100 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – Climb every mountain, ford every stream (spoilers)

IIRC I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 around the 100-hour mark. I killed the boss, did some perfunctory extra exploration and that was it. There was a lot I didn’t like that about that game (and a lot I did), but the biggest was having the map filled in for me already so there were no fun moments trying to fill in every inch of a map and discovering fun new things along the way. I certainly didn’t spend an entire playing session swimming along the edges of an ocean in XC2 like I did in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 last night. Good times. I just need one more dead body to get Colony 15’s affinity up one star so I was scouring the map for corpses. Luckily there was no one around at 2am to hear me muttering “Here, dead body dead body dead body♪” to myself.

What have I been up to in the 45 hours since my last post on XC3? Oh you know, same old, same old. Play the story a little, explore a LOT, play the story a little. I asked for more stages in an earlier post and so far XC3 has delivered in a big way. We’ve had the jungle, we’ve had the ocean, now a big ol’ snowfield just opened up for me to prance about in. This is the way!

I’ve even shelved Genshin Impact‘s Sumeru update for now. I’ll need it to sustain me when I’m done with Xenoblade and start feeling the need… the need to… uh, what rhymes with “need” and means “explore every pixel of a game world”? Anyway, that.

But it’s not all exploring, I have made some progress with the story. Just a little, not too much. I learned my lesson from XC2 where I beat the last boss too quickly and lost the will to play, so the last boss here is gonna be waiting for me for a long, long time. The world and its timeline are a little unclear right now but evidently the baddie has been hanging out in a movie theater for aeons and aeons. Another 100 hours won’t hurt.

NGL that meat looks hella good, whatever it is.

To gather my thoughts on the story further… we got away with our stupid plan from last time. We finally reached the City we were aiming for and my party found out and easily accepted how humanity was supposed to live all along, i.e. growing up, having kids, getting old and dying, instead of living for 10 years and returning to the “Queen.” Who is a robot btw. The real queens are snoozing elsewhere and my current goal is to go wake them up.

Lessee, what else happened… oh yeah, there was another crazy hare-brained scheme of waltzing into the enemy camp. Lots of shenanigans and a couple of skipped cutscenes later, and Mio has a new body! So we don’t need to worry about her croaking for a while. Turns out Alter Noah is “Noah who made some bad choices in the past” and Alter Mio is “Mio who is suffering from Noah’s bad choices” and somehow present Noah and present Mio are in love because they have always been attracted to each other for aeons and aeons of repeated trial and failure to either kill the big bad (Z) or escape their short lifespans.

Oh they’re definitely expecting you. Y’all ain’t slick.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I hate the kind of romance where people are in love just because they are “soul mates” or their past selves were in love so somehow they also have to be in love. It’s so lazy, and I absolutely don’t see the romantic attraction between Mio and Noah beyond “the story says so.” They’re more like good off-seer buddies than anything else. I’d buy Lanz x Sena before I bought that (actually I quite like Lanz x Sena). But not Eunie x Taion, no matter how much the writers try to force it. That said, the last thing I’m playing Xenoblade 3 for is romance, so as long as they keep the new areas flowing, I’ll overlook the nonsense.

Oh yeah btw, did you shed a tear or two when Mwamba, Cammuravi or Ethel kicked the bucket? Better get a refund on those tears, because they’re all revived later. …What? It says “spoilers” right in the title of this post. All things considered, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a rather optimistic game, which is why my party can keep carrying out stupid plans without getting flattened to a paste. Or, possibly, in other timelines they did get flattened but I happen to be playing the one timeline where everything goes swimmingly. It’s all kind of vague right now, but it should get clearer as I keep playing.

Time’s a-wasting, back into the fray!

What I’m playing at the end of summer 2022

You tell ’em, Manana!

