Does the job. I've been watching some of your newer vids (just finished up my XB1DE run, so bought XB2 and waiting for it to install) and am still pretty satisfied with content & quality here. Also appreciate that you avoid spoilers or at least warn for them usually. Looking forward to getting far enough into XB2 to check out some of your vids on specific blades.
My left joycon stopped drifting for no reason at all now my right one is drifting which makes open world exploration hard when the direction I’m moving changes with the camera angle and i have to fight it to use fast travel as well
The most rewarding thing is when you’re setting a driver + stage 3 blade combo and you get it at the exact moment the music drops harder than pianos in 80’s cartoons
I played a whole 100 hours of the game and finished the story without understanding driver and blade combos. The tutorials are very bad, even though I admit I can be a bit dense.
I went through the entire game and not only did I never find fusion combos (like I wasn’t even aware they existed), I also never realized that to do level 4 specials you had to be at max affinity and close to the blade for a while, I just thought level 4 specials happened when the game felt like it. The tutorials suck ass
I see people saying “those who say the game is slow didn’t go past the intro” comments. And it’s true, but it’s the game fault for taking ages to explain the system... and it’s not even clear. I mean bot everybody wants to look for videos on RU-vid to understand the game. It’s a shame because it’s all really good once you really understand it. Nice video tho 👌🏾
but since theres a decent amount of depth to the combat showing it all at once would be completely overwhelming, although i agree it should be better at explaining things in general
@@heidilebredo6901 And i understand that. My problem is that its really hard to fully understand the *core* mechanics of the game without tuning out of it and looking for information elsewhere (videos/forums). It kinda break the experience imo.
@@thefakeollie3417 In the English dub, all of the characters have different British accents depending on which titan and kingdom they're from. Mor Ardain is Scottish, Gormot is Welsh, Uraya is Australian, and Tantal and Lefteria are both English, just by Southern and Northern pronounceation respectively.
So, in essence, always make sure to break before doing a blade combo, break/launch/topple/smash as much as possible, vary your combos to get several orbs, break again, and then do a devastating chain attack that you choose which attacks you do intentionally to break as many orbs as possible. Got it...I think
Yep, this is what i am gathering. Plus art recharge specials and damage accessories and aux cores. I also seem to basically always have party gage so i have been using it to avoid nasty enemy attacks even when i have no orbs set. I have watched this guide like 5 times now. Every time i get better at combat. Before i used to think you had to full burst every enemy. Now they all die to a few fusion combos :p
I'm in for about 2 or 3 years and still have 0 clue as to what I am doing, the main things I get are driver and blade combos other than that I'm pretty hopeless
@@notreal5826 Main thing is you're having fun and beating enemies. I've put in about 300 hours into the game and have comfortably beaten all endgame bosses, but I'm fairly certain my party setups are still not the most optimal lmao.
I played for about two months and was only at the base level of Xenoblade 2 combat. Then I got torna and I started hitting arts every second and chaining them together and finishing with a special. It was torna that basically cleared everything up for me.
17:56 Even after watching the full video & being able to execute most of the combat I'm still in utter awe at how you were able to take him down so fast.
not gonna lie, im too much of a brainlet for your other guides to help me haha, its too much to think about at one time. i still liked this games combat even if i didn't fully understand it. this video helps immensely so thank you!
People who say the combat is slow in Xenoblade 2 obviously didn't play very far. This game has the best combat I've ever played and it's going to be very hard to top it.
One month ago, i bought xenoblade chronicles 2. Two hours in I searched on google "does the combat get better xenoblade chronicles 2" look at my pfp now
I’ve just watched the tutorial and I still don’t get it. I think someone needs to do a tutorial showing specific parts on screen and buttons they press, because a lot of the names are hella confusing.
I couldn’t agree more Im hella lost on this stuff even after watching this. Feels like i’m hearing a bunch of names and they all sound the same. I understand up to “blade specials” but i don’t understand anything past the skill tree
Alright so... I have to auto attack, use my arts, use my level 4 super punch, cancel my arts, chain attack, fuse my combos, open kingdom hearts, travel through the mushroom kingdom, save Zelda, use a water type move with squirtle to get a same type attack bonus, then I use an all out attack with wonder guard as my ability, sacrifice my monsters to summon my blue eyes white dragon in attack mode with exp share as my held item so my personas get more experience, and have my power bounce badge equipped so I can do a total of 2,780,736,375 damage to the enemy, right?
