By A.C. [Last updated 2011.12.05]

This article is partly inspired by "The Secret History of Star Wars" book by Michael Kaminski which was written to shine a light on George Lucas' creative process and trace the many changes that occured in the Star Wars saga along the way. This is an analysis of the history of Xenogears and Xenosaga, in an attempt to shine some light on how the Xeno- series evolved.

I felt this was necessary because of the many rumors people have had over the years. Some believed Takahashi had Xenosaga written out from the beginning and that Xenogears was the result of Square forcing him to have it set on just one planet. Others have grossly assumed Xenogears was just a result of Square wanting to rip off Neon Genesis Evangelion following that series' success in Japan at the time and that Xenosaga has nothing to do with Xenogears and only used references as cameos and homages. Square and Namco have often been charged with claims that they must've been the reason for the games' incompleteness and that Xenosaga II was the reason the Saga never went past Shion's story arc. There is a lot of controversy, confusion, assumptions and even deliberate misinformation on the subject. This article will show that most people's perception of Xenogears and Xenosaga's development have been incorrect, and hopefully shine light on the truth. Also, with the likes of Dostoevsky and George Lucas being studied in university courses alongside Shakespeare, I wanted to write something for "academics" in addition to fans of Tetsuya Takahashi. Though it is yet uncertain how much recognition gaming will receive in the future as a form of art or self-expression, if there is ever a history book on gaming as art, then it should include a mention of Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno- series at the very least. While a book on gaming will no doubt mention games like Mario and Zelda, generally those games contain no substance or relevance to human culture beyond escapist entertainment. On the other hand, simply because Takahashi had something to say, doesn't mean he is garantueed a lasting legacy like Lucas, Kubrick, or Shakespeare. Being attached to gaming as a media is both a big obstruction as well as favorable. While gaming won't allow him to be recognized as an "important writer" or "brilliant film director", he is certainly unique as a game director, and will always stand out that way. And to his critics, specifically of these two works, I will say that in describing Takahashi as a bad writer or game director you are not saying something demonstrably untrue. But in reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Tetsuya Takahashi, or any other writer/director, is 'good'. Ultimately there is no test of artistic or literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion. Of course Xenogears and Xenosaga are very young works so majority opinion may change, but Xenogears is still widely known as the game with "the greatest story of all time", and still critics mostly throw weak or dishonest arguments against the work. Even the creators' regard for their own work becomes irrelevant in this regard, since their later design philosophy is intentionally cartering to a "mass market" in the commercial realm and it is in fact this very contrast that reveals how much more expressive and genuine these older works now appear. I also identify the critics chief quarrel with Xenogears and Xenosaga as the quarrel between the entertainment obsessed and the sincere and important attitude towards life and art. The relevance to life that characterizes these works, their interest in the spiritual and cerebral, the poetic and eloquently expressed ideas and truths through language - the very qualities for which people tend to admire these works - are precisely the qualities that make them unendurable to their detractors, who take things at face value and whose only satisfaction appears to be spectacle, high fantasy entertainment, constantly varied gameplay, state-of-the-art production with CGI, action-driven writing, likeable and attractive characters or instant gratification so that action is not left to one's own thoughts. Since Takahashi's attitude to these games threatens the attitude of these gamers, they are incapable of enjoying Xenogears/Xenosaga and will sometimes mount an assault on these works in order to try to ensure that others cannot enjoy them either. It is the most common type of criticism between an artist (or a work of art) and an observer; the difference of attitude.

In conclusion, considering how little difference these critics attack on Xenogears has made, the only criterion for the merit of the work as a work of art is that it continues to be admired, and hence, the greatest threat these works currently face are not their lack of substance or artistry, but the possibility of them falling into oblivion. Ideally, Takahashi should have tried making the story more complete and fitting to his vision through a novel or an animated series, but even without that the works are worthy of essays. By writing about these works I also make my small part in trying to keep them in continued awareness. I will likely make additions to this article if more info should surface. Because of the sheer length of this article, I decided to create short-cuts in the form of Chapters. * Contains spoilers Chapter I: The Beginning -- on the origins of the story Chapter II: Project Noah -- developing the game Chapter III: Xenogears -- a fandom is born Chapter IV: Perfect Works / Episode I -- Transition towards "Xenosaga" Chapter V: MonolithSoft's Project X -- Tetsuya Takahashi's Xenosaga Chapter VI: Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht Chapter VII: A new stance -- series cut down to 1/3 Chapter VIII: Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose Chapter IX: Fixing the mess -- A(nother) remake Chapter X: Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra Chapter XI: Monado: Beginning of the World -- renamed to "Xenoblade" Appendix: Links to referenced articles, interviews and sources The Beginning -- on the origins of the story The original story idea was invented by Kaori Tanaka (from now on referred to by her pen name Soraya Saga) in 1994. At that time, Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga had finished their work on Final Fantasy VI, and Takahashi was working on Front Mission and Chrono Trigger, while Soraya was working on Romancing SaGa 3, and they would later get married in 1995. The original concept was a story about "a young soldier of fortune with multiple personalities" that Soraya wrote that year. Soraya have given at least two accounts of what followed: "Takahashi proposed the plan to our boss. Though the plan was rejected because it was too sci-fi for RPG, the boss kindly gave us an advice "Why don't you make it into a new game?". Then I came up with an idea about a deserted A.I. with feminine personality who becomes an origin of new mankind in the unexplored planet. Takahashi refined the idea into more deeper and mystic love story."

- Soraya Saga (Fringe FAQ, Mars 05, 2005) "I and Tetsuya Takahashi originally submitted it as a script idea for Final Fantasy VII. While we were told that it was too dark and complicated for a fantasy, the boss was kind enough to give Takahashi a chance to launch a new project. Then Takahashi and I wrote up the full screenplay which contained cutscene-dialogues in final form, thus the project was born."

- Soraya Saga (Interview with Siliconera, June 11, 2010) Xenogears, as a story, is a work primarily about philosophy, psychology, science, and ideology. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung are the most obvious influences, and happened to be part of common interests Soraya Saga shared with Takahashi. "Xenogears is basically a story about 'where do we come from, what are we, where are we going'. In that respect, we were inspired by those concepts a lot", says Soraya in the Siliconera interview. What has been less known, and mostly hinted at in the Xenosaga Official Design Materials released in 2002, is that Xenogears and Xenosaga are works that primarily explore Karen Horney and Claudio Naranjo's "theory of neurosis". This theory is an existential interpretation of neurosis according to which the bottom line of all psychopathology is the loss of being. The central idea is that we are looking for the key to our liberation, to our ultimate fulfillment, in the wrong places. This error, which is at the root of well constructed belief systems and ideologies, is the source of our unhappiness.