Summertime blues~ Let’s round up all the games I’m playing/want to play/should be playing right now.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – It came, I’m playing it and I’m taking my sweeeeet time about it. I’m supposed to be doing [important spoiler mission] right now, but it can wait while I explore vast areas of nothingness. If you’ve ever complained about an open world game having large, empty spaces just for the sake of having space, you can blame gamers like me. 70 hours and counting, will probably update around the 80-hour mark, once I finish [important spoiler mission that will surely move the plot forward but is not so important that I can’t dilly-dally for 20 hours first].

Love Nikki – I think my wardrobe percentage hit about 30% recently, and I’ve crafted almost all of the Evolution and chapter suits. I’m now turning my attention to others, especially low diamond-consumption ones like Pragya Princess. Normally I would complain about the uselessness of Momo’s guide feature in suggesting suits to craft (it suggests recolors, then once you color them it suggests you recolor them back) but it’s pointless because the publishers don’t seem to care about QoL. There are some welfare suits and a housing pavilion coming up in the next couple of weeks, so I’m looking forward to that and having a pretty good time.

Shining Nikki – Dropped it at the beginning of the year and picked it up again for the first anniversary, which did not disappoint. Gifts and giveaways out the wazoo and a powerful UR Cool suit with a powerful (but hideous, seriously) outfit, and I enjoyed reading the story in a sadistic kind of way. Plus since I hadn’t played in so long, I had plenty of main story quests to catch up with, so that kept me busy for a while. Right now I’m bored again, so I’m thinking of uninstalling for a while until Nikki’s birthday in December when there’s sure to be more good stuff.

Genshin Impact – Sumeru released at last! This will merit its own post once I’ve had a chance to explore a little more and once I’ve finished the archon quest. Huge map is HUGE, and this is only 50% of its true power! (smashes scouter) Ideally I’d like to write after I’ve gotten Lesser Lord Kusanali, because it is my mission to collect all the archons. But since no one knows when she’s coming out, I’ll play a little longer and write some quick thoughts.

Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia – Dropped it. I was kind of enjoying it at first, and the game is RIDICULOUSLY generous, possibly even topping Romancing Saga Re; Universe, but they lost me with the fiddly Force and Shinryu era. I hate gimmicky battle systems. I’ll probably write more about it if I do a “Games I dropped this year” post at the end of the year, because I did play for quite a while.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius – Speaking of gimmicky battle systems, look what we have here. The battles themselves are very straightforward, and I’ve been auto-ing my way through most of them. But I can tell things are going to get complicated with the sheer number of support skills every character has. Skills to reduce damage, skills to buff others, skills to infuse elements, skills to trigger other skills, etc etc. I’ve been around the block a few times, I know how this goes. Love the ridiculously huge numbers, though. 10,856,234,909 in a single turn, anyone?

I was enjoying the story too until they introduced the “obligatory amnesiac mystery girl whose name starts with F” and then the main character’s friend started going all broody and moody on us. Urghh… Currently playing to collect all the 6th anniversary rewards and any compensation given for the Facebook login issues the game is currently facing. After that, I’ll uninstall it until I have more time for theorycrafting and grinding.

Tower of Fantasy – Played for about two weeks after it launched but it kept crashing, especially when I had to do anything multiplayer like Joint Operations. I kind of wanted to get into it so I’d have a “standby game” whenever I was bored/not feeling Genshin Impact, but the technical troubles were too many and the game wasn’t good enough to make me want to overcome them.

Undernauts and Tokyo Xanadu eX+ – On hold because my computer has been taken hostage by Sumeru. Once the excitement wears off and GI gets stale again (and it always does), I’ll get back to them, or maybe start something new.

Epic Seven – No, I haven’t gone back to this. I’m really tempted because their 4th Anniversary is starting in a few days and they’re pretty generous with the giveways. But the fundamental issue I had with E7, which was the ridiculous amount of grinding for good gear and the lack of PVE content haven’t gone away. Even if I get shiny new units, I still have to grind to gear them, and then all I can use them in is the labyrinth, which I hate, the Tower, which is too short, the story, which I like but which takes too long to gear up to clear, etc etc. Basically I’m just convincing myself not to go back, and I think I’ve succeeded so I’ll call it a day.

Right, that’s enough of a roundup for today. It’s helped me to get my priorities in order, i.e XC3 > GI, fit in Love Nikki here and there, and drop/suspend the rest.

Before I forget, Ranshima Monogatari ~ Lair Land story, a dating sim I played way back when I had time for dating sims, recently came out in English on Steam. Check it out if you like Princess Maker-style raising sims, and if you want to chase both husbandos and waifus at the same time. And no, nobody paid me for this plug, I just enjoyed the game that much and hope more people can play it. See you all later!

55 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3, time to start spoiling!

Me at the end of every playing session

All right, I’ve gotten the exploration bug out of my system so it’s time to progress the story.

Heh, you actually believe that? Nope, what happened was I explored and explored until Xenoblade Chronicles 3 itself intervened and stopped me with a Genshin-style “Let’s explore the area ahead later.” I laughed my head off at that point, I was like “Finally! Finally, I got you to admit defeat!” Not so open world now, are ya? 😀 If you want to experience a similar stoppage, try exploring up to Dow Dolmen when you’re supposed to go through Maktha Wildwood.

When I eventually did do Maktha Wildwood, I found out the reason why they don’t let you go through Dow Dolmen. It’s because that route leads to the end of Maktha Wildwood where there’s a major cutscene waiting for you, and they didn’t want any sequence breaking. What major cutscene? Ehehe… I don’t know. [spoilers follow, non-players stop reading]

Thing is, when I got to the end of the woods, there were bosses waiting for me. I mean, they didn’t show up as bosses but I knew we would end up fighting. I was already fed up with all the talking and the boss battles where we never ever manage to defeat the enemies, so I did a little skippity-doo, and another little one… and next thing I knew, Ethel and Cammuravi were dead. Oops, tee hee! So, uhh, if anyone knows what happened there and wants to share, be my guest.

I wish I could say I’ve been faithfully watching the cutscenes ever since, but they seriously talk too much. Blah blah meaning of life, blah why are we fighting, blahhy blah blah. Just get on with it already! I blame Square-Enix first and the Xenosaga series second for making every developer think they’re a movie studio. But I’m LOVING the vast spaces I get to explore, so Xenoblade Chronicles 3 gets a slight pass from me. Slight.

All the purple space with the fuzzy borders is mine to explore.

Speaking of slight, I have a slight complaint about the maps. There are too many palette swaps! Not enough enemy variety. Same old bunnits, Gogols, Volffs, Ropls. They just change their names and levels slightly but they look almost identical. That’s lazy programming. It doesn’t make fighting exciting, so I avoid it as much as I can these days. Besides, cowardly me always goes where the enemies are at my level or slightly below so I can explore and grab items in peace without hassle. More maps! More areas! And hopefully more variety later?

It’s the same with the colonies – every new place looks the same, the people dress the same, live in the same tents. So boring. However I believe – or I want to believe – that the colony thing is deliberate on the writers’ part. The bad guys have stripped people of individuality and sentenced them to an eternity of killing and being killed, so they had no time or leisure to develop different cultures. Once I free them of their living hells, things will surely change. Unfortunately it will almost certainly change after the credits roll, so I’m not getting my hopes up too much.

It’s coming… You can’t have a JRPG without “the power of friendship.”

Time to spoil the story~ No special reason, just musing to myself. So there’s these guys in white and these guys in black (like chess pieces) and they have to fight to absorb each others’ life force to go on living. Eventually some of them find a way to break free of this cycle of fighting. The people who were making them fight don’t like that very much, so now the escapees, i.e. our party, are on the run to a safe haven while liberating other people as we go. Things are slightly more complicated than that, but not by much.

