The Shrine

I just edited the title and added to this thread rather than create a new one. Post #7 below has the new videos.

Tetsuya Takahashi (FF6 magitek Armor guy, Chrono Trigger graphics director, original FF7 concept, Xenogears creator, Xenosaga creator, Xenoblade creator): "I've made the game I always wanted to"

For anyone who might not know Tetsuya Takahashi is a bit of a renaissance man when it comes to videogame development: designer/writer/artist responsible for doing the Magitek Armour scene in FF6, graphics director on Chrono Trigger, but best known as the creator of Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade.

His full tweet from December 2014 translates to - “15 years have passed since Monolith was founded, and I believe that with this game I have finally met the challenge I had within me, of creating an RPG in which humans and robots can co-exist.”

This is fairly exciting considering he has created such fantastic work, but has never made that game that he has really been satisfied with. Xenogears ran into budgetary issues and BS, Xenosaga suffered from lots of politics and his wife, Soraya Saga, being forced out of the company - those of us who were on the GIA back in the day will remember that situation.

Last year, a fantastic analysis of the footage shown at E3 2014 was created by a Japanese enthusiast named iYakku; most of her videos are in Japanese, but she got an English translator to narrate this one:


She points out the unifying artifact, the Zohar, which has me extremely excited. She also points out Takahashi's use of Gnosticism throughout his games. Although misses something: B.L.A.D.E. - which is an acronym of Beyond the Logos Artificial Destiny Emancipator - without going into too much detail, Logos is the ancient Greek term for "Word" and is the voice of God which created the universe, since God exists beyond time and space in a perfect form. Jesus is the Word/Logos made flesh. The Theology of the Logos as the Son of God exists in Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, and Gnosticism.

B - Beyond
L - The creator
A - Artificial
D - Destiny
E - An element which frees from imprisonment

Tying this together, I would separate this into two terms: 1. Beyond the creator's artificial destiny. 2. Emancipator, or something which frees from the creator's artificial destiny.

Given Takahashi's history of artificial Gods and artificial creations, including the artificially created universe in Xenoblade Wii - and arguably was the goal of the Zarathustra device in Xenosaga Episode 3 - it's safe to say that BLADE may actually be an object or organization which is in opposition to the latest incarnation of Wilhelm and Zarathustra. At the very least, some sort of relationship to it - I could have it backwards - as it could be argued that Zarathustra was the emancipator of the doomed natural universe, while artificially taking on the role of the Logos.

As a longtime fan of the series, even the highest budgeted game development project in Japanese history "Legend of Zelda U" is not enough to top the anticipation I have for this particular game.

Here is the most recent trailer which reveals some of the environments of the game's world - and if you can see it, you can go there:

Time may be right for me to journey to the worlds of Xeno. I never got into them only because I feared disappearing into them at a time when I was concentrating instead on building my social networks and skills, back in college. They're certainly among the finest stories ever told on a machine; and may be the finest stories told about the relationship between humans and machines on a machine, from what I hear.

Graphically Xenogears is very Playstation, and the character sprites are very pixelated. It's fine for me as I replay the game all the time, so those sorts of antiquated features don't register. I do, however, caution new players about playing it. Although I find the setting, characters, and story to be so phenomenal that it's made me a lifelong fan.

The only thing that concerns me about a statement like that, is if he's made the RPG he always wanted to, he has nowhere to go but down after this lol.

It depends on how he decides to take his next step.

I don't think a guy like Takahashi will just stop on this floor.
He may look for the next flight of stairs and step it up with the next game, take a leap of faith that lands him somewhere even higher. Of course, he may come tumbling down, breaking his dreams on the way.

Heh, I guess what I am trying to get at with this metaphor is that it all depends if he's clumsy or not.

Julius Seeker wrote:Graphically Xenogears is very Playstation, and the character sprites are very pixelated. It's fine for me as I replay the game all the time, so those sorts of antiquated features don't register. I do, however, caution new players about playing it. Although I find the setting, characters, and story to be so phenomenal that it's made me a lifelong fan.

I played the original Zelda again a few years ago and immediately pronounced it finer than Twilight Princess. Graphics don't bother me. The important thing is; does the game create its universe believably, create its hunts for treasure, beauty, and meaning meaningfully, and does it in the end make you feel uplifted and good to play?

