Xenoblade Chronicles 2 could be Skies of Arcadia 2017

[Julius Seeker]

Skies of Arcadia is one of my favourite games of all time. The unfortunate thing about it is that the most up to date console I can play it on is the Wii (with a gamecube controller) and no other game since has really replicated the feeling or experience. But now Xenoblade Chronicles 2 looks like it might be doing something similar.

The first Xenoblade Chronicles game was a little like Faxanadu from NES in its overall structure... except 3D, and with biological lifeforms vs. robots instead of 2D and Elves vs. Dwarves. Both games involve a journey on the vertical axis. Then close to the top is the connection to the enemy realm. Xenoblade Chronicles involves 2 Titans which are dormant.

Skies of Arcadia involves islands and continents floating in the sky. The time period is kind of a amalgamation of 16th century exploration, 17th century piracy, and 19th century steam technology, with some 24th century-like higher technology possessed by surviving ancients. The difference is that players are flying through the skies; one of the interesting elements is that it wasn't on a single plane, but rather a 3D plane, so you could fly way above certain islands, and you might land on an island that is way above another island you could land on. That sort of thing. In Skies of Arcadia, there're 6 different civilizations based on the six different moons that fly above, and each has a colour and element assigned: yellow are the antagonistic Valuan Empire, based on the Spanish; red are the other major power, the Nasr based on the Arabians; blue is Yafutoma, based on the Japanese; green is Ixa'Taka, based on the Incans; purple is a lost civilization based on a fictional hidden Antarctic civilization; the last is the silver moon, their civilization exists in space, and they are much more advanced than anyone else, mostly machine based with a few humans; on the planet's surface, below the silver moon, are some scattered settlements largely based on the Dutch.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 looks like it is bringing elements from both those games. Except the civilizations are based on multiple titans, like those of the original Xenoblade; except multiple living and moving titans, instead of two dormant ones. Like Skies of Arcadia, airships are going to be a thing; but instead of islands, it looks like it will be various points on the Titans that the characters can travel to; there are also some mini-Titan looking creatures as well, which may behave similarly to smaller independent islands, rather than just extraordinarily large monsters. There's the potential of ship battles as well, similar to Skies of Arcadia when extremely large monsters were fought. Unlike Skies of Arcadia, but like Xenoblade Chronicles X, if the location exists, you can go there; like Xenoblade Chronicles X, the majority of the game is likely on the surface, rather than within internal dungeons. Like Skies of Arcadia, there's a faction that looks like the Valuan Empire; other factions look to be based on the Mongols/plains peoples, medieval Europe, and some of the art style of the main settlement they've shown looks similar to Nisan in Xenogears.


The game's known staff so far are:
Tetsuya Takahashi - Executive Director and writer (best known for Xenogears, Xenosaga, Xenoblade, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger)
Koh Kojima - lead designer and director (Best known for Xenosaga, Baten Kaitos, and Xenoblade)
Yasunori Mitsuda - lead music and audio director (best known for Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Xenosaga, Xenoblade, and Shadow Hearts)
Tetsuya Nomura - Villain character designer (best known for Final Fantasy 4-8, 10, 11, 13, and 15)
Masatsugu Saito - Hero character designer (Best known for the anime Rakuen Tsuiho: Expelled from Paradise)
ACE+ (band) - Music composers - (best known for Xenoblade Chronicles)
Minami Kiyota - Music composer - (best known for Xenoblade Chronicles, and Uematsu's band the Black Mages)

More on audio - "The soundtrack features performances from the Bratislava Symphony Choir and the Irish-based vocal ensemble Anúna, with the latter providing song mixes that Mitsuda later revealed to have made him cry. Mitsuda stated that it was the largest project he had ever worked on, with him being in charge of the budget, music sheet management, booking, and composition." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoblade_Chronicles_2

Takahashi also said that this game's development was much easier than the last one because they had already solved most of the design dilemmas they would have had with Xenoblade Chronicles X, also they're able to reuse a lot of the code from that game, so most of the engineering side is script work. He also says the design philosophy of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is taking the best parts of Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X and putting them together in this game. So it's got the singular plot driven focus of the XC, and the open world elements of XCX all in one.

In the video at the top of this post, you'll notice the shape of the glowing light on the girl's chest. In an interview, Takahashi said the shape is important, but didn't specify why. Long term fans will recognize this as the shape of the monolithic Zohar from Xenosaga and Xenogears - the object which Monolithsoft took their name from.

(THANKYOU ctr+shift+t and Chrome for saving this post which I accidentally closed before posting )

[Eric]

I'll shocked this is coming out this year with how long the last Xeno game took to come out and then be released in the US.

[M'k'n'zy]

It looks REALLY good so far, I can't wait to play it!

