Segata wrote:Fiora
That's what I was hoping would happen, thanks!
alienjesus wrote:I used Melia, Riki and Sharla as my standard boss killing team.
Well the good news is this game is intelligent enough to parallel level characters you're not currently using. So if I do need to switch to any of them for special purposes, it's simple enough.
PartridgeSenpai wrote:I've been meaning to give it another chance on 3DS someday though.
If graphics matter to you, keep in mind the Wii's native resolution is 640x480, whereas the 3DS' native resolution is 400 x 240. This means playing Xenoblade on 3DS sacrifices original image detail.
PartridgeSenpai wrote:the combat was really just getting annoying more than anything
The main thing is it's just too passive. Basically you just stand around enemies waiting for your special skills to automatically charge, then manually select said skills and activate them. So most of your time in combat is spent diddling around with the d-pad playing whack-a-mole with your skill selection. Your ability to control the AI of your party members is paltry. You can tell them to attack your highlighted enemy, to stay by you, or to do their own thing. That's it. (A far cry from FFXII's glorious gambit system.) If you let your AI party members do their own thing, they will routinely make boneheaded usage of their own skills. You can't even do something as simple as tell your party members to focus on defense or healing.
The worst thing I hate is that you can't change party leader while in combat. So if I'm playing as Shulk, and I need Sharla to heal the party, but she actively refuses to do so, there's no way for me to manually switch over to controlling her in combat. That's just ridiculous to say the least. Instead you're stuck as whoever you were when combat initiated, for no rational reason.
Another thing that makes combat annoying is enemies often have stupid amounts of health, effectively making them damage sponges. This was done to encourage the player to use special skills, but ultimately serves to prolong combat unnecessarily. And furthermore, using skills tactically is a bit of a joke. I say that, because as long as you maintain at least one level ahead of your enemies, you'll crush them anyway. Thus to stay ahead of the game, all you need to do is grind enough to maintain +1 level parity to the surrounding bad guys. It's just silly.
So yeah, there certainly are things I enjoy in Xenoblade Chronicles. But its joke of a combat system is not one of them.
All the same, I seem to enjoy my sessions with this, even if I feel like Xenoblade is artificially prolonging its own experience a little too often. A lot of knowledgeable gamers I know were utterly enraptured by this JRPG. I keep waiting for the same sense of bliss to envelop me. It hasn't happened yet, but perhaps once I reach Mechonis? If nothing else, this is some proper JRPG comfort food. An all you can eat buffet even.
