Xenoblade Chronicles’ Klaus Saga Is at an End, And It’s Now Time for Xenoblade Chronicles X-2

It was hard having the Wii U as my only modern console in middle school. There were practically no third-party games to speak of, and even Nintendo’s first-party games slowed down as they held their best titles back for the launch of the Switch. It was a dark time for Nintendo fans, myself included. That was, until Nintendo announced a game called Xenoblade Chronicles X

I hadn’t played the original Xenoblade Chronicles that came to the Wii in 2012, nor was I a big fan of JRPGs aside from the Pokémon games, but the vast open world shown lit my 13-year-old brain on fire. I was barely aware of games journalism before this game, but my excitement for it caused me to follow it more closely through various outlets, particularly GameXplain, which produced a smorgasbord of content around the title before and after its release.

When the game finally released in December 2015, I immediately fell in love. I spent my entire winter break playing through as much as I could, but I had barely scratched the surface. Around 40 hours in, where most games stop, Xenoblade Chronicles X was just beginning, as you got your first Skell, a flying mech that opened up tons of new opportunities for traversal and combat.

Over the course of a year, I played almost nothing but this game, and beat its hardest boss, Telethia, the Endbringer, after around 220 hours of playtime. Elated, I recorded a video of me gleefully celebrating the accomplishment, proclaiming, “I never have to play this game again!” I had enjoyed the majority of my time with the game, but I think that comment came from frustrations with the grinding necessary for beating its final challenges.

I went on to play and enjoy every other game in the Xenoblade Chronicles series. The “main series” of games are pretty different from X, focusing a lot more on story and having a series of areas that open up in a linear fashion, unlike X’s massive open world. Starting with 2017’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the series also adopted an anime-inspired art style, and even went back and changed the style of the original game to adhere to this style in 2020’s Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition.

That brings us to April 2023’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, the Spider-Man: No Way Home of the Xenoblade Chronicles universe. The 20-hour DLC sees the return of the first and second main titles’ protagonists, Shulk and Rex, as well as their respective children, Nikol and Glimmer. Along with new characters Matthew and A, the party comes together to stop a version of Klaus, a character from the original game, from destroying the world, learning more about the origins of their worlds and how all the games tie together.

Xenoblade Chronicles X

That is, except X. There may have been a short cutscene in Future Redeemed that might imply that X is somehow connected, but it was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and I don’t fully understand how X’s plot could happen if the plots of the main trilogy also occur. In any case, X’s connection was an afterthought at best, with the most important connections being between the main three games.

But now that the games’ stories have been nicely wrapped up, we still have a massive mystery in the form of Xenoblade Chronicles X’s post-credits scene.

I’m not going to explain the entirety of the game’s plot, but the important part is that every human character in the game is actually a robot, controlled by their actual bodies, which are resting in an unknown location for most of the game. At the end, you finally find the place where these bodies are being held, have a huge final boss fight, and all appears to be well. That is, until after the credits, where Elma discovers that all the bodies are missing. If that’s the case, then how are their robot bodies working?!

It’s a huge shock, and one that we still have no clear answers for, nearly eight years later. Clearly the developers were setting up for a sequel, but the original game hasn’t even been ported to the Switch, making it one of very few Nintendo-published Wii U games to remain exclusive to the dead system.

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There could be a few reasons why it hasn’t been ported, and why we haven’t gotten a sequel after so much time. First, the game is massive, and would certainly require a ton of effort to port to the portable console. I don’t think it’s impossible, as games like Breath of the Wild and Skyrim can run just fine on the Switch, but that isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be hard. Second, the game made good use of the Wii U gamepad, going beyond just showing the map and actually making it interactable, with an entire resource-management game taking place there. Again, I don’t think it was as essential to the game as something like Nintendo Land, but it certainly doesn’t make things easier.

As for why we haven’t gotten a sequel, I think Nintendo and Monolith Soft would like to see X ported first, so audiences can be caught up to speed on the game’s story. But I also think that they were more interested in telling the full story of the “main” series first. Now that that story appears to have met its conclusion, it’s time to return to the planet Mira.

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Joseph Stanichar is a freelance writer who specializes in videogames and pop culture. He’s written for publications such as Game Informer, Twinfinite and Looper. He’s on Twitter @JosephStanichar.

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