hi! i've enjoyed looking through your xcde and comparison shots a lot lately, and whenever i miss the game i come back to them!!! they all really capture the beauty of the game, and reading your comments on it is really cool! i was wondering how you took such good pics without the ui and characters showing up, though? i too want to take pics, but i cant get them out of the way unless i get melia to kick the air ;v;
First, thanks so much for your kind words! I appreciate that people still look at this blog even if it's not as active these days.
As for taking pictures without the UI and characters, the original Xenoblade and Definitive Edition are a bit different, so I'll talk about each of them. In both, you can remove the entire UI except for the party gauge in the game's settings. The only way that I know of to remove the party gauge is to run it down completely by standing still (which is much easier in the original when you have a speed-up button on an emulator).
For the original Xenoblade, you can't zoom the camera in all the way through the character, who then always shows up in the frame. You can get around this by moving whoever you're controlling next to a solid surface and then rotating the camera towards the surface so it clips through their character model. This doesn't actually make taking pictures that much harder, as there's tons of little rocks and ledges scattered around that you can clip the camera through. It definitely takes some getting used to, but I think it's fun to run around looking for the best wall to frame your photo in front of.
Definitive Edition doesn't have this problem, and you can zoom the camera all the way in like you can in XCX and XC2. In the original, there were several places that I really wanted photos of but there weren't any good walls nearby, so being able to run right up to them and get great shots in DE was incredibly rewarding.
As for party members you don't control getting into shots, there's no real way to prevent this besides wiggling your character around until they resettle and leave the frame. This is a lot worse in the original, because having a wall behind you means that the NPCs will tend to walk right in front of where you're trying to point the camera. It takes some practice and some luck (usually more luck) to get certain shots, but it's definitely not too hard to get the hang of.
Side note: if you're interested in taking pictures of XCX, it essentially has the same UI & camera things as DE, and is thankfully very easy to get pictures of. XC2 is by far my least favorite game to photograph (and in every other respect), as there's no way to remove certain large parts of the UI.
Anyways, there's my long winded response. Hope this helps!
