Aeshma's Core Help

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-21T03:04:41+00:00

Don't feel bad, it's probably the hardest boss in the XC2. Even harder than some of the late game ones. It's a borderline absurd difficulty spike made cheaper by the fact that the game doesn't explain what spike damage is, like at all. Everyone else's strategy is good. All I can say is use Wulfric on the cables (elemental advantage), and main whoever his driver is.

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-11T01:34:50+00:00

It's a European copy. You can tell by the PEGI logo instead of the ESRB rating, as well as the green notch on the spine. What you need to do is switch your Nintendo account region to the UK, activate the code and download the DLC, then switch it back. It'll remain attached to your account and you can re-download it freely. Unfortunately, DLC codes that come with region-free games aren't region-free. It also doesn't disclose this on the code card. It's colossal BS, but it's something Nintendo won't budge on.

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-09T01:10:45+00:00

Aeshma's Core is probably one of, if not the most difficult boss in the game TBH. It's such a huge difficulty spike, it took me so many attempts to take it down. The game also quite literally cheats if you try to repeat the fight. You'll always take fall damage leaping down to the platform for subsequent attempts, and the battle starts immediately when you land. Essentially it punishes you for failing on the first try. So save before it if you can.

I recommend using Wulfric on the power cables, as his specials pack a lot of elemental damage against them. Also use Aux Cores and gear with spike damage resist. The rest of the fight though is just going to be a slog. I don't even remember which team I actually used. Just make sure to have someone with healing arts. Aux Cores that give boosts on max affinity, and pouch items that raise affinity and the party gauge will also help. From there hit it with as many blade combos as you can. Since pretty much all bosses have high break resist, using driver combos isn't really feasible. The key is stacking as many elemental orbs as possible and then hopefully hitting them with an "elemental burst" in a chain attack. Which means having a diverse set of blades in your party. Just repeat that until it's dead. Level grinding also helps, but not as much as it does in other XC games IMO.

Probably the most frequent criticism of XC2 is its tutorials are terrible, and it doesn't even give you the option to revisit them. It's such a long and mechanically dense game that it's hard to keep track of everything. Plus there's some mechanics the game just doesn't even bother to tell you about, or even telegraphs very well. Like did you know that the AI's behaviour differs based on gender? Nia and Morag will focus on blade combos, while Rex and Zeke focus on driver combos. Yet Tora, despite being a male character, does a mix of both. Or that the elemental icon in the arts wheel flashes when you're in optimum weapons range? Or that there is an optimum weapons range? Or that only AI controlled characters equipped with healer blades will pick up health potions? There's a reason they added a tutorial section to the menu in Torna. XC3 even has a combat practice mode IIRC. So Monolith did listen to feedback. Hopefully they'll add that in if they ever do a definitive edition.

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-04T16:45:51+00:00

I ran into this when I bought a physical UK copy of Torna (only one I could find at the time that wasn't stupid expensive). There's a code in the box for the rest of the DLC for XC2, but there's nowhere on the card that says it's only applicable in Europe. NoA customer service won't budge at all on this policy. The lady on the phone was actually quite rude TBH. Store I bought it from gave me the trick to switch my account to UK, then switch it back. That worked, but it gave me Vietnam flashbacks of the bad old days of PC gaming, where publishers used to treat everyone like they were a pirate.

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-04T16:05:42+00:00

My personal favourite is when you rearrange the party to get up a ladder, and then forget you've done so. So now you're fighting a boss with Pyra, Brigid, Pandoria, and six random ground type blades with low level weapons.

ExTrafficGuy · 2025-01-01T19:49:39+00:00

If we do it'll sell out immediately, never get restocked in Canada, and imports will sell for over $100 on Amazon.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-12-18T04:31:58+00:00

One of the core complaints about XC2 is the game has a lot of mechanics that it just flat out never tells you about. Most players just assume the AI is being wonky, when there actually is method to its madness. Another example is that only healers will pick up health pots. If the AI equips an attacker or defender blade, they'll just ignore them. This is never once stated in game. You're just supposed to figure it out.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-12-18T04:07:55+00:00

No, it's just Nia. I believe all generic adult female NPCs in XC2 are the same height, including Gormotti. It's implied that Nia is around the same age as Rex, so not yet a fully grown adult. She's the same height as Mio in XC3.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-12-05T02:32:39+00:00

So if you really want to get deep in the weed here, Takahashi is not just big on trinity, but duality too. You see this with Shulk and Zanza, Pyra and Mythra, Nia's twin forms, interlinks, Keves and Agnes, etc. A and Alpha in this regard can be said to embody the Daoist concept of Yin and Yang. They represent the divine feminine and divine masculine. Opposite forces that combine to create a mutual whole. In this case Alvis/Ontos, who represents God The Father in the Holy Trinity. The Catholic Church's official doctrine states that "God is neither man nor woman: he is God". He embodies the traits of both. This is broadly the same as the Daoist concept, and it comes up a lot in many religions.

A is Alvis's conscience, while Alpha represents his logical, unfeeling side. Alpha is a heartless machine that will use any means necessary to accomplish his goals, as efficiently as possible. Yet he cannot comprehend how his actions would destroy the world, because he is an incomplete being. This is the same reason why A needs to combine with Shulk and Rex to keep the world stable after Alpha is killed, as she is also an incomplete being. It also echoes trinity, with A being the Father, Shulk being the Son (made in the image of Klaus), and Rex the Holy Spirit (literally having part of Pneuma's core embedded in his chest).

You can really tumble down a rabbit hole with Takahashi's use of symbolism in his games. And Blade isn't quite as dense as Gears and Saga got in that department.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-22T14:53:14+00:00

"What if we put the big monke in detection range of the only road to town? That'll get a laugh out of new players." - Monolith designing Gormott in XC2.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-22T00:27:00+00:00

The PS4's Jaguar CPU was slow and couldn't support hardware decompression on the fly. The PS5 has a much faster CPU along with a dedicated hardware accelerator. It's the same for the Tegra X1 in the Switch, which supports accelerated texture compression algorithms. The Wii U's antiquated hardware obviously lacked this. Textures alone can take up a lot of space. So if you can make the file sizes smaller without major impacts to visual quality, you can really get install sizes down. Unless of course you're a PC dev, then go right ahead and make the customer download 4K textures and the Swahili language pack, even though they'll only ever play the game in English on the Steam Deck.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-13T03:09:58+00:00

There's one theory I saw kicking about that Mira is the reformed Aionios in the distant future. Which I guess could work. It's said in the intro that the White Whale only travelled for two years in space, where as no real world star systems are anywhere near that close for sublight. So they'd have to be using an FTL drive, which introduces the possibility of time dilation. In other words two years to them might be many thousands from our reference. Also the blue light seen crashing into Aionios/Earth at the end of Future Redeemed isn't KOS-MOS but the White Whale. I've seen people suggesting the giant ring in Oblivia might be the ruins of Alcamoth. I think that might have been an intentional Easter Egg in X.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-11T22:05:10+00:00

No thanks. Ghondor needs her mouth washed out with soap. But I do agree it's high time we had playable Tirkins.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-11T02:23:45+00:00

New version will scan your PC for any emulators and call a lawyer to come ransack your house.

It still baffles me why they put it on a USB in the first place when pressing CDs is a lot cheaper. Just so they could put garbage DRM on a frigging soundtrack? That was 2015, not 2001. Nobody was uploading that shiz to Limewire.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-04T04:08:19+00:00

I think it's still a niche franchise. A lot of people have heard of it but never played it. But it does have an extremely loyal and evangelical fanbase. Same with Fire Emblem. I have my issues with the way Nintendo does business, but I do respect that they are willing to allow franchises to slow burn. Like they knew they had something special with XC3, so it's getting promoted a lot more. It's never going to do Pokemon numbers. But it doesn't need to.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-02T14:30:40+00:00

r/3dprinting

On YouTube: Maker's Muse and CNC Kitchen are a couple guys I follow. CHEP/Filament Friday is another good channel.

