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I see the tradition of implementing lovely half-assed mini-games into RPGs is being kept alive in Xenoblades. How necessary is it to play Tiger Tiger and keep Poppi built up, or can Tora safely be taken out of the party early and not have to deal with the mini-game at all?
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Jan 8, 2018 02:04
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 04:38 |
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Are regular fights against even a single common enemy equal level to the party supposed to take a minute or more? Seems insane, but at level 18 with everything maxed out (I can only use two blades at the moment, but they're fulled equipped with the best cores I can get for them) and I'm not sure what I can do to make it faster. I can make it slightly faster by being on the ball with timing the arts and working down a arts combo, but they usually die just before I finish it and the time benefit from doing that is barely noticeable. Honestly the last few fights I've just dropped the controller and surfed the forums because it seems like a better use of my time in the fight since they can't kill me and I only shave a few seconds off by paying attention to it.
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Jan 8, 2018 06:34
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Tae posted:I'm confused by a minute. The only faster battles you'll get is like action rpgs. Even Persona 5 which people deem turbo-fast for the series takes as long or longer than a xenoblade battle. If your time in a Persona 5 fight takes more than 10-15 seconds, it's either because you haven't found the weakness, the enemy doesn't have a weakness, or a boss. And a minute or more is fine for bosses or actual challenging content, not a random bug you run past and aggros on you in the open world. Edit: Persona 5 is such a weird comparison to pull anyways, not only do they have a fast mode for enemies like I'm describing but you also have a button to shortcut straight to your ability that triggers the weakness. It's literally the polar opposite of Xenoblade in terms of fight accessibility and time management (at least in the fights themselves). nessin fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 06:50
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Dirk the Average posted:In the initial stages, fights just suck. You don't have access to driver combos, and specials are the most damaging thing you have. For the most part, common enemies will be wiped out if you can get a level 3 special combo off (use Pyra level 1, Nia/Dromarch level 2, then Pyra level 3). Later on, once you have access to driver combos, Break/Topple/Launch/Smash will kill most common enemies in a fraction of the time. I've got access to most, at least I assume, of the combat features in the game and it's still taking forever. I just came back here to complain I just had the longest fight I've had so far in this game. Started as a fight against two small raptor creatures that pulled in something called a Cunning Saggie. The name isn't noteworthy, but it's now seared in my brain for how long it took to fight. It was two levels above me and I went through three full art combos and not one, but two chain attacks. Two. I can't say how long the fight actually took since I didn't mark it, but at some point I realized this was taking forever and started a timer on my phone real quick and it took 2 minutes and 13 seconds from when I started the timer. Edit: And this was after I grabbed some instruments per a recommendation earlier, although all I have available at this stage is 0.8 regen per second. Edit #2: I also took a look at some random recorded streams of others playing the game, and hilariously the two streamers I checked out both apparently had the same idea, where they'll let the AI fight out the pointless forever battles and use the time to engage with their chat or call out subscribers. nessin fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 09:25
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chumbler posted:Pretty sure Cunning Saggie is a unique monster, which require significantly more to take out. You can tell if you're fighting one because the music is different. I didn't have the music turned on, but it didn't have the unique monster icon nor did it spawn a monument.
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Jan 8, 2018 09:58
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Is there some special element that looks exactly like Earth but isn't Earth? Several times I've found Art Combos that very clearly show an earth finisher and even though I have two earth blades in my party, neither one will show as able to do the third combo to finish it off despite the fact that they can do it with some other combos. It makes no sense and is driving me nuts.
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Jan 9, 2018 06:40
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Should I avoid burning through Merc missions when I've just got junk blades to work with, or are there enough repeatable missions down the road that it doesn't matter?
