Xenoblade Chronicles Creator Expresses Interest In Smaller-Scale Project

I'm interested in anything Monolith Soft is making, but if by "increasing the value of the brand that we have created with the Xenoblade Chronicles saga" Takahashi means more Xenoblade games... hell yeah!

At this point Takahashi could make a mayonnaise sandwich and I'd still buy it.

You know he'd totally cut it into the shape of the Zohar, too.

I'm looking forward to any future Monolith Soft projects especially Xenoblade ones. Loving my time with Definitive Edtion.

Xenoblade mobile rpg... Can be done right without throwing micro-transactions too much in our face

"Unfortunately, we're likely to see anything like this in the near future..."
Awesome! I'm glad the odds are in our favor.

Baten Kaitos is smaller scale.

How about remaking Xenoblade Chronicles X? Now is the perfect time.

Everything I have played from Monolith I have liked a ton! So I'm willing to try anything they make.

But frankly I would love to see Xenoblade grow to be a rival of Final Fantasy. I personally already vastly prefer Xenoblade, but I'd love it to become an established franchise in a similar style to FF.

Animal Crossing spin offs again for Nintendo Switch, as long not Amiibo Festival or Happy Home Designer.

Actually I wouldn't mind something that is a lil' smaller than then Xenoblade Series. If we get more Xenoblade Chronicles that is fine by me.

@King-X wasn't there talks about X-2 a few years back? I'm pretty sure they'll make a sequel for it. It was an amazing game in its own right and there's never been another one like that.

I trust Monolith Soft as everything they have done is a gem. An excellent track record and no signs of doing the contrary.

You know what? Good. Xenoblade has become Nintendo's top JRPG franchise next to Fire Emblem and deserves to become a well-known brand under Nintendo's belt. They should be known for more than just the hyper-cuddly Mario/Pokemon/Animal Crossing. More hardcore games like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem that deal with harsh themes like loss and revenge, and offer stellar gameplay elements that appeal to older players. Nintendo has a wide variety of things that they publish and the last thing I want is for them to milk one series to death while the rest fall behind and become irrelevant like certain other companies tend to do.

But yeah, hoping to see more quality stuff from Monolith in the future!

Better graphics please and if you do sides quests then atleast make them interesting this time round, or just remake xenoblade chronicles X

Smaller project? Focus on the Xenoblade brand?
They could make some spin-offs like a racing game, a board game, a fighting game or well... anything honestly.

They got the characters and the locations, they could make so much work with it if they want to!

@Heavyarms55 that will never happen, have you seen the colossal sales figures vs those of xenoblade? Final fantasy 7 remake sold more than the whole of the xenoblade games together, plus final fantasy games are multi platform

@King-X there are other games to play. Thats like complaining that FF7 Remake ended on a "cliffhanger" too.

It'll come eventually.

Disaster: Day of Crisis remake and sequel please.

Port X, you cowards.

I’m not asking for a full remake like the first game just got. A simple port. Do something with the second screen and just... rerelease it to broaden the audience. Then maybe consider a sequel, but just a quick port would be lovely.

@fafonio it’s not really comparable. We knew FF7R would end on a cliffhanger, they’re made it clear awhile back that they were only giving us a portion of the game. It’s precisely why I refuse to buy it. Maybe I’ll consider it when the full thing is out, but cutting up an already finished story and serving it to us in chunks is much different than actually writing a story with a cliffhanger and not addressing the cliffhanger with no guarantee it will be addressed (like what happened with Golden Sun: Dark Dawn).

I loved Xenoblade X, but I think it's a lot harder to make a sequel to just because the main character was customisable. Plus the characters in general weren't as memorable as the casts of XB1 and XB2. Also it relied on the Wii U gamepad for its uniqueness.

I could see Last Sword and Pandora's Tower being updated for the Switch however.

Big N should fully integrate Monolith in their Kyoto and Tokio studios, and do the same with 1-UP and NDcube. I want to have more AAA games from Nintendo and less smaller ones, they are not needed in an vital industry we have today wirh many third party developers.

Are they not working in one smaller project already?? What about that medieval RPG they've been working on for some years? I love Xenoblade, but I really want them to explore new lands. Creating a new IP, going back to Baten Kaitos, that kind of things.

Nintendo needs to give these guys some more many and resources. Adding more employees would help.

@playstation_king Yeah, it's a right shame too. FF7 is over-rated in my book. Go ahead and burn me at the stake for that opinion, I really don't care.

@NerdyBoutKirby "Get in there, Shulk!" - "The future can be changed!"

Anyways, I hate to say this, but if they're looking to increase the value of the XC brand, perhaps they should also be looking to improve the engine used for it. The XCX engine works, but it's based on Wii U's design of having eDRAM, which Switch has none of. They should get in touch with Shin'en, who knew the Wii U inside and out, and yet proved the Switch was far superior despite not having some of Wii U's benefits.

I think the obvious move for them at this moment is a Switch port of XCX. It likely wouldn't take too long, they could use pretty much the exact same team. If you look at their release history, they tend to put something out every 1-2 years whether its a new game, expansion or remake.

For the time being I think the potential for XC and XC2 has been maxed out, both are on switch with expansions, so I think the next logical step is XCX and an expansion, to be released in early 2022.

XC released in 2010
XCX released in 2015
XC2 released in 2017
XC2:Torna released in 2018
XCDE released in 2020

I think you will already have another team working on either XCX2 or XC3 but that probably won't hit for another few years either.

I would love to finally see a sequel to X.

I'll be happy with either Xenoblade Chronicles X2 or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 though. The latter can finally bring the universes of XC1 and XC2 together. While XCX2 could continue the many open endings and cliffhangers presented in XCX. Personally, I like the sci-fi theme more.