The name of Fei's mother, Karen, is thought to be a reference to Karen Horney, a German psychoanalist who looked at neurosis in a different light from other psychoanalysts of the time. Her expansive interest in the subject led her to compile a detailed theory of neurosis, pointing towards neurosis as the root of personality itself. Karen Horney's theories had a strong influence on Dr. Naranjo when he developed his theory of neurosis - more commonly known as the Enneagram of Personality - even dedicating his book Character and Neurosis to the memory of Karen Horney. The characters in both Xenogears and Xenosaga were written using this "Enneagram of Personality", as the basis. Understood properly, Enneagram of Personality constitutes a tool to reach the roots of Ego's conditionings and deformities; what Nietzsche would refer to as the "will to power" driving force in man. Naranjo compared the "theory of neurosis", or degradation of consciousness, in symbolical terms, with that of the spiritual traditions in the mythological stories of the "fall from paradise". These mythological stories of our genesis are featured heavily in the Xenoverse, with a clear portrayal of man's degradation of consciousness, to the point that we might even call the Xenoverse a fictional representation of Karen's and Naranjo's "theory of neurosis".

This is further expressed very poetically in the lyrics of Xenogears' ending theme song "Small Two of Pieces" where the imagery of humanity is painted as being fragments of a mirror that has broken into a million pieces. If one examines the existential psychodynamics of human types in relation to one another in the Enneagram structure, it becomes clear that each of us are a fragment of a larger body, and that, like fragments, we each connect and reflect our own psychodynamics with others in a complementary fashion. We all become "incomplete" and flawed, but remain a necessary part of the whole. In fact, Dr. Naranjo himself uses the mirror-analogy in Character and Neurosis published in 1994: "In particular I have imagined that the reader, as he or she has moved from one to another hall of portraits deriving from literature, psychology, or my own cumulative experience and its elaboration, would have felt as if she had been walking in a hall of mirrors reflecting back to her different aspects of her personality."

While the lyrics for Small Two of Pieces were not written by Tetsuya Takahashi himself, it is likely that Masato Kato may have been instructed to write something with this imagery in mind, or Kato simply caught on to it after Tetsuya Takahashi must have introduced to the other writers the Enneagram of Personality. Kato added references to this mirror-imagery for parts he wrote in Xenogears, such as the Chu-Chu's in Shevat: "You humans are truly unusual living beings, aren't chu? You're all like shattered fragments of a mirror." So when did all this begin? Clearly all this had to be at the back of Tetsuya Takahashi's mind when he started writing for their project that would become Xenogears. The story is simply too ambitious to have been made up on the fly. One does not proceed from merely two ideas and then write up a full screenplay like the one in Xenogears filled with multiple references to psychologists, philosophies, ideologies, religions, science terms, names, and homages, without a lot of reading. Born in 1966, Takahashi was a pretty small kid, so he was better at study than sports. Chemistry and physics were his favorites, "but I was awful at math" he recalls in an interview on Sony's Website in 2002. For art he would sometimes get good grades, sometimes bad, depending on teacher. "I used to read a lot of manga and those science fiction novels with the blue spines from Hayakawa Publishing" he says, referring to the publishers of Japanese translations of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, which have clearly influenced Takahashi. In fact, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke was directly referenced in Xenogears in the naming of the character "Karellen" (localized as "Krelian" for U.S. audience) who, according to Soraya Saga on Yggdrasil's Periscope Club BBS back in 1999, was the name of Takahashi's favorite character in Childhood's End. The titel of "Guardian Angel", given to the character Citan Uzuki, was another reference. Clarke's idea for Childhood's End began with his short story "Guardian Angel" (1946). 2001: A Space Odyssey is referenced with the "SOL-9000" computer that houses the Ministry, and also in Xenogears: Perfect Works with the discovery of Zohar - a monolithic artifact - on Earth in 2001. This event, with some rewrites, was later used as the opening cinematic in Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht. No doubt Childhood's End served as one of the main inspirations for Xenogears. Many have assumed that the concept of evolving mankind into a singular being was taken from Evangelion, but it was actually from Childhood's End ideas such as humanity's evolution into a vast cosmic intelligence were borrowed from. In the book, human children begin to display telekinetic powers a few generations after the alien Overlords arrive on Earth. In Xenogears, human children like Midori are displaying similar telekinetic powers. Only 500 years before the present, humans in Xenogears began to evolve an ability called 'Ether'. The Gazel Ministry and Karellen are supervising humanity in Xenogears just as Karellen and the Overlords are supervising humanity in Childhood's End. When no more human children are born, many parents find their lives stripped of meaning, and die or commit suicide in the book. New Athens is destroyed with a nuclear bomb by its members. In Xenogears, the Zeboim civilization, existing 4000 years before the present, had a similar scenario playing out. However, the style and themes of Takahashi are in some ways radically different from those of Clarke. Most notably is Clarke's more optimistic view of science empowering mankind's exploration of the cosmos, and his images of Utopian settings with highly developed ecology, and society, which were based on Clarke's ideals. Takahashi has a much darker vision of the future, with humans continuing to force their strong wills and ideals upon the world with the consequence of being trapped in darkness, unable to see the truth of things. He states in Xenogears: Perfect Works that "I'm more of a doom and gloom kind of guy." In terms of his own ideals, Takahashi said in the Xenosaga Official Design Materials that "I have this ideal of how carefree it would be to just ignore social matters and live like a child who doesn't think too deeply about things." There is a part of him that seems reckless, which is often reflected in his main protagonists, and is further supported by his view of death. He would say "I'm what you could call not very insistent regarding life, in that there's a part of me that doesn't care if I die. Especially when I was still single." He is known to have taken risks, with the break away from Square being one of them. On what kind of child he was, he recalls "It seems my relatives called me a strange child. Basically, I never listened to what anyone said. My parents must have had a pretty tough time." People familiar with the auteur theory of cinema knows that it is difficult to write a main character and not having him or her be a part of yourself. Takahashi reveals that the messages in his works are also reflections of his own life: "The many messages in the game are also reflections of my own life. Having said that, I am a selfish human being and when I'm creating I only say what I want to say."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenosaga Official Design Materials) For this reason it is not surprising that Fei and Shion are as reckless as they are, almost as if they don't have much connection with the human drive for self-preservation. However, in disregarding this drive, they can be quite heroic and fearless. In the Xenosaga Official Design Materials, when asked which characters he thinks have an ideal compromise towards death, Takahashi replies, "It depends on further story developments, but if I had to choose I think it would probably be Shion and Albedo." Albedo is not only a character that has no fear of death - being cursed with immortality Albedo wants to die. Albedo desires a union, or merging, with his twin brother over that of preserving his own life, or a safe but solitary existence. Shion, in turn, desires a similar union with her lover Kevin, after learning that he has come back from beyond the grave, even if she knows she is partly being manipulated. This echo of union and merging exists in several characters in Xenogears as well, including Fei and Karellen, who both were attached to the holy woman Sophia, who, in turn, was part of the evolution of Soraya's concept of the female A.I. who gave birth to mankind. On Yggdrasil's Periscope BBS, while talking to fans, Soraya had told that Elly (Sophia) was Takahashi's ideal woman. The webmistress of Xenogears: Guardian Angels fansite recalls it on her Livejournal in 2007 while ranting on feminine stereotypes: "Elly of Xenogears is the ultimate feminine stereotype (and not just the mother of a small family, but an entire bloody religion), and I remember Clio Saga commenting that she was the director's ideal woman."

