The story here wasn't really explained, but the previous game saw players exploring a world on the backs of old gods. The Xenoblade series is usually one marked by a theme of perpetual war, and it's hard to tell exactly what the story will revolve around given that the first game seemed to have a fairly conclusive ending. This is partly why some people are curious about why they chose to succeed Xenoblade Chronicles with a sequel when Xenoblade Chronicles X was the game that had more to tell and more to explore as far as story and characters were concerned. One of the issues with Xenoblade Chronicles X, however, was that since the main character was a player creation, and the story slightly suffered from that.