Where I’m at right now, the bad guys have gotten an evil superweapon they’re menacing the whole world with, so we’re fixing to storm their stronghold and destroy it. Never mind that they could just build another one, never mind that this whole thing is a huge and obvious trap and we would be better off heading for safety ASAP. The characters even admit it’s a trap, but the game has already established that Noah is a massive goody-goody and the rest of the party likes it that way, so *shrug.* Don’t blame me if you all end up “Sol Triggered,” is all I can say.

Credit where credit is due: Taion hasn’t betrayed me yet. Doesn’t seem like he’s going to either, with all the focus on his backstory and character development. It’s almost like they’re setting him up to be a replacement protagonist for when Noah betrays us… or dies.

…or betray it.

Hmm? You think I’m trippin’? The seeds have already been sown, first with how ridiculously “good” Noah is shown to be and secondly with the reveal of his evil alter ago on the bad guys’ side. BTW I don’t know why I bothered to specify “evil” alter ego, it’s not like there’s ever a good alter ego. Said alter ego wears a mask like it’s some big secret or something, but it’s so obviously Alter-Noah. I wonder if there’s some significance to naming him Noah, like in Noah’s Ark? 🤔

Anyway, for all my complaining about the story, I’m quite interested in where things go from here. Us storming the bad guys’ castle 50 hours into a 200-hour game is obviously not going to end well. Total Party Kill? And then we start over with a fresh set of “reborn” characters? Might be fun, but it would reset all of our affinity progress with the colonies, so that’s out. Maybe we’ll succeed by the skin of our teeth and continue on our merry way. Hmm, it’s faster to play it than speculate – though speculating is more fun than the hour-long cutscene I’m shortly going to be subjected to. I’ll get to it and report back later. See ya~

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – Sweet freedom! 30 hours in

It’s official: Complaining-On-My-Blog-no-Jutsu is the most powerful blogging technique known to man. Shortly after I noted in my last post that I wanted to explore more in Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the game let go of the hard-driving reins and let me go basically wherever I wanted. Within reason, of course, since many areas are naturally story-locked. And there are field abilities you won’t have until you meet and befriend certain characters. I’ll let you figure out which those are.

So! I’m free to explore! And I’ve been overdoing it to the point where I tried to continue the story just earlier and I was about 8 levels stronger than the average mobs. I should hold back a little bit… NOT. This is what I came for, not that awful story… It didn’t start out so bad, but it’s getting worse by the minute. Should I spoil? Hmm… No, too early to spoil. Anyway, we all knew the story would suck. They always suck when the writers try too hard to be “deep” and “meaningful.”

Just BTW, I know it isn’t really Complaining-On-My Blog-no-Jutsu that made the game world open up for exploration. It’s probably the result of game testing, and Monolithsoft knowing what people buy Xenoblade games for. You go to a steak restaurant, order your steak, compliment the decor, chat with your friends, nibble the breadsticks, all well and good. But after 15 minutes you get just a liiiittle bit antsy. When’s the steak coming out?

Well, I got my steak. However, much as I hate being “that gamer” that clamors for stuff and complains when she gets it… 13 hours is bit soon to go exploring in XC3. Not enough of the world has opened up, and what little is available is very samey. There are not one, not two but three huge green plains modelled after Gaur Plains in the original Xenoblade Chronicles. If it’s not plains, it’s caves. And one desert. It’s worth waiting a little longer for more stages, like maybe a nice jungle zone, a beach, a snow field, maybe some volcanic rock.

But that’s all advice for you the reader. Me, I’ve got some more explorin’ to do. The alternative is continuing the story, but… the story… it’s… and the voice-acting is even more awkward that usual with those odd pauses. Not in a hurry to get back to any of that, but I won’t have much choice soon because I’m running out of major sidequests to pursue. Eh, okay, one more sidequest and then I’m definitely continuing the story. See ya!

First 13 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – I like it but I want to explore more

What it said in the title. The downside of playing a story-heavy RPG like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is that you’re limited in where you can go and what you can do for much of the game. It isn’t a true “open world” for now, though I know for sure the whole world will open up eventually, usually right before I’m supposed to kill the very patient final boss.

