Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Devs Explain Why There Are So Many Female Rare Blades

Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s executive director Tetsuya Takahashi and composer Yasunori Mitsuda recently talked about the upcoming Switch RPG in an interview in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine. [Thanks, Hachima.]

• Plans for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 started back in July 2014.

• Monolith Soft was working on Xenoblade Chronicles X at the time, but began work on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 at the same time.

• Xenoblade Chronicles X took a different direction from Xenoblade Chronicles, so the developers grew impatient after hearing fans ask “Why did you change it?”

• At the time, Monolith Soft had no idea about the specs of the Nintendo Switch, so they began working on its plans while simply imagining what kind of hardware it’ll turn out to be. They got the green light after Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamgami said “This, this is it!”

• Xenoblade Chronicles X’s development revolved around the enjoyment of exploring an open world, but Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is story-focused like Xenoblade Chronicles. That’s why the title is straightforward.

• Tetsuya Takahashi: “Mitsuda-kun (composer Yasunori Mitsuda) is a mother ship-like being to me. I end up wanting to work with him after not doing so for a while.”

• Some felt that it was a little awkward to select Arts while moving and controlling the camera in past titles, so we’ve made the controls more intuitive this time around.

• We needed plenty of Blades, so it was already decided on that we’ll need to get help from numerous character designers.

• The reason we request designs from outside is because Monolith Soft doesn’t have a character designer.

• Lately we’ve been told that our modeling has gotten better, but it’s actually the same staff.

• As a result of having the Rare Blade illustrators follow a weapons and attributes guideline document, we ended up with too many girls [laughs].

• With singles included, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has over 120 recorded songs.

• Previously we had ACE handle the field music, Kenji Hiramatsu the battle music which got a favorable reception. They’ve been assigned the same roles for Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Mitsuda composed about 25 songs.

• The music alone is simply extravagant, and we’d like to have an orchestrated concert if given the opportunity.

• There are some Rare Blades that are extremely rare. We hope to see people play the game and share what they get with each other.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 releases on December 1, 2017 for Nintendo Switch.