I am going to try to adjust the combat audio volume a bit for next episode. It gets a bit crazy when fighting multiple enemies haha.

@zeldaootforever

Ай бұрын

Couple things to keep in mind about the in game volume sliders. "Battle narration" is not the characters voice lines during battle. It is instead the deep voice you hear say things like "excellent" when you time a button challenge correctly. The character voice volume is split between cutscene voice volume and in game voice volume. The latter affects all voices in the overworld during exploration and combat. I've seen people mute this and not realize that it would also mute all character banter in the world so just a heads up.

@SolitarySaturn

Ай бұрын

Oh that is really good to know thanks!

@Luigipotter

Ай бұрын

Ardainian soldiers are notorious for their loud and frequent voice lines. It was originally louder to fight them with them having longer voice lines. ("Think you can take me!", "Don't forget me!", "Yer done!") Other enemies shouldn't be as bad from what I remember.

As for pouch items, I recommend using narcipear jelly found in Argentum

@Perseus3248M

Ай бұрын

Sparklesugar is good too if you run out of money

A few extra tips that I will update as I watch the video: During a Blade's special you can move around at regular speed, this is useful for collecting loot and potions as well as general positioning. There are 8 elements, and 4 pairings which are weak to each other. Fire/Water, Electric/Earth, Wind/Ice and Light/Dark. Each element has its own Blade Combo tree that will start once a special of that element is used when an existing Blade Combo is not currently in progress. A tip for you to have more success completing a Blade Combo: Don't always use the next special right away just because its available, use the spare time you have to give yourself time to have the third stage ready. You can tell what stage you or your party members are at via the circling orbs of light on their special prompts. Remember you can adjust the camera, if you need a refresher on the controls you can use the D-Pad To explain how Blade's are composed in their simplest form we have: Blade Arts: Passive abilities that your Blade's supply their Driver with. Same system as regular Arts except these aren't attacks and are instead stat boosters etc. Battle Skills: Passive abilities that are always in affect when that Blade is active in the battle. Think of these like the many skill tree rewards you would unlock in Xenoblade 1. Blade Specials: Special attacks that the Blade can perform after building up enough charge on the special guage via auto-attack usage. AI party members will only perform specials when they have been commanded to do so as a way to start or continue a Blade Combo. The level 4 special is built up when you are at maximum (golden) affinity and importantly it can only be performed by the player character with one exception you will eventually encounter. Every Blade has 3 unique attacks as part of the 3 stages and each attack is different and as such has a unique effect which you view in the menu. Field Skills: Skills that a Blade can use to pass checks during non-combat gameplay. This is their only purpose. These are the four things to pay attention to with your Blades in battle beyond raw stats, core chips and aux cores.

24:59 Wow I've never seen that happen before but I think you somehow triggered a battle with a unique monster that's locked in one of those cells! I always assumed it spawned in after you beat the dungeon

Pouch items: Each driver starts with a pouch item slot. Using the slot will give the pouch item to the driver and all equipped blades. Blades and Drivers have favorite pouch items. These favorite items are split into liked categories such as stable foods and loved specific items. These pouch items are more effective (20% for liked 50% for loved). According to the wiki the bonus for a favorite item will only apply when the blade who likes/loves the item is engaged if a blade likes the item. There is no way to tell a favorite item besides trial and error, but there are hints for some of them hidden around different aspects of the game. I personally mostly ignored the favorite item system exept for when items where needed for the affinity chart. I usually gave all characters items for giving art recharge such as narcipear jelly. Pouch items have a huge effect on fights and make them much much faster. If you are ever stuck make sure to check if you have pouch items active. (Also sorry for the post being so long, explaining xenoblade 2 mechanics takes forever sometimes.)

DON'T FORGET BEHAVE YER DONE? DON'T FORGET

Level four special: While I don't know all the info on what each lvl four does specifically, you can think of them kinda like an upgraded lvl 3 special. You can only charge them with a lvl 3 special charged and its effect on blade (element) combos is the same as a lvl 3. Blade and driver combos: Blade Combo: A blade combo follows the element chart in the top right that appears after you use the a special. Following that deals extra damage and appies the effect at the end of the chain. Driver combo. Break and topple return from xeno 1. Daze is removed. Instead we now have launch and smash. Which someone will probably go into more detail on later. For now dont worry to much about driver combos because you lack the blades to really do them consistently. Using both: having both combos going at once is a fusion combo. This increases damage more and gives you more time to advance your blade combo. This is probably not an exhaustive list of what they do but instead what I remember off the top of my head.

