Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Beginner's Guide

Starting out in Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition can be difficult, and not knowing what to do while starting out can put you in a tough spot. This guide covers everything from Combat, TP, Art Cooldowns, and Augments.

Usage of Tension Points

If you get close enough to an enemy, your character will attack on its own. Even though these auto-attacks aren't very strong, they do give you TP, which stands for Tension Points.

TP can only be used for two things at first:

• You can bring a dead party member back to life with 3,000 points.
• You'll mostly use it for TP Arts.

These Arts are so good that you'll need 1,000 Tension Points just to use them. But remember that some normal Arts will also give you TP in some situations. Keep an eye out for those Arts because, as the game goes on, a big part of getting good at combat is constantly raising your TP to use your best attacks.

Fast Cooldowns

For the most part, your Arts disappear as soon as you use them. Early on, it can be hard to win fights because you can't do much.

Xenoblade X: Definitive Edition is better because it has Quick Cooldowns. If you press Y on an Art that you've already used, you can use it again right away. Quick Cooldown can be used four times at the start of every battle. This is shown by the green bar in the bottom right corner.

What you can do with this mechanic is insane. One way to make sure the enemy stays down longer is to use a Topple Art more than once in a row.

Starting the Game

This is how I like to use Quick Cooldowns at the start of the game:

• The best Art you have on one of your characters should be found.
• As many times as you can, make it better.
• If you use that Art five times in a row, you can beat almost any normal enemy on your level.

At the beginning of the story, you have to fight groups of enemies, which can be hard. But they're a lot easier if you kill the lower-level enemies first because then there are fewer enemies in the way. This is very easy to do with Quick Cooldowns.

Energy Clips, which you get by exploring, can be used to improve the green bar throughout the game. In the end, this will help you get even more use out of Quick Cooldowns.

Cooldowns for Secondary Art

If you press X during a battle, your character will automatically switch between their close-range and far-range weapons. If you want to get TP faster, you can switch weapons after every auto-attack. But the weapon you're using also affects secondary cooldowns.

A yellow line will slowly go around the edge of an Art icon when it's ready to be used. When that yellow line goes around all the way, the Art's secondary cooldown is over, and it will be improved in some way. There are Arts that will get stronger and Arts that can be used again.

When you auto-attack with a melee weapon, melee arts will only charge their secondary cooldown. The same is true for ranged arts and weapons.

This is very important: if you press the Y button on Arts that are ready to use, they will start their secondary cooldown right away. For a few Arts per battle, you can skip the whole waiting process.

When you have all of my buffs ready, use your strongest Art while I wait for its secondary cooldown to charge. 

Soul Voices

Your party members may ask you to use certain types of Art from time to time. This is called a Soul Voice.

If you use an Art of the same color that someone at your party asked for, you and that person will both get healed and get a bonus effect based on what they said. For example, if a Soul Voice tells you to "Use a ranged attack to topple the enemy," your next yellow attack will indeed topple the enemy, even if the Art itself doesn't do that.

Soul Voices can appear after certain events happen for each character. You can look at those terms in the menu.

There is a chance that you will get a quick-time event if you set off a condition for your Soul Voice. To use your Soul Voice, you must press the B button at the right time. Your character will get even more TP if you time it just right. 

Feeling better about yourself gets better as you complete more quick-time events. When morale is high, Soul Voices are more likely to happen for your whole team, and you get even more TP for future quick-time events.

Body Parts

The next mechanic, enemy appendages, gives you a lot of benefits with almost no work.

A health bar for an enemy can be seen on top of the screen and on the enemy itself. You may also see an extra orange bar on the enemy. That is one of their limbs' health.

To aim at different parts of the enemy's body, hold down the R button and press A or Y. You should always check to see if you can hit a limb. If you damage one of these body parts, the enemy can't use some attacks, and their defense goes down. You'll even get more stuff after the battle is over.

If it gets too hard to keep track of all the limbs, remember that you can target them before the battle even starts. Always go after these to deal more damage and get more items.

Forget About Your Defense and Focus on The Resistance

Did you know that your defense is based on seven different stats in this game? What was the funniest part? The least important stat is the defense stat itself.

The game starts by attacking the enemy and taking away your defense. You will still lose 900 HP even if your defense is 100 and the enemy attack does 1,000 damage. A lot of enemies have attacks that are way too strong, so defense is important, but not as much as resistance.

Every enemy and you do six different kinds of damage:

• Real-world
• Temperature
• Beam
• Electric
• Ether
• Pulling
• The resistances to these are given as percentages. In other words, if you have 50% physical resistance, any physical damage you take is half as bad. When you're at 100%, you have no weaknesses.

If you're having trouble with a boss, find out what kind of damage it does. If it's using thermal attacks, for instance, switch to a gear that can handle a lot of heat.

This is why evasion is the worst stat:

Not a lot of time or money should be spent on evasion. An enemy can still hit you 5% of the time, even if you have max evasion. Max Evasion won't work for a long time, so it's not a good idea. Some Arts make you immune to damage or evasion, which makes the evasion stat even less useful.

Attack Types

There are three main types of damage:

• Attack (for close combat arts)
• Attack from a distance (for ranged arts)

Chances (for TP Arts)

You'll use all three at first. But at some point, you should choose to focus on one: melee, ranged, or TP Arts.

Last but not least, don't forget about augments! When I first played the game, I had no idea about them.

Start the game and press ZL on a weapon or piece of gear that has an empty slot. This will add an augment to it. Go to the shop in Armory Alley to make some add-ons.

Also check out our Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Review and other guides below:

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