[Julius Seeker]

So I went on a rant. In short - a portion of the dev team was freed up before XCX was complete, and they could get immediately to work. Takahashi hired a new art lead to handle things while Tanaka finished things up on XCX. They used the XCX engine, so they didn't have to wait for their engineers before they could see their assets in game and in action. Since the game was playable, without blockers, early on, they were able to get a head start on localization. The game has been in development for three years.


Xenoblade Chronicles X was actually the more rushed looking of the two. The interface was obscene, and didn't look as polished as it should have been; an overabundance of text, and weird font choices - particularly in the sizes. There's a reason this one didn't take as long, and ends up looking more polished than the last: they're using the same engine. Also, I would guess that Monolithsoft has good direction as a studio.

The game still took a very long time. Since they don't need full art and design capacity to complete a gold master, many of that staff could begin working on the new project. They used a different character design lead; instead of Kunihiko Tanaka, they brought in Masatsugu Saito, who I don't know a lot about - but he seems to be some kind of anime artists that Takahashi liked... similar to Hiroyuki Sawano on XCX... but the point is Saito was able to begin months before Tanaka was finished with his work on XCX (which looked beautiful in the end). Tanaka was able to come in later to work on the project, helping with the final push, and they also brought in Squaresoft's Tetsuya Nomura to work on characters as well.

Anyway, to the point: the engineering team didn't need to get an engine up and running before they could see graphics in game, they just needed to script together a world, and so they could begin full development on XC2 before XCX was out the door. They began development sometime in 2014, and the design was finished by early 2015.

Xenoblade 2 will essentially build off of XCX. Takahashi wants to make an open world RPG like XCX, but also focus the story more around the party's adventures. I am not quite sure how that's going to work out, but I would guess it can be achieved somewhat like XCX - in that you can do a lot throughout the world, but the story will be told through events happening at various areas. There's also definitely going to be locations that won't be accessible at earlier portions of the game, the story in the trailer has indicated as much. He may also make a classic style RPG where the world opens up gradually as the story progresses; which is Skies of Arcadia, IMO, did best. This game has a lot of resemblance to that one; of course, it will probably be more toward the open world features.
Dragon Quest 9 also had an interesting model, it was an open world RPG that began with a 40-50 hour standard RPG with some introduction to their open world game, but it's not really until after completing the main story that the game really becomes open world; which can last another 250+ hours.

[Oracle]

So, as is par for the course when I'm looking forward to a massive RPG, I do zero research - I want to be surprised.

Based on playing XC2 for about 30 min yesterday, all I could think of was Skies of Arcadia.

My SNES Classic is coming today, I'm underwater at work, and there's so much shit to do at home - and I'll still try to bang out 50-100 hours this month. Sleep is for the weak!

[M'k'n'zy]

I can't wait. Unfortunately my collectors edition from Amazon got delayed because I had to change the payment method, so I won't get it until Tuesday.

[Eric]

This game has a few performance issues. It's resolution drops to a noticeable/distracting degree in handheld mode, which sucks since that's how I primarily play my Switch.

And the frame rate drops into the lower 20s at times as well in both docked & handheld.

The pace of combat is much slower then XCX, and similar to the first game.

That said it's a Xeno game, it's fun when the above distractions aren't working my nerves.

[Julius Seeker]

My first impressions (I played a lot yesterday and last night, about 12-15 hours) I think the game is a significant improvement over the first Xenoblade. Despite the marketing, it feels like a progression from Xenoblade Chronicles X rather than Chronicles. Although it is a different sort of game, it's not open world.

On performance, I haven't noticed any issues besides a few minor stutters here and there in the seconds after loading. But I have a bad eye for that kind of stuff anyway. I usually only notice framerate issues in racing games.

STORY
I wouldn't say the story feels much like Xenoblade Chronicles. It's much more like Skies of Arcadia, or even stylistically similar Xenogears. That is, Xenoblade Chronicles, you have one big plot conflict that drives you for about 30-40 hours until the twist; everything you come across (aside from the mines by Colony 6) are pretty much just obstacles on your way to the goal. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 gives you a big mystery, but it's more of a series of things coming at you while you get your footing. You're jumping from place to place to escape the immediate threats and do things that are more urgent; you still have your main conflict, but there's a lot of distractions (similar to most Xeno-games); you have this mystery of Elysium, which is your goal - it's a mystery, but not quite as mysterious as Xenogears which essentially gives you this very dangerous weapon (Weltall) and you uncover information about it as you go forward, and by extension, information about Fei, and the story explodes from that.

BATTLE
Responding to Eric here.
It does start off feeling very slow, but it gets a lot faster as the game goes on. I think it was before the 10-hour mark. Especially when you start getting multiple Blades, and you begin having skills that activate Arts at the beginning of a battle. Also, it's nice you can pick up items in battle now. It gets a lot faster than the first game.

