As each Xenoblade release grows in size, so does the series' developer, Monolith Soft. According to a post on ResetEra, the Japan-based company recently updated its website - with the employee headcount now at 171. Back in May, there were three fewer people at the company. Monolith is now also reportedly recruiting 'business assistant staff' for its studio in Tokyo.
Monolith Soft was founded in 1999 by Tetsuya Takahashi and was originally owned by Namco. Later down the line, Nintendo became the major shareholder of the company. In recent times Monolith has been keeping itself busy with the Xenoblade Chronicles series. With the company continually expanding, hopefully, this means we'll see even bigger and better projects from it in the future.
[source gonintendo.com]
Comments 39
Really hope Xenoblade Chronicles X gets a switch port soon. One of the few WiiU games I really enjoyed. Would love it on the go
I really hope that they'll never port Xenoblade X to the Switch !
1st, you canno't port it perfect because the Switch is not able to handle a dualscreen display as the wii u did and,
2nd, I prefer to see MonolithSoft doing something NEW than a port... and when I say new, I'd like to see them bringing a POLISHED game not like Xenoblade 2 wasn't...
If they could stop DLCs too, would be really appreciated...
Would like to have the game from A to Z in the cartridge from day one.
*doubled
Employee headcount grown by three, soon to be a few more. And we don’t even know the job titles, so could be non-game related roles.
With news this gripping, who needs Nintendo to announce new games?
I know it’s already been released for the New 3DS, but how about an HD version of the original XC?
Just picked up XBC2 as managed to find it cheap, a bit worried about the combat system's lack of action but as I love Octopath thought I would give this a go. Don't really understand why anyone would bemoan a port of XBCX though as long as it doesn't delay other projects more games in never a bad thing. There are a lot of games I would love Nintendo to make portable from the GC, Wii and WiiU eras.
Can't wait to see what they do next. Still my money is on a xenoblade x port to be revealed first ,and we have to wait until e3 for announcement for a new game
@Cobalt
You would like to have the game from A to Z from the start , yes is that what you prefer you entitled baby. It’s not like making DLC takes time or anything.
XCX port would be nice, and a sequel to it as well to continue the story. Hopefully without changing the art and animation style, not a fan of XC2 and how they can't turn their heads and always stand in a weird idle position...
XCX and/or XC1 on the Switch please. Either or. Just need more Xenoblade in my life. XENOBLAAAAAAAADE!
Also, if you're gonna remaster XC1, maybe re-add the Bionis Shoulder?
They better create New teams for Animal Crossing Switch.
@Anti-Matter Monolith Soft, to my knowledge, never had anything to do with the Animal Crossing games. So this is a random thing to ask in this topic. Lol
@Regpuppy
Ow.
Because i remembered Monolith Soft was included on Animal Crossing New Leaf credits.
I hope Xenoblade X gets a port, done as a secondary project, and I hope they work on a new game as well. But I hope they take there time with it. I hope their success with Xenoblade and XC2 doesn't pressure them to start churning out yearly games.
I don't agree with the people who don't want an X port and who want there to never be DLC. Monolith has shown they know how to do DLC right.
@Anti-Matter Well, they're owned by Nintendo, so they might've played some part. But they didn't take lead on any of them, so Nintendo likely sourced them for extra manpower.(Big publishers do this for crunch time) So, unfortunately for the Animal crossing fans, I doubt this means anything for that series.
Which is a shame, since Animal crossing is good for the casual and female demographics Nintendo likely wants to bring in.
I hope some of the new employees know how to tell their boss that when every female character has breasts bigger than your head and clothes that make them look like battle blow up dolls, you look like a creep.
I'd love to play another Monolith game that isn't as creepy/pervy as XBC2 was. I enjoyed it overall and finished it, but I'm honestly at the point where I can't recommend it. (Which is a shame because I loved Xenogears.)
Hope one of them knows how to draw a female character lol
Does anyone know if they actually have in-house character designers now so that they don't have to outsource all that work lol
An HD texture update of the first Xenoblade please.