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Jan 9, 2018 20:55
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I will say that there are plenty of great voice actors in Japan, even more so just because the size of the industry there, but I think a lot of non-Japanese speakers get stuck in this stance that original/japanese voices always get a huge artificial bump in comparison to English voice overs. Plenty of English voice actors and voice work in games and anime dubs is great, fine, or at the least equal to the performance of the Japanese cast. Edit: I think part of it is just not knowing what's going on in the Japanese voice acting. So much of it sounds overly dramatic and exaggerated that you think it's emphasizing the moment perfectly. In reality, that's just the cultural norm in Japan and it's stupid/ridiculous in context if you follow the conversation. nessin fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 21:03
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Yeah, I know. Thanks for reminding me. But changing names from the Japanese names that wouldn't have meaning to English names with no meaning doesn't make sense. Why even bother? Homura to Pyra? That one completely makes sense, and the name they chose is a good indication of what the original name was supposed to tell you. Hikari to Mythra? Why didn't they stick with the pun about light, but sure, they picked some special-sounding name. Suzaku to Roc, I guess Roc works but now you're ditched the tie-in with the other blades. Byakko to Dromarch? What's a Dromarch mean? Sure, you might not know what a Byakko is, but you don't know what a loving Dromarch is either so why loving change it? Tell me the significance of the name "Pandoria" and how that actually relates to the character. Same deal with "Brighid." What does Brighid mean in English? Same with "Aegeon." They didn't take a Pokemon approach where all the Pokemon names were basically puns that don't translate very well and so they came up with appropriate English puns, they did that with maybe three characters and then just changed tons of names for the sake of it. Naming an entire cast around puns and not-so-subtle references to in-game traits/flaws/whatever is not much of a thing for Western audiences. At least no where near as much as it is for Japanese/Asian audiences. I agree that Pandoria is kind of stupid, but otherwise something like Dromarch or Brighid don't need meaning, they can just be a name, that's perfectly normal.
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Jan 9, 2018 21:29
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How in the world are you supposed to get Percival's gather 10 HP potions affinity? He's on Nia and I thought I'd be super easy to just play Nia with Percival while Rex can just Anchor Shot and drop potions like crazy. Except he never sticks on Pyra/Mythra for long and when I change his setup so he has only Pyra/Mythra, he never actually uses Anchor Shot. So I had the bright idea of bonding a couple normal healers to him and making him a healer. But now, like Nia, he insta-runs to any health potion he generates and easily beats me to htem unless they spawn perfectly. It's loving nuts.
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Jan 9, 2018 22:35
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So I'm fighting Mikhail and Patroka. They are a pretty easy and simple boss. Except they cast a ring of fire that your party will happily sit in. And MIkhail has a skill that has bugged out once and instead of doing a lot of damage to his target, it wiped my entire team from full health. And Patroka has bugged twice on the edge of the map making her unkillable. I do so enjoy starting a fight for the fifth time and only have one loss that was actually my fault, or even just luck of the draw. Edit: At least I didn't have to restart a sixth time. Although in the spirit of complaining about annoying Anime tropes, how about just watching people escape after being defeated? That gets used a lot in any story but anime writers seem to need to one up everyone by making it so there is intentionally no reason why they couldn't be stopped and having the heroes make no effort to actually stop them from getting away, they just do it. nessin fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jan 10, 2018 |
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Jan 10, 2018 00:08
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:The whole schtick of "we won the gameplay fight but the cutscene tells us that we lost" is also super annoying, especially considering this also happened all the time in the first game too and it's really weird to rely on the same super lazy narrative tactic over and over and over even across multiple games At least you occasionally get resolution here. You should play the Trails of Cold Steel (at least the first, I couldn't stomach to get far into the second) games if you really want to see what happens when an entire game is built on that concept.
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Jan 10, 2018 00:47
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multijoe posted:Monolith Soft should just hire one developer whose job it is to ask 'is this design decision needlessly frustrating, punitive or inscrutable?' and hit the responsible person on the head with a rolled up newspaper if it is. Every new game in the series seems to drop the worst cruft from the last but manages to replace it with a new selection of horrible, unnecessary bullshit, there's still alot to love in each game but trying to do anything approaching a full clear in them just gets more and more aggravating the deeper I get. It's pretty obvious the developers on this team are incapable of working out how they don't have to implement F2P mechanics in a fully priced game. I could defend a lot of bad design decisions in one way or another, but there is no defense for not having a quick blade swap option for challenges. For that matter, there isn't a defense for needing to swap blades at all, there is not point in the game for field arts being locked to just your active three blades. Although the true thing that takes the cake is the gachapon system, where you can skip the introduction animation for your new blade but not the core activation animation. No way such a small and simple thing yet so pervasive in the game would have made it all the way through to release unless they never played their own game without debug tools unless the concept of user friendliness is foreign to them. And to be clear, when I say F2P mechanics I mean the complex and frustrating menus, the lack of animation skips, and so on. The gacha system itself is one problem but the whole interface and user experiences screams lovely F2P game designed to frustrate the player into buying into premium services to avoid it.
