Xenoblade Chronicles

• You have to put things into the collection by hand, it doesn't happen automatically

• Whenever you see someone with a blue dot, speak to them. What they say will change as you do more sidequests, relationships in the affinity graph change and as your affinity with the area they're in goes up.

• If you want to farm regular enemies for a rare drop or are trying to get a unique monster to spawn, go to the area where they are and save. Keep reloading your game until they drop what you are looking for or in the case of unique monsters they decide to spawn.

• A dropped chest will only decide what it's going to give you when you open it. If a monster drops the type of chest you want (Wood, Silver, or Gold), you can save the game and open it. If you don't get what you want, reload the game and the chest will still be there. You can repeat this as many times as you want until you get what you want.

• One thing that a lot of people seem to miss is that you can fast travel to any area in the game you have previously been to by going into the menu and finding the map you want from the far left option.

• Chain attacks work by making each subsequent attack of the same colour stronger. Chaining a whole bunch of red attacks together does a hell of a lot more damage than switching between different colours. The exception to this is each characters white attack (like Shulks Monado abilities), which act like wild cards and can continue the chain just like any other colour, so for example Red - Red - Red would be just as strong as Blue - White - Red.

• Successful chain attacks reward the party with bonus EXP.

• Auras do not stack. Each one you cast removes the previous one.

• If an enemy is tearing your shit up consistently, go level up for a little while. It may not seem like there should be a huge difference between level 12 and level 13, but there is.

• Fix Colony 6. Do it. You are rewarded handsomely throughout the process, and it's definitely worth it.

• Unless you're a completionist, don't bother trying to finish every single sidequest that shows up in the log.

• Accept every side-quest you come across. The game will "turn in" sidequests as soon as you complete them in the cases of "Kill this number of enemies" or "Collect this number of items", so you don't always need to run back to the quest giver to get the rewards.

• Quests in the log that have little clocks next to them will expire if you proceed past the point of no return in the game. You will know when this happens, I promise. The game makes you save before continuing, and a character tells you "OK this is it, are you ready to go because there's no going back to those other places we've been if you say yes," then lets you choose to go or stay.

• The game lets you keep whatever is equipped on each character for New Game+, as well as various other items of your choosing (a certain number of weapons, armor, collectibles, etc.) Keep track of how much of each thing you have, and plan accordingly - some of the higher-level Colony 6 repairs require either waiting around for collectibles to respawn or being close to the end of the game, or both. Get them before you finish the game and hang on to them if you plan on playing through NG+.

• If you want a new outfit for a certain character (your seventh teammate) so they doesn't look fucking ridiculous, fixing Colony 6's Commerce is the way to get it. A pink Nopon merchant will arrive when you max it out, and she'll sell what you need. You'll know what I'm talking about about 2/3rds the way through the game, trust me.

• Debuff your enemies! Daze them, Topple them, Poison them, Freezinate them, etc. Some really hard fights are no big deal when you figure out that you can knock the bad guy down and go to town on him.

• Topple is great until you start running into certain foes who do Spike damage while toppled. This won't happen until the late game, but it's something to watch out for nonetheless.

• Monsters and NPCs (Notably quest NPCs) are affected by the time of day, and in the case of monsters by the weather. If a target is shown as "Inactive" in the quest pop-up, it's usually the time of day. You can change the time in the menu, and this has a chance of changing the weather.