The Development History of Xenoblade Chronicles X

After Xenoblade

Xenoblade Chronicles was released for Nintendo Wii in Japan in May 2010. It was an enormous role-playing game set on the bodies of two frozen titans. Tetsuya Takahashi first came up with the image of the world, and artist Yasuyuki Honne turned his sketch into a small model of two motionless figures. Only then did the team begin building an actual game around the idea. Players could see distant mountains, valleys, and mechanical structures, then eventually reach many of them for themselves.

The model of the two titans helped the developers work out how cities, plains, and connecting routes could fit directly onto the giants' bodies.
Nintendo / “Iwata Asks: Xenoblade,” interview about the story / nintendo.co.jp

It was an important project for Monolith Soft. Its founders had previously become known for Xenogears and the Xenosaga series, but Xenoblade was Tetsuya Takahashi's first major game after Nintendo took control of the company.

Takahashi believed Japanese role-playing games had become too focused on story and cutscenes, pushing gameplay into the background. For Xenoblade, the team therefore followed the approach commonly associated with Nintendo: first decide what the player would actually do, then build the story around it.

After that success, it might have seemed obvious that the developers would make a straightforward sequel. For Takahashi, however, Xenoblade was only a test of ideas for the next, much more ambitious project. By his own estimate, the first Xenoblade represented only a small part of the role-playing game he truly wanted to create.

Work on the new game appears to have started almost immediately. In December 2010, Monolith Soft opened a large number of positions for programmers, game designers, and artists.

Another recruitment campaign followed in June 2011. This time the studio was looking for map and battle-system designers, event and combat animators, and 2D artists. The listing specifically mentioned the ability to draw mechs, the first small hint at the science-fiction direction of the still-unannounced game.

Catching Up with Western Studios

The new game was being developed for Wii U. That meant the studio would be producing a major HD project for the first time.

At first glance, Monolith Soft seemed to be at a disadvantage. After Nintendo took control of the company, it did not develop games for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, so it had missed almost the entire HD console generation. Inside the studio, however, preparations for the transition had begun much earlier. Programmer Toshiaki Yajima said Monolith Soft had experimented with HD graphics on competing hardware even though it could not release commercial games for those systems.

The plans were serious. In one interview, programmer Michihiko Inaba said he wanted to create an HD game that would surprise players and prove that Japanese developers could still compete with American studios. He specifically named Bethesda, the creator of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as a benchmark.

One of the earliest scenes from Monolith Soft's project: a robot flies over a vast landscape that players would explore without the usual division into separate areas.
Nintendo / first look at Monolith Soft's HD project in Wii U Direct Nintendo Games 2013.1.23 / GAME Watch

For a studio only beginning to learn HD development, the plan was exceptionally ambitious. Monolith Soft wanted to create a Japanese RPG that could rival Bethesda's games in scale and the freedom of its world.

Creating an Entire Planet

While developing Xenoblade Chronicles, Takahashi had wanted to connect the bodies of the two titans into one continuous space. The team could not achieve this completely: separate regions were linked by transitions, although the game cleverly created the impression of a single world.

For the new project, the developers decided to go one step further. This time, the player would be able to travel freely through a genuine open world without the usual division into separate levels.

At the first planning meeting, Takahashi proposed going all the way and creating an entire planet. It soon became clear that fitting a whole planet into a game would be impossible, even with a much larger team. The original concept was therefore reduced to five continents covering roughly 400 square kilometers in total.

That may sound like the developers had become realistic. In practice, 400 square kilometers was still an enormous area for a Japanese role-playing game in the early 2010s.

The size of the creatures helped communicate the scale of the planet before the player even began exploring it.
Nintendo / official XenobladeX flora and fauna screenshot / 4Gamer

Size was not even the main problem. In a conventional RPG, developers know where the player is likely to go and can focus their attention on the places that matter. An open world breaks that approach. If a mountain is visible on the horizon, the player will inevitably try to climb it. And if they complete the long journey only to find an empty platform, they will realize that the beautiful world was merely scenery.

According to director Koh Kojima, the developers could not limit themselves to the locations required by the story. They also had to build out remote corners of the world that players might reach simply out of curiosity.

The vast natural regions were not designed as background scenery: players could reach almost every prominent location on their own.
Nintendo / XenobladeX screenshots ahead of the Japanese release / 4Gamer

When Satoru Iwata learned how much work this degree of freedom required, he remarked that the world was paradise for the player and absolute hell for the developers.

