How To Combat Good in XBC2?

jessiray

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Nov 1, 2020
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I have been working my way through this game at a decent clip playing on Easy mode for story reasons. I plan to post my thoughts on the story and such when I am done (in chapter 7 now!) but man oh man I never did quite get good at the combat.

Thru talking to my friends in Xenochat I finally learned how to stack elemental combos. Thru talking to them I know I need to get better at timing my driver auto attack canceling so that I can grind Affinity faster but man I still have a hard time with that. I feel extremely fancy when I commit a level 3 combo. I have never once activated the orb chain thing outside of the 1 tutorial on it. Pouch items help me a lot though.

There's so much to this game I feel like I would never run out of content playing it, and despite being kind of bad at it, I definitely see the appeal and have found it much more intuitive than most Active-Time JRPGS. The button presses make a big difference and the affinity system is both unique and makes sense so it would be cool to know the tricks for getting good too.
 
The thing I would do is used dessert items in the pouch. It drastically speeds up the speed of the game, allowing you to do more damage. I would also recommend getting some experience from just exploring the world, if you think you're underlevelled. I don't recall it being very hard, so if you do those two things, I'm sure you should be fine. I didn't bother with raising blade affinity or anything like that, and I still did fine.
 
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I did a lot of exploration / quests as early as possible in XC2 (unlike in XC1, the quests are at least decent most of the time). As a result I was somewhat overleveled, so outside of bosses and random passing level 80 monsters the game was easy.

I never figured out the canceling thing. For hard enemies, what almost always worked was continually stacking orbs for as long as I could and when the party was about to start dying (usually with an enraged boss at ~40% HP), start the combo (not really a combo, don't remember what it's called, at full affinity bar) to break the orbs which would finish the enemy off... often with a massive overkill. In the few cases where that wasn't enough, using the right pouch items / other equipment could give sufficient extra boost.
 
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