Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Any% FAQ

Q: What category is this?
A: Any%. Complete the game as quickly as possible. Use of DLC is allowed.

Q: What does the DLC provide?
A: The DLC provides lots of extra resources such as money, pouch items (namely Love Sources) and core crystals. It also allows us to disable enemy aggression. Most importantly, it gives us access to two very strong Blades - Crossette and Corvin.

Q: Why do you use Crossette?
A: Crossette has a skill known as Gathering Sparks which increases her damage by up to 500% by collecting potions, as well as having access to easy combos like Mega Explosion and Steam Explosion.

Q: Why do you use Corvin?
A: Corvin is just a very solid tank with strong arts and specials. He also comes with Ancient Wisdom, which is needed for the field skill check in Spirit Crucible Elpys.

Q: What are Blade pulls?
A: This is a section at the start of Chapter 4 where you have 1min of downtime. Hence, we use this time to summon Blades that we will need for the rest of the speedrun, namely: 2 Fire Mastery, 3 Earth Mastery and 1 Wind Mastery.

Q: What other Blades save time?
A: Boreas is the biggest timesave of ~1m30s. Perun also saves ~1min if you manage to pull a Leaping Blade. Any Blade with Keen Eye also saves you ~30s. You also want a Water Blade on Rex for Steam Explosion combos.

Q: Why do you not use Zeke?
A: The other Drivers are just more useful. Nia for obvious reasons, Rex for Anchor Shot (Topple) and a certain special Blade, Morag for tanking and setting up Fire combos with Brighid. Zeke still has his place as a HM slave though.

Q: What are the hardest fights?
A: Makhos, Lila 1, Trio.

Q: How did you just clip into that wall?
A: The game's geometry is pretty bad.

Q: Why not just open the door in Chapter 9 normally?
A: To open the door, you need many electric Blades which you probably will not have, as well as a high level of Focus which you will have to waste a lot of time levelling up.

Q: How did you just survive that jump?
A: This is a glitch known as Zombie Hover. By holding down certain buttons during screen transitions, you can trick the game into thinking you're dead, allowing you to survive all fall damage with 1 HP.

Q: What is Zombie Hover good for?
A: Mainly to save time over taking longer routes when you can just jump down. The best example is in Tantal, where you can skip the ~4min descent. The other big use of Zombie Hover is to bypass a cutscene in Temperentia to get the Shining Star Chips, which boost our damage tremendously.

Q: Why are you using Chain Attacks even though you already killed the enemy?
A: The rewards from the fight are multiplied by your Overkill. This allows us to skip having to grind. On certain fights, namely Morag 2, Giga Rosa and Infernal Guldo, we want to get as big of an Overkill as we can get in order to get the XP and SP we need for the rest of the run.

Q: Why are levels important?
A: More levels gives you more stats and HP. This is important for survivability in fights such as Lila 1 and Jin 3. More importantly, enemies that are 10 or more levels higher than you get increased break resistance, making the fights exponentially harder. This is why we aim to be at Lv51 for Inferno Guldo and Lv61 for Aion.

Q: What are breaks and why are they so important?
A: Break (as well as Topple) is a status effect that increases damage done to enemies tremendously. This obviously makes a lot of fights faster. Furthermore, killing enemies with a Blade Combo while a Driver Combo (Break/Topple/Launch/Smash) is active also increases the rewards gained from the battle by 1.5x.

Q: Why are you collecting wood?
A: You need 10 Puzzletree Wood for a story quest at the start of Chapter 3. These are collectibles that only drop from specific collection spots. Every extra warp for Puzzletree Wood loses you ~15s.

Q: Which voice language is faster?
A: Both are about the same.

Q: Why are you running in German?
A: No particular reason.

Q: What is the world record?
A: The world record is 3:48:32.

Q: What is your goal time?
A: I'm just aiming to get a run that I'm satisfied with. No specific time.