#xenoblade 1 chapter 17 spoilers

[eaglefairy]

I posted 1,318 times in 2022

That's 137 more posts than 2021!

87 posts created (7%)

1,231 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

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@bunjywunjy

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I tagged 1,312 of my posts in 2022

#video - 181 posts

#ace attorney - 129 posts

#art - 101 posts

#tumblr - 91 posts

#pokemon - 79 posts

#xenoposting - 75 posts

#cats - 58 posts

#music - 35 posts

#xenoblade chronicles 3 - 33 posts

#queued - 31 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#sometimes you get murdered in your office. sometimes the god pokemon kidnaps you out of your office and throws you through time and space t

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Chapter 5 finale. what the fresh fuck. Back to bullet points because there's a lot to cover here!

LANZ. SENA. ARE WE GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE SUICIDE PLOY. I never thought I'd be thankful for X to appear and yet here we are.

When Mio vanished at the Homecoming I was like "damn they actually killed her" and then when N "killed" Noah I was like "OH SHIT THEY'RE KILLING THEM?!"

When I heard the disembodied voice say "we only need three more months" my immediate first thought was that the party was going to reincarnate at the start of the game, they'd jack a Levnis and/or save Guernica, and we'd resume from there. Tying in to some previous thoughts I had about how the Consuls never really seemed to take the party seriously, making me wonder if all of this has happened before and the reason they aren't worried about the party freeing colonies and stuff is because they already know they'll be defeated

The flashback sequence in the cloudy area (Memory Space lite?) had me well and truly baffled for a while lmao

When Noah pulled out the sword of origin or whatever they're calling it out of the chest of the Ouroboros I literally shrieked "THAT'S A MONADO!!" because it totally is. Look me in the eyes and tell me that's not the exact shape of the Monado II

Also M's ploy with Mio has an extremely Meyneth and Fiora feel to it, at least to me

So Z. I feel like he's...probably not actually Zanza? I don't see how he could be, though I know that 2 already did some retconning to 1 so it's not unthinkable they could do more. But the fact that he's the "creator of this world" and his real name starts with a Z and the fact that Moebius feeds on human souls much like Zanza fed on the Homs as the Bionis makes me extremely suspicious

5 notes - Posted August 17, 2022

#4

There's a lot of things I could say about all of the that that just happened but also there's a bunch of new sidequests that I want to do so instead I'll just say that seeing Eunie say "I'll never understand Moebius even if I live to one hundred" and knowing that the full High Entia lifespan is far longer than that is just...ow

5 notes - Posted August 31, 2022

#3

I was writing up my thoughts on Xenoblade 3 as a whole when I realized that I'd written a mini-essay on why I like the ending and why letting the nations stay together from the start would've been narratively and emotionally unsatisfying. Instead of trying to cram that in with the rest of my thoughts on the game, I figured I'd make it its own post (since this is much more of a meta piece than the rest of my opinions). Spoilers below the cut for the ending!

3 is a heavily thematic game.  One of those themes is that even if the future is uncertain, it’s worth fighting for anyways.  Noah and the party make that choice, and there are two options for what the narrative can do from there: it can reward them narratively for fighting a fight with an uncertain outcome (making the right choice), or it won’t.  They make the right choice, but the narrative doesn’t reward them for it.  I hesitate to call the ending of 3 a “punishment” in any sense, but narratively it somewhat is.  They make the difficult choice to continue fighting against Z, the Moebius, and the endless now, and the consequence of that is that the worlds separate and they have to leave behind the friends they’ve made form opposite nations.  Why would the narrative punish them for making the right choice?

