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Sylvian Wastes posted:And the way you get them back is amazing. They come back riding a giant transforming Zaku and exit via a hatch in the wrist after it punches into origin. Yeah it’s sick as hell lol
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Nov 19, 2022 01:27
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I finished this behind absolutely everyone else and now I'm subjecting you all to my review. No real spoilers about the plot or anything, just thoughts on stuff in general. The story is outstanding. I feel like the ending runs out of steam a little on that front but just the entire middle third or so is absolutely amazing. Where I think the game shines is character work. There's nobody in the party who's annoying, they're all really fun and interesting characters and ultimately are all likeable as hell. Even the less developed ones, like Taion have some definition to their arcs and feel like more complete characters by the end. And then of course there's Ashera who's my favourite psychotic masochist murderhobo ever. Gameplay is probably a step back from where Torna landed. Xenoblade I feel always suffers from a fight just going along and then an enemy doing an attack you can't identify and suddenly everyone is dead. So it always kinda feels that you're just hitting buttons into monsters that do random damage back. I think 3 suffers from this more because the 6 person party structure means that your power as a player is dispersed even further and that's made worse with interlinking at the like. The ultimate patch for this ends up being Noah with Flash fencer in a tank class because super tank Noah is able to hold aggro no problem on everything and has long periods of invincibility. Progression is a complete mess as I've come to expect from Xenoblade. Tonnes of my gems were at level 3 because I never found upgrade mats, I couldn't tell you what half the items did or whether they were having a real effect on combat and I was mastering classes just to master them rather than because I found any synergy to take advantage of, beyond obviously Flash Fencer 15 which I was told by others anyway. I ended the game with thousands of gold in my pockets unable to figure out what I was meant to spend it on as well as billions of ingredients that I never ended up using. Encounter design is obviously tied to the above, but it does feel like either, chain attacks are too polarising or enemies have too much health. Without chains encounters would probably have taken 15-20 minutes to take down each and with chains you're taking 2m HP off an enemy in what is essentially a very long and ultimately not very interactive cutscene. I don't really know how to make that better, but the game felt like it wasn't really made for chain attacks as they are or an absence of them. If in the end it sounds like I have more complaints than praise, it's because I do. But the story is just so good that you can ignore like 90% of the problems and run past everything to see how it all turns out. And it's probably worth it honestly, I certainly don't regret playing at all.
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Nov 21, 2022 02:11
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You could have skipped Gem levels and probably made higher level gems, so that was your own fault. You could also spend 99 gold coins to make a level X gem and you reach that many coins maybe midway through the game. As for the job system, it wasn’t very complicated I didn’t think? You had seven characters and I usually ran with three healers, two attackers and two defenders because I played on hard. You could easily roll with three attackers and two healers on normal. I don’t know, again I didn’t find it difficult to figure out how to field a decent team, which jobs were good and which weren’t so good, etc.
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Nov 21, 2022 03:24
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Blackbelt Bobman posted:You could have skipped Gem levels and probably made higher level gems, so that was your own fault. You could also spend 99 gold coins to make a level X gem and you reach that many coins maybe midway through the game. The UI isn't particularly clear about the gem thing but I did figure out upranking. I still had level 2 gems despite knowing that because around 90% of my recipes had one missing ingredient that I wasn't going out of my way to try and find. Additionally I killed every rare I saw and never got close to 99 gold coins. Admittedly I spent some early on in the game, but like I didn't have 99 despite killing every rare in the final dungeon for example. The game's UI just doesn't really tell you anything about what's going on. Does my Flash Fencer do more damage than my DPS Soul Hacker? I don't know? How much healing does Medic Gunner put out relative to the other healers? I don't know? I think the only place where i had any idea was with the tanks where Mio's class is just better than all the others because of how quickly it's able to get things off cooldown. But like, what job do you want to master if you want to optimise the damage Ogre is putting out? Probably a DPS one, but I couldn't tell you which.