Takahashi did an interview with Famitsu which revealed some very interesting information according to forum posters on both Neogaf and Gamefaqs:

-Xenoblade Chronicles X will offer more freedom than the first Xenoblade with more to do. The structure of Xenoblade Chronicles X is an open world RPG, whereas Xenoblade was traditional in structure.
-Planet Mira is 400 square kilometers, which calculates to a little larger than 150 square miles. That is nearly double the size of World of Warcraft, and over 10 times the size of Skyrim.
-Battle system is an evolved and faster paced iteration of the original Xenoblade battle system.
-Party is 4 members, which is one more than Xenoblade on Wii.
-The scope of content has been increased, there are more unique monsters and equipment.
-The game is now finished, Tetsuya Takahashi's playthrough of the game took 300 hours; presumably this means all or most side quests.

I'm picking these points out of forum posts. I'm looking forward to the full article translation.

A couple new videos from Japan,

Make sure English captions are on during the one below.


It's interesting to note that there are native populations on Mira, as well as visiting alien powers.

This one shows off a bit of the character customization and some other things.


Here are some new environmental screenshots as well:




The one below is of particular interest because it looks like the ruins of the city portion of a colony ship from Earth... but it looks like it has been around for at least hundreds of years, and humans only left Earth in those a few years prior according to the story we know so-far... It's possible time travel is a part of this game, they've played with the concept in the past, it's possible that they got stuck in a gravitational rift and thousands of years passed, and the human galactic Empire expanded during that time. There is a hint in an earlier trailer, before the crash on Mira, that one of the alien races are familiar with humans as a great enemy in the galaxy.

Fuck my eyeballs, that's pretty. I may have to take the plunge one day.

So here they do a teardown on the battle system of Xenoblade using the characters, Elma who is sort of like the Chaos character of this game, and Lyn and Tatsu who are the mascot characters. It looks like the Gears will be featured in a later video. I also hope they do a video on how to build up and advance the main human city, which is essentially like Vice City dropped onto an alien planet, and complete with a Xenosaga style space ship/station that crash landed with the city. LOTS of stuff revealed about this absolutely colossal game in this video released in Japanese on Friday, and fan translated by Gamefaqs users:



Below I categorized the information, and tied it all to similar features in familiar games.

ATB System:
* The battle system is similar to the original Xenoblade in that it has its auto-attack component which slowly drains enemy strength.
* Arts are the main attack, they have a cooldown time, and are used once this time is expired. Arts are the equivalent of your traditional ATB attacks which originated with FF4.
* Different Arts can be assigned to your character to use in battle.
* Charge attacks: You can double load the ATB gauge for any art, using your auto-attacks. This means rather than a single attack, you can do a double attack.
* Using melee attacks will fill up your charge attack gauges faster than ranged attacks. Melee attacks also deal more damage.
* Later on in the game, you'll be able to stockpile more charges for your charge attacks. This is somewhat similar to Xenogears in a way, but the stockpiling of charges seems to be much more beneficial in Xenoblade than it was in Xenogears.

Healing and Dual-Techs:
* Dual techs are activated by something called "Soul Voice" - either you call out to your teammates when it is activated, or they call out to you. When a Soul Voice is used, another player in your party can use an Art to form a dual-tech attack.
* Healing works differently from tradition: rather than having healing available all the time, it is a consequence of dual-techs.
* You can also sacrifice your charge (from the charge attacks listed above) to heal your characters.
* It also looks like there is some customization behind the side-effects of dual techs. You customize this in the menu.

Other Battle Tactics Involving Critical Hits:
* In addition, toppling and combos are making a return. Combos are essentially just a string of similar attacks that help increase their power - and toppling in this game is just like toppling in Monster Hunter, it stuns the enemy so they can't act for a bit, allowing the player some free hits.
* Also returning are positional effectiveness of attacks. In its simplest form, if you swing around behind the enemy your attacks will be much more effective by increasing damage rate, hit rate, and critical rates. Kind of like a forced back attack from previous games or attacking weak points in Vagrant Story.
* New to this game franchise, you can break off parts of your enemies, and this will have an impact on the enemy capability of attacking you and defending against you. Also, like Monster Hunter, breaking parts off of the enemy will also increase the dropped rewards you get from defeating them.

