are you ready for a Chain Attack?

2022 08 28

alternative title: "THIS is how bowser won!"

there are four xenobade game: 1, X, 2, and 3, in that order. your welcome for reminding you that xenoblade 3 is the fourth game in the series!

the primary similarity between X and the numbered games is the combat and themes. Xenoblade games use a MMO inspired combat system, which means, it has different roles (attack, healer, tank, for example), real time combat, and a menu to select actions in that real time combat. kinda like kingdom hearts spells we think, which is another menu based real time system (we have never played kingdom hearts)

in 1 and X, it is, literally a menu, and the later games abstract it a little more.

we've read some people praise Xenoblade 1 for being refreshing, and that it took good aspects from all kinds of games to make something new and interesting. it was praised for rewarding thoughtful character builds, real time and positional combat, and and action based!

although, somewhat funnily, all of the numbered games have a mechanic called chain attacks which make the game essentially turn based.

we think chain attacks are overcentralising, and are unhealthy for the xenoblade games. we are going to talk about why :)

origin

we talked to a friend about xenoblade 3 playing and how really really good smash comboes in chain attacks are. smash comboes are when you do specific things that incapicitate the enemy by setting them up and then spiking them back into the ground.

we said we though this was absurd, it did a comically large amount of damage. we talked with concern about how stuff like this could ruin the game's combat system, and she said that the game seems to encourage everyone to reach the same endgame.

she explained this by saying that most of the game's end game combat is set up: go into a menu to optimise your build, come out, fish for your win condition, and then flow chart the enemy to death. these words gave us words to describe our feelings about xenoblade 2 combat in particular, but also the rest of the numbered games, in comparison to, primarily, X and Torna.

Prepare for our fury!

chain attacks are mechanics in the numbered xenoblades that let you basically play a turn based game, where you do a combo. They require a resource to activate, and are different in every single game.

a core theme is doing something to get a kind of combo going, and also that chain attacks significantly increase damage dealt. in this video, notice how our damage signifcantly increases as the "chain" number on the ride of the screen increases. this increases if you use certain coloured Arts (basically a character's move) in combination!

figuring out how to do a combo to do the most damage is fun and rewarding! when we played Xenoblade 1 Definitive Edition, when it came out, we already fully understood the combat system, and had an enormous amount of fun doing all the quests, using expert mode, and party affinity to optimise our characters at every point. it felt awesome (and incredibly dynamic!) especially compared to when we first played the Wii version, which we struggled in. We planned out so much and it felt almost like a Fire Emblem game how everything just came together perfectly through our game knowledge and planning. It was awesome.

trying in xenoblade 3

we tried doing this in xenoblade 3, which was, really difficult. a combination it being a new game, its pacing, and how it presents information were a big reason why. the game's combat feels a lot less involved than in 1, so it feels less rewarding too, and, critical base information for builds, like how long an aura lasts or how strong it is are, still, not present in the game itself, for example.

There is also a lot more build options in Xenoblade 3 because of how many weapons there are. In DE, in order for us to be optimal and constantly grow our characters, was to switch out characters when they reached affinity checkpoint with other characters in the party. This is what made it so dynamic! we constantly had new party comps. In 3, the equivalent is switching out classes when one reaches a rank checkpoint, and this is, extremely unfun and overwhelming.

in order to always have classes available to do this with, you need to do side quests, which can make playing the game how we want make us do things we don't want to. We needed to risk going above the expected level in the story, and we needed to constantly make entirely new builds for team comps. in order to fully engage with this, was exhausting. even in X it was less overwhelming, because in general that game has much friendlier pacing, less classes, and also levels don't matter in X.

making builds was something we felt forced to do and not something to engage fully with the game's mechanics.

it also being a new game made it impossible to play it in the happiest way possible!!! but we also think that is bad game design for games you aren't meant to play multiple times. we like this in Fire Emblem because we think the games are designed to played multiple times. Xenoblade is very long and is about telling a story, and is not designed to be played multiple times!

basically, we try to engage with everything a large game has, because we've learned that things off to the side are often just as important as the game's main focus. and this made us, not enjoy 3, and previously, Xenoblade 3.

one of the things we found especially upsetting, was chain attacks.

