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Warning: heavy spoilers for both Xenoblade 2 and Xenogears It might just be an effect of ramping up the anime but the more I think about it the more I notice how XB2 draws on Xenogears more than the other Xenoblade games. While XB1 and XBX were light on flashbacks, pretty much everyone in XB2 gets one, including to a war 500 years ago that set everything up. (The Solaris/Shevat war takes place 500 years before the start of Xenogears, just like the Aegis war in XB2) There have been multiple cycles of ancient technology being excavated, re-purposed, and re-lost, dating back to a non-native (xeno) progenator civilization, whose forklifts are now one-of-a-kind battlefield-dominating superweapons. There's a character with multiple personalities (including a stronger merged personality), a mentor who witholds essential information for no good reason, a scarf-wearing artificial girl who grows up, and an impulsive but heroic exiled prince with an eyepatch. There's an evil church controlling the flow of gears/blades to two misguided warring nations. There's an immortal villain who wants to destroy the world after loosing the woman he loved in the war 500 years ago but turns good and sacrifices himself to save the heroes. There's a preserved modern city at the bottom of the ocean, a race of humans zombified as a byproduct of scientific experimentation, nanomachine bullshit, and cannibalism. There's even a line about how unsporting it is to end a fight by dropping a ship on someone. It really covers up the twist that Rex isn't anyone special and that he and Addam are both just good hearted randos who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
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Dec 13, 2017 03:08
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 05:58 |
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Pollyanna posted:How do you add more element orbs to a chain, anyway? I only ever end up with the one. The third element in a blade combo determines what color the orb is (and what is sealed), and you can have one of each color. Here's a cheat sheet arranged by end color: Fire -> Fire -> Fire Fire -> Water -> Fire Light -> Electric -> Fire Light -> Light -> Water Electric -> Electric -> Water Water -> Water -> Water Fire -> Water -> Ice Wind -> Ice -> Ice Electric -> Fire -> Ice Water -> Earth -> Wind Ice -> Water -> Wind Electric -> Fire -> Wind Earth -> Fire -> Wind Ice -> Ice -> Earth Wind -> Wind -> Earth Earth -> Fire -> Earth Dark -> Dark -> Earth Wind -> Wind -> Electric Earth -> Earth -> Electric Dark -> Light -> Electric Fire -> Fire -> Light Light -> Light -> Light Water -> Water -> Dark Ice -> Ice -> Dark Dark -> Dark -> Dark Fire: Seal Self-Destruct Water: Seal Stench Ice: Seal Shackle Blade Wind: Seal Blowdown Electric: Seal Back Attack Light: Seal Affinity Down Dark: Seal Reinforcements \/\/\/ It's worth noting that driver art cancelling is basically the "defensive offense" of Xenoblade and should be everyone's first goal. It lets you cancel driver arts into other arts, so 1. You get more action economy because you can go autoattack -> art -> art -> art instead of autoattack -> art -> wait -> autoattack -> art -> wait ... 2. You build more special because you can chain all three arts off the third autoattack, which grants the most special Remember that you can also cancel into driver changing and into special arts. By combining this, you can go from requiring all three party members aligning to pull off a combo to being able to do it solo. Microcline fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 03:34
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They made a system where getting hits from the Skinner box is a fundamentally unpleasant experience where you think "I'm going to have to sit through that cutscene again and possibly have to sort through a bunch of procedurally generated abilities". It's a system that makes you worry that your choices are permanently screwing up your builds while at the same time your choices don't actually matter because who gets what is entirely random. Generic blades can be more powerful than uniques but dealing with them means sorting through reams of computer-generated nonsense. How to fix the gameplay in Xenoblade 2: 1. There's now a finite number of blades: the ~30 uniques and a generic for each of the 7 weapons/elements. Core crystals now all come from quests. Some of them are fixed while others are still random. 2. All blades other than each character's default (Pyra, Dromach...) are held in a common pool and can be assigned to any driver. This could be fluffed as them all being equipped to Rex and being transferred through Aegis bullshit. It would also explain why no one else ever uses more than one blade, what the blades are doing on merc missions, and cover up that Vandam dies. 3. All blades count for skill checks regardless of whether they're equipped (no more skill tetris) 4. Merc missions only take three blades but give twice the reward (less micromanagement, easier to focus up a single blade) 5. Core chips are gone (it's just a tax on switching blades), and what blades are equipped to a driver and what aux chips they use are now handled via a single character equip screen like Blade1 Aux1 Aux2 Blade2 Aux1 Aux2 Blade3 Aux1 Aux2
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Dec 16, 2017 22:19
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Zoran posted:Because in many cases the localization conveys the intended meaning of the original name (or a suitably analogous reference) to a non-weeaboo audience? Like "Homura" doesn't mean anything to me, but "Pyra" definitely means "fire." Or sometimes the changes tie in with the choice of local accents on the different Titans. "Mor Ardain" comes from the Scots Gaelic word for pride. The localization is a mixed bag. Many of them, like Kagatsuchi -> Brighid, are arguably better than the original. With some of them, like Seiryu/Byakko/Suzaku/Genbu -> Azurda/Dromach/Roc/Genbu there's really no good option because there's no equivalent western concept. Then you have things like Grail -> Aegis. The grail is immediately recognizable to a western player as something that 1. Is an artifact of immense power with links to the creator and ender of the world 2. Is repeatedly found, hidden, and lost again 3. Has bands of knights (drivers) questing and fighting each other for it 4. Is sometimes a girl (Takahashi has used the Rennes-le-Château hoax as inspiration before) It only makes sense if you need to cut references to Christianity, but this is a Xeno game so people are disappointed when you don't have cutscene Jesus or a shadowy figure talking about the -time- of the -gospel-.