For a second, I’m going to take a tangent here.  In her Trope Talk on magical otherworlds, OSP Red discusses some of the pitfalls of escapist stories, one being that a “happy ending” in a portal fantasy where the hero is allowed to leave their boring life in the real world forever can actually depress the audience, because we will never get that same opportunity to literally leave the dissatisfying parts of our lives behind.  It’s the same principle here.  The narrative could have rewarded the party for making the right choice by giving them a no strings attached happy ending, but that’s not how real life works.  In real life, we also don’t know if the future we are moving towards will be better than what we’re living in right now.  But unlike in Xenoblade 3, we don’t have the option of grinding to max level and beating the superbosses before moving to the future–that is, we can’t live in the endless now.  In a constructed narrative, we expect heroes to be rewarded for their good deeds because that’s a convention of storytelling: good is rewarded, evil is punished.  Good people win, and bad people lose.  But real life doesn’t work like that, and I believe the impact of the ending on the audience would have been diminished significantly if the uncertain future the Ouroboros were fighting so hard for turned out to be unequivocally good.

The other main theme of the game is about grief, loss, and accepting those things into your life, which is another message the ending conveys supremely well.  Just because everything goes back to the moment the world stopped in the beginning doesn’t mean that anything that happened on Aionios doesn’t matter.  It all mattered!  Just because something ends doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning while it’s occurring.  That goes for lives, events, relationships, and even worlds.  Nothing in this world is permanent, not even the world itself, and to pretend that none of it matters because it doesn’t last–to say that nothing we did on Aionios meant anything just because it’s all been erased and it’s remembered by no one–is to say that the only things that do matter are those that last forever, and that is a road that leads to nothing but grief and regret.

And besides, the game is very clear that they’ll all meet again at some point in the future.  Even if Monosoft never elaborates or tells us about the reunion from on high, that does nothing to stop us all from imagining it and writing it ourselves–giving the characters a lifetime of joy, and giving ourselves a path to hope.

6 notes - Posted September 12, 2022

#2

There's still nothing funnier to me than the victim of 3-1 being Doug Swallow, who died with a bottle of poisoned pills in his hand Died of poison? No, he was electrocuted, why would you think he was poisoned?

6 notes - Posted January 23, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Sometimes I remember that during all of the final battle with Volo, the "BATTLE DECIDED" splash screen never appears: not after beating his team, and not after either form of Giratina

20 notes - Posted May 11, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[unicornlovers10]

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Screenshots

Part 10

These are random screenshots that I've taken during my playthrough of Xenoblade 1. This will contain spoilers for the game under the cut, all the way up to the start of chapter 17. It's mostly end game spoilers, you have been warned.

This is awfully chilling.

Yura, Melia has a point you know.

[burgermiester]

Stella Glow Review

(spoiler-free)

Stella Glow is a tactical turn based RPG with visual novel/dating sim elements for the Nintendo 3DS.  It was originally released in Japan on June 4th 2015 and arrived in the US on November 17 of the same year.  It was the final game made by developer Imageepoch.  I picked up the game shortly after it released in the US, I even got the special edition.  But despite that, I never really played for more than a couple of hours until a few weeks ago.  As of this writing I have beaten the game once and am pretty far into new game plus, so I think I have seen enough of the game to give an accurate review.

Before I go any further I need to mention that I will be comparing this game quite a bit to Fire Emblem.  Ordinarily I get a little bit grumpy when people get too comparison happy between Fire Emblem and isometric TRPGS like Stella Glow (or FF Tactics, Disgaea, Tactics Ogre) or say things like “if you like FE you will like FF Tactics!” because even though they are both technically in the same genre, the huge emphasis on height, directional combat, magic and skills using mana, turn order calculated by unit, and battles being between smaller numbers of stronger units, isometric TRPGs usually have a completely different game feel from Fire Emblem.  While this is still mostly true for the actual combat, the gameplay in Stella Glow is split between mission segments where you have the main story and tactical combat and free time segments where you have an affinity building conversation/relationship system.  So while Fire Emblem (specifically Awakening and Fates) and Stella Glow both have their genre listed as “turn based rpg” on Wikipedia, I wouldnt be surprised to learn that most players of both are playing more for the romance.  Add on to this the fact that virtually every playable character (and all but one of the prominent NPCs) in the English version is voiced by someone who also voices a Fire Emblem character (including Matthew Mercer as one of the principle characters) and its hard to not to think about Fire Emblem when you play it. Plus most if not all of my followers are Fire Emblem enthusiasts, so hopefully this will help you decide if Stella Glow is the game for you.