X was fun, kinda reminded me of Phantasy Star Online and it had giant transforming robots but they spoiled it by having you buy bloody insurance for them. It's like Tom Nook runs the Skell businesses.
I never got on with Xenoblade 2. I quite liked the characters and gameplay but it's 2018: 50% of gamers are female and need better representation than scantily glad jailbait.
Xenoblade 1 was perfect. It had strong characters, a great story, fantastic battles, more sidequests than you can shake a stick at and an original premise: difficult in JRPGs. If they released it tomorrow I'd buy it straight away.
A company hired three people since May. I'm sorry, but how is this news? I'm sure you can put out an article every week when someone is fired or hired at one of Nintendo's studios.
I hope they try something new. A Mech Action game set in the XCX universe would be fun. I always found the cutscenes in the XC games to be more exciting than the battles. Especially when Skells were involved.
Just work a bit on the story more and give is an actual character to play as. Silent protagonists can work in JRPGs (i.e. Persona series) but the one in XCX was the epitome of an empty shell.
@Cobalt port would probably be handled by someone else. All they have to do is make the map as a button and make the font larger.
@RadioHedgeFund @DavidMac Dalia was drawn by a female.
Get this SJW white knighting out of here.
I'm convinced everyone who is obsessing over the appearance of female characters in the game simply has their mind in the gutter deeper than Tora to be fixating on it like that. Yeah, the costumes are bizarrely revealing, but no more revealing than clothing actual teenage girls wear in real life, for better or worse, and more would if they could get away with it. I mean she's not even showing belly button. Not even piercings! She's practically dressed as a nun in contrast to actual 17 year old girls.
I can almost imagine as everyone tells her "you're not going out in public dressed like that, young lady!" I can practically see Pyra flipping us off, yelling "you're not my father, you can't tell me what to do!" rolling up her bustier higher, and storming off to Torigoth at night. Bet you guys are all feeling old now, huh?
It may be shameless and tasteless....but it's also more the norm in real life for the age group Anime characters usually are than not.
It's not the way I would design the characters, and it's not my ideal of what a character (or real life person) would dress like, but it's not my design or fashion sense, it's someone else's, and there's nothing particularly contrary to aspects of real life about it, it doesn't get in the way of the characters or the game. Not unless your mind works like Tora's, anyway. If it does...might want to avoid shopping malls, pools, beaches, and restaurants....
@quinnyboy58 The combat system is complex. The tutorials just forget to tell you until you get stonewalled by a cheap boss half way through It's not "actiony" but more like the ATB from certain final fantasies...it's really menu driven like Octopath but nicely tucked away in an actiony covering.
Hint to save you trouble later: Blades are like Pokemon or SMT demons. Gotta' catch 'em all. And field skills are like Pokemon HMs. For better or worse.
@Cobalt X really deserves a port. It's a flawed but very unique game that didn't really get much attention. Yes, it needs to be reworked for the map for single screen, but that's not a huge limitation. I would like to see some adjustments to some of the punishing systems like the excessive cost of dolls and unforgiving high level monsters everywhere. At least add an "easy mode" that includes unlimited doll insurance or something like XC2 has to make it accessible to more players.
A port would likely not hamper development on new games. They managed to port XC to 3DS and WiiU while producing XCX and XC2 simultaneously. For that matter I'd like to see XC ported to Switch too. That's a worthy game I'd love to play again, but I'm not dragging out the WiiU to do it and on 3DS it's kind of "eh".
Monolith's DLC is probably the best take on DLC. I'm annoyed at the additional quests that make some of the field skills and rare blades easier that are DLC locked, but in terms of the big single player content, releasing it as an actual physical retail game like expansion packs used to be is the right way to do it.....and technically isn't DLC, it's a full game of smaller size than the original for less money that includes bonus DLC.
@DavidMac Bad news for you then, because Takahashi wants to make a game that's quote-on-quote "erotic and violent". Trust me, they're going to go further from here on with certain games.
