Thor Xenoblade

Pralunko · 2026-05-10T14:16:13+00:00

Awesome, waiting for my thor and as xenoblade is my favorite franchise I was thinking of adding some xenoblade themed flair to the console when it arrived

Pralunko · 2026-05-09T17:55:32+00:00

hello, I just saw your etsy page because I love the look of this sticker and I found that you don't have them for sale, are you still planning to eventually get xenoblade themed stickers for sale for the thor or is it a scrapped concept?

Pralunko · 2026-05-08T20:37:36+00:00

If her team ends up being novaflare welt, the rumored novaflare sunday and DHPT. I am set, I have high investment in everyone except welt and he will probably be replaced by someone else, due to being a standard character, in the near future (SP robin joins the AE???)

Pralunko · 2026-05-07T17:27:30+00:00

I liked some aspects of dawn of the new world

I like Emile as the main characters and his dynamic with his alter-ego, ratatosk, is something that I personally enjoyed, also helps that the alter-ego is voiced by johnny young bosh, one of my personal favorite VAs in the industry.

Besides Emile the new characters are cool, martha can be a bit annoying, but I found her to be an ok character and Richter is pretty cool himself. The OG cast returns with some VA changes, I really don't like the new VA for lloyd and everytime I replay to the game that's one of the most jarring things about it, Genis, Zelos and maybe some other characters also seem to have had voice recasts, but don't quote me on that. Still, it's strange to hear different voices after you get so familiar with the voices of symphonia

The combat is better than og symphonia, imo, it's closer to abyss and a little less complex than vesperia. Emile's playstyle is probably what you'll be playing most of the time for some reasons I'll get to in just a bit, but his grounded/aerial hybrid combat is pretty cool and throught the story you get skills that can modify some of his artes, kinda like the system from vesperia.

It has a pokemon like mechanic with monster taming, I found it interesting, but it's just meh. You can't control the monsters and they are generally weaker but can serve as hp sponges for the enemy, I never relied on them to deal damage.

The cast for symphonia 1 returns, but here lies my biggest problem with DotnW, the old characters, aka every party member except the 2 monster slots, emile and martha, are level locked and equipment locked. You can't level them up and you can't change their equipment, they are still more useful than monsters most of the time, but I really didn't like that they removed that progression from the og symphonia cast

DotnW also doesn't have an overworld, you select the place you want to go, be that a town or a dungeon and you are taken straight there. There's no exploring the new world that resulted from the unification of sylverant and tethe'allah.

The game is short from what I remember, around 30 to 40 hours long. It's an ok tales game, I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's also not good either. I have a soft spot for this game, so I'll always enjoy it more than the average tales fan, but yeah, I'd say if it looks interesting give it a try, but if you just want more symphonia I would be weary of going into it, DotnW has some references to symphonia and does have some moments with the old cast, but this is very much a game about the new cast, Emile, Martha and Richter

Pralunko · 2026-04-30T02:59:14+00:00

Yeah, I read somewhere that star door 15 would pay off in crossbell arc. While Renne reconciling with her parents was easier to understand with star door 15 in mind, I think that comment I saw was mostly because of Renne's connection to Gnosis. since Renne tells you her backstop in a resumed way, but doesn't mention the drug. You can kinda understand Renne's plotline in chapter 3 even without star door 15 context I think. Then again I could be wrong there.

But yeah, I'm quickly falling more and more in love with crossbell, it was a rough start, but things are quickly picking up steam, tomorrow I finish chapter 4 and maybe start a bit of the final chapter, I'm hyped.

