Tips for starting Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a massive game, perhaps too massive for its own good. If this is your first time playing a game in the Xeno series, then you might be intimidated by the ludicrous amount of systems the game has to offer.

[FullmetalRoyale]

From the article, and just one of the things to know:
“Check to see if you have any quests that are finished but that haven’t been turned in.
Check to see if your mercenaries have returned in the merc menu and send them on another quest if they have.
Stop at a nearby inn and spend all your bonus XP. This is usually enough to level-up your party once or twice.
Stop by the trader to trade in loot for special items.
Go to the local blacksmith and equip your Blades with the best possible shards you can find.
Check your accessories menu and see if you have the best accessories equipped on your characters. The game doesn’t do a good job sorting them so you’ll have to sift through them yourself. In general put attack up accessories on attackers, HP up and aggro drawing accessories on tanks, and recovery boosters and aggro avoidance accessories on healers. Be sure to stop by accessory shops to see if you can buy better ones.
Stop by an Aux Core forge and refine your best Aux Cores. You should follow the same rule of thumb with accessories when it comes to equipping Aux Cores: damage up for attackers, aggro up for tanks, recovery up for healers.
Go into each Driver’s affinity menu and use up your skill points on new passive bonuses.
Go into each Driver’s art menu and spend their weapon points on upgrading their arts.
Go into each Blade’s affinity menu and cash in your achievements.
Stop by creature comfort shops and put special buff granting items in each character’s pouch.
When all this is done, use your salvaging tanks at salvage points. Note, this might put you into a battle, at which point you should repeat all these steps after you are done salvaging.”

This game is gonna be good!

[wonderfulmonkeyman]

For people that don't like how spongy the enemies are in the early game, I have a trick for speeding up auto-attacks and making battles faster in general.

Try tapping a direction on the left stick, right as an auto attack lands.
It'll cancel the wind-down animation at the end, AND lead straight into a repeat of the first auto-attack with less of the wind-UP animation, really quickly.
You'll build up your Arts energy quicker and deal more damage early on with this method.
I figured out that this might work just from watching the directs and paying attention to how things move and act, and was very happy to see that it worked like a charm in practice.
Enemies of my level or even a level or two above me, even when I only had Pyra, got taken down with little to no problem thanks to this; I'm sure it will help all of you as well.

[LordoftheCritics]

Thanks for the tip.

[Servbot41]

I figured that out myself, and it works great for Rex, but not for Nia as far as I can tell (who I'll be playing as for the rest of the game probably). Also, even though the auto-attacks after the first deal more damage I don't think they are ever worth doing because you build up meter so much faster if you tap the first over and over.

[wonderfulmonkeyman]

Apparently linking an auto-attack into an art afterwards will give a buff to how much of that art's meter your future auto attacks will refill for the rest of the battle, and if you trigger the skills on the second or third then I believe the buff is comparatively bigger.
Also, there are many blades that this doesn't really work for. Stuff like the Knuckles hit so fast that there's no point in tapping, while stuff like that one rare blade with a ball has such a long wind-up animation that canceling doesn't do enough to mitigate it, so you're better off letting all three hits play out repeatedly anyways.

I think that this trick is mostly useful for Pyra and other weapons with similar swings to hers; we may discover new tricks as we go along, though.