How to Fill 400 Square Kilometers

Drawing a large map was not enough. The player needed constant reasons to leave the road and explore. Takahashi and Kojima found a solution during one of their planning discussions.

The developers divided Mira's surface into small hexagonal segments. Each one could contain a separate objective: a dangerous enemy, treasure, a site for an exploration probe, or a small quest. The FrontierNav system gradually grew out of these cells.

The map no longer simply showed the way forward. Players uncovered regions, installed probes, gathered resources, and gradually increased each continent's survey rate. This gave travel through the enormous world a clear rhythm: notice an interesting place, reach it, complete an objective, and reveal the next part of the map.

The Wii U GamePad was also well suited to the system. Its screen constantly displayed the segmented map, allowed fast travel between discovered locations, and provided controls for the probe network.

The world was divided into segments, each containing a separate task or discovery for the player.
Nintendo / XenobladeX navigation demonstration in Nintendo Direct 2014.11.6 / 4Gamer

The GamePad did not try to take over the entire game, but it worked extremely well as an explorer's tablet.

The Game Receives the Letter X

While Monolith Soft was building its planet and designing FrontierNav, almost nothing was known about the game outside the studio. The first official clue appeared in October 2012, when Nintendo's financial documents mentioned an untitled “completely new Monolith Soft project” for Wii U.

Western fans greeted the news with interest, but also concern. The first Xenoblade had arrived in Europe after a long delay, and its American release had effectively been demanded by fans through the Operation Rainfall campaign.

Even Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé could not promise that the new game would be released in the United States. He knew the Japanese division had high expectations for the project, but any localization decision would depend on its sales potential.

Everything changed on January 23, 2013, when Nintendo officially revealed Monolith Soft's new project. It still had no title: the trailer ended with a large red X, so for the next several months the project was simply called Project X, or just X.

Nintendo showed a second trailer at E3 2013 and promised a 2014 release. The real title did not appear until a year later. At E3 2014, the project became Xenoblade Chronicles X, and its release was moved to 2015.

The letter X did not merely indicate a loose connection to the Xeno series. Takahashi gave it several meanings at once: an unknown variable, a meeting between people from different countries, and the combination of a single-player RPG with online play. It was no coincidence that the Japanese title was read as Xenoblade Cross.

A Story the Size of a Novel

Takahashi's games are usually associated with complex stories, and Xenoblade Chronicles X was no exception. Once the team had settled on the open-world structure, Takahashi wrote several versions of the plot. There was so much material that his colleagues compared it to a finished novel and joked that the manuscript could be sent straight to a publisher.

Yuichiro Takeda initially tried to turn all of the material into a complete script on his own. The game needed more than a main story, however: it also required dozens of quests, characters, and smaller narrative threads. The workload quickly became unmanageable, so Kazuho Hyodo, who had previously worked on Gundam anime, joined the project.

The new writer was given a slightly alarming condition: he was not allowed to run away halfway through production. Hyodo agreed, then discovered an unexpected amount of freedom. If a quest required a new character or a special location, the artists and designers rarely said it was impossible. The world was large enough to accommodate almost any idea.

The story was built around the destruction of Earth. The White Whale carried part of humanity to safety, but after an alien attack it crashed on planet Mira.

This scene explains why a human city appeared on Mira and why the heroes must explore the entire planet.
Nintendo / XenobladeX backstory in a collection of official screenshots / 4Gamer

The survivors built New Los Angeles and began searching for human stasis pods scattered across the planet. This gave the exploration of the enormous world a clear and specific purpose.

A Major Rewrite

The team did not reach this version of the story immediately. At first, the game had a conventional protagonist with a fixed appearance and personality, and the plot revolved around him much as the story of the first Xenoblade revolved around Shulk.

During development, the team began to feel that the enormous world was too lonely. This led to the idea of adding online features that would let players sense the presence of other explorers.

The developers did not want to make a full MMORPG. In fact, some of them were personally uneasy about online games: they did not want to talk to strangers, be criticized for mistakes, or constantly carry out other people's requests. They therefore created a principle of “loose connection.” Players belonged to shared squads, exchanged messages, recruited other players' characters, and occasionally joined forces for missions, but the game did not require constant communication.

This decision triggered a huge redesign. If other players were going to travel through the world, each of them needed a unique character. The fixed protagonist was replaced with a customizable avatar, and the writers had to rewrite the story so it would work with a silent hero of any appearance.

