When and where the first side quest becomes available?

[Maniak 2000]

Currently I'm on my way to Palamides tample, and apart from that class 4 island \ arena I haven't encountered any side quests. I'm starting to think I'm overlooking something obvious.

So apart from these arenas, when (and where) is the first side quest becomes available?

[Fel]

Depends on what you consider side quests, if it's just the objectives that are shown on the world map bellow the main quest objective, you should already have seen a few (the first one I remember is when rokurou sees the axe monkey code red down the cliff and asks to go kill it).

If you meant proper "quest" with a series of such simple objectives, the first one I saw is sending me collect ingredients for a long forgotten miracle potion, from the port city where the "port" part is outside the town itself (on the world map, it's somewhat close to the prison island).

[Tawm]

Aside from code red hunts and Tales of Xillia cameo fights, there are very few sidequests in the game. There's one quest line per party member, Velvet not included, and you can start progressing through them starting in Reneed I believe. May as well wait until you're about to enter the final dungeon, because you get no rewards from them until the last step, and they can't be completed until you can freely roam the world at the end of the game.

[Arn]

All exclamation balloons are Side Quests, mostly are dialogues with lore and other story tidbits. As for Side Quests where you need to do something I only know Code Red daemon, the arena islands and making the elixir thing.

[Maniak 2000]

What confuses me is that map icon legend says green ! is a side quest, but so far green !s were voiced NPCs. They're nice, but I wouldn't call it side quest.

[(deleted)]

On reaching Reneed. That's Laphicet side quest to collect ingredient for Omega Elixir. Anyway the side quests are not missable. Just have to open up the map, look at the town tab and scroll through to see if any speech bubble is on the individual town map.
If you ignore them, some of the skit tagged to those speech bubble will be permanently lost.

[Maniak 2000]

So can I wait untill the last boss \ dungeon and then go hunt for them?
Or are they missable past some point?

[OnlyOffensive]

Originally posted by Fel:

Depends on what you consider side quests, if it's just the objectives that are shown on the world map bellow the main quest objective, you should already have seen a few (the first one I remember is when rokurou sees the axe monkey code red down the cliff and asks to go kill it).

If you meant proper "quest" with a series of such simple objectives, the first one I saw is sending me collect ingredients for a long forgotten miracle potion, from the port city where the "port" part is outside the town itself (on the world map, it's somewhat close to the prison island).

There are mostly companion side quest, with rokoruo, magilou etc, hard to miss. Rokuruo side quest starts with killing monkey demon early in the game, other part will be soon for you, but you might miss it, because you need to revisit place that doesn't go along the main course. Laphicet elixir quest should be avaible to you by now, it was avaible before south islands.

[OnlyOffensive]

Originally posted by Maniak 2000:

So can I wait untill the last boss \ dungeon and then go hunt for them?
Or are they missable past some point?

They aren't really offer anything aside "wider" view on the story, literally 0 point to do it later, at the end it is single player RPG, not MMO where you do quests for exp or smth.

[Arn]

You can't miss any Side Quests but I recommend to do them as long as they appear just for the sake of saving time, also Code Red daemons and arena islands thingie doesn't scale with you so by doing them later you will have little to no challenge.