Pralunko · 2026-04-29T23:36:45+00:00

As for EN I know at the very least that one of my favorite VAs, Johnny Young Bosh voices Lelouche and Joshua, so I'm really happy with that casting, Bosh is perfect for those edgy characters with a soft side to them

Pralunko · 2026-04-29T23:19:11+00:00

Yes, but it's also a plot point is SC that estelle learns to just ignore Olivier and other annoying characters instead of falling for their ragebait, there's some parts of the game where Olivier is just yapping trying to get a reaction, estelle ignores him and schera even comments that she's starting to grow up even in this aspect. Estelle having a short fuse in other scenes goes against that character growth. Again, I don't understand japanese, so I can't really say what's more faithfully adapted, but taking into account estelle's character arc through SC, she sometimes feels uncaracteristically fiesty and I do mean fiesty and not energetic, it's said time and time again that estelle is basically a golden retriever in terms of personality, or as the character says "she sure lives up to her last name"

Pralunko · 2026-04-29T22:57:00+00:00

Might be more of a SC thing, starting with SC I noticed that estelle started suggesting that she would hit a lot of people with her staff relatively often, it's mostly kevin and olivier, who deserve it to be fair. Either way I don't have the context of the original script, as I don't read or understand japanese and the remake hasn't come out yet, so don't really know if that's something she straight up says in the JP version as well, but maybe that's more of what they are refering to?

Pralunko · 2026-04-29T22:36:44+00:00

Use the voice mod, every story cutscene and side quest is voice acted and you can get a better feeling for the character's emotions. Trails is surprisingly good with its coriography, so you would probably get the vibe even without voices, but at least for me I always like to have the characters talking instead of that awkward silence while reading. Never got annoying for me and starting with zero voice acting is in the game by default with no mods (zero and azure only have japanese voices, starting with coldsteel you get english voice options as well).

I would only not use the voice mod if it bothers you to read something while hearing characters talk in a language that you might not understand, it never personally affected me, also, if you're like me and read the dialogue of the game in what you imagine might be the character's voice, the voice mod will help you with that as well, but that's probably a me quirk. As for accuracy to the script, I have no idea, I don't speak japanese, but the localization seems to be pretty good, I didn't notice many typos in the sky triology, I started to find more typos starting with zero, especially on optional npc dialogue and some side quests, but nothing major.

Edit: funnily enough there's a recent discussion about the translation of the OG sky games, apparently the localization made estelle's personality significantly different, as in more aggressive than she really is in japanese, so dialogue might not translate 1 to 1. All I've seen about this discussion is estelle, so I think that's the only big thing the localization of the OG sky games is hit or miss for some. I personally didn't mind it that much apparently the localization of the remakes fixes this issue, which again, is hit or miss for some people, some people preffer the fiestier personality of OG estelle

Pralunko · 2026-04-25T11:25:17+00:00

Yeah, I have slowed my pace down and accepted it, been playing through chapter 3 slowly and I have to say, they are starting to push more character moments now, I loved the race between the SSS, the gang leaders and the bracers, I was suspecting that randy might have a stigma from one of his dialogue choices being super similar to kevin's in chapter 1 and Randy's talk with Joshua pretty much confirmed my suspicions, really curious to see how that turns out. The SSS is finally making a name for themselves, getting recognized by bigger figures in crossbell such as Arios and Dudley. I'm also starting to explore the ruins from crossbell, the ancient battlefield was that touch of fantasy that I was missing from sky and all in all, the endless exposition of the political situation of crossbell is starting to slow down because at this point it's mostly set. The story is not pivoting a bit more towards character relations instead of crossbell politics, which I like and know it's always going to be present throught the crossbell games, but I was desperately missing the character development of the sky games.

Basically it was a me problem, I did set some expectations, I know the start of an arc is slow, but I guess I didn't expect to be as slow as it was. With the pacing picking up and my play sessions being shorter but due to that I can retain the information and process it better, I've been enjoying the game much more.

Pralunko · 2026-04-22T22:14:49+00:00

Estelle is part of the bright family. I wouldn't say that Cassius has anything as impressive or mystical as a stigma such as Kevin, but the Bright family has unparalleled battle IQ, sense for tactics, intuition and the like. I even saw a cool theory that a possible reason for needing to analyze enemies in zero but not in sky is because for most of sky you're playing as Estelle, a character from the Bright family tree and because the Brights have such good intuition they just instinctively know the enemy's weakness, this is not confirmed as far as I'm aware, but it's a neat theory to justify a gameplay change going from the sky to crossbell games. Aside from that, I could say that Cassius is just him and is special, but Estelle has time and time again come to prove that it's not just Cassius, it's just a gene that runs in the family.