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Nov 21, 2022 11:17
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Natural 20 posted:The UI isn't particularly clear about the gem thing but I did figure out upranking. I still had level 2 gems despite knowing that because around 90% of my recipes had one missing ingredient that I wasn't going out of my way to try and find. Additionally I killed every rare I saw and never got close to 99 gold coins. Admittedly I spent some early on in the game, but like I didn't have 99 despite killing every rare in the final dungeon for example. Equipping Ogre for endgame (or at least high levels) arts: a) break art from Yunsmith. Ogre has a skill massively increasing reaction infliction chances, and said skill can't be transferred around. b) the biggest, baddest physical art from Keves classes you have available (read: highest damage multiplier). I think Hidden Thorn from Flash Fencer (art that inflicts bleed) is the best option for this. c) physical art with utility (topple, launch or charge) as third is probably best skills: any skill that increases damage dealt or physical damage dealt (the +% to physical damage skill is from Ogre, so it's already equipped). Some options: a) ultimate Qigong. Best in slot for any physical attacker b) Universal Annihilation from Seraph. +stupid% on toppled and launched targets c) Maniac from Lone Exile d) Critical Strike from Flash Fencer e) Covert attack from Swordfighter for some aggro reduction Accessories: a break reduction accessory, two damage increasing accessories preferably on independent multipliers from those you get from skills. Combat plan: Equip the biggest, baddest master art so it's in a fusion art with the biggest, baddest Ogre art. Break -> topple -> launch an enemy, then trigger a chain attack. Murder almost any boss from 90% health in a single chain. Note: dot damage such as bleed is a fixed multiplier of the damage dealt by the inflicting art. When inflicted by a fusion art, it counts the damage of the whole fusion art. When inflicted during a chain attack, it calculates off the boosted damage (but does not get boosted again). The same is true for smash damage. Omobono fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 12:10
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Omobono posted:You also get gold coins from the various treasure chests around the world. Have you been exploring? Not really? I just followed the red line, did every class unlock sidequest and unlocked any chest I saw along the way. Largely I think that you should have been able to substitute missing materials with Nopon silver coins since I had a billion of those that I just spent on unlocking classes I didn't need because I had nothing better to do with them. Omobono posted:A lot of interesting stuff on Ogre. Sorry I wasn't really asking how to optimise Ogre. (But also thank you because this was really interesting to read, especially about bleeds snapshotting) I was citing it as an example of something I didn't intuitively know how to do because how systems cross over into one another isn't very clear from the UI as presented. I'm absolutely sure that what you're suggesting would be a great way of optimising Ogre, but absent a simulator or damage meters allowing me to confirm that, there's no good way of knowing other than kinda, guessing that the change you suggested is the thing causing the damage. Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 12:27
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Oh right. Sorry, you gotta go by feels. Spoilers: debuff infliction chances suck on normal, nevermind on hard; break infliction chances can be made to not suck even on hard and on the toughest superboss. The general gist is that no class can be self-contained; grabbing skills/arts from everywhere is mandatory so hunt the list for synergies. Attacker want big numbers, and possibly aggro reduction but short naps in the dirt from overaggro are not that bad usually. Defenders want a mix between damage and survivability. Pure aggro is inferior to damage. Healers... gently caress it all other healers suck compared to Signifier and Troubador. And good luck parsing the accessory list, that UI sucks. Doing a deep cavity searching on Aionos is part of the intended gameplay loop so that explains your lack of gold coins and materials.
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Nov 21, 2022 13:08
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*numbers pop up on the screen* THERE IS NO WAY FOR ME TO KNOW IF THESE NUMBERS ARE HIGHER OR LOWER THAN THE PREVIOUS NUMBERS. HELP! But seriously though, apart from seeing the actual numbers go up, you can easily understand that increasing the attack stat by 30% is going to make number go up. You can easily understand that a gem that says “does xx% more damage when canceling into an art” will make number go up. You can easily understand that equipping an accessory that increases your critical hit chance with skills/gems that increase the damage bonus for critical hits is going to make number go up. Flash Fencer does a lot of damage because it has a high crit rate and does bonus damage on critical hit. You can understand that a move with the description “heals team on hit for up to 100% of healing stat” is going to heal more on classes with a higher healing stat. If you weren’t exploring/doing most of the side quests I could understand why you wouldn’t have the materials for gems. But it sounds like your biggest issue is your inability to try new things that could be considered minor risks to see if they will make your characters do more damage or heal more. Sometimes you just have to experiment and pay attention! I didn’t think the UI was so bad that it made the mechanics of the game difficult to understand. And there are like 100 tutorial messages you can read in the menu about stats and mechanics. Idk man!
