Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Takahashi and Mitsuda on development, soundtrack, rare Blades, more

This week’s issue of Famitsu features a 14-page article on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which will finally be released this Friday. Included in that article is an interview with director Tetsuya Takahashi and main composer Yasunori Mitsuda. Japanese blog Hachima Kikou has a summary of the interview up on their website, and Perfectly Nintendo has kindly translated that. Here are some key points from the interview:

• Development started in July 2014, while Monolith Soft was still working on Xenoblade Chronicles X. This was before they knew what the technical specifications of the Switch would be like. Eventually, they got the OK from Hitoshi Yamagami, a producer at Nintendo.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a return to the formula used in the first game, with an increased focus on story, as opposed to the exploration-heavy Xenoblade Chronicles X. However, there are still many large areas to explore in this game.
• With the previous games, some players complained that it was difficult to move your characters around and use Arts at the same time, so for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, they came up with a system that makes those things easier (Arts are now tied to the ABXY buttons).
• The soundtrack features over 120 songs, with 25 of those composed by Yasunori Mitsuda himself. In Xenoblade Chronicles, many players liked the exploration / field tracks composed by ACE and the battle tracks composed by Kenji Hiramatsu, so they were given the same assignments for this game.
• There are a large number of rare Blades in this game and Monolith Soft does not have an in-house character designer, so they reached out to external artists for the Blade designs.
• The artists were given nearly free reign when designing the Blades – Monolith Soft only gave them the basics in terms of weapons and attributes. As a result, the designs vary wildly, and they somehow ended up with a lot of female Blades.
• Some of the Blades are quite rare, and Takahashi hopes that players will share with each other what types of Blades they have collected.
• An element of the game being praised are the improved character models and especially the more expressive faces, but the staff working on them actually hasn’t changed compared to the previous games.

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