I'm not the most experienced player of this game (I'm 60 hours in) But one thing that reaaaally peeves me about this game is... it doesn't feel interactive. I can see that there is a lot that you can do in this battle system, and pulling off combos is very satisfying. But I feel like a lot of the time against bosses (at least at this point in the game) they do a really powerful AOE attack with little warning, and it wipes out my team. Also, you can't pick up your friends after they have been toppled which just makes me feel powerless when it comes to defense. At least you can equip break/topple resist, but that's still not the most reliable thing. I guess I just need to get good, but I just liked XC1's visions and how they were telegraphed (except for that AOE vision bug) I'll admit, I may be a bit "elitist." I can apprecciate Monolith going for something different though, and I'm glad people have enjoyed it. It's just been a difficult transition Sidenote: I think a big part of why people are calling it slow is that the pace you are taught things and given new options is pretty slow at the start. You're stuck with Poppi a for quite a while being tora's only blade, it took the game 30 hours to give Rex his topple art, when in XC1 you're taught it in the first 5 minutes. Excuse the wall of text. I'm not meaning to hate on XC2. These are just things that peeve me so far.
first game is shulk doing backslash 1X1000000 times. while I enjoyed the characters and adore fiora and think xb1's story was..... a bit more enjoyable xb2's freaking good... the combat is insanely good and just gets better as u level up/grow the blades
I love this game, but I am absolutely guilty of not using pouch items enough! Rectified that immediately starting up my Torna playthrough this week. I immediately saw the art recharge dessert recipe and was like "OOOOH right this exists".
Same but thank to cuggaaconroy making a lp of this game has help me out like how special\arts recharge and max up harder items are the best you can get and to stay stocked up on narcpear jelly.
@@babyjiren9676 Not particularly. It's a fault of the game that it takes several hours for combat to be interesting. The game would be objectively better if the opening hours were more interesting combat wise.
It doesn’t take hours. If you had the attention span of anything other than a three year old it wouldn’t be a problem for you. Also, I didn’t personally think the combat was slow, not even at the start. Then again, I’m used to Xenoblade. In my experience the people complaining are people too dumb to figure out the combat system. I was experimenting with augments and combos within the first hours.
@@babyjiren9676 Ah yes, I forgot. Your elite gamer brain and heightened jrpg gamer awareness and ability to sit through cringy anime dialogue with repetitive combat is superior. I concede. Thank you for your wisdom, Baby Jiren. Get a fucking life lmao. Online gamers are so pathetic. Biggest complaint about the game overall is it's slow start, but shiver me fucking timbers, not to this ELITE gamer Baby Jiren! I should have known they were all just too stupid to fully understand the full scope of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. With your absolutely massive brain you were experimenting with pressing an entire two to three buttons after auto attacking? Good god. Without access to your weapon chains, skills, etc? Lord have mercy. It takes the any% speedrun of the damn game like 40 minutes to even get to 3 characters while skipping literally everything and this dumb fuck is over here talking about iT dOeSnT tAkE hOuRs
@@TKBadMoon dude you're arguing online, doesn't make you better than you claim he is. Plus my comment was about how to tell people who finished the game from those who didn't. How did this happen?
Please it's not rocket science its preety simply it's just the game does a poor job at explaining its own machanics that's why most people use wiki also it doesnt help that the quest lines at times can be confusing as to where you actually need to go
I was always wondering dang why do I have to find so many different blade elements and then this video showed up and god this made xbc2 so much more fun
So I've recently been going through xenoblade 2 to mentally hype myself for xenoblade Definitive Edition. I've pretty much mastered the game mechanics, went into regular new game and proceeded to beat every single boss on the first try because orb chain attacks are hilariously op.
As someone who has recently beat the game and is prepping for NG+, I appreciate this guide a lot because it condenses a huge amount of information that other guides tend to drag out too long. After almost 200 hours I completely disregarded fusion combos and felt that I was missing on a huge part of this games great combat because I couldn't wrap my head around it. I like that you not only explain the mechanics concisely but also point out bad habits and what to do instead. Looking forward to seeing more from you!
I wish there was a vid like this that was spoiler free. I waltz in here a month ago and nearly got messed up seeing PoppiQTPi lol. And I also got a friend who's trying to pick the game back up who could really use something like this.
I stopped after wrapping up the story mode but found your channel cause I decided to finally try Torna to get ready for Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive edition. Holy crap this video has opened my eyes. I knew all that stuff about blade and driver combos but the thing that blew me away more then anything is how effective break was. Seeing you down these enemies with only level 2 blade combos and only having break active is blowing my mind.
