Nintendo’s Wii U console will go down in history as a complete disaster. From its 2012 launch until its discontinuation in 2016, the underpowered console barely managed to scrape sales. Even so, it hosted some genuinely amazing games that got overlooked until Nintendo started dragging them back out for their insanely popular Switch handheld consume for profit.
Titles like Mario Kart 8, New Super Mario Bros. U, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all started on the Wii U but were practically wasted there, only to find new life on the Switch. But there was one game, Xenoblade Chronicles X, that seemed like Nintendo completely forgot about it, an epic sci-fi, open-world action RPG by Monolith Soft released in April 2015 to stellar reviews.
It stood out from other Xenoblade entries with its unique setting, deep gameplay mechanics, and an entire alien world to explore. Now, at long last, Nintendo and Monolith Soft have announced that Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition will finally hit the Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2025.
This should be a damn celebration! The Wii U, which was more suited to compete with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 rather than the looming PS4 and Xbox One, barely stood a chance. Dropping in at a time when it was already behind, this misfit console only managed to scrape together 13.56 million sales during its entire lifespan.
Xenoblade Chronicles X, one of the few big Wii U titles, managed around 500,000 global sales, decent enough given the system’s sorry state. The game even topped charts in Japan on its release week, proving that Monolith Soft could still deliver despite the console’s failures.
Those numbers were solid for a project of its scope, justifying continued installments like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in 2017 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in 2022.
For fans, especially those newer to the franchise, Xenoblade Chronicles X is like the holy grail, the “one that got away.” With the Wii U dead and gone, playing it meant dusting off an old Wii U or turning to emulation.
And yet, as if fans hadn’t waited long enough, Nintendo confirmed the re-release for the Switch will be based on the censored global version, a real gut punch for those hoping to finally experience the game as intended.
The Japanese Nintendo eShop listing confirms that this Definitive Edition will include all previously released DLC, some of which never left Japan. So at least players around the world will get a little extra with this re-release.
Unlike other Xenoblade games, Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn’t follow a set protagonist. Instead, players create and customize their own character, fully personalizing their look and style. But, when the game dropped in the West, it didn’t arrive unscathed.
It came censored.
Originally, the game let players adjust the breast size of their female characters, but in the Western version, this feature got axed. And, naturally, it sparked a lot of debate. Fans were pissed, feeling the removal needlessly limited their freedom in customizing their character to their liking and because it was simply ridiculous to remove a subtle chest slider, with the Western version defaulting to the baseline “medium” scale instead.
In Xenoblade Chronicles X, one of the main characters, Lin Lee Koo, is canonically a 13-year-old girl in the Japanese version. When the game was brought to the West, though, her age was bumped up to 15, likely to fit Western cultural standards around portraying younger characters.
Even with this change, they didn’t stop there, many of Lin’s outfits, especially her swimsuits, were also modified to show less skin. Fans saw it as a heavy-handed attempt to censor the character for Western audiences, a choice that also sparked plenty of debate.
In the Japanese version of Xenoblade Chronicles X, Lin’s outfits often showed her midriff and legs, but when the game came to the West, these were changed to be a lot more modest, likely to dodge any criticism over her age and the whole “sexualization of young characters” issue.
Xenoblade Chronicles X’s director, Tetsuya Takahashi, even addressed the changes in an interview years after the game’s release, saying it’s important to make a game everyone can enjoy without anyone feeling uncomfortable. But for fans, it felt more like Monolith Soft was bowing to the censorship demands of Nintendo Treehouse’s localization practices.
Cultural differences between Japan and the West are glaring. Western markets seem to detest femininity in video games, forcing Japanese devs to run everything by the hypercritical eyes of Nintendo’s Western branches and censor any “problematic” content.
And the situation hasn’t exactly improved: in Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the localization team went all in, pushing for characters like Juniper to be non-binary and “A” to be portrayed as possibly transgender, complete with characters strictly referring to them with either “they” or “them” in the games English dialogue.
For fans, this re-release of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is more disappointment than celebration. Instead of remastering the uncensored Japanese version, Nintendo and Monolith Soft are opting to base it on the censored Western version, probably because it’s easier and cheaper to repackage the “sanitized” version than to redo the original.
This is yet another shining example of how much “localization” has morphed over time. ATLUS censoring “problematic” scenes from Persona 3 Reload and Square Enix’s botched Dragon Quest 3 remake show just how far some companies are willing to go to cater to Western sensibilities, even if it costs the original version its authenticity.
