GRcade

They have not long ago introduced the purge mechanic for the Monado.

Who are the best characters to use, I’ve stuck with using Shulk the whole way through so far with Reyn and Dunban in my team. Not had Riki at all in my squad and only had Melia once.

Sharla, Shulk, and one other IMO. Melia can do stupid damage if you play as her, but also she's kind of boring to play as? And the CPU seems to be useless with her.

I always end up with Shulk, Reyn and Sharla, once you’ve got Melia and levelled up some of her skills I switch her out for Sharla. You definitely need to play as Melia if you’re using her though.

I do wish there was a way you could switch between characters during battles so you can take control on the fly

That’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to in 3!

I was Sharla, Shulk, Reyn all they way (other than story enforced changes)

Maybe I should switch Sharla back in for Dunban, seems a lot of love for her

Sharla

I really liked having Sharla in my party, just felt that the first proper trio you get compliment each other really nicely, not even just what they say either! Sharla is a solid healer and can deal out decent damage with the right arts.

I have a question on chain attacks.

I'm about 30 hours in and I don't seem to do huge amounts of damage even if I chain together combos. And I don't tend to get many attempts to go again. Am I doing something wrong or does it open up more?

Possibly I'm more use to XC2's approach to it

I think increasing tension helps build up CAs? Or maybe it's affinity? I certainly remember them being less impactful in XC1 than 2, though.

Yeh I don't really pay attention to tension so that's probably something I need to do.

Also, don't really do anything special to raise affinity. I think I should rotate party members when doing side quests to help on this? And gifts obviously.

Also you can go up to them in battle when they're down (low tension, shown by their face icon looking miserable) to cheer them up.

I managed to get my head around the battle system a lot better this time! Helps that the tutorial documents in the help section are actually pretty good.

I think my Switch might have just died. Won't power on all of a sudden after working fine this morning.

Edit - Oh thank god, it just came back on after holding the power button down for a while with the charger plugged in (Think thst does a soft reset)

It reignited my annoyance at certain games having cloud backups explicitly blocked though. Looking at you Pokemon.

So just started this and one thing is immediately obvious - it's quite grainy. It's obviously a Wii game originally, but was expecting it to look cleaner.

Secondly, the side quests seem a bit MMO-y and "kill X amount of this" or "gather X amounts of this item". Are they worth orogrdssing with (feels like a rabbit hole to go down) and do any of the side quests actually contain story and character?

Parksey wrote:So just started this and one thing is immediately obvious - it's quite grainy. It's obviously a Wii game originally, but was expecting it to look cleaner.

Secondly, the side quests seem a bit MMO-y and "kill X amount of this" or "gather X amounts of this item". Are they worth orogrdssing with (feels like a rabbit hole to go down) and do any of the side quests actually contain story and character?

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The side quests don't really go beyond fetch/deliver/kill/speak to much to be honest, and you don't really get much story beyond flavour text from the person setting it.

I tend to use the side quests as a way of exploring the different areas as it adds abit structure to your exploration and a lot of reward.

They're definitely time consuming though.

The side quests are far and away the worst thing about this game. That's even more obvious on a replay.

Is there anything massively missable in side quests? Will I end up underlevelled if I give them the swerve? I don't mind a 100 hour game, but not if 50 of them will be fetch quests for materials I'll never use.

Nothing completely obligatory. You might end slightly underlevelled yes.

The material gathering does become a bit more rewarding later on in the game at least.

There's a few different systems going on too that makes the side quests more rewarding to complete even if they aren't always that varied or interesting.

The side missions can also help with filling out the Collectopedia which has its own rewards.