5 months until release

Xeno 3 has a higher sexuality rating than Xeno 2 did lol.

She's actually a great midgame blade but I've never bothered maxing her out because of the bullshit on the last leg of the quest.

Pretty in-line with a lot of Nintendo's stuff as of late. Announce just a few months before release.
Yeah basically this

Main characters finally sleep together again?

Yeah her quest is pretty damn awful, though I'm sure it's intended to run in the background while you do other things, you're not supposed to literally wait for merc missions to complete while doing nothing. What bothered me most was how short her missions were, not the total time it takes to complete them. With the right Blades one of her missions only takes a few minutes IIRC, so even if you're doing something else you have to go back to the menus all the time to kick off a new mission. If her missions were longer but you needed to do fewer of them the whole quest would be a lot less tedious since you could let it progress in the background without having to give it attention every few minutes.

Even better, if you start new game + the quest has to be redone.
My story with Ursula was getting her as fourth or fith blade, taking almost the whole walkthrough to put her on all the merc missions she has to do, hit new game, and never touching her anyway because I had a generic ball that healed changing weapons and did everything else better rolled at the end of the first run.

Is Torna good? Just finished DE and FC with around 100 hours. I've had Torna since I started XB2 NG+ but completely forgot about it.

>Xenoblade is one of Nintendo's AAA IPs, their most costly games to make
user, xeno is one of their cheapest games.

Yes, it also fixes a lot of the issues with xeno 2's battle system.

Yeah, it's good.
Be aware though that the game expects you to finish most side quests to progress the main story.

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Xenoblade is definitely not a AAA IP. It doesn't sell anywhere close enough for it to have a budget like that. Mario, Zelda, Smash and Pokemon (kek) are the only series that could justify a AAA budget.

And even then the only game that came close to a AAA budget was BoTW

I've easily done her quest 10 times over because her 2 minute missions are fucking legendary for completing nodes on common Blades. Easily managed to get all my Idea levels up to level 10 across all Drivers (helps for pulling Rare Blades and four crown commons for Overdrive Protocols, lower crowns give Weaponry boosts, and also acts as a multiplier to the elemental damage tied to each Idea).

I wouldn't say that
Xeno is probably closer to something like Mario or Zelda in budget, probably somewhere around $50-80 million for a brand new entry with new assets and voice acting and game mechanics.
The critical thing is that Monolith puts in a lot of work on Ninty's other projects. So while xenoblade isn't a huge success in terms of profit (though maybe that changed with XB2 and XB1 DE), I can imagine it being a situation of "one for them, one for us"
For every 2-3 games Monolith helps out with on the EPD side of things, they're cleared for the budget of one of their own internal projects.
And given that they separated out a special studio JUST to handle help with other EPD projects (specifically on art and 3D asset creation), I can see XB3 being their reward for working on Animal Crossing, Splatoon 3 and BOTW2

They probably spend a lot for the soundtrack as well considering how many people are involved. And Melia's VA certainly isn't cheap nowadays.

Xenoblade X was possibly the most expensive game Nintendo ever published. Nintendo sees Xenoblade as a training investment, and it pays off by using Monolith Soft to help out in every major release from BotW to New Horizons.

>Xeno is probably closer to something like Mario or Zelda in budget, probably somewhere around $50-80 million for a brand new entry with new assets and voice acting and game mechanics.
Not even remotely close. Xenoblade is on considerably less than Mario let alone Zelda with botw still standing as their most expensive game.
>So while xenoblade isn't a huge success in terms of profit
I'm going to stop you there because there hasn't been a single xeno game that hasn't been successful monetarily.

Yeah, it's good for what it is. It has a lot of content and will give you a lot of background on a bunch of characters and show some of the events that happened in the past. The combat is overall worse and dumbed down, they simplified blade combos (anything works, no longer need specific elemental routes) and you cannot pick and choose which Blades you use since it only has story Blades assigned to specific drivers, so there's basically no party customization. The combat is much less flexible and you have way fewer options than the main game but I can understand why they did this, Torna is a lot shorter than the main game so there's a lot less time to find and use lots of different games. I'm not a fan of it but I think this sort of change was necessary given the length, so it works out overall. It's not long enough for the lack of flexibility to truly get on your nerves.

There are also only 2 Blades per driver, but you can control Blades directly when you swap to them. The one truly good idea the combat has is that swapping the character you control triggers a special arte, plus it offers healing. The latter basically means that as the controlled character takes damage the HP isn't lost immediately and permanently, a chunk of the health bar goes red and if you swap the character out that chunk is healed, so it adds another factor to deciding when you should and should not swap.

>Xenoblade X was possibly the most expensive game Nintendo ever published
Not even close. The game would have been a massive failure on their part needing at minimum 2m to break even like botw did but we know that the game did in fact make a profit.

