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Entry 1: WHAT DAY IS IT?!

November 13, 2022

My current save file was last played two months and two days ago. I nearly fell off of this game again, and I can tell you exactly why:

Side quests.

There is *so* much to do in Xenoblade Chronicles, to an absurd degree. I had gotten to the awe-inspiring sprawl of the Bionis' back, when I decided that I had some side quests floating around in my quest log that I wanted to clean up. There were plenty, but they were peppered throughout the areas I'd been through up to this point, so I figured it wouldn't take too long. I'd get a bit more grind in, get to revisit some old locales, but not stay around particularly long in any one place before I came back around to the story proper.

I was completely and horrifically wrong.

When I returned to Colony 9, the starting area, I was but a child--still bright-eyed and nostalgic for the home of the majority of the party's characters. I circled the perimeter of the colony gathering items for the first side quest I singled out, then, notified that I'd collected as many whateverberries or somethingflowers as I needed, entered Colony 9 proper to complete the quests which required talking to people.

This is where things got bad.

Using the map to track down my marks, I found something that, at first, tickled my curiosity: Questgiver icons. Apparently, on my initial jaunt through Colony 9, I had missed a handful of quests opportunities. No problem, I thought, I can stick with this for a little bit more.

Then I changed the time of day to make the contact for a quest appear in their place.

More questgiver icons appeared.

Okay, okay, a few more quests won't hurt me. This is still fine, I thought. But then, as I kept changing the time of day to complete more and more of the quests I'd let slip through the cracks, I just kept finding more new questgiver icons. After several hours zipping about the fields around Colony 9, it felt like the stream of quests would never end.

So skip them, right?

I wish it were that easy for me.

Some of these quests are genuinely interesting, like investigating an odd light at the bottom of the lake beneath the colony, then making a choice stemming from your discoveries that, while having no proper impact on the game, feels like a short dive into what kind of person you are.

Others, however, are so bland that I've clean forgotten what they were about. There are arguments between children, and... people who don't show up for work? Are they in danger? Are they lost somewhere that the player might not have explored yet? No, they were daydreaming behind a building.

And yet, I feel like I have to complete all of them. They're all so short and insignificant that, well, I've done a couple dozen, what's one more? And they just pile on like so.

Okay, writing this has convinced me: I'm going to complete the subquest I'd set as active--several areas ahead in Satorl Marsh--then continue with the plot. If I get bogged down in all of this, I'll never finish this game. Worse yet, I won't enjoy it.

Now, all of that said, I really do enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles--when the story is moving, or when I'm doing a very small handful of side quests. In fact, I just remembered that the story introduced an interesting development that the party is unaware of shortly before I stopped playing. I want to get back to *that* Xenoblade Chronicles, not the Xenoblade Chronicles with laughably stereotypical side quests.

So, if there's a lesson to be learned from this: Don't let Xenoblade Chronicles drown you in its optional content. If you don't enjoy it, quit and move on. Come back to it later, maybe, but don't let the game ruin itself. There's good stuff here, and I don't want to forget that because of the mediocre stuff.

Tune in for the next entry!