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Nov 21, 2022 13:14
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yeah i never had any issue understanding how to optimize the game because it was usually very apparent if something was doing more/less damage. like, what do you mean about 'how systems cross over into one another?' they all just boost stats
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Nov 21, 2022 14:18
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Endorph posted:yeah i never had any issue understanding how to optimize the game because it was usually very apparent if something was doing more/less damage. like, what do you mean about 'how systems cross over into one another?' they all just boost stats If I have something that boosts my attack speed by 10% and something that improves my damage by 10% which one is better overall? Does the speed at which on hit artes return compensate for the fact that they're doing lower overall damage? Is there a threshold where that changes? Like if I gained 10% attack speed but lost 5% damage, am I now better off? How does that calculus change if I'm comparing attack speed vs. crit rate? (What by the way, does "High crit rate" on an art mean? Is it 50% higher? 90%?) How do these work in chain attacks? If I put down an attack up field during a chain attack with my healer, does everyone in the aura now do more damage or are they snapshotted at the state they were at the beginning of the chain? If I put down 3 fields with the same healer stacked on top of one another during the chain attack, do they now receive triple benefit or just the benefit of one? Actually a really, really basic one is trying to figure out if the doublestrike gem is better than the improved attack speed gem on Agnian classes and if either of them are better than the cancel +damage gem. Number go up is fine, it is something you can understand. Relative number from one thing to another is much, much harder and the game does not provide a reasonable way for you to understand the consequences of those decisions. None of this is catastrophic for the game, it's fine, you can beat it without any of these considerations. But I think it could have either been a lot better with clearer indications of what things did, or significantly less complex. I don't really feel like gems are needed, I don't really feel like accessories add that much. I honestly think that you could have kept skills to a single cross class skill as well. ((Please please don't answer all of these goons, I know someone might try to take these hypotheticals seriously, but they're just meant to be illustrative of a point, not the actual problems I saw in game))
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Nov 21, 2022 14:39
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I spent a lot of time in the first half of the game trying to experiment with different accessories, gems, etc. But I could never really tell what effect all these choices were actually having in combat so I kind of gave up after a while and mostly went with auto-build, which seemed just as good in most situations.
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Nov 21, 2022 15:09
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Macinirol posted:I spent a lot of time in the first half of the game trying to experiment with different accessories, gems, etc. But I could never really tell what effect all these choices were actually having in combat so I kind of gave up after a while and mostly went with auto-build, which seemed just as good in most situations. I just went with auto-build except for whatever character I controlled because there's a few accessories that are way less efficient with the AI (like that one accessory that gives a chance that an art won't go on cooldown after use). Though the benefit for that is more obvious than trying to weigh different attack or defense stats.
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Nov 21, 2022 15:13
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Natural 20 posted:((Please please don't answer all of these goons, I know someone might try to take these hypotheticals seriously, but they're just meant to be illustrative of a point, not the actual problems I saw in game)) You’re overthinking it, the game isn’t that complicated lol
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Nov 21, 2022 15:19
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Natural 20 posted:None of this is catastrophic for the game, it's fine, you can beat it without any of these considerations. But I think it could have either been a lot better with clearer indications of what things did, or significantly less complex. I don't really feel like gems are needed, I don't really feel like accessories add that much. I honestly think that you could have kept skills to a single cross class skill as well. This idea sucks poo poo and would have made character customization near non-existent and dreadfully boring and probably would have completely killed the game for me
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Nov 21, 2022 16:01
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there's an option in the menu to only show your own character's damage pop ups. figuring out which skills and accessories are better isn't exactly hard.Macinirol posted:I spent a lot of time in the first half of the game trying to experiment with different accessories, gems, etc. But I could never really tell what effect all these choices were actually having in combat so I kind of gave up after a while and mostly went with auto-build, which seemed just as good in most situations. auto build is completely awful but if you're on normal then it probably doesn't matter turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 16:07
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Namnesor posted:This idea sucks poo poo and would have made character customization near non-existent and dreadfully boring and probably would have completely killed the game for me I couldn’t imagine not having access to the accessory that lets non-healers revive, or the one that fully fills a healer’s arts after reviving someone lol not to mention the gems that increase revival speed and HP!