Thanks anons

Beat me to it

Kind of like how FC was limiting in its gameplay then I guess. Behind forced to only have four party members and not having the vision system really grated after a few hours.

yew, you said "period"

I said “huge success”, generally meaning an ROI of $10:$1
I know Xeno games usually at least break even and then some but it’s a bit like how ARMS isn’t considered a huge success by many people (and potentially Ninty themselves) even though it likely made back it’s budget a couple of times over. Because people compare it’s ROI to something like Splatoon.
My point is that Xenoblade games are likely funded on the stipulation that Monolith helps out with other projects.
I think $50-80 mil isn’t too absurd of BOTW allegedly cost about $120 mil to make (based on Reggie’s one comment that it needed to sell 2 million copies to break even)

Yeah actually that's kind of how it feels like.

WE ARE

still waiting to see if they make a CE before i preorder.

Give me XC3 music aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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There's an Iwata Asks where he brings up when Takahashi went to get approval for the voice budget, Nintendo was in shock by the sheer amount needed. X was also easily one of the most expansive games ever released on a Nintendo platform, if not the most expansive. The fact that it was part of a niche series (it was the game that made it a series) and released exclusively on the Wii U (and all the paid DLC was built in outside of Japan) should tell you that the game was not released to be immediately profitable. It was even an HD game when Nintendo was collectively struggling with HD development, with only a few handfuls of examples like Super Mario 3D World and The Wonderful 101 (developed by PG) being examples of bigger HD games published by them at the time.

If Super Mario is Nintendo's AAA platformer and The Legend of Zelda is their AAA action-adventure game and Splatoon is their AAA third-person shooter, then Xenoblade is their AAA JRPG. No, not Pokémon, the only thing that bloats that budget is the sheer amount of marketing it gets. The purpose of Xenoblade is to
>be a training exercise in HD AAA game development for the growing Monolith Soft staff so they can provide assistance on other projects
>fill a major gap in Nintendo's line-up of IPs and genres, being a JRPG for a more traditional audience than Pokémon caters to, a way to stand with the Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests
Even the amount of work that has gone into promoting the games over the past decade is unusual compared to what you would normally consider to be a lower tier of Nintendo releases.
>2010: Xenoblade
>2013: Shulk for Smash
>2015: Xenoblade 3D
>2015: Xenoblade X
>2017: Xenoblade 2
>2018: Xenoblade 2: Torna - The Golden Country
>2020: Xenoblade Definitive Edition
>2021: Pyra/Mythra for Smash
>2022: Xenoblade 3
Brand growth seems to have really ramped up in the last decade and it's still growing.

that OP is a retard.

it'll probably be the exact same gameplay as XBC2. Elden Ring did the same thing, kept the actual gameplay reveal for very late

I’m not sure, but if the gameplay is as bad as XB2’s they’re not getting any of my money again. The fact that they’re hiding the gameplay EVNE though it releases in just a few months probably means the gameplay is going to be shit.

Retard you know nothing.
>probably
The words of an idiot dunce

HRT rage

would you a bird or a cat

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>Xenoblade
>AAA IP

We will get gameplay in june or july.
That's the most logic thing to do for marketing.

Wait, Shulk was 2014, I'm forgetting my years. But 2010-2012 was essentially "Hey, that Xenoblade game finally came out, here's 1-2 years of begging Nintendo to release it outside of Japan, and the American release is just a limited one anyway". 2013 had the X teasers when Nintendo shot their load all at once to convince people the Wii U had a future. In 2014, you'd be easily forgiven for not having any idea who Shulk was. But in the span of 6 years, they remade Xenoblade TWICE. In the span of 7 years, they released three expansive new console entries.

I'm not saying it's recognized like Mario or Zelda or even Splatoon, just that Nintendo just keeps publishing and investing in these huge games in a short timeframe that rivals their AAA output.

Xenoblade reference in Lego Star Wars

youtu.be/OLtkR7xLvbs

Bird I suppose

>just that Nintendo just keeps publishing and investing in these huge games in a short timeframe that rivals their AAA output.
You need to stop thinking that game size makes a game AAA user. It doesn't.

CANCEL ADAM HOWDEN

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Lol
Howden is in fucking everything

I love xeno series so much

Finished XB1 a week or so back and it was fucking kino. How does Takahashi do it? Literally the best JRPG series besides Etrian Odyssey

Howden is based.
I think for the release of Ultimate he posted a screenshot of the game where the camera was positioned so it looked like Palutena was giving Shulk a blowjob, was pretty funny.

Aside from Xenoblade 3, I can't believe I'm actually excited for a new Star Ocean game. Call me crazy, but it kinda reminds of me of Xenoblade X

This year is not bad for JPRG and SciFi fans.

Nene and Kino are cute as fuck and it took until them for me to appreciate Nopon

I don't understand

Howden suggested the goblins in harry potter might not actually be an allegory for jews and now he's hitler

This is disgusting. Why are Brits so transphobic? Boris Johnson just said transwomen shouldn't be in female sports too

Found it.
twitter.com/A_HOWDZ/status/1083023488267571200

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riki is one of the most based characters in XC1 my man and it’s not because he’s the comic relief pineapple