That guide looks interesting, but apparently you need a skell for those.

There are some leveling up tricks before you get a Skell, but the main guide requires one (and there’s an even better version if you have a flying skell, which is the one I used). I highly recommend subscribing to Enel’s channel since he has excellent in-depth Xenoblade videos, including combat guides, farming guides, best skills and setups for all weapons and so on.

Need more of those. Have tons of mining probes though

Research probes feel limited even later in the game. Mining ones are aplenty though, even higher level ones so you can build some crazy combos.

Am I playing it wrong? Should I explore more? I try to explore but there are high level monsters everywhere and then I die, and think maybe I am not supposed to go there yet. Going to explore Noctilum now, so that I can start Chapter 6.

Scary monsters are everywhere, just be careful to not draw their attention. It’s kinda annoying when you bump into ones that are very aggressive and keep chasing you forever, but that’s one of the things that get a lot easier once you have a Skell since you can outrun them on vehicle mode.

Playing Xenoblade X!

Somehow still on Chapter 9. 😆

Playtime was limited due to the work trip I’m on right now, but I managed to get some good progress before flying away from home. I tried the last method in Enel’s guide for leveling up classes which was ridiculously effective, I got all characters (including the main one) to max class level in less than 2h while also going up something like 10 levels.

Money is a bit tight right now because I bought a Level 50 Skell and those are very pricy, ended up spending some time optimizing FrontierNav setup. Other than that I did a lot of side-quests, but need to find some time to sit down and start moving with the Affinity and Story quests.

That’s including “explorable” water/cloud sea portions for all games, but even if you cut down to just the landmass the XCX map is still around 100 square kilometers… and that’s not counting the parts of the map that have several “layers” like mountains, caves and floating islands.

Found a video of someone who did their best measuring the worlds of the Xenoblade series. They meme a bit about XC2 being the biggest if you include the Cloud Sea, but put the real measurements at the end.

Their results, in square kilometers:

• XC1 28.83
• XC2 21.10
• XC3 40.62
• XCX 355.78

The opposite, it probably still the biggest map in the series.

Transversal is relatively fast because you character is quite speedy even before Skells, but the overall area is massive.

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Repair something, Lin’s affinity quest.

Got lucky since I already had the necessary items for that mission, but a friend of mine also complained about being stuck on that one for a while. Not being able to cancel Affinity/Story missions is one of the few annoyances from left the original that I wish had been fixed on the DE.

I am still not sure which probes to place where, currently I am going with the stats of FN, if production is high, I go with mineral, and if revenue is high, go with research, but pretty much every FN in primodia has lower revenue stat than production one.

I focused on building combos when installing my probes and it worked well so far.

So keep investing so that I don’t hit the limit (which I have increased twice by using Storage probes. Any suggestions?

That’s a few quests that request Miranium, but other than that I did the same and just kept feeding any I had left spare into the AMs. You get an extra use for it once you unlock mechs since they use if for fuel, but even then there should be plenty.

And can I sell all the low level stuff I have?

Probably? I haven’t seen any use for low-lever gear myself and I’m much farther into the game. The only reason I haven’t sold mine is because I didn’t need to since I have a dumb amount of money piled up from FrontiverNav income.

Playing Xenoblade X!

Finished Chapter 9!

A few days ago I decided to rush to get the Flying Module, and it worked mostly fine, with only the Chapter 9 boss being a roadblock - that one took me a few tries and even made me use some of the healing items I had stashed for the first time. Then I decided to satisfy my OCD and went flying around the world installing every single FrontierNav probe, so I now have the world fully mapped! 🎉

Currently doing a bunch of Affinity Quests that I had pending, will probably balance between these and trying to do at least one Story mission per day. I’d love to use the Easter holiday to finish this game so I can play something else during my trip abroad next week, but not sure if I’ll be able to do it.

I am looking for a new board game to play with family. We have Catan, Dominion, Carcassone etc, looking to add something new. Any suggestions?

I love Pandemic (may be a bit hard to play depending on how old your kids are) and Ticket to Ride. There’s also versions of the latter with smaller maps if you want faster games.

Exploding Kittens tends to be a big hit with kids in my experience, and it’s a also decent game for more casual adult players.

Will probably get Guns of Fury which is a Metal Slug-inspired Metroidvania, I have a couple long (12h+) flights coming next two weeks and I’d like to have a platformer as a side-game. Blasphemous is another option on a deep discount, but given people compare it to Hollow Knight in difficulty it’s probably better to leave it for when I’m more relaxed at home. 😅

Also tempted to pick up The Silver Case 2425, it’s a pack of two VNs from Suda 51 that I heard good things about.

Yep, it’s just like the Xbox 360 compatibility program.

While I do agree that anyone with a big collection should hold on to their Switch 1 until we get more updates and real-life testing, I don’t think this is a fair comparison - even now this looks massively better than anything MS did for backwards compatibility.

