite a lot out of a playable cast of about 20. One thing that is missing from Xenoblade Chronicles is giving characters collectibles as presents to raise affinity. That was an easy way to max affinity between all seven characters in Xenoblade Chronicles.

As for the structural and pacing issues leveled at the game, I honestly think Monolth Soft built it that way to have a game that demands more time from the player. Maybe the developers felt that a player would have fun spending as much time with every character as they would with the avatar character.

More so than a lot of other big games, Xenoblade Chronicles X was made with the intent that it will be the player's only game for 100-200+ hours.

As for the Heart-to-Heart thing, that is sadly a carry-over from Xenoblade Chronicles. I remember hunting down many cute scenes across Bionis. Xenoblade Chronicles X complicates things by hiding the locations behind NPC eavesdropping and having the events be in-game time sensitive.

251 hours in and that's the twelfth and final Story Mission done. (Just in case anyone wasn't sure, that's not a time count I'm proud of.)

I understand the (severe) disappointment that other people have expressed over the finale. I find its execution in narrative and play problematic. However, I love it when my JRPG endings go crazy, and Xenoblade Chronicles X is not the one to betray that love. I find it amazing that Fallout 4, SOMA, and Xenoblade Chronicles X are games that all came out in the same year. Then again, we've seen this before with Halo 4, Assassin's Creed 3 (I think), and Mass Effect 3.

Suffice to say, the stories on Mira aren't done yet. I suspect that hour count will go even higher.

@eribuster: Yeah, so now that you've finished it...

It was not so much the super dumb anime stuff from chapter 12 that irked me. I mean, "He's absorbing all of the DNA!" might be my favorite new terrible line of dialogue from a video game in recent memory. The fact it just so happens there are fifteen minutes until the Lifehold shuts down is a hilarious cliche, but whatever. More, what really pissed me off is looking back and realizing they wasted 2/3 of the plot in a hundred hour game on freakin' Lao. Lao was awful. I think by chapter 5 or 6 everyone should have picked up on how obvious it was he was a traitor. The game flat out admits they know you know he's a traitor by something like chapter 8 or 9. But you still aren't allowed to do anything about it for... reasons? The reasoning behind him being a traitor is super dumb. Oh, my wife and child died and I didn't like the selection process for evacuation of the planet, so I'm going to commit genocide and help the aliens who destroyed the Earth? Huh?! The moment I really kind of lost it on the game was in chapter 11 when they force your character to step in and stop Elma from killing Lao. It's like they knew if they gave the player the option there, they would have slapped Lin aside and personally killed Lao.

And then he doesn't even have the good decency to stay dead at the end of the game. So yeah... The story they're hinting at with the end of the game sounds interesting! I wish they told that story here instead of what we got.

@cav829: I want to reiterate that there are problems with the narrative of Chapter 12 that I can not defend. I am expanding that to the whole of Xenoblade Chronicles X's main Story.

The ticking bomb is ever present in the main Story. I forgive it's overbearing usage since it clear from progressing (and not progressing) in the story chapters that it is not an in-game threat but a narrative framing device. The energy levels drop the same amount whether you spend 10 hours between Story Missions or 50 hours. I took its usage in Chapter 12 as another hammering that the heaviest shit is about to go down. I was amused that the game asks the player twice that this is the point of no return.

As for Lao...

Speaking on character development throughout the narratives of Xenoblade Chronicles X, it is such a personal disappointment how poor it is. From reading the Iwata Asks, I knew going in that the focus on narrative will be different and lesser when compared to Xenoblade Chronicles. Monolith Soft was developing their first high-definition game, a bigger world than the already gargantuan Xenoblade Chronicles, a world that functions and sings on three radical scales (on foot, in Skell, and in flight), arbitrarily filling each designated hex with at least one big thing to do, creating layers and tangles of systems that interact in an interesting way, and doing all of this on the Wii U. From the perspective of "it's a wonder video games are made and released at all," Xenoblade Chronicles X will always be a triumph.

But this came at the cost of scattered and lighter story from Tetsuya "Ye shall be as Gods" Takahashi and co. It was a design goal to have a shorter main story and more side content. Most disappointing, it was a design decision of Takahashi to further curb his Xeno-ness, furthering a downward trend from Xenogears (as I gather from more dedicated fans of his work). It is clear now, at least, that the aim of Xenoblade Chronicles X's narrative is depth from breadth.

Even knowing all this, it is distressing to me how thin the characters. After 251 hours in, how little there is to know of Lin as a person, of Irina as a person, of Hope as a person, of Nagi, of L, of Vahndam, of the Murderess, of Frye, of Phog, of everyone, but most of all Elma. Austin Walker's assessment of Elma as the story's actual protagonist is correct, and I don't have enough of a sense of her as a person at the end of Chapter 12. This is the most saddening for me because Elma is the most obvious candidate Xenoblade Chronicles X has for the next Smash Bros. and the game she is in doesn't do her many favors. From indulging all the official pre-release coverage I can find, I was so ready to love adventuring alongside Elma, and it is such a bummer that the game has precious few moments to support that love.

It is painful in many ways that the strongest emotional reactions I have from characters in Xenoblade Chronicles X came from Grette and Aldebart.