FIELD DESIGN
The more detailed field design is definitely a lot closer to XCX than XC. Although, unlike XCX, it is bounded, and doesn't have that whole "if you see it you can go there" feeling that XCX had. The continents are enormous but smaller than XCX (which was monstrously huge, about four times as much land as Breath of the Wild when you take into account all the layers.)

DIALOGUE
I like it! It's more light-hearted and very self-aware of its cliches; it manages to weave it in without breaking the fourth wall. An example includes Rex looking like a bit of a kid, kind of silly for him to be doing anything in this world. Another example is with some of the tutorial stuff where the Nopon character Tora just happened to have the item required to test something out.

TOWNS
In the first Xenoblade Chronicles, I had issues with every town except Frontier Village. They felt like collections of people with building shaped environments; it was kind of similar to Final Fantasy 12. Even more significant of an issue was that cities either felt too maze-like (Colony 6, 9, and Fallen Arm mainly) or way too open and spread out (Alcamoth in particular). XC2 took design hints from New LA, and improved on them, and made some fantastic 3D city design. In addition, the cities in XC2 are also a lot bigger than the first game.

QUESTING
Questing, predictably, has continued to improve. As has the heart-to-heart stuff, I don't think they have requirements anymore other than having the characters in your party; it's no longer something that you find and have to remember about for later.

SKIES OF ARCADIA COMPARISON
Back on the XCX meets Skies of Arcadia thing:
Rex = Vyse
Nia = Aeka
Pyra = Fina
Dughall = Alfonso
Dughall's Blade = Antonio
Ardainian Empire = Valuan Empire (They're Scottish instead of Spanish though)
Morag = Ramirez (maybe? She could be an Enrique archetype. There are already three other potential Ramirez/Sephiroth type characters in this game).

I would be shocked if Tetsuya Takahashi was NOT inspired by Skies of Arcadia.

OTHER COMMENTS
The draw points in this game have been changed to dig spots, and they yield items for crafting rather than magic essence. I have noticed little integrations from FF8 design in Takahashi's games. Another thing is the pop-up dialogue, where extra NPCs will talk without the player engaging them, you'll see a speech bubble and text above their head as they speak with others, or as you approach. I enjoy these sorts of touches. I wonder if these kinds of things, along with crafting/refinement in Final Fantasy 8 were Takahashi's additions? He was on the game's design staff, after all.

[Julius Seeker]

On further reflection of the early game, since I am a while out now.
It's not very good, maybe the worst beginning of the three games - and perhaps of all Xeno-games with the exception of Saga 1 and 2 (both of which I actually enjoyed, but I understand their issues).

A few things they could have done:
1. Made Arts available from the beginning of each battle, it's kind of pointless to have to wait each time.
2. Early enemy HP shouldn't be scaled from the same level as later enemies. It makes them take forever to kill. Essentially, in the late game, players have access to much quicker combos and can kill off enemies much more quickly. In the early game, players have to deal with a scaled down versions of that HP, and without combos and quick access to arts, early battles end up taking a lot longer than they should. It seems like an oversight rather than the intention.
3. People get confused with the compass, it is not intuitive, and if people are getting lost because of it then they shouldn't have designed it that way. Later in the game, you get used to how the compass works, and it is not an issue then.
4. The tutorial section I found WAAAAY too long. I am more of a fan of getting the player going, and using intuitive design (even though I am personally a fan of games that are incredibly unintuitive). In some cases, I find that the tutorial does more to confuse players than to help them by making fairly simple mechanics seem much more complex.

All in all, I think that if you liked the beginning of the game (first 2.5 chapters) you'll love the rest. If you didn't like the beginning, there's still a chance you could like/love most of the rest.

[Oracle]

Just got a surprise when I got a new named blade:

Spoiler: show

KOS-MOS

[Julius Seeker]

Oracle, not much of a spoiler anymore considering the clip was all over the Internet for anyone even looking up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 =P
Unfortunately, I do not have her as of chapter 8.


Anyway, as of chapter 8, and also including the completion of Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenosaga, and Xenogears. Some discussion.

Spoiler: show

The Xenosaga stuff is more of a throw-off. This is about comparing Xenogears to Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2.

Core plot details in Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 are retellings of parts of the Xenogears story. Although their focus is on different sets of plot points, and both are simplified. Takahashi is a little more restrained these days with story telling - he knows the story he wants to tell, but he also knows that large amounts of people don't really have the capacity to digest it... Either that or he just really liked Xenogears and can't think of plots he'd rather do. They have different settings, so it is kind of like a plot reskin.

