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Xenoblade Chronicles |OT| Man, what a bunch of jokers.

L

Leeness

Member
Really, really, really looking forward to this game (Gears and Saga are some of my favourites), but I'm just too stinking poor right now. :(

What's the chance of this becoming one of ~those~ titles that get a single print order and then become impossible to find?
 
S

Sammy Samusu

Member
Sklorenz said:
Here to rep NA GAF that'll be importing. Can't wait for this game. My Wii has been a MK/SSB machine for far too long now. Too bad school's starting up right when this will be arriving.
Click to expand...
I feel you, but why not add Monster Hunter Tri to your list? It's amazing and my favorite Wii game, let's see if Xenoblade can snatch that title away!
 
D

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
Wow, that buttrock battle song is awesome... brings back Baten Kaitos memories :)

Totally gonna import this asap, game may end up being my GOTG.
 
S

Sadist

Member
RPGCrazied said:
Wish it had some Character bios though! Isn't there like 8 members? That's probably a lot of work.
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Well I tried, but there isn't a lot of info out there. Guess we'll need to discover it ourselves.
 
V

vitacola

Member
RPGCrazied said:
Wish it had some Character bios though! Isn't there like 8 members? That's probably a lot of work.
Click to expand...
There could be spoilers. Some dudes "censored" other characters in their screenshots.
For example:

uwroV.jpg
 
C

CruxisMana

Member
Sadist said:
Well I tried, but there isn't a lot of info out there. Guess we'll need to discover it ourselves.
Click to expand...

I prefer it this way anyways.

I've been following the game for awhile and although I know who the playable characters are looks-wise, I have no idea about anything else.
 
B

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
A Human Becoming said:
Damn, that's another Wii game I want to import. :( Do you know what type of TV you need?

EDIT: I see your explanation above. My TV does allow 480P, but now I'm really hesitant to import it.
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Yeah it's a damn shame.

All the other big Nintendo imports: Disaster, Another Code R.. work just fine on homebrew Wii.
 
C

Corleth the Fey

Member
vitacola said:
I assume you live together? Why would you buy a second CC then?
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We're both gamers and own a Wii each, and our lounge has two TV's for double the gaming fun. There's a very good chance that we'll be playing the game at the same time. So two controllers required.

Just ordered a Black CC Pro from Amazon - about £13 with postage.
 
S

Sutton Dagger

Member
Would be awesome if any Dolphin users can create an ideal settings guide to be added to the OP when it is released. I'm sure some of us will be playing that way. Too bad it doesn't come out till September in Aus :(
 
C

Clipper

Member
Could I please suggest that the region free links in the OP be changed to link to this page of GAF's Wii Homebrew Tutorial, or at least to link to the site itself as the first link to avoid confusion? The current guides 1&2 from CruxisMana's quoted post are partially obsolete due to recent release of LetterBomb.

Best approach might even be to use our typical linking style in the thread:
 
M

MYE

Member
My body is ready.

I wanted that red CCPro but dammit i already have too much controllers and shit all over my room. I really hope its plays ok with the remote+nunchuck or the original CC.
 
T

timetokill

Banned
I'm very, very tempted to import this, even the collector's edition for that awesome red CC Pro. I haven't modded my Wii yet but from what I hear, it's dead simple to do.

Do we have any reviews from GAF players from the previous thread that we can bring into this OT? I'd really like to get some more impressions on it to help me decide.
 
C

CruxisMana

Member
timetokill said:
Do we have any reviews from GAF players from the previous thread that we can bring into this OT? I'd really like to get some more impressions on it to help me decide.
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Bebpo said:
Battle system
+Fast
+In addition to the normal choosing of commands, positioning and party member interaction make it more interactive than FFXII and thus more fun.
+Chain attack system is great. Connecting the same color attack increases damage exponentially, while tumbling an enemy opens up opportunity. Interesting decision choices.
+Tumble, paralyze, aura systems are great and lead to a lot of interesting battles.
+Every character is totally unique. Exact opposite of FFXII. By endgame no character is even remotely alike. All have their uses. All are fun to main as.
+Over 100 optional boss battles. Some are quite challenging and require good strategies, others are pushovers. Some just depend on what level you are when you fight them. But there's enough of them throughout, that you'll always have exciting fights with good rewards.
+No punishment for death gives an incentive to push yourself and try to fight anything you think you can. If you die, you simply start at last warp point and don't lose anything.
-3 party feels too limiting. Especially since so few spell types crossover. Someone is hit with poison? If you don't have the 1 character with cure status, you just gotta wait it out which is annoying. At times you are basically required to keep Shulk in your party and then you're limited even further to only 2 open slots. 4 person party would've gone a long way.
-AI is not terrible and you do have some control over it, but at the end of the day your AI partners will not play their characters as efficiently as you would have, which can be a bit annoying.
-Always auto-attacking while in battle. This is built into the system and so defenses are built around it occasionally. But sometimes you just want to NOT ATTACK so you don't trigger the counters, but you can't. >_<

