Xenoblade Chronicles

Affinity

• Affinity Is a core game mechanic, if you ignore it you will miss a large amount of content

• Party Affinity: Party members have 5 ranks, from yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, 0 to 5000 affinity points. Despite what the game says, giving gifts can increase at most 22 affinity points. The bulk of affinity gains will come from combat action button presses, chain attacks, and when talking to sidequest NPCs the party leader will often gain affinity with the active party members through interjections. You will see a pop-up of two character icons and some hearts when there is affinity gain.

• NPC Affinity: Every major location has named NPCs (green dots on the map) you can talk to and make them active on the affinity grid. This is required to get all the side-quests as sometimes if they aren’t active their related side-quests won’t be available. NPCs have schedules can may be in their location for 12+ hours or in rare cases only 4 hours.

• As location affinity increase, more options unlock, from improved trading options to more side-quests. When you gain a star it’s worth checking the whole area map during several different times to see if any new exclamation marks have appeared.

• Heart to Heart moments are only available at green or the highest two ranks(purple&pink).

Combat

• Combat is MMO style where simply auto attacking isn’t effective. The emphasis is on using buffs/debuffs and getting into correct position to deal maximum damage.

• The main party dynamic is DPS/tank/healer and there are several party configurations that will work.

• The AI for party control ranges from good to terrible. The worst AI is for the female party members and Shulk.

• The basic combat strategy is break-topple-daze and using abilities that gain increased damage against those conditions. Certain AI party members are much better at this then others.

• Chain Attacks start off as merely okay and become exponentially better once you have more arts and higher party affinity. Chain attacks are linked by color, with the talent art a wildcard that will link with anything, so a talent art as the second attack will always give you a 3x chain

• Defeating enemies with Chain Attacks rewards you bonus exp, and 2x skill exp.

• Auras do not stack. When setting up arts for the other party members the AI really only benefits from using 2 auras.

• The game expects you to be within ~5 levels of the enemies or your exp gain drops off a cliff, so use expert mode to stay within a certain range as needed.

• Despite everything mentioned there are ways to build a level 20 party so that you can kill the level 120 superboss, so if you are having combat difficulties there’s probably some options or abilities that will make things far easier.

Sidequests

• Almost all side-quests are some form of “collect X items” or “kill X enemy” and many of them will autocomplete in the field once done and give you the reward

• Colony 6 Reconstruction has massive benefits that outweigh the costs.

• For some rare collectibles, you can find them for trade from named NPCs, especially ‘overtrade’ where you give them something worth far more then what they ask for and they give you a bonus item

• For collectibles, complete Colony 6 reconstruction and fill the collectopedia first. When you require specific collectibles for sidequests they will be explicitly marked on the map for ease of access.

• Quest Logs with a time symbol mean they will fail at a point of no return, this isn’t a major issue until much later in the game.

General

• The only way to improve overworld travel speed is with Quick Step gems. You get one for completing the Colony 9 collectopedia very early on.

• Buying equipment once makes it available as a cosmetic for your game account. Clearing out shop’s inventory then reloading to a prior save will still result in unlocking the cosmetics without having spent any money

• Enemies and some rare collectibles only spawn under certain conditions. You can change the time until those conditions occur and the quest should then be visible in the map

• Your Nopon companion has skills to increase the drop rates of silver and gold chests. When unlocked and active on all 3 party members you get a 30% bonus to drop which will massively decrease the time spent trying to farm for items.

• The party members start with 3 skill trees, and you can unlock the 4th ones around chapter 10/11. It requires a series of side quests that only become available when the previous one is completed.

• Gems are useful but not overly important until getting to the 5/6th rank. Important ones to keep are exp/AP boosts and whatever gem types your play style is focusing on