3 chain attacks

chain attacks in xenoblade 3 started off really exciting for us! they seemed to be primarily support, since we could never do enough damage to take out an enemy with them, and let us encourage the enemy to target our tanks.

we didn't like how, the music changed to something less interesting! we also really disliked how slow they were. chain attacks in 1 were very snappy and could be gotten through really quick. they felt like a part of the battle! they didn't feel like you were pausing to do your big attack.

when we unlocked Full Metal Jaguar, we realised, we realised that, chain attacks were, a Bit of a problem!

enemy health bars are designed with them in mind, so they are huge. it makes other strategies so much less fun. it feels like an autoscroller. the game forced us to rely on chain attacks to play the game!

regular unique monsters have comparable health to some of the strongest unique monsters in X and 2, it is,, absurd.

you need to these time consuming, oppressive comboes in order to do lots of damage. we think this is horrible!

in 1, we thought these comboes were interesting and engaging, and felt rewarding! we think chain attacks stop feeling rewarding when they feel like your only real option to be effective. it feels awesome when you figure out how to destroy the enemy the first time! but the realisation that this is basically the entire game's combat is crushing, especially how 3's chain attacks also destroy pacing. it isn't fun going for overkill bonuses on every enemy, it isn't fun doing your flow chart the same way every time.

xenoblade combat

tallking to our friend made us realise that this setup based combat is entirely antithetical to what xenoblade combat is good at. it is good at being stressful, quick, positional and real time. we also associate it with interesting character builds.

chain attacks make the combat a series of pre determined actions to do the most damage. Enemies are completely inactionable and you cannot die during a chain attack, so a chain attacks effectiveness is entirelty determined by your build set up, and game knowledge, and ability to execute on that knowledge. and the damage multipliers are so large that they become quickly either the only way to kill an enemy, or trivialise otherwise interesting fights! we don't like either of these extremes!

an aspect of xenoblade is build set up, and we enjoy that part of the game! we do not like how our actions in the pause menu can entirely predetermine our results in combat. this is both inaccessible for some people, and also reduces a lot of potentially interesting things.

we think xenoblade combat is the best when it is strategic and highly reactive and interactive! and by that end, our favourite combat in the series is by far, xenoblade X, and we also want to talk about xenoblade 1 and torna.

xenoblade x combat

we said one of the primary similarities between X and the numbered games was its combat! and this is true, but it is designed with a very different perspective from the numbered games.

we aren't quite sure how to articulate that right now!

in X, there are no chain attacks, and instead there is overdrive. like in 3, overdrive is basically an expectation of the player in combat.

overdrive is actually surprisingly similar to chain attacks: you can set up, you can basically do anything you want, and you get big damage bonuses, although, to be clear, the damage multiplier peaks way earlier than the chain attack multiplier in all the numbered games (max 6x for overdrive, max 8x for chain attacks in 1, and we think there is no max in 2 and 3). There are even comboes! albeit, much much more in depth than 1 and 3, and probably more in depth than 2. while we're here holy fuck fusion comboes in 2 were broken and the game never tells you about them.

there is, however, one HUGE difference. Overdrive does not pause the game or completely change how you play the game. the name is really good: Overdrive enhances your regular combat abilities, it doesn't change the combat entirely. You go into a overdrive!

in this regard, all of the systems Xenoblade combat is renowned for are kept intact: positional effects, art animation speed, time based buff effects, reacting to enemy actions as they happen, etc.. It is so funny that Overdrive is the most Xenoblade power up mechanic in the series and it exists in the least Xenoblade-like game in the series.

Overdrive is very fun and also feels rewarding in a similar way to chain attacks, but that rewarding feeling takes much longer to go away, because in order to do so much damage to trivialise combat you either need to be very overlevelled or have literal end game equipment, which takes an unreasonable amount of time and effort to get, and is completely impractical to expect a normal player to actually ever unlock.

we really love overdrive, and it makes everything in the game's combat feel extremely fleshed out. It is important to note that this game existed in the topple lock era of Xenoblade, and toppling did trivialise the game's combat, but, that seemed to be an oversight, and it no longer exists in the new xenoblades.

we have a feeling that, the desire to make xenoblade 2 a direct sequel to 1, made the developers look over some of the good design decisions made in X, and that led to chain attacks being tied to the numbered games, and keeping overdrive in X.

This was a bad decision!! we think that overdrive was a really good design decision and didn't undermine all the rest of the game's combat, and instead enhanced it! even the music overide and intense motion blur works, because it is action based and meant to help you focus on doing things in overdrive. the music tries to relax you and the motion blurs helps your eyes focus on the Art palette and other important information. xenoblade 3 should have overdrive or something that takes from the good concepts of overdrive.

1 combat

xenoblade 1 mostly just does everything pretty well, it is a remarkably good game. combat is another one of these: it is special because of how well it nails what it was going for. we think chain attacks being busted was a little bit of an oversight but the rest of the combat feels very solid and X expands on it really well! we don't have words to explain. xenoblade 1 is an incredible video game.

torna combat

torna is a side game based on Xenoblade 2.

combat in xenoblade 2 is, disapointing. it has very uninteresting build designs and the art variety highlights how its combat is basically all character builds.

torna, says, no to this! like, holy fucking shit. This is incredible. The combat is explicitly trying to be dynamic and interesting in real time. Everything is so much faster and more interesting and everything feels so much more fleshed out. we are disapointed 2 had build variety and that torna was stuck with too little characters and weapons to have build variety.

