For the third week in a row, I’m going to start off the Xenoblade check in by complaining about how little time I had this week. It turns out, when you work a full time job, help out and your dad’s house, and try to play enough Star Fox Zero to make something resembling a coherent review, you don’t leave yourself a lot of time to play a giant open-world RPG. I actually considered skipping the Check-in this week, but it wouldn’t be Sunday if I wasn’t telling you about my week’s experiences with playing Xenoblade Chronicles X. So, as always, let’s start with numbers. My total play time is 32 hours and ten minutes, my main character is level 26, and I’ve currently completed chapter 7 of the story. So yeah, that’s about an hour and a half of time, no new levels, no story progress. Yeesh.

Right now I’m a little stuck as far as the story is concerned. In order to unlock the eight story mission, I need to be level 30. That means I have a lot of grinding to do. To deal with that, I’ve started running more side missions. As I’ve said in earlier check-ins, these are a lot less exciting than the story missions, but they are still fun. I took one mission that required me to kill two bird-like monsters that were just a little too high level for me. After getting my butt kicked by them a couple times, I decided to hop in my skell and try again. The use of the skell seemed to make all the difference, although all of my party ended up dying anyway. But this was the first real time that I using the skell actually seemed to matter. So, that’s cool.

I also did a side quest that didn’t offer any experience points, so yeah, that was worth it. Basically, a guy needed some materials to make repairs on some skells. He told me to gather forty of a material, but before I could go on my way, a Ma-non walked in and claimed that he had a much more efficient way to take care of the issue. The game actually gave me a choice of which material to go collect, but the decision was pretty easy since I already had the one that the Ma-non needed, so I just gave it to him.

The human was pretty impressed with the Ma-non’s efficiency and asked if he’d be willing to share their technology. The Ma-non wasn’t interested, however and returned to his ship. So, now it’s up to my team to try to convince him to share his stuff. The Ma-non isn’t interested in human technology or money, but I was able to convince him in exchange for human delicacies. After trading him a pizza, he was more than willing to share. So that’s neat, but I need experience points right now, so I can’t help but think that was kind of a waste of time.

Finally, a side quest I did brought me to an affinity mission. A team of blades has gone missing, and a new character named Boze wants you to help him rescue them. Boze’s kind of intense, and he seems kind of obsessed with Eastern cultures, making his students call him “sensei”. After a short conversation introducing the character, we head to find his missing blades.

Along the way, we stumble into an injured Ma-non. Boze comes off as kind of a racist, claiming that we don’t have time to help him and humans don’t have any xeno friends. However, I interject that we should help him. Also, turns out that I had exactly what he needed, so I just hand the Ma-non the stuff and we go on our way.

After a while of walking, we come across Reggie, the lone survivor of the blades we were trying to rescue. After talking to him a bit, we get attacked by a ton of monsters. Thankfully, I’m way to high of a level for this encounter, so even though there’s enemies covering the screen, I’m never in any real danger. I quickly deal with the monsters and then it’s back to talking to Reggie. He seems very upset that he ran away and want to quit the Blades. After a, uh, inspiring speech from Boze, he changes his mind and returns to New LA.

And that’s what I did this week! I’m really hoping to get more play time in this coming week, but we’ll see. I still want to take a look at Star Fox Guard and give some thoughts, but probably not a full review. And there’s always other things that come up. But I still want to keep playing Xenoblade Chronicles X and hope to get much more time in soon.