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Blind Sally posted:No. I dunno. I either got used to it or just numb to it over time. I get a kick out of the way [SOMEONE WHO HASN'T APPEARED YET] pronounces it though: "Shoolk". It never fails to make me smile. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Sep 3, 2013 |
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Sep 3, 2013 00:28
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Okay fine, I removed it. Nice to see you're keeping up with thing though despite how you're feeling. Get well soon. Anyway, am I the only one who shouts out "DICKSON!  " in full joyous glee every time he turns up out of nowhere?
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Sep 3, 2013 |
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Sep 3, 2013 01:13
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Polsy posted:I can't make myself pronounce Reyn as 'rine'. Not helped by the fact I saw it written a long time before I heard it and already convinced myself it was pronounced 'rain'. It just seems like a really odd spelling for that. I found listening to it being pronounced over and over again in-game for about 20 hours helped for me at least. I'm an aural thinker, so I can hear it in my head the way the characters pronounce it, British accents and all.
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Sep 3, 2013 23:01
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Lethemonster posted:What influences do you see in xenoblade? I've played a fair amount of games, but I have mostly played all the mainstream classics in each genre. Eg, the Final Fantasies, Zelda, etc, so I'm interested in what less typical games have informed the creation of this one. Obviously keep it spoiler free. Mechanically, I would say Final Fantasy XII really shaped a lot of how the game feels when I play it. Both share that "open world you can literally walk from one end to the other of" style of gameplay. The combat also feels very XII-esque, with the line between exploration and combat being very permeable. Over all, I like XII's battle system better than Xenoblade's because there was more to customize and control and the party AI was as smart as you wanted it to be thanks to the Gambit system. Setting-wise, I'm at a bit of a loss for comparisons, all said. I've encountered "worlds built on the back of X" stories before, but nothing of this scope and scale. I want to say Baten Kaitos, but I honestly haven't have any experience with it beyond seeing the occasional screenshot, so take that with a grain of salt. EDIT: Actually, I have thought of something. The setting reminds me an awful lot, aesthetically at least, of Chrono Cross, another game Monolith had more than a few fingers in as a developer. And story-wise? Well that one's piss easy: Tetsuya Takahashi has been trying to perfect what he only got about 45% finished in Xenogears for the last 15 years. And after trying five times (ie: the Xenosaga trilogy, and the two Baten Kaitos games), he finally stuck the landing on #6, Xenoblade Chronicles. I really can't say much more without it being a spoilerfest. However, I felt, upon completing Xenoblade, an odd sense of completion, having followed the Xeno series since Xenogears back on the PS1. This was the one that took all the themes that the games leading up to it had been experimenting with and made a complete thought out of them, and restored my faith in Takahashi and co. As storytellers and pretty much guaranteed my eventual purchase of a Wii U for X, and only for X. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 05:28
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Neddy Seagoon posted:I wonder if it's a case similar to Silicon Knights with Eternal Darkness - Nintendo keeping a tight reign on them to make sure they turn out something good. And generally telling them "get this part done before you add something else". Good point. I wonder just what exactly was the ratio between Monolith's artistic coming of age vs. Nintendo's quality control in Xenoblade turning out as good as it did. Because Namco pretty much gave them free reign to do what they wanted and they put out three games that no one really understood and were commercial bombs for it. And I'm saying that as someone who loves the Xenosaga trilogy. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 09:00
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Whuttup me bropons? I remember my first time going through Satorl marsh. I'd gotten used to the game's night/day cycle already, but seeing the transition for day to night in Satorl for the first time, music and all was nothing short of magical. That was the moment where I said to myself "I don't care what else I have to put off to see it done, I am finishing this game." And I did. It's rare that I find a large-scale game like this these days that I more or less play front to back in a reasonable amount of time. Blind Sally posted:This bit was great, because it was so refreshing to hear the annoying child sidekick admit that he's a bit useless and should probably leave. Good ol'Reyn even tries to cheer him up, but no, he is well and truly useless, so back to Colony 9! Good riddance! It did not surprise me to learn that Juju was an expy of Dan from Xenogears. I enjoyed mercillously punching Dan's face in during the Aveh battle tournament. Never regretted a second of it. I just wished Otharon would stick around though. He was cool. I wound up rebuilding Colony 6 just out of guilt because I was tired of it looking like a shithole every time I went back to it for something. Also DICKSON!