- Amber Michelle (livejournal, Jan 01, 2007) If Elly was not only the product of Soraya's female A.I. concept, but also the result of Takahashi projecting his own ideal woman into the story, then naturally those two characters who were to be in love with her would carry aspects of Takahashi himself - and perhaps no other character would be more similar to Takahashi in personality than Karellen, the character named after his favorite character from Childhood's End.

As the main antagonist, Karellen is a character that is thoroughly treated with dignity and intelligence, despite the atrocities he commits on a global scale. It is usually expected in RPGs to get a chance to fight each of your opponents, and usually the main antagonist is saved for a final epic battle, but Xenogears breaks off from this tradition, and not once do the player get a chance to fight it out with this character.

Karellen's actions are the result of the sorrow of having lost Sophia, his resentment at those who caused her death, and his lost hope (mixed with a love) for people, which turns him into a hardened scientist and holy man in search of a real God to save human beings. His master plan is an Ark plan that the character refers to as "Project Noah", which would turn out to be the working title for Xenogears.

Karellen is an intense and sensitive character that tries to supress his emotions, but ends up having a really hard time doing that, ultimately having to face what he has done. Takahashi says of himself: "My daily emotional life is pretty intense. If you look at it a certain way it's a burden to be going to the office, working, and meeting with a lot people. There's a part of me I have to suppress."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenosaga Official Design Materials) He goes on to say, "Even if it's something you can't do [in society], you can always instead incorporate it into the story and the game." His unexpressed emotions can thus be seen pouring out in his writing in Xenogears and Xenosaga, which sets the tone of the story in many ways. His friend - and composer for the series - Yasunori Mitsuda, when asked what he thinks of Mr. Takahashi, said: "It's hard to put into words, but I really feel that there's a hidden anger inside him. Like, "Why the hell don't they realize this?!" That anger has been poured into this game, and people who resonate with it will be sucked in. My impression was that I sensed he was very similar to me. He's probably a dark person too, Mr. Takahashi (Laughs) But he's diligent."

- Yasunori Mitsuda (Xenosaga Official Design Materials) Like Karellen, Takahashi also likes to read, though it is unknown if a woman had inspired this in him as Elly had inspired Karellen. Likely, Takahashi was always a curious man who would read everything he could to satisfy his desire for knowledge and wisdom. Takahashi recalls: "As a child, in the middle of a meeting with the chief priest of a Buddhist temple near my home, I began having vague doubts myself on, "What is religion?" That's when I started having an interest in religion and I did research by reading various books."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenosaga Official Design Materials) Combine his interest with religion and reading from an early age, along with his hobby of manga, science fiction novels, and finally cinema, it is not strange that he would end up being known as the "science and ideology" game director who attempts to "create game experiences that outdo films." The elements of romance, mystery, horror, and pop-culture camp that are frequently felt in his games could've been influenced from Futaro Yamada, prominent author of romantic, detective, horror, and bizarre ninja novels, as Takahashi recalls being a fan of his. It would've been interesting to find out what source Tetsuya Takahashi was getting his Enneagram knowledge from because his grasp on not just the types but the subtypes as well is impressive. And Xenogears went into development at the end of 1995 when the Enneagram just started to find its way into the mainstream. Claudio Naranjo's books are apparently not officially translated into Japanese, but I don't know about Oscar Ichazo's material. Right now I'm thinking Ichazo might've been the first or main influence, who's theories are part of a larger body of teaching that he terms Protoanalysis, that Takahashi might also have an interest in. Though I hear Ichazo's books from the early 80's are considered outdated, and his full material is kept secret and only thought in the Arica School. Ichazo's theories are based upon such traditional metaphysical questions such as: "What is humankind?"; "What is the Supreme Good of humanity?"; and "What is the Truth that gives meaning and value to human life?" Takahashi doesn't know English though, so some Japanese publication must've appeared at some point before 1994 in order for Tetsuya Takahashi to have had time to grasp it, and I wouldn't be surprised if he followed the Enneagram since his university years. As for robots, Soraya Saga explains: "I'm of an older generation who grew up with classic giant robot anime by Nippon Sunrise (e.g. Raideen, Gundam, and Votoms). Besides the guy who enthusiastically created gear/AMWS/AGWS/ES mecha is more Takahashi than me. (His room is filled with vintage Chogokin Toys.) ;) "

- Soraya Saga (deviantART, Jul 7, 2008) Finally, once getting in to college, "I began to grow up and started reading books on philosophy and ideology", Takahashi recalls. "I read a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche during university". All this knowledge and passion for study on these and many other subjects, would finally be given an outlet for expression after Takahashi joined Squaresoft as a Graphics artist and subsequently met and became romantically involved with Soraya Saga, who was to come up with the original story idea that Takahashi would turn into the game known today as Xenogears.





Project Noah -- developing the game





Starting with Soraya's original story idea in 1994, Xenogears would not be released until February 1998. In the official source book, Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~, released about 8 months after the game, Takahashi states in the "Main Staff of Xenogears" section, that "The development of Xenogears took a little more than 2 years (any ideas about it taking 3 years or more is just rumor)." He goes on to reflect on the development: "Looking back on this, it was a day by day, person by person struggle that was all-engrossing, and when returning to the everyday world, it felt like only one part in 3 was actually there. When I think about the work that lies in the years ahead, I get dizzy thinking about that now. (hah, hah.)"

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) So what happened between 1994 and February 1998, during the planning, which would have ended at the end of 1995, and the development of Xenogears, which would have started just before 1996 rolled around? How big was the story going to be? When did Takahashi decide on a 6-part episodic structure similar to that of Star Wars? Why did Takahashi feel afterwards that Xenogears was only "one part in 3" and not one part of 6?

Although practically nothing is known, we will have to examine the little we know, and make educated guesses based on various information and quotes. Some evidence actually suggests that Xenogears was going to begin with "Episode IV". In 2008, a list of "random facts about Xenogears" appeared on a now defunct Xenogears: Perfect Works scanlation site called Razael Central, which said that "At the beginning of its development, the game was going to be divided into two separate games -- one covering Episode IV, and the other Episode V."

While at the time these "random facts" were met with some skepticism, they did also mention that the game was considered a possible Final Fantasy VII during its planning stages, and was then developed as "Chrono Trigger 2" before being established as a completely independent game - both facts which could be verified later. The "random facts" are these days considered authentic: "Random facts about Xenogears: - Xenogears was called Ura FFVII (Bizarro FFVII) in Japan because development on the two games began around the same time, as well as the fact that while FFVII had polygonal characters with prerendered backgrounds, Xenogears had polygonal backgrounds and hand-drawn (prerendered) characters. - Xenogears was considered a possible FFVII during the latter's planning stages, though Hironobu Sakaguchi decided against the idea. It was then developed as Chrono Trigger 2, but various circumstances meant it was reformed into Xenogears. This is also a reason why it shares a number of similarities with Chrono Cross, in addition to sharing some staff members. - At the beginning of its development, the game was going to be divided into two separate games -- one covering Episode IV, and the other Episode V. - Xenogears was not an offered choice in the recent 100 Items Representative of Japanese Media vote, but it did make the #3 write-in spot in the Entertainment category. - Square had decided that a sequel to the game would be made if it sold 1 million copies, but in the end it only reached just shy of 900,000, so the plan was dropped."

