Xenoblade Chronicles

We've only been playing Xenoblade Chronicles pretty much exclusively recently. Life gets in the way and the game that is perhaps best served in a long glass and supped over the course of a long evening is instead consumed like downing a can of red bull on the tube in the morning whilst tyring to read a newspaper with some sweaty office twat with his elbow in your balls. We also happen to be completionists so instead of skipping most of the optional quests that realistically wouldn't impact our game bar the loss of some EXP and the odd bit off gear, we literally can't skip a single one. WE PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME WE'LL EXPERIENCE ALL OF IT.

So with this background to consumption, we're finding playing Xenoblade Chronicles slipping from a fun game to a bit of a grind. Desperate to progress the story we keep spotting new NPC quests. You see the game has a day night cycle and the NPCs don't stand around like WoW pricks just giving you out quests. This is great because it means that the environments feel like 'living cities' even if the populace just appear from a portal and then walk about all fucking day. Don't they have a job? This is shite because some prick will give you a fetch quest (I kid you not, one NPC woman was having period pains so I put my plans to save the planet on hold to go and fetch her two sweaty tails and a burned biscuit or something) you run off and do the quest then come back and because the environments are so fucking huge you can't remember where they are and because of the day night cycle it'll be the wrong time of day. You can look up the character on the NPC grid but it'll only tell you when they are out and about (for example) 6am-6pm not exactly where. So you have to Gamefaq it all the fucking time. This is also a pain in the arse because if you want to do all the time limited NPC quests (some quests have a stopwatch next to them which means if you progress the story too far you won't be able to do the quest anymore) like a completionist twat every now and then you have to run laps around the massive cities keeping your eye out for exclamation marks on the map. 

You have to check everywhere once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once at night just to make sure some knob isn't wandering around with a quest to give you before they have to get home before their strict curfew. At the moment I've just left Alcamoth city, in which every single quest was stopwatched so I'm thinking at some point the city is going to be wiped out so I've been extra cautious to hoover up all the quests. Even though there is skip travel and you can move time backward and forward it still takes about 20 minutes to do a comprehensive sweep of the city for each time of the day. I pretend that I'm tempted to ignore the NPC quests in a not-tempted-at-all-and-would-regret-missing-out way. On top of that there's gems to keep crafting, levelling up to do and relationships to manage. Sometimes I log in and waste my precious game purely on 'team administration'. It's my fault. Nobody is making me do them all. We really need to learn that the days of revelling in games for hours or even days at a time are long gone.