How Xenoblade Chronicles Grew Out of Two Clay Gods

After Xenosaga, the Team Had to Change Its Approach, Not Just the Story

To understand the idea behind Xenoblade, we need to return to the early years of Monolith Soft. The studio was founded in 1999 with support from Namco, and Xenosaga became its flagship project. The team was young: many of its programmers and planners were only beginning their careers in the industry. Takahashi later recalled that the graphics engine for the first Xenosaga reached a usable state only about six months before the game had to be completed.

In that situation, Monolith Soft relied on what it already did best: large cinematic scenes, a complex world, and a long story. It was a rational production decision, but it had an unpleasant downside. The game systems increasingly existed to serve the story instead of standing on equal footing with it.

In a 2015 interview, Takahashi described the structure of a Japanese RPG through two axes. The vertical axis is the story, which carries the player from beginning to end. The horizontal axis is exploration, combat, and every activity that lets the player leave the main route. By his own assessment, the vertical axis had become too dominant in Monolith Soft's earlier games.

After three Xenosaga episodes, the team was satisfied with neither the reviews nor its own results. Yet the years spent working on the series had given the studio valuable experience. Koh Kojima joined Monolith Soft as a newcomer, but by the time development on Xenoblade began, he had become one of its directors. The studio could now return to making a large-scale RPG with a seasoned team.

Xenoblade was made by an experienced Monolith Soft team with constant involvement from Nintendo's producers.
Nintendo / 「最後まで行きましょう」と言われて / nintendo.co.jp

Xenoblade was therefore not conceived as another Xenosaga for a different console. The team was trying to redefine what a modern Japanese RPG should contain. The story remained important, but now the player also needed enough reasons to leave the beaten path.

The World First Fit on a Table

The central idea came to Takahashi on a train in July 2006. He imagined two gods who had died in battle and remained frozen in the moment of their final strike. Centuries passed, life appeared on their bodies, and the peoples living there continued the war of their worlds.

This idea shaped not only the story but also the structure of the game world. A giant body gave the journey a direction and served as a natural landmark: players could look up, see the titan's head, and understand how far they still had to go.

Takahashi summarized the concept on roughly one page and showed it to Yasuyuki Honne, one of Monolith Soft's founders and the art director of Xenogears. Honne did not stop at a drawing. He bought diorama materials and worked with other employees to build a physical model of Bionis and Mechonis.

The model Honne built in 2006 was still preserved in the studio eighteen years later.
Yasuyuki Honne / the Xenoblade world model eighteen years later / x.com

To choose the poses, the developers stood opposite one another and acted out a battle between two giants. The geography of the future world depended on how their bodies were positioned.

The pose of the model immediately defined the future plains, forests, cold regions, and the sword bridge between the two worlds.
Nintendo / 「最後まで行きましょう」と言われて / nintendo.co.jp

The model immediately became a map of the geography: a wide plain could be placed on the thigh, a forest on the back, and a cold region in a part of the body kept in shadow.

The abstract idea of “life on a god's body” became the concrete geography of the player's route.
Nintendo / 「最後まで行きましょう」と言われて / nintendo.co.jp

The sword connecting the gods became a ready-made bridge between the two worlds.

By the model stage, both the look of the world and the player's future route had already taken shape. This happened before Nintendo acquired a controlling stake in Monolith Soft: the deal was not announced until spring 2007. The foundation of Xenoblade came from within the studio. Nintendo became involved later, when the concept had to be turned into a full game.

Even so, there is no single precise date for the start of development. The concept appeared in July 2006, the team began work on a prototype in April 2007, and the main production effort started later still. When 2008 is given as the start of development, it refers to only one stage of the process: by then, the project had already existed for almost two years.

The Prototype Grew Out of the Delayed Disaster: Day of Crisis

Before Xenoblade, Monolith Soft was developing Disaster: Day of Crisis for Wii. For a studio accustomed to RPGs, a project built around driving, shooting, and cinematic disasters was unusual. Development took longer than expected, and the team began discussing its next game before Disaster was fully completed.

Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami saw the model of the two gods when the new project had almost nothing else. Nintendo and Monolith Soft had already concluded that the studio's next major Wii game should be an RPG. There was no finished story yet, but the model clearly conveyed the future game's defining feature: a journey across the bodies of giants.

Work on the prototype began in April 2007. Takahashi became the project's overall director, Koh Kojima oversaw development on Monolith Soft's side, and Genki Yokota was responsible for systems on Nintendo's side. Yurie Hattori later joined them and was asked to evaluate the story from a fresh perspective.

