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So, a friend and I played all the way through this game together over a course of an entire year, and one question I was never able to get a decent answer for is... What the gently caress is up with Reyn's weapons? They're like... spring-loaded shield giant bottle opener club spear claw things that look like they weigh about 50 pounds. Also, one thing that Lethemonster didn't mention during her brief overview on Chain Attacks is the multiplier. Using arts of the same color consecutively will increase the amount of damage that later arts in the chain do - this is indicated by the Chain Multiplier on the right side of the screen. The second attack of the same color will do double damage, the third triple damage, the fourth quadruple, and the fifth "Max" damage - I'm not sure if the fifth is quintupled as seems logical for the progression, or if there's an extra bonus for getting to Max. I think the big damage hit that Letthemonster referenced may have been partially because of this (but only partially, because Fiora really does hit harder than Reyn or Shulk). This makes chain attacks really really good if you plan them right, especially because defeating an enemy using a chain attack refills a fair sized portion of the party gauge! Despite this, going for maximum damage isn't always the best idea - topples are ridiculously easy to set up with chain attacks (which helps a ton against Mechon and isn't too shabby against anything else either - a toppled enemy takes more damage and can't attack you), and especially in the late game there is sometimes a place for defensive chain attacks focused on healing and buffing the party as well. There's even an art or two in the game that refills part of the party guage - using these in chain attacks is as hilariously powerful as you can imagine.
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Aug 10, 2013 17:13
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:20 |
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Agent Interrobang posted:They're referred to as 'gunlances' in various materials; from what I can tell, the shield isn't actually a shield, but a cowling for a piston mechanism used to drive the blade or speartip forward. It's functionally a weaponized pile bunker/stake driver. So, in other words, it is indeed intended to be a spring-loaded shield giant bottle opener club spear claw thing just like I assumed. Oh well. I suppose that's less stupid than the weaponized dolls, megaphones, paintbrushes, and other silly things you see in a lot of JRPGs, so I guess I can't grumble too much about it.
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Aug 10, 2013 17:52
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Vil posted:Chain attacks are even better than you said! That may very well be the case. The game doesn't go out of its way to explain all of its mechanics to the player, so when we noticed damage increasing when the multiplier went up, the assumption was that the increase was related to the numbers shown - we never actually got out a calculator to confirm it, though. Agent Interrobang posted:My favorite detail is that Reyn barely even uses it for its actual function. He pretty much just clubs poo poo over the head with it, because REYN TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS. I noticed that as well - I'm not sure if the animations work like that to draw attention to the fact that Reyn is both very strong and a little dense, or if it's just the typical "video game animators have no idea how the weapons they are tasked to animate actually work, so everything just gets swung around like a sword or a club" thing. Lethemonster posted:With the exception of some of the equipment having boob windows later on this game writes all the female characters very well and keeps them strong both in the narrative and in gameplay. The friend that I played through Xenoblade Chronicles with is currently in Grad school, and one of the things he's been really fascinated by lately is the depiction of women in media viewed through a feminist lens. Consequently, we had several lengthy friendly debates on the subject when we weren't too busy making jokes about Reyn being a dummy. He would typically take the devil's advocate position that the female characters in the game were being objectified or denied agency, while I would take the counter position that (boob plate armor aside), the female characters of the game were at least as strong and active as the male characters. I understand that he took that position more to provoke interesting discussions than because he really thought the game was over the top offensive. Fiora's death was really the first time the subject came up. In the case of Fiora, she quite literally saves the entire party's lives here, then gets a chest full of steel from Metal Face for her trouble. From where I sat, her death had nothing to do with her being victimized or singled out because she was a woman, and frankly Reyn or Dunban could have ended up eating Metal Face's finger sandwich instead and served the same story purpose just as well. My friend took the position that the only female character was chosen specifically for this unexpected tragedy because it would provide more motivation for both the protagonist and for male players. There's a few other times the subject came up, but getting into that would be venturing waaaay into spoiler territory, so I'll refrain for now.
