Xenoblade - New Monolith RPG for Wii

Got game + classic controller. It's been a while since I've played a proper JRPG. Excited!

AUs_TBirD wrote:

As I don't have the game in my hands atm, and probably not for quite a while (sent to my US address), here's a dumb question:

Everyone's talking about classic controller vs. Wiimote & Nunchuck. I'm guessing this means no Gamecube controller support? In other words, do I have to pony up for a classic in addition to my incredibly-rare full price purchase of a game?

Back of the box does not show a Gamecube controller.

Well it's interesting to see that despite not having the best graphics, someone took the time to make sure Sharla had adequate... um... physics?

You can't even rotate the character model on the equip screen without a whole lotta bouncin goin on.

Just ordered this from the Nintendo store, and ordered a classic controller from Amazon. Hopefully it will arrive in a couple days.

Stele wrote:

Well it's interesting to see that despite not having the best graphics, someone took the time to make sure Sharla had adequate... um... physics?

You can't even rotate the character model on the equip screen without a whole lotta bouncin goin on. :lol:

It compliments the extremely classy 'bikini armour' you'll find for the female characters fairly early on

Haha yeah I saw that bikini armor in the store before Fiora had joined my party but I don't think I had enough cash for it until after she had left the party. Apparently there's some higher level bikinis out there with great stats. Fun times.

Yes, apparently in this world swimwear is an incredibly popular alternative to armor.

(Men can wear it too, by the way, so if you'd like to see your dudes running around shirtless in your cutscenes, that's totally an option. :P)

Oh yeah I got a "swimming oil" shirt drop and "swim trunks" or something for pants. Didn't try them on yet. They seemed to have very high ether protection but not as much physical, which at least makes some sense.

I applaud equal opportunity cheesecake.

I'm a bit over ten hours into the game and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I'm having some fits as I try to tune my tv settings to get the best picture and reduce the jaggies, but it's still a good looking game regardless.

One question I have in case someone has figured out an option I haven't seen. Is there a quick way to remove gems from equipment from the inventory screen? When I'm in the field and find an upgrade I'll swap the equip slot to the new gear and the old one will retain the gems (especially if the new gear is a "U"). It then becomes a bit of a pain when comparing gear later since you can't really tell exactly how much a gem affects a specific stat. I know the game removes them when you sell the equipment, but I'd like to remove the gems from the inventory screen if possible so I don't have to re-equip the gear.

Really looking forward to starting this tomorrow. With PAX I've had no time at all to actually play games, and everything I see and hear makes me want to do just that.

Any tips on stuff you wish you knew when you started?

sithcundman wrote:

One question I have in case someone has figured out an option I haven't seen. Is there a quick way to remove gems from equipment from the inventory screen? When I'm in the field and find an upgrade I'll swap the equip slot to the new gear and the old one will retain the gems (especially if the new gear is a "U"). It then becomes a bit of a pain when comparing gear later since you can't really tell exactly how much a gem affects a specific stat. I know the game removes them when you sell the equipment, but I'd like to remove the gems from the inventory screen if possible so I don't have to re-equip the gear.

Pretty sure that ZR button removes equipment or gems from the main equip menu.

A little over 11 hours myself, but I think I got a little too caught up in side-questing and filling the map. I spent a lot of time in Bionis' Leg zone, did a bunch of sidequests the Refugee Colony, and am up to level 21 or so, but still haven't done the next story quest to enter Colony 6.

Damn this game is fun though. So much to explore and do. So many named (and unnamed) NPCs. A ludicrous amount of sidequest, affinity, and trading opportunities so far. :shocK:

Also got a very cool achievement back in Colony 9, near the caves...

Spoiler:

jump off the highest point by the cave exit, into the water below. :cool:

Stele wrote:
sithcundman wrote:

One question I have in case someone has figured out an option I haven't seen. Is there a quick way to remove gems from equipment from the inventory screen?

Pretty sure that ZR button removes equipment or gems from the main equip menu.

A little over 11 hours myself, but I think I got a little too caught up in side-questing and filling the map. I spent a lot of time in Bionis' Leg zone, did a bunch of sidequests the Refugee Colony, and am up to level 21 or so, but still haven't done the next story quest to enter Colony 6.

Damn this game is fun though. So much to explore and do. So many named (and unnamed) NPCs. A ludicrous amount of sidequest, affinity, and trading opportunities so far. :shocK:

Also got a very cool achievement back in Colony 9, near the caves...

Spoiler:

jump off the highest point by the cave exit, into the water below. :cool:

Yeah, I knew about ZR in the equip menu. I'm hoping there's a way in the inventory so I don't have to equip an item just to remove gems. I'm just getting used to stripping gear before replacing it. Not a big deal, but would be helpful to have the option.