Encounters:
* Look similar to the Wii Xenoblade, which is kind of an advancement on Earthbound. Essentially some enemies will be aggressive towards you, others will try to avoid you, and others will completely ignore you until they deem you a threat.
* It looks like sensing is important too, you can sneak around some enemies who would otherwise be aggressive toward you. This sort of encounter system did exist in a primitive form in Chrono Trigger.
* Enemies will band together to try to take you down, this is especially true when considering intelligent enemies, such as alien invaders and raiders; yes, think of Mira as a part of an ecosystem of various spacefaring civilizations. There are aliens that visit the planet, some helpful, some harmful. It's a little like Star Wars outer-rim planets.
* Enemies can attack the player from incredible distances. The video shows a giant ape-like monster throw a boulder from about 500 meters away, striking and killing the player.

Equipment, Shops, and Arms Development Corporations:
* There are loads and loads of different sorts of weapons and armours that can be equipped.
* Weapon shops work similar to how towns develop in Terranigma, you complete certain objectives throughout the game, and give different corporations the ability to manufacture more advanced weaponry and armours.
* By wearing gear from certain companies, you effectively help them advertise, and increase their profitability and thus their ability to develop more advanced weaponry. That implies that there's going to be some challenge based equipment sets that will yield interesting rewards.
* So while the character models look a little derpy, the equipment looks badass enough to make up for it, and there is a ton of it in the game.
* Aside from having a ton of equipment, it is also customizeable. Kind of like materia in FF7 which behaves like FF8's junction system (except with single components junctioned to each slot rather than groups of up to 100 magic points), except relative to the equipment rather than the character.

Leveling up:
* There're both standard levels, and character class levels.
* There are at least 16 character classes.
* Players can customize their characters based on their advancement levels in various classes, kind of like certain Dragon Quest games where you learn abilities in various classes, and keep those when moving into other classes. Except Xenoblade allows a much deeper customization.
* Experience is not just gained in battle, but also for completing other tasks, including discovering new area.

Battle Parties:
* Now I wonder if this is just due to the rough translation, but it looks like you might be able to recruit just about anyone living in New LA into your party. There are 8 different battle factions in BLADE, I am assuming it must mean just from here.
* I should mention that BLADE is an organization which specializes in advancing New LA, as well as defending it. BLADE has 8 different factions within, each with different purposes. You can join these factions. Two of them were mentioned in the video: Interceptor and Avalanche.
* Not mentioned in this video, but there is also online multiplayer, so you can add people to your party who are human controlled.
* Your party can have up to 4 active members.


This battle system makes games like Disgaea look like kindergarten. It has taken Xenoblade to the next level for certain. Above there are mentions of dual-tech/soul voice attacks - which have customizeable effects, but also charging up recasts of abilities, breaking off parts, positional attacks, topples, and combos. Throw all of those together, charging up attacks, looping them into combos from particular positions, and it looks like there's going to be some really awesome potential here for some interesting techniques. There is a tremendous amount of depth here. Xenoblade 1 did an extraordinary job making the complex potential of its battle system very simple and intuitive in execution and it is looking like Xenoblade X is taking this to the next level, adding incredible depth, but making all of that accessible. I can hardly wait to play this game.

Battle Theme came out



I certainly could have gotten down with this, then singing started happening and I turned my head sideways @ the screen. Now granted, I have no problem with J-Rap/Pop, but it's such a radical departure from the previous Battle Theme in XenoChronX, and again, the rap in battles might weigh on me over time, then again I love Persona's lyric heavy music so we'll see.

I'm not too fond of the battle theme. I really don't want to listen to something that sounds like Linkin Park every time I go to fight things. If this is going to be the case, I really hope there are multiple battle themes. Earthbound did this way back on the SNES, and not a lot of RPGs have really followed this good move. At least new battle themes by area. I wonder if XCX will have as much music in it as the original Xenoblade, which I believed clocked in around the 5 hour mark.

On the bright side, Xenoblade on Wii wasn't about spamming the user with hordes of battles. I doubt this one will change that since Takahashi was looking at pacing with Xenoblade Chronicles, and he really nailed it in that game.

Want.

Again, only reason I bought a Wii U. There have been some nice side benefits, however. I spent a lot of time playing Wii U in the last two quarters of 2014.