The "Chrono Trigger 2" rumor can be verified with the DVD that came with the Xenosaga Fanbook with DVD where the developers talked about Xenogears and Xenosaga during a Monolith Soft conference that was held in the summer of 2001. Square has also gone on the record as identifying a connection between the two games in the Chrono Cross Ultimania, and the Japanese Wikipedia on Chrono Cross stated that Xenogears began development as Chrono Trigger 2. Also, in a demo movie of Xenogears the following line was used: "So let love's blood flow! Like the seas of hell, it runs red and deep...!" This line appear in Xenogears' system files, as a deleted part of the script when Fei wakes up after having destroyed Lahan (possibly it was meant to appear just before he wakes up, or while staring at Weltall, or after leaving Lahan behind), translated as: Now, Fei, allow me to spill the blood out of love... Like the sea of hell, crimson, deep...! Presumably this is Id speaking, but was removed (probably due to it being too heavy a foreshadowing). Instead Masato Kato later used it in Chrono Cross' script, for Dark Serge, translated as "Now, let love bleed! Darker and deeper than the seas of hell!"

Furthermore, Lucca, a character from Chrono Trigger, appears in Xenogears as a guest, whose last bonus line makes a reference to the Silbird (The Epoch), etc. So then, we must assume that the game began to be referred to as "Project Noah" some time in 1996, and possibly the idea of turning it into two games must've happened before this. Whenever the game settled on the title "Xenogears" is unknown. The episodic structure was likely established even before Takahashi and Saga approached Hironobu Sakaguchi about making the project in 1995, which would explain why Sakaguchi felt it was too complicated and sci-fi for a Final Fantasy title, but also why he was impressed enough to let them turn it into a new game. Tetsuya Takahashi makes the following comment at the beginning of Xenogears: Perfect Works: "The world of Xenogears is divided into 3 large parts. The first takes place approximately 5000 years ahead of our time, with the vast universe as its stage. The second is the game itself, the story of Fei and the others' world. The third part tells of what comes after.

We can further divide the second part into 4 smaller episodes. From the beginning [of development] the [story's] secrets were contained in the various episodes, and I pondered every concievable medium in order to reveal them, for example as simulation games, or as novelizations, but I ended up putting them all together in the one game. In a sense, Xenogears is a game whose main episodes, IV and V, are intermittently supplemented by Episodes II and III that must be pieced together from fragments.

So, you're probably wondering about Episodes I and VI now. Actually, I really hope you are wondering about them, and I think that they should certainly, at least, appear in print. The transition from fragmentary stories to finished product shall come about gradually. Maybe you could all make a "wish" to Zohar that they will happen."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) (Note: There are at least 3 different translations of this comment. Here I have combined Ultimate Graphics' rough literal translation with that of Razael's in order to cram out as much potent information as possible while making it easier to read.) The above Director's Comment by Tetsuya Takahashi is one of the most revealing comments he has ever made, not only on developing Xenogears' story, but also for the development of the Xenosaga series (as we will explore later). It supports the idea that Xenogears is about Episode IV and V, and so it makes sense that it was originally going to be two games with spin offs for Episode II and III. It is also very clear that Takahashi didn't have a developed plan for what Episode I and VI were going to be about, but mostly left them open to future possibilities - which explains why all the focus is on the four episodes in the middle of the story.

By the end of development, however, Takahashi would feel that even after having 4 episodes crammed into the game, if only by fragments, it was still only a third of what he felt he needed to tell. Episode I and VI were now visualized as being the size of the 4 combined episodes each, and the scale of the story and the Xenogears universe had expanded in scope. It was no longer just a story about a soldier with multiple personalities, or a "mystic love story", or even a story about the history of just one planet... It was a huge scale space opera that portrays the creation of the cosmos until its demise. From a philosophical standpoint, it is not surprising that a story about humanity, religion, and the nature of existence, would evolve into a larger canvas. Especially since there were apparently other human civilizations out there in the vast universe who had to have created the "female A.I." that gave birth to the civilization in Xenogears. However, this would cause a problem for Takahashi, since now people would wonder why "Episode V" appeared in the game's credits, and Takahashi would not be able to deliver 5 more episodes on that scale, but rather just the two; Episode I and VI, with Episode II-IV absorbed into Episode V. Because of this, he would update the episodic structure for Xenosaga, where each of these 3 large parts would be divided into two episodes each. But we'll get back to that later. As the story of Xenogears was originally written, Takahashi first had his core ensemble of main characters; Fei, Elly and Karellen (who would in some ways be mirrored in the Xenosaga trilogy with chaos, KOS-MOS and Wilhelm). Fei was the central character with multiple personalities that Soraya conceptualized with her original story. Elly (and Miang), were Soraya's female A.I. that gives birth to a new mankind. Finally, the character he created by himself - Karellen - would also play a part in this mystical love story. As Takahashi refined Soraya's ideas into the core story of these three characters, the most logical approach to the development of Xenogears would indeed have been to start with "Episode IV", the period of 500 years before the game would actually be set. Not only is this logical from such a conceptual standpoint, it is further supported by the previously mentioned "random facts about Xenogears." Thus Lacan, Sophia, and Karellen would've been the main characters and supported by Roni, Rene, and Zephyr as the main protagonists. Lacan and Karellen would then "turn to the dark side", and become the central antagonists for "Episode V". However, most likely the story Soraya originally wrote centered more on Fei as he appears in the game. Episode IV was then added as a prequel story similar to George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Once development began, the idea of beginning with Episode IV must've been appealing, since "Episode IV" is both the numbered episode of the first Star Wars film, and centered on the relationship and struggles between the three core characters of Lacan, Elly, and Karellen. Takahashi would then decide that it wouldn't work, for one reason or another, and went back to the original story arc beginning with Fei and his multiple personalities (Episode V). While we're on the subject of George Lucas' Star Wars it might be the right time to examine how Star Wars have influenced Xenogears. As a fan of cinema, Tetsuya Takahashi would of course be very familiar with George Lucas' original trilogy of Star Wars at the time. The biggest influence is obviously the character of Grahf as a homage to Darth Vader, and Takahashi is not subtle about it. In Xenogears: Perfect Works he states, "[Grahf] looks like Darth Vader - as ordered. In terms of the masked design, we had a hard time with this one. The mask, because it was worn, had fairly complicated lines, and it is hard to find another example of such careful balance. However, behind Id and Grahf, there are many tears in the drawing process (Ha, ha)." The "dark father" aspect of Xenogears, as well as the possibility of Fei giving into his dark sides (Id and Grahf) are clearly reminiscent of Luke, Darth Vader, and the "dark side of the Force" in Star Wars. The game, just like the original trilogy of Star Wars, begins with an orphaned hero with little knowledge about his parents, who is also under the supervision of a wise and knowledgable guardian - who becomes a sort of mentor figure - and soon after the hero's farm-like home is torched he sets out with his guardian and finds himself in a lively Desert town, becomes involved in a war between an Empire and a rebellion, befriends a pirate with a heart, and encounters a masked man in black as a central antagonist; who turns out to be the hero's father and his potential fall to darkness, but who ends up sacrificing himself for his son. Fei would even be frozen in Carbonite at one point.