I'm in the same boat as far as getting caught up in side quests. I'm still in Colony 9 wrapping up side quests and filling out the affinity chart. As soon as I think I've filled it out a bit a new person pops up. This is a crazy amount of content. I think I'm just going to push on with the main quest soon just to see what cool new environments and critters will be at the knee.

Well I'm usually not replacing something that has a slot unless the new piece has a slot too. Then I just switch it over immediately.

You can see and equip gems that are already equipped in other items from the gem equip screen. They're the ones with the black E on it. So not sure why you need to strip the gems in the first place. If you sell it, the gems are stripped. If you need to equip them in a new gem slot, they are there, easily selectable.

I'm around the 14 hour mark and feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this. Like others have pointed out there's just so much to do, it's crazy. Very much reminds me of the Level 5 games in their prime (Dark Cloud 2 and Dragon Quest VII). Love the combat system, it's fairly simple but highly engaging. Really like all the positional stuff as it keeps you moving around. Also love how they handle the open worldness of it all; quick travel between landmarks is awesome and once enemies are far enough below you in level they'll ignore you unless you attack... so good. Plus there's no penalty for death so the game encourages you to explore, which is great as the environments have been massive and very interesting.

Somehow I need to strike a balance between completing side quests and focusing on the main storyline. The completionist in me is really struggling with that, though I do wish the quest log was easier to browse through and it'd be really nice if it would at least highlight general areas on the map where your quest targets are. It'd be nice to have the quests in context with the map.

I've barely touched gem crafting and the "seeing the future" mechanic during battles still has me a bit confused, but slowly things are falling into place. If the game can keep up this pace it will be on track to be one of my all-time favorite RPGs. It really is everything I wanted White Knight Chronicles to be.

Blind_Evil wrote:

Really looking forward to starting this tomorrow. With PAX I've had no time at all to actually play games, and everything I see and hear makes me want to do just that.

Same here. Just picked up my copy about 45 minutes ago when I left the office to get lunch. Can't freaking wait to drop it into the Wii tonight.

Wow. So I snuck in a couple more hours today. Now maybe 13-14 hours in, level 26 or so... and finished with the Ether Mines boss fight and following cutscenes...

Apparently that was just the prelude to the real game.

Seriously, now I have an extended 4-person party finally, so I can actually choose who to fight with. There was an amazing scene I just witnessed where the Monado showed Shulk a dozen visions of the future... characters and zones I haven't even ventured into yet. Some new characters and races were just introduced in the other post-boss scenes. I have tons of crafting to do after all the mining I just did. Character affinity is growing, so I need to go back and watch some heart-to-hearts. Tons of stuff to do at this point, and it seems I just barely scratched the surface of the story. Wow!

Cannot imagine how huge the rest of this game must be. Loving it.

You heard it here first: Xenoblade has a 13-15 hour tutorial. Raspberry of the Year.

Cannot imagine how huge the rest of this game must be. Loving it.

It is a big ass game. On two different occasions (so far) I've thought I must be approaching the final act, only to realize I was probably a lot closer to the middle than the end.

Only now, at over 100 hours in, am I comfortable making that declaration again. We'll see how that actually goes, though. (At this point I'm only playing a few hours a week though, so the final report might still be a little while off.)

ClockworkHouse wrote:

You heard it here first: Xenoblade has a 13-15 hour tutorial. Raspberry of the Year.

Don't start clocking.

I wasn't saying the last 10+ hours haven't been awesome. Exploring each new huge zone felt great. Just read my post a few up on this page about my first 11 hours being a blast. Now it's just even more awesome finding out that I've barely scratched the surface.

Really contrasts with the 3 zones/dungeons that sorta make 6 "dungeons" of Skyward Sword recently. Instead of the cool flying thing and feeling like you were in a huge world, Xenoblade is actually a huge world.

About 5 hours in and the story is really starting to grab me. It's going to be hard trying to avoid the story and complete side quests/mess around in the huge-ass world.

And it seems this game has absolutely no problem killing off characters

Stele wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

You heard it here first: Xenoblade has a 13-15 hour tutorial. Raspberry of the Year.

Don't start clocking. ;)

It was a joke about the "30 hour tutorial!" meme that sprang up around Final Fantasy XIII.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Stele wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

You heard it here first: Xenoblade has a 13-15 hour tutorial. Raspberry of the Year.

Don't start clocking. ;)

It was a joke about the "30 hour tutorial!" meme that sprang up around Final Fantasy XIII.

Subjectively speaking, the first 13-15 hours of Xenoblade didn't actually feel like a tutorial (with a few exceptions involving Monado abilities, I felt like the tutorial phase was over well before then when the traditional "heroes set out on their adventure" portion begins), whereas those complaints about FFXIII feel much more legitimate, especially in comparison to how quickly they give you access to the full game systems in FFXIII-2.

