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It's not enough for a video game to 'sprawl' anymore. Where once the size of a virtual world provided a somewhat useful measure of its creators' effort and ambition, nowadays, entire galaxies can blossom from a few seemingly throwaway lines of code. If ever you grow tired exploring one of Minecraft's worlds, simply load a fresh one; the next unique arrangement of hills, trees and caverns will keep you busy for months. There is, in fact, already more virtual real estate in video games than humans will ever be able to chart or fathom. Considering this surplus of space, the world of Mira, home of Xenoblade Chronciles X, which launches in the west in November, should be unremarkable. Except that its creator, Tetsuya Takahashi has always brought a great deal more than mere expanse to his worlds. 2011's Xenoblade Chronicles, for example, takes place on the torsos of two miles-long colossi, whose bodies are overgrown with moss, reeds and lakes. You trek along their vast arms and knees. Look up and you might see a shoulder waiting in the misty distance. It's the kind of virtual world that even a room full of monkeys loading procedurally generated landscapes for an infinite amount of time could never produce.
Mira stretches dizzyingly from the smog and spires of its capital city, New LA, across verdant plains filled that scoop up to form stratospheric cliffs. It sprawls, but, crucially, it also entrances. That's what makes it so beguiling. It was not, however, easily arrived at. For Takahashi, building a place of such scale and ambition has been a career-long quest. His first assignment as a new recruit at Square-Enix in the early 1990s was nothing more than a dry-stone wall, a strip of art just a few pixels thick. The wall, which was used in the first game on which he worked, Final Fantasy 4, used up less processing power than a single blade of Xenoblade Chronicles X's grass. It may not have had much in the way of sprawl, but Takahashi's wall did a lot for the artist, bringing him to the attention of Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, who noticed in him a unique and, as Sakaguchi put it in 2014, "impressive" talent.
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