Xenoblade Chronicles Basics- Skills

Skills are another way in which Xenoblade Chronicles makes your characters customizable.  Skills are a set of abilities that your characters develop automatically as they gain Skill Points- the third form of reward you get for every battle won.  Skill Points, like experience points, are gained by all of your characters, even if they aren’t in the party at the time the battle is won.  This helps to keep your characters relatively even in power.

Skills are essentially passive effects (although some of them are only triggered by certain conditions) that your characters can have, which enhance the character or even the entire party based on an element of the character.  Each character has three ‘branches’ on their Skill Tree, indicating a spiritual or mental element (like Diligence or Humanity) that those skills relate to.  At any given moment, each character will have one ‘branch’ prioritized.

This will grant them two things- first of all, the Skill Points they gain will automatically be funneled into that Skill element, progressing them down the branch and granting them later and more powerful skills.  Second of all, each Skill Tree branch grants an additional effect when it is prioritized, enhancing the character’s function in some way.

The three ‘branches’ on each character’s Skill Tree will improve the character in a different way, so it pays to look ahead and figure out what you want your character to do.  Humanity Shulk is very good at keeping the party on its feet and improving your party members’ cooperation, but Intuition Shulk is a very strong source of damage and can easily commit lethal backstabs with his higher agility.  Integrity Shulk, on the other hand, is more durable than both, though he leans more to the damage dealing element of Intuition than the party-improvement and healing of Humanity.

Just as much as the selection of which Arts to use and develop, the choice of Skill Tree branches can severely change how each character plays- so you need to decide for yourself whether you’re going to concentrate on using the Skills to boost your Art choices and become a monster at one particular thing, or make your Skill selections to balance things out and cover the weaknesses of your playstyle and Art choices.

It is fairly obvious at this point that the game’s designers wanted to use the mechanics to back up the player’s intuition and their affinity for preferred tactics.