GamesBeat: It must be a daunting task to make an RPG. You have so many elements together — combat, story, interface. Is there any one aspect that’s particularly challenging, the hardest part of making an RPG?
Takahashi: There’s a couple of ways to look at it. In a practical sense, maybe the hardest challenge is coming up with a combat system that feels right. But from an aesthetic point of view, menus present a lot of challenges. When it comes to the challenges in creating the story, those tend to be challenges of cost.
GamesBeat: Talking about combat, is the system in Xenoblade Chronicles X similar to the one in Xenoblade Chronicles?
Takahashi: When you see both games side by side, they may look similar at first glance, but one thing you’ll notice is that the combat in Xenoblade Chronicles X is a little bit faster in tempo. Also there’s more variety. You can have characters in combat, as well as Skells in combat, which mixes things up a bit.
Above: Who doesn’t love giant robots?
GamesBeat: Are the Skells an intentional callback to Xenogears?
Takahashi: Yes, there is a little bit of a reference there. Although I want to point out that in Xenogears, we had to separate dungeons that were meant to be cleared by characters on foot from the dungeons that were meant to be cleared by the characters inside their Gears. We had to do that because of tech and cost limitations. But now we’re able to do those together, where you can have the ability to choose whether you want to fight in the Skell or fight on foot.
GamesBeat: Do you worry that being in the giant robot suit is so cool and powerful that people will feel it just isn’t as fun to fight as a normal person?
Takahashi: It’s a bit of a balance. We had to think about the Japanese market, where people have different reactions to giant mechs in games. If we’d gone with a situation where you were only ever in the mech, this would have been a very polarizing game in Japan. We feel like having both options is a little bit better as far as getting to a broader audience. For the record, though, I’m the sort of person who’s okay with only mechs in a game.
GamesBeat: Is that something you think about a lot when you’re making a game — how to make it appeal to both a Japanese and a western audience?
Takahashi: Yes, we have to constantly think about appealing to both.
GamesBeat: What do you think is the biggest difference between those audiences, especially in terms of what they want from a role-playing game?
Takahashi: What you’ll find quite often is that a lot of the markets outside of Japan are interested in games where you can do anything you want. They put a high priority on a great degree of freedom. In the Japanese market, it’s more common that people will demand a certain flow to the events in a game. We find that they’re more comfortable with a linear framework. We have our own theories about why this might be. For example, in the Japanese tea ceremony, there’s a very specific order of events. People feel comfortable with that. They even seek out that kind of framework. But I feel like the west is a bit different.
Above: So much room for activities!
GamesBeat: We’re more interested in all-you-can-eat.
Takahashi: [laughs] I guess so.
GamesBeat: One thing you have with the Wii U is the second-screen experience. Did that open up a lot of options to you, or was it more of an outlet for ideas you already had in the 3DS port of Xenoblade Chronicles?
Takahashi: As you may know, in Xenoblade Chronicles X, the way we use the GamePad is putting the map, subdivided into hexagonal segments, on that second screen. There’s quite a bit of gameplay there when it comes to changing different views, looking for objectives, and setting up probes. That also makes it easier to play it on the TV when you turn your attention back to the big screen. When we’re talking about the 3DS version of Xenoblade Chronicles, this is originally a game that was played on one big screen, and now we’re making one of those screens smaller. The UI was a little bit harder to see. The way we used the touch screen in the 3DS version of Xenoblade Chronicles, we moved a lot of UI elements there, so you could use the stylus. That’s quite different from the applications you’ll find in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
GamesBeat: When you make an open world for an RPG like this, is it just about making it as big as you can, or do you have a set goal as far as how big you want it to be from the beginning?
Takahashi: Monolith Soft isn’t a very big company. There are limits to the resources we can use to make a game. In this case, we tried to find our capacity — how big a world can we possibly make? — and use all of that capacity the best we could. That’s the size of the world we ended up with.
GamesBeat: Do you wish your company could be bigger, or do you like having a smaller team?
Takahashi: Personally, I do have some ideas about us growing a bit in the future