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Nov 21, 2022 17:42
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Regarding other healers... The thing is that Soulhacker by the endgame gets access to the master art battle pheromone and the class art desperate charge. If fused, you get an attack up buff, crit rate up, crit damage up, and art recharge speed up buff all at once. Large scale shock is a skill that doubles the AOE of arts, and it applies to buffs too. So everyone is getting this package of buffs that are extremely good, and you can easily apply them in a chain attack. But Soulhacker also gets access to dragon decree, an AOE debuff remover that applies power charge to everyone. The strength of the power charge buff is boosted 50% by the swelling blessing gem, but the skill strength support adds an additional 35% on top. Being able to apply a 185% power charge and attack buffs to everyone is very very good. On top of all that, you have enemy buff removal with the snake eyes class art. The war medic lets you create a very good healer/buff relayer that fills in the rest of the troubadour benefits Soulhacker partially replicated. Use the +1 field skill to get ring of roses and advanced cooldown together to rapidly fill the talent gauge. Swap the talent to glittering melody. For the other 2 class arts pick non-attacking ones. The other 2 master arts are aqua mind and resonant flag. Basically this is a war medic whose job is to use resonant flag to reapply the Soulhackers buffs while rapidly healing and deploying fields with the help of aqua mind to get glittering melodies out faster. You could also do a similar thing with the medic gunner if you want even more attack power.
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Nov 21, 2022 17:53
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I think it would be nice if there was an MMO-like damage meter in the game, I agree it's hard to parse if a specific build is more or less effective. Yeah you can see the numbers of individual hits but I can't tell if, say, a class built around building up big hits is actually doing more or less damage over the course of a several-minute fight than one that does sustained damage with smaller hits or DOTs cutting away at the enemy, especially when there's five other characters attacking so you can't just go off health bar movement. Since a lot of the appeal of the gameplay is around mixing skills/arts to optimize it'd be fun to be able to accurately assess that stuff. You can estimate with vibes but that's about it unless you sit down with a notebook and log every single number that pops up across an encounter. Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 18:22
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Yeah it would be nice to have something like that in this game especially. The difference between a seraph, a incursor, and a swordsman in their optimal-ish builds can be immense based on if a healing art is linked to resonant flag in a chain attack, how long has the incursor been alive, or how good your break-topple-launch setup is. An actual aggro value or meter we could see would be nice. In the end and postgame, building tanks was kinda tough because I didn't know how good various 'this art has +100% more aggro' stuff was. I read about how being hit made the tanks aggro go down, so aerial slash and jackal claw on keves tanks became default, but I still had trouble.
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Nov 21, 2022 21:49
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Namnesor posted:This idea sucks poo poo and would have made character customization near non-existent and dreadfully boring and probably would have completely killed the game for me Agreed. No accessories or gems means your tanks are a lot less durable and/or generate much less threat, DPS would do a fraction of their current dmg output, healers would be made of even thinner paper, take a lot longer to rez people (who'd have almost no hp)...etc. Customization basically wouldn't exist and things like burst/smash combos would be a lot more of a pain to setup. Combat as-is would have to have been completely redone because it'd be an awful slog left as-is but without those options. Sylvian Wastes posted:Regarding other healers... Troubadour+signifier, when setup properly, puts every buff on your party forever and this can include invincibility from lucky seven and or awaken from seraph via damage taken proc through some tactical ouroboros usage. Though you could have a soulhacker healer support, or you could have a bunch of soulhacker dps who take those buffs and delete superbosses.
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Nov 21, 2022 22:12
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Natural 20 posted:None of this is catastrophic for the game, it's fine, you can beat it without any of these considerations. But I think it could have either been a lot better with clearer indications of what things did, or significantly less complex. I don't really feel like gems are needed, I don't really feel like accessories add that much. I honestly think that you could have kept skills to a single cross class skill as well. this game would be 5x worse without these customizations options lmao
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Nov 21, 2022 22:24
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Rather than a DPS meter or whatever I'd like it if the game's mechanics were transparent enough that you could just do math to figure everything out. There's so much poo poo going on in combat that it'd be hard to tell what is actually doing what.