While I WILL admit to going for 8-orb chain attacks during my playthrough, I wasn't doing it because I thought I had to, or because I thought it was how you get damage. I was doing it because I was trying to get lots of overkill, and I was only going for it against bosses and UMs. I was also trying to get damage from everything else, and was trying to get a bunch of overkill bonus after using a Chain Attack on foes whose HP was as close to 0 as I could get it without killing them. Incidentally, I have also spotted a small mistake in your video. Upon performing a Full Burst, ALL party members perform a level IV special, but they do it simultaneously and you only have the QTE prompts for the pair you are controlling at the point of the Full Burst, while the AI handles the other two pairs doing their level IV special. Also, you didn't cover healing, and while I know it is pretty simple, there are some people who don't understand how you are supposed to do it, and at least one idiot who was trying to get all their healing from potions, presumably after unequipping their direct-heal Arts (I saw them in the recorded chat in a VOD of a stream once). Finally, while they're not particularly useful for endgame content, the masks that continuously generate aggro are quite useful while normal enemies are a threat, as they work even while your weapon is not drawn and cause enemies that spot you to aggro onto your tank instead of you, making it easier to run (and if you draw and sheath your weapon, the AI will stop and fight, and since the battle ends as soon as the player gets out of aggro range and dead party members revive and heal as soon as battle ends, this makes running even easier), and there are also specific UMs where running certain pieces of equipment can prevent big issues, like running spike damage reduction for foes with high counter damage, or reflect prevention/the item that saves you and gives Unbeatable once per battle against Artifice Ophion to prevent a full wipe to Barrier Field at the wrong moment (incidentally, using a level IV special on Barrier Field will actually cause an invincible effect tag to appear on your driver whenever they hit Ophion if they are not protected against the damage reflection, so you are ACTUALLY invincible during such specials, not just intangible or evading). Finally, while most Special Recharge pouch items are pretty bad, there is one item with 2 per second and two with 1.5 per second, which is enough to enable near-continuous use of level I specials (after the bonus charge from getting a Perfect) without ever using an Art when combined, and can thus be used to spam them. Not sure how good the DPS is, but it works decently well, and on Mythra (and sometimes Finch, if she feels like it) you can spam level II specials, which on Mythra is the really good one for AOE damage and general damage.
Basically Xenoblade 1 has the easiest combat. Xenoblade X has ridiculously confusing combat. Xenoblade 2 has the best combat system IMO. Easy enough to understand, but still challenging to get the hang of.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think the reason is that he capped out on the amount of damage he could do. There would be no reason to succeed the qte's when you wouldn't get anymore additional damage
I've thought about it and have come to this philosophical conclusion that Xenoblade 2 is the Smash Melee of JRPG Battle Systems.... It truly seperates the weak from the strong willed/minded
@@asadhus of course. The only thing though, tutorials can be annoying but don't let them derail your enjoyment of the game. Story yes... You are going to have absolutely nonsense tropes, but the actual focused narritive is really good.
I just want to say this small mechanical detail - that Break also serves a purpose of interrupting an enemy attack. This isn’t the case in XC1/XC DE, but it is in XC2 and XC3. I’m certain it won’t be used solely for that purpose given the chance of break, but does really give break a small level of crowd control that the other statuses more obviously give.
I'm doing my first playthrough right now and there is so much depth to this combat. I feel like I have a decent understanding thanks to this and chuggaconroys let's play but it's so easy to forget things
People claiming that combat is boring in Xenoblade 2 invariably fall into one of two categories. 1. People who didn't understand the game's combat system. OR 2. People who didn't play the game for more than a few hours.
"Please stop saying the combat is slow. Xenoblade 2 has some of the fastest and most interesting combat in the series." Just because its better than its predecessors doesn't mean it's not still slow lol
Xenoblade 2's combat is more complex than its predecessors, but the tutorial does squat to communicate its intricacies. One thing that really pisses me off is when I'm trying to get that third special on the boss or unique monster, and the bastard just starts dodging everything and doesn't let me recharge my arts! AND THEN IT KILLS ME IN ONE HIT!
I still really didn't understand so much of what you were saying. The problem is that people trying to explain this are doing so having already well understood these things, but aren't thinking of things in terms of people who DONT understand it. Like, I dont know what the hell 'cancel an art into another art' means, yet you just threw that out there like I was supposed to. Or the blade combos, like, why am I using certain elements and when? Should I always be building up each combo from I, to II, to III in terms of levels or just use a level IV right away? Which RT or LT art should I use when those pop up? What does seal an art mean and how do I know what to go for? What do I about orbs and why would I want that? None of this was well explained here and is exactly the kind of thing that confuses people so much. Also, if you're trying to explain something complex that confuses people - DO NOT SPEAK SO FAST. lol That is so wildly unhelpful.
Thank you SO MUCH for making this video. Nobody seems to believe me when I tell them Xenoblade 2 has the best combat in the entire series, but when optimized, it's easily the most engaging Xenoblade game from a combat standpoint.
I cant even fight a simple level 8 boss while a level 10 I seriously keep dying all the time at the beginning of the fights and its pissing me off so hard, when I tried everything I can cancelling, arts, timing each attack but I cant ever seem to do just enough to hurt them more than they are doing to me, IN THE BEGINNING... (Sigh) can you please give me some tips for beginners?
I am 140 goddamn hours into this game and I'm only just now learning a lot of this. I don't think a game has ever made me feel like an idiot as much as this one did.
