I started an NG+ file in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 because I had a long plane ride and no self control

doubt I'll finish it because it's like 80+ hours but man I love this game

Kinda wonder how different these games feel in their original language without all the UK accents

it feels like such an important aspect of the series but like, it only exists because of the localization team...

Pyra and Malos's American accents feel genuinely odd and misplaced in the context of all the other voices, which is entirely appropriate and really cool

Nia's original JP voice is just generic anime-girl style instead of her MAGNIFICENT Welsh accent rolling Rs all over the place

still admire the sheer audacity of this game to have merchants that SELL TUTORIALS lmao (and they're expensive!)

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 had a talking hamster that was so monumentally irritating that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 features a *talking hamster with a maid fetish played for comedy* who's practically endearing by comparison

I forgot Pyra removes an earring at one point

this complicates the "are Blades' clothes part of them" question even further

I didn't have a proper capture setup when I originally played this so now I'm mostly just saving screenshots of everyone being cute tbh

somebody on the internet pointed out: XC1 has a stylized but generally realistic art style, and XC2 is anime as hell. The creator god of XC2's world is present in XC1's plot, which suggests that god created a universe of real live anime girls because he is a colossal weeb

NG+ is hilarious; all your character levels carry over. You can manually lower them to a story-appropriate level at inns, but inns are several hours apart, so whenever someone joins the party they're stuck at like level 75 for hours and just one-shot everything

Half the cast of this game is unaware of the fact that 500 years earlier there was a world war that ended with three continents getting nuked into the sea. Like, it's not remotely a secret or anything, but it's still treated like A Big Plot Revelation every time it comes up lol

like, you'd think "oh yeah there used to be three more continents but the magic sword people blew them up" would be the sort of thing most people would know about at like even the most rudimentary level of education

i love her

The fact that that entire gif looks like it's playing at 50% speed (it's not) really is the most Videogame Cutscene thing isn't it

why is everything so slow! why does panning the camera to show an object take 30 seconds! why does everyone speak in paragraph-long monologues!

like I get that doing snappy back-and-forth character dialogue is hard with a limited animation budget but why do game cutscenes not have snappy ANYTHING

yeah sure sounds like a fun time

oh right lol I forgot something like half the boss battles in this game end with a cutscene where the boss you just killed inexplicably wrecks your whole party and then monologues about how pathetic you are

this is just as absurdly overpowered as it sounds

my only regret is they didn't do the thing from XC1 where all your equipment was actually visible on the character models

shulk gets an underpants model but rex only wears a loincloth in flavor text

also 50% is a big buff but because this is a GOOD rpg even the low-level stat boosts are like 15% or more

none of this "upgrade your weapon for a 3% poison proc-rate boost" videogame crap; you get two armor slots and you'll FEEL everything you put in there immediately

NG+ skips all the tutorials but I haven't played this in two years. Whatever build I had set up means Pyra's sword does about 4X the damage of anyone else and I can't figure out why lol

so the only obvious way to tell humanoid Blades apart from humans is they have giant glowing crystals on their chests

Rex ALSO has a giant glowing crystal on his chest, but the first character to ever even notice it just goes "huh, I thought it was an accessory" lmao

how is her voice so good aaaa

obviously all the animation's matched to the Japanese dialogue, so the game's full of the usual Translated-JRPG weird pauses and akwardly timed reactions etc

it's honestly a huge credit to the VAs and localization team that so much of the comedic dialogue still lands really well

game is pretty

random thug NPC got mad at the protagonist and decided to attack my entire crew of eight people lmao

this actually happens a lot and it's hilarious every time

RPGs always feel a bit silly when the villains always casually jump into 3-on-1 fights but this game takes it to hilarious extremes with six or eight characters dogpiling some hapless boss

pitch for this game is so what if pokemon but all the mons are weird horny OCs from like 20 different artist all from different studios, and there's a plot, and like, good dialogue, and you can bring 9 pokemon to a fight and field 3 at once,

and combat is this wild realtime thing where every move charges up bigger moves and you swap pokemon to pull different elements into this colossal tower of damage that you just sort of drop on the okay actually this isn't very much like pokemon is it

lmaoooo I forgot about the disastrously schmaltzy translated jpop song that obliterates every cutscene it plays in

like it's bad music in its own right but it's also COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE in terms of tone lol

mythra owns

haha I forgot this game devotes like 20 minutes of cutscenes to everyone grieving the loss of an irrelevant and largely irritating side character

So: Mythra's design has an extremely short Anime Skirt. Smash Bros included her as a Spirit, but edited the art to give her black tights. Paradoxically, this instantly resulted in JP artist internet going FULL HORNY for Tights Mythra. The devs then PATCHED IT INTO THE ACTUAL GAME

haha I ran across a DLC quest and [probably not canon] Shulk and Fiora showed up and WOW do they look weird in XC2's art style lol

actually shouldn't Pyra recognize the Monado?

