The early learning curve is a matter of figuring out what you can ignore. This one gets a lot more chaotic a lot quicker than the last two games. Lay on top of this all the visual noise and damage numbers and overlapping audio calls, and yep, you’re playing a Xenoblade Chronicles. The real-time battles are a shuffling mob of drivers, blades, and the tangled criss-crossing beams that connect them. One blade equips you with a battle axe, another with a sword, yet another with grenades.Įven the bad guys have blades. Indeed, the blade determines what weapon a character uses. The blade determines whether the character is a tank, healer, or dps (by the way, can game designers please invent another combat model already?). The blade determines which special abilities and attacks are available. If I was thinking this stuff up, a “blade” would be out front and a “driver” would be the equivalent of its puppeteer, controlling its action.īut in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the idea is that the blade is a weapon.

The “driver” does the actual fighting and the “blade” hangs back and shoots a support beam at him, like a steadfast medic from Team Fortress. It’s an odd paradigm, especially for how it works in combat. They’re called “blades”, with the character described as the “driver”. It takes a while to congeal into something worth seeing through.īut it seems that a fundamental part of the gameplay is the idea of each character using a set of combat avatars. But that’s how Xenoblade Chronicles have always started. A lot of these hours are barely coherent JRPG silliness, ridiculously chaotic combat, and sifting through inventory detritus. I’m still in the early stages of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. And of course there’s a Japanese word for this concept: “waifu”. This Xenoblade Chronicles is also built on a simple idea: sexy dolls are supposedly sexy. The last Xenoblade Chronicles - it was numbered X, but it was really number 2, which makes this number 3, although it’s technically number 2 - built up to and was eventually based on a simple idea: wouldn’t it be cool if you could get into a giant robot and fuck shit up? There’s even a Japanese word for this concept: “mech”.

Xc2 high dmg blade combos guide