Some personal context: Xenoblade Chronicles is my front-runner for most favorite game of all time. I will gladly fall with Xenoblade Chronicles in the discussion "The Best JRPG of Recent Times" against the much deserved winner Persona 4 which correctly started the future of exploring emotional spaces rather than expansive spaces. While some critics will at best award Xenoblade Chronicles's story with functional competence, I love every moment and heart-to-heart of its tale. Most of all, I love playing as Melia and watching her arc in the story unfold as the game's most complete and fully-developed.

From this stand point, Xenoblade Chronicles X was doomed to be a personal disappointment. Elma, considering the design goals of the game she's in, was doomed to be compared poorly to Melia. No creator has created two works back-to-back that become the personal most favorites for a single audience member (or at least it hasn't happened to me). I accept this fate for Xenoblade Chronicles X, painful for me as it may be. It is after accepting this that I can move myself to see Xenoblade Chronicles X away from the shadow of it predecessor and see the many joys it has in its own light. Hopefully, I'll find the time to write about that in the future.

Hey duders. My birthday is coming up shortly and this game is on my list of possible gifts. So I'm curious to see if it will mesh with my style. I've played a couple JRPGs before like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 10 and 12 (I think it was twelve at least haha), but not a ton of JRPGs. I've got an idea of what the game is like thanks to the quick look, but with such an expansive game I'm sure it didn't cover a bunch. So I come asking y'all to help me. Are the systems super dense? What are some of the most fun things about the game in your opinion? I'm really interested in checking the game out, but I just want to make sure that it'll be a game I enjoy before getting it.

@eribuster:Yeah, as I mentioned in my review, I can't offer any sort of input on how I felt it compared to Xenoblade Chronicles as I never played it. I have wanted to at various points, but I never grabbed a Wii copy before they became hard to find, and I've heard others mention the 3DS version has a lot of performance issues. Also, I just haven't had the time to sink into it.

What you mention about Lao is not wrong, and it could have been interesting to me if they had spent some more time developing that theme with other characters. Or it might have helped if the Ganglion weren't so comically two-dimensional so maybe there was a reason for Lao to want to help them other than petty vengeance. You're spot on with the fact it is crazy this game could take someone 120-200 hours to finish and the amount of plot detail and character development is so sparse. Meanwhile, the stories they hint at sound so much more interesting. I hope you take the time to write something about it down the line as you've got a lot of interesting points and perspectives about the game.

@mattadord: I touch on some of those issues a bit here. The QL does give you a pretty good idea of the basic gameplay loop. Honestly, for all the complexities of the combat and the game's systems, the gameplay loop is pretty straight forward. All missions pretty much can be broken down to one of several types: hunt an Indigen(s), collect items from various areas or Indigens, explore the world, plant a probe, or go talk to someone. It is a pretty dense game, and just about anyone will tell you the UI design is kind of a mess.

The game is at its best when you're just exploring the world. The world itself is gorgeous. The Indigen designs are pretty damn cool. The flow of combat is fast and tight. All of that stuff works very well. The parts that don't are the main plot and much of the main cast are just not that interesting.

@cav829: Thanks. I read your review and now you've got me thinking. I think I'm still leaning toward getting it, but I just need to know what I'm getting myself into. Thanks again!

@cav829:I wish there was an easy, good, cheap, and non-copyright-infringing way to play Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii) in North America. Maybe Nintendo of America can clean whatever impasse they have in their heads and publish the Wii U eShop release that Europe can enjoy right now.

@mattadord: If you have a way to play Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii), I would suggest playing that for a bit first before Xenoblade Chronicles X. The more linear and directed nature of Xenoblade Chronicles gently eases you in to systems that have descendants in Xenoblade Chronicles X (e.g. Arts palette combat, character affinity, collectopedia, tension gauge). Xenoblade Chronicles has a better tutorial and less tangled systems.

The problem with Xenoblade Chronicles X is that, even after you thoroughly read the extremely vital electronic manual, it is hard to grasp all the systems that in play after Chapter 2 and 3. It is only through harsh experience that you start to see how things fit together and play off each other. How doing anything raises your BLADE level, which allows you to return to Eleonora to raise your Mechanical Field Skill, which allows you open certain treasure boxes and plant more probes in the field, which allows you to use mining and research probes to gather more Miranium and money, which gives you more resources and capital for improving your equipment and arms manufacturing, which finally makes you more able to tackle harsher missions and areas that progress the narratives of Mira and further raise your BLADE level.

The numbers can keep going up, and the narrative context Xenoblade Chronicles X provides to cover it is about as much as any of the skimpiest female armor sets (they can get really skimpy [except for Lin if you're playing the English version]).

Not gonna lie: where as Xenoblade Chronicles felt like a journey, Xenoblade Chronicles X feels more like work. Now, the work has you journeying to some fantastic places and creatures, but you will inevitably feel to be an ace employee to the organization of BLADE as well as a video game player grinding away at a big-ass JRPG. If that's what you fancy for, Xenoblade Chronicles X will happily eat up a month or two if you let it.

@eribuster: Well the Wii U can play Wii games correct? Maybe I'll go pick up Xenoblade Chronicles first, and see if I'm left wanting more. Xenoblade Chronicles X just seems so pretty and expansive that I wanted to give it a shot. Plus almost most importantly.... MECHS!!!!! haha Well thanks again for all the tips and talking to me about the game. I really appreciate it.