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Nov 21, 2022 22:53
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turn off the TV posted:Rather than a DPS meter or whatever I'd like it if the game's mechanics were transparent enough that you could just do math to figure everything out. There's so much poo poo going on in combat that it'd be hard to tell what is actually doing what. The problem is that more transparency will get overwhelming fast with how complicated the game is.
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Nov 21, 2022 23:19
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I think a lot of it is just the UI being kind of awful at listing what your options are. Accessories are the big one, with different accessories with the same effect scattered randomly throughout the list instead of being sorted in a useful manner. But even skills and arts are largely the same way, with no really good sorting or categorization, and a limited number of them on screen at once. It's often hard to parse all of them with the aid of a spreadsheet in a google doc, let alone scrolling through the in-game UI. On top of that, the way class progression stalls if you get too high compared to the enemy's level (which is trivial if you're exploring/sidequesting) makes it difficult to actually max out multiple classes and get access to their juiciest skills/arts until you stop and do a dedicated grinding session for it, which is honestly only really viable once you've finished the game and can manipulate your level down to where you can actually get class points (developers/localizers need to learn to avoid that acronym) in a large enough quantity to matter. If I had my druthers, I'd change the class system so that only the inheritor needs to level the class up, and everyone else just gets their rank automatically. It'd cut down on a lot of the grinding. There's not really a good way to deal with the UI bloat though, which is weird, because games like Bravely Default have a lot more abilities to toss around, but the system seems a lot more intuitive.
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Nov 21, 2022 23:26
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Natural 20 posted:If I have something that boosts my attack speed by 10% and something that improves my damage by 10% which one is better overall? Chain attacks are your main damage dealer. A straight 10% damage increase applies to chain attacks, but auto-attack frequency doesn't. Attack speed can help marginally with charging up the party meter, but there are more direct ways to do that. Take the damage boost.
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Nov 22, 2022 01:29
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turn off the TV posted:Rather than a DPS meter or whatever I'd like it if the game's mechanics were transparent enough that you could just do math to figure everything out. There's so much poo poo going on in combat that it'd be hard to tell what is actually doing what. The damage goes into the millions lol, what math are you going to be doing with that in the 5 seconds between battles
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Nov 22, 2022 01:35
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Barreft posted:The damage goes into the millions lol, what math are you going to be doing with that in the 5 seconds between battles afaik arithmetic actually works for numbers that are bigger than one million so i was thinking that
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Nov 22, 2022 02:19
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Endorph posted:this game would be 5x worse without these customizations options lmao I mean everyone is facetiously assuming that I'd want to get rid of those options and leave nothing in the void. There's basic poo poo going on with gems that should just be baseline, like tanks starting with Aggro for example. It's complexity for the sake of complexity rather than examining the complexity and wondering if it's in service to anything. Why are there a thousand accessories of varying rarities that all say Add x% to your agility instead of just one? Why are there ten ranks of gems when all of them could just be a gem that scales for whatever it's doing? Hell why are there 30 gems to begin with when multiple gems are variations on the same thing. Doublestrike, attack speed increase, crit and +damage are all really similar variations on the same thing, +agility and +def could easily be folded into one stat that takes the form of dodge mitigation or def mitigation based on class. There is so much poo poo here that you can easily cut down to aid legibility for the player. Evil Fluffy posted:Agreed. No accessories or gems means your tanks are a lot less durable and/or generate much less threat, DPS would do a fraction of their current dmg output, healers would be made of even thinner paper, take a lot longer to rez people (who'd have almost no hp)...etc. Customization basically wouldn't exist and things like burst/smash combos would be a lot more of a pain to setup. Combat as-is would have to have been completely redone because it'd be an awful slog left as-is but without those options. This is what I'm getting at. These things are papered over by the complexity as is, but most of what's being talked about should just be baseline. DPS should do large amounts of damage and the customisation should be the icing, healers should feel durable enough to res people and ressing should take a shortish amount of time without you having to sacrifice healing output it (or basically as I felt, just taking two mandatory slots on my gems for res power). I'm unsure on how like Burst/Smash would be affected because I do actually think three regular arts and three cross class arts is fine, because there's plenty of time where you have dead buttons even with that, but you get the picture. And yeah, I'm criticising the game, so I am broadly thinking of how I would just rework everything from the ground up, or perhaps how an ideal XB3 would look. turn off the TV posted:afaik arithmetic actually works for numbers that are bigger than one million so i was thinking that The difficulty lies when you're looking at 3-4 decisions stacking on top of each other. It's easy enough for me to figure out if 10% attack speed is better than 10% damage. But if you then ask me, to make that choice and then figure out whether 10% crit vs. 10% armour pierce is better given the prior choice, I'd probably need a minute and a calculator. When you ask me those two choices and then whether an additional 10% armour pierce is worth a 5% chance to multistrike on top of all of those. I'm making a spreadsheet etc. etc.
