Much like last week, I simply haven’t had much time to play Xenoblade this week. I had a lot of extra things to deal with at my full-time job, plus Star Fox Zero released and I’m working on a review of it. But I did still manage to play a little bit, so let’s take a look at some numbers. My current play time is 30 hours and forty minutes, my main character is level 26, and I’ve completed chapter 7 of the story.

The main thing I accomplished this week was getting through chapter 7. Before I could do the mission, I had two prerequisites to take care of. First, I had to complete an affinity mission called “Close Comrades”, and then I needed to survey 20% of Oblivia, the Eastern-most continent. Close Comrades is a pretty straight forward mission where you run to a couple of flowers, scan them, and then fight a boss. Story-wise, Lao has ditched his duties, so now you are picking up the slack. That’s about it.

Throughout my time with the game, I’ve had a lot of issues with not being able to figure out how to get where I need to go, often running around in circles until I happen to stumble onto a small path that takes me where I need to go. I ran into this again while trying to survey Oblivia. But, after about an hour or so running around, I was able to find enough FrontierNav spots to complete 20%.

In chapter 7, Irina’s team has located a piece of the Lifehold, but has been attacked by the Ganglion. It’s up to your team to fight off the bad guys so that Irina can get to the Lifehold. The first fight is against two giant robots, which I didn’t have any trouble with. But after you defeat them, three more show up. These were a giant headache and they killed me a few times. After finally beating them, Elma comments that this must just be a diversion, because it was far too easy. Oh, yeah? Too easy? If that’s the case how hard is the actual fight going to be?

Turns out, not very. You catch up with Irina who’s investigating the Lifehold piece. Then suddenly, the female Ganglion who we met a few weeks ago shows up and destroys the piece. This leads to a boss fight with a really cool looking giant robot, but one that I destroyed without much effort. Afterwards, you return to New Los Angeles and Lin makes a meal.

So yeah, I’m still really enjoying the game, life’s just been getting in the way of playing it a whole lot lately. Hopefully next week I’ll have a lot more time. That is, if that Star Fox review doesn’t get in the way.