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Sep 17, 2013 10:27
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Szurumbur posted:I have question(s): It's not explained, or if it is it's not explained in plot-relevant dialog. It is an interesting wrinkle in the plot because the wildlife of Bionis was also born of it, just like the Homs, Nopon, and High Entia were, yet the Monado can hurt them just like it can Mechon, despite it being the sword of the Bionis.  Maybe the rule only applies to sentient Bionis life. I dunno. I don't want to say because to delve any further into how the Monado works is massive friggin spoilers.
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Sep 18, 2013 11:26
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Blind Sally posted:What's even better is that Riki winds up being one of the more complex and interesting characters in the story. Some of the Heart to Hearts with him are brilliant. It's the reason I picked him for my avatar. He's got some of the best battle dialog too. Riki: "Sidekicks try hard!" Reyn: "What, who are you calling sidekicks?" Riki: "Don't see anyone else, must be you."
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Sep 20, 2013 00:46
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Tupperwarez posted:You know that old gag where a guy brings a cute baby/puppy with him to the park to attract women? Riki is the guy and the puppy. Does his deviousness know any limits? Well he does have 11 kids. Clearly Riki's swag has no off button. Reyn on the other hand... Melia: "Riki, may I please stroke your soft fur?" Riki: "Melly always welcome!" Reyn: "Me too please!"
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Sep 20, 2013 05:20
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Blind Sally posted:It's absolutely stunning. A tour de force. A triumph for humankind. I absolutely second this as a read. That said, Xenoblade is pretty much every other Xeno- game distilled and crystalized. Like I said way back a few pages ago, it's the one that got the Xeno- formula right. 'gears, and the 'saga trilogy have a lot of flaws to them and don't hold well to Xenoblade's high water mark at all. That said! I would also definitely recommend reading TheDarkId's LP if you want to. It treats the game with the right levels of praise and derision it deserves. Zutaten's Xenosaga LP's are much the same, though good luck finding any of them, as Episodes I and II weren't archived and his Episode III one just kind of sputtered and died not even halfway through the game. Or better yet, Xenogears is up on PSN as a digital download title now for $9.00. Now you too can experience the wonders of
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Sep 24, 2013 08:21
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Riki, notably, has very little impact on the story from here on out. It's been a year or more since I played, so my memory might be faulty, but I can only remember one or two scenes where he does something noteworthy. Yeah, in terms of meaningful story developments, Riki's more or less done, barring like one more scene that's still a ways off. All of his character development from her out plays out in Heart-to-Hearts. Xeno games are notorious for having characters like that, who do one or two significant things around the time of their introduction and then fade into the background for the majority of the game, pretty much the entire playable cast of Xenogears was like outside of Fei and Elly.
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Sep 28, 2013 23:28
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Glazius posted:I love how Riki just does his prancey little idle animation while NPCs are busy telling you the quest details. Remembering little details is what Heropon's friends are for! It made for interesting times trying to equip anything on him. I try turning him to get a better look at his new weapon or armour and he TURNS BACK THE OTHER WAY ON HIS OWN! I used to get pissed off, and then immediately forget about it because he started doing his little dance too. Oh Riki, I can't
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Oct 20, 2013 09:30
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Mazed posted:On equipment-talk: I had no idea I was walking into a cutscene back at the beginning of Makna where Shulk first met Aldo. So, he was shirtless. It definitely added something to that exchange. I beat The Last Story before I made any significant headway into Xenoblade, and Alvis shares a voice actor with Jirall from Last Story; the biggest blazing douchecannon I've ever encountered in a video game narrative, so my first encounter with him went something along the lines of "Aw, Christ, not you again!"
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Oct 20, 2013 09:57
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LordAba posted:Magical DNA scanners and not knowing what the hell is going on. All we need now is an explanation of nanomachines and we will have the xeno-noun trifecta! No nanomachines, but "ether" gets dropped a bafuckzillion times in the second half of the game, so 2.5, maybe?
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Nov 21, 2013 05:11
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Lethemonster posted:some arbitrary plot point Well, in all fairness, they kind of telegraph it a long way off. And plus, the event in question is a staple of every single Xeno- plot. But yeah...