Xenoblade Chronicles:
1. Main character - A young man missing his childhood memories, adopted by his current village, gets attacked by incoming Mechons/Gears, picks up a weapon of immense almost holy power, and wins. In the process, the girl he had a crush on is tragically killed. His reason for leaving the village is linked to that. In Fei's case, it is because he feels guilt, in Shulk's case it is a revenge mission.
2. Main characters & gods - Fei and Shulk both house the spirit of a very strong being. In Shulk's case, the scientist who created Bionis and is god-like. Fei is infused with godlike powers by coming into contact with the wave existence. Zanza and the wave existence are higher dimensional beings. Both Shulk and Fei are genetic rebirths. Fiora and Elly are both characters who have a Goddess implanted into them due to possessing the correct body; with Elly, it is Miang, with Fiora it is Meyneth.
3. There is a dominant pure-blood race that gets transformed into monsters: in Xenogears, it is the Solarians, in Xenoblade, it is the Avian master-race High Entia.
4. God created life to be building blocks for its rebirth. In Xenogears, it was the fail-safe reconstruction of a super-weapon capable of destroying star systems. In Xenoblade it was as building blocks to rebuild Bionis, life is essentially made to be Bionis-food. Also, Telethia and Angels are the same things, the defence mechanisms of their respective gods.
5. God is not anything sacred, but a creation of ancient human scientists housing the soul of a higher dimensional being. God is killed at the end to free the universe. As previously discussed, in Xenogears it was the Deus weapon; created by humans and loaded aboard the colony ship Eldrich to take to a location, it destroyed after the weapon become self-aware, but the failsafe rebuilt it 10,000 years later. In Xenoblade it was the result of Zanza (a scientist) experimenting on a space station, creating a new universe where he would be a god. So the particulars are different due to the different settings of each game, but they fit the same role in the plot.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
This stuff doesn't become apparent until much later, the beginning of the game is much more Skies of Arcadia-like, while the later portion shows its true Xenogearsian colours. Although, I haven't really thought about the plot as much. I am still on Chapter 8, so my thoughts may change in the future.

The parallels:
1. The world was destroyed multiple times in the past, once 500 years ago, and even more complete destruction thousands of years ago. I'll break this down further in the next three points.
2. 500 years ago a powerful person destroyed a large amount of the world using ancient Gear technology under his control (and yes, they LOOK just like Gears from Xenogears, although they're called Artifice Aions in Xenoblade Chronicles 2). In Xenogears this was Grahf, in Xenoblade, this was Malos (although Malos's reason hasn't been revealed yet, it seems he is just created to be the destroyer - in Xenogears Graft did it out of grief for the loss of Sophia). Grahf used something called the Diabolos, which can be assumed to be Angels or ancient Gears; Malos used Artifice Aions - which are Omni-Gear-like objects.
3. The main villain seeks annihilation due to knowing the truth of the existence of life in the world. He has felt great pain again due to the death of a loved one. In Xenogears this is Krelian, in Xenoblade this is Jin. Krelian learned life was created to be building blocks for the Deus weapon, while Jin learned that Blades and Titans were built to be enslaved for human usage (truthfully, I'm still in the process of uncovering Jin's plot). Krelian lost Sophia, and so he joined Solaris and came to lead them. Jin lost Lora, and so he joined Torna and came to lead them. Jin and Krelian are both villains with redeemable qualities. Egill from Xenoblade Chronicles another of this archetype, although he doesn't have the same number of similar plot elements, just the same characteristics.
4. The other significant destruction: At the bottom of the world is a civilization dead for thousands of years that lived in skyscraper-filled metropolises and were of incredibly high technology. In Xenogears this was Zeboim civilization which was destroyed about 4000 years earlier, in Xenoblade this is Morytha - it was destroyed thousands of years ago, but an unspecified number. Here at the root of the World Tree, it seems that there is a technological base that appears active.

This is as far as I am in the game. It is possible the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is Earth; it's also possible that it is some planet existing in the Xenosaga universe. I haven't discovered it yet,

[Oracle]

Oracle, not much of a spoiler anymore considering the clip was all over the Internet for anyone even looking up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 =P

So, as is par for the course when I'm looking forward to a massive RPG, I do zero research - I want to be surprised.

:p

[Oracle]

So I beat the main story a couple days ago. Working on end-game content now. Thoroughly enjoyed the game. I like that the end game stuff doesn't seem so ridiculously time-consuming like it was in XCX (at least so far).

[Julius Seeker]

I’m getting close to the end, I’m still in chapter 8. Yeah, the game seems like it is going to take me less than half the time I spent on Xenoblade Chronicles X.

To be fair, I’m not wasting much time in this game, while I wasted tons of time in XCX doing bullshit that had nothing to do with progressing the game - like, how long will it take to drive around the world, how long will it take to get from the far side of Oblivia to the far side of Noctilim on foot?

I’d love to play XCX again, on Switch. I am a little upset that the game ended with a hook for an undelivered sequel. Even if it is just a book, like they did with Xenogears, I want something!