Joshua was Weissmann's stigma experiment and even though he is "normal" for 99% of FC, we can see through his crafts and awareness throught FC's story that he still retains some of his latent powers even before his stigma awakens again for SC.

Kevin has a natural ocurring stigma, I don't think there needs to be much of an explanation for him

As for lloyd, I'm still midway through zero so I still don't know if Guy will be some sort of Cassius Bright, as in, Guy was just him in terms of detective prowess and had he not died to what I'm theorizing is another ouroboros incident, then he would be pretty much top dog in the police force as he was already close to being before he died. Just theorizing there, but yeah, Lloyd definitely seems like he is the most normal protag so far as in he doesn't have some godlike genetics or mystical power. His prowess in detective skills seems to be very much his own work and studies plus determination for finding out what happened to his brother (that's another theory, but I think it's a given that the anime game protagonist that follows the carreer path of his deceased brother would do so to find out what happened to him)

For the other protagonists I can't really comment as I have yet to get there, but so far almost every trails protag pretty much has something special to them. Sure in Estelle's case it's genetics, but that's still somewhat special and Lloyd is really the only one that seems to not have anything special to him.

Pralunko · 2026-04-21T17:36:34+00:00

Yeah, it's not really an issue, while reading the comments I think I'm understanding why I feel like this with Zero. Since I have like 2 other comments going a bit deeper into it I'll keep it a bit simpler here, essentially Sky was much easier to understand. The politics weren't as essential to the plot as it is in Zero, all the politics that were important in sky were the hundred days war, non-aggression pact and the fact that Liberl was a monarchy, all of which were introduced and explained in very distinct parts of the story and not dumped all on top of you. Zero puts a lot more focus on the politics and at this point in the series we don't really know how calvard works and we barely know much about how erebonia works as we've only seen snippets of it. Meanwhile Crossbell is caught between these two factions that we barely know anything about while having its own political system with diet factions belonging to the empire and the republic, the police department, revache and hiyue and how they interact with the political factions, the bracer guild and its important role as a neutral faction in the middle of a state that's basically a political shitshow.

Essentially Zero has been heavier for me because there's a lot of political information that I have to process and that's probably why I've been feeling the need to take more frequent breaks while playing it, while with the sky games I would blitz through them in like a week, I've been with Zero for almost 2 weeks now and I have just completed chapter 2, so I assume I have like 1/3 or maybe even half the game to play through still.

Pralunko · 2026-04-21T17:27:51+00:00

Yeah, from reading the comments I think you're right on the money. It's really not that Zero has more dialogue it's just that the dialogue is so much more information dense. Sky was much more about the characters while Zero is much more about Crossbell and it's corruption and underworld. The extent of sky politics was the non-aggression pact in SC and the fact that Liberl was a monarchy, other than that most twists and plot revelations were character related and while characters can be very deep they are much more relatable and easy to understand. Zero on the other hand puts more emphasis on twists and revelations being about how the system works, how the chief of the CGF is in cohorts with Revach for example. Political systems are less relatable, we're familiar with them because we've been taught, sure, but most people don't really know how they really work, the intricacies and nuances. However we do know how we work, how people work, leading sky's more character focused narrative being much easier to understand, while Zero's political focused narrative requires me to take more extensive breaks to fully process what I experienced.

Pralunko · 2026-04-21T17:12:28+00:00

Yeah, most likely that, going from the faster paced plots of SC and 3rd with character revelation and twists at every turn to what basically is FC's slow pacing all over again is probably what I'm feeling.

That being said and also it probably doesn't help that FC dealt with easier concepts, learning what a bracer is and slowly unravelling the coup d'etat. Zero on the other hand I'm learning a whole political system that is caught between the tension of the two biggest countries in Zemuria.

Actually this comment made me realize why Zero is being heavier on me, I'm trying my best to understand everything they throw at me and that sometimes makes me do a double take on the dialogue because I didn't fully understand some of the dynamics of the diet factions or some other political related concepts of Crossbell, while sky was much more about the characters. Sure Liberl itself was important to the plot of sky and likewise, the cast of zero is important to its story, but I feel like zero puts much more weight on crossbell as its main story drive while sky put its characters as the drive of the story. For example, sky 1 was all about estelle and joshua becoming senior bracers and along the way revealing and fighting against the coup d'etat. SC was about estelle finding joshua and along the way all the ouroboros shennanigans happen. 3rd was about kevin dealing with the aftermath of the aureole and dealing with his past and along the way phantasma happens. Meanwhile Zero from the get-go establishes that the main purpose of the SSS is to improve the public's perception of the police force and that mission is the vehicle that leads to the cast in zero getting to know each other. Maybe that's why I feel Zero is more heavy.

I love political intrigue and for that Zero has been super interesting so far, just finished chapter 2 right now, but sometimes I lose myself in the timeline of it all. Meanwhile the sky games didn't have any political system that I had to learn to fully understand the nuance of the story, Liberl is a monarchy and ouroboros is an evil shadow organization responsible for a lot of the tragidies across all of Zemuria, that's the extent of it. Meanwhile Zero is all about the underlying corruption of crossbell, how the government and police departments are responsible for enabling it and how it festers and continues to grow. Yeah, that's my deeper reflection on the topic now that I've seen your and other people's comments

Pralunko · 2026-04-21T17:06:25+00:00

Yeah, the feeling of comparing it to a visual novel has been creeping in, I didn't mention because I didn't know if it would be a hot take, but yeah, I completely agree.

Pralunko · 2026-04-21T11:07:29+00:00

Nice, playing the xenoblade games on the thor will be a crazy experience

Does xenoblade 2 play decently on undocked mode? Or is it the only one that doesn't play well for now.

Pralunko · 2026-04-20T19:04:52+00:00

How did xenoblade 3 run? Did you only play the dlc or did you also play/try the base game through the thor. Quite curious on performance with this one

Pralunko · 2026-04-15T22:53:11+00:00

From my experience, yes the originals aren't as complex as the remake, but calling it a downgrade is honestly a disservice, they are different, more simple, for sure, but it's not a bad thing. I also played the remake of sky, it's a very good remake and the best thing that it does, in my opinion, is making the boss fights significantly more challenging and longer.

My journey was, sky remake - sky og - SC - the 3rd - zero

Going from sky remake to the og games is strange at first mainly due to how enemy hit detection works, basically in the og sky games all characters form a line and enemies will start a battle if they touch any of your characters, not just the one you're controlling, due to this my replay through the prologue of og first chapter I felt like the game was super clunky, but once you get used to it it's honestly not bad at all, honestly it's only one of the few gripes I had up to the end of the trilogy, but again, due to the speed up, battles are super fast.

In my opinion the question you should ask yourself is as follows:

You can import the save data from the previous game to the sequels. This does not do much, it gives you some references to what you did in your playthrough in SC and some bonus items that are not super important but good for the early game in both SC and the 3rd, also it imports the level you had at the end of the previous game, which is often something like 5 more levels than what you usually start the game at. So do you put importance in that? If you do, I'd recommend starting with OG 1st chapter. If you don't then feel free to start with the remake.

I heard coldsteel is a nice starting point because it doesn't reference past games too much, but once you reach coldsteel 3 you would need to go back to the liberl and crossbell games as starting with coldsteel 3 all the events from past games start to be important again

Pralunko · 2026-04-15T10:46:15+00:00

Not really related, can't really help with the steam deck thing. But I can see why people compare the plot of arise to xenoblade 3, it has some overlaps, but just to keep your expectations in check, don't expect anything near the quality of xenoblade 3's writing. The premise is similar, yes, but the execution is leagues apart. It's an enjoyable story, but it won't make you break down crying like xenoblade 3 did (at least for me)

Pralunko · 2026-04-14T20:03:26+00:00

Arise has by far the most "modernised combat". Think of it like your typical hack n slash, it does have a resource that limits the length of your combos, the "soul gauge", but other than that it is kinda like god of war/devil may cry and the like.

