A far more useful way to spend your charges are by performing party attacks or resurrecting allies. It's often boring and breaks up the flow of battle - and, in more frustrating scenarios - proves useless when you don't have a filled gauge. Although this is an interesting idea, and a cool way to incorporate the famed power of the Monado into everyday battles, you have no control over when you'll have these visions. You'll sometimes be given the chance to 'see into the future,' or predict an enemy's attack and burn a bar to prevent the action from happening. There are a couple ways to use these charges. As you perform these hits successfully, you build a three-bar gauge. Your job, then, is to time and deliver special skills to impair enemies or perform heavy damage. You control only one character in a fight, and they'll perform basic attacks on their own. Xenoblade's real-time battle system is complex, even a little unfriendly at first blush.

Like most role-playing games, Xenoblade divvies up your time between cutscenes, world exploration and battles, and it's in these last two pieces that the game really hits its stride. I can say with a sigh of relief that it's neither the story nor the characters that make this game good, but the system by which you control them. This is a shallow cast with few truly interesting characters to be found, but the game's twisting narrative at least kept me invested. Shulk wants to make the Mechonis pay his best friend Reyn feels similarly, but can't let his buddy adventure alone Sharla is happy to support their cause after the pair saves her loved ones from Mechon, and so forth. Shulk and his friends are simple characters with transparent motivations. Xenoblade's story, once established, is easier to keep up with than it first sounds. After hero Shulk's home town is attacked, he leaves on a journey of vengeance. The Mechonis is home to the Mechon - hostile machine creatures that brutally attack the residents of the Bionis.

Eventually, both beings perished in the battle, and the corpse of the Bionis became the world in which our heroes reside. Eons before the events of Xenoblade Chronicles, two great, god-like beings known as the Bionis and the Mechonis waged eternal war. But to understand its present-day story, you need to first know its lore. Xenoblade Chronicles begins as both a tale of revenge and a quest for answers about a mysterious sword called the Monado.

Xenoblade chronicles x level grinding