When it comes to an RPG, the game’s story is just as important, if not more important, than everything else in the title. Because that’s part of what the people come for. So when Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was being made, one of the team really wanted to dive into some heavy themes in the story. Such as how the characters in the story only have 10 years to live total. A unique concept to be sure, but as producer Koh Kojima noted in an interview for Nintendo, the concept needed some “balance” in certain ways:
“At first, I thought it didn’t feel like Xenoblade Chronicles at all… I think Takahashi-san was deliberately trying to remove the sense of “Xenoblade-ness” of the series. The stories for the first and second games were completely different, but there was this sense of “Xenoblade-ness” that was common to both of them. I didn’t feel that at all at the initial proposal stage. And the reason for that is because this game’s world is very serious. That is the world that Takahashi-san wanted to depict in this title, but I was concerned about whether it would be acceptable to deliver it to players of previous games in the series, for what it is. The design this time was also different from the previous games in the series. But after a lot of trial and error, we found a good balance, and in the end, I think we were able to create this sense of “Xenoblade-ness.””
This balance though also applied to the main characters, who have a much different view on the world and things than the previous main characters in Shulk and Rex. And for chief creative officer Tetsuya Takahashi, that was kind of the point for Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
“The first title is kind of like a straight-A student for me. The second one is not quite a straight-A student, but it has a much brighter and more lighthearted start… For the third title, I wanted to stop being a goody two-shoes. It was a challenge when thinking about what kind of response I would get from people who had played the first and second titles, but one of this title’s themes was “finding your new self and a new path toward the future,” so I knew that I could not go back to the past or do the same thing again.”
So as you can see, a lot went into making this title from top to bottom.
