Image credit: Xenoblade Chronicles cover art from Wikipedia.

Year: 2010 (started)

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Monolith Soft

Creators: Tetsuya Takahashi and Koh Kojima

Country: Japan

Genre: Action role-playing

Platforms: Wii, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Nintendo Switch

Xenoblade Chronicles is an action role-playing videogame series developed by Monolith Soft featuring open-world exploration, real-time command-based combat, and inter-character affinities that affect combat mechanics. Each game in the series is considered as a spiritual successor as they feature similar elements but do not have major overlap in timelines or events.

In each Xenoblade Chronicles game there are cutscenes available for two characters to have a conversational moment called “Heart-to-heart”. These events require the affinity between the characters to reach a certain level, and the player must be at a certain location in the world to trigger the cutscene. Triggering a heart-to-heart gives the characters power-ups, and also reveals more about each of the characters in their own storylines.

This series itself is a spiritual successor to another series, Xenosaga, which started in SquareSoft but was subsequently developed by Monolith Soft. The storyline for the first title, Xenogears, was originally proposed as a storyline for Final Fantasy VII, but later became its own project.

LGBTQ references in this game series: