Xenoblade Chronicles Basics- Quests

Quests are an important part of Xenoblade Chronicles- not a vital part ever, but an important part.  Much like trading, Quests are a fully optional part of the game that you can use to enrich your playing experience and enable options you wouldn’t otherwise have.

You can, if you like, complete the entire game without ever once doing a Quest, making a Trade, or even opening a Heart-to-Heart.  However, while doing so will be much faster, you will miss out on a lot of the extras in the game and a lot of character progress.

If you think back to the discussion of Affinity, you will remember that Quests were mentioned there.  Whenever you complete a Quest, you will get rewards of a material sort- and you will also gain Affinity in the area that the quest is from.  What’s more, some quests will affect the relationships NPCs have with each other- all of which you can track with your Affinity Chart.  If you keep a careful eye on your Affinity Chart, in fact, you will sometimes be able to be alert for new quest opportunities caused by some of these changes in relationship.  There are even quests whose whole purpose is to create or alter a relationship between two NPCs on your Affinity Chart.

Quests in Xenoblade Chronicles, as in many MMOs, can be noticed by looking for NPCs who have yellow exclamation marks over their heads.  These marks also appear on the Mini-map.  When you talk to an NPC to gain a quest, make sure to talk to them again afterwards- some NPCs have as many as four quests to give you, and even if they are named as part of a sequence, you don’t need to complete one to get access to the next one.

When you have completed a quest, you will either automatically ‘turn it in’, or need to go find the NPC who you got the quest from.  If you need to find an NPC to turn in a quest, the NPC will have an orange exclamation point over their head, and that will show on the map as well, just like the marks that show you can gain a quest.

Quests can provide you with a lot of extra experience points, but you do need to be aware that, unlike battles, quests do not give you Skill Points or Art Points.  They can, however, provide you with interesting gear or other items you can’t otherwise get.  They also grant you considerable amounts of money, which can be used to garner yourself even more gear- or even better gear.

Of course, Xenoblade Chronicles being so much like an MMORPG, the nature of the quests will be very recognizable to any regular MMO player- fetch quests, kill quests, find quests, gather quests and even a few that just have you run back and forth ferrying one or two items.  Fortunately, because many of the quests auto-complete without you having to run back, it's a much more convenient part of the game.

Hmmm, perhaps some of those MMO developers should be paying some attention here, don't you think?