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have spent nearly the whole day in Xenoblade Chronicles X and I'm having a great time. I can't believe how great it looks and runs on my OLED in handheld mode. slowly starting to get to grips with the various systems, of which there are a lot (it's pretty overwhelming)

still in chapter 3 so early days

the one downer is the inventory/gear system. you pick up *so* much stuff, and managing your party members gear/upgrades/skills is a pain in the arse as it's so fiddly

I have no idea what all the numbers mean when I look at a piece of gear. I realised after about 5 hours that one of my party members was still wearing her starter gear with zero defense because I hadn't equipped all the new stuff I kept picking up

one lightbulb moment I had which changed everything for me with the battle system was with the Soul Voices. Your allies say things like "move in and hit them with a melee attack" and if you use a melee skill within the time period everyone gets a bonus and some health/TP back, right?

I was confused about what triggered the PRESS B prompts to pop up, and I suddenly realised that it's YOU offering the same challenges to your allies, and if you look in the Soul Voices section of the menu you can see the actions that trigger this to appear, and even customise four of them

so I went from the QTEs popping up seemingly at random, to knowing how to trigger them, which meant I was ready and can hit them nearly all the time

I set one to "use a ranged attack from higher ground" so in battle I always try to position myself so I'm above the enemy when I use a ranged art so the QTE will pop up

Also, I'm playing the Mastermind class now which focuses on debuffing enemies, so I changed the Soul Voices to give bonuses to debuffs, and also the new guy in my party (can't remember his name) really likes telling me to use them which means more health/TP

this game is a menu-fiddlers dream. it reminds me a bit of SMT in how much customization it offers if you can figure it out. SMT is all about demon fusion and making OP broken demons with ridiculous skill combinations, and this is similar. I bet you can make some busted characters in this

was running round Noctilum in Xenoblade just now and said out loud to myself "HOW have they fucking DONE this!"

remasters of 9 year old open world games running on 8 year old handheld consoles have NO business looking this good. Monolithsoft are actual wizards I swear. the complexity of the world and the amount of creatures, terrain, and graphical effects this game is capable of throwing around simultaneously, with no drops in frame rate is mind blowing

a technical masterclass

hit 60 hours in Xenoblade tonight, in just over a week just finished Chapter 5 and not unlocked the Skell yet. it's a big game

@MirkSerain yeah they are making other Switch developers look a bit silly tbh