With my second blog on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I figured I'd shine a light on the game's expansive number of side-quests, activities, development tools, bonus objectives, and other non-combat features through the lens of all the overly-fastidious note-taking I've been doing. Most note-takers I know tend to open Google Spreadsheet or Excel if they have it, if the current Twitter trend of recording every angle of discovery in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is any indication, but I usually stick to Notepad like a low-tech sucker. It's a timeworn practice whenever I play an explormer where I want to record where I need to backtrack to and with what probable upgrade, and I usually bust it out if a game has an achievement list that's on the right side of reasonable, but then there are games like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 where before long a document begins to resemble an eighty page manifesto someone might send to a national newspaper if they suddenly wanted a whole lot of police attention. It's not pretty, in so many words, but it does help keep track of an awful lot of data.

I intimated it last time when I unsuccessfully attempted to describe the nuances of the combat system in 10,000 words or fewer, but Xenoblade Chronicles 2 can be ridiculous to the point of overbearing when it comes to its systems and features. So many of these are interconnected, of course, and generally serve to benefit the core gameplay - the combat, exploration, and character development - but there's a certain degree of "opt-in" where you can go from casually playing the game like any other RPG - keep following the critical quest objective on the map tracker, perhaps buying new gear whenever you reach a new town or checking in occasionally on the character development screens - to total bugfuck, coffee-jittery, "corkboard full of strings tied to pins" territory tout de suite. I am presently in that full-on "who is Pepe Silvia?" stage of the process, and even though the game's denouement is literally a single door away I find myself compelled to finish out everything the game has left in store, up to and possibly including all these enormous end-game superbosses that just showed up like they own the place.

At any rate, I wanted to go through each of my notepad sub-headers in turn, tell you a little about what they are, how they benefit the playthrough or character builds, and how I'm just about managing to track them for the sake of... honestly, just so all this meticulous journalizing can have value in retrospect. I am not an accomplished man, these days least of all, but perhaps I can still salvage something out of all this; even if it's only a cautionary tale to others currently mousing over their own chosen word processor tool with a determined look.

(Quick primer on some XC2-specific terminology:

• Drivers are playable characters and Blades are their "equipment" which can be switched around but are also characters in their own right. I've taken to thinking of Blades like Pokemon, since the currently equipped one determines your fighting strength, elemental bias, and range of combat skills.
• Blades are broken up into: Commons, which are procedurally generated and all look the same; and Rares, which are unique individuals with their own distinct appearances, personalities, skill trees, and questlines. True to their name, Rares are very hard to obtain and usually require a lot of luck in the game's gacha-style Blade bonding system.
• Heart-to-hearts are optional cutscenes between Drivers and Blades that are usually comedic asides, similar to the skits of Tales.
• Titans are really big monsters everyone decided it was OK to live on. Every region of the game is a separate Titan, with a handful of exceptions.)

Side-Quests

The original reason I opened up a text document on that cold spring morn. The in-game side-quest tracking is fairly decent -even taking multiple stages into account - but it doesn't follow more than one SQ simultaneously. NPCs and areas vital to other SQs will still have a blue exclamation mark (a blue question mark, meanwhile, indicates that a side-quest is available here) when you get close enough to them but only one can ever appear on the game's compass at a time.

As you can imagine, this ain't so hot when you have multiple quests across multiple Titans, so I needed some way to corral them by area and by requirements to keep from bouncing around too much. Progress in SQs is often stymied by skill checks in particular, which I'll get into in a little bit.

Brief shout-out to the way the game withholds side-quest experience and deposits it in a bank you access by sleeping at an inn. Good for letting completionist types like myself not overlevel before the next story dungeon, provided we go by the honor system and don't just gorge on whatever XP we have in reserve at every opportunity. Dunno if I've seen that in an open-world RPG before now, but I can think of several where it might've been handy.

Driver Affinity Charts

The Affinity Charts, which are Xenoblade's version of skill trees, are this game's meat and potatoes as far as character development goes, but the Driver charts are relatively straightforward and considerably smaller than the Blade affinity charts. They are, however, an early indication of just how elaborate XC2's character development can get, as it uses the first of the game's four separate types of experience earned from battle to activate nodes across its fan-shaped grids (SP, or skill points, as opposed to XP, WP, or Trust).

I took to recording which skills I wanted to buy next so I could quickly scan through each character's Affinity Chart and check if their respective SP totals were sufficient enough to afford them. It's arguably a faster process than checking skills manually, and "arguably beneficial" is usually enough reason for me to go through with something time-demanding.

To circle back around to those "four types of XP," which is like the quattro formaggi pizza of character development, I should explain that WP are Weapon Points. Every Blade has a specific weapon type - laser-katanas, hammer-axes, an electrified Blitzball, i.e. the usual shit - and characters earn WP for those weapon types as a whole, which are spent on upgrading the four Driver skills (called Arts, or at least they were in XC1) that are attached to each type. It means if a Driver has been using someone with a katana for a while and decides to switch Blades, they might benefit from using another katana-wielder because they already have some training with its accompanying skillset. Tracking weapon art mastery is some real deep "in the weeds" business though, and I've not gone so far as to note which of my Drivers are primarily using which weapons. Just another example of how details-obsessive you could get with this game.