[Oracle]

I did a lot of bullshit in XCX, spent well in excess of 120 hours on the game.

I've put a decent amount more time into XC2. I've also REALLY taken my time. Went crazy trying to up the development level of regions, likely earlier than I should have as not all the quests were available, making for lots of going back and forth between regions.

But I will say one thing: FUCK FUCK FUCK Tiger! Tiger! I'm not playing that shit anymore.

Spoiler: show

I did enough to get Poppi a her skill upgrades, didn't do shit with other models...

[Eric]

https://twitter.com/Comp_Shut_In/status ... 2155116544 I had to share.

[Oracle]

Haha, yea, I had a chuckle at that scene.

[Julius Seeker]

Finished it.

Few things (non-spoiler)
IMPORTANT - there is a memory leak in the game, I disn’t Have it hit me until after I finished the game. There is a point where you can save at the end after the “The End” screen, and this will be the save you can use in New Game+ when it launches in a few weeks. I got a black screen at the end, waited about 3-4 minutes, hit the home button, went back into my game, and got the option to save. I was lucky. One way to avoid this is to hard-power down the Switch before playing the final battle. I essentially played nothing else but Xenoblade 2 For 30 hours, so I had 30 hours of memory leakage; that was since the last patch update.

End Boss difficulty - not hard. I was at level 69. In fact this is might be the only time, outside of Xenosaga Episode 3, where I defeated the end boss on my first attempt. Chapter considering Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X were perhaps the 2nd and 3rd most difficult bosses in Xeno-History (The Patriarch in Xenosaga Episode 2 still holds the crown) I was a little surprised, and relieved - as XC and XS2 in particular took me at least 5 attempts each to defeat, XCX may have been 3 or 4.

Ursula (Blade) - if you have her, doing her quest line can get her very powerful, but necessarily don't go overboard just because you can. She has the highest potential of the healer Blades, but even just doing a bit of her extraordinarily grindy quest line is enough. I got her about 65% of the way, and she was by far my second most powerful Blade overall at the end of the game; the only one more powerful is a story related one. It’s not worth the time unless you have patience or are maybe doing New Game + later on for a 100% attempt.

I won’t speak in detail on story stuff in this thread because it will be full of spoilers. I’ll write something up later.

Opinion on the Game

Gameplay - starts off slow, and it takes about 40 hours until it really starts feeling great. In the end, better than the the first two battle systems, more snappy, less list scrolling. Combos also become WAY faster to do at the end, I was getting 4 unique elements off fairly quickly at the end, and then chaining out with 4X bursts, and that’s all you need to finish the game. In the early game, it seems to be a monumental achievement getting even 1 combo off, so it’s much slower.

Story - This game is another late game plot heavy title. The last 4 chapters are significantly more interesting than the first 6. It does something similar to Xenogears where the game seems like your run of the mill RPG until a certain point, then BOOM! You have a Xenogears-type game. The first Xenoblade did this to some extent, but I liked XC2’s late game significantly more than XC. Without going into any details, if you’ve played Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade Chronicles, then you will get more enjoyment out of the later portions of the game. I think that accounts for most of us here playing XC2, though.

Overall = the early stages of the game are a bit lacking in polish, very maze-like, full of difficulty spikes; and the story doesn't seem to be moving forward so much as developing characters. The later portions (particularly chapter 8, 9, and 10) are quite a bit different in pacing. They play like a polished up Xenosaga game - in that, while there are different directions to go around, there's never feeling of being lost, all of the cutscenes progress the plot, and there aren't any crazy difficulty spikes; the last difficult gameplay portion was Chapter 7 (although Chapter 7 is where the story begins to take it to the next level, and actually feel like a progressing plot rather than just a loose link of scenarios to get you to go through the world), after that it's smooth sailing. So it seems like they focused most of their later dev polishing efforts on the last quarter to third of the game.

[Julius Seeker]

Some dev information.

Apparently the team not only completed the game in about half the time as Xenoblade Chronicles X, but with 40% of the development capacity. The other 60% had been working on Breath of the Wild following the completion of XCX, and had since been shifted to work on the next Monolithsoft game. Monolithsoft had a lot of experience with developing huge open worlds, vertical elements, and XCX was a similar sort of “if you see it, you can go there” style game. Their role, as stated by Aonuma, was primarily on topography; so they effectively shaped Hyrule.

