Max out the affinity of all towns before moving forward by diving, selling stuff, and then spending around 300k at shops. You often wind up unlocking secret missions that give you good rare blades, or Poppi blueprints.

God this game desperately needed to utilize the video recording feature! The AI is just as derpy as in the first game which has led to many funny moments, and I've had a number of interesting glitches like everything except people and enemys being invisible.

Anywho, I love this game even more than the original thanks to it's greatly improved gameplay! After mastering it, the original looks so basic in comparison. I just love how much more depth and player input there is. I can't see myself going back, it's that good! I don't think X2 is superior in every aspect however. The bigger anime influence only hurts the game, and the 90% of the sidequest are still boring tedious fetch quest that are rarely worthwhile, but I still do them anyway for some reason. :L

I feel like such a MORON. I was doing this mission where I had to get chocolit and riceballs and the mission statement was really vague. It was like "Get chocolit and riceballs. Complete mercenary quests, finish sidequests, and build up Argentum". So after I got the chocolit and riceballs I figured I must have to keep building up Argentum to complete the quest. I did the only quest that was left at the time and hit a roadblock. I got so fucking mad at the game, I was so close to getting a rare blade and I was like "FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

Turns out I didn't need to keep building Argentum, just had to go buy my riceball xD

Blade Arts are a Blade's passive skills(ex. critical up, draw aggro, debuff cancel and such) which Blades use automatically during a fight to support their Driver, the higher the trust you have with a Blade, the more support you get from it.

Blade Combos happens when you use more than one Blade Specials (the A button), for example, "Heat" then another Driver/you uses a water element that causes "Steam Bomb" then adding a third element for example another Fire element causes "Steam Explosion" bear in mind that a third Combo will create an Elemental Orb floating around the enemy and the element will depend on the last element used which in this case a Fire elemental Orb will float around AND will make the enemy more resistant to Fire elements as well, the only way to remove these orbs is by Chain Attack(the + button). I do hope you understand what I just wrote as English is not my language.

An advice during Blade Combos, when you do a blade special, a bar just to the upper right of the enemy name will appear and will have a limit, when it slowly goes down, try to do lots of cancellations so you can build up your blade special faster and when the bar almost depletes, do another blade special that can coexist with the elemental you first used, like my example above, Fire(Heat) then Water(Steam Bomb) then Fire(Steam Explosion), this will allow you to do a third combo almost all the time, try to spawn 5 orbs when facing a very strong boss or world boss and use the Chain Attack, then your damage is gonna be sweet, you can do a million, highest I've done is 750k by spawning 3 orbs with lots of misses in the QTE.

The hardest (but should have been winnable) fight I have had in the game is unique monster in Lefteria, Confiscator Something or another, it is the griffin, dragon lion thing that is also a driver. It took two hours of repeatedly trying to kill that bastard for me to get him, I would always be able to bring him down to less then half or quarter health before he went on nullifying heals and slaughter my team one by one, or the fight would bring in some of the local monster who would aide in hacking my team to death.

Actually scratch that, I just remembered there is a unique monster version of the spike things on one of the other islands in the area and I still haven't killed that fool, that enemy type is as annoying to deal with and the area is loaded with monsters that jump in at the slightest provocation.

Finally got my first skell in XCX. 2 coming out got me to finally start that game up. It took about 38 hours to get the skell.

WHAT? I'm the one creating the floating orbs. Did not realize that.

Question about floating orbs. Say a fire orb is floating around an enemy and I enter Combo to break it. What's the best way to break it? Do I use fire attacks to break it? Any attack? What the enemy is weak to if he is? Is there an element triangle system like use Water attacks to break the fire orb the fastest?

And you say its better to build up orbs on an enemy so that when you do break them all it does massive damage huh? I guess high risk, high reward. Question in regard to multiple orbs though. Is there a way to target one or is it random. When I was doing a combo against an enemy that had 2 of them, I didn't manage to break either, cause the attacks sometimes hit one and sometimes the other.

With the possibility of X being ported to Switch this thread is now open to the whole Xenoblade series for discussion with the title reflecting that, so feel free to discuss X and the original as well if you want.

Yea I mean chain attack. Pushing plus.

I always get the naming of things screwed up. Whether its a drive combo, blade combo, chain attack, ect. Whenever looking at affinity charts I'm always like "hmm I need to do which one again now 4 times"

Im in chapter 8 now..lol but now Im grinding to get my field skills better on my blades..I completely ignored it until I got stuck at this certain point. I will probably start doing tons of the sidequest now also