Xenoblade Chronicles Guide- Walkthrough Part 29: Buy, Sell, Trade

I mentioned before that trading is a way to improve your game by giving you access to more and better equipment, but it’s also an excellent way to save money- to a point.

When you sell an item, you receive only 1/10 of that item’s value in money.  Even compared to other RPGs, this is a pittance, and really not worth your while.  Trading, on the other hand, will get you items up to the value of what you’re trading away.  Unfortunately trading is also limited- you can only trade away materials and collection items, despite the fact that you can get gear and ether gems by trading.  Since you can’t trade away equipment, you’re stuck selling it- and you’re not going to want to sell everything that you’re not wearing, believe it or not.

Xenoblade Chronicles is clearly a game with a lot of customization in your character- between the Skill Trees, Arts and Ether Gems there are a lot of choices to make.  Your equipment is another such choice, and it’s an interesting one.  Xenoblade Chronicles doesn’t follow the old method of ‘and now it’s a better sword’, ‘and now it’s a better sword’, ‘and now it’s the best sword’.  Every character is going to have multiple options for weapons and each piece of gear, and those options aren’t just better or worse- as with a good MMORPG, there are a lot of gear options that you are going to want to balance to your play style and what you’re finding you need.

Even just in weapons, this is already showing up- Reyn has over eight different weapon options in the Colony 9 area alone, and while some of them are better than others, none is distinctly the best because they all do different things.  Some of his weapons have high Critical rates and strong attack power, some have strong attack power and come with Aggro Up gems in them, some have higher Defences and lower damage, at least one has higher Dodge and Defences, and there’s even one that is trash for stats but provides three Ether Gem slots for ultimate customizability.

Because of this, at no point during this guide will I say that you need to equip X weapon or Y armor- I’ll let you know what the gear available to you does, but after that it’s up to you.  After all, you are playing and I don’t likely play the same way as you.

Besides, this is a game about exploring and finding new things .

I would like to recommend that you keep at least one of each kind of gear or armor on-hand, in case you feel you need to adjust the way one of your party members functions.  If you find a new piece of gear that is strictly superior (likely does the same things but better), go ahead and sell the old one- but you lose nothing by keeping the older gear around just in case.