Xenoblade Chronicles Basics- Time

Time is also an important factor of Xenoblade Chronicles.

The game runs off of a directly-scaled-down timescale: every second that passes in real time ticks off a minute of the day in-game.  This means that each full day of game time lasts for twenty-four minutes.  Time has two major effects on the game:

First off, at night the more dangerous monsters come out.  Many areas that are full of inoffensive creatures that will only fight back if assaulted during the day will harbor much more aggressive things at night.  And in every area, the monsters that appear at night are more powerful than those that appear during the day.  Fortunately, the game changes lighting as well as having a handy clock in the top-right of the screen, so it’s pretty hard to accidentally stay out in a hazardous area at night.

Second, the various NPCs are active at different times of day.  You can look at the named NPCs in your Affinity Chart to see when they are active- at times when they are active, these characters have set areas that they wander around in, or set locations that they stay in.  In fact, all NPCs have areas or locations, but these are the ones you will most want to keep track of.  Many NPCs will simply not exist during certain times of day, which can be a bit eerie when you’re walking towards someone on the street and they suddenly vanish as the sky turns orange for dusk.  This also means that it can pay off a lot or even be outright necessary to experience a given area at all times of day, just to make sure you haven’t missed an opportunity for a Trade or a quest.

This would make the game extremely long by necessity, but the game designers decided to play nice- in the game menu, alongside the tutorials is the option to set the time of day to a different time, allowing you to avoid nighttime terrors, or find out who stands here twelve hours from now without actually waiting twelve minutes.  Judicious use of the time change option will save you a lot of grief, a lot of waiting, and a lot of unnecessary danger.

It will also give you access to even better items.