I'm wondering if you control your whole party in real time, or just your main character? I never got a chance to play Xenoblade on the Wii.

It seems like you can set up the automated logic for your party, but can you switch between characters to control them in real time?

In the first one you could swap characters.

I hope so. My one minor complaint with XC was the occasionally moronic AI of your party. Some of those post-game bosses required some really specific strategies that were pretty darn hard to pull off with your party members farting around in the corner while you got your ass handed to you.

Yeah you definitely could in the first, would be a bit odd for that to change.

It's really not that different from Tales of [dumb word here] or Dragon Age, in that you only have direct control of one character at a time, and you have to rely on everybody else doing what you instructed their AI to do.

I kind of hope they change it so that you can give your party members direct commands at any time. From what I remember, in the original you had to fill up a three segmented special gauge in order to do so, and while you could play as the different characters, you couldn't change in the middle of combat. The only upside was that using a part of the special gauge let the character use an ability even if it was on cooldown, but having party control limited to that still sort of sucked.