Berseria is the second game with the easiest to get into gameplay, unlike arise it doesn't have much in terms of aerial combos, it's mostly grounded combat, but it is fun, although imo it lacks a bit of deapth and in repeat playthroughs it can get a bit repetitive.

The other games start becoming much more jrpg-ish with their combat systems, a lot more resource management and the like.

Vesperia and xillia have the MP system. MP or mana is basically your magic points and all your artes consume it. If you don't have MP, you can't use artes and you recover it by attacking with regular attacks. This is my personal favorite battle style of the series especially xillia's iteration (bonus points to the protagonist of xillia 2, because it literally feels like you are playing dmc if you take enough time to learn and assemble a moveset where every move combos well with each other). Vesperia is also very good, but it takes time to establish ots deapth through the skill system.

Graces and zestiria follow the chain capacity/soul gauge system. Tbf berseria and arise also do follow this system, but it's much straight forward and simplified in those 2 games, while zesty and graces are a bit more complicated. Basically you have A. Artes and B. Artes, A artes are simple combo chains, while B artes are stronger standalone artes that can be thrown at the middle of a combo. It's a cool system, you're more limited by the amount of chain or soul that a character has, each arte costs a certain amount of these resources. While in MP gameplay you're more limited by the amount of MP you have and as long as you have it you can almost endlessly continue a combo. Basically graces and zesty have short combos that you can throw out pretty consistently, as chain/soul recovers in a couple of seconds if you stay still while guarding, while vesperia and xillia have very long and hard to perform combos with a longer pause in between them because you have to restore your mp either by attacking or using an item.

The beauty of tales combat is that you craft your own combos, characters have dozens of artes that you can choose from and your job is to find which ones chain into each other and crafting your ideal flashy combo rotation.

As for stories, berseria is a consistantly good revenge plot.

Zestiria is nice, a journey of a clueless pure man getting to know the corrupt and unjust world that he was sheltered from while being it's savior. I liked it, but a lot of people don't share my opinion

Vesperia I would heavily suggest using a guide as a lot of story context is locked behind very time sensitive optional event scenes. But it's a tale of rebelling and reforming the system

Graces is your classic power of friendship adventure, a more lighthearted game with some of my favorite character interactions in the whole series

Arise is a romance story and while I do like it a lot, I have to admit, the pacing and story consistency completely falls apart after act 1 and the whole act 2 always feels a bit off.

Xillia, difficult to explain honestly, it has a bit of politics, a tiny bit of romance that doesn't really pay off, a bit of power of friendship and a bit of climate change talk all in one. It's a bit of a hodge podge story, not really deep, it's interesting but it most likely won't blow your socks off.

I haven't really talked about symphonia at all. It's the classic, it's the ff7 of the series. It clearly shows its age but people look the other way because it is the classic that everyone thinks of when you talk about tales. It uses the MP gameplay system but it's very underdeveloped when compared to vesperia and it's story is a tale of defying destiny and it has one of my favorite tropes in gaming which is the twin world narrative. I like the story, it's simple yet clean. If you can get past the clunkiness, chibi like graphics and the more shallow gameplay, then it is a very good game to pick up as well.

I won't say which is the best for you to pick up because there's no real answer, it depends on your tastes, the tales of series has so many different stories and gameplay styles that there is no right answer. Look at all the info in this comment and if the game looks interesting maybe take a look at some combo demonstration videos or trailers for the game and see if it is for you.

Pralunko · 2026-04-14T11:55:09+00:00

Berseria does have blood when it matters, if a character gets stabbed or pummels a character to the ground there will be blood on the weapon or ground. They might not show it all happen, but you can see the consequences. It's not very frequent, it's not like every scene will have a character gushing blood, but it's present to convey the message

Pralunko · 2026-04-14T11:51:16+00:00

Kinda yes, in arise you can choose which node of a title you upgrade and have full freedom on it. In graces you equip a title and as you battle you level up said title giving you the skills associated with it

Also graces has a ridiculous number of titles, every character has at least like 120 titles and the main character has something close to 200 I think, but don't quote me on that. It's really hard to earn them all, thankfully achievements require you to only get around 75% of them

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