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Dec 17, 2017 00:03
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Valliantstu posted:I love how the game tries to get you to sympathize with the genocidal mass murderers. Chapter 9 spoilers Like, near the end of the game all the torna backstories and the sad music and all I could think when Akhos and that patroika bit it was, "loving finally." I just realized it because it's a really goofy theme but all of the Xeno games seem to imply that every hero, no matter how messianic, is one dead girlfriend away from genocidal mania.
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Dec 17, 2017 00:58
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Neither points are things that wouldn't be in the game's manual if it had one. Other things that would be in the manual:  That's 20 hours of tutorials on one page.
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Dec 18, 2017 07:35
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Zore posted:I mean honestly I'm not a huge fan of Mythra since Nia fits that role way better. I kind of feel the same way about Pyra. Like if Mythra is a one-note cliche, Pyra is a blank character template. Denying the usual Jekyll and Hyde relationship could be an interesting twist but it's not set up beforehand and doesn't go anywhere afterwards. I'd also bring up the Oedipal undertones but after Xenogears I can't really complain about that.
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Dec 21, 2017 05:43
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Chaosfirev posted:If we're being frank about characters Nia is the only one who had an actual character arc, everyone else finished the story almost exactly as they started. I focus on character interactions in any game I play so it wasn't a huge deal for me but the only things that really change are how the characters interact with each other. I wouldn't classify it as a static/dynamic character thing. I love that Rex manages to answer every "deep" philosophical question in an internally consistent way with rhyming aphorisms about friendship, and how Zeke's heart-to-hearts gradually reveal that he's got a lot of wisdom and maturity under his goofball exterior. Pyra/Mythra just feels like a waste of the deuteragonist slot compared to the other party members.
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Dec 21, 2017 06:39
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kirbysuperstar posted:It's a Xeno game. Having an unfinished junk-rear end story is par for the course. There's a difference between having a second half with some dungeons that have been conspicuously left out and not having a second half at all. When XBX came out I appreciated it for being willing to lean in to the potential of open world games. That's been subsequently vindicated by Breath of the Wild, which expanded all of XBX's good points, but while that validates my opinion of XBX it makes me less likely to recommend that anyone play it.
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Mar 1, 2018 05:05
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Zopotantor posted:The worst are the ones that go, "travel to X and talk to Y. OK, now go back to exactly where you came from and talk to Z again." You forgot the step where you need to wait 45 minutes for a merc mission to complete
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Mar 24, 2018 09:23
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Ytlaya posted:The pairing of Pyra/Mythra with Rex always really bugged me largely because Rex is not only a teenager, but a pretty young teenager who looks and acts his age. It would be a little easier to stomach if Rex were 18 or otherwise looked like something remotely approaching adulthood (or if Pyra/Mythra looked closer to Rex's age), but the guy looks like he just started puberty last year. Shulk is an obvious counter example as a character who is a teenager but doesn't look so young that it's off-putting/weird to have him involved in a romance. Tetsuya Takahashi's ideal woman is his mom and this this has been subtext since Xenogears, where it was text.