But dear god, please use a new engine. The current engine is still the one ported from XCX Wii U, and is designed for Wii U hardware architecture. Therefore it doesn't work well with Switch hardware, as the engine has a bottleneck/bug with this architecture, preventing to take full advantage of it.

This presumably has to do with the fact that the engine was designed to use the Wii U's eDRAM to its maximum potential. Thus giving us such a huge world 8 times the size of GTA V + an entire city without any loading times whatsoever. The Switch has no eDRAM, while in portable mode it is basically just as powerful as Wii U.

The result - the infamous resolution drops to early 1990s quality during handheld play. I think with this engine, as long as Monolith just remains too lazy to fix the bottleneck or find an alternative, the Switch simply wouldn't be able to run Xenoblade Chronicles X without major downgrades compared to Wii U. It might be able to power through this bottleneck while in docked mode and present the game in a comparable manner, but in handheld mode it would awkwardly fall short of its predecessor and give us the same filthy 360p garbage as seen in XC2 and XCDE. And that's why it isn't coming.

@King-X I wouldn't watch the Italian Job lol.

Waiting for Switch port of XCX (and please don't do it the #FE Encore way).
And just hope this "interest" won't end up with a "smaller-scale Xenoblade brand focused game". i.e. F2P smartphone game like FE Heroes.

@Max_the_German
Monolith Soft develops the landscapes and topography for Zelda games and provides asset development for Animal Crossing and Splatoon. They are pretty well integrated into Nintendo.

1-Up is another support studio for Nintendo and NDCube develops Mario Party, whose last entry just sold over 10 million copies. Neither of those studios are going to be integrated into Nintendo.

Chronicles X Definitive Edition please

@ShadJV I agree. I just want to play it again and give the game the chance it deserves with a larger audience.

I certainly feel for him.
Only putting out a product every fifth year can be exhausting as a creator.

@BenAV To each his own I guess. X was my person favorite as It had the the most role playing and exploration. They just needed to iron out some of the flaws. Like the item fetch quests were horrible in X. But I think 2 still had more wrinkles.

@King-X
"This story never ends."

Tiger Tiger for mobile devices.

I was just thinking that a xenoblade game with breath of the wild like climbing and exploring mechanics would be very interesting. Just the thought of scaling a titan gets me hyped.

@Heavyarms55 Though the franchis-iness of FF is the reason Takahashi wanted out of Square to work on something different to begin with....that might be too much of a good thing for him!

Maybe they could finally revive "Disaster: Day of Crisis" with another Definitive Edition

I bet a lot of developers feel this way. The bigger the project (and budget), the more pressure there is to stick to a formula that you know sells. And once you reach that level of success, any "Hey, I got an idea for something new and different" will probably bet met with a scowl and readying of a baseball bat from the publisher.

@fafonio I still have a copy for my Wii U. Is XCX enjoyable and finishable without online gaming? Thx

I'd like to see a Monolith Soft title that isn't a gigantic open-world game. Not everything needs to be like Xenoblade or modern 3D Zelda - a more focused and linear experience would be nice.

@Discostew Honestly, my comment was mostly to expose a typo in the original article. It has since been changed, by the looks of it.

@sportvater yes... Actually the online component of the game is not that important. As far as I can remember it just helped as for which factions did the most work and some bonuses. It helped the game to feel like a real recovering civilization in a foreign planet.
However you can play it normally without it. And if you haven’t played it I totally recommend it. It’s not a totally story-driven game like other Xenoblades, but it’s really unique and after obtaining your first Mech you really feel that the game world becomes another beast.

My personal top is:
XB1
XBX
XB2

So if you really enjoyed any of the other two games, X is really good. Also, one of the few games that used the gamepad correctly.

@fafonio thank you very much for the insight! Back then the far too small onscreen-text annoyed me so much that I rather played Donkey Kong. When I put in the disk a few days away, the text size still annoys... but maybe I should try to handle it. Didn't that annoy you at all? Cheers for the explanation and effort!! Couldn't find anything about the non-online issue on the net. Kudos for you!

@NEStalgia That's a fair point I suppose...

@arrmixer I never finished and I want to. But I no longer have access to a Wii U.

@sportvater damn... I can’t remember my time with it about the small texts. Could be that you’re right since there was a lot of stuff happening on screen. But I think that once you get used to it you can play without problems. Since I don’t remember that setting back my experience with it.
I guess you’re playing with HDMI instead of VGA right? I remember that happened way back with Banjo Kazooie Nuts n Bolts, really small text.

Anyway... I’ve never seen so many people complaining about it, so maybe you’ll adjust to it until you understand the menus. But it’s a small stepping stone to a great game. It’s a lengthy game but I remember it being one of those unique experiences in gaming that hasn’t been emulated again for me.

So... Baten Kaitos HD collection? No, just me? Ok.

That being said I wonder if there are thoughts of making a game set far in the future now that there is a true land mass. Then again that might be how they handle 3.

@fafonio thanks for the reply! How do I use VGA? Cheers!

@Ryu_Niiyama no. Not only U! Baten Kaitos is great!!

@King-X
Thanks for the bonus. 😊
I would love to see them continue the story of X, or maybe somehow merge the worlds of X and Xenoblade Chronicles? As far as a franchise's future goes though it might be best to do something different altogether for Xenoblade 3. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will be great.

@sportvater ohhh no, not VGA, that would make matters worse. Keep with HDMI. And I’ve looked online and it seems that many people had problems with the text actually. I didn’t remember for it to hinder my experience with the game. However I have a really bad memory.

Well, the only thing I can say is, give it a try.

@fafonio cheers!

I look forward to a collaboration between the Sword Art Online series and Xenoblade Chronicles <3

@King-X

Honestly, I wouldn't mind a remake (•__•)...