Xenoblade Chronicles 2 devs – no more content, designing Blades, talk about the ending
Nintendo Life recently had the chance to speak with some of the developers behind Xenoblade Chronicles 2. These include Monolith Soft executive producer Tetsuya Takahashi, producer Koh Kojima, and Nintendo director Genki Yokota.
We have some excerpts below, which confirms that there won’t be any additional content for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, talk about designing Blades and the ending (spoilers of course), and more. You can read the full discussion here.
On any plans to continue support following Torna’s launch…
Takahashi: No. Right now we are actually planning for Torna – The Golden Country to be the final content for Xenoblade Chronicles 2. … There are no plans for any additional content for Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
On the more anime-like art style…
Takahashi: I’d like to restate that my feelings about the term ‘JRPG’ are still the same. When comparing the look of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to Xenoblade Chronicles X, we’re making these games for a worldwide audience, and I think we have a feeling at Monolith that if we’re going to be sending these games out to a worldwide audience as Japanese game developers, we feel more comfortable adopting a style that we feel we can do justice to, as opposed to skewing too close to something that would be overtly realistic. So, we went for a style we felt we could do the most justice to.
On the process behind designing Blades…
Takahashi: So, we worked with a large number of character designers on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and when giving our requests for character designs to them we didn’t go so far as to specify whether we wanted male characters, female characters, or beasts. Instead, we gave them elements of those characters and how we would like them to perform in battle. We left it up to the designers at that point, and we ended up with a lot of females, and I think that’s the best answer I can give.
On the ending…
Takahashi: [Laughter] Originally we envisioned the ending sort of in an Inception-style where you would see a cutscene with Rex’s core crystal glowing, and that would be the end of the game. But, while making the final scenes of the game, I really thought we should give players a clearer sense of closure, and I really started to come around to the feeling of ending the game on a happier note. The players have been through this incredibly long, trying the experience of completing the game, so why not give them a happier note to finish on? So we thought, “Well, okay, we’ll bring back Pyra or Mythra, which one should we use? Or maybe we’ll bring back – what’s her name? The green-haired one.” In any case, we thought about ending the game with one of these female characters joining Rex again, but I decided to roll with the feeling of a happy ending of sorts and thought as a bonus why not bring both Pyra and Mythra back as a bonus for the player at the end of the game?