[Julius Seeker]

Heads up - a new update has released 1.3.0 which does a lot:

Adds:
* New Game+ - Blades, items and money, character levels, town development, merc levels, equipment growth, and play time carry over - new features and content unlock including access to Torna Blades, all Blades can go on Merc missions, hidden affinities unlocked, can decrease levels for Bonus exp at Inns, can trade Bonus exp to Traveling Bards for special items (e.g. 200,000 Bonus exp for an extra accessory slot, so you can equip 3 accessories instead of one).
* Easy Mode
* QOL updates (like skipping all Blade unlock animations, better sorting, better map functionality, etc)

Full list here: https://nintendoeverything.com/xenoblad ... -and-more/


A bit of trivia: Monolith Soft's foundational roots are with the Chrono Trigger development team (founding members of Monolith Soft: Tetsuya Takahashi, Yasuyuki Honne, Makoto Shimamoto, and Tadahiro Usuda all began as a part of the Chrono Trigger dev team) and New Game+ was first implemented as a feature with that game. So in a way, this is a feature in the direct line of succession.

Why does this line exist? The Xenogears team walked out of Square to form Monolith Soft in 1999. Before Xenogears was the first of the Xeno-games it was known as Project Noah, and before that: Chrono Trigger 2, the members I noted above, as well as others who also left Square but work freelance (Yasunori Mitsuda most notably, Masato Kato a couple years after the first major exodus) and collaborate with Monolith Soft (Mitsuda is still Monolith Soft's primary composer).

To expand the story a little more (because I like rambling about the history and this studio in particular) check the spoiler box:

Spoiler: show

1995 - Chrono Trigger launches with the New Game+ feature
1995-1998 - The big issues with this team and Square occurred mainly with Xenogears and Square's insistence on a 2-year dev cycle with limited staff; this created a lot of animosity between Takahashi and the production staff at Square - in an interview much later Hironobu Sakaguchi told Takahashi he hoped to work with him again some day, Takahashi brushed him off; I don't think Takahashi dislikes Sakaguchi, the interview (which also had Nintendo President Iwata) seemed friendly (I'm linking it below), but I think there may still be some hard feelings with the former FF leader.
1998-99 - Xeno-team members were broken apart with Takahashi heading to the FF8 team, and much of the rest going to Chrono Cross (a bit of a remake of Radical Dreamers). Chrono Cross was disastrous from a dev standpoint, and for much of the staff it was the last straw- Mitsuda became hospitalized with stress during this game's development; it must have been nasty since they took his credits off of the Chrono Trigger port to PSX. He would leave Square and not work with them again for 18 years when he did some work on some FF15 DLC.
1999 - took a huge chunk of Square's talent with him to Namco to form Monolith Soft studio.
2001 - Relationships with Namco quickly soured when they discovered that Namco was not the home they were looking for, and in 2001 Monolith Soft leadership (Hirohide Sugiura and Tetsuya Takahashi) was already in talks with Nintendo executive Shinji Hatano (one of Nintendo's video game department founding members from back in 1972).
2002 - things worsened when Namco's leadership had a shake-up, Takahashi and Soraya Saga were removed from the lead positions on the dev team for Xenosaga Episode 2 and 3; and after things were really bad. Namco was re-arranging the studio.
2007 - Nintendo purchases 80% of Monolith Soft - and they become exclusive to Nintendo platforms but with longterm creative goals; vertical map design, open world design; and these missions were realized with Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X.
2014/15 - Monolith Tokyo would help Nintendo EPD in the development of the open world style Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - while simultaneously developing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Takahashi has stated XC2 actually only required about 40% of the capacity, while the other 60% were on Breath of the Wild).
2018 - This update gets released: Tetsuya Takahashi, Yasuyuki Honne, Makoto Shimamoto, and Tadahiro Usuda were there the entire journey from Chrono Trigger to this DLC for Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-Asks/I ... 11179.html

[Oracle]

Well, FML:

https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/e ... 0-6459748/

Whole new stand-alone expansion content, also auto available to season pass holders.

Those fuckers got me.... I despise buying season passes. But , in this case, it's kind of like buying another game.

/Clicks purchase

[Eric]

Remember ORacle, you have to 100% the game before you do the DLC. :^)

[Oracle]

Yea... I'm working on it. 370 hours so far (with a lot of idle and min/maxing time) :p

If I don't get this last unique blade soon I'm going to lose it. I don't know how many god damn crystals I've gone through with 999 luck...

[Julius Seeker]

I'm on my second playthrough as well, paused for a bit.

The season pass thing was more or less just a gimmick branding of pre-selling the expansions.

[Oracle]

I STILL HAVEN'T GOT THAT LAST FUCKING BLADE@$!%#%&#%&@#%!@%@$& I must have gone through over 500 cores since my last post in June, maxed Nia's Truth idea level to 10, 999 luck... just fuck. Fuck Dahlia. FUCK HER.

I've completed everything from the latest DLC, includign completely maxing out

Spoiler: show

Shulk and Fiora

.

[Julius Seeker]

I have Dahlia but not KOS-MOS. I haven't been making a big effort to get them all though, mostly I want KOS-MOS =P

[Oracle]

So new expansion content (the last before Torna) came out. A new rare blade (that has a smash for Rex, so I don't have to use stupid Roc anymore!) and, to likely no one's surprise, Elma from XCX.

