Now things are getting interesting.��
Listed on Nintendos japanese site
IGN eyes on trailer and screens
A lone warrior chopping through an army of robotic warriors with an outsized Cloud Strife-like energy sword. Colossal war machines advancing though a misty canyon, shooting anything that moves. The few remaining human defenders hiding behind simple wooden shields that are no match for high-energy weapons. Welcome to the world of Monado.��
The debut trailer for Monado: Beginning of the World premiered today at E3: 2009, and first impressions for the new Wii RPG are that the beginning is going to be pretty exciting. Things kick off with that canyon-set battle, revealing more and bigger enemies with an interesting steampunk design. Things likely don't end well for our lone warrior, as we soon segue to a young blonde hero discovering that energy sword - now inert - only to see it flash blindingly to life the moment he picks it up. Your standard JRPG Hero's Journey (tm) is definitely in full effect here, with just a dash of King Arthur.��
Gameplay appears to be open-world, where you'll traverse lush jungles, glowing forests, climb sheer walls, and encounter the crumbling remains of a conquered people. It looks nicely textured and details pop, animating at what looks like a smooth 30 fps.��
Players will pick up two partners in their travels, and while combat initially looks turn-based, we saw all three party members attacking simultaneously. Transitions into combat are completely seamless; characters approach enemies, draw weapons, and it's on. One scene showed your team (wielding much smaller edged weaponry) surrounding a lizard-man enemy, who didn't make much of a dent in their lifebars before it was downed. A much larger lizard-man (a good twenty feet tall) and giant mutant crab monster probably fared better.
(back up link - check the japanese site first link in post for proper quality trailer)
Hit the HQ option.
Spider dude? I can give you advice but it helps if you level up and register some collectables in the collectopedia first to get EXP.
Zavvi offer free shipping worldwide, but you will have to pay the same price we europeans regularly pay for internet games. $50.
I've been honing my crafting skills. The only thing I don't quite understand is when you choose 2 characters and they ping pong the process back to each other. Basically your ether whatever needs to be the same rank, there are 1, 2, 3 etc marks dividing them - to combine. You add gems until one quality (like HP Up or Strength Up) is 100% or over. Red text shows you what will happen if you mix a particular gem. You can pair together different gems to give dual status improvements.
In battle, if I'm not luring people towards me I go into battle, hit B to rally everyone then I try a front attack to break, wait for Reyn to topple then circle around and backstrike for massive damage. My back strike is more powerful than the frigging Monado Buster.
Anyway, complaint time, first complaint and it's a fairly big one: the sidequests.
They aren't really set up properly, I mean I will use GTA as an example. You get a small cutscene setting up a mission. When you arrive at your destination there is a little cutscene before you start. Then usually when you finish there is a pay off cutscene.
In Zelda you get a sidequest and have to return to complete it. In this game the characters are so small and you can't really zoom in to see face detail on these low poly characters. In zelda when you talk to someone the camera moves and zooms in so you can get personal with them, see their character and emotions. In this game you go up to a small, barely viewable character you get a mission which inevitably involves killing some monster. Then when you do the game just auto completes a box by ticking it and saying it's done. It's not very satisfying to do it that way, although it does make things less of a hassle.
Anyway, I hit the Bionis' leg, you know the place
And holy shite, even on a giant HDTV where wii looks crap it was amazing. I almost couldn't believe it was being done on Wii. I love the dino's and horsies that pootle about. Totally epic environment. Love it.
GG, did you go back to Colony 9? There are new quest there, most of which are awesome.
Minor spoiler, the Monado is not only used for battles.
No, it was a tentacled Mechon thing. I'm past it now but I'm not going to Colony 6 yet. I've done almost all of the quests I found in the Bionis' Leg area so I'm going back to Colony 9 where I barely did any quests. I've done almost no crafting either, my current equipment has barely any slots so the crystals I got from quests and the collectopedia are more than enough to fill all of them at this point.
Wow at Gaur Plains, just wow. There are lakes, there are caves, waterfalls, swamps, ledges, two floors. It is much bigger than the whole overworld in Twilight Princess, but yet much more complex and with more stuff to do. There are even NPC on the plain.
And no matter how big it is, it is just a single leg of a single giant.
All your impressions sounds like the RPG I dream of. Open world, giant beasts roaming the land, tons of quests to do and a great battle system. Hmmmmmmm, I may start searching for import websites.
Ok, don't worry about the quests with the clock gg, I asked on GAF and they confirmed they're not actually time limited, but later main story points may affect the area or whatever else making them unavailable. So it's up to you when you will proceed with the story past that point, and other than that you can complete them at your own pace. I think I read elsewhere that the points of no return are obvious too but maybe that doesn't apply to the whole game. Or maybe I saw that in the last let's play video that spoiled a few things about Bionis' Leg.
I'm doing tons of sidequests in Bionis' leg because they say that they are time limited and I don't want to miss anything. You were right, the side quests get better, the more and more I did the more I had to return and follow up on quests with multiple objectives. I just wish the NPCs were chunkier and larger and had a zelda style camera swoop and zoom when you talk to them.
I might head back to Colony 9 as I didn't do most of the quests there either.
The crazy thing is that Gaur plain is just one bit of an area that gets 3 times as big, with no load screens, just seamless. Hell, I still need to uncover parts of the map.
The battle system is so good, I find myself just slaying everything because it's fun. If you hate grinding in rpgs, in this game grinding is fun.
Thanks Agnates, that's really helpful. I think I will stick around Bionis leg for a while then maybe head back to Colony 9.
I was very sad last night
One of the missions made me kill harmless Ponies! I had to slay the baby Ponies too. 
Did you guys bust into the Tirkin headquarters yet?
This is Bionis leg - what's more impressive is that the area you see in the pic is about one sixth or less of the explorable Bionis leg area.
The Mechonis
Also there are some cool wallpapers here
Edgecrusher/Dvader there is a guide on Joystiq on how to play Xenoblade on your USA Wii
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/19/how-to-play-xenoblade-chronicles-if-you-live-in-america/
The quests on Colony 9 were boring compared to the ones on Bionis' Leg so after doing a few of the more involved ones I advanced the story instead of stick around. New party member get and moving to a wholly new outdoor area now, I don't like it as much as the plains so far but it's different at least. At level 25 or so I was already slightly above the enemies in the Colony 6 story bits so if you're around that at the moment you may want to proceed with the story also gg. I've been playing this game way too much, closing in on 20 hours.
Ha, you can even remove Shulk from the party and play with three others if you want once you get the next one. Of course you need Shulk to fight the Mechon but as you know a lot of the game isn't against them, at least so far, I imagine Mechon are more prominent the closer you get to certain story parts and the end. Anyway, this guy has some cool skills but you can't repeat them too much. He basically can inflict Break, Topple and some other things all by himself, but for those to take effect on top of the damage dealt you first need to perform a specific skill, so you can only cause all these once in a while if you let all his arts fill up and start with that skill then proceed with the others. He can also leech aggro from the other members, buff himself with haste and strength and remove some negative status effects at the same time.
He's fun to play as, he reminds me of Paladins in World of Warcraft since they also had moves that to deal more damage or cause certain effects needed to be used during a brief period after another skill. I'll try setting the others as primary characters to check out their skills and play style first hand too.