Monolith Soft
"Xenoblade Chronicles X" was developed by Japanese development company Monolith Soft, with Tetsuya Takahashi forming the original concept and serving as the game's executive director. Following the completion of "Xenoblade Chronicles" for the Wii in 2011, Takahashi approached Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami and asked if he could develop a new science fiction-themed role-playing game built upon the systems of "Xenoblade Chronicles". Yamagami and Nintendo were willing, and talks turned towards what Takahashi and Monolith Soft could do on Nintendo's Wii U console. "Xenoblade Chronicles" directors Genki Yokota of Nintendo and Koh Kojima of Monolith Soft returning in their original roles. The producers were Shingo Kawabata of Monolith Soft and Hitoshi Yamagami of Nintendo. Discussions about how to realize "Xenoblade Chronicles X" went on for around six months. While planned for release early in the Wii U's life cycle, the planned release date was pushed forward due to development issues. They later commented that it was a challenge fitting the entire game onto a single Wii U game disc, with Kawabata commenting that the game "barely fits" onto the 32 gigabyte disc. "Xenoblade Chronicles X" was Monolith Soft's first high-definition video game. To help cope with this first, the team decided against using cutting-edge technology when designing the game. The team used the lessons and experience from their time developing "Xenoblade Chronicles", in addition to setting limits upon what they did during production; a specified self-imposed limitation was not using middleware to speed up the production process.