Taking a look at the different continents on this map, we can see a number of different biomes, and I want to take a bit of time to try and interpret what these are:



Top Continent
1. On the right there looks to be a region with massive artificial structures, which we have seen some of in early videos. There looks to be some sort of robotic or non-anthropomorphic intelligent race which runs this area. One of the screenshots I posted above looks to be located in this area on the border between the two main areas. This could be the industrial complex of a species alien to Mira. (We do know of at least two massive interstellar powers that were responsible for destroying Earth - one called the Growth who seem to be a Borg-level power in the Galaxy, another one appeared to be some sort of wolf/cat people. In addition, there were at least three more alien species shown who were lesser powers, two of them named - the Manon, and the Vyer. There are a lot of different people not belonging to any of these races shown walking around New LA.)
2. The left looks to largely be a very firey location, and some mountain locations at both the upper left end, and at the very bottom end around the area leading into the white continent. There also looks to be a large basalt field on the far left of this section.

The White Continent
1. The top left looks to be an open up plain. It might be a snow plain?
2. The top right looks like it will be related to the top left, although I do think this is the portion covered in the two screenshots above that look like they are from a white forest type area with large spherical trees. The night sky looks very colourful and full of aurora type effects which cause the whole land below to glow. It's weird, because a lot of the flora looks like it belongs in a more tropical location, rather than a frozen arctic type area. It should be interesting to see how this area unfolds.
3. On the far left is what looks like a massive volcanic crater. In the video this was shown, it looks like it can be accessed via Gear travel. Where does it go? I am going to speculate that it leads to a subterranean location, Xenogears in particular had multiple locations like this; the most impressive was the Zeboim Civilization, but the Fei also found one early on while battling with Bart, and falling down to find Old Man Bal and his Gear Calamity.
4. In the middle, it is difficult to tell, but it looks like a giant frozen lake. If this is the case, I wonder what can be seen below? Is this possible lower area accessible through the volcanic crater?
5. The bottom area doesn't look very different from the snow plain mentioned in part 1 aside from the existence of mountains, and what looks like a beach.

The Sandy Continent
1. On the right side is a very mountainous and canyon filled area. There has what appears to be a giant lake that may be dried up.
2. In the middle of this location is a large desert plain, reminiscent of Aveh from Xenogears. Somewhere in this location is something that looks like a large ruined portion of the circular habitation zone of a colony ship from Earth. This is shown in one oft he screenshots in an above post. Like the Aveh desert, no doubt there is going to be a lot of buried mysteries throughout. Especially since this planet looks to be visited by many different alien species, has had prior existing civilizations, and may have had some sort of human civilization on it at some point in the past, although that may require some sort of time travel.
3. On the left side there looks to be some mountains surrounding a large black puddle. Due to the lack of a grid, this looks to be more than just empty ocean space, although it might just be one giant ocean space and the grid is just missing, I don't know what this is.

The Green Continent
1. The giant plain, filled with mountains, lakes, rivers, and other green temperate areas. This is the most shown off portion of the game. This is where the main character begins. There are also some incredibly large monsters here, so big that the main character is dwarfed by the toenail of a creature... which has relatively small feet for its massive 300+ foot tall size.
2. New LA, which was built as the habitation center for the colony ship that reached Mira... Not so that humans could merely travel across the galaxy to a new planet, but so that they could preserve their very way of life as well. This is a defended open world city along the lines of Grant Theft Auto. There are some tall buildings, including one massive skyscraper that represents the government headquarters for humans on the planet. There are subdivisions with houses, commercial zones, cars and Gears moving around the streets. It also looks like the city builds up over time as you fly around Mira and gather survivors from pods scattered all around the planet... In addition, humans won't be the only people immigrating to the city, there have been seen a lot of aliens walking the streets. There's also several corporations that seem to advertise around, players can actually help them out by wearing their gear and showing off their stuff. The size of New LA is immense, and is no doubt the largest city in the game unless there is something beneath the surface that is larger - but I doubt will have the same intricacies as New LA.
3. Off the coast, to the North are a bunch of islands, some bigger, some really tiny specs on the map. What can clearly be seen here is a lot of beach type locations.
4. To the left is a rocky and mountainous region, probably filled with rapids and waterfalls.

