Back to Xenoblade this week, and I actually made a pretty serious amount of progress. It helps that despite having to wear a cast for a few more weeks, the Wii U Gamepad fits pretty comfortably in my hands, making Xenoblade one of the few games that I’ve been playing. So, as always, let’s go over some numbers. My current play time is 66 and a half hours, my main character is level 51, and I’ve completed chapter 11 of the story. That means I played about six hours, got ten levels, and finished two story missions.

I suppose I should talk about how I got so many levels. I don’t know if this is a really well known leveling spot or if a friend of mine just figured something out, but the far Eastern point in Oblivia is amazing for levels. There’s a level 55 skell that hangs out right by the fast travel point, and if you’re properly equipped, you can take them down pretty effortlessly even when you’re ten levels too low. For a while I was getting a level up every fight I got into. I stuck with it til I hit level 50.

The first major thing I got done this week was finally finish chapter 1o. I’ve been stuck on this mission since week 11, so I was pretty excited. If you remember from back then, the two bad guys that we had fought in New LA had taken a massive ship without permission from the Ganglion and were headed to the city. We attempt to stop them, but I keep losing.Well, this week, I get the ship down to half health and am treated to a cutscene where the ship turns into a giant robot.

I had no real problems with this fight, other than occasionally losing track of the boss due to weather effects. It was a cool looking boss though. The robot was destroyed and the two aliens were seemingly killed. So, great, finally got that done.

Before I could get started on chapter 11, I had to do two affinity missions, both of which involved the party member Gwin. Despite the fact that Gwin has been available to use since the beginning of the game, I’ve literally never used him. So, before I could do either mission, I had to grind some affinity. After a while of random side quests, I was good to go.

The first affinity mission I did had us talking to another Blade, named Mathias. Apparently, he’s doing research on a cat to see how Earth biology adapts to Mira. This is a big deal since we’re currently robots, so we don’t know how our bodies will react when we get them back. Unfortunately, the cat has gone missing, so now we have to find it.This means walking around the city until we overhear some information. Apparently the cat was spotted outside the city!

We go to the last known location of the cat, but scare it off. So, next, we decide to set up a trap for it. Thankfully, I already had the food we needed to use as bait, so I was able to skip the gathering portion of the mission. The cat shows up, along with a giant crab. The cat tries to fight it, but Mathias jumps in and stops him. Gwin yells at Mathias for endangering himself, and then we easily kill the crab.

The second affinity mission dealt with training Gwin. Seems like a weird thing to be doing sixty hours in, but whatever. We meet up with Gwin in the test hanger, offer to spar with him, and promptly kick the crap out of him. Gwin whines about how much he sucks, but Lin suggests that it has more to do with weapons training. We purchase him a new assault rifle, get ordered by Elma to kill some monsters with it, then head back to the test hanger. We then beat up Gwin again, but this time he;s happy about it? I don’t know, I don’t care about Gwin.

And finally, I played through chapter 11. Some important data has been stolen, and we rush over to see what’s happening. Turns out Lao really is the mole, even though that was the obvious choice. He has the data stored in his robot body, so we can’t really shoot him right there. He jumps in a skell and leaves for the Ganglion base in Cauldros.

Obviously, we chase after him. This leads to an extended indoor sequence where I can’t use my skells. This is actually kind of cool, as the game has been basically all skell combat after I unlocked them. After fighting through a bunch of Ganglion, including one tyrant that quickly killed me so I just ran past the second time, I find a key that unlocks a large door. This lets me bring my skells inside and head off to find Lao.

Lao is waiting for us in his skell. He reveals that he turned on humanity because the selection process for getting aboard the White Whale favored the elite, resulting in his wife and daughter being left to die on Earth. We fight and defeat Lao, and Elma is ready to kill him. Lin and my character stop her and tell him it’s not too late to come back to New LA. Yes, the selection process was unfair, but that doesn’t mean you should turn your back on your entire species. Lao gives Lin the data and we head back home.

And that’s my week with Xenoblade Chronicles X! I only have one story mission left, so the end of this series may be coming up pretty soon. But don’t worry, I already have the next game to do a “check-in” series with figured out.