Xenoblade's production was jointly managed by staff from Monolith Soft and Nintendo.
Nintendo / “作家と編集者”のように / nintendo.co.jp

Nintendo did not agree to build the entire enormous world immediately. The team first had to finish one section completely: its graphics, quests, combat, and pacing all had to be brought close to final quality.

This was unfamiliar to Monolith Soft. The studio normally developed a game across a broad front: it would begin by building every area in rough form, then gradually raise the quality of all of them. That method revealed the overall scale early, but it gave poor answers to two uncomfortable questions: how long would the project take, and how much would it cost?

Nintendo's demand caused arguments, but the finished section gave the team a point of reference. It could be used to estimate the remaining maps, define the quality target, and identify ideas that would prove too expensive. The principle was simple: before taking on an enormous RPG, the team had to be sure it could finish at least one part of it.

The Story Was Tested as a Game, Not a TV Series

Takahashi was responsible for the project as a whole and knew that he could not write the entire story alone. He therefore invited an old acquaintance, writer Yuichiro Takeda. For almost a year, they met every week with Koh Kojima, producer Shingo Kawabata, and other members of the team. New scenes were discussed and revised, after which Takeda rewrote the text.

The Xenoblade story was refined for almost a year in weekly meetings involving the whole team.
Nintendo / “キャッチボール”をしながら / nintendo.co.jp

Thanks to his experience in anime, Takeda could judge from the length of a script how long the finished scene would run. This made it possible to plan staging and costs in advance. In a game, however, cutscenes are interspersed with playable sections whose length depends on the player.

One rejected idea shows why an RPG story cannot follow the same rules as a TV series. Takeda proposed turning one of Shulk's longtime companions into the final enemy. Such a twist might have worked in a series, but a game was different: players would have spent dozens of hours developing the character and choosing equipment, only to lose that companion without warning. Instead of experiencing powerful drama, they might simply have felt cheated.

For the same reason, the team wanted players to understand Shulk and sympathize with him. Unexpected events could happen around the hero, but Shulk himself could not suddenly say or do something the player would never expect from him.

Yurie Hattori of Nintendo reviewed the story from a fresh perspective. She flagged confusing passages and made sure the characters' behavior suited their relationships. In one scene, Shulk was supposed to touch the cheek of a sleeping Fiora. Hattori noted that the gesture felt too forward for two people who were not yet a couple. In the final version, Shulk simply took Fiora's hand.

In the end, the story was not created separately from the game. Every decision was considered from the player's point of view: what they had already done, how much time they had spent with the characters, and what they now expected from them.

Combat Could Not Interrupt the Journey

Connecting the story to the player's actions was only half the task. Exploration and combat also had to be joined so that they did not feel like separate parts of the game.

Players could spot a distant cliff and reach it without a loading screen. If every enemy encounter moved the party to a separate arena, the world would immediately fragment into a series of disconnected scenes. The enemies therefore remained on the map, and battles began exactly where the party encountered them.

Turn-based RPGs were more familiar to the Japanese audience. Xenoblade used real-time combat instead: characters performed basic attacks automatically, while the player moved around the field, selected special Arts, and watched the party's positioning.

The team initially tried to incorporate future visions into a turn-based system, but that approach did not work. In the final version, the visions became part of real-time combat. Before a dangerous attack, the game showed which character would be targeted and how many seconds remained.

The player had several seconds to warn an ally, draw the enemy's attention, or stop the attack.
Nintendo / 「やりきりたい」一心で / nintendo.co.jp

At the same time, the team tried to encourage every attempt to explore the world. Almost every departure from the main route offered a reward: a quest item, a rare enemy, a beautiful view, or a hidden area. The leader of the quest team promised to prepare around 400 items for quests. The interview referred specifically to items, not to 400 separate quests, as the figure is sometimes interpreted.

Side paths were designed to be visible, while the return to the main route was kept short. The experience of Honne and other employees who had worked with 3D maps since Xenogears proved useful here. The environment had to do more than impress with its scale; it also had to keep suggesting places worth investigating.

Not only the world but also the party had to feel alive. During combat, allies commented on successful actions and responded to one another, so the characters continued to interact even outside story scenes. So many lines were recorded that their frequency had to be reduced near the end of development.

The same problem appeared elsewhere in the game: the more detail the team added, the harder it became to keep the project within its planned limits.