What I really like about the tie ins with XC and XCX - the characters talk about their own worlds a bit, how they differ from each other's, and what they have in common (primarily the Nopon).

Spoiler: show

One of Elma's affinity chart lines is all based on going to different areas in Alrest and seeing a cut scene discussing theme. I was disappointed that part of the world tree, but not the lower orbital station itself, was included as one of the cut scenes. They appear to be hesitant to expose the creator of Alrest, the Architect, to discussion or scrutiny by Shulk, Fiona, and Elma. Maybe I was hoping for too much, but I thought at LEAST addressing the tie in between the Architect and Zanza would have been cool (other than the tie in from the game's ending itself).

I also wish that there would have been a scene for Elma in the Land of Morytha. Based simply on timelines, it's becoming less and less likely that Alrest, prior to Klaus' activation of the Conduit, is in fact Earth. Could be an alternate universe thing I suppose, or Alrest and Earth could be completely unrelated. I'm doing reading online to try and stitch it together better, but a scene with Elma in Morytha would have been at least intriguing.

[Julius Seeker]

So new expansion content (the last before Torna) came out. A new rare blade (that has a smash for Rex, so I don't have to use stupid Roc anymore!) and, to likely no one's surprise, Elma from XCX.

What I really like about the tie ins with XC and XCX - the characters talk about their own worlds a bit, how they differ from each other's, and what they have in common (primarily the Nopon).

Spoiler: show

One of Elma's affinity chart lines is all based on going to different areas in Alrest and seeing a cut scene discussing theme. I was disappointed that part of the world tree, but not the lower orbital station itself, was included as one of the cut scenes. They appear to be hesitant to expose the creator of Alrest, the Architect, to discussion or scrutiny by Shulk, Fiona, and Elma. Maybe I was hoping for too much, but I thought at LEAST addressing the tie in between the Architect and Zanza would have been cool (other than the tie in from the game's ending itself).

I also wish that there would have been a scene for Elma in the Land of Morytha. Based simply on timelines, it's becoming less and less likely that Alrest, prior to Klaus' activation of the Conduit, is in fact Earth. Could be an alternate universe thing I suppose, or Alrest and Earth could be completely unrelated. I'm doing reading online to try and stitch it together better, but a scene with Elma in Morytha would have been at least intriguing.

Response to your spoiler stuff (Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and X end game spoilers) also some non-spoilery stuff from Xenogears and Xenosaga.

Spoiler: show

It was fairly clear at the end of XC that the planet Klaus had his orbital base around was Earth given that you travel through the Sol system at the end... That was, at least, the original intention of Takahashi. I don't think he was thinking about a connection between the original Xenoblade and the greater Xeno-universe at the time of its creation - he put a game together with the intention of exploring vertical design on a large scale... I would be shocked if Faxanadu had no inspiration on this. Another thing is that the plot mechanics of Xenoblade are unoriginal compared to his other games - much of Xenogears and Xenosaga are repackaged to fit the new characters and settings - and the storytelling is slimmed down as well.

With XCX, he became interested in the greater Xeno-universe again and crafted a new story to fit at the very beginning of the timeline, when humans first left Earth. It fits about 15,000 years before the events of Xenogears. In Xenogears and Xenoblade Chronicles X, Earth is "lost" shortly after humans began traveling into space. This is kind of similar to Asimov's Foundation universe - from which Takahashi was heavily inspired... especially with Xenosaga.

In XC2, he may be redacting the storyline by obscuring the planet Klaus had his orbit around. It might not be Earth, but rather a different human planet. I've put a bit of thought into it. Taking the old timeline and mashing it with XCX, you get something like this:

20XX - Zohar discovered on Earth near Lake Turkana, Elma reaches earth
2054 - Earth Destroyed
2056 - Landing on Mira, New Jerusalem/New LA founded. Also, the post-game quest of XCX revealed the survival of other Ark ships when they are contacted.
2XXX - Zohar/Conduit weapon prototype created, weapon disappears
6XXX - Zohar/Conduit reacquired, Deus project resumed.
7000 - Deus weapon & Eldridge crash.
17000 - Deus weapon resurrected.

10,000 years seems to be the distance between the creation and end of Alrest. It doesn't really fit. What we can say is that the Zohar monolith did survive, even though the Wave Existence was released. Alrest could potentially be the Xenogears planet 27000+ years in the future.

Although, with what has been said in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, it looks like rather than redactions Takahashi intends for each game to be linked through the Conduit/Zohar in a sort of multiverse.

As another note, that is not Elma's true body. That is her Mim.

I am sure we'll find out more in the next Xenoblade game.