The writers had to rework the story after the fixed protagonist was replaced with a customizable avatar.
Nintendo / “Iwata Asks: XenobladeX,” part 4 / nintendo.co.jp

The amount of voice recording was growing at the same time. The first Xenoblade included around 3,000 battle lines. Players sometimes complained that the characters talked too much, but Takahashi chose not to reduce the number. Instead, he increased it. Xenoblade Chronicles X ultimately contained 11,000 battle lines.

The actors spent hours shouting attack names and combat phrases. Some eventually lost their voices, something even writers with extensive anime experience rarely encountered. When Iwata saw how much it would cost to test all of those lines, he said he was stunned.

A Robot as Your New Car

After the open world, robots became the game's second major foundation. Early in production, Takahashi and Kojima decided that after Xenoblade it was finally time to give players a controllable combat machine. For the creator of Xenogears and Xenosaga, the absence of robots from the previous game had indeed seemed almost strange.

The mechs were called Dolls in Japan and Skells in the Western version. They were not intended merely to participate in combat, but to completely transform the player's perception of the world. At first, the hero spends hours exploring Mira on foot. Then they receive a robot that can transform into a car and begin crossing familiar regions in minutes. Later, flight becomes available, and mountains that once had to be circled can simply be flown over.

After obtaining a robot, a familiar walking route first became a drive, and later a free flight.
Nintendo / official screenshot of a flying Doll in XenobladeX / 4Gamer

The developers deliberately avoided balancing humans and robots too closely. Once the player acquired a Doll, they were meant to feel genuinely superior: an enemy that had required a long sword fight on foot could now be destroyed with a single shot.

That power came at a price. The robots were extremely expensive, and buying one was compared to purchasing a real car. Worse, the machine could be destroyed in battle. Kojima originally wanted a lost robot to disappear permanently, forcing the player to buy another, but the rest of the staff considered the idea too cruel.

Insurance became the compromise. After the first three accidents, the robot was restored for free. After that, the owner had to pay for repairs. In this way, a science-fiction game about saving humanity unexpectedly acquired automobile insurance.

An Unusual Soundtrack

The team also decided to take the music in a new direction. Instead of Yasunori Mitsuda, who was closely associated with Xenogears and the Xenosaga series, they hired Hiroyuki Sawano. He was best known for his soundtracks for films, television series, and anime, and had never worked on a large game before.

Takahashi had admired Sawano's work for years, but other staff members doubted whether his style would suit a role-playing game. The composer was not troubled by those concerns. He proposed using vocal tracks even during battles and readily agreed to write a vast amount of music for the game.

Once the finished tracks were placed over game scenes, the doubts disappeared. The result was a highly distinctive soundtrack: loud, occasionally strange, and completely unlike the music of the first Xenoblade.

However, the decision to take a new path in every part of the project came at a cost. Learning HD development, building an open world, adding controllable robots, and implementing online features all kept increasing the team's workload, so the original schedule became impossible to meet.

The Long Road to Release

Nintendo originally planned to release the game in 2014. By November, however, it was clear that development was taking longer than expected: the launch was moved to the following spring, and an exact Japanese date was finally announced in January.

Xenoblade Chronicles X was released in Japan on April 29, 2015.

The XenobladeX team during an official Nintendo interview shortly before the game's Japanese release.
Nintendo / “Iwata Asks: XenobladeX,” part 1 / nintendo.co.jp

The European and American versions followed on December 4. More than four years had passed between the first recruitment campaign and the game's release.

The game was enormous, sometimes overloaded, and not always easy to use, but it was completely unlike an ordinary Japanese RPG. Monolith Soft did not become a new Bethesda, but it proved that a Japanese studio could also create an open world that remained interesting even away from the main story route.

Xenoblade Chronicles X had one major problem, however: it was released on Wii U, one of Nintendo's least successful home consoles. Despite positive reviews and a devoted audience, it remained exclusive to that system for almost ten years.

The situation changed only on March 20, 2025, when Nintendo released Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition for Switch. The remaster featured updated graphics and additional story content, and the game finally became available to Switch owners.

Epilogue

The history of Xenoblade Chronicles X reveals a great deal about Monolith Soft's character. The developers repeatedly chose the most difficult option. They did not hide distant areas behind invisible walls, abandon robots for the sake of balance, or remove the online component when it forced them to rebuild the story.

At times, it bordered on the absurd. Eleven thousand battle lines, 400 square kilometers, expensive robots with insurance: almost every idea increased the budget and added more work.

That is precisely why Mira remains so impressive today. Monolith Soft could not create an entire planet, as it had dreamed of doing at the beginning. It did, however, build a world large enough to make players believe that another new place waited beyond the next mountain, rather than the edge of the game map.