Spiritual sequel.
Basically, Earth is the battlegrounds for two alien races. Humanity escapes in giant arks.
The arks crash land on a new world. Humans try to conquer and rebuild this land.
There's another race that already lives there that doesn't like this.
The main character is your own character, which is custom made. He/She is mute, but the supporting characters carry the story.
The bolded; is that the case? What I'd gathered was that one of the alien species that participated in the war that destroyed Earth actively chased down the American ark-ship, causing it to crash-land on the planet that it did. Presumably, it is a member of that alien species that is talking about eliminating a "cancer" in the Digital Event trailer.
Granted, I suppose it's entirely possible that this is coincidentally the home planet of one of those two alien races, or that there's a third alien race entering the picture here, but the trailer/Treehouse streams didn't give me that impression.
I dunno, I do have a lot of questions about the whole scenario - things like, who were the two alien species? Did they choose a populated planet like Earth for the site of their battle for a reason? If not, why should either species care about the evacuee ships enough to actively attack them? Was the other species trying to defend humanity, and if so, will they show up later in the game, showing remorse for the loss of the old planet? Did any ark-ships other than the one holding NLA make it off Earth before it shattered?
I'm wondering if the dialog in the intro sheds light on any of this, but expecting most of the answers won't come until the game is in my hands. Admittedly the plot premise is a bit of a turn-off for me (I don't like plots where the Earth is explicitly destroyed, and have passed up experiences I'd probably have otherwise enjoyed over such plot events; I understand that virtually nobody else gets caught up on things like that, but I can't really help that I do), but I think my appreciation for the first
Xenoblade (which I should really finish one of these days, only up to
) is mitigating my trepidations enough that I'm still interested in seeing where this goes.