Field/Questing
+Great dungeon/field designs. Really intricate places with tons of secrets to reward those who explore. Lots of variety.
+Awesome weather effects. Every area has unique weather at random parts of the day.
+Gorgeous day/night cycle with music that fades nicely between night and day. Some areas become completely different during the night than they are during the day.
+One of the best endgames ever. As you go through your adventure you come across many monsters or places you can't fight or access. Endgame is going back and doing everything you couldn't during the main game. Very rewarding and pretty long.
+Quick travel and the ability to adjust time is awesome
+Save anywhere is fantastic and needs to be in more jrpgs
+400 optional quests. Some with neat stories. Some with great rewards
+Hundreds of unique named NPCs with their own stories that play out as you become more involved in the towns/cities by doing their quests
+Skill trees and borrowing skills from other trees is a good dynamic that provides lots and lots of passive skills. Some very good.
+Good amount of hidden things. Hidden skill trees, hidden attacks, hidden extensions of normal attacks, Ultimate weapons, Hidden areas, hidden npcs, etc...
+Gem crafting is neat and gems are very useful.
+Loot is alright. You get lots of it, but 75% of things in the game are useless
+Almost nothing important is missable. The few quests that are give you fair warning although they don't tell you when they expire.
+Character relation system is neat. Good rewards for building it up between characters.
-Some quests with rare drop grinds which are the worst thing ever invented. The only times I truly hated playing XB was spending 20-30 mins grinding an enemy for drops.
-Towns are sometimes too big with not enough quick travel landmarks. So when you're running quests there's a ton of in-town running back and forth to talk to people.
-Running speed is a bit slow for the size of the areas. Even with gems that boost running speed, it's capped at 125% for no reason. Should have at least uncapped it to 200% on new game+
-NPCs can be a pain to find without a guide of where everyone is at what time. Since every town has a day/night cycle you have to check the entire towns (which are huge) twice when looking for quests.
-Limited inventory SUCKS. Especially because you're constantly bombarded with items. Almost every time you kill an enemy (95%?) they leave a treasure with like 3-4 items each. Most of it junk. But just because it's fast (and because you can't compare it to your current equip) you click "take all" and move on. This means you fill up your inventories quick and often have to sell stuff to make room.
-Comparing equipment is really tedious. Especially if you ever think about buying from a shop.
-Character relation system between characters grows way to slowly. After 120 hours with everything done, you'll still only have about 50% of the relations maxed out. Growth needed to be at least twice as fast.
-Wish the game had field treasure chests as another way to reward players for exploring
-No beastiary. Inexcusable for a game like this that requires drops all the time.
-Because of no beastiary and the amount of named npcs you often have to find (and sometimes the unclear quest intructions), XB is a "wiki or die" game when trying to 100% it. Without some sort of a guide it'd be near impossible to do everything on the first run.

Story:
+Very interesting plot set in a very unique world.
+Great pacing, exciting cutscenes, mysteries, foreshadowing, twists
+Smart writing. You will not find a more intelligently written rpg this gen. The game avoids most cliches and stereotypes and at no point will you roll your eyes or have to deal with stupid characters acting idiotically. The characters (even the lead) are all intelligent people and act accordingly.
+Good length. Story size is probably about the size of two of the Xenosaga games combined. Smaller in scope and length than Xenogears though.
+Satisfying tale from start to finish. The story is great from the start and never dips even once before the end credits roll. A grand adventure.
+Good cast. Everyone is likeable, no one is generic game/anime stereotype. Character depth doesn't go as deep as something like Xenosaga.
+ or - depending on what you want. XB's story is great and cinematic, but it's not melodramatic like XG/XS/FF/KH. You will not get white room speeches with piano green grass playing. I think this is the biggest change from Takahashi's previous works. XB is not any more mainstream or less ambitious than XG/XS. The story is just as original and creative and well told, it's just that Takahashi has moved away from trying to pull the emotional strings of his audience and make melodrama. Instead it's simply a story where things happen and you enjoy them and watch the story unfold.

Graphics/Audio
+Gorgeous environments
+Good character design
+Visibile equipment is pretty varied and has some real cool designs
+Nice range of tunes that are incorporated very well into the gameplay and cutscene
+Great voice acting
-Wii image quality drags things down a bit

Other
+Large game; takes at least 60-70 hours first time. If you plan to do everything, you're looking at ~120 hours first time.
+New game+ is great. Almost everything carries over.
-Game clock stops at 99:59. Really dumb for a huge game like this

Overall
While there might be a decent amount of small negatives spread throughout the title, the fact of the matter is that in the face of the giant adventure that Xenoblade presents, they're all minor issues that only pick away at the greatness of the experience Xenoblade gives. Anyone willing to invest the time to explore the world of Xenoblade will find that it's populated with hundreds of creatures, quests, characters, bosses, and hidden tales. All which add to up to a truly satisfying console rpg experience unlike any other out there.