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Nov 22, 2022 02:59
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Natural 20 posted:The difficulty lies when you're looking at 3-4 decisions stacking on top of each other. I don't see the problem with this. Right now you're trying to make the same decisions but without as clear of an understanding as to what's actually going on mechanically. Stuff like damage resistance, buffs, accuracy vs evasion, etc. are more or less completely opaque. Just knowing what those are would go a long way.
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Nov 22, 2022 03:11
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turn off the TV posted:I don't see the problem with this. Right now you're trying to make the same decisions but without as clear of an understanding as to what's actually going on mechanically. Stuff like damage resistance, buffs, accuracy vs evasion, etc. are more or less completely opaque. Just knowing what those are would go a long way. Oh sorry I didn't mean to imply what you said wouldn't be helpful, it absolutely would. But at least to me, it's only part of the process.
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Nov 22, 2022 03:31
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Wrapping the last few quests up and having some time to reflect on things, some lingering thoughts (ending and postgame spoilers): I swore off listening to the OST until I had beaten the game, partially because I knew I'd get spoilers recommended to me if I did. Speaking as someone who listens to a lot of game music to help focus on work, after listening on quality headphones this is probably a top 5 OST of all time for me. The level of detail in a lot of the tracks (A Formidable Enemy  ), the leitmotifs and how they're used, all of them really give the game an extra dimension. I don't like the final boss theme nearly as much as 1 or 2, but the bars they set are so, so high to clear that I give it a pass. Have to say, though, they really hosed up by not calling the Unique Monster theme You Will Never Forget Our Names. I mentioned laughing at one part of the ending, but that's in part because I guessed as soon as they stood in the same frame in Chapter 6/7 that Mio is related to Nia - Mio very clearly has Nia's facial structure along with hair color/style, and I suspect the whole reason the writers played the Queens-are-fake card, masked them, and then kept Nia's further hidden earlier in Chapter 6 is otherwise the player has way more opportunities to notice. There also doesn't seem to be any other way to explain how M meets with Nia. Even with M's subterfuge against Moebius like introducing the Homecoming/off-seeing ritual and giving the Cloudkeep key to Ghondor, if Nia put herself to sleep to escape Z, and other Moebius could track M's whereabouts, there's only one reason to take such a huge risk. The ending just makes it super clear that Mio inherited Rex's eyes. It makes Nia trying to keep up her proper front so as not to embarrass herself in front of her (grand?) daughter and her friends very cute. Back to the OST, Kaleidoscopic Core might be a top 5 track in the entire game for me. I'm totally a sucker for triumphant reworkings of sad/emotional themes, and recontextualizing Drifting Soul to show the fulfillment of Nia's character arc in light of the ending turned the photograph from funny to actually pretty moving, doubly so thinking of the song as her finding renewed strength in journeying with Mio. A couple of things I still don't understand: 1. Despite the endings of both 1 and 2 happening simultaneously, I always got the impression that less time had passed since 2's ending prior to the worlds colliding than 1, I think in part because otherwise the Mio/Nia connection is more tenuous if the same amount of time as passed. 2. How is it that Eunie is the only High Entia whose wings don't match her hair color, and how does no one point this out? Even Melia's match her hair color. 3. It took me forever to realize Lucky Seven is a replica Monado even with the kanji staring me in the face, and I get the implications re: Riku and Melia, but it begs the question - how did N get his? 4. This one may just be rhetorical depending on the DLC, but it is incredibly weird to have Noah vanish in the post-credits sequence. The more I think about it, the more it's kind of a sucker-punch that he vanishes from the newly-reformed world and leaves Lanz, Eunie, and Joran behind. 5. Speaking of sucker punches, Monolith Soft are real assholes for playing Shulk and Fiora and then doing the flashback with their voices in Melia's ascension quest. I'll also echo some others in saying I hope that the DLC story is an epilogue set in the reborn world(s) because it would align with the "Future, Past, Present" themes of the three games. I have no idea how they'd do it, though, in light of point 4 above. I had been excited to explore a story about the Founders, but honestly now I want a journey of young Mio, Taion, and Sena finding a way back to meet their other halves - "and thus, girl met boy" basically writes itself for an ending. And ultimately, I realized that N succeeds in "rewinding" their clocks, back to the start, which is kind of wild to think about. Love this game. Manoueverable fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Nov 22, 2022 |
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Nov 22, 2022 04:48
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Manoueverable posted:Love this game.