There are 462 games made backward compatible out of 989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_compatible_with_Xbox_360

There are 632 games that have been made backward compatible out of 2,155

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_games_for_Xbox_One_and_Series_X/S

How much does the game change with Skells?

A lot. It’s a drastic improvement in exploration speed and ease .

• Faster movement speed, which also means you can escape easily from those annoying high-level enemies that chase you.
• Huge jumps that let you climb mountains quickly. And this game has a lot of verticality.
• Larger enemies go down more quickly since some Skell weapons do a ton of damage.
• Visiblity is better since you have a larger POV.

I was having a good time before, but the game certainly became a lot more fun after I got them.

Should I try to hurry to the point where I get skell, or just enjoy the exploration and quests until I naturally reach that point?

I don’t think you can rush too much since there’s exploration requirements in some of the story missions, and one of the “tests” to get the skell requires you to have a good amount of FrontierNav spots (you need to get it up to 15k credits per return).

But if you’re close to Chapter 6 I’d say yes, rush a bit and get your mech now, it’s worth it.

Playing Xenoblade X!

Finished Chapter 6.

Got two Skells so far, the one that you get for free after getting the pilot license, and another from the “New Skell on the Block” mission… but that’s only because I need to get to Level 30 before I can buy more of them. I’ve got something like 3.5M sitting in the bank due to all the passive income from FrontierNav so I’m ready to spend big bucks into buying+upgrading mechs once I get there.

Have been focusing mostly on Primordia and Oblivia, though I also got some reasonable progress exploring the goddamn labyrinth called Noctilum. I took a quick trip to Sylvalum and Cauldros but only unlocked a fast travel point on each to make life easier, haven’t really started exploring those yet.

Currently doing sidequests and leveling up, will probably move on with the story once I get everyone past 30. Might try to unlock a few more characters too, I there’s 2 or 3 available and just waiting for me to do their recruitment mission.

Ys VIII. A surprise hit for me after impulse buying years ago. It’s an action jrpg where the action is very arcade-y (in a good way). The story starts out about a group of people getting shipwrecked on a deserted island. Part of the fun in the early game was finding the castaways and building up your little base on the island. The story eventually develops into something really ridiculous, but by the time it got there I was along for the ride. Worth a try for jrpg fans.

If you enjoyed this game and want more, looks like Ys IX is also on sale. The sequel has a more urban setting as it takes place around this huge city and includes some really fun magical-powered parkour for exploring the place. I like the scenario and story of VIII more, but still had quite a bit of fun with this one too.

No, this one is much shorter, something around 20h.

I just didn’t have the time to play a lot recently, weekends have been very busy.

Finished Grisaia Phantom Trigger 5.5 to 08.

For those unfamiliar with this series of Visual Novels I left a small explanation about it on the second half of a comment a few weeks ago.

Episode 07 ended up rather disappointing. Given it’s the second-to-last episode and we already went through introductions for all the heroes and the main antagonist I was expecting the story to ramp up, but after the decent start with Shiori we go into the warzone and… get even more setup, with a very late introduction of a bunch of smaller villains alongside the early stages of the war.

Then we start 08 and… somehow there’s a brand-new PoV character? This late in the story? But this turns out to be one of the best parts of this VN as you read the grim tale of Patrick, a civilian among the enemy forces trying to survive as the war rages on. The story keeps switching between Patrick and the main character group for the first half, then switches back entirely to the main cast for the action-packed finale.

Overall a decent VN, but nothing exceptional. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone starting with the genre as there’s much better things to read, but it’s a nice “confort food” read if you’re a VN fan looking for something new.

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GD Scans started catching up to the raws for Eiyuu to Kenja no Tensei Kon and I’m very happy about it.

Despite the somewhat generic premise this one has been consistently fun due to good character interactions and Elria’s hilarious expressions. Only 6 chapters so far, so if you enjoy fantasy+romance stories you may want to take a look at this one.

Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE

Really wanted to play this one but my copy is taking forever to go through customs. :/ Might stick to shorter games for a while and pray it gets here soon.

If you’re liking the PW series you’ll probably also enjoy the Danganronpa games. Much darker stories despite the colorful visuals, but they’re another VN/Adventure hybrid with a mystery plot.

In that line of hybrids there’s also 13 Sentinels which has an amazing story and mixes adventure-style exploration with tower defense battles.

Depends on who you ask, as they’re kind of a midway between a VN and a point-and-click adventure.

I’d consider them VNs, VNDB says they aren’t, but I’m pretty sure most people would be fine discussing those on VN-focused forums or communities.

Are you enjoyjng them? I’m a big fan of the series overall, with the third game being my favorite.

As for how it compares to “traditional” VNs: PW games have you interact way more often. You don’t get sections of 1h+ of just reading text uninterrupted in PW games, and that’s fairly common in other games of this genre.