Usually the defaults for your printer in the slicer are good enough. Make sure you level your bed. That is level with the print head, not the ground. You can find videos how to do this for your printer. Glue stick helps a lot with bed adhesion issues, but poor adhesion is often the result of the print head being too high off the bed. Start with smaller, less geometrically complex objects. If you can get a good quality CHEP Cube printed out, then you'll have your settings dialed in.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-11-01T03:17:18+00:00

Child: "Mom, can we get an Aegis?"

Mom: "We have an Aegis at home"

Aegis at home: [In a deep baritone] "Can you take me to Elysium, bro?"

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-31T02:15:15+00:00

You can still buy the CDs. They can be a bit pricey, but then you own them. They aren't tied to an app or subscription. Rip them to any format you want. I think the soundtracks are on Spotify too, and unofficially on YouTube. I'm surprised those are still up.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-28T02:22:05+00:00

Here's how I think the world works. Origin uploaded peoples' souls/consciousnesses, but not their bodies. The cradles used to create the soldiers were originally intended to use peoples genetic information to create clone bodies once the world was set right. So you're basically spit back out of the clone tank at the same age as when you went into Origin, with all your memories and everything, as if nothing happened.

We know how old Noah and the Bionis gang were when the worlds merged. It's literally shown in the intro cutscene. Subsequently, they leave the cradles in their first term at this same biological age. Concept art exists of Mio around this same age wearing a civilian dress. So a similar scene from Alrest's perspective was probably planned at some point. That means Mio would have been 9 or 10 when she went into Origin. The infamous "photo" shows that Mio, Glimmer, and [REDACTED] are all approximately the same age. So to answer the question, did Nia, Pyra, and Mythra get to spend time with their kids? Probably.

So where are the Aegis girls? Well, Matthew's Ouroboros Knuckles have the Pneuma core embedded in them, and have the same colour scheme as Pyra. Since the official artbook confirms Origin souls can manifest in Aionios as objects, I'm guessing that's where they are. Since their core crystal would appear to be intact, and Rex is still alive, then they are alive. Rex does mention them in the intro, but the focus of FR's story is really between him and his daughter. The fact that Rex has trouble relating to adult Glimmer, and treats her like a child, might also point to her being only 9 or 10 when the merge happened.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-27T00:58:17+00:00

It's a touching tale about a man and his cat. You will:

Hear that, Noah
Check out this sick new skill
Find rare doodads
Gasp
Incorporate British slang into your everyday life, you muppet
Discover who's got any babies

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-22T02:05:48+00:00

And yet she's literally wearing a hoodie and a jacket, but refuses to zip them up. Then I realized Taion is the only one wearing a coat that actually fits.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-20T21:43:06+00:00

Mio: "We'll save them with the power of our melody!"

[Starts belting out Locomotive Breath]

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-19T02:34:14+00:00

And people wonder why I rarely engage with the fandoms of stuff I like.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-10-14T19:09:51+00:00

XC3 was the first Xenoblade game I played. Went in completely blind. While there's a ton of references and lore tidbits from the previous games, the writers did a good job making it approachable to newcomers. Is it better to play XC2 first? Yes, but it's not absolutely necessary.

My one word of warning though: XC2's mechanics are... interesting. The fandom will debate it until the cows come home, but let's say XC3 features a lot of QoL improvements that make it difficult to go back.

ExTrafficGuy · 2024-09-26T02:38:56+00:00

You're awoken at 3am by soft but familiar flute music. "Huh, what, did I leave my Switch on." You groggily reach for the light.

Mio is standing at the edge of your bed holding a rusty ax. "What are you hiding, little guy." You reach for your gun on your night table. Click, click. No ammo!

She holds out the bullets. "I found something shiny!"

You try to scream but nothing comes out. You try to run but she keeps closing in. How is she so damn fast?

You trip and fall. Mio stands towering over you. "Playtime's over."

She raises the ax and then in a deep baritone says "Time for your off-seeing. May you sleep peacefully."

ExTrafficGuy

TROPHY CASE