On June 29th, 2023, my Xenoblade-specific Twitter alt was inexplicably suspended; it had existed for about a year and a half prior as a means of dumping my thoughts into the void without inundating followers who were there for horror art with hundreds of esoteric tweets about the silly little anime laser sword game I had abruptly fallen back in love with, and it had since turned into sort of the single most unfiltered window into my brain that existed online.
No reason was given for how I had supposedly broken the rules. This left me to simply assume there must have been something deeply objectionable about the last tweet I'd made, wherein I idly speculated about the best way to make two characters lose affinity and settled on an elaborate slapstick contraption designed to trade everything I own for someone's least favorite item and launch them at him with devastating mechanical efficiency. What exactly was ban-worthy about this is a mystery; perhaps this device made to pelt a fictional man with fruit was deemed cruel and unusual enough to qualify as a war crime, or as hate speech against him specifically. Perhaps Elon's moderation algorithm caught me joking that the developers were oppressing my genius for not allowing me to trade for Ether Plums, said "Hmm, 'oppress' is a word people I don't like say a lot, good-bye," and banished me to the ether myself. The website promptly started falling apart completely mere days later, so I do not expect to ever know and I have little hope that my appeal will ever be answered.
Now bereft of my quiet little spot to publicly post garbage about my favorite video game, I started up a new channel on my test server on Discord to fill the void and act as a stand-in. I already used that alt as more-or-less a personal journal and had accrued a grand total of one follower who was not an IRL friend, so this change was functionally like taking a diary I left in the woods for random people to find and putting it in a drawer in my bedroom like you're supposed to. Because it got banned from the woods.
This introduced a great benefit: Discord's threads are significantly more conducive to centralizing posts about a topic than Twitter's, making it infinitely better for keeping up liveblogs compared to having to dig through my own feed to find the last time I tweeted in a dedicated thread about something. It'd be perfect for documenting my thoughts as I very slowly continue working my way through Xenoblade 3, which I will get back to eventually someday, I promise, but, um, uh,
I was not in the mood to play 3. But the boat being rocked so heavily on my end kicked the special interest back into full force and the potential that this format introduced was tantalizing, so I decided now was as good a time as ever to finally start up a fresh playthrough I'd been considering and liveblog that instead. And to keep things interesting, I could combine a couple of self-imposed challenges that I'd previously floated the idea of to create the worst playthrough anyone's ever done.
Thus came the birth of Xenoblade: No Shirts, No Skips, No Service edition.
The rules are very simple: I am not allowed to wear any armor (temporarily unremovable pieces notwithstanding), and I am not allowed to skip travel. If I ever receive the "Skip It" achievement, I have to reload my save no matter how long it's been since the last one. In a sense, it's like a more "realistic" playthrough save for the one key fact that everyone is running around in their underwear with improbable beach bods like a confusing dream that maybe awakens something in you.
This restriction, on top of generally making traveling this game's gargantuan maps more tedious, also introduces an additional, self-imposed point of no return: around the game's rough halfway point is an area transition that involves the characters mysteriously surviving a fall of several miles and waking up on an island below, which, as you might guess, is not something you can walk back home from. The only way back naturally is to fly on an airship that will dock in a handful of areas after a certain point in the story... that also happens to be the beginning of the game's final chapter, just past the OTHER major point of no return. If I want to appease my completionist mindset, I have no choice but to do every missable quest as early as possible if I don't want to be locked out of them forever.
All on foot.
How bad could it be?