I forgot the inn exp mechanic after leaving the game for a month or so.... I was wondering in chapter 7 why the difficulty spiked so hard... I had 20 levels per character that I had to rest at an inn to gain... Me too man
i learned all of this after beating the game i never understood how to use chain attacks and i never understood how to use pneuma so i was basically only using steam bomb with pyra and nia
I just finished Xenoblade Chronicles definitive edition. I started playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2. This video is a good job of answering many questions. I'm so high right now.
How did it take me this long to actually understand how blade combos work? I got all the way to the final boss without actually knowing how the hell they function. Thank you for explaining it.
When you ARE that noob(Beginner player) he is talking about XD Thanks lots for the videos I feel like a pro now understanding all the mechanics of the game
So because of this video you made me motivated to play this game i orginally bought the collectors edition but because it was so different from xenoblade 1 i stop after like 5 hours but you made me actually want to play this game
I played through a good chunk of the game spamming arts and driver specials with absolutely no thought or strategy. It was only until the Zekenator fight in Leftheria did I *accidentally* find out about Blade Combos and extending Chain Attacks. I thought I had the combat down pat by that point yet here I am now learning that the Driver Combos I had neglected to use the entire game were actually extremely useful. Screw me.
I hate that xenoblade 2 is one of my favorite games and I barely understood the depth of conbat. I put over 180 hours into my first playthrough and did every quest i could find while really savoring the story and by the time the last boss fight came around I was still going "how the heck do combos work" I totally understood the break topple launch smash stuff but orbs went over my head for the whole playthrough.
Xenoblade 2 has great combat... it just takes forever to get to it. By endgame, the combat is probably best of the series. I dislike some of the extra nonsense thrown in with the Blade system; getting the right Blades with the right elemental affinities, the right roles, with the right weapons, on the right Drivers, can be a pain. It happens, eventually, but it takes hours and hours to get to that point. In the first 3 chapters the combat is unarguably atrocious. Until you get Morag you can't even have all 9 Blades, until you get Poppi... maid version, beta, whatever... you can't even have 8. If you miss the little hidden book in the big factory you can't customize Poppi so you either ignore her or build your limited team around her to make combos. It gets amazing, but the large majority of any playthrough will usually consist of attempting to make your ragtag group of nimrods (and Poppi) work together to produce something resembling a team. I've never faulted anyone for saying that Xenoblade 2 has bad/slow combat. I love the game, but it's unreasonable to expect someone to either put massive effort into grinding for Blades and playing Tiger!Tiger! or, alternatively, playing for over a dozen hours at least for the game to spoonfeed you enough stuff to make a semi-functional team.
So do you want to do a stage 1 to stage 2 to 3 to 4 combo or just jump straight to stage 4? This is the problem I'm having with combat lol I also don't know if I should always wait till the end of a auto chain to use arts
Honestly I thought it was slow as fuck when I first bought this game back in november since it was the first game for the switch I bought. Later on though It really did pick up for me and enemies got harder, that final boss fucked me up hard several times.
"Doing more damage will increase your damage" big brain strats Seriously though, nice video. I have over 150 hours in XC2, and I still don't feel like I fully understand the combat system, so this will come in handy when I try to finally 100% the game.
Game starts out slow for combat for new players, but seeing Carlos fall in seconds is the deceive evidence XB2 is a fast paced game. A must watch for new players of xenoblade 2. [still not as fast as Overdrive in X that can burn through 100M health in 10 seconds, but getting there is too tedius in setup, 2 is more snappy]
I could have really used a guide like this so very long ago when I got into this game at first. You were definitely right when you said other videos on RU-vid don't do a great job of explaining the most effective means to use the combat system. All of them just explain how the mechanics work and... you can get that from the in-game tutorials lol. So you've made content overviewing 2, X, Saga, and will cover 1 when DE drops. Any plans to talk some Xenogears in this space?
wow overly complex battle systen that many players can skip through the entire game and still beat everything in the game lol they should of just stuck to the original and X version so much more fun keep it basic keep it fun, FFX would be boring with xenoblade 2 battle mechanics. star ocean 3 would be boring with xenoblade 2 battle mechanics like i said if it aint broke don't fix it. Thanks for the video btw
Bought this a week ago. Gave up after chapter 3, lol. The combat mechanics are way too convoluted, imo and the game doesn't do a good job at explaining it. Traversal/Map mechanics aren't the best either.
even as an XC2 vet who has cleared all but like one boss, and most of the trials, I learned a thing or two from this video. During my initial run I was all about the orbs, but I see that if I just capitalized on driver combos I probably would have a better time of it. Although I will say, I am not a fan at all of the tiger shark game so as soon as morag was a choice for tanking, I dropped tora like a bad habbit. Now we have other ways of getting crystals and poppi 3 is just a terminator.