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Dec 5, 2013 19:56
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Even though Melia was in your party before, and you could change her weapon and maybe some other gear, you were not allowed to remove her hat - making this the first possible time you could see her headwings. That was one of the really nice things I enjoyed about Xenoblade: its commitment to its narrative conceits. The audience clearly knows Melia is not human by the point she becomes playable, but the characters don't, so you can't change her head equipment because it would be one of those rare inward breaks in the fourth wall between you and the characters. One of the few other games I've seen do that is FFXIII right at the beginning where Vanille has 3 ATB slots instead of 2 because she's already a l'Cie unbeknownst to everyone else. The rest of the game is poo poo, but I always admired that little bit of it.
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Jan 21, 2014 01:16
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Sindai posted:Wait, if they've been doing the two-consort thing for generations, how is it that they just now produced a hybrid heir? One is pure-blood High Entia, the other is a hybrid. Melia isn't the first hybrid, she's simply the first one considered "good enough" for whatever weird Darwinist bullshit plot the High Entia have been working towards up till now. Traditionally, the heir is provided through the pure-blood consort. This is the first case of the reigning emperor choosing the hybrid heir presumptive over the pure-blood heir apparent. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 01:29
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That would be the ultimate capper to the "Fate hates Tetsuya Takahashi" curse thing: the Wii U kills Nintendo as a company and all its games still in development are summarily cancelled, X first and foremost among them. 
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Feb 4, 2014 13:00
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Neddy Seagoon posted:
Yeah, it's been pointed out already, but Melia's VA is Jenna Coleman, the current companion of Peter Capaldi's Doctor on Doctor Who, while Alvis's VA Blake Ritson plays the main villain Girolamo Riario on DaVinci's Demons.
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Feb 5, 2014 12:56
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That "voice acting group" is actually a random assortment of British TV stars and voice actors of various degrees of fame and success. Incidentally if you've seen the CGI Captain Scarlet series, I want you to look at Captain Scarlet himself and try picturing him saying "Riki sneaky!".
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Digital Jello posted:I always loved that part. It's where the game turned from an entertaining adventure into a convoluted (but loveable) mess, with a crapload of questions on the horizon. That said, these Xeno games sure love their mechanized women. Well, I've always maintained that Fiora was the perfect combination of Elly and KOS-MOS.
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Feb 6, 2014 03:59
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There's a point coming up in the next couple of areas that would be the point were most modern JRPGs would slam down a "To be continued, buy the sequel suckers!" on you, but in Xenoblade its actually where the game starts Act 3 of its story. It threw me for such a loop because I'd become numb to games having lovely underwhelming "gently caress it lets just end it on Act 2" endings. It was such a breath of fresh air to see the game actually continue.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:28
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When researching the game about a year before I played it, I'd come across concept art of Mechon-Fiora completely out of context. When I started playing the game I was thinking, oh, maybe she gets kidnapped later in the game and we have to rescue her, because it's a tried-and-true Xeno-game trope to jack the female deuteragonist for an extended length of the plot and then when we find her, she's a Mechon now. ...And then she "dies". And I was like "well, poo poo. ...Wait." And I spent the rest of the game up to where it teases Face Nemesis wondering how she would be reintroduced into the plot.
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Feb 9, 2014 00:55
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Digital Jello posted:Especially with Xord, it was overly-hinted at Face Mechons possibly being people, although on my first playthrough, I assumed it was going to pay homage to Xenogears by having people's brains operate the giant robots, as opposed to someone actually being "cyberized" and inside. I really like the idea that in introducing Fiora in a Mechon, it brings up all sorts of new questions, establishing the counter-world of Mechonis as perhaps being something more than just "killer robots". It's not explicitly spelled out in-game, but the Mechon run on ether. As we've seen in Colony 6 (and will be seeing later on), ether takes a lot of time, effort, and precision to mine into a consumable form. Yet Homs (and actually all life on Bionis), as has been established by Zanza, are just condensed packets of raw ether, which the Mechon then break down and feast upon. Though it only seems to be a) Mechon who travel far away from Mechonis and b) really crazy fuckers like Xord who tend to resort to this kind of predatory behaviour.
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Feb 9, 2014 05:34
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Blind Sally posted:Isn't it the fact that they are immune to the Monado? Gives the Mechon a pretty sweet tactical advantage. Well, not any more, at least now that Zanza went on Grafh on it and turned it into a super-Monado. Now Shulk gets to see if he can balance "gently caress I HATE MECHON  " with "I don't want to hurt Fiora  ".
