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Xenoblade Chronicles (ゼノブレイド, Zenubureido) is a JRPG video game series created by Monolith Soft. It currently consists of three main series titles and one spin-off game. It's known simply as "Xenoblade" in Japan.
Overview
The successor to Xenogears and Xenosaga, Xenoblade is a fantasy/sci-fi JRPG series heavy on philosophical and religious themes, mechs, and a bit too much of an obsession with connecting unconnected things together in a higher-level meta-verse. While the first two games were designed to be standalone, and the rest can be played standalone, they exist within the same continuity.
The Xenoblade community generally tries very hard to limit public spoilers, as even the names of some characters can ruin certain twists and plot points. As a result, the following summaries beyond the opening are click-to-reveal and gloss over many lesser arcs.
Xenoblade Chronicles (1)
Prologue
Long ago, two titans fought and killed each other, forming the only landmasses in an endless sea. The life born from them fought a long war. As the game opens, the forces of Bionis (Homs, humans in all but name) defeat a large Mechon army from Mechonis, accomplished by Dunban using a special sword called the Monado, the only man-portable weapon that can damage Mechon.
Chapter 1
The Bionis has been at peace for a year. Dunban is alive, but using the Monado has crippled his arm, and is tended to by his younger sister Fiora. Shulk, a nerdy engineer, has been researching the Monado to try and figure out why only Dunban can control it.
The Mechon launch a surprise attack on Colony 9. Shulk is forced to use the Monado to help drive off the invasion, and discovers he can use it even better than Dunban. It turns out that a large Mechon with a face (they decide to call him "Metal Face") is somehow immune to the Monado, and it kills Fiora. Once the raid is over, Shulk and his best bud Reyn head out on a journey of revenge.
Shulk starts to have odd dreams and visions. He realises that some of them are visions of the future, shown to him by the Monado, and they can be used to change the future and avart foreseen deaths. With this knowledge, he and Reyn proceed to Colony 6. In the process, they find that the colony has been taken over by the Mechon. With the aid of local medic gunner Sharla, they drive off the Mechon and save her kid brother Juju from being eaten by them, but further mysteries arise as more Face Mechon appear and it's revealed they can talk. Dunban rejoins the party as Shulk receives another vision: he will go to the Bionis' head to unlock the power to defeat the Faces. His well-travelled adoptive father Dickson knows this is Prison Island, and guides them where to go next.
Passing through Makna Forest, the party picks up a mysterious stranger Melia and a local deadbeat hero Riki, both instrumental in defeating a Telethia that is draining the land of its ether. Melia guides them to Alcamoth, the city of the elf-like High Entia, where they can get permission from the Emperor to go to Prison Island. It turns out that Melia is a half-blooded princess, which causes problems as she is suddenly named successor and the secret pureblood faction attempts to kill her. The Mechon then attack Prison Island, prompting the Emperor to go there based on a vision he received from the royal seer, Alvis. The party follows him to find the island's only prisoner, Zanza the Giant. Zanza says he created the Monado, and must be freed to give Shulk the power he seeks, which Shulk obliges. Metal Face then immediately kills both Zanza and the Emperor, but the Monado can hurt him now, and Shulk is feeling good. Suddenly, one of the other Faces is opened up to reveal Fiora. The Mechon then leave.
Having a hard time with learning that Fiora is alive, the party decide to go rescue her. On the way, they find that Metal Face is Mumkhar, one of Dunban's war buddies thought to have been killed in the prologue. Shulk tries to spare him, since he's not quite on a journey of revenge anymore, but he gets himself killed anyway. Upon getting deep into Galahad Fortress, the party finds Fiora but also Egil, the self-proclaimed leader of Mechonis. In the ensuing fight, part of the fortress is destroyed, and everyone falls into the endless sea below. They then wake up on the beach of the Fallen Arm, cut off from the Mechonis in the ancient battle, and it turns out that Fiora is now free to join them. Not long after, they discover the race of Machina - the actual people of Mechonis, with the Mechon being simply tools. Their leader Miqol says that Egil is his son, and is attacking the Bionis on his own journey of revenge.