The Project Once Again Outgrew the Plan

Even after the team completed the test section and estimated the remaining work, the project continued to expand. Every new area had to be filled with enemies, quests, items, and music, and then every route had to be tested. The denser the world became, the more time it took to finish.

Takahashi then proposed the standard solution: cut part of the game to stay on schedule. Yamagami saved Xenoblade as we know it by deciding to see the game through and taking responsibility for negotiations with Nintendo. No public release date had been announced at that point, so this was not an official delay but a revision of the internal plan.

The extra time allowed the team to finish the core systems and focus on debugging. Takahashi kept playing through the game himself and found bugs that Mario Club's testers had missed. Toward the end of development, he sometimes contacted the people who could fix a problem directly rather than waiting for the request to pass through the entire management chain.

The scale of the project can also be seen in its credits. MobyGames lists 479 people in the Wii version's credits, but that number includes more than developers: it also covers employees of outside studios, localization staff, testers, and people listed in the special thanks. The often-repeated breakdown of “300 developers plus another 200 localization and quality-assurance specialists” therefore cannot be treated as exact; the total depends on who is included.

The game's scale also shaped its soundtrack.

Six composers wrote around 90 pieces for Xenoblade.
Nintendo / ６人の音楽家を集めて / nintendo.co.jp

Yasunori Mitsuda wrote the ending song Beyond the Sky, Yoko Shimomura composed several key themes, and most of the soundtrack was created by Manami Kiyota and the members of ACE+. This gave different regions and story sequences their own musical character.

From Monado to Xenoblade

The public first saw the game at E3 2009. At the time, it was still called Monado: Beginning of the World.

A year before the Japanese release, the vast fields, the Monado, and the combat system had already taken on their familiar form.
Brian / Monado: Beginning of the World screenshots / nintendoeverything.com

On January 29, 2010, Satoru Iwata announced the final title. He explained that the name Xenoblade referred back to Takahashi's earlier Xeno works and acknowledged his contribution to the new project. This connected the game to Takahashi's body of work rather than to the stories of Xenogears or Xenosaga: the new world and characters remained independent.

Xenoblade was released in Japan on June 10, 2010. Europe received Xenoblade Chronicles on August 19, 2011, and North America on April 6, 2012. Western sources therefore sometimes give 2011 or 2012 as the game's release year. Development of the original Japanese version, however, ended in 2010.

Bionis' Shoulder Began as a Test Map

After the game's release, a large area on Bionis' left shoulder was found in its data. In 2011, a user named Helsionium examined the map model and later managed to load it in the game.

In 2011, Helsionium found a large map in the Wii data that could not be visited during normal play.
Helsionium / Unused/Beta Area: Bionis' Left Shoulder? / gamefaqs.gamespot.com

The map already contained roads, caves, buildings, and other objects, so fans concluded that they had found an almost complete chapter cut for lack of time.

Takahashi later explained that the shoulder had been created as a test map for movement, jumping, and falling. When the team needed a background for a scene set in Bionis' past, the developers reused the existing terrain rather than build another map for a single sequence.

The test map was not an empty technical playground. By 2010, its model had been developed in considerable detail, and numerous objects remained in the data. There is, however, no evidence that a completed story chapter existed and was removed at the last moment.

In 2020, the map was reworked for the Future Connected epilogue in Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition.

Ten years later, the test map became the foundation of a separate epilogue in Definitive Edition.
Caty McCarthy / Monolith Soft and Nintendo on Why Xenoblade Chronicles Was a Turning Point for the Studio and for JRPGs / vg247.com

Future Connected was not a restoration of an old chapter, but a new story that made use of the surviving map.

Xenoblade Changed Monolith Soft's Approach

The central concept of Xenoblade Chronicles proved remarkably durable. The two battling gods appeared before the characters, the combat system, and even Monolith Soft's move under Nintendo's control. Almost everything else had to be tested and reconsidered during production.

The project's strength lay in the way one decision led to another. The shape of a giant suggested the geography, the continuous world required combat without a separate arena, and future visions connected that combat to the story. Rewards for leaving the main route restored the “horizontal axis” that Takahashi had found lacking in the studio's earlier RPGs.

Monolith Soft created the central idea, but the studio learned how to bring it to release together with Nintendo.

Xenoblade therefore became a turning point for the studio. Monolith Soft did not abandon complex worlds or long stories. It learned to connect them to game systems so that story, exploration, and combat supported one another—and so that an enormous project could actually be finished.