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Feb 10, 2014 08:05
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Blind Sally posted:This is actually a pretty difficult question, because the entire party was so drat likeable. I've also found that to be surprisingly rare in RPGs. There's usually three or four party members who I rotate through while I ignore the rest. ^^^^ Pretty much this. The character I really avoided playing as was Melia because I just couldn't wrap my head around her playstyle, yet she saw about as much party time as everyone else did by the end of the game. I didn't really play as Sharla that much either because her cool downs were far too slow for me, but the AI handled her great, so I can't complain. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 21:38
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tlarn posted:Dang, Mumhkar's got a stylin' suit. Mumhkar is the best. I don't don't think I've ever seen a more gleefully unrepentant shitfucker of a character in a video game. The closest analogs I can think of are Pigma Dengar from StarFox or maybe Belcitane from White Knight Chronicles.
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Jun 15, 2014 04:36
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Yeah, from this point forward Fiora is pretty much a direct combination of Elly from 'gears, and KOS-MOS from 'saga in terms of character design.
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Jul 12, 2014 23:16
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That we know of. 
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Jul 12, 2014 23:32
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I remember when I played through the game the first time I was convinced right up to the reveal of Face Nemesis that Fiora was dead and never coming back, and I actually applauded Monolith for having the balls to fake you out by giving you a decently rounded main character with their own complete skill line, armours, and weapons, and then kill them off 3 hours into the game. And then I went on Creative Uncut to look at some of the game's official artwork pieces and saw Mechon Fiora front and centre and was so pissed off that I'd ruined the twist for myself. Also, Riki, because Heropon very cool!
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Jul 15, 2014 09:40
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DOOP posted:So how much of Fiora is her own flesh and blood at this pint. Her head and ...? Pretty much. I think her head and her central nervous system, but it's been nearly a year since the last time I played it and I don't really want to say any more because its all spoilers.
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Jul 17, 2014 01:32
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Pollyanna posted:Dammit, I really like robots and mechanical stuff, too. Fiora's kind of a disappointment in the lack-of-obnoxious-bullshit-fanservice department. I once tried to hack human Fiora back into Mechon Fiora's place just because all her Mechon armours outside of her base set were poo poo to look at. It broke the game.
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Jul 17, 2014 21:39
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Are we sure they didn't secretly get Brian Blessed to voice this dude?
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Aug 19, 2014 07:53
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That's not all! Xenoblade's also getting a 3DS port. Man, Nintendo of America may absolutely hate Xenoblade, but Nintendo HQ sure does love it right now. Edit: Holy gently caress! Riki and Dunban assist trophies!  Between this, Hyrule Warriors and XBCX, I might actually have to buy a drat Wii U now. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Aug 29, 2014 |
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Aug 29, 2014 22:13
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The Sandman posted:Now watch as they don't release the Xenoblade port in the US. Of course it won't come out in NA. Reggie visibly sighs in frustration every time anyone mentions Xenoblade in interviews with him. It took a massive outcry just to get a limited run co-publication with Gamestop. Dude probably punt kicked an intern reflexively when the Shulk SSB trailer dropped.
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Sep 9, 2014 21:15
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Faust IX posted:Sad, but probably true. At least we still have the original game, right? Unless they actually have really stopped making it for good for NA, in which case my condolences. Is the PAL version still being produced, as a viable alternative if that sort of thing actually happens? They did a second equally limited run under the same conditions, but now the best you can do at finding an NTSC copy of Xenoblade is a $90 used copy at Gamestop, if you're insanely lucky. I bought a PAL copy from the UK back when it looked like it was never coming to North America and modded my Wii to play it and never once regretted it. In fact, it actually cost me less after shipping and import taxes than it would have cost to buy it retail here in  . I was incredibly surprised.
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Sep 9, 2014 21:42
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ktimekiller posted:Slightly off topic but I would like to mention that Nier is one of those JPRGs that have superior English dubs over the Japanese VAs in my opinion. A surprising number of JRPGs are like that. I had to play through the Japanese version of White Knight Chronicles for something for my LP and the Japanese version is dead bland compared to the English version, and the English version isn't all that great either. Chalk me up as another person who can't picture the game in anything but the British-est of English. I can't pronounce Monado without mangling into like how Mumkhar or Xord say it, "DAH MANAAHDOH?!"
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Sep 14, 2014 19:38
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Lethemonster posted:I had updates planned for this holiday but the universe struck again. Oh my god. That's terrible. I'm sorry to hear that my condolences to you and your family.  Losing a relative is hard enough, but right before Christmas is about the worst.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:33
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