Without the budget/time issues that caused the 2nd disc of Xenogears, or the production issues that caused Xenosaga Ep2, Xenoblade feels like the first time Takahashi has been able to give the game experience he wanted from start to finish without resistance blocking his way. And if this is the kind of experience that Takahashi wants to give, then I can only look forward immensely to whatever he creates next.

The three years Monolith Soft spent creating Xenoblade feel truly justified by the end product. As the best game in their resume to date, and the best rpg on a Nintendo system since Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade stands as a proud example of how great rpgs are made.

A+
Click to expand...

.
 
S

Sadist

Member
Clipper said:
Could I please suggest that the region free links in the OP be changed to link to this page of GAF's Wii Homebrew Tutorial, or at least to link to the site itself as the first link to avoid confusion? The current guides 1&2 are partially obsolete due to recent release of LetterBomb.
Click to expand...
Done ;)
 
H

Hiltz

Member
What place are people importing this game from at the cheapest price possible ? I already have a classic controller pro so just want the game by itself. Just have to mod my Wii properly.


I canceled my Amazon pre-order after Nintendo gave Operation Rainfall the thumbs down. By the looks of it, there's no need to wait for the reviews (game's already confirmed to be awesome) and I'm not going to wait until next year for NOA To possibly release this game.
 
Z

Zafir

Member
The section about the posters should possibly edited to mention that they're an in-store bonus only for the UK(Possibly other countries too?). Other than that great job. Can't wait for the game to arrive.
 
C

Chris R

Member
Mr. Wonderful said:
Can we get recommended Dolphin Configuration added to the OP for those of us who may try to emulate, should FPS be reasonable?
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I'd really like to know this. Also, some high res images would be great!

Never even really knew about the game before the whole brouhaha occurred, but now that I've seen some gameplay video and listened to some of the music I'm very interested. Can't import right now, but if the game doesn't come out in the USA within a reasonable time frame I'd probably hunt down a disc.
 
L

Lafiel

と呼ぶがよい
Man i remember when i thought this wouldn't come out in english, can't believe it's finally happening in a week! can't wait hype+ infinity.
 
M

Mlatador

Banned
Really good summary!!!

The German gaming magazin "M-Games" (formerly known as "Maniac") gave it a pretty good score too!

91% - M-Games (Germany)

And about the pre-order posters from GAME.CO.UK, it's important to note that ONLY people who pre-ordered the game IN STORE (NOT ONLINE!) will get these posters.

Other than that, very well done!
 
Lord Ghirahim

Lord Ghirahim

Member
GAME and Gamestation are pure shit, I remember having limited edition game orders cancelled days before the release date because they wouldn't ship outside the UK.
 
M

MasterShotgun

brazen editing lynx
The only thing stopping me from importing this is college starting back this month. Having Xenoblade would be detrimental to my grades. Either that, or I would play it very little at a time and not have to buy a new game for months.
 
M

Mlatador

Banned
GAME and Gamestation are pure shit, I remember having limited edition game orders cancelled days before the release date because they wouldn't ship outside the UK.
Click to expand...

While I have actually never bought anything from Game myself, only pre-ordered Xenoblade there a couple of days ago, only to learn that the pre-order bonus won't apply for online-orders, I can't say anything good or bad about them (how long it takes to ship I mean, for example).

Their online-customer service, though, is terrible! I couldn't get a simple answer from them, regarding the pre-order posters. I actually came to know about this pre-order thing only through some guy from a Wii - Forum, who managed to get an actual statment from them as to whether the pre-order bonus would apply to ONLINE or OFFLINE pre-orders only.

They just wouldn't let ME know - claiming they have "never heared" about it >_>
 
P

Peagles

Member
I wasn't even planning on getting this game, but due to all the localisation kerfuffle I thought it must be really amazing, so I'm importing it from the UK (I'm in NZ). About to hit to confirm on the Classic Controller bundle from Game... Oddly enough it's only costing me $110 NZD shipped, but to buy it locally (maybe an import copy I don't know) is $100 NZD just for the vanilla version. Here we go!
 
S

shadyspace

Banned
Peagles said:
I wasn't even planning on getting this game, but due to all the localisation kerfuffle I thought it must be really amazing, so I'm importing it from the UK (I'm in NZ). About to hit to confirm on the Classic Controller bundle from Game... Oddly enough it's only costing me $110 NZD shipped, but to buy it locally (maybe an import copy I don't know) is $100 NZD just for the vanilla version. Here we go!
Click to expand...
It's coming out in Australia on the 2nd of September.
 
K

K444WSR

Member
My CE is ordered at game. Hopefully I get the posters with it. This is my most hyped game of the year, more than zelda dare I say. Great job on the thread op. Just fuelled the hype se more. This next week is gonna be a looong one.
 
S

Sophia

Member
shadyspace said:
What does this mean for those of us looking to run it through composite on an SDTV?
Click to expand...

What I'm looking to know myself, except with component. I want to import, but my TV lacks 480p despite having component hookups.
 
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