Xenoblade Chronicles Guide- Walkthrough Part 22: It even cuts right through this can!

Wielding the Monado changes how Shulk’s Arts work- for the more interesting.  His Talent Art, Turn Strike, is replaced with a new Talent Art: Activate Monado.  With the Monado equipped, Shulk can use this art to temporarily drop his Art list for the Monado Arts, Monado Enchant and Monado Strike.  The former causes all of Shulks’ allies’ attacks to damage Mechon regardless if they’re Toppled or not for a time.  The latter is a high-powered attack that strikes in a brief line in front of Shulk and does heavy damage.

On crossing the bridge the rest of the way, you will find a set of six of the taller Mechon standing and waiting on the hillside, as well as a few smaller flying Mechon around them.  This is a very good thing, because you’re going to want to fight all of them in quick succession for two reasons.

First of all, you want to get some practice using Shulk’s new Monado Arts.  It seems at first like swapping between two sets of Arts is likely to be a pain, but it is surprisingly easy to adjust to, particularly with there only being two Monado Arts.  It makes it very simple to decide which situation calls for which Monado Art- if any of them.  Second of all, even if you haven’t been using them up to now, Chain Combos are a powerful and important part of wrangling hefty enemies- and by now it’s only sensible to expect a boss fight coming up sometime soon.

None of the Mechon you see here are outside of the difficulty range of the ones you just faced within Colony 9, so mopping them up ought to be fairly simple.  Strangely, you still aren’t likely to see any special techniques out of the Mechon, the mechanicals apparently perfectly content to rely on their incredible defences- defences you’re going to be pretty much ignoring thanks to the Monado.

It’s worth noting that despite now dealing vastly more damage than Reyn, Shulk still won’t be keeping the aggro for himself, the special effects of Reyn’s aggro-drawing moves overcoming the hefty discrepancy in damage (1 versus 340 or so).  This means that you can continue any old tactics you had without worrying that the Monado will change their viability or cause everything to focus on Shulk all the time.