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Nov 22, 2022 05:26
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Manoueverable posted:A couple of things I still don't understand: 1. Despite the endings of both 1 and 2 happening simultaneously, I always got the impression that less time had passed since 2's ending prior to the worlds colliding than 1, I think in part because otherwise the Mio/Nia connection is more tenuous if the same amount of time as passed. 2. How is it that Eunie is the only High Entia whose wings don't match her hair color, and how does no one point this out? Even Melia's match her hair color. 3. It took me forever to realize Lucky Seven is a replica Monado even with the kanji staring me in the face, and I get the implications re: Riku and Melia, but it begs the question - how did N get his? 4. This one may just be rhetorical depending on the DLC, but it is incredibly weird to have Noah vanish in the post-credits sequence. The more I think about it, the more it's kind of a sucker-punch that he vanishes from the newly-reformed world and leaves Lanz, Eunie, and Joran behind. 5. Speaking of sucker punches, Monolith Soft are real assholes for playing Shulk and Fiora and then doing the flashback with their voices in Melia's ascension quest. You've discovered the true twist of xenoblade 3's ending, which is that the writing kind of sucks. Other great mysteries include what was going on in future connected, what the black fog even is, why do annihilation events happen, what is even going on with noah and mio that makes them so special and why does everyone from agnus have a core crystal. Maybe these are things that would be addressed in DLC, but there are just a lot of plot elements that kind of go unexplained or are contradicted hours or even minutes after they're introduced.
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Nov 22, 2022 06:02
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Manoueverable posted:A couple of things I still don't understand: 4. This one may just be rhetorical depending on the DLC, but it is incredibly weird to have Noah vanish in the post-credits sequence. The more I think about it, the more it's kind of a sucker-punch that he vanishes from the newly-reformed world and leaves Lanz, Eunie, and Joran behind. I finished the game not too long ago, and might just be ignorant of some of the lore/plot I didn't recognize, but the impression I got from the ending was not a "newly-reformed" world but rather that everyone went back to where they were in the game's intro. It would be really weird to not address ending stuff, but I'd also be really surprised if we see any of the post-XB3 universe during the DLC.
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Nov 22, 2022 08:00
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Evil Fluffy posted:Agreed. No accessories or gems means your tanks are a lot less durable and/or generate much less threat, DPS would do a fraction of their current dmg output, healers would be made of even thinner paper, take a lot longer to rez people (who'd have almost no hp)...etc. Customization basically wouldn't exist and things like burst/smash combos would be a lot more of a pain to setup. Combat as-is would have to have been completely redone because it'd be an awful slog left as-is but without those options. To me, the Soulhacker+keves healer is good because it works fast in setup, and is easy to use in chain attacks against hard mode superbosses right after recovering from having multiple party members ko'ed. I'm focused more on chain attacks and buff utility within that space since thats where I focus my builds. So being able to get a boosted power charge buff+attack+crit is more important to me than having a huge pile of defence buffs. I also run with a Ogre Sena with a Break brooch, Gust gauntlets, and Chaotic memory. I control her directly most of the fight, and all I do is break foes. I can't miss because chaotic memory makes all attacks hit and unblockable if you cancel into them. With ring of roses fields and desperate charge reducing cooldown, I don't need a pile of defensive buffs if I'm launch-locking a foe until I get a chain attack off. The Ogre sena/buffing soulhacker/war medic setup works for me because it lets me basically go very, very aggressive and discard all passive aggro reduction on incursor and seraph. I then use this lone exile build. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK3mPcG_uV8 It takes advantage of the fact that lone exile has a bunch of multihit attacks, and that the martial artist skill that gives arts that crit 30% recharge applies the effect for every single hit. It takes a few seconds to ramp up, but it draws and holds aggro incredibly well. It gets its aerial slash and jackal claw-linked fusion arts off cooldown incredibly quickly as well. Its not the best at the top top tier, at around lv 190 hard fighting seraphic ceratina you really need to change tactics. But its a good intro to the build of an effective dodge tank.
