Winning battles earns the player experience points, which allows the characters to grow stronger by leveling up and learning new Arts. Health may be restored by the player by using healing Arts in battle, or the player may let characters' HP regenerate automatically outside of battle. Combat is won when all enemies lose their HP, but the game is lost if the player's character loses all their HP and has no means of being revived. Both party members and enemies have a finite number of health points, and attacks deplete this value. Battle Arts are only available after a 'cool down' period that occurs after every use, while character specific 'Talent Arts' only become available after enough auto-attacks are executed. Manually input attacks, called 'Arts', may also be performed, but in a limited fashion. The gameplay within the Xenoblade Chronicles series uses a real-time action-based battle system, where the player manually moves a character in real-time, and party members will 'auto-attack' when enemies enter their attack radius. It is loosely a part of the Xeno metaseries, for which it receives its namesake, co-created and directed by Tetsuya Takahashi. The series has been represented in other gaming franchises, including the Super Smash Bros. Xenoblade Chronicles has been well-received for its world design, music, stories, and themes.

The series has since sold more than 8.2 million copies worldwide.

The original game became a critical and commercial success, spawning multiple sequels. Though initially only released in Japan, it was localized into other regions as a result of Operation Rainfall, a large grass-roots fan campaign to pressure Nintendo to localize several Japan-exclusive games. The series began with the original Xenoblade Chronicles game, published for the Nintendo Wii in 2010. Xenoblade Chronicles is a series of action role-playing games developed by Monolith Soft and published by Nintendo.

Xenoblade chronicles 3d cia