Started playing last night and didn't get very far before I started to crash from post-PAX exhaustion. Completely agree about the texture issues, but it's ok since I wasn't expecting anything phenomenal in that department. Worst case is the game looks like a long-lost PS2 game which I have no problem with.

Will need to order a classic controller pro though. Playing with the wiimote + nunchuk just felt weird.

shoptroll wrote:

Started playing last night and didn't get very far before I started to crash from post-PAX exhaustion. Completely agree about the texture issues, but it's ok since I wasn't expecting anything phenomenal in that department. Worst case is the game looks like a long-lost PS2 game which I have no problem with.

Will need to order a classic controller pro though. Playing with the wiimote + nunchuk just felt weird.

I picked up a Classic Controller yesterday and it feels much better than wiimote + nunchuck. I did have to change the X/Y sensitivity though, it's way too sluggish on normal

Up to 6.5 hours in now. Got through the first major story event, and the game wants me to go off to the next town. Unfortunately, I developed a tic from having uncompleted quests in my journal, so I spent a while running around and polishing most of those off. I think I have two or three kill/collect quests for a token reward that I think I'm going to leave because I don't feel like finding the mobs to kill for them.

Also got the gem crafting unlocked. Am I right in that once you've picked your ingredients and two crafters, you just wait and see what pops out? I crafted a bunch of lvl I gems, which was cool. Jacked the "main" dude's agility way up, and tossed a bunch of HP/defense increasing stuff on the tank.

This game is totally the real deal.

MadcapLaugher wrote:

I did have to change the X/Y sensitivity though, it's way too sluggish on normal

Definitely with you on that.

This game, though. For the first 20 minutes I was getting what I expected. Then I found the jump button, accidentally jumped off of the starting area, and discovered just how open-ended the game seems. I'm super excited.

I guess I forgot that a lot of actual Xenogears developers formed Monolithsoft, because I'm surprised at how compelling the collectibles are and how explorable (not a word, is it?) the world feels. Kudos!

I went back to colony 9 a bit last night just to do some gem crafting and accidentally found a few new people that I hadn't before somehow, and several new quests. Did some of those and my colony 9 affinity has now went to 2 stars.

But it already feels like I've done a ton of stuff there in my 18 hours or whatever of playing. But somehow you can get affinity up to 5 stars, right? I also swam around a bit for the hell of it to fully reveal the colony 9 map. Found several higher level things, lots of red. So I guess there will be more quests as I get higher levels and return. Wow.

So much to do... think I'll head back to the story when I play this afternoon. But holy crap there is a ton of sidequests.

Chaz wrote:

Also got the gem crafting unlocked. Am I right in that once you've picked your ingredients and two crafters, you just wait and see what pops out? I crafted a bunch of lvl I gems, which was cool. Jacked the "main" dude's agility way up, and tossed a bunch of HP/defense increasing stuff on the tank.

Yeah there's nothing you can interact with once you've chosen your crafters. Pressing A just speeds up the animation. It's random based on their affinity for how many turns they will craft. And then there's a random chance of the other person in the party jumping in with bonus flame or something. You're not going to have a ton of success until you get a better affinity with at least 2 characters and can get more than 10-15 turns.

Quick crafting stuff I've read/seen:
Getting 100% makes the same rank gem.
Getting 200% makes one higher rank gem.
Getting 300% makes two higher rank gems.
Any stat not 100% you can take out as a cylinder to use in another crafting. Some pairs can let you recover 2, 3, or more cylinders instead of just 1.
You can combine two materials to like 70-80% and start crafting with team with low affinity to just craft a cylinder around 90%, to then use in your next crafting, to have a better shot at 200/300.

And it doesn't seem to be worth crafting when you first get it. Wait until you have better party affinity. You get a lot of gem rewards from quests, and from completing the collections, usually enough to fill your armor. And by the time you can finally get more than 10 turns you should have a ton of rank 2 materials.

I'm at that point now, where Shulk/Reyn gets 9/14 turns, and I have 2 pages of rank 2 materials, which I can usually craft into some rank 3 gems. But they're still got good enough to get the rank 1 stuff up to 300% for rank 3, so I actually sold off all my rank 1 materials last night and am just working on the rank 2 stuff to get it to rank 3 gems. And I have way more than enough rank 2 gems for all 4 party members right now. Lots of extra unslotted stuff at this point.

I just want to say I hate you all.

According to Nintendo my game will be delivered Friday. I ordered it months ago but apparently they didn't even want to ship to individuals until Monday - and then they used the slowest shipping possible.