Eribuster

Soul Voice is always an extra. There's little way in messing with it that will cause you to wipe. Maybe if you switched all your Soul Heal bonuses to non-healing bonuses. You can only edit the Soul Voice of your character. I recommend poking at it to see the options. Remember, the actions you are setting are for your party to reply to with their arts. Don't expect to see many Soul Voice melee triggers from your party if there are few melee arts in place among your entire party.

For the development terminal, the most use you will get out of it is in investing Miranium to AMs. Most of the features of the Armorey Alley's development terminal are for the post game. Once you get an AM to level 4 or 5, you will see better gear in the shop across all levels.

When you use a piece of gear as fashion gear, that gear is essentially equipped on the character. You can't sell it as long as it's equipped as fashion gear. Feel free to buy or keep gear that you want to wear. I have so many silly hats and dresses from finishing Basic missions and other things.

@machofantastico: That's nice to hear. The game is worth something (so says the 300 hour clocker), and we want to help you give the game it's best chance. As systems heavy the game is, it doesn't punish you harshly for not engaging with them outside of some egregious game stoppers (e.g. the aforementioned "The Repair Job" Affinity mission that requires you to set up mining probes on Frontier Nav). However, if you have the mind of at least attempting to "100%" the game in a quick manner, the beginning to going to be very rough.

It will take a lot of time to explain the systems and interactions of the game, and it will be difficult to explain them with no context for you or us. So, feel free to @ me or anyone else when you have a question or a wondering thought.

One tip if you value an uncluttered inventory: The inventory sorting is okay-enough in the equip menu and non-existent in menu where you can sell stuff (Intel -> Inventory). If you don't want junk in your inventory, take some effort to be picky now. Blue gear (Rare) drop all the time and are generally lackluster. Sell those, and keep Green gear (Unique). All loot drops have either have a Worn or Advanced modifier with expected negatives and positives when compared to gear you can get from Armory Alley. Take what you need and sell the rest in the spoils screen.

That said, you have enough inventory space to last you for hundreds of hours. So if you can't be bothered to manually sell your trash gear, then you are free to do so if you're not thinking of a completionist or near-completionist playthrough.

Oh, unlike a lot of other RPGs, the gear you buy in town can be pretty decent. Investing Miranium (mined from setting Mining Probes on Frontier Nav) in to Arms Manufacturers can increase the rarity of sold gear when an Arms Manufacturer reaches level 4 and 5 (max level). Keep that in mind whenever you see that your Miranium storage is full.

As the idiot who spent nearly 300 hours in the game, your experience is par for the course.

I've indulged myself to all the official promotional and preview material of the game, so I came in to the game prepared. It might help to watch the subtitled versions of the half-hour Japanese promos:

But even then, these videos won't teach you the flow of the game or how the numerous systems interact with each other.

Starting out, finish the first three story chapters that serve as the slight tutorial sequence. You'll unlock the network features after Chapter 3, don't worry about it. From there, you can do what you want. The two most useful things are to plant as many probes as you can and raising your Mechanical Skill every time you increase your BLADE level.

The Basic missions you get from the mission board are mostly throwaway extra things. They often lead you to your doom, if they lead you anywhere at all. Normal missions (quests you pick up from red questions marks over named NPCs) have a bit more direction and story. Try to do those if you are able. Affinity missions can do a good job of guiding you to interesting places, but some (like The Repair Job) can get you stuck with some of the more bullshit systems of the game.

This game is unfocused and varied to it's detriment. Also, that was pretty much the design goal of the game. If you set out to do something specific and immediate in Xenoblade Chronicles X, that is the path to hating the game immensely. Unfortunately, this game is best played with a meandering and fickle attitude.

@pepsiman: Thank you for the insight!

I'm excited to have a confirmed date for this game. Now the other big thing I'm wondering is if any thing will be edited. From reading the impressions of a few importers, there is a possibly uncomfortable and creepy scenario in Chapter 2 involving the teenage girl characters dressing down to distract a perverted antagonist. A sort of plot movement that one would expect from a trashy, tactless anime, but I wonder if Nintendo will elect to modify that for the releases outside of Japan.