Happily enough, XC3 has eliminated the biggest issue I had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is that the whole map was open so I couldn’t tell where I had been before and where I hadn’t explored yet. XC3 has also helpfully added a “show route” option, a marker which will lead you straight to your objective if you get lost, but I haven’t used it yet because the map layout is a lot less confusing this time.

I have used the Auto Battle option a few times, mainly for weak mobs that insist on attacking you. In general though, I don’t want to see auto-battle in a game where I’m supposed to be enjoying the combat. Which I kind of am, kind of amn’t. My tastes have shifted heavily towards “Unga Bunga Me Cut You Die” kind of action RPGs, so this auto-attacking with skills stuff feels a bit sluggish. But to XC3’s credit, they’re trying to keep things fresh with a variety of classes.

I’ve already used a sword, a pair of chakrams and a greatsword in 12 hours, with the promise of many more classes on the way. Usually I dislike class systems in an RPG because I get stressed out about optimum builds, but here you can change quite freely, the benefits aren’t that great and it keeps combat from falling into a rut, so I’m enjoying the changes.

Next the story and characters, which I also complained heavily about in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’d already accepted that the Xenoblade series is one I enjoyed for the exploration and combat (sorta) while holding my nose at the story, but this time it’s not that bad at all.

The hero Noah is the sickeningly sweet goody-goody kind of hero mainly seen in the kind of isekai manga where the hero forgives all the bad guys and quickly ends up with a harem of slaves… Hmm, now there’s a thought… On the plus side he isn’t slavering all over a random pretty girl, he thinks things through when he can, and he questions the status quo even more than those around him. He’s a sap, but he’s a promising sap.

There’s also the obligatory bulky best friend, the fiesty chick, the Nopons, the possible love interest, etc etc. I’m mainly playing to find out what shady secret Taion is hiding, I know that dude is up to something… But this isn’t a spoiler post (for now) so we’ll leave it here for now. All I can say is I like the characters (except Eunie) and the story-I-won’t-spoil is quite fine, though the cutscenes are a little long. And they still do that thing where I beat up the enemy fair and square but the cutscene afterwards shows us struggling helplessly against a mighty foe. I HATE that trope, but I guess it’s just a Xenoblade thing, so I must helplessly accept it.

Speaking of helplessness, Monolithsoft stopped letting players warp back to town to save and chillax in the midst of a crisis. If you’re persona non grata somewhere, you can’t just waltz back in. If you’re on the run, you can’t teleport your way away from your pursuers because that would be cheating. It adds tension and makes sense so I like it, though it probably won’t be so cute if I ever get stuck on a hard boss for lack of grinding.

I took a ton of screenshots but can’t find my SD card adapter, so make do with these ones from Nintendo.

Last word for this initial post: I kind of like what they’ve done with sidequests. They’ve shoved all the petty collection and fetch quests into a category where you don’t even have to meet the quest giver to get or finish the quest. They post their request “online,” you find their stuff and submit it “online” which totally doesn’t make sense but we can assume the Nopons delivered the goods. Then you get your rewards. That means there are fewer sidequests, but the ones that do exist are higher quality and more closely related to the story and the characters. Quantity vs. quality.

I lean towards the “quantity” side myself, though. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful in a videogame. In particular I wish there were more “Kill X monsters” kind of quests, but it’s early days yet. In any case XC2 had too many lazybones NPCs so this is a bit refreshing.

That’s enough for quick first impressions. I studiously avoided all Xenoblade Chronicles 3 trailers to the extent that the only things I knew going in were the title, the release date and the face of the main character. That makes every area and every twist and turn fresh and exciting now. I even avoided looking at the poster image, so I didn’t know who would be joining the party until they actually joined. I’m thinking of doing the same thing with Genshin Impact from now on. Now I think of it, it’s self-defeating to play a game about exploration and have everything exposed before you even buy the game. Right?

Anyway, that’s it for now, see you guys in another 13 hours or so!