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Aug 11, 2013 03:46
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I have to admit that at this point in the game I started to get slightly infuriated by Shulk's sudden and severe case of the stupids. "Gee, I just had a vision where Reyn was fighting a bunch of spiders, then a giant spider killed him. This feels just like the vision I had about Fiora right before she died. Hey, Reyn is fighting a bunch of spiders! Should I tell him to watch out for a giant spider? Nah, probably won't come up!"
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Aug 13, 2013 15:50
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Poor Sharla continues to get no respect. She's not half as bad as Lethemonster makes her out to be. While I'll grant that she's marginal at best against routine trash enemies, and she's not really much fun to directly control (at least to me), in boss and unique enemy fights where you're a little under the enemy's level she's incredibly useful thanks to her heals and buffs. If you spec her right (selecting weapons and armor with many gem slots rather than the highest damage or defense rating, prioritize her healing skills, and loading her up with enough Ether gems to get the maximum bonus), her Large Heal and Party Heal abilities should both end up restoring most or all of your characters' hit points whenever used. In practice, this often means that a chain attack both does tons of damage AND brings your party to full HP. In especially tough fights, my friend and I would sometimes hold off on using chain attacks entirely until things started looking grim so we could instantly turn things around and carry on pounding on the baddies for long enough to refill the party gauge again. She also gets a pretty solid red damage skill later on which helps a lot with building up high multipliers when you don't need to rely quite so much on megaheals. Dunban, on the other hand, is pretty great all around. He's... sort of a tank like Reyn, except instead of getting punched in the face and asking for more he ducks instead. He also does good damage (a bit more than Reyn) and can topple enemies by himself. His main downside is that he has significantly less HP than Reyn, so he can get into trouble easily. He's also really fun to play as pretty much everyone has agreed.
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Aug 27, 2013 05:53
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quote:
As I mentioned upthread a bit, the friend I played through Xenoblade with and I had a number of conversations on this topic. While I think it's fair to say that this game is sometimes a bit over the top with fanservice at times (especially for Sharla) it mostly did a pretty solid job (for a game) in depicting its female characters strongly. Yes, Fiora goes out early in the game, but she had been built up as an equal of the other characters both in plot terms and in terms of game mechanics. She ultimately went down saving the lives of her friends in a manner that would have worked just as well if it had been Reyn or Dunban. Sharla's main arcs in the story so far has been about trying to save first her little brother, and later her husband who appears to have fallen trying to protect Colony 6. Really, her situation vis-a-vis Gadolt almost precisely mirrors that of Shulk and Reyn with Fiora, save that Sharla's loss of Gadolt occurs offscreen before we meet her. Admittedly, her in-game role as the party's primary healer is pretty cliche for a female character, and she is the game's #1 offender where fanservice is concerned, but her personality and motivations are about as far from your stereotypical white-mage type as you can get. As for Melia... well, we don't really know her well enough to talk about that yet. I will, however, say that neither my friend nor I were big fans of how she played in-game, either under player control or as an AI. Maybe that had something to do with why neither of us really liked Alcamoth or the High Entia much in general. Or maybe it was the fact that Alcamoth is basically a huge dull empty palace overlooking a huge dull empty park with the game's least interesting music.
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Sep 30, 2013 02:21
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about the portrayal of female characters, especially Fiora
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I came into Xenoblade knowing that there was a cutesy mascot character and fully expecting to hate him as I have hated all mascot characters in every other game I have played. But Monolith Soft was smart in their depiction of him. They made the rest of the party (at least initially, and to a lesser extent as the game goes on) not take him at all seriously while at the same time making him both a really good character gameplay wise and well differentiated from all of the other characters. So, as you use him, you start to unconsciously feel just a little sorry for him because everyone treats him pretty much like a joke. Then, as the other characters start to accept him more and realize that he is not, in fact, useless, you feel vindicated that the game has recognized that he is a valuable contributing member of the party. At some point shortly after that, the realization hits. Oh god, I like a cutesy mascot character, what's have I become?!? 
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Oct 4, 2013 04:13
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:20 |
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Chaltab posted:Alex Dewitt was a victim of a supervillain, whereas Fiora is a Edited slightly for greater emphasis of your point. On the subject of which characters to focus on, once we do Fiora I agree with the idea that it makes most sense to look at the characters in the order they joined the party.
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Oct 8, 2013 05:44
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