@cav829:I wish there was an easy, good, cheap, and non-copyright-infringing way to play Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii) in North America. Maybe Nintendo of America can clean whatever impasse they have in their heads and publish the Wii U eShop release that Europe can enjoy right now.

@mattadord: If you have a way to play Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii), I would suggest playing that for a bit first before Xenoblade Chronicles X. The more linear and directed nature of Xenoblade Chronicles gently eases you in to systems that have descendants in Xenoblade Chronicles X (e.g. Arts palette combat, character affinity, collectopedia, tension gauge). Xenoblade Chronicles has a better tutorial and less tangled systems.

The problem with Xenoblade Chronicles X is that, even after you thoroughly read the extremely vital electronic manual, it is hard to grasp all the systems that in play after Chapter 2 and 3. It is only through harsh experience that you start to see how things fit together and play off each other. How doing anything raises your BLADE level, which allows you to return to Eleonora to raise your Mechanical Field Skill, which allows you open certain treasure boxes and plant more probes in the field, which allows you to use mining and research probes to gather more Miranium and money, which gives you more resources and capital for improving your equipment and arms manufacturing, which finally makes you more able to tackle harsher missions and areas that progress the narratives of Mira and further raise your BLADE level.

The numbers can keep going up, and the narrative context Xenoblade Chronicles X provides to cover it is about as much as any of the skimpiest female armor sets (they can get really skimpy [except for Lin if you're playing the English version]).

Not gonna lie: where as Xenoblade Chronicles felt like a journey, Xenoblade Chronicles X feels more like work. Now, the work has you journeying to some fantastic places and creatures, but you will inevitably feel to be an ace employee to the organization of BLADE as well as a video game player grinding away at a big-ass JRPG. If that's what you fancy for, Xenoblade Chronicles X will happily eat up a month or two if you let it.

@cav829: I want to reiterate that there are problems with the narrative of Chapter 12 that I can not defend. I am expanding that to the whole of Xenoblade Chronicles X's main Story.

The ticking bomb is ever present in the main Story. I forgive it's overbearing usage since it clear from progressing (and not progressing) in the story chapters that it is not an in-game threat but a narrative framing device. The energy levels drop the same amount whether you spend 10 hours between Story Missions or 50 hours. I took its usage in Chapter 12 as another hammering that the heaviest shit is about to go down. I was amused that the game asks the player twice that this is the point of no return.

As for Lao...

Speaking on character development throughout the narratives of Xenoblade Chronicles X, it is such a personal disappointment how poor it is. From reading the Iwata Asks, I knew going in that the focus on narrative will be different and lesser when compared to Xenoblade Chronicles. Monolith Soft was developing their first high-definition game, a bigger world than the already gargantuan Xenoblade Chronicles, a world that functions and sings on three radical scales (on foot, in Skell, and in flight), arbitrarily filling each designated hex with at least one big thing to do, creating layers and tangles of systems that interact in an interesting way, and doing all of this on the Wii U. From the perspective of "it's a wonder video games are made and released at all," Xenoblade Chronicles X will always be a triumph.

But this came at the cost of scattered and lighter story from Tetsuya "Ye shall be as Gods" Takahashi and co. It was a design goal to have a shorter main story and more side content. Most disappointing, it was a design decision of Takahashi to further curb his Xeno-ness, furthering a downward trend from Xenogears (as I gather from more dedicated fans of his work). It is clear now, at least, that the aim of Xenoblade Chronicles X's narrative is depth from breadth.

Even knowing all this, it is distressing to me how thin the characters. After 251 hours in, how little there is to know of Lin as a person, of Irina as a person, of Hope as a person, of Nagi, of L, of Vahndam, of the Murderess, of Frye, of Phog, of everyone, but most of all Elma. Austin Walker's assessment of Elma as the story's actual protagonist is correct, and I don't have enough of a sense of her as a person at the end of Chapter 12. This is the most saddening for me because Elma is the most obvious candidate Xenoblade Chronicles X has for the next Smash Bros. and the game she is in doesn't do her many favors. From indulging all the official pre-release coverage I can find, I was so ready to love adventuring alongside Elma, and it is such a bummer that the game has precious few moments to support that love.

It is painful in many ways that the strongest emotional reactions I have from characters in Xenoblade Chronicles X came from Grette and Aldebart.

Some personal context: Xenoblade Chronicles is my front-runner for most favorite game of all time. I will gladly fall with Xenoblade Chronicles in the discussion "The Best JRPG of Recent Times" against the much deserved winner Persona 4 which correctly started the future of exploring emotional spaces rather than expansive spaces. While some critics will at best award Xenoblade Chronicles's story with functional competence, I love every moment and heart-to-heart of its tale. Most of all, I love playing as Melia and watching her arc in the story unfold as the game's most complete and fully-developed.

From this stand point, Xenoblade Chronicles X was doomed to be a personal disappointment. Elma, considering the design goals of the game she's in, was doomed to be compared poorly to Melia. No creator has created two works back-to-back that become the personal most favorites for a single audience member (or at least it hasn't happened to me). I accept this fate for Xenoblade Chronicles X, painful for me as it may be. It is after accepting this that I can move myself to see Xenoblade Chronicles X away from the shadow of it predecessor and see the many joys it has in its own light. Hopefully, I'll find the time to write about that in the future.

251 hours in and that's the twelfth and final Story Mission done. (Just in case anyone wasn't sure, that's not a time count I'm proud of.)

I understand the (severe) disappointment that other people have expressed over the finale. I find its execution in narrative and play problematic. However, I love it when my JRPG endings go crazy, and Xenoblade Chronicles X is not the one to betray that love. I find it amazing that Fallout 4, SOMA, and Xenoblade Chronicles X are games that all came out in the same year. Then again, we've seen this before with Halo 4, Assassin's Creed 3 (I think), and Mass Effect 3.

Suffice to say, the stories on Mira aren't done yet. I suspect that hour count will go even higher.

@cav829: There are four characters that were previously DLC characters for Japan. That is quite a lot out of a playable cast of about 20. One thing that is missing from Xenoblade Chronicles is giving characters collectibles as presents to raise affinity. That was an easy way to max affinity between all seven characters in Xenoblade Chronicles.

As for the structural and pacing issues leveled at the game, I honestly think Monolth Soft built it that way to have a game that demands more time from the player. Maybe the developers felt that a player would have fun spending as much time with every character as they would with the avatar character.

More so than a lot of other big games, Xenoblade Chronicles X was made with the intent that it will be the player's only game for 100-200+ hours.

As for the Heart-to-Heart thing, that is sadly a carry-over from Xenoblade Chronicles. I remember hunting down many cute scenes across Bionis. Xenoblade Chronicles X complicates things by hiding the locations behind NPC eavesdropping and having the events be in-game time sensitive.

@cav829: Hmm, I don't know how many Normal Missions you've done, but I've found they are consistently more involving and engaging than the Story and Affinity Missions. I was down on the narrative(s) of Xenoblade Chronicles X until I had seen through some hefty Normal Missions. It might be too little, too late at this point.

As for the ending of the game, I've gotten the sense it is a sight to behold. I've gotten the read from some tweets that it is a video gaming highlight of 2015. Some Giant Bomb users have expressed the opposite. As for making sense of Mira, I've heard that wrapping up Affinity Mission chains really help in that regard. If you ever do go back to the game, just go to the Network Console in the BLADE Barracks to run the Affinity boosting Support Mission.

One thing I will agree on is that this is a game that you wish you could make time for, would make time for you.

The 200 hour mark ticked by. This is a problem and I don't care.

I've just finished Chapter 10 and have been doing Normal Missions as they pop up. My biggest disappointment with the game initially was the lacking narrative. Since then, the game has dramatically improved in that regard for me. The Story and Affinity Missions are still a little flat, which is a real shame because want to love Elma, Nagi, Irina, Hope, Celica, and a few other major characters. But the Normal Missions you come across in the game truly and literally bring life to NLA. And then you have characters bouncing off each other in amusing or tragic ways, creating an odd and fun canvas of story lines that you can only get from a Japanese sci-fi geek interpreting the American melting pot. The mission to take back an ice cream cake was the first shot to hit. The game finally had me when it literally dropped a quest out of the sky in front of my feet.

I'm somewhat angry at the game's narrative for being so dull in it's front half. But as with going from your feet, to your Skell, to flying, the game slowly and painstakingly built its story to become something special to me.