First Impressions: Xenoblade Chronicles
A hybrid game between the JRPGs standard characters, the questing from West MMORPG and a more action oriented battle system? Where will all this lead to?
The main idiot
Shulk is a boy that is very much interested in mechanics and above all a mysterious sword called the “Monad”. So interested that he ignores basically everyone around him. Much to Fiora, a girl childhood friend of his, big irritation.
For me it is irritating to see that a person is so much interested in mechanics and a mysterious sword that he has to ignore just about everything around him. Openly anyway. He is interested in Fiora one can tell from his actions and how he acts when she is in danger.
He also has some fighting ability and weirdly for a main character he also has some weak support spells. You can understand my face when I noticed that. All this is because the game itself uses “aggro” in battles and Shulk is pretty weak in the HP department for a MC.
The reason he has healing spells is for when in battle he is supposed to be more of a supportive character than anything else.
Questing
When I called this a MMORPG I wasn´t lying. Just about everyone in town has something to ask of Shulk. It can be killing a certain monster, collecting items dropped from monsters or finding persons or people.
Your reward are items and exp as well as the items you get for killing the opponents. MMORPG style it is. Very western RPG as well with loads of NPCs thinking you are a blind hero that is only to be used for little reward. Given the amount of enemy levels that appear in the starting area you kinda need the levels. And doing these quests by yourself is a big no-no as you are to weak, the healing spell you have rarely heals anything and the enemies are everything from easy to gruesome. In the starting area there are enemies from lvl 1 to lvl 70 all depending on where in the big starting area you head. Some of the enemies are agressive and attack on sight, others are more friendly and need you to attack them first. Which is a good thing since otherwise you would be attack by swarms of enemies.
It´s basic stuff but it works and it gives you a good chance to rack up on the small amount of exp that some of the enemies give as well.
Achievements
Discovering new lands, doing big amount of damage, doing quests. Everything in this game seems to give you a achievement of some sorts sometime. Which will give you exp which is a good thing. Often you get more exp from the achievements than from questing or defeating enemies.
Battling in real time
The most disturbing thing with Xenoblade Chronicles is that you need to choose a enemy and then draw your weapon to start the battle. It makes walking around and exploring easy but if a enemy is attacking you on sight you have to sport the enemy first, draw your weapon and then you have to execute the command to start fighting.
Normal attacks are automatic and depends on weapon type. So dual wielding is a good idea here. Skills is where you get in. You have special skills with certain attributes for each character. Which can make more damage if you attack from the rear or side by example.
There are also bigger badder monsters available that do more damage, have higher HP and are a big challange. They also give out quite good exp if you are at the right level.
I haven´t started yet
This is my thoughts for the first 6 hours of gameplay. And with that I haven´t even walked past the first area yet. There are simply so many quests to do. Often one person have 3 or more quests in a row for you to accept. So this is a big freaking game.
But understandable. It is both fun and irritating to do battle. Irritating that the only revive option is for your teammate to walk over to you and use a special unit that charges up as you do critical hits and the like. But there are only 3 of these units that can be filled. And if you don´t battle all the time they slowly degrade and go from full to empty. Which can be irritating.
The really sad part is that this so far is a PAL territory exclusive title only. So no NTSC version available yet. Which is a pity since it is actually a quite good and interesting game. But I hope it will get better as I play it.