Xenogears already lives on in Xenoblade anyway, pretty much every idea Xenoblade/Xenosaga uses comes from there. Jin = Krelian, Poppi = Emeralda, World Tree = Eldridge, etc.
If you're at a point where you're going to not recommend a game simply because of character designs, I'm going to say that's dumb.
I personally am fine with all the erotic stuff. I mean, when you're mature enough for violence such as mortal kombat, such things as complaining about showing too much skin in games is kinda stupid and pointless in my opinion.
Never really understood that about American culture.
I played XCX on the Wii U a few months ago and loved it. A Switch port is doable IMO. Heck, they could even use the porting process to improve on some issues with the game (like the tiny text and a better menu structure).
The Switch community always begging for more old ports is just mind bending to me.
A NEW jRPG IP would be amazing. They way talented to be a 1 pony show. And could alternate a nice AAA jRPG each other year for Nintendo.
@quinnyboy58 once you're fighting tough bosses and have a full party, the combat is non stop action in xc2. If you want to pull off chains, burst, combos it's pretty much the most engaging battle system I have ever played
Towards the article, wasn't xc2 developed by like 43 only people ?
I'm still holding out hope for that Xenosaga HD Collection that was rumored a few months back. Never got to play those games, and it'd be great to see Namco and Nintendo co-publish it with Monolith developing.
Or maybe a Baten Kaitos sequel! I like the Xenoblade games more, but I'd love to see more from Baten Kaitos.
Oh wow, three more people added woopdy doo. Whatever, as long as my favorite developer keeps growing, I'll be at peace. If EA owned them, then it would be a different story.
@RadioHedgeFund That 50% statistic is only accurate if you include mobile games. Which is an entirely different ecosystem to PC/Console games.
Not that this statistic would be a problem. It's just misleading. It's what happens when you take a female-dominated market (Mobile) and combine it with a male-dominated market (Console/PC). It produces a stat that represents neither accurately.
@Cobalt Nope, you can play XCX with just one screen. My brother plays XCX exclusively in gamepad and he's doing fine. The difference is just one extra tap to switch to map screen.
@DownRightSam cheers mate, played first few mins to check game worked and loved it already
@NEStalgia from what I have played seems the game got a hard rap from the 'pro' reviewers, as most JRPGs do to be fair.
@Regpuppy my friends and I are always complaining we can never play on our Switches because our wives are always hogging them to enjoy a variety of games.
Discuss.
@RadioHedgeFund Cool anecdote, but it doesn't exactly prove anything. Even if I give the benefit of the doubt and take you at your word. Your social group is a very poor sample size, compared to the entire gaming community.
@quinnyboy58 I really don't get why the paid critics generally don't get JRPGs. It's as staple a genre to classic gaming as you get. But it does seem common.
That said, I do have my own stable of criticisms about Xenoblade overall, and 2 in particular (X gets its own separate criticisms.) Personally I feel like the entire Xenoblade series is a deeply flawed masterpiece. I can pick apart a ton of things it does very very wrong, and makes it inexplicably frustrating, and systems that make me scratch my head what anyone could have been thinking in implementing them, let alone not explaining them. And yet the things it does right are so great it makes you want to overlook the flaws, however deep they are.
The problem is most of what the critics complain about are often not even factual and aren't the things I would highlight as the real flaws of the series.
For XC2 my biggest frustration is the horrible horrible blade/affinity/field skill setup (Pokemon HMs on steroids after Pokemon finally ditched them), the lack of explanation (or at least a good one) and how dependent upon it (and the inevitable RNG creation of it) sidequests are, along with the fact that sidequests need magic requirements to even appear that you may never know about. Things like that are frustrating and worthy of criticism even if the rest of the game more than makes up for it. Yet that's never what the critics discuss!
@NEStalgia agree entirely and to round it off my copy of retro gamer this month even gave Octopath 77%, if anyone should appreciate such a game it should be them ffs!
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