There’s a spicey new rumor about Monolith Soft that’s just too good to ignore.
As shared on the GamingLeaksandRumors subreddit by user nickelfiend46, a Spanish language Twitter account claimed that Nintendo was set to announce Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Nintendo Switch, tomorrow, June 11, 2024. Some fans believed that this rumor was debunked because Nintendo has yet to announce a Direct, but it is possible that Nintendo won’t announce this in an event, but as a single game trailer.
If you’re a Monolith Soft, you certainly ate good during the Nintendo Switch era. Monolith Soft published the definitive version of Xenoblade Chronicles on this platform, before moving the franchise forward with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 & Xenoblade Chronicles 3, also on the Nintendo Switch.
This era saw Monolith Soft truly mature and come into their own in polishing their own work with the franchise, and that’s come after making multiple ports of the game in the hopes that their labor of love would find an audience, in the same way that Fire Emblem did, originally, on the 3DS.
But before Monolith Soft was in a position to move forward with a Xenoblade Chronicles 2, they took a brief detour where they took different risks with their RPG franchise. Xenoblade Chronicles X, published in 2015 for the Wii U, was an abundantly ambitious title, that had the misfortune of releasing on a platform that already wasn’t selling enough on the hardware side. Nintendo’s old reliables like Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros realized their potential, selling the most copies of their franchises, on the Wii U, but new ideas like Devil’s Third or ZombiU were simply not positioned for success.
When Nintendo saw unprecedented success on the Switch, they proceeded to bring back multiple Wii U games to the platform. While it’s true that this was easier for Nintendo to fill the console with their first party games, Nintendo also saw, on the creative side, that a successful console was the ideal platform to realize their experiments and risky new ideas.
In case you had forgotten, Xenoblade Chronicles X is an open world RPG of a massive scale, with the player exploring an entire self-contained planet called Mira. While many open world games were satisfied with building a world the size of an archipelago, Monolith Soft scaled up so hard that they had the player boarding gigantic mechs called Skells. They previewed this game with a clip of a Skell flying over a towering cave, a seeming dormant volcano, that wouldn’t be possible to access otherwise.
For those who wonder why fans are even asking for this port, Monolith Soft’s own Tetsuya Takahashi stated that he wanted to bring the game to the Switch. In that interview, he also explained why making such a port would be difficult, but perhaps Nintendo saw it fit to fund this port as one of the Switch’s final salvos?
That would be a great way to send off the Switch, but of course, if you ask the fans, they would rather have it on Nintendo’s next console, the proverbial Switch 2. Maybe the original Switch can do Xenoblade Chronicles X justice just fine; it was originally spectacular on the Wii U. But fans are definitely thinking of what Monolith Soft could add to the game with more modern hardware, in terms of performance and graphical effects.
We would love if this seemingly unlikely rumor is true, but for now, hope is the most credence we can give towards it.