The similarities doesn't end there, and would also carry over to Xenosaga as we will examine later. The episodic structure of a 6-part saga also screamed "Star Wars". Though some fans will compare Fei's reluctance to fight in the beginning of the story with that of Shinji Ikari from Evangelion, and Fei's father issues with that of Shinji and Gendo, the influence here is clearly Star Wars more than anything. However, Takahashi's style and themes are far more complex than George Lucas' rather simple fairytale. Star Wars is not intellectual sci-fi, and was mainly aimed at children and teenage boys. There's no way Lucas would include heavy philosophical discourse and scenes of human beings turning into zombies and eating each other, or have a mother torture her child, an insane man waving a knife in front of a little girl, or soldiers shoting a woman's face at point-blank range in Star Wars. Even the dark Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith would not come anywhere near the dark and morally grey stories that Xenogears and Xenosaga presents. Lucas has often been concerned that even some of the smallest things, like Vader revealing himself to be Luke's father, or Han "shooting first" at Greedo, could have a negative influence on children. Takahashi on the other hand does not hold back on the disturbing content. Xenogears and Xenosaga are also open about sex and have more adult subject matter with real scientific concepts (although quite a few concepts are stretching it). While both have been criticized for their script writing, Takahashi actually have the style, substance and desire of a true novelist while George Lucas admits that he doesn't like to write and frequently doubt his ability. Both are rather humble people, but Takahashi is clearly more interested in having substance and messages in his sci-fi. Psychologically speaking, Takahashi has the capacity to retain knowledge or information with an ease that corresponds to the schizoid personality of the American DSM III classification and individuals who internally demand a lot of themselves, who minimize their needs, who are shy and have great difficulty expressing their anger. In that respect he is not too different from Kubrick, director of such radical films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, also known for his technical perfectionism, meticulous attention to detail, and reclusiveness.

On the other hand, Lucas has an interpersonal style more reminiscent of the dependent personality of DSM III and individuals that have a resigned over-adaption, who are contented, loving, and hard-working. Both have a rich inner world and imagination, but as can be determined from Lucas' orientation towards children and his own childhood, contrasted with Takahashi's mature themes and struggle with nihilism, they both become widely contrasted. Note Takahashi's attentive care for his story and Lucas' preference for more action and quirky creatures, or Takahashi's "horror" and Lucas' "fantasy".

Generally speaking, it can be said that directors such as Takahashi and Kubrick will be more likely to be identified as extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal by the outside world, while Lucas is among the least likely to make a problem of himself or appear pathological to others. Although a common trait among them would be recurring depression, which Lucas went through a lot. This can further be observed in their characters. Although Fei is indeed a resigned and conforming type character, it should be more obvious by now that the character most similar to Takahashi and his intellectualism would be Karellen who is characterized with a schizoid personality, who tends to be regarded as pathological or frightening by many of those who played Xenogears.

On the other hand, Mark Hamill has said that "Luke is George", and the character of Luke Skywalker is characterized with the adjusted, daydreaming, loving, and hard-working characteristics of George Lucas. In terms of the Enneagram of Personality, Takahashi corresponds to Ennea-type 5 and Lucas to Ennea-type 9; just as Karellen corresponds to Ennea-type 5 and Luke Skywalker to Ennea-type 9. Fei, of course, also corresponds to Ennea-type 9, but it is more likely that his personality was carefully selected among the Ennea-types to be a 9, as necessity dictated that he have multiple personalities. Disassociative Identity Disorder, the psychiatric diagnosis that describes the condition in which a person displays multiple distinct identities or personalities corresponds to Ennea-type 9's level of pathological destructiveness. Once you realize that Takahashi is more or less teaching you about the Enneagram personalities in the Xenosaga Official Design Materials it becomes abundantly clear that the characters in the Xenoverse were always written using the Enneagram of Personality as the basis in addition to psychologists like Jung, Freud and Winnicot, who are mostly referenced rather than having their psychological theories adapted in a literal manner. In this respect there is also a similarity between Tetsuya Takahashi and Hideaki Anno, the latter whom portrays a very strong characterization of the schizoid personality in Shinji Ikari, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, who is considered a "self-portrait" of Hideaki Anno in addition to representing a big portion of Anime's fan base. There's no indication that Anno used, or was even familiar with the Enneagram of Personality though, since his characters tend to be more allegorical than what Takahashi and Soraya Saga portrays in the Xenoverse (although they have also used characters for allegories and religious symbolism). However, it should be pointed out that even if Anno was familiar with the Ennea-types, Shinji is still a different personality type from Fei. So, regardless of how one twists and turns it, the comparison is never anything more than superficial.

As Soraya Saga has denied that Xenogears was influenced by Evangelion I will not regard it as having been an influence, but we will get back to a comparison between the two soon. Citan being a wizard mechanic and inventor, making Weltall usable, and Fei calling Citan "Doc" is reminiscent of Back to the Future, which was likely another influence - and possibly it was the influence for Chrono Trigger, the game Takahashi and team had worked on previously. Chrono Trigger is a time-travel game, and a character in the sequel, Chrono Cross, is also referred to as "Doc" - which is what Marty McFly calls Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future as they travel around in a plutonium-powered DeLorean time machine. Takahashi would later use the time-travel device in Xenosaga, although technically the characters weren't actually in the past but trapped in a temporary world made by restoring the consciousness of people from the past.

Masato Kato, who was one of the script writers for Chrono Trigger, would write the beginning "Lahan scenario" and "Citan's house", so the initiative to use "Doc" could also have been his. He would go on to write the script for Chrono Cross but was not involved with Xenosaga. Throw in the fact that Xenogears was at one point considered to be part of the Chrono Trigger series and little doubt remains that Back to the Future must've been at the back of the developers heads. If the influences from Chrono Trigger in Masato Kato's parts of the story (Lahan and Shevat) were not enough, there were also small influences from Kitase's Final Fantasy VII. The globe shaped designs on the chest of El Renmazuo came straight from the command 'Materia' in FFVII as a reference point according to Ishigaki. As they were in development at the same time the two games also referenced each other. In Solaris there is a poster of Final Fantasy VII's Tifa, while Cloud, when recovering in Mideel, says among gibberish: "A billion mirror fragments... small... light... taken... angel's... singing voices...zeno...gias" As Kato wrote this scene he was obviously making a reference to the ending song Small Two of Pieces which he wrote the lyrics for, and "zenogias" is the romanized spelling of "Xenogears". Final Fantasy VII, in turn, would borrow from both its predecessor Final Fantasy VI and Xenogears. Most notably is the hero's mental problems with identity. While nothing has been confirmed, it seems rather likely that FFVII's darker, dystopian science fiction setting, and plot elements like having the heroes be stuck in prison for a portion of the game, where influenced from Xenogears - since the concept for Xenogears was pinched first, as a possible "Final Fantasy VII" no less - and Tetsuya Nomura was even a part of Xenogears' development team at a very early stage in Xenogears' development. Sakaguchi's original idea for FFVII was also something radically different from the final product. Soylent Green, was another influence in Xenogears, as was Solaris. Balboa (Big Joe's last name) is a reference to Sylvester Stallone's 'Rocky Balboa' of the Rocky films and the exploding collars that are placed on prisoners in Nortune's D-Block prison appear to be based on those in the Rutger Hauer film Deadlock (also known as Wedlock). From Anime there were references to Macross with "Super Dimensional Gear Yggdrasil IV" and the bridge of the Eldridge in the opening movie, while G-Elements was a reference to Voltron. The term "Overtechnology", describing parts of the Deus System in Xenogears: Perfect Works, was likely borrowed from Macross where it refers to the scientific advances discovered in an alien starship. Finally, with the wealth of backstory Tetsuya Takahashi made up - not just a single plot with a set cast of characters, but an evolving story that takes the form of a universe represented in many different ways with political themes, gives the impression that he may have been aiming for something closer to Gundam rather than Evangelion. A common trope of the Gundam series is that the robot pilot hero starts trying to live a peaceful life but gets forced into combat in strange machines where he discovers he has amazing power. He then gets put as a force trying to even out two major powers in a conflict. Arguments that Xenogears must've been influenced by Evangelion simply because the staff were fans of mecha, because Masato Kato was an ex-employee of Gainax (though before Evangelion entered production), because some of the animation directors from Evangelion worked on the game's anime cutscenes, and because Final Fantasy VII included a homage to "B-Type equippment" from Evangelion's episode Magmadiver, has persisted in spite of this, but what would these supposed influences be then? Xenogears does not allude to Evangelion but use a few similar devices, and has thus been charged with claims that it must have ripped off Evangelion. However, nothing of substance can be produced to support this claim, and the co-creator denied it. What they have most in common is actually an identical reference to something else - Jewish mysticism. The strongest common trait between the two is the use of religious symbolism, but religion itself doesn't really play much of a part in Evangelion like it does in Xenogears. Evangelion was decidedly deconstructionist, with a message that criticized the "super robot" genre and its fans, much like Alan Moore's Watchmen did with the super hero comic genre. In Evangelion the mecha represented isolation, rather than unity, while the "super robot" genre generally focused on teamwork and championing the right cause. A lot of focus in Gundam and Space Runaway Ideon was on the horrors of war, or the idea that war doesn't change even as technology improves - something they have in common with Xenogears. Boy hero finds giant robot, learns bravery and friendship, and triumphs over evil, is the standard arc of the giant-robot genre. An ancient robot left by an alien civilization was the hero's robot in Space Runaway Ideon which referenced several western theological themes such as a "Messiah", and is more similar to the concept of Xenogears (and Xenosaga) than Evangelion is.

Both Xenogears and Evangelion were also influenced by Childhood's End, which is where their themes of evolving mankind came from, as well as the mysterious committees; Seele and the Gazel Ministry.

The psychological themes in Evangelion were mainly used to make a commentary on fans of the genre and the political climate in Japan and the Anime industry, while the psychological themes in Xenogears were used to comment on humanity and what it means to be human. So what's left that could've been influenced from Evangelion? The scene where Id rises up, holding the Yggdrasil and throws it, has been compared to when Asuka lifted a NERV ship and threw it in The End of Evangelion. But The End of Evangelion came out in July 1997 when Xenogears was already 75% finished, and the scene in question is a pivotal scene that takes place early on in Disc 1. This example would be more suitable to illustrate how these similarities more often are coincidental rather than intentional.

The destruction of the second gate, where Billy has to reload and shot twice while enemies are attacking, has been compared to the battle with the blue crystal angel in Evangelion, but the scene from Evangelion was already borrowed from Future Police Urashiman where a yellow crystal known as "Super-X" is fired upon with no effect at first. If you have a scene where a character needs to hit a precise target then it is quite natural to have him or her miss with the first shot to amp up the tension and make it more believable.

Elly has been compared to Asuka for having "red hair", but Elly's hair is meant to be auburn as Fei describes in the game's dialogue: SAMSON

"Right, that's the spirit!

But, be careful! A female Gebler just came by for some reason..." FEI

"!? Did she, have auburn hair?" SAMSON

"Yeeaah, that's her!! What, you're friends?

Come to think of it, she was looking for someone...

She still oughta be around here somewhere. You oughta look for her." Finally, Fei and Shinji. Almost every individual has self image issues at one point or another, especially after tragedy strikes. Shinji had it before the story starts and is part of what Evangelion is about. Fei was at peace in the beginning and often he acted very reckless even while he was depressed. Fei was also written using the Enneagram as a basis, which explains his characterization, so we know he wasn't based on Shinji. Takahashi says (for Xenosaga in the ODM, though it probably applies to Xenogears as well) that he put in religious parodies and metaphors that are difficult to see, but the parodies that you can see, especially those of movies and anime that are easy to understand, he left to the staff. So by now other team members were contributing to the writing of Xenogears, and it will be necessary to talk a little about them. Citan Uzuki was actually suggested by Tetsuya Nomura, the character designer who replaced Yoshitaka Amano for Final Fantasy starting with Final Fantasy VII and later directed the Kingdom Hearts series and the CGI animated film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. "Our old friend Tetsuya Nomura was in the team for a short time at a very early stage of development. He said 'Don't you guys think there should be an Asian, tactician type of a character in the game?' Takahashi came up with Citan from that remark. It was fun working together with friends", says Soraya in a comment to fans on deviantART in July of 2008.

Masato Kato would write in Shevat, Chu-Chu, and Maria Balthasar's story in addition to Lahan village. It is believed by fans that he was responsible for the pastoral feel of the game that Tetsuya Takahashi wanted to resist. "I wrote them to my own personal tastes... er... maybe I should learn to listen more to what other people tell me (laughs)", Kato said of the scenes in an interview on Yasunori Mitsuda's Official Website, in Mitsuda's My Friends section (which also refers to scenes he wrote for other games). Some fans suspects he may have been dumped by the Xeno-team after that: "I heard that on the day that "Xenogears" went on sale, while all of us were supposed to be still on vacation, the entire Xeno-team decided to get together at the company to talk about the next project. At that point, none of us knew which team we would be assigned to yet. Oh, and the reason why I say "I heard" is because I didn't go to the company on that day. I was off somewhere in the southern islands... enjoying my scuba-time (laughs). I also heard that because of this reason, some of the members decided not to work with the Cross-Team and decided to join a different team... Well, that's life I guess. Different people go their own different ways."

- Masato Kato (http://mitsuda.cocoebiz.com/friends/kato.html) However, the meeting here between Xenogears team members sans Kato was not just to discuss a new Xenogears game, but rather what the team would do next. Most of the Xeno-team split off to work on Chrono Cross and Dew Prism (Threads of Fate) following this meeting, with Kato being asked to direct Chrono Cross, so not many Xeno-team members other than Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga started planning for Xenogears Episode I. Thus it's unlikely that Kato actually was dumped and the main reason he didn't go with the rest of them to MSI later was because he was stuck with directing Chrono Cross. Ironically, Masato Kato would be regarded by western fans as the one responsible for the complete screenplay before Soraya Saga stated that Square America had made a misdescription in the credits. Accordingly, Masato Kato was absent from the "Main Staff of Xenogears" section in Xenogears: Perfect Works where Tetsuya Takahashi was credited with "Performance/staging", which had been attributed to Masato Kato in the japanese game credits and mistranslated as "script" by Square America, hence the confusion. Apparently Kato should only have been credited as an Event Planner, but someone put his name second only to Takahashi with "Performance/staging". "From the outset, everything in Xenogears was still potential and it was written with a pastoral feel to it. Also, Fei - and where he lived at the village - were designed along martial arts lines. As the script was being written, I wanted to resist the pastoral feel, but to no avail, and [Fei's design] was revised along those lines. I couldn't see this as a pastoral world, I'm more of a doom and gloom kind of guy. So the succeeding versions of Fei, especially the latter half, became more out of place. But there wasn't time to do it over, and [what you see in the game] is what we came up with. I would have liked to refine this character a little more."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) It is difficult to tell if he is referring to Masato Kato's script writing here, or if "as the script was being written" is a poor translation, but it sounds like since Takahashi didn't write the Lahan part, everything having to do with it - including Fei - felt out of place with what Takahashi himself would write for most of the game, but didn't have time to make alterations once the game was near finished. It is also possible that he is talking about the script used to drive characters around the screen for events and such, since a similar confusion almost appear in an interview with Takahashi during Xenosaga Episode I where the interviewer had to explain this to the reader: "Usually the planner takes his script and assigns the animator the task of character movements... For example, let's say there's a scene where a character turns around while walking. Using a script to generate that will almost always result in a jerky transition, so it's usually the job of the animator to fix things like that. The planner's job is to direct the animation, timing, message displays, and camera positioning."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenosaga Interview) That excerpt gives a new meaning to the label of "Event Planner", which Masato Kato, Tanegashima Takashi and several others are credited with in the credits - which means that no one besides Tetsuya Takahashi himself was credited with the scenario (screenplay) in the original credits. We can only confirm that Kato and Tanegashima wrote parts of the screenplay from Soraya's and Kato's comments and CVs outside the game itself. "In relation to the past Fei, because of time considerations for the main illustrator Tanaka-kun, the designs were made in-house. At first, [Kim] had japanese style clothing, intending to show that Zeboim was very close to the present day world. As a doctor [Kim] had a white lab coat. Originally Lacan was to have had a separate design, but during [development] there wasn't a lot of time to draw new characters, so it couldn't be helped, he had the same clothes as Fei, and with Fei having the memories, his point of view as the main observer kind of had it make sense - at least that's how it comes out. Elly was originally envisioned with a lighter version of her clothing. It had a strong pastoral feel. Elly is different from Fei, and more direct by comparison, which I wanted Tanaka-kun to reflect in his drawings. The past Elly, Sophia, was drawn like Fei for the same reasons inside the company. The same for each time period's concept. There wasn't really a design for Sophia's clothes, and finally getting down to it, the staff helped to make an outfit that suited her perfectly. Tanaka-kun wanted to draw the Zeboim Elly (nurse) himself. (Heh, heh). The first notes on Elly said that she had to have long hair. Anything else was all right, and almost all drawings got the O.K. The concept of her clothes was something sleek, (like a race queen). The slit in the hip area wasn't there at first, but we wanted it (heh, heh). And the shoulders were on a draft that we liked - for a total costume that we liked the most. On the other hand, too complicated and the cosplay guys would have real problems! (Hah, ha!) And the stockings couldn't get too colorful, (hah, hah). They were more of a undercoat (leotard type thing) and it came together. However, compared to most stockings, these might be really expensive (luxury item). And normally would have been like the clothes, white also. Citan's clothing also ended up pastoral. It didn't bug me as much as Fei's, so we went with this. There weren't any revisions in the design process, and the original got an O.K. On the surface, he's a traveling doctor. A protecting presence in the party. He gives the impression of great knowledge - kind of old fogeyish - as ordered. I increasingly felt that this was perfectly suited to the character."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) Kunihiko Tanaka goes on to say, "To give you an idea of what goes into character design, I'll see if I can describe it.

Let's start with Fei. As he's the hero he has to have a distinctive hair style. When people see him, they have to say 'Ah, he's different'. And for this reason, Fei was given a very "different" hair style. There are a lot of results from this. The concept of the heroine, Elly has her with long hair. I wanted to see it go straight down to her knees. And Bart's outfit I thought, 'what kind of jumper to put him in?'. Maria's goggles are swiss goggles. Seraphita is of the house of rabbits. Emeralda as an adult? Margie as stubborn. Big Joe's chin. Rico's chin, too. Zephyr as a calm and serene beauty. Citan's glasses like 'Snoop Dog's' and Ramsus having the belly from Gundam F91. Really...I mean it!" Kunihiko Tanaka struggled very hard to design Karellen. As a symbol of holiness in western culture he was given a head band, and apparently Takahashi wanted him to be good looking. The design of Karellen as leader of Nisan's Monastery army was made by the interior staff. The only directive for Maria's design was sending out the idea of "How about the fastest to be made is a girl?" along the staff, "and everyone got the drift (heh, heh)", Takahashi says. For Chu-Chu a koala type animal was ordered, and until she was finally finished it caused unrest. "A real pinch" says Takahashi.

"The quick death of all the Lahan Villagers that appear except Dan, was not ordered specifically by me," Takahashi continues. "Alice is the first main event's character as ordered, and after the destruction of Lahan, while Timothy's death as her fiance sounded good, we thought about leaving her alive to follow Fei around. A woman like that couldn't come between Fei and Elly's path to love, so she died off right away with the other villagers." Soraya Saga would write the script for Bart, Billy and their families and enemies as well as the former Elements - Jesiah Blanche, Kahran Ramsus, Sigurd Harcourt, and Hyuga Ricdeau - though "Takahashi wrote Citan", Soraya says in her infamous FAQ, and he probably wrote Ramsus during the present as well. She also contributed with countries and area concepts, concept of a terraforming weapon out of control, and naming concepts of Elehayym, Myyah Hawwa, Kahr(Carlin) Ramsus, Emeralda(Emerada), Elements girls, and the former Elements. Finally, Tanegashima Takashi wrote the script about Emeralda, the Yggdrasil's crews and the Elements girls, while Tetsuya Takahashi wrote the rest of the screenplay - including Fei, Elly, Karellen, Grahf, Miang, Cain, Rico, Hammer, etc. "After the main story and integral sideplots were done, Tanegashima applied a sense of humor and his knowledge about science and military hardwares. Kato added a poetic and mysterious touch to Maria's story. An alchemical reaction of various creativity made the game enjoyable like a plate of all-you-can-eat", Soraya recalls. Bart was designed around the same time as Fei, "and by now we didn't want a hint of anything pastoral" says Takahashi, "so the clothing is really sci-fi style with strong colors just as I remember ordering. As a result, both Bart and Elly are decked out rather 'expensively' (Heh, heh). Out of all the male characters, I like his clothing the best. And that's just the clothes", he continues, suggesting he became real fond of the character. "The eyepatch should be on the left eye, so when it sometimes show up as the right eye, that mistake was on Square's side. My appologies to all the gamers." Rico was the fastest character they designed. "If he looks familiar from other games, that's just in your mind, the first I've heard of it. Anyway, we'll let that one go", says Takahashi with a laugh, alluding to the fact that Rico looks like the character Blanka from Capcom's Street Fighter series. "Billy's appearance is a remnant of the lost civilization in the Aquvy area (partly excavated in the present). Originally, he was to have had long hair, but we wanted him to come off as a little more cool than that when compared to Bart. So can a bishounen with a pretty boy face be a 'cool and dry' kind of character? That's the concept of Billy. Why a holy man bearing guns? That's what we were asked all the time, and for the gun bearing holy man (shepherd) this is a popular image in some cultures (assuming Billy is a son of God). From the beginning, [Emeralda] was Tanaka-kun's design along the lines of a [Key the Metal Idol] character, and was created as an artificial life that has no heart. Her clothing was destroyed when she didn't like what was supplied to her in Solaris, at least that's what Tanaka-kun says, and she asked for [the clothes she wears in the game]. Originally, because she was able to transform her body, her face was the result of the personal data collected from Fei and Elly, the desired child they had always wanted (expected looks of their child) - and this might be why she is very precious to them."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) Sigurd was designed almost completely by Soraya Saga, and because of schedule conflict Tanaka was only able to draw the official face portrait. Maison was ordered to have an impression similar to that of Batman's Alfred, or the actor Max Von Sydow. Ultimately he became closer to Alfred. Margie was a playable character at a very early stage in development, but the plan was dropped. Takahashi asked for Miang to have short hair to contrast Elly's long hair. "There is absolutely no genetic between her and Elly and as one of 'those awakenings 'as Miang'', Tanaka-kun requested a woman reminiscent of Elly around 26 years old or so. He directed her clothing be a grade up from Elly's. The tight skirt gave a more adult look."

The rough designs for the Elements girls were done by Takayama and were not totally solidified. In particular their lower halves' clothing. "Dominia was drawn as a forceful character. Kelvena regardless was a character as service to the boys," explains Takahashi. Not much was expected of Tolone other than she's a cyborg, and she came together quickly. Seraphita was ordered as a 'demi-human' and Tanaka, who loves bunnies, came up with the design.

Emperor Cain was vizualized with a silver skeleton look but ended up in gold color. "The face behind the mask would probably have Ramsus' style of beauty," says Takahashi, although "Ramsus himself was fused with Solarian Kahran, so even though he is a copy of Cain, he doesn't have his exact appearance," Takahashi continues.

From the beginning, the story had centered on a protagonist with multiple personalities, and so it became necessary to make him appear as different persons. "Unlike Fei, [Id] is really out there. The first drafts were really hard, and after much thought, Tanaka-kun made him much better looking. For the clothing, at that time, Tanaka-kun adopted something along anime lines. When Fei changes to Id, how the clothes changes too is still a mystery to me."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) Fei's father, Kahn, came together pretty fast due to Tanaka-kun's love of martial arts movies. A designer from Square's Front Mission team, Hamaeda, came up with Hammer's appearance. "Hammer and Rico's relationship was aided by asking the input of FF designer Yashiro-kun. Hamaeda-kun says "crap!" often," Takahashi explains. In the course of writing, Kunihiko Tanaka asked for the addition of an awesome non-playable character and thus Big Joe was created. Probably because the story started out as a mystic love story, a major theme of this story would be "tragedy" and "grief". The grief that both Lacan and Karellen felt at losing Sophia results in the central conflict of "Episode V". However, Takahashi would not stop there, but turned it into a main theme that extended to all the characters in the game. All of them experienced loss, grief, or the absence of love in their lives, and almost all of them are motivated by a desire to retain that loss. Ramsus is probably the greatest example of this, but Hammer's desire to acquire super strength like his friends, Emeralda's isolation for 4000 years, or Stone's hatred of Jesiah for stealing the things he desired, are other strong examples. Even Id is revealed to have been trying to form a connection to others through destruction.

For this reason and more, the story playing out in Episode II through V would feel like one part with a theme of Grief, while the degradation of man's consciousness starts with Fear, another theme that wasn't explored, but referenced in the game's genesis mythology:

"Long ago, humans were with God in a paradise in the sky called Mahanon. The place was protected by the power of God. Humans were never exposed to the fear or danger of death. However, one day, humans entered God's forbidden garden and ate a fruit which bestowed upon them tremendous intelligence and power. God found out about the incident and the humans were banished from the paradise. The prosperous times were over, an era of sorrow and hatred began..." "Humans banished from the paradise were foolish enough to revolt against God. In order to resist the power of God, they created twelve Vessel of Anima, and called themselves gods... For 10 days, 10 nights, the world shed its blood, Mahanon was enveloped in flames. But human strength was no match for God and the arrogant humans were destroyed by God's anger. Only a few righteous men were left on the land. However, God was also tired and wounded. He decided to rest in the deepest depth of the earth. God's rest was long. But eternity is only a moment to God. Since then, the righteous men who didn't revolt against God had to live in the harsh nature by themselves, being in constant fear of death..."

The central human emotions mentioned here are Fear, Sorrow and Hatred, in that order, with a lot of emphasis on Fear. However, Fear, especially the fear of death, was not explored in the game. Likewise was Hatred (Anger) not given nearly as much focus as Sorrow (Grief). Thus the origin of the story in the Xenogears universe as "3 parts" may very well have had it's origin in its desire to thuroughly explore these 3 central themes of Fear, Sorrow, and Hatred. As a starting point, the burden of bondage to Sorrow has its root in the darkness of unwisdom, a darkness that often comes with religion, but also with self-assertion, lust, hate, and attachment, as the Indian philosopher Patanjali puts it. A lot of the game's world mechanics and religious symbolism are also heavily influenced by Gnosticism. I will not go into detail in this article, but the references to Sophia (Greek for "wisdom") and Aeon's (localized as 'Seraph Angels' in the U.S. version) are there. The concept of the Lower and Higher dimensional universe also parallels our sorrowful world and the heavenly "pleroma" in Gnostic tradition, while the terraforming weapon is based on the Demiurge concept. The duality between Elly and Miang relates to the Gnostic imagery of the Demiurge as a lion-headed, snake-bodied entity, and so on. Even reincarnation was likely added because it featured in the early Gnostic's belief. While many fans suggested that Nietzsche's concept of 'eternal recurrence' was the influence for Fei and Elly's reincarnation and repeated suffering, the suffering that the terraforming weapon causes humanity by killing them off in cycles is more certainly based on the Demiurge concept from Gnosticism. The Demiurge who is sometimes called YHVH (Yahweh) is oblivious of Sophia but apparently knows of the true god's existence (known in Gnosticism as the "God-head" and appears in Xenogears as the 'Wave Existence'), and creates the material world, encasing the power he has from