Also thinking about getting the skell before that.

Definitely do it, the game changes a lot (in good ways) after you get it.

About that 16 hour long trip, how long does your battery last? I am noticing mine only lasts about an hour or so when playing XCX (with usb dongle of headphones attached)

Not a lot, probably 2h or so using a bluetooth headset (no dongle), but I carry a powerbank which gives me a couple extra charges and this particular plane also had power outlets which made it easier.

Playing Xenoblade X!

I was quite overleveled from exploring and doing side-quests so I decided to rush through some story missions during the long 16h trip home. Finished Chapter 12 which was was the ending of the original WiiU version.

So I’m quite curious to see where the extra story content goes.

Hard to call it a “loophole” when it was listed on Nintendo’s own website less than two weeks ago.

You can check it by making these choices:

Click “How to share games with other users”, then “Digital games”, then “Multiple users”, and finally “How to play the same digital game at the same time”.

I only own a single Switch so I never used this, but considering they listed this officially before I’d say the compaints about downgrade are 100% reasonable.

I haven’t done the update yet, but supposedly there’s an option to stay with the old system if you prefer that.

System Settings -> User Settings -> Online License Settings -> Use Online License

By default AFAIK.

If you have it on Airplane mode and put it in the dock it also re-enables bluetooth while keeping wifi off.

That guide looks interesting, but apparently you need a skell for those.

There are some leveling up tricks before you get a Skell, but the main guide requires one (and there’s an even better version if you have a flying skell, which is the one I used). I highly recommend subscribing to Enel’s channel since he has excellent in-depth Xenoblade videos, including combat guides, farming guides, best skills and setups for all weapons and so on.

Need more of those. Have tons of mining probes though

Research probes feel limited even later in the game. Mining ones are aplenty though, even higher level ones so you can build some crazy combos.

Am I playing it wrong? Should I explore more? I try to explore but there are high level monsters everywhere and then I die, and think maybe I am not supposed to go there yet. Going to explore Noctilum now, so that I can start Chapter 6.

Scary monsters are everywhere, just be careful to not draw their attention. It’s kinda annoying when you bump into ones that are very aggressive and keep chasing you forever, but that’s one of the things that get a lot easier once you have a Skell since you can outrun them on vehicle mode.

Playing Xenoblade X!

Somehow still on Chapter 9. 😆

Playtime was limited due to the work trip I’m on right now, but I managed to get some good progress before flying away from home. I tried the last method in Enel’s guide for leveling up classes which was ridiculously effective, I got all characters (including the main one) to max class level in less than 2h while also going up something like 10 levels.

Money is a bit tight right now because I bought a Level 50 Skell and those are very pricy, ended up spending some time optimizing FrontierNav setup. Other than that I did a lot of side-quests, but need to find some time to sit down and start moving with the Affinity and Story quests.

That’s including “explorable” water/cloud sea portions for all games, but even if you cut down to just the landmass the XCX map is still around 100 square kilometers… and that’s not counting the parts of the map that have several “layers” like mountains, caves and floating islands.

Found a video of someone who did their best measuring the worlds of the Xenoblade series. They meme a bit about XC2 being the biggest if you include the Cloud Sea, but put the real measurements at the end.

Their results, in square kilometers:

• XC1 28.83
• XC2 21.10
• XC3 40.62
• XCX 355.78

The opposite, it probably still the biggest map in the series.

Transversal is relatively fast because you character is quite speedy even before Skells, but the overall area is massive.

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Repair something, Lin’s affinity quest.

Got lucky since I already had the necessary items for that mission, but a friend of mine also complained about being stuck on that one for a while. Not being able to cancel Affinity/Story missions is one of the few annoyances from left the original that I wish had been fixed on the DE.

I am still not sure which probes to place where, currently I am going with the stats of FN, if production is high, I go with mineral, and if revenue is high, go with research, but pretty much every FN in primodia has lower revenue stat than production one.

I focused on building combos when installing my probes and it worked well so far.

So keep investing so that I don’t hit the limit (which I have increased twice by using Storage probes. Any suggestions?

That’s a few quests that request Miranium, but other than that I did the same and just kept feeding any I had left spare into the AMs. You get an extra use for it once you unlock mechs since they use if for fuel, but even then there should be plenty.

And can I sell all the low level stuff I have?

Probably? I haven’t seen any use for low-lever gear myself and I’m much farther into the game. The only reason I haven’t sold mine is because I didn’t need to since I have a dumb amount of money piled up from FrontiverNav income.

Playing Xenoblade X!

Finished Chapter 9!

A few days ago I decided to rush to get the Flying Module, and it worked mostly fine, with only the Chapter 9 boss being a roadblock - that one took me a few tries and even made me use some of the healing items I had stashed for the first time. Then I decided to satisfy my OCD and went flying around the world installing every single FrontierNav probe, so I now have the world fully mapped! 🎉

Currently doing a bunch of Affinity Quests that I had pending, will probably balance between these and trying to do at least one Story mission per day. I’d love to use the Easter holiday to finish this game so I can play something else during my trip abroad next week, but not sure if I’ll be able to do it.

I am looking for a new board game to play with family. We have Catan, Dominion, Carcassone etc, looking to add something new. Any suggestions?

I love Pandemic (may be a bit hard to play depending on how old your kids are) and Ticket to Ride. There’s also versions of the latter with smaller maps if you want faster games.

Exploding Kittens tends to be a big hit with kids in my experience, and it’s a also decent game for more casual adult players.

Will probably get Guns of Fury which is a Metal Slug-inspired Metroidvania, I have a couple long (12h+) flights coming next two weeks and I’d like to have a platformer as a side-game. Blasphemous is another option on a deep discount, but given people compare it to Hollow Knight in difficulty it’s probably better to leave it for when I’m more relaxed at home. 😅

Also tempted to pick up The Silver Case 2425, it’s a pack of two VNs from Suda 51 that I heard good things about.

Yep, it’s just like the Xbox 360 compatibility program.

While I do agree that anyone with a big collection should hold on to their Switch 1 until we get more updates and real-life testing, I don’t think this is a fair comparison - even now this looks massively better than anything MS did for backwards compatibility.

There are 462 games made backward compatible out of 989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_compatible_with_Xbox_360

There are 632 games that have been made backward compatible out of 2,155

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_games_for_Xbox_One_and_Series_X/S

This comparison with 0079 is really cool. https://bsky.app/profile/yuyucow.bsky.social/post/3lmv6zp2gc226

Though I suspect anyone new to Gundam will be feeling rather confused after this episode.

Also Cyberpunk.

The first half of this episode was amazing.

Ooh, nice, looks like they skipped ahead to get the second part of the plot started.

This is a great choice as that part of the story is IMO far more interesting, and I think they’re going do both in parallel which will provide an good balance.

How much does the game change with Skells?

A lot. It’s a drastic improvement in exploration speed and ease .

• Faster movement speed, which also means you can escape easily from those annoying high-level enemies that chase you.
• Huge jumps that let you climb mountains quickly. And this game has a lot of verticality.
• Larger enemies go down more quickly since some Skell weapons do a ton of damage.
• Visiblity is better since you have a larger POV.

I was having a good time before, but the game certainly became a lot more fun after I got them.

Should I try to hurry to the point where I get skell, or just enjoy the exploration and quests until I naturally reach that point?

I don’t think you can rush too much since there’s exploration requirements in some of the story missions, and one of the “tests” to get the skell requires you to have a good amount of FrontierNav spots (you need to get it up to 15k credits per return).

But if you’re close to Chapter 6 I’d say yes, rush a bit and get your mech now, it’s worth it.