Character

Xenoblade Chronicles is a series of action role-playing games developed by Monolith Soft and published by Nintendo. The series began with the original Xenoblade Chronicles game, published for the Wii in 2010 in Japan, and released in Europe and Oceania the following year. Nintendo originally had no plans for a North American release, but after a fan campaign named Operation Rainfall showed sufficient interest, the game was eventually released in the region in 2012. The original game became a critical and commercial success, spawning multiple sequels. The series has since sold more than 8.74 million copies worldwide. Xenoblade Chronicles has been well-received for its world design, music, stories, and themes. The series has been represented in other gaming franchises, including the Super Smash Bros. and Project X Zone series. It is a part of the Xeno metaseries, for which it receives its namesake, co-created and directed by Tetsuya Takahashi. Gameplay The gameplay within the Xenoblade Chronicles series uses a real-time action-based battle system, where the player manually moves a character in real-time, and party members will "auto-attack" when enemies enter their attack radius. Manually input attacks, called "Arts", may also be performed, but in a limited fashion. Battle Arts are only available after a "cool down" period that occurs after every use, while character specific "Talent Arts" only become available after enough auto-attacks are executed. Both party members and enemies have a finite number of health points, and attacks deplete this value. Combat is won when all enemies lose their HP, but the game is lost if the player's character loses all their HP and has no means of being revived. Health may be restored by the player by using healing Arts in battle, or the player may let characters' HP regenerate automatically outside of battle. Winning battles earns the player experience points, which allows the characters to grow stronger by leveling up and learning new Arts. Arts for each character must be set by the player on their respective set up, called a "Battle Palette", outside of battles. Another defining aspect of the Xenoblade Chronicles games is exploration. In each game, players are encouraged to freely explore the open world environments. Players can discover locations and landmarks, which in turn grants them experience points. Once landmarks are discovered, players can use them as fast travel points. Audio The Xenoblade Chronicles series has been praised and highly regarded for its sheer variety of video game music across all of the games' soundtracks. The main composers are Yoko Shimomura, Hiroyuki Sawano, and most notably Yasunori Mitsuda. Other music composers who have been involved in the soundtracks include Manami Kiyota, ACE (a musical duo consisting of Tomori Kudo and Hiroyo "CHiCO" Yamanaka), Kenji Hiramatsu, and Mariam Abounnasr. Plot Story Although the stories are largely self-contained in each game in the Xenoblade