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Nov 22, 2022 08:04
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stuker posted:I finished the game not too long ago, and might just be ignorant of some of the lore/plot I didn't recognize, but the impression I got from the ending was not a "newly-reformed" world but rather that everyone went back to where they were in the game's intro. It would be really weird to not address ending stuff, but I'd also be really surprised if we see any of the post-XB3 universe during the DLC. I don't think this is right because the key difference is that the other world isn't looming anymore in the ending cutscene like it is in the opening. I can see the argument, but I don't think it's supported by the evidence we have. If the worlds were to imminently collide again there would be some other indication like a fade to white, or they would all vanish. I do wonder if by following the flute in hopes he can reunite with Mio, Noah is choosing to do N's path the right way. TV, while I agree while many questions linger without being fully answered, at least one is: Noah and Mio are explicitly stated by N and M in the ending to be manifestations of their respective regrets. I think the more interesting question that doesn't get answered is whether Noah and Mio were born in pods like the rest or just appeared, and either way, how they integrated into their respective armies. IIRC, the person being birthed in the pod in Chapter 1 is not Noah, maybe Eunie? I think it's also easy to interpret the fog/annihilation as a byproduct of M's attempts to erode Moebius' power and thus the world's structure, maybe even the lingering energy of those who successfully reach Homecoming and no longer are part of the cycle. Future Connected, though? Yeah, I've got no clue about that.
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Nov 22, 2022 18:32
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Manoueverable posted:I don't think this is right because the key difference is that the other world isn't looming anymore in the ending cutscene like it is in the opening. I can see the argument, but I don't think it's supported by the evidence we have. If the worlds were to imminently collide again there would be some other indication like a fade to white, or they would all vanish. I do wonder if by following the flute in hopes he can reunite with Mio, Noah is choosing to do N's path the right way. According to Z time was stopped prior to the two worlds actually overlapping and destroying anything, and that this will happen whenever time resumes. So the post credits scene should take place after this happened and Origin recreated everything, but that could also just not be the case for reasons. Noah and Mio being M and N's regrets doesn't really explain anything about why Noah seemingly vanishes into the air in the post credits scene or why Noah alone appears to exist outside of frozen time in the intro, or why Noah and Mio existed outside of the cycle before their incarnations as N and M. The fog appears to be generated by or accumulate around interlinking, either between the characters or the two universes. It even shows up for the first time in Future Connected, well before M even exists. I don't really see any connection there. The thing about it which doesn't make a lot of sense is why annihilation events are happening if time is stopped and the universes are no longer actively merging together, and why the black fog is just randomly interspersed throughout Aionios instead of being concentrated in areas where the two worlds have clearly combined.
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Nov 22, 2022 19:15
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I’m confused how soul hack works, I did a rematch against one of the named enemies in the list and I’m mor acquiring the skill. What am I missing?
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Nov 23, 2022 05:13
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Someone in the party needs to have the Soul Hacker skill equipped. It’s the base skill for the class but Triton doesn’t have it so if he’s the only soul hacker you’re running you won’t learn anything.
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Nov 23, 2022 05:20
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Yeah, when I realized Triton himself would be kind of dead weight, except for helping people inherit his class faster I guess, I just spent Nopon Coins to max out the class on Lanz. He's had the Soul Hack skill permanently bolted onto him as I've gone around and I've picked up a ton of Soul Hack skills. One of these days I should maybe get around to having people other than him inherit the class... and also maybe actually look through the skills to see if I got anything good...
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Nov 23, 2022 13:44
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