What to do after story completion?

[Honorable_D]

What is considered the real challenge/grind? I have so many resources now I can completely max out a bunch of characters/weapons but if there isn't any real content left...

[Lord Torstein]

Events, if you haven't done them yet--including Challenge Mode.

Race Mode, which operates under Challenge Mode rules, so stats don't matter.

Jakob's Ladder for residual chip memories and a grip of Element Metals. Three flavors; Normal, Hard, and (surprise) Challenge.

Once you've done all of that, then the only thing potentially left to do is max all characters (including skills), weapons (level, upgrade, pumpable skills) and all cards to 200.

By that point burnout should thoroughly set in, and you'll be looking to put X Dive down for a while.

[SparkTFS]

You can collect all the Hidden Elements and play the stages in challenge mode if you haven't already, beat the three difficult options of Jackob Elevator, mess around on events, try to unlock everything on the game to get 100% of the achievements, and finally - you can do some type of insane challenge like beating the game/stages with specific characters and weapons, see if you can surpass the supposedly max power level of the game (aprox. 1.3M) and wait for some mods to be done to play with pallet/models swaps and stuff.

[Honorable_D]

Already got all the hidden deep elements, but I think Challenge Mode for the main story missions is what I'll do next. It'll be nice being able to blast through the levels without having to hunt all over for the hidden elements. Hunting for the hidden elements got kinda annoying sometimes.

[William Shakesman]

The highest power numbers you are going to see are at the top of Jakob but that is hundreds of floors of really easy fights to get there. The real postgame is rerunning content in challenge mode with weaker chars just to have fun with them, or clearing all the events. S ranking Challenge Mode events is probably the best balance of "challenging but not utterly ridiculous" content you're going to get.

[Honorable_D]

Yeah, too bad a lot of the events I've come across require you to collect enough "random things" to get S rank. I've currently had enough scouring all the story missions for 3/3 deep elements.

[Lord Torstein]

The good news is that once you learn the locations in each event, they don't change... mostly. The year-3 christmas event has a variable number of tchotchkes to collect, but if you're at 10 by the last section, there are 5 easily attainable in static spots.

Anyways, I imagine Jakob's Ladder will be more to your taste, because it encourages you to use different weapon types each floor. Every 5th floor is a boss fight, and the bosses at floors 100 and under all provide a specific bonus effect to one particular character if used in the fight. The payout per floor isn't amazing, but it adds up over time. It's also the cheapest method to max star-ranking the Drill Man and Toxic Seahorse chips.

At the end of the day, X Dive is a very broad but shallow pool of content. I'm still enjoying it, but I won't shy from recognizing the game for what it is.

[William Shakesman]

Yeah, and the more I'm playing event Challenge, the more every boss is a 32x bar DPS race against the CM time mission more than anything else, which isn't a lot of fun and worse I need about 10x more eventbux than I need EM because the 60k EM for all secret items is PLENTY to buy everything that looks even slightly cool out of the limited shop

[CrowRising]

Mostly unrelated to the topic question, but I keep seeing people referring to Jakobs Orbital Elevator as "Jakobs Ladder" in these Steam forums and I feel like I'm missing context or something. Is it some sort of in-joke I'm not in on or something?

[CyclonefernoX]

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Mostly unrelated to the topic question, but I keep seeing people referring to Jakobs Orbital Elevator as "Jakobs Ladder" in these Steam forums and I feel like I'm missing context or something. Is it some sort of in-joke I'm not in on or something?

Megaman X8 has a few things that are a play on Christian concepts. Noah's Park is perhaps the most obvious one. Jakob's Orbital Elevator is most likely derived from Jacob's Ladder, hence why people sometimes call it that.

[CrowRising]

Originally posted by CyclonefernoX:

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Mostly unrelated to the topic question, but I keep seeing people referring to Jakobs Orbital Elevator as "Jakobs Ladder" in these Steam forums and I feel like I'm missing context or something. Is it some sort of in-joke I'm not in on or something?

Megaman X8 has a few things that are a play on Christian concepts. Noah's Park is perhaps the most obvious one. Jakob's Orbital Elevator is most likely derived from Jacob's Ladder, hence why people sometimes call it that.

Sounds like Jewish inspiration rather than specifically Christian, but thanks for the info.

[CyclonefernoX]

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Sounds like Jewish inspiration rather than specifically Christian, but thanks for the info.

Well, Judaism and Christianity do share a lot of scripture, so it might be better to say the inspiration is Abrahamic.

[Casual Amateur]

Hmm.... This may sound silly. Max out all........ (Cards). It will be fun to test card set build.

[William Shakesman]

Originally posted by CyclonefernoX:

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Sounds like Jewish inspiration rather than specifically Christian, but thanks for the info.

Well, Judaism and Christianity do share a lot of scripture, so it might be better to say the inspiration is Abrahamic.

For most of the Japanese, Christianity is an esoteric foreign religion with cool symbols to play with like Americans would make a samurai movie of steely eyed bad dudes with katanas staring each other down. And, as is typical of the Japanese, they are book learned about trivia that most of us wouldn't know. Every Japanese dude knows every single one of Odins and Thors weapons more than any actual Norseman these days.

[Chaos 混沌 カオス]

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

For most of the Japanese, Christianity is an esoteric foreign religion with cool symbols to play with like Americans would make a samurai movie of steely eyed bad dudes with katanas staring each other down.

I blame ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Hideyoshi for this one.

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

And, as is typical of the Japanese, they are book learned about trivia that most of us wouldn't know. Every Japanese dude knows every single one of Odins and Thors weapons more than any actual Norseman these days.

wait really? I mean even if this were true, wouldn't the Norse themselves also consume Japanese media?

[MarioFanaticXV]

Originally posted by Lord Torstein:

The year-3 christmas event has a variable number of tchotchkes to collect, but if you're at 10 by the last section, there are 5 easily attainable in static spots.

They're not variable; the same enemies carry them each time.

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Sounds like Jewish inspiration rather than specifically Christian, but thanks for the info.

The stage comes from X8 which had the subtitle "Paradise Lost" when you start playing the game; so I'm going to say Catholic rather than Christian or Jewish since that was the name of a distinctly Catholic novel.