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Jun 24, 2018 04:51
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multijoe posted:It takes place on a world designed to be traversed by giant robots, but you don't get the giant robots until about 30 hours in so for the first third of the game you feel like this insignificant ant exploring this gigantic world which utterly dwarfs you in every respect. Then you get the giant robots and you have to buy insurance not to lose all your poo poo when you die and win every fight by alpha striking with all your best weapons (which you have to farm for) and hoping that's enough to burn the enemy down before it voids your machine's warranty. XBX is kind of like a proto Breath of the Wild in that BotW keeps the core idea of climbing up cliffs to go where you're not supposed to go but has content to populate the world, a combat system that isn't absolute rear end, and a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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Jul 20, 2018 23:05
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Amppelix posted:It works for most, in fact all, of the main game up to the final boss just fine. It's only when you start reaching levels 80 and beyond and/or really optimizing your team for damage output that the aggro can't keep up. XB2 probably has the worst system around its DPS/tank/healer system in that for the most part its balanced around having each one play a rigid role, with the DPS dealing almost all of the damage, the tank taking almost all of the hits (as everyone else is extremely fragile), and a dedicated healer being expected (while in XB1 it was quarantined to Sharla and XBX realized dedicated healers weren't fun). XB1 was overall pretty well though out/balanced in terms of how your character might speed up damage for a short time to take aggro from Reyn (so you can take a few hits if he's looking bad) or Fiora (if she's built up too much and you need to buy some time while the tank's aggro generation gets back on track). I'd put XB2's gameplay problems down to 1. Dedicated healers (don't do this) 2. A massive number of unexplained or poorly explained mechanics that range from irrelevant to game changing 3. As the lack of QoL demonstrates the game was shipped in pretty much open beta with no balancing
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Oct 19, 2018 03:32
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U-DO Burger posted:The whole DLC makes me think of all the scenes from 500 years ago from Xenogears so much. Especially the campfire scene in XG. I wish they could just revisit XG someday This is definitely Takahashi's most 'gears influenced Xenoblade game, possibly even more so than Xenosaga. I did a post about the explicit links around when it came out, including the fact that both the Solaris/Shevat war and the Aegis war took place 500 years before the main game. I'm about 75% through Torna and it's incredibly good in a way that makes it painful to think about the game XB2 could have been if it was finished. It also gives me a lot of hope for their next project because it identifies and addresses almost every complaint about it and fixes it without introducing a bunch of new issues.
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Oct 31, 2018 09:17
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So I finished the expansion. I guess my first thought is that it's fairly obvious that this was supposed to be part of the main game, to the point that Takahashi has said it was originally supposed to be between chapters 7 and 8 when the party falls into the Great Void at the base of the World Tree. The worst part is that this is the first case where the game being blatantly unfinished isn't Takahashi's fault as he was working with less than half the staff and development time of XBX. As a DLC it's packed with filler and isn't paced with the main game. It also has the disadvantage that there's less room for things to happen "off-screen". The main game's dying earth setting is supported by the idea that the Aegis War was an incomprehensably vast conflict that sank more titans than are alive today and where weapons like the Tornan warship were ordinary. It provides a ton of stuff that re-contextualizes the main game, from essential (how Jin went from a hero who fought Malos to someone who broadly agrees with his opinions of humanity and why Mythra is so afraid of her own power) to fun (how Zeke isn't someone who's trying to be a hero like Addam and messing it up by being a scenery chewing goofball but a hero who is like Addam because he's a scenery chewing goofball). I also find it funny how Mythra viewing Addam as a father figure adds an Electra complex element that makes Rex's relationship with Pyra/Mythra into a Freudian combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. The other thing I noticed immediately is how the DLC treats blades. The main game is constantly undermining it's own point by treating blades as a harem of expendible pokemon. The DLC treats it more like two people being joined at the hip for life. No one ever disappears into a pokeball, blades and drivers take turns fighting, and everyone takes part in crafting (Lora even says something like "no one has to shoulder all the burden"). There's also a morbid enjoyment in reading the DLC as a 20 hour long joke about winning the battle but losing in the cutscene.
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Nov 3, 2018 02:23
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I recall reading somewhere that big Japanese games selling more in the US than in Japan is starting to be the new normal (and IIRC it was the case with the original Xenoblade as well). Xenoblade 2 had a marketing push, a solid base of old and new fans, and was on an extremely popular console so it doesn't surprise me it's their best selling game. In North America the original only got two small retailer-specific print runs (that sold out almost immediately) with no fanfare and while XBX had an actual marketing budget and a release day it was a weird half-game on a stillborn console. The numbers I can find seem to be around 1.3 million at one year after launch, which is a bit above what Xenogears sold at the same time (1.2 million).
