A speedrunner of Xenoblade Chronicles X managed to squeeze in one last world record before Nintendo shut down the Wii U’s online servers, making it the last record ever.
Last month, Nintendo did the at best quite annoying, at worst outright destructive thing of shutting down its online servers for both the Wii U and 3DS. That left numerous titles outright unplayable, and others with online modes that are no longer accessible. Xenoblade Chronicles X was one such game with an online mode, but now you can’t play it anymore because of the servers being shut down. It’s a lesser known entry in the beloved RPG series, but one that many hope will get a Switch port somewhere down the line (or maybe at this point a Switch 2 port). As it turns out, speedrunner YMG-C actually performed one last run of the game’s online mode right before the servers shut down, and in the process beat the world record, as shared by a fan on Twitter (thanks, GamesRadar).
With the Wii U’s servers now offline, this also makes it impossible for anyone else to speedrun the online mode at all, meaning YMG-C will forever be the world record holder. Though, if no one else had decided to do a run before the servers shut down, it wouldn’t matter much, as they were the previous world record holder anyway. Their previous record was two hours and 57 minutes long, whereas this new record is a minute shorter at two hours and 56 minutes, and that will be the record forever more. Even if the game does get a Switch port, speedrun categories will also be placed across various platforms, and with the Wii U being a generation behind, that would obviously cause discrepancies in things like load times.
While a port of Xenoblade Chronicles X might be a bit of a pipe dream, it’s not like the game isn’t getting new entries: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 released in 2022, and even got some DLC the following year, so there’s still a future for the series somewhere in Nintendo’s library.