Monolith Soft

Monolith Software Inc., best known as Monolith Soft and sometimes shortened to M.L.S.I., is a Japanese game developer founded on October 1st, 1999 by a group of former Squaresoft employees leaded by Tetsuya Takahashi, Hirohide Sugiura and Yasuyuki Honne, with the financial support of Namco.

As a subsidiary of Namco Limited (later Namco Bandai Games and currently Bandai Namco Games), they developed games for multiple systems, mainly for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube. Their debut game was Xenosaga Episode I, part of the Xenosaga series, a spiritual successor to Xenogears, which many staff members worked on while employed at Square. Other games developed under Namco ownership includes Baten Kaitos and Namco x Capcom.

In April 2007, Nintendo agreed with Monolith Soft to purchase a 80% of ownership on the company, while Bandai Namco would retain 16% until 2012, when they completely divested. Since then, Monolith Soft has created the Xenoblade Chronicles series, itself a spiritual successor to Xenosaga. Other games include Soma Bringer, Disaster: Day of Crisis and Project X Zone, which is a spiritual sequel to Namco x Capcom, as well supporting on the development of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

In 2011, Monolith Soft opened a Kyoto studio near to the Nintendo's headquarters, to provide assistence on game development. So far, this division helped on the development of various games from The Legend of Zelda series (Skyward Sword, A Link Between Worlds, and Breath of the Wild) and Animal Crossing entries (New Leaf, Happy Home Designer, and New Horizons), and also collaborated with the Splatoon series and Pikmin 3.

Monolith Soft has been the developer for all games in the Xeno series with the exception of Xenogears, which was developed and published by Square (who, as Square Enix, are also the current holders of the intellectual property of the game and its universe).