Xenoblade Chronicles X launched in Japan a couple of months ago, and while it was a very good game, it does not seem to have achieved the kind of universal praise and acclaim that its predecessor, Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, did. There were a lot of sticking points- for instance, the game’s story was criticized, as a definite step down from the cosmic adventure of Xenoblade Chronicles. Other issues included how the text in the HUD of the game was too small at times for players to read.
Speaking directly to fans, executive director Tetsuya Takahashi promised to take all the feedback and criticism of the game into account, and to have a much stronger focus on lore and narrative with the next game. He also gave us an insight into issues such as HUD and text size.
“Being several years behind others in the development of an HD title and taking into account Monolith Soft’s company size, there are just some thing that we could not achieve, which couldn’t be helped, but in order to move on towards the next step, there was no avoiding this. And that is the truth,” he said Takahashi.
This is, interestingly enough, the first explicit admission that any Nintendo developer has made about the negative fallout of having joined the HD development era late. Nintendo’s decision to stick with SD may have been beneficial in the short run, but in the long term, it seems to have hurt them and their developers more than anything.
In any case, Xenoblade Chronicles X looks great, so we can at least still look forward to it, when it launches on December 4 later this year.
(Translation by Siliconera)
