I think that, for the next few months at least, that I am set for video games.
And by that, I mean that I have been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and that it’s going to take me a good long while to get my fill of it.
Over the weekend I squeezed in a whopping 20 hours of play. It’s essentially the only thing I did on Sunday (and the only thing I will be doing for many a Sunday to come). During that time, I did a lot of exploring, a lot of collecting, and a lot of dying, but weirdly enough I didn’t actually “accomplish” all that much.
I played through the story up until the end of chapter 3, at which point I said “that’s enough of that; I’mma go muck around on my own now.” And muck about I did. Here are a few highlights and notes from my first weekend on Mira:
- Five minutes into the game, I met a large dinosaur with a leech face and elastic legs. It killed me over and over again. So I levelled up by slaughtering a family of massive boars and still got killed by the elasti-saurus a few more times.
- Near the start of the game, there is a wrecked robot on a small plateau across a wide gap, many feet above the ocean below. I took a running leap and just barely made it across. I felt like a superhero. And then my level was too low to examine the wreckage.
- There are no invisible walls anywhere. I spent a good twenty minutes climbing the crystals and mountains surrounding New LA just to see if I could.
- There is a force field around the edges of the map though. It’s a solid fifteen-minute swim to hit said barrier. I learned the hard way so that you don’t have to.
- I found a small, completely unmarked island populated by super-powered crabs out in the middle of the ocean. So maybe it’s worth swimming around in the empty space for a while.
- Some dork asked me to find his lost cell phone. Somehow it had ended up on a hill populated by vicious four-armed apes. He did not pay me enough for retrieving it.
- My party was being chased and killed one-by-one by a way-too-strong Grex. I tried to escape by jumping into a lake and swimming away, but it just followed me in and killed me just as I reached the shore. I should have known, as Grexes look like a cross between a wolf and a shark..
- I climbed up to the highest peaks that I could manage, and jumped off. No matter how high up you jump from, there is no fall damage.
- Jumping off a cliff is a great way to escape a pursuing monster. I have been saved many times by leaping to what would be my doom in any other game. Except for that one time that I accidentally jumped into a pack of even stronger monsters.
- One time I was slaughtering a pack of sheep when a titanic spider-thing strolled in and then smooshed my party because a stray laser dinged one of its legs.
- There is a gigantic waterfall In Primordia. It is exceptionally beautiful, but also disappointing because there are no hidden caves behind the falls (there is one that goes in the side, but it’s not the same).
- I could not figure out for the life of me how the online multiplayer is supposed to work. Which is a pain, because I was actually really looking forward to the multiplayer component.