...I am reminded that there are seven games in this series and I have played two of them and I am ill-equipped to speculate about Xenolore

OVERWORLD THEME OF THE DECADE

So when the camera passes inside of characters/monsters, the game makes them semitransparent via dithering

These huge tank things are great because they dither the whole screen, which completely breaks motion vectors, which causes TAA to fall apart in exciting ways

you can tell this game is an anime because there's a hot springs episode

since this is NG+ I started paying a modicum of attention to, like, Builds

turns out it's trivially easy to give Mythra a 50% crit rate, and then also heal yourself every time you crit lmao

re: above tweet:
lmaooooooooooooooooooooooo

so, normally every move takes several seconds to recharge (it's sort of a cooldown system but more interesting)

this ability means every move has a 50% crit chance, and if it does crit you can immediately use that move again lol

this isn't even a particularly esoteric build; it seems like the designers more or less intended post-game Mythra to be an infinite crit-based damage tornado

there are superbosses that are 30 levels ABOVE the level cap, and a DLC challenge mode that absolutely wrecks any kind of "normal" party formation, so the game's actually designed to let you completely break most of its systems and still have interesting stuff to fight

obviously this sort of thing isn't particularly uncommon for JRPGs; I just never bother with any of it in other games because it's usually a GIGANTIC pain requiring hundreds of hours of griding

in this case NG+ puts some of it within reach, which is neat

A thing I love about this game: Most of the characters are from completely unrelated artists

so you've got your party full of wideface anime teens, and then Organization XIII shows up out of nowhere because oh hey turns out Tetsuya Nomura is here

instead of directing a specific style the art team basically just commissioned every rad games/anime/manga artist they knew and had them all do their own things stylistically, which absolutely rules

so

this is what this game sounds like now

Double Spinning Edge does two hits that each have a SEPARATE 50% chance to crit and reset the move's cooldown

lmao I forgot there's a section of this game where you walk across a GIANT empty courtyard to talk to a dude, watch 15 minutes of cutscenes, walk back, watch 15 minutes of cutscenes, walk back to the dude, etc etc

this happens something like seven times and takes literal hours

it's a giant loredump but it's all deliberately vague flashbacks and statements of Mysterious Import because we're not far enough in for the plot to start revealing things

one of the villains casually explains to his co-villain what their villainous plot is, unbidden

A+ JRPG

there are a great many Big Reveals that aren't even actually secrets, just things that the protagonist didn't know about because he's too much of a dumbass blank-slate Anime MC to ever just like, ASK any of the characters who would have willingly explained the situation to him

Fellowship of the Ring but when they buy the pony in Bree Sam spends five minutes explaining what horses are and how they can be used to expand your inventory slots or to transport KO'd party members and Frodo's just like "wow, amazing!"

good evening everyone here are some pictures of Nia

*minor spoilers*

absolutely cracking up as one of the Nomura characters reveals his True Form and it turns out it's the most Kingdom Hearts-Ass boss designs ever conceived

there's no way you're taking kairi's heart

tfw

absolutely top tier JRPG airship designs

i love this game

(spoilers I guess for a quest that you're extremely unlikely to find before NG+)

took three 80-hour games but somebody finally dealt with villainous-nopon quest in the most obvious and reasonable fashion

welp I got everyone to level 99 lol

at last I am the Ultimate Gamer

do I want to get all the blades

I have 3 left. Each one has about a 1% probability of dropping from a Legendary Core

I can farm roughly one legendary core per 5 minutes

lol

instead of spending days grinding for blades I decided to just actually finish the game so that I can play other games maybe

this isn't actually correct but lmao

(launch build of the game had a bug where the timer would occasionally keep running while the switch is in sleep mode, so I have no idea what the actual play time is)

kinda forgot that the ending of this game has basically nothing to do with its own actual themes

the story is full of really interesting ideas and then it just sort of... never really does much with them?

like, most of the villains are the misfit-band-of-heroes JRPG party who saved the world last time around. Subsequently they all concluded that actually the Final Boss was right all along and *switched sides*

and like... how cool is that for a JRPG plot??

...except none of their motivations or backstory make any sense unless you play the DLC, which didn't release until a year after the base game lmao

every time you fight one you're just like "who's this dude and why is he getting like a ten-minute cutscene of contextless pathos"

I mean it's still one of my all-time favorite games; the combat and characters are fantastic. The main plot's generic anime bullshit but all the individual character arcs and their relationships with each other are wonderful, which is all you really want from the genre anyway

in conclusion here's nia doing the ear twitch thing