The party traverses Mechonis to reach Agniratha, the capital where Egil is. On the way, they encounter a Face Mechon run by a brainwashed Gadolt, Sharla's presumed-dead fiancé. Once getting to Agniratha, Egil's sympathetic sister Vanea shows them the true history of the titans: the people of Bionis and Mechonis lived in peace, but then Zanza used the Bionis to attack, giving Shulk a crisis of conscience. After fighting Gadolt again and freeing him, the party gets to Egil, who explains that he doesn't really care about the Bionis' people: he just needs to deprive the Bionis of its food source, the ether energy of what lives upon it. As they fight, Egil discovers that Vanea has installed the soul of the goddess of Mechonis, Meyneth, into Fiora's body as part of initially making her a Face. With Meyneth denouncing his plans, he renounces her, and leaves to install himself into the Mechonis' Core so he can control it directly. The party follow him as he starts attacking Bionis, and eventually defeat him. Shulk refuses to kill him, since he sees they both know pain and revenge, and instead commits to stopping him forever until he understands. Egil realises that Shulk is not in fact Zanza, something that he expected since Shulk wields the Monado - he'd seen his old friend be taken over by the Monado and become Zanza. He decides that there may be hope for peace after all.
Dickson shoots Shulk, and reveals he's been planning this all along, from the day he first met Shulk in the place where the Homs found the Monado. Zanza is released from Shulk, now looking just like him, and explains that because he's a god he can do whatever he wants, such as kill everyone right now so he can again restart the universe. Meyneth opposes him with her own Monado, and is killed. Zanza takes both Monados and vanishes to Prison Island, causing it to enter the Bionis' head while turning all the High Entia into Telethia. The party manages to escape (Shulk ends up being fine) and enter the Bionis to fight him. It turns out that Alvis was the one true god all along, and grants Shulk his own Monado, which he uses to cleave Zanza. Alvis goes on to explain that Zanza was once a scientist called Klaus aboard a space station above a normal-looking Earth, and ended up destroying the universe and creating this new one. Now that Shulk is the new god, Alvis asks him what he wants. Shulk decides that's not his job to decide, so he has Alvis create a new world without gods, where most everyone has a happy ending.
A year later, Shulk takes Melia on a joyride to Alcamoth, which has drifted near the floating Bionis' Shoulder (the rest of the Bionis lies collapsed in the ocean). They find an extradimensional threat called the Fog King, seemingly spawned from a nearby rift in space. With the help of various nearby Telethia, they manage to get rid of the Fog King and close the rift. Alcamoth can then begin being restored.
Xenoblade Chronicles X
Prologue
Two alien factions fought a vicious battle over Earth, destroying it. The humans were forewarned and managed to get some arks off into space. After two years, one of the arks is attacked and crashes on a planet called Mira. The player's custom character, which the fandom calls "Cross", is discovered from wreckage by Elma, and taken back to the crash-landed habitat unit, which has been turned into the city of New Los Angeles.
Cross joins BLADE, the organisation that runs NLA. Among other things, their top priority is to find the Lifehold, a piece of the ark that holds most of the people. However, it quickly becomes clear that one of the enemy factions, the Ganglion, are also on Mira and are actively trying to wipe out humans and all their stuff.
Elma's unit discovers a new race, the Ma-non, who are also being antagonized by the Ganglion. In an attempt to rescue some, Cross has their arm blown off, revealing to the audience (Cross has memory loss, so everyone else already knew) that every single human in NLA is actually a robot, since they couldn't know if they would spend centuries traveling space. BLADE needs to recover the Lifehold before its power drains because that's where everyone's bodies are, controlling these "mimeosomes" remotely. The Ma-non form a treaty of friendship with the humans.
