How Leitmotifs Spoil a Twist in Xenoblade 3

Spoilers for Xenoblade 3 ahead. This is a short one, a brief infodump about a fun bit of story telling in Xenoblade 3 and how it spoils a twist with its own musical cleverness.

Leitmotifs are always a fun technique to hear in any piece of media. For those unaware, a leitmotif is a recurring piece of music that is associated with an aspect of a story. This could be a character, a location, a theme, etc. The leitmotif acts as a musical “representation” of that thing. Some uses of leitmotifs may slightly modify the leitmotif to represent changes in the thing it represents. If a character goes through a tragedy, their leitmotif may change to become more somber e.g. by switching from a major key to a minor key. In this way, the music can emphasize and reinforce the storytelling.

Xenoblade 3 does something with leitmotifs that I haven’t personally heard elsewhere (but if you have, PLEASE let me know) and I love it.

For Xenoblade 3, the development team made two custom shinobue flutes to use in the recording of the sound track. These flutes represent the flutes used by the game’s two “off-seers”, Noah and Mio. Off-seers are characters who perform funerary rites for those who die in combat, playing their flutes to see off the dead. Whenever you hear the flutes played by Noah or Mio in-game, it was performed by the real world flutes.

The flutes also show in up the musical tracks that play in-game, generally in tracks associated with the off-seers or with their role in seeing off the dead.

If you notice this, you may be surprised when Moebius Battle suddenly has Mio’s flute while fighting M. You may be inclined to think that this is because M is Mio’s original, but from what I recall N’s music doesn’t feature Noah’s flute. It is also important to note that, as we learn a little later, M was never an off-seer while Mio of course is.

So what does this mean about our fight with M?

An hour of brutally emotional cutscenes later, we learn the truth, one you can probably guess but I still won’t say here just in case. And in hindsight, it’s a brilliant bit of foreshadowing that attentive listeners may pick up on while the rest of us are left to reel from the realization in hindsight that the pieces were all there.

These games are far from perfect but wow I love them so much. For all their faults, there is clearly so much care and thought put into these stories.