[Julius Seeker]

Torna: the Golden Country's release comes tomorrow.

So far, the most exciting feature is the fact that you can switch up Blades and use them in combat. This is something I have wanted to do for a while. I want to see what the benefit is from a gameplay standpoint for doing this before commenting further, but it's interesting even if it is purely cosmetic.

From a plot standpoint, the top things I hope to see more exploration on, but entirely don't expect are:
1. Morytha Civilization.
2. Fleshing out the story about the Zohar Conduit
3. Fleshing out the connection with Xenoblade Chronicles X and Xenosaga.

And one thing that would be REALLY awesome, but is also far more unlikely than anything above - due to all those concepts being introduced in the vanilla: A connection with the Xenogears Deus weapon or planet.

In all though, I would love to see what elements/parallels from previous Takahashi games will make it into the Xenoblade canon.

[Julius Seeker]

A few notes after a bit of play on Torna The Golden Country:

1. The expansion is treated like a whole new game on two Titans (not just the new Torna Titan, but Gormott 500 years prior) - which makes sense given it takes place 500 years earlier and is also sold as a stand-alone game (~40USD). It is kind of like a Lufia 2 to Lufia 1, or Dragon Quest 3 to dragon Quest 1/2 type deal. The Torna titan is huge, and beautiful, from what I have seen so far it’s similar to a giant Fonsett Island, with a Tantal influence.

2. So far it seems that either game played first is fine - BUT there’s a lot of spoilers for the main game if you play Torna first - but that probably goes both ways: Playing Torna first: while you learn the secrets of the character backgrounds and world of Alrest before you should, all of the fates of all the characters and the world will still be a surprise. Of course, there's something to be added with how you feel about the characters when you already know their fate, but not quite how they get there, or when they get there.

3. The initial experience is much faster gameplaywise than XC2. And has a very different feel to it, it is more streamlined and refined; and it comes off as feeling just as deep as before, but the more grindy bits are gone. It also seems there's no more gacha core crystal minigame, it's just like getting Magicite in FF6 now (except better).

4. Pacing is as good as a Xeno game has ever been. Perhaps the best.

5. May just be me, but the graphics seem to be improved over the base game. Aside from a little colour bleeding, everything looks more vibrant.

6. The battle system is much more fun, IMO. The Blades aren't just a support role, you flip around, and attack with the new character's stats - HP is also healed up to a certain extent when switching. In a way, this is kind of like what they did with Xenosaga where you can switch in and out your EWGS (Gears) - except more interesting IMO. Also, there's an option to halve your HP in exchange for charging all your arts, and you can do this at the beginning of every battle - regular battles are WAY more fun now.

7. Campsites work as cooking centers and also have a Talk and Rest option - Talk is basically like Party Chat from Dragon Quest games - although rather than having the option for brief dialogue in every location, after talking to any NPC, or any event - your party members sit and discuss things around the campfire - like DQ: really an optional thing for anyone looking for a more in-depth character experience. The game feels much more adventure with these all around.

8. The NPC Community relationship map from Xenoblade 1 and X returns. It makes the game a lot better for those who want to go along and do all the side-quests: which are really well paced and easy to come by this time around (Xenoblade, the original was a gigantic headache, and XC2 wasn’t much better... I don’t remember minding quests in XCX though, likely because you lived in one giant HUB city.

9. The audio is REALLY good (not exactly a rarity for any Xeno-game); the music, IMO is as good as I have ever heard in a Mitsuda game.

10. The Torna continent, IMO, is the best of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Also, Xenogears, if you see the beginning there’s a very Graahf/Id moment.

From what I gather, this is a more moderately sized RPG, something around SNES. So if you’re looking for something more i. the 12-35 hour range like the Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger, instead of the 80 hour range Xenoblade games tend to be - here it is.

[Oracle]

So Torna: The Golden Country is out as of the weekend.

So far: I'm pumped. I haven't experienced DLC this rich before (not to say it isnt out there). Improvements to battle system, massive amount of new content, great story, great characters (not nearly as campy as the main story, at least not yet).

I really like the spin on the driver/blade system they did with the expansion. I feel combat, especially switching between drivers and blades, is now so much more important. I like how drivers and blades are all now treated more like their own entities - they still rely on one another, but, for example, drivers now have their own weapons, and don't solely rely on using the blade's weapon in combat.

Some combat from the main game, like level 4 combos, are identified as being somewhat unique to Lora, as her and Jin are the only driver/blade combo observed as sharing the blade's weapon. There was a comment in the hints that alluded to other drivers acquiring this ability later in the story.

[Oracle]

And for what it's worth, I'm personally expecting very little in the way of fleshing out the Xeno* canon with this expansion. I'm getting the feeling it will be very focused on the events that took place 500 years ago, and less so on the Xeno-verse.