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Jan 12, 2018 01:42
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Now that I'm in the final strech of the story, there are two critical things none of the "things to know before you play" people ever mentioned. 1) If you get attached to Agate, be prepared for a world of pain. Her final two tiers of the Affinity Chart require killing basically every unique monster in the Spirit area, where you're stuck only using level 1 special arts. I did it because I apparently like to torture myself, but holy gently caress that is nuts. 2) Actual real tip, it's worth taking the time early to filter your blades. Open up a bunch of common cores and save only those that have multiple ranks in their mastery and at least one other skill (level of other skill doesn't matter so much, but it always helps to be 2 or 3). It gets real lovely in the late game if you're stuck with a bunch of level 1 mastery blades because most of the rares dont' come with the mastery skill for their element and you'll often need to hold two or three to make up the rare only skills and trying to fit in another 5 or 6 blades of the right element can get dicey.
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Jan 13, 2018 05:31
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Ytlaya posted:You're not wrong about the bad writing and kind of dumb plot in XC2*, but lol if you think the writing in previous Xeno games was much better. There are a few things worse about XC2 like the character designs and a few of the characters' general characterization, but there really isn't a big difference overall. Not to hang the entire plot on a single cutscene but the end of the chapter where you visit Tantal cements this game as having some of the worst writing ever. Jin goes on an rant about his reasoning for trying to destroy the world is the greatest "how could someone have actually written this" moment in a game with a meaningful focus on a story that I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of corny, pathetic, and just plain poorly written expositions by a bad guy, but that one officially takes the top prize.
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Jan 13, 2018 05:47
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Ytlaya posted:*stuff* You're going well beyond the scope of what I was talking about. The story overall has some problems, but Jin's exposition specifically in that section is literally just Blades can't write or maintain an oral history, therefore humans must die.
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Jan 13, 2018 10:20
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Evil Fluffy posted:Tora lived through it on my run and then revived the other two party members. I think I was +/-1 level compared to the boss. I'm assuming I missed the attack completely. I had him prepped for a four orb combo attack and I saw a new attack name prop up on the screen, switched to my healer blade to heal, and then decided to not bother sitting through the attack animation of whatever was coming and just hit the combo to kill him.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:46
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bizarre deformity posted:I haven't played Xenoblade 1 in five years, can you give me more details? I don't remember who that person was. In that game Klaus was Bionis, and the scientist that tried to stop him in the XB2 cutscenes survived and became, Mechonis. The two titans that formed the game.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:47
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DLC Inc posted:yeah same, I was expecting when Azurda said "we're going into the breach" that they'd end up crossing dimensions and ending up in Shulk's world. At least that what I thought when the shot of all them agape appeared on screen. I wanted more callback to XC1 than Monado arts and Klaus ending up being a guy who was torn between this world and the Monado world. I even halfexpected Shulk to show up to help fight the pseudo-Mechon final boss. But oh well. I don't see how you get a connection between XC2 Klaus and XC1 Klaus. The fact that XC2 Klaus has part of his body in another universe doesn't really mesh with anything from XC1, it's probably either going to be Story DLC, tie in for a future game, or just another of the ridiculous devices put in to try and solve a story problem that doesn't exist (why Klaus is dying now) in this game.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:17
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CharlestheHammer posted:He...he states it directly. I had to look it up because I had no idea what you're talking about it. One generic and bland line cropped out of a game 8 years old is not really all that "clear". I thought that line was just background sound from Rex and friends.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:47
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 04:38 |
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CharlestheHammer posted:You....don't know what the characters you have played sound like. For one, yes. I'm not crazy enough to subject myself to the torture of 100 hours of that repetitive and grinding battle noise. For two, what does that have to do with anything? It was said in a long drawn out series of cutscenes and seemed like a generic battle cry from any JRPG played through a filter. I'm more disturbed that anyone actually bothered to recognize/remember it or have enough of an attention span remaining by that point to actually think it could have been more than what I thought it was.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:04
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