Member-only story
After years of swirling rumors, intense fan hopes, and three other franchise installments on the Nintendo Switch platform, Xenoblade Chronicles X finally has a second chance at life. When I saw its new trailer pop up online, I made loud noises and dropped everything I was doing in order to watch it immediately, and I’ve already cleared my gaming calendar for its late March release.
You might be sitting there going, “wait what’s a Xenoblade again?” You wound me, but I get it. When you think “Nintendo,” I imagine that other games like Mario, Zelda or Pokemon come to mind — and that’s totally fair. The company has built a steady and stable brand on their popular cute franchises and characters, and rightly so. They make some of the best games in the business.
But the cutesy end of the spectrum is not the only place where Nintendo’s exceptional design philosophy has delivered meaningful returns.
For the last couple of decades, Nintendo has also produced some of the finest sci-fi RPGs ever made — and I always feel like one of the only people who has noticed. While Fire Emblem eventually broke through to mainstream recognition and sales success, Nintendo’s other in-house RPG series always quietly sells…
