Eribuster

@westernwizard: You should hand off the no-insurance Skell to a party member as NPCs will always perform a perfect eject.

Finally, the game is mine! I've joined the Mediators in a bit of role-playing. Looking at the Division rankings, it looks like Prospectors will always be at the top by having the game idle and the probes gathering Miranium.

I've left off at Chapter 3 for my first session with the game. It's looking like I still have major network features to unlock even though I'm 5 hours in to the game.

EDIT: Oh! I forgot to enter my character name. It's Renne.

NNID: EnnerBlade

Hopefully my Special Edition arrives on time on Thursday. Looking how its in Illinois now, I somewhat doubt it.

Yeah, the squads aren't static. People come and go within the connection. Maybe a squad can be friends-only if that option is set by all friendly players logging in.

Well, Phil Kollar in Polygon's review did state that the game has no sense of pacing!

I can see the thought pattern of "Well, the game is really huge anyway. There will be time to level them up," coming from the development team. That, or they didn't want some sort of auto-leveling because it would screw something else up.

With how Xenoblade Chronicles X is structured, you'll always have Elma and Lin by your side. The 4th slot is extra. And the only progression-critical 4th party member is Gwin, according to Games Radar.

The reviews have rolled out and there's a spread of scores from the 9s to the 7s. It the average I expected after indulging in much of the pre-release coverage. From reading the reviews at Nintendo World Report, GameSpot, Polygon, Eurogamer, and The Jimquisition, the gist of the bad of Xenoblade Chronicles X is that Monolith Soft has missed a few marks in its effort to make an even bigger successor to Xenoblade Chronicles. It's disappointing to read that some of the resource and battle systems are poorly or not at all explained. Most distressing to me are statements of poor pacing. Xenoblade Chronicles can get bogged down if the player gets lost in the weeds of simple side quests and lacks discipline avoid task that feel more like work. It's a shame that Monolith Soft has failed to address this in Xenoblade Chronicles X and has seemed to make it worse. Jim Sterling mentions a quest being slogged by the RNG of the material drops, and that is terrible. Lastly, those that enjoyed the story of Xenoblade Chronicles will be disappointed in Xenoblade Chronicle X's weaker offering.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's shift in focus on exploration of vast spaces seems to have brought good and bad. If there's a silver lining to the disappointing aspects of Xenoblade Chronicles X it's that Monolith Soft has made an effort to make a follow-up with significantly different aspects and goals.

I want Monolith Soft's next game to dial back on the scale it plays at, seeing how doing so has bitten back in their recent game. Until that distant time, I can't wait to start exploring planet Mira.

It will be a pain because of the lacking capability of the Nintendo Network's friend system, but I hope we can have a few community Squads up and running in the game's hot month(s).

While Nintendo doesn't recommend it and forum chatter has guessed it would reduce the drive's life, it would be cost-effective to grab a cheap 32+ GB USB drive to expand the storage of the Wii U to fit the ~22 GB Xenoblade Chronicles X or the 10 GB of faster-loading data packs.

Unless you have an extra AC outlet nearby and an old AC-powered external hard drive, using a USB flash drive is the easiest way to go.

Do you want it to be serious or not? Which would you align with your values more? I'm sorry to be giving this a hard time, but my thoughts have always been fluid in regards to this subject.

From the selection of talk and words I've read from professional localization people (particularly those that aim for big audiences), they believe the best practice is to tune the work to the cultural values of a different market while maintaining (as they interpret it) the main message of the art. Granted, this view seems more in line with the older work horses; the recent trend (perhaps the wrong chronological word to use) has been moving toward more literal localization.

Taking some of the words from the latest 8-4 podcast episode as the whole truth, is it more or less distressing that the removal of the boob slider was a decision that was scrutinized by a group of people on both sides of the pond rather than a single person's or handful of people's whim?

I have no imagination for the discussion that lead to the removal of the boob slider and other edits. Ultimately, I'm a little disappointed with some of the actual and alleged changes (some changes I don't care for either way), and I can only hope that don't bother my experience with the game.

Well, wait, my real ultimately is that I trust that Treehouse, 8-4 Play, and other contractors will give me a good time in spite of any drastic changes they made. Perhaps that is an unacceptable compromise, and I respect that. Personally, my wants from localization have always been fluid and depend the specific circumstances of each particular work.

VALUES OF A DIFFERENT MARKET DISAGREE.

Isn't the internet grand, now we can see the sausage making and how it's being made differently for different countries.

The Quick Look is scheduled to land on the 27th of November. Austin has tweeted that he got his first Skell. Ah! I'm getting eager and anxious.