torna adds a lot more arts for a character to use at once, and each art has a lot more variety from other arts! talent arts also are basically used to define characters and special things they could do, which 2 just didn't have.

talent arts also engage with HP directly. fun fact! our favourite class in X is full metal jaguar!!! we're also masochist. health manipulation is one of our favourite things in xenoblade.

in xenoblade 2, auras (called stances in xenoblade 3), buffs arts, most debuffs, didn't really, exist. you are can NOT make Menancing Jo bleed to death in xenoblade 2.

the ways specials work in 2 basically force you to play a set up based game, because you need to set up comboes to engage with the majority of the combat system! and, if you didn't want to, you only really have access to 3 arts at a time regularly, and none of them are very special!

torna adds, in addition to the base 3 arts, a talent art, and a reargaurd art, and makes switching characters much more heavily incentivised through all having unique powerful arts, limitted healing options, and vanguard/rearguard arts. it's so cool and awesome!

QUICK ASIDE

we absolutely love how creative 1 is with talent arts, and how they basically all work differently. Cooldown, elemental discharge, monado arts, seven's talent arts, they all work so completely differently. also!! xenoblade 3 dropped the ball on not letting talent arts get used in chain attacks and also by (seeming to?) split damage ratio between all hits, unlike arts, which get the full damage ratio for each hit. this is so silly! talent arts can't be cancelled out of like arts, and they usually have really long recovery and flourish animations at the end! also! this is a real time game! long animations are bad! and all multi hit talent arts have long animations!

we imagine that multi hit talent arts being bad is a relic of 2. in xenoblade 2, specials used the same button as talent arts do in 3, but, you had to use them in chain attacks. we imagine they divided damage across the hits in 2 to try and balance multi hitting arts in chain attacks (which is very funny, because multi hit specials are the meta because they can get all hits to damage cap lol). very similar energy as leveling up and down at rest spots. in 2, these were designed to only be accessible in certain locations in the world, and you moved the cursor slowly, because you could (initially), only ever level up a tiny bit at a time. you also didn't unlock the ability to level down in 2 until new game +, probably done out of fear of affecting game balance since it was added in a update. they fixed the manual level control in Definitive Edition, making the menu snappier, accessible from the pause menu anywhere at any time, and let you use it from the beginning of any save file.

xenoblade 3, like DE, was also designed with the manual level capability from the start, but it used Xenoblade 2's method of accessing it. This is an inexplicable oversight, like, with talent arts it could've legitmately just been the developers forgetting to change it to reflect how talent arts engage in the real time combat, not the chain combat like specials. for leveling, the developers had to make new ways to access the options from 2 in order to fit 3's theming. it is,,, inexplicable.

back to program

chain attacks are still really good! but the regular combat feels a lot more xenoblade-like. it feels incredible how they did that and we love it.

xenoblade 3 does have options! just overcentralised

xenoblade 3 is more like torna! chain attacks are really good! but the regular combat is also fairly fleshed out.

xenoblade 2 didn't only feel overcentralising, but also like there were really not many options in regular combat, so you were meant to use chain attacks. 3 just feels overcentralising! there are so many things you can only really do outside of chain attacks, and it feels like they didn't actually mean to make chain attacks broken. in 2, it very much felt intentional!

like, buffs don't work properly in chain attacks, DPS is dramtically different, conditional damage buffs are difficult to achieve in chains, you can't use Ouroborus.

it is nice to know that the game very much lets you play more like you want to, without making all the non-chain attack options unfun. it just, hm, rough.

we think that xenoblade has an issue where dealing with enemy hits isn't very interesting. we think they either do too much or too little damage to make it so that healers are effective! it's tough. we don't know if this continues to be true.

X and 2 basically relied on complete invulnerability. of course we went into fights with a healing art in X still but it still stood that enemies had too few damage attributes to make it so you could basically gurantee zero damage, even if that could still be reactive it made healing basically a non mechanic. we think that enemy damage output and defenses should be looked at too.

anyways. xenoblade 3 combat has options, like torna! it is just completely overshadowed by chains. we think also that combat real time is disconnected and 3 and doesn't feel engaging and we think a huge part of that is because of six party memebers simultaneously, and that it makes it too much to focus on to reasonably engage with all the mechanics and diversity at once. we want this feeling to go away with character swapping but it still keeps feeling like too much to engage seriously with it fully. we hope non chain attack combat is fleshy!

conclusion

we think that xenoblade 3 combat is not fun and this is because of a overcentralising mechanic that in itself is not fun to engage with. Kinda like Dr. Coyle from hit video game Arms.

we are proud of ourselves for identifying why :) and also, and also, meow meow, and also being able to talk about.

ALSO we JUST remembered that future connected's chain attack equivalent is a literal union strike! that's the power of collective bargaining, babey.