Baseless Pitch: Xenoblade Warriors

Nintendo and Dynasty Warriors seems a match made in heaven for non canon hack and slash games for franchises. Seeing as the Legend of Zelda has had two warriors games and Fire Emblem has had one I imagine a lot are thinking what other franchises could also have this sort of spin off. To me no other franchise makes more sense than Xenoblade Chronicles. Here I want to briefly touch on what the roster could look like and how the story could look like.

Playable Characters:
With this being a non-canon game you can have some real fun with the roster, Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors took characters from the entire history of the franchise and if you just look at protagonist teams you have a lot to choose from. Breaking it down you could have all or most of the below as playable characters.

Xenoblade Chronicles One:
Shulk
Reyn
Fiora
Dunban
Sharla
Riki
Melia 

Xenoblade Chronicles Two:
Rex
Nia
Tora
Morag
Zeke
Vandham

Xenoblade Chronicles Two: Torna The Golden Country:
Addam
Lora
Hugo

Xenoblade Chronicles Three:
Noah
Mio
Eunie
Tauin
Lanz
Sena

Xenoblade Chronicles Three Furure Redeemed:
Matthew
A
Nikol
Glimmer
Shulk (Adult)
Rex (Adult)

Right away you can see the sheer variety of characters to choose from and this is just listing the playable characters and not even putting blades from two on the list like Pyra, Mythra & Jin or the hero characters in Xenoblade 3 to name a few. Looking over everyone listed you get a good variety of playstyles should you choose it in relation to weapons used. You could always break it up with some being DLC and what not but Xenoblade would be a franchise which would not lack when it came to a roster for a Warriors spin off. 

Story:
Looking at what the story would be you have to imagine it would focus on a character created for the game. While Hyrule Warriors main character was Link a large part of the story was dictated by the character Lana who I’m pretty sure was created for the game. Fire Emblem warriors focused on the story of characters created for the game aided by classic Fire Emblem characters so it would make sense that this would be the same. I can imagine a story that uses classic villains as part of it such as Metal Face, Jin & N as sub bosses with Zanza, Malos, Z as main bosses perhaps with a big bad at the end being a character created for the game. The main character not overly playable to see where they would go on is Alvis. Being such a key part of the lore of the franchise it would be wrong to leave him out. If I had to pick something I would have him as a boss at some point in the game that becomes an unlockable character. I always felt the stories of these games were basic and the main emphasis was on the slashing through enemies which I am a fan of not everything needs super heavy lore so I would do something similar here. Let’s say the main villain is someone trying rewrite the history of the universe and as such the world itself fights back summoning warriors from its entire combined history. A fairly basic premise but allows us to gather heroes from each game in the same place at one time.

Character Interactions:
What I feel would be the most interesting part of the game would be the character interactions. Fire Emblem Three Hopes introduced a hub of sorts for this type of game where you could go around and speak to all playable units. It also gave a chance to check through support links and with Xenoblade having Affinity Bonds this feels like the perfect game to continue and build on this. A change would be made from reaching a certain point of the map to trigger them you would get them by having a certain amount of battles with units in your chose team. How interesting would it be to have adult Rex and Xenoblade 2 Rex interact or Xenoblade 1 Shulk and Nikol for example.

To conclude I think out of all main Nintendo franchises Xenoblade Chronicles is the one that makes the most sense to have a Dynasty Warriors spin off (no matter how fun a Mario bros one would be) so it would be cool to see. It’s one of those where the series has such a complicated lore it would be task to implement all these characters into one game. However this was done with Hyrule Warriors 1 so it’s not the most impossible task.