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Nov 20, 2018 10:14
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My thoughts in order 1. It's better than the original 2. It's like when they put a shirt on Vaan and it improved his character 100% 3. Chumbler is right that it's a little too much black and that kind of shows it's a kludge. The light-and-shadow effect is good but it'd be perfect if she had more of a skirt. That would fix that her outfit is in an awkward place between a leotard and a skirt (making the original design look like she's just wearing a shirt and no pants) and make white the dominant color again.
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Nov 26, 2018 17:26
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Momomo posted:They went about fixing her design in the laziest possible way since it looks like they literally just colored her legs black. This could look better if they had actually bothered to put some of her design elements into it. It's for the best. At a certain point you need to put down the pen and be satisfied with the number of glowing panels and Gundam spikes on your character and most blades are already two designs worth of accessorizing beyond that point.
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Nov 26, 2018 20:42
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Yeah but they can also be sympathetic and right. Jin was basically right, but him wanting to kill all humans just seemed like the writing team didn't know how to make you want to stop him when his core argument is totally solid. Amalthus is kind of a sideshow who was never able to acknowledge that in awakening the Aegis and exposing it to the evil in his heart he created something larger than himself. Malos is a much more appropriate final boss because he represents a "dark" version of the protagonist in that he's as wholeheartedly devoted to being a big stupid villain as Rex is to being a big stupid hero (similar to how Jin is a kind of tragic "fallen" version of the hero). U-DO Burger posted:lol remember in xenogears when fei and elly are like 'i guess krelian really was a decent guy deep down' after he got exactly what he wanted after killing all of humanity save for like a hundred people? this poo poo's par for the course It comes with the territory when every main character is some degree of "literally Jesus Christ"
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Dec 20, 2018 07:03
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ThisIsACoolGuy posted:I feel like I missed the conversation but throwing it out there that I think Ahkos has the worst writing in the game to the point I don't think they ever had a plan for him. When you first meet him he's holding a kid hostage and talking about how he's going to chop off her fingers as a warning and is super sadistic. He talks in stage play format as a gimmick and feels cornball anime. Yeah he's the smug baby of HB and Wilhelm except he doesn't have the legitimate superiority of HB or the intricate scheming of Wilhelm to back up the talk. I could get him being an act 1 jobber, but we're supposed to think he's relevant for the whole game. I could get him being a part of the whole of Torna as "the brains of the operation", but Torna is mostly a smash-and-grab operation run by a charismatic but uncomplicated brute. Akhos shows up, loses a fight, kicks Rex around in a cutscene for a bit, then loses to some new protagonist superpower he didn't anticipate. If you want to call yourself a "mastermind" in a Xeno game you should be fought once (if at all) at the end of the game and your last words should be about how you completed your plan anyway.
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Dec 28, 2018 01:58
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SettingSun posted:What the hell is up with this mandatory fight to open this giant door in the Abandoned Factory when you only have Rex and Nia. These things kill me dead in just a few hits even when I outlevel them with tank Blades equipped. Nia just couldn’t heal fast enough. This pissed me off enough to lower the difficulty to nothing so I could steamroll them. It's a section where your options are 2-character combat or stealth in a game where the mechanics fundamentally don't support combat with less than 3 characters or stealth.
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Jan 5, 2019 07:25
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CharlestheHammer posted:I think people get confused on what writing is. Very, very few games actually try and reconcile gameplay and story and to an extent it’s kind of impossible. You can combine the two to a degree but there will always be a disconnect. I don't quite get what you're arguing here. Is reconciliation similarly impossible between all artistic elements of a game? If not, what makes the writing special?
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Jan 18, 2019 02:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:I don’t get what your saying, what artistic elements are you talking about here. Could you give an example as I can’t come up one that would even cause contradictions. Imagine we took all the music and mixed up when it played. So you're walking through town to a gratuitous church-organ-and-electric-guitar theme, watching a comedy scene while the comfy inn music plays, or fighting the final boss to the wacky antics music. There'd be pretty big contradictions between what's being evoked by the gameplay and writing and what's being evoked by the music. If a skilled designer can harmonize elements like game mechanics, visual art, animation, and music I don't see why they can't incorporate writing.
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Jan 18, 2019 06:26
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 05:58 |
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Rex gets launch with greateaxes and a unique (spoiler) blade Nia gets launch with fists Tora gets launch with his third blade Zeke gets launch with his default weapon (Pandoria) and shield hammers Overall launch is sort of a bottleneck and I think the random blade system kind of screwed with how driver combos are balanced. XB1 and Torna did it a lot better by giving everyone a few defined pieces of the puzzle.
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Feb 11, 2019 07:22
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