The Blue and Purple Continent
1. An open swampy area appears in blue, it is surrounded by very large mountains, the largest looking in the game. There appears to be what looks like a city of sorts, as well as some artificial structures. Could this be the Nopon capital? This is the sort of location they lived in within Xenoblade on Wii - although short stories released by Tetsuya Takahashi indicate that Nopon live in smaller caravan villages; this was also the case with the Nopon in Xenoblade on Wii, but they also had their massive "Frontier Village" city.
2. To the right is a mountain area, the largest mountain range in the game. In the middle of it looks like a clearing. There are also specs of different colours throughout, possibly jungle type biomes.
3. To the left is another mountain range, although this looks far more solid without anything spectacular within. This area may be nothing but solid mountains, but they are accessible by Gear, since as far as this game goes "If you can see it, you can go there."
4. The upper portion is a purple jungle area, in a screenshot in an above post, this area can be seen. There was a portion of the exploration video that showed a Gear traveling through a lush rain-forest environment, this is somewhere on this continent, and looks like it is probably in this area. There is also some sort of central structure here.

That's what I've gleaned from looking at the map. There may be more in the way of alien villages and towns I missed. From the writings from Tetsuya Takahashi, there are multiple sapient native lifeforms on the planet, aside from the Nopon. There are also aliens who come and go from the planet, and may have some permanent settlements here.

http://kotaku.com/a-disappointing-xenob ... 1697674483



As I said in the FFXV thread, the internet bitches about everything.

At least it's not like the Xenosaga trailer that showed movies of stuff that weren't in the game, like Jun Uzuki fighting Margulis in a sword fight.

If it's like the first Xenoblade, then it's probable that the video was just at a different time of day and therefore no sunlight. In Xenoblade 1, cutscenes did not adjust the time of day, characters in the area, and that sort of stuff.

Anyway, here is the full 30 minute video subtitled to English detailing the mechas and the network.

Network capabilities look interesting. It is detailed in the last 10 minutes of the video.

• 32 players share the same Mira, and co-operate independently with each other.
• Players can form parties of up to 4 human players out of that pool of 32, or everyone can just use NPC party members. So you can have up to 8 parties of 4 with all of them being human players, or you can have 32 parties with 1 human each, and 3 npcs each.
• Quests are Mira-wide, and everyone within Mira works to complete them, for example, an invasion of 100 different enemies of various types may occur, and the users must defeat them, or their may be multiple objectives that require the co-operation of all 32 players across Mira to defeat.
• There are events which trigger, such as big enemies (equal to Weapons in FF games) which will require everyone's attention.
• It also looks like their will be large battles that will involve everyone.
• There will be world-wide connectivity features, they showed that many stats will be tracked.
• Different factions across Mira will be tracked for their progress, and it will show which factions are doing the best.
• There will also be a news network to track the going-ons around Mira, including the progress of human players.

Effectively, this is an open world co-op multiplayer game, everyone is working together, sometimes in the same region or in vastly different locations. Or some may be working together while others are doing their own thing.

Here's a new Xenoblade Chronicles X overview trailer:

So this comes out next week in Japan, if Nintendo didn't regionlock their shitty hardware I might have been tempted to double dip heh.

Still no word on English release.

I'd be afraid to play any Xeno title in Japanese. This one is apparently very story packed too, but it also has 32 player co-op. That'll be difficult.

I am sad that there's no date yet as the longer it goes, the later it gets. I want to see some English dubs in the next few weeks.

Well, here we go: http://www.nintendo.com/nintendo-direct/04-24-2015/

I need a date, damnit!!!

Well, that was disappointing, I Was expecting a Direct rather than a short preview video using the Japanese version of the game.

It didn't give any new information except English names for the continents and Dolls will be called Skells, which I hope they change - it sounds like a mispronunciation of skills.

Julius Seeker wrote:It didn't give any new information except English names for the continents and Dolls will be called Skells, which I hope they change - it sounds like a mispronunciation of skills.

Gotta keep it manly for the Western Audience, we don't want no dolls, we want Skells, which I guess is close to Skulls! or something. >.> Translations bugs me sometimes.

Or maybe instead of Skulls, misspelled short form for skeletons or exoskeletons.

Here's the video



There was a gameplay demo as well that I missed yesterday



Update: Here's another beautiful video that shows off some of Noctilum.

Video of the English voice acting.

Sounds good, but the lip syncing is shit, so basically like the first game heh.

I don't expect it to be great in the final product either considering the vast amount of dialogue in the game.

I am glad Lyn doesn't sound like a 2 year old toddler on energy drinks like in the Japanese version.