Another week, more Xenoblade! And this time, I actually managed to play a significant amount of the game. The majority of my time was spent doing side quests, hoping to save up enough money to buy better gear so that I could finally finish chapter 10. But before we get into all that, let’s start with numbers. My total play time is 58 hours, my main character is currently level 40, and I’m currently halfway through chapter 10. Spoiler warning, I’m about to talk about stuff that happened in those side quests.

One of the side quests I took part in involved a church that was claiming to have a cure for a disease that apparently has been effecting the Ma-non. A scientist Ma-non believed that something fishy was going on and asked us to investigate. We found a Ma-non who was tasked by the church with adding something from a bottle to the water supply to appease God. When we confronted them, they drank the contents from the bottle and died. The scientist’s suspicions were correct, the church was poisoning the Ma-non and then offering them a cure, claiming it to be God who cured them. So, that’s kind of messed up.

Another quest I did started when a friend who was watching me play told me to go down an alley. When I walked in, the body of a Ma-non fell from the rooftops, seemingly a suicide. A Ma-non who is apparently the first Ma-non Blade, asked us to help investigate what happened. This resulted in me going to Army Pizza, where the Ma-non had previously been, and learn that they had an argument with a human who was well known for hating the Ma-non.

After a lot of running around, I found the guy, but he had been attached to a bomb. I attempted to disarm it, but failed. He ran into a near by lake and exploded. The detective returned to Army Pizza to continue to continue the investigation. Now, the rest is kind of a blur, but basically, it turns out that Powell, the guy who runs Army Pizza was behind it the whole time. The amount of complaints that the Ma-non had given his business for late deliveries or not perfectly spaced toppings had apparently driven his wife to suicide, and now he was taking it out on the Ma-non. Unfortunately, the detective had been killed, and I ended up fighting the pizza guy. That’s not something I ever expected to happen. And that was that quest. Lots of Ma-non hate going around. Weird.

While there were a few other quests I did, the last one I’m going to talk about involved a guy named Professor B. This might be the weirdest quest I’ve done in the game. Professor B is a time traveler. He looks like an alien, but apparently that’s just what humans look like thousands of years in the future. The first thing he tasks me with doing is buying him a car. After that, he requires some equipment to turn the car into a time machine. While gathering supplies, I run into a guy who wants to steal Professor B’s tech. We fight, I win, and I return to Professor B.

Now that he has his time machine, he has his Ma-non assistant test it out. After a fairly dramatic cutscene, it ends up not working. So, now I have to get some more stuff. I do that, and now Professor B tries out the machine himself. this time, it’s successful. What a weird video game.

Later, I find Professor B again. Apparently, even though the time machine works, he found himself unable to actually make it back to his time, and now needs even more stuff. We get ambushed by the same guys who want to steal his tech, I beat them again, and all is well. Now I need to gather even more stuff, but I haven’t actually done that yet.

And yeah, that’s more or less my experience this week. There’s a lot of side content that I haven’t done, so I’m going to continue doing it at least until I can get myself strong enough to beat the boss of chapter 10. Hopefully, that’ll be pretty soon.