Story, Characters, and Affinity System:

Stella Glow follows a young man named Alto as he joins the knights of the kingdom of Regnant to find the witches of water, wind, fire, and earth so they can save the world from Hilda, the witch of destruction. In the world of Stella Glow witches are the only people who have the ability to sing, and within both the narrative and gameplay the witches songs have special effects (this also cant help but make me think of Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but theres not much to say except that I like TMS songs on the whole more than the ones from Stella Glow, but theres some good ones in Stella Glow.)  I cant say that anything about the main narrative is particularly new or shocking or memorable, but it serves its purpose.  You’ll probably want to keep doing the main story to meet more characters more than to see what happens, but near the end I got pretty invested in the narrative.  The biggest thing the story has going for it is the characters.  There are 16 playable characters, and with the exception of the final (and only optional one) they are all involved in main story scenes. Alto and the witches and a few others do drive the plot more and thus get more dialogue than some others, but the whole cast still speaks up pretty regularly.  This is quite refreshing compared to FE where outside of supports, only a handful of characters get to participate in the story.  I wouldnt say that FE should switch to doing a cast size this small because I like the replayability that comes from using hugely different unit composition between playthroughs, but its still nice to see in a non-FE game and with 16 characters and maps that let you field 6 units you still get a bit of the feeling that you are choosing your army based on the characters you like. 

And you will probably like a lot of these characters. The character designs are bright and fun and they are written and acted fairly well and there is an affinity system that lets you get to know them all even better.  When you compare Stella Glow’s affinity system with Awakening and Fates’ support system there are upsides and downsides to each.  The biggest downside to Stella Glow’s system is that, in a very visual novel sort of way, affinity building is only between Alto and the other characters, whereas in FE the whole cast can talk to each other.  The trade-off is that there are a lot more of these conversations and they will last for most of the game unlike in FE where its not uncommon to meet a character and be married with children in under an hour.  So I apreciate the added depth longer lasting relationships gives, but I do wish I could have seen the more colorful characters talk to each other as opposed to just Alto who, like the Avatars of FE, is written with a pretty minimal, deliberately inoffensive personality.

From a romantic perspective the longer lasting relationships are mostly a good thing but with one big downside.  FE struggles to make the romance organic, since characters can get up to A support with anyone, relationships are usually platonic right up until marriage.  In Stella Glow the romance grows much more organically, but as the game goes on and Alto gets into increasingly romantic situations with the female characters it feels more and more like a harem anime.  I know thats an instant turn-off to a lot of people and its one of the reasons I kept dropping the game for so long, but I personally am glad I stuck with it because the characters and their struggles are interesting and memorable.  I sighed at a few parts for sure but it was worth it for the rest of the experience.  Building affinity also gives gameplay bonuses: either passive abilities, new skills, or new songs (for the witches.)  For me these are more exciting than the raw stat pair-up bonuses in Awakening and Fates because the effects are more varied and personalized. 

Combat:

I have less FE comparisons here, as I said before isometric tprgs like this feel very different from FE.  If you have played something like FF Tactics then you should be very familiar with how this game plays.  Turn order doesnt alternate from all allies to all enemies, but rather one at a time where faster units will go sooner and more often than slower ones.  You do more damage if you hit enemies from behind and they do the same to you.  Theres no permadeath, you only fail a chapter if you fail the main objective, which is usually just to not let Alto die.  On the whole I’d say this game is pretty easy; I had to replay one chapter 4 times before I beat it but aside from that I had maybe 3 chapters I had to reset.  There are optional objectives for each fight and going for them can make the game harder but it is mostly for your own satisfaction as the rewards are rarely noteworthy.  The main thing that sets it apart from other similar trpgs is the song meter and song system.  As you fight with any character a song meter fills up (up to 5 times) and you can expend the meters to do a special attack (usually costs 1-2 meters) or have them sing (usually costs 4-5)  which will have an effect on the whole battlefield, depending on the song its a buff or heal to all allies, a debuff to all enemies, or an attack on all enemies, or some combination.  Songs last for a few turns and during that time the witch cant do anything else.  The whole system is pretty fun.  Of all the isometric trpgs I have played, I liked the combat in Stella Glow the second most; only Jeanne d’Arc I find more fun to play. 