An alien mech is discovered by a BLADE member called Lao. Once it's retrieved, the Ganglion mount a large attack on NLA and successfully take it for themselves. After further missions go bad, Elma suspects that Lao may be a traitor. In the meantime, the enemy forces are beginning to splinter, with various high-profile names either deserting or taking on foolish attacks that get them killed.
BLADE manages to pinpoint the location of the Lifehold, but Lao steals the data and deletes all the backups. When the team catches up to him, the truth comes out: When the Earth governments chose who to save on the arks, only the rich, connected, and useful got chosen. With the rest of his family passed over, Lao had decided to help wipe out the people who enabled the problem. The team defeats him and he gives up his crusade, letting them have the data.
Both BLADE and the Ganglion converge on the Lifehold. The Ganglion leader, Luxaar, reveals that he's afraid of them and must wipe them out because humanity are descendants of the Samaarians, who created the Ganglion as slaves to them. The Lifehold is also revealed to not hold any human bodies at all, but only consciousnesses, as this allowed them to save millions more people at the expense of philosophical quandries. The core is also equipped to generate new bodies for all of them plus many other species of Earth. In the ensuing battle, Lao ends up being transformed into a chimera by this process, killing Luxaar via exposure to human DNA but also requiring the team to kill him as well. With the enemy defeated, Elma reveals that she's the alien that came to Earth thirty years ago to warn them of what was to come, along with the technology used to survive it, and her real body is revived from stasis.
It is discovered that the Lifehold's entire database was destroyed in the initial crash on Mira, and there is no logical explanation for how anyone could still be alive.
Chapter 13 (DE)
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Chapter 1
The world is nothing but a sea of clouds, with continent-sized animals called Titans roaming around the World Tree. Rex, a young salvager skilled at bringing up odd artifacts from beneath the clouds, is tasked with helping a crew on a big job. A group of people named Jin, Malos, and Nia are looking for something called an "Aegis", in an ancient sunken ship. Rex manages to find it first - a young lady called Pyra, held in stasis. He accidentally touches the sword in front of her, so Jin kills him. In a shared dream world, Pyra talks with Rex and voices her wish to be taken to Elysium, the fabled land atop the World Tree. Rex has always wanted to seek out Elysium, so he agrees, and she shares her life with his so he can be revived. They fight off Malos, join forces with Nia, and manage to escape.
The party is carried to the nation of Gormott by Rex's mentor, "Gramps", a titan small enough for just Rex's house. Gramps almost dies from his injuries suffered during the escape, but manages to regenerate himself into a larval form that sits in Rex's helmet. In the capital Torigoth, the party watches as a Blade is awakened in a crowd: When a human with the right potential touches a Core Crystal, they become a "Driver" and summon forth a Blade, a personified weapon. While Rex wonders what this means for Pyra being a Blade but also an "Aegis", the group is surrounded by the authorities for Nia being a recognized member of the terrorist group Torna. Rex gets away through the help of the local Tora, and with the help of his artificial Blade Poppi, mount a rescue for Nia. But this was a trap, and they are confronted by Mòrag and Brighid, high government officials and the strongest fighters of the parent country Mor Ardain. Mòrag won't let the Aegis destroy three continents as she did five hundred years ago, so they fight. The party escapes via ingenuity and luck.
The party tries to head straight for the World Tree, but are driven off by a huge robotic sea serpent. In the process, they wind up in the country of Uraya, where they meet the world-wise mercenary Vandham. They help him with a job, where more details of Core Crystals are shown: Core Crystals come from Titans. When a Driver dies, their Blades revert to their Core Crystals, and can later be awoken by a new Driver without their memories. They are shortly attacked by Akhos, another member of Torna, and realize that Pyra sharing her core with Rex means that they share injuries and can both be killed. Vandham thinks he might know a guy who can help with getting to the World Tree, so he takes them to Fonsa Myma, ignoring a weird pest named Zeke on the way. They do meet Cole, but Malos and Akhos are also present, so they fight. In the scuffle, Vandham is killed, and Rex wastes the opportunity he is given to escape. Pyra then suddenly turns into Mythra, the same person but also not, and demonstrates her power by killing Malos's and Akhos's Blades outright, making them flee.
