#just me rambling about XB3 quests

[kaishun]

Xenoblade 3 Questing

I'm around 130 hours, and I think I've finished just about every sidequest? Only thing still pending is Info gathering on Aionios's dangerous monsters or whatever, and I don't think that even has a quest marker on it.

Most* colonies are at 5 stars or 4.9 stars after doing the quests, so just need to slap some more collectopedias at them.

There could also be a few quests that are level-locked? As my experience lands me around LV94, which is not LV99.

I'm not much of a Unique Monster hunter and I've only gotten 3 of the "Treasures of the Seven" or whatever items (the Attack, Agility, and Aggro ones) not sure if there's more? But I'll probably grab some guide for the Unique Monsters so I can plan a path accordingly.

That said, Xenoblade 3's side quests have felt good. Very involved, interesting, and impactful. My girlfriend complained about them being sidequests, even, as there's so much lore and character developed, giving them the extra polish of being voiced would've really helped. When your main complaint is "so good it deserved to be better", you know it's great!

However, since I'm wrapping things up now, the hours I put in are ending with it being much shorter than other Xenoblade games as far as my speed of questing-- I have well over 200 hours clocked on Xenoblade 2, and I'm still not done with all the side quests nor at max level. (I can't remember how far I got in Xenoblade 1. Playing it both for the Wii and Switch has muddled a lot of the quests for me. Don't think I hit max level though.) But Xenoblade 2's combat is... pretty painfully slow at times, so I'm not sure if that time stamp is a reflection of the actual amount of content.

My only real beef with the XB3 side quests outside of that was picking them up in the first place. The Info Gathering things are good in theory, but in practice they can be a bit awkward. They don't show up on the overworld map, and the characters often don't even exist (as little green dots) on the minimap. Just giving them a quest indicator would've helped a lot. I've even seen it take 2 in-game hours for two people to spawn in and start talking, pending on how the Switch is feeling about loading-- so even if I check every inch of a Colony, sometimes what I need is where I started searching, just it hadn't loaded in, yet. (And no, not a "time of day" sort of issue-- time of day seems a lot less important in XB3.)

Other minor complaints, the levels are also REALLY fucked up, like, prerequisite quests will sometimes have higher levels than their indirect follow-up quests, and it bounces up down and all around. It feels like at some point, they went back and rebalanced the quests levels to spread things out better, but didn't quite catch them all. The number of LV30-50 quests that send me to LV75 areas was rough. As I was doing this post-game, it was fine, just every once in awhile I'd run into a LV70 when I'm scaled down to LV50, or a LV30 when I'm sitting at LV70.

As a potentially game-breaking issue, there was also one quest (Side Story: Lanz I believe) that I was underprepared for, so tried to leave; but literally couldn't. I couldn't teleport, couldn't take the boat out, nothing. My quick saves were both on this quest, and my last manual save was over 6 hours previous. No way to abandon the quest, deactivating didn't do anything. There weren't really any enemies to grind on. I'm not sure if that happens on any other quests-- being locked into them like that-- as I didn't run into stuff "too hard, I'll come back later" very often. So I just had to slam my face into Consul H until she died, mostly via boring turtle method (I think 3 healers, 3 tanks, 1 attacker; I can't remember if I was able to bring a Hero to that fight).

*Colony Mu is weirdly behind on reputation-- more like 4.7? Which makes me wonder if the dangerous monsters info thing is for Colony Mu, especially since the Armu quest originally stated it could attract Rare monsters-- though after getting my golden boy, there's no more feeding to be done, so that feels like its done? Regardless, I'll need to shove my lil nose everywhere to find the remaining Infos for the Dangerous Monsters thing.