Xenoblade Chronicles

[Vyk]

I just spent the last two days polishing up all the sidequests I skipped on my way past the refugees and on to Colony 6. Just about ready to head there finally, and probably spent a good 14 hours doing just side quests, which is a complete rarity for me. I hate that World of Warcraft crap. But yeah, like Wolf says, the characters are not annoying or tedious, they're endearing. Kinda saddened that I skipped them until now, but no matter how you do it, they tend to work. Granted its kind of a waste doing Colony 9 quests when I'm almost level 30 lol But still, its really nice that both main-plot elements and mildly amusing side-quest plots are all entertaining to some degree. And the exploration is indeed quite fun and rewarding. Managed to meander my way into some very interesting secret areas on the Bionis Leg. And I kinda like that there's always LV 70+ monsters just chilling around in random areas, so you don't always feel like an invincible badass. And not to spoil anything but I'm really glad that the main character isn't the only one who gets hints of romantic sprinkles scattered about in the story and character interactions. Gives you a good reason to change which character you control for a slightly different pace in battle and a change of avatar-scenery running around making townsfolk love you

Edit: And I gotta say, I'm really glad its not an action'y battle-system set-up. It feels like an extremely refined version of the original Dragon Age's battle system. Mass Effect is kind of that way too, just with guns. The action is in real time, but you're not just mashing a button. You pick a target and pick your attack, and try to remain strategic about it. Only slight draw-back is that as long as you do a few quests and kill a few monsters, you're going to be at least equal level with the monsters, and at that point even a little strategic knowledge is going to put you in the advantage. If you're doing the better part of everything presented to you, you're quickly going to over-power the monsters. Unique monsters don't even bother me anymore. Bosses barely challenge me. The only times I've scraped for my life recently is when I accidentally had a whole room aggro'd at me who were all equal level which was before I started doing all these side-quests. Hopefully the monsters catch up in Colony 6