Xenoblade Chronicles is in a weird spot for me. The premise of each of the games is exactly what I look for. But the most interest part for me is the concept that ties the games together with XenoGears and XenoSaga. From what I understand there's a scientist doing something that divided him and makes him several Gods in different universes (or something like that). The problem is I don't see myself playing the games to see how much of that gets explained.
Massive spoilers for both Xenoblade 1 and 2, along with how those relate to information about 3 that was available pre-launch:
There haven't been any explicit tie-ins to previous Xeno games, but 1 and 2 were connected by way of a cutscene that occurs at/near the end of both games. In that scene, a scientist named Klaus makes use of an artifact called the Conduit (not explicit shown in 1, but retconned in 2. This bears considerable physical resemblance to the Zohar and may end up being a tie-in to Gears as the series plot develops) to try creating a new universe. The results are apocalyptic. Most life on Earth is wiped out, the handful of human survivors are mutated into twisted creatures roaming the shattered remnants of their former world (which is visited in 2 as the Land of Morytha), Klaus himself is granted the power of a god, but has half of his body transported to another dimension. In this initial world, Klaus takes on the role of The Architect and creates what comes to be known as the world of Alrest, in which all of Xenoblade 2 is set, including establishing the circle of life that ultimately results in Titans being born to act as landmasses for smaller creatures.
The other half of Klaus, along with the colleague that tried to stop him (Galea, only named in 2) end up in a completely new, parallel dimension, consisting of a world that's just an endless sea (at least, that's all we ever see of it). In this world, the two create the Bionis and Mechonis and respectively become Zanza and Meyneth, gods of their respective titans. The events of that game all follow the conflict between the titans, ultimately culminating in the death of both gods and Shulk using the power of the Monado (his magic sword, to grossly oversimplify matters) to create a new world with no need for gods. This new world is briefly explored in 1's epilogue cutscene and in Future Connected (the epilogue campaign included with the Definitive Edition), and as far as we see there, consists mostly of locations from Bionis and Mechonis laid out as part of a more traditional landscape that expands beyond that and explicitly exists as just one planet in an otherwise normal universe.
At the end of Xenoblade 2, just before the party is fights the big bad guy to prevent Alrest from being destroyed, Klaus warns them that his time is nearly up and the Conduit will be leaving the world soon, taking all of his power and the power of anything else that depends on it with it. During the final cutscene, we see Klaus performing one final act of divine intervention to preserve all of Alrest's existing Titans and life in the new world that is forming, all of which happens at the same time as Xenoblade 1's ending (we hear Shulk's voice from that ending cutscene echo through the dimensional vortex that forms Klaus' left half, and there's a considerable chance that the Conduit left because Shulk wanted to create a world without gods). Once the final boss is defeated and the party returns to Alrest, they see the Cloud Sea retreating and find themselves looking at a new, more traditional landscape. The old titans all make their way to the shores of this new continent and crash into it to become part of the land, forming a new world for everyone to live in.
It was implied that this new land and the new world formed at the end of 1 were the same place, and that 1's world had merged back into the dimension from which it came, but that wasn't explicitly confirmed until 3 was announced. 3 includes many elements from both worlds, from landscape elements (the Mechonis' Sword and Urayan titan are both pictured on the game's cover art, title screen, and seen in the landscape of the game very early on) to creatures, to the people that live there (the two warring nations seem to consist of people that resemble the inhabitants of 1's world and people that resemble the inhabitants of 2's). I can't speak to exactly how 3 shows this connection beyond that, since I'm still pretty early in the game, but it definitely seems to be set in this combined world, many years later.
There's more nuance to it than that, but that's the gist of it all. There's also Xenoblade X in there somewhere, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the other games yet. People have half-joked that the title might be a roman numeral and that Takahashi opted to release #10 before #2, which may yet prove to be true, but as of now (again, speaking without knowing how 3 ends), there doesn't seem to be a connection. If you want to see how it's all actually portrayed without playing through multiple 100+ hour games to do so (though they are excellent games and I quite recommend them), compilations of all of their cutscenes are available on Youtube (1 is ~10.5 hours long, 2 is 14) and there's a substantial number of analysis and lore videos that explore/explain things further, so it may be worth your time to dive into those if you're interested. There still isn't any definite connection to Gears/Saga, but a lot of those lore videos explore potential connections, and depending on what comes out of 3, that may change.
SKARDAVNELNATE posted...
Okay... though I'm not even sure how accurate it is.
It's not unheard of for speculation - even inaccurate speculation - about spoiler content to be modded as spoilers. Bear in mind that a lot of the time, the mods haven't actually played/seen whatever's being allegedly spoiled, so they can't verify the accuracy of a spoiler (and might not even want to read it for the sake of avoiding spoilers themselves) and instead have to take the word of whoever marked it at face value.
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