Long ago, a man climed the World Tree hoping to find Elysium and meet his creator. He found the place empty, so to prove his journey, he took back two Core Crystals. The first he resonated with to produce Malos, who got straight to work on destroying the world. The second was given to the hero Addam, who became Mythra, defeating Malos but causing mass collateral damage. To prevent this from happening again, Mythra became Pyra, and had Addam seal her away. Cole then directs the party to Indol, while also revealing he's a Flesh Eater, a Blade injected with human DNA. The party planned route to Indol goes through Mor Ardain, where they encounter Mòrag again. After a misunderstanding caused by Poppi being mistaken for another robotic assailant, they join forces to find the real perp. Who is not Zeke. The trail is tracked to an abandoned factory that is mass-producing artificial Blades. The kingpin Bana is defeated, but his clients from Torna, Mikhail and Patroka, continue the fight. Mythra snipes out their Blades, and forces them to retreat as a new ally joins, called Fan. In the enemy base, Jin broods over a woman frozen in ice, Lora, who looks a lot like Fan.
A flashback to five hundred years ago shows that Addam, Mythra, Lora, Fan (but called "Haze"), Brighid, Jin, and a child Mikhail were all allies in the same adventuring group. In the present, Fan is here to take them to Indol because the Praetor, Amalthus, wants to see Rex. The path takes them through Rex's hometown, where they are ambushed yet again by Zeke. This time he needs to actually be taken seriously, since he's the prince of Tantal and isn't playing around anymore. He finds them satisfactory and "lets" them into Indol. The party meets with Amalthus, who is the man who climbed the World Tree and resonated with Malos, but nothing much gets actually done. Jin then causes problems by going to Temperantia and using an Ardainian weapon to attack Urayan soldiers. The party goes in to try and stop him. It's revealed that Jin is a Blade, the strongest in the old country of Torna, and that he seems to want to wipe out humans because he's upset about Blades being used as tools by them. He kills Fan and escapes. The armies of Mor Ardain and Uraya arrive, but Indol itself gets in the way to stop them.
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Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Chapter 1
The nations of Keves and Agnus are in perpetual war. A trio of Kevesi special forces are sent on a mission to track a mysterious source of ether energy that does not seem to belong to either nation.
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Games
Xenoblade Chronicles (2010 in Japan, 2011 in Europe, 2012 in North America, 2015 on the 3DS, 2020 for the Definitive Edition)
Initially, Nintendo of America (NoA) had no intent to localise XC1 at all. It was instead picked up by Nintendo of Europe (NoE). Despite being "gifted" an English translation, NoA continued to have no interest in the game. This prompted fans to organise under the name Operation Rainfall to campaign for its international release, alongside the games Pandora's Tower and The Last Story, which were in a similar situation. The campaign eventually succeeded and all three games were released in all territories.[1] Despite this, NoA continued to "disrespect" the game by only releasing it in limited ways, such as only in GameStops.
The fact that NoE localised XC1 using British VAs caused a bit of a tradition where further games used primarily British accents throughout. The exceptions are XCX, which canonically takes place among the survivors of an American spaceship, and certain people in XC2/XC3, where various accents are assigned to specific regional groups and their descendants.
Shipping
The canon ships of each main series game (Shulk/Fiora, Rex/Pyra/Mythra/Nia in every combination (don't ask), Noah/Mio) are all fairly popular in the fandom. Other popular ships include:
Since characters in battle tend to chatter a lot, certain common voice lines get picked out and memed hard, both alone and in combination with other chopped-up bits of dialogue. A particularly popular form consists of variations of the "you're a lifesaver" line, which appears in all three main games.[2]
Fan Events
Xenotober, which also includes Xenogears and Xenosaga content[3]