Presentation and Final Thoughts:

Overall the game has pretty good presentation.  Its got that typical jrpg look and sound to it, but its got enough of its own style that it doesnt feel generic.  In battle it switches to a chibi style, which isnt my favorite thing in the world but it still looks good.  The animations remind me a lot of the GBA FE games, they are super over the top but they are also the same everytime, which for me means they get turned off pretty quickly even though they are pretty nice.  Thats about the only quality of life setting the game has, by the way.  Skipping enemy actions isnt a thing so youll unfortuntely spend a lot of time waiting for the enemies to do something, or even more frustrating, waiting for them to do nothing, as you will oftentimes see enemies who dont move until you aggro them, yet you still must wait for them to wait before another unit can go.  The music is nice, a quick look at the composers wikipedia page shows that he did a couple of songs for a few beloved games like Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Kid Icarus Uprising.  The game also has a new game plus.  In the new game plus only your money carries over but the big draw is the free time sections are longer which lets you do the affinity conversations for every single character and the exp formula is modified to let you level up more easily.  I dont normally play new game pluses, so to me the fact that I was so eager to jump right back in to learn more about the rest of the characters is proof that this was a good game. 

If you decide to purchase this game for yourself, the physical launch edition comes with a CD containing 5 songs, the first song of each witch, as well as a cloth poster of Hilda and a particularly large keychain of Bubu, a little pig who I guess is something of a mascot but honestly its barely in the game which is why I havent mentioned it until now. If you get the digital version I think it comes with a 3DS theme.  Its currently ~$30 online or $40 on the eshop, and if any of this has made you interested there is a demo on the eShop.  I hope you do decide to check it out because I found Stella Glow to be a very fun and enjoyable game.  As I type this I am downloading the demo for Disgaea 5 on Switch to give that game a try next, so not only was Stella Glow a ton of fun but it got me interested in isometric trpgs again. 

[unicornlovers10]

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Screenshots

Part 9

These are random screenshots that I've taken during my playthrough of Xenoblade 1. This will contain spoilers for the game under the cut, all the way up to the start of chapter 17. It's mostly end game spoilers, you have been warned.

Melia found a transparent frozen flower.

Melia reassures Talia, and Melia unlocks her passion skill tree.

A vision showing Vidian and some High Entia stuck in Whitewing Palace.

[unicornlovers10]

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Screenshots

Part 8

These are random screenshots that I've taken during my playthrough of Xenoblade 1. This will contain spoilers for the game under the cut, all the way up to the start of chapter 17. It's mostly end game spoilers, you have been warned.

Funny character interaction with Riki, Dunban, and Raoul.

Redundant enemy name is redundant.

Funny Reyn dialogue.

The only acceptable example of "Boys will be boys", and you can't tell me otherwise.

Jarack asks for help from the party, with Shulk as the leader.

[unicornlovers10]

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Screenshots

Part 7

These are random screenshots that I've taken during my playthrough of Xenoblade 1. This will contain spoilers for the game under the cut, all the way up to the start of chapter 17. It's mostly going to be end game spoilers from here on out, you have been warned.

I tried to explore Junks, before going after Seven.

Linada reassures Melia about Shulk's condition.

Melia worries about Shulk.

Altar at Bafalgar Tomb.

Found some interesting dialogue while doing a sidequest run in Colony 6.