Blade Affinity Charts

Blade Affinity Charts are where you start losing your damn mind. They're filled with skill nodes to activate in the same manner as the Driver affinity charts, but there's no currency to unlock most of them. The one exception is "Trust," which builds as you use Blades in battle and also when you complete side-quests, discover new locations, and watch heart-to-hearts while they're equipped.

Instead, every single node on a Blade affinity chart - and there's usually anywhere between 20 and 50 - requires a milestone achievement, fetch quest, or some other bonus objective. Kill certain enemies, perform a certain number of feats in combat, use their favorite "pouch items" (store-bought temporary boosts that can be anything from food and drink to musical instruments), acquire cash, or complete specific side-quests that they're involved in. Not only do all the unique Blades have these, but so does every "common" Blade in the game: for the latter, these node goals are randomly determined along with the Blades themselves. Imagine a game that procedurally generated an achievement list from a near endless pool of possibilities every time you played, and you'd get a sense of how in-depth the Blade affinity system can be.

Because of this, I've taken to tracking these goals by category, rather than by Blade. I have a list of enemies to hunt, a list of pouch items that Blades request (as well as recording any favorites I've found), and whether or not I've accomplished their side-quests yet. As I keep finding new Blades or upgrading the old, I keep appending the data. It's... well, you need to keep yourself busy these days.

Skill Checks

Across the world there are chests, doors, passageways, eddies, and other barriers that require skill checks to surpass. These skills could be elemental - almost every Blade has a "Mastery" skill for their particular element - but might also include lockpicking, fortitude, leaping, superstrength, and many others depending on the type of barrier. Rare Blades frequently carry up to three of these skills, but they need levelling up like pretty much everything else. Fortunately, multiple equipped Blades can pool their expertise together if you're a little short.

Anyway, there's a lot of these early on where you simply won't have the range of Blades and Blade skills to complete them. Most lead to chests with valuables that you can find anywhere else, but a few lead to secret areas (great for resource gathering) and side-quest specific items. The game's map system helpfully records those you've found and the skills you need for them, but I took to jotting down the information as a convenience.

Rare Blade Rundowns

Here's where my extracurricular nonsense takes a sharp left turn into death cult level insanity, building an elaborate table for each rare Blade in my possession and everything I still need to do with them: their current level of affinity, the amount of nodes completed, the number of monster hunts and pouch items they need, and an outline of their skills for the sake of the Skill Checks above. Once you have more than twenty of these rare Blades, it gets hard to track whom has what and which needs some attention as they fall behind the Blades used more regularly. I also track elements: when building a party for attacking certain high-level foes, it's good to either have a mix of elemental types or a focus on one element in particular. The game's not too dissimilar to Pokemon in this regard.

I update the table at the end of every play session, and use it to judge who to take with me next. I'm already individually tracking hunts and items elsewhere on the document, but this table makes it easy at a glance to know where I should focus my energies. Of course, there's still a number of conspicuous gaps... the game's gacha system of acquiring new Blades gets more parsimonious with Rare Blades the more of them you have on your team.

Unbought Stores

Another system, one easy to miss, is that you can own almost every store in the game. This involves buying one of every product sold there and then buying the company, President of Remington style. The benefits are an unusual collection of highly valuable passive boosts that stick with you for the rest of the game, which include earning more money, more experience, more items, magnetizes item drops to you from further away, decreases enemy detection range, and so on. Each deeds purchase does cost a lot of money though, so you need to keep a fat wallet on you.

I'm just logging which ones I haven't bought at this point. Stores get new inventory as the game progresses, whenever you increase a region's development level (raised by buying things and completing side-quests), and when you complete certain mercenary missions.

Oh right, development levels and mercenary missions. I'm not tracking either of those, but the former is the best way to unlock the latter, and the latter is how you quickly raise Blades you aren't using. They're a bit like those missions in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood where you send off goons and wait for them to come back and report an hour or so later in real-time.

Aux Core Set-Up

If I was just a little more off my rocker, I'd be tracking my Accessories and Aux Cores more closely too. They naturally get buried in menus along with everything else, but they both serve as essential boosts to Drivers (accessories) and Blades (aux cores) alike and it's necessary to keep them up to date. If I were a truly desperate individual looking for an edge against a challenging foe, I might be farming some of the high-level items from the final dungeon to ensure everyone's weapons and gear are in peak form or taking the time to find the right accessories to minimize a nasty status effect, but I'm hoping it won't come to that. I get enough farming and grinding done upgrading all these Blades so for now I'm working with whatever I've found so far.

Now that I'm getting into theoretical topics to keep notes on, I've almost certainly passed the OCD Rubicon and should probably draw this thing to a close before I start alphabetizing my sock drawer. (NB: To be clear, I have not gone stir crazy. I have always been this level of crazy.) Thanks for reading, and let me know in the comments what kind of games have had you scrivening away like a literary hermit. Did you have reams of arcane symbols jotted down playing Fez? Needed to keep track of what to give whom in Stardew Valley whenever birthdays rolled around? Were you playing games back when drawing your own maps was common practice?

As for XC2, I've got one more piece in the tank - despite being close to the end I'm not close to being done with it, if you catch my meaning - and then it might be time to resume an old favorite blog feature of mine; one that will serve to keep me distracted (and hopefully some of you) from cold, hard reality for a spell. See you again soon.