Monolith Soft on player feedback, Xenoblade’s future, relationship with Nintendo, more

Gamereactor has gone live with a new interview featuring Xenoblade Chronicles X senior director and chief creative office Tetsuya Takahashi. Topics included player feedback, where he’d like to take the series next, Monolith Soft’s relationship with Nintendo, and more.

You can find several excerpts from the interview below. A couple of additional questions and answers are on Gamereactor here.

On any changes made in the west for Xenoblade Chronicles X…

The core parts of the game are the same as the Japanese version, but there have been some small adjustments to character statistics, the experience points you gain, and the inventory sorting feature.

On player feedback…

We are always interested to hear players’ feedback. This is something that we are lucky to be able to do in our industry due to the large volume of fans out there who express their opinions. When developing games, we always want to create the best game possible, and there are always changes we can make or tweaks here and there. As you know, creating high-definition character models is a very complicated process, but in simple terms there are two major factors when creating good character models: creating high-quality assets, and the implementation of those assets by a team of skilled staff. If one or both of those requirements aren’t fully satisfied, the ideal result cannot be realised. We are a very small studio, which is sometimes good but also sometimes restrictive in terms of manpower and resources, so we can’t always achieve everything we would wish for. We certainly listen to what people say about our games: we always try to improve them and will continue to improve in the future.

On how there being a custom avatar instead of a preset character affected the scriptwriting and narrative processes…

In RPG development, the sections that cost the most are the cut scenes and events in the main story. Since this is Monolith Soft’s first high-definition open world title, we decided to focus less on these and instead shift our resources into improving the quality of the gameplay – which is most important – especially the “hack and slash” combat. This is the reason that we decided to make the player’s character an avatar without a real personality. In exchange, we focused on designing lots of quests, and added a lot of supporting characters related to these. Many people in the development team were involved with these supporting characters, and I think we have been able to give them all strong, distinct personalities.

On where he’d like to take the Xenoblade series next…

While Xenoblade Chronicles was a true story-driven JRPG, we took a rather different approach with Xenoblade Chronicles X. You could say it doesn’t really feel like a typical JRPG: what really sets it apart from other JRPGs is that the game world – the planet Mira – is really vast. I’ve heard that some Japanese users who played Xenoblade Chronicles X said they enjoyed a more story-driven type of game. So if we have the opportunity to make another game in the series, I’d like to made another typical JRPG-style game like Xenoblade Chronicles again.

On what game elements are responsible for the global appeal of Xenoblade…

I imagine a large part of the appeal is in this being the first open-world RPG from Japan. I also think it’s really meaningful that this is a middle tier title, rather than a AAA title. The Xenoblade series has always had a different genre for each game, with the previous game being fantasy, and now turning to science fiction. I hope we will be able to continue the series like this, exploring lots of different settings, rather than being confined to a specific genre.

On Monolith and Nintendo’s relationship…

This is just my personal view, but I think that Monolith Soft should continue making the kind of games that can’t be made within Nintendo. As you know, before we were Monolith Soft we worked at Square Enix, so Xenoblade Chronicles is the result of those Square Enix influences combining with influences from Nintendo. Just as human civilisation has developed through the intermingling of different peoples and cultures, I hope that Monolith Soft can continue to develop further through having various opportunities to work with Nintendo.