Re: Kiir's Gaming Topic (Reply #1 on: April 10, 2016, 05:00:36 pm)

THE GRIND TO 100% STARTS HERE

So, if there are still people here that don't know: the original Xenoblade Chronicles is my favourite game of all time. I've played it about seven times via the New Game + feature and last year, I made it a goal to 100% the game before X came out. Unfortunately, I started slacking, and I didn't reach that goal, and I haven't touched the game since I got Xenoblade Chronicles X. When I get back to it, I'll talk about my 100% grind in relation to that game in extensive detail. But for now, I'm gonna stick to talking about X.

I have my opinions about the game itself (6 or 7/10 rating - would be a lot lower if I didn't enjoy the side content and exploration so much), but I'm not going to talk about that unless asked. These posts are about the hell of 100%ing this game. I know reading about monotonous grinding is probably boring, so I've decided to include an in-game picture of my adventures on Mira every time I post about this game so you can just check that out and then get the heck out of the topic to avoid the boring stuff if you so desire. Because this game has a lot of cool areas, and I like taking pictures of them all.

Here's my avatar character and my beloved Ares 90 (the strongest "out-of-the-box" Skell in the game, for the unaware - can one-shot pretty much anything that isn't a superboss), affectionately named "coolcatbad" (past Skell names include "HELLO", "YEHA!", and many others). I'm working on another Skell behind the scenes that'll let me one-shot even superbosses (which will be necessary if I don't want to go insane while trying to kill them for achievements), but you won't be seeing that for a long time. I'll take pictures of the more interesting places in the future, I promise. You may even get to see some of my favourite party members tag along! Exciting!!!

Anyways, now onto the serious and unfun part. Back when the game first came out and before I had a chance to play it (I waited until Christmas to get it and it was nightmareish), I was reading what other people had to say about the game to figure out if it was worth 100%ing or not. My initial conclusion was actually a big "NO", especially after hearing there were approximately 20 party members and they didn't gain EXP outside your party. But upon actually playing the game for myself, I realized that, despite all the grinding you have to do in X, it's actually a lot easier to 100% than the original game.

I wish I could say "truly 100%" but since there's no New Game + feature in X and I really don't want to start over to get all the stuff I missed, I'm just going to be getting as close as I can get. So that just means I don't have the "good" ending for every mission (I HAVE SO MUCH BLOOD ON MY HANDS) and a certain character that permanently becomes unavailable doesn't have max affinity on the affinity chart. And I missed their heart-to-hearts. Finally, the enemy index will forever be incomplete because there's actually a missable enemy that appears in the very easy final boss fight. But thankfully, it doesn't show up in the index at all since I never killed it, so I can pretend it doesn't exist.

So, what does this leave for 100% status? (My definition of it, mind you:)

• All story, affinity, normal, and basic missions completed
• All characters at max level & affinity
• All characters have their arts & skills maxed
• 100% Survey
• blah blah blah probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting but who cares I'm done it anyways
• All 749 achievements achieved

This all probably sounds like awful, but basic grinding is pathetically easy in the post-game. There are a couple Tyrants for the survey that are a nightmare to beat (most notably the strongest enemy in the game) but otherwise 100% survey is pretty painless. The basic missions where you have to collect a bunch of a really rare collectible sucked but they get done eventually if you just keep at it. I used a lot of guides to help me along as well, so that definitely helped. All I have left to do is: max out the rest of the avatar's arts/skills and get the rest of the achievements.

A lot of the achievements I have left are dumb things like "do 200 online missions" or "scout people 100 times" or "fall into a pit 100 times". There are also a lot of achievements that require you to beat a certain enemy type X amount of times (three for each enemy type - one at 10, one at 30, and one at 100). These are the bulk of what I have to do (there are probably about 100 of them honestly), and thankfully, with my trusty Ares 90, it's not hard to achieve most of these. I haven't focused on it since killing enemies pops up in Squad Tasks and stuff so y'know, I'll get there eventually. The ones that are going to be hard are "kill 10/30/100 Yggralith" and "kill 10/30/100 Telethia", since there are only one of each enemy in the game and they're both superbosses. I can't consistently kill them either, and this is where the OP one-shot Skell I mentioned earlier will come in. Eventually.

Another achievement I have to get is "get all the Holofigures", and there's like 453 of them. You get most of them from missions but the rest are from Tyrants. There's at least one for every enemy type (yes, including Telethia and Yggralith - and a couple other superbosses!), some of which I'm going to have to build a better ground build for so that'll be fun. This achievement is pretty much the reason I'm running around Mira solo, since most of my potential party members are wearing Treasure Sensor gear, which increases odds of rare drops but for some reason makes it so Holofigures NEVER drop. Too lazy to take the armour off them, and the party members in this game are useless anyways lol. Nothing of value is lost.

And lastly, if you thought those achievements were bad, this one is the absolute worst to get: With everything else, you can just grind a bunch and then roll over everything and bam, you'll get the achievement eventually. This achievement? None of that matters. It's purely based on timing. There are these missions where you and every other Xenoblade X player in the world contribute to slaying what's known as a "Global Nemesis". They have two health bars of sorts - a traditional one, and one called "RP" that depletes when you empty the normal one (it has other functions, but I'm treating it as a health bar for the sake of explanation). Each time the Global Nemesis shows up, it starts with several million RP, and players have a limited time (usually a week or less) to slay the beast. Average players alone can probably do 20-400 RP per run depending on their build (I can do about 100) but I've heard of squads getting up to 20k. Anyways, the achievement is to be the one to deal the finishing blow.

*cue sad trombone*

It's not AS BAD as it sounds, since several people can actually get the achievement at once, but the window is very small. You pretty much need to jump into the mission while the boss has less RP than you can do in one run and pray you make it on time. I remember putting down the game for a few minutes while it was around 20k, then coming back to see it was slain. But anyways, this is pretty much the biggest achievement I need to get and once/if I get it, the rest won't be too bad. It's literally just grinding in various different ways.

TO END THIS POST, HERE'S A SUMMARY OF ACHIEVEMENTS I NEED!:

• Do 200 online missions
• Contribute to 1000 Squad Tasks
• Scout other BLADEs 100 times
• Played online with other players 100 times
• Obtain all 453 holofigures
• Fall into pits 100(?) times
• Buy 30 Skells
• Add 777 augment slots to gear
• Deliver the final blow to a Global Nemesis
• Revived party members 100 times

...and then kill every enemy type 100 times.

I'M IN THIS FOR THE LONG HAUL AND I CANNOT BE STOPPED!

This post ended up being longer than I thought it'd be so here's another picture to make up for it:

Future Xenoblade Chronicles X posts will not be this long, and will likely be small progress updates. I just wanted to make sure everyone understands what I'm going through and no one tries to accomplish all this themselves. It's NOT WORTH IT. ...Much like the main game! *LAUGH TRACK*