Xenoblade - tons of details

- "The world setting, story and other elements have no relation (to past Xeno games). It's a completely new title." - Xenoblade director Tetsuya Takahashi
- Takahashi feels that past Monolith titles have focused on events and scenarios, and this development path was a dead end
- Xenoblade started off with the dev team examining the origins of the RPG genre, and creating a game that was simply fun
- Why does this game have 'Xeno' in the title? "I wanted to to have some sort of common point with the games I've made."
- "Xeno" has the meaning of "different nature" or "uniqueness"
- the 'blade' portion of the name is explained in the game's ending
- background story involves two golds that fought a great battle tens of thousands of years ago
- the end of this battle resulted in two giant corpses, which happen to be the setting for this game
- "It seemed like it would be enjoyable to adventure on top of the body of a giant god." h
- Mr. Takahashi was inspired by Soma Bringer for his giant god idea, and started to work on design documents right away
- a model of the two gods (one with wings) was created in order to better give a sense of what's going on
- the two gods are frozen in battle, with swords clashing against one another
- the model was created before game development began. "It was of great help when explaining the project to Nintendo."
- the entire game takes place on the two gods, and you'll find nothing but ocean surrounding them. There's not even any outer space to speak of.
- the game world is about the size of Japan
- areas of the world open up as you explore
- you'll be able to go inside one of the gods
- verticality is a big part of Xenoblade. "From the start of the project, we thought it would be interesting if we could make use of a vertical construction."
- Areas of the world correspond to parts of the gods' bodies
- you'll also experience different weather and varied monster ecolog
- you can head to the top of one of the gods to see an aurora
- the people that live on the different gods are fighting with each other
- one god is a home to organic life (where the main character is from), and the other is home to mechanical life
- story beginning: "It's simple -- the fight against mechanical life that threatens the peace of mankind."
- the game kicks off in a cave on the foot of one god
- your aim is to make it to the god's head
- the game keeps track of where you should be going for both the main quest and side quests
- use warps to transport back to older areas
- specific systems in place to keep you from getting lost
- seamless world movement: "We've put effort into this, because we felt that in order to show a living world, we needed an overwhelming sense of scale, like that of an MMORPG."
- gain experience for exploring special areas that include monsters that can't be defeated at first. Level up and return to take these foes down.
- enemies visible in the game world, encounter one and you seamlessly transition to battle
- nearby enemies can join in on battles
- journey with two AI-controlled characters
- select special skills (called Arts) for your AI party members
- your character performs attacks automatically
- Arts - attack skills, recovery skills and more
- 50 to 60 hours of gameplay
- Takahashi promises you won't spend endless amounts of time grinding or engaging in event scenes."


This game sounds very engaging to say the least. Seamless world, over 50 hours of gameplay and an interesting story on top of it. Could Wii owners finally be getting the RPG they've been wanting?