Nintendo of Europe released a new Iwata Asks feature, this time geared towards the upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles, slated for a September release in European territories.

In the interview, the executive director of Xenoblade Chronicles, Tetsuya Takahasi, explained the reasoning behind including 'Xeno' in the game's name. Due to Yasunori Mitsuda working on music in both Xenogears and Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht, Takahasi decided to include the 'Xeno' due to both of them working on the game much like they had with the other two 'Xeno' games.

When Satoru Iwata questioned Takahasi on how the concept of how the soundtrack should be, he responded by saying:

I didn’t want to restrict it to any particular genre or instrument. There are of course various potential routes you can take: limiting it to only acoustic instruments, for instance. But I think this makes a certain monotonous feel unavoidable. That’s why I wanted to use a wide range of instruments for this title, thinking that mixing classical stringed instruments with more electric sounds would be all right, too. Tomori-san is originally a guitarist, after all.

One of the team's main goals when it came to the game's soundtrack was to break away from the typical RPG-esque battle scenes. Takahasi mentioned that he wanted to use instruments with their own individual flavour in order to create a more varied soundtrack. Takahasi went on to say that:

Well, it’s because I wanted to break away from the sound you’d expect every time from an RPG. But – and I know this sounds like bragging – in the end I think the final results I got were good. Each of the tracks which the different team members worked on has its own individuality, but yet if you listen to them all together, I don’t think you can tell which one was made by which person.

In the second part of the feature, Takahasi went on to mention how he brought the game's protagonist, Shulk, to the Mario Club, a branch of Nintendo that deals with things such as debugging testing. The reaction to the character was positive, with no one disliking him in the slightest. The positive response made Takahasi feel very proud of his work with the game up to that point.

For those who have been out of the loop over the past few days and have no idea about Xenoblade Chronicles, the game's scenario writer, Yuichrio Takeda, described, in a nutshell, what the title is all about.

Hmmm... Well, in terms of the story, a single pint-sized youth comes face to face with an enormous god, creating some kind of connection. What I had in mind was to find out what kind of story would unfold from that point, contrasting the realms of the micro and the macro. When you actually play the game, you’ll find a vast world which you are free to explore at will. On the system side, you’ll find it’s a game that allows you to experience a host of new things. So I hope players will enjoy themselves as they explore the huge game world, experiencing that contrast between the micro and macro levels.

Following this, Takahashi took a stab of summarizing the game:

For this title, we started with this giant model...We built the game world based on this, and what I really wanted to explore was how these tiny beings, the hero and his companions, would grow, and whether they would be able to embark on their adventure. That’s why I think that if I were to sum up this title in a single word, I would say that it was ‘embarking’.

In the initial part of the game, the hero and his companions set out on their journey, facing the future in an unfamiliar world, and I wanted to describe the way they progress.

Xenoblade Chronicles is due out in European territories this September.