Xenoblade Chronicles 3 exists and it’s only a few months away. Nintendo revealed the sprawling open-world game will come to Switch in September 2022, and it looks even prettier than its predecessors.
“Players will step into the roles of protagonists Noah and Mio amid turmoil between the hostile nations of Keves and Agnus,” Nintendo announced in a press release. “Six characters hailing from those nations will take part in a grand tale with ‘life’ as its central theme.”
Life has always been one of my central themes as well. Here’s the trailer:
We didn’t learn a whole lot about the game today other than it’ll feature the usual mix of war-torn misery, existential dread, and god-killing anime beauty the Xeno-series is famous for. And, uh, the usual goofy voice-acting accents.
2017's Xenoblade Chronicles 2, for all of its faults (and there were plenty), pushed the Switch hardware to its limits, so it’ll be interesting to see how a sequel five years late will fare.
For anyone unfamiliar, the Xeno series originally started with Square Enix on the PS1 with Xenogears. Then series creator Tetsuya Takahashi decided to jump ship and co-found his own studio, Monolith Soft. An extremely uneven Xenosaga trilogy followed on the PS2.
Xenoblade Chronicles followed in 2010 on Wii, then Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 on Switch (Xenoblade Chronicles 1 also got re-released twice, first for 3DS and then later for Switch). All of the games share themes, motifs, and callbacks, but the Blade spinoffs have a lot more continuity in their world building, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 looks to continue that trend with a story that “will connect the futures” of both previous numbered games.
Monolith Soft was rumored to have a new game in the works as it went on a hiring and expansion spree over the last year. The studio then relaunched its website at the beginning of the month with a new logo.