Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – Production Notes #1: Drivers and Blades
On November 14th, the official website of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was updated in Japan, adding a new section: Production Notes. It’s a blog-like section, where members of the development team will come discuss various aspects of the game.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – Production Notes #1: Drivers and Blades
The first post is from Tetsuya Takahashi (General Director, Monolith Soft), who came to talk about the changes the relationships between Drivers and Blades have gone through throughout the ages.
In ancient times, Blades were not born with weapons, and so their relationships with Drivers were not really deep. Blades could use Arts, but their power was limited, and so they were not of much use to Drivers. That’s why their role on the battlefield was pretty limited, and Blades played nothing but a support role.
But eventually, the relationship between Driver and Blade underwent a radical change, when a limited number of Blades were born with a weapon. People quickly found out that the power of Arts could be magnified by having the Driver use the Blade’s weapon.
What’s more, it turns out that a part of the Aether energy is purified, compressed, and then sent back to the weapon everytime the Driver uses an Art. The result: attacks than are much more powerful than “regular” Arts, called Specials. Also, Drivers using weapons provided by Blades enjoy secondary effects, such as increased strength, agility, and endurance when in battle with a Blade.
As a result of these changes and discoveries, the relationship between Blades and Drivers came to be much deeper than ever before. It it said that a certain pair of Driver and Blade from the lost realm of Torna was the first to estalish Driver-Blade battle tactics, but there are no official records of that left.
The change in the relationship between Blades and Drivers led to the creation of Driver-Blade battle tactics, but also the gradual disappearance of Blades born without a weapon. Nowadays, Blades are generally summoned with their specific weapons. You could say that the principal of “survival of the fittest” also applies to Blades.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch) comes out on December 1st, worldwide.
Source: Nintendo