Now that you have played a few hours I want to explain the blade combos again. I leave the level 4 arts out of this because they are their own thing, sort of. Lets begin with the combo tree in the upper right corner. Here you can see the options you have, depending on the element of your first Blade Art (I will call them specials so you can differentiate them better from the Driver Arts, wich I will just call Arts). The first special (no matter if you start the combo or an ally) will determine the tree that will appear. The easiest for beginners is fire, because you'll always have Pyra with you. So the fire icon will be on the left when you use "Heat" (the level 1 fire special) , then you can see fire and water a little bit more to the right. That means the tree splits here depending on what level 2 special you will use. Here the easiest path is Nia using "Steam Bomb", because Pyra just used her level 1 and the special resets to zero. If you have a second fire blade with another ally, you can use a fire level 2 as well, but we use Nia because it is convenient at the moment. As soon as you use "Steam Bomb" the upper part of the tree disappears, because we chose the second path. So for the level 3 special there are only two options: fire and ice. And because we only have fire at the moment., ice is not an option. To reach level 3, speed and timing is important. First you don't want to rush level 2 and 3. You know the combo-cooldown bar above the healthbar of the enemy. When you start with "Heat" (level 1) don't cast "Steam Bomb" (level 2) right away. Wait until the cooldown is almost gone, so you can level up Pyras special again in the meantime. Remember, we need to reach level 3, one cooldown bar alone is a bit short, use both from level 1 and level 2 to make that easier. An additional tipp is to swap your blades to level up the special. The special build up is across all your blades. You don't have to use the special with the other blade (Roho the wind blade), just use his arts to fill your special. You just have to change back to Pyra when you reach level 3 and you can use her level 3 special "Seal Self-Destruct". Something to keep in mind is that blade changing also has a cooldown so don't do it too late, so you can switch back to Pyra when you need to. This whole thing gets easier the more blades you have. Because you can use more options of the tree if you have many different elements with you and you can spam more arts to fill up specials. It can get a bit annoying when your allies swap blades and they can't use the right element at the right time, but that is a thing we all have to live with. Also the allies are too dumb most of the time to reach level 3 in time, so I mostly use them for level 2 and I myself start the combo with level 1 and end it with 3. Landing those combos will be more important over time. Later in the game you will learn this games version of the chain attack and the combos + their element will matter then. Take your time and practice them. With time you will learn to build your team around the combo-tree, so can use different level 3's in one fight. I know it was a long text, but I tried to explain every step as understandable as possible. The terms blade art and driver art are too similar, so I used my own terms, I hope that didn't confused you. Maybe I was a little help, maybe not. I will enjoy you lets play either way. :D

I will not give tips. Because probably you already read too many tips. But I'm really enjoying your let's play, glad I found it while I can try to catch up.

If you get those crystals to summon more blades, be careful about what driver should use it. Once summoned it's tricky to change its driver. Imagine you get a blade that is powerful on attack, but the driver is strong on healing. That blade won't be as useful anymore. Its potential is diminished. It's not impossible to change the driver but it requires an item that is relatively rare and as far as I remember, limited in number. In my opinion,if a driver has many blades, better try summoning with a different driver. You can still be unlucky but at least you'll be more balanced with the chances. I'll probably repeat this advice in the future when its more relevant.

I always say it but the music is incredible. And just you wait. You have heard nothing yet. My favorite songs are found relatively close to the end of the game.

In closed areas you can have a better view adjusting the distance and angle of the camera.

@SolitarySaturn

22 күн бұрын

Thanks for the reminder

If you choose to practice, I would suggest to wait until the tutorials end. Yeah. There are still a bunch of mechanics, the truly important ones, left. You'll need to have full teams of blades to be able to use the full combat system. Being able to change between many different elements at once. Be patient. These last combats got very slow. That's not gonna improve in the short run. Once you unlock all the mechanics and you start getting the drill, combats will start getting shorter... and much more enjoying. I mean, I never got there in my first playthrough, but I didn't look on youtube back in the day. Once you feel the only thing that keeps you back is your own knowledge and skill, then look for advanced tutorials in youtube and practice. That's not ruining your playthrough. That's, sadly, the right way to enjoy this game. They really fucked up with the tutorials... so many of them and so... relatively useless. Or maybe your experience will be different, who knows.

Getting lost in XC2 is normal. It has by far the worst map in the series, so bad that they just added a glowing (optional) path to XC3 that shows you the way to the next objective. I got lost at the exact same spots as you in my first playthrough. Just be aware that more often than not the entry to the next step is not where the marker is.

@SolitarySaturn

Ай бұрын

Yeah I edited out half of my wandering lost to spare y'all the pain haha

@Requinix17

Ай бұрын

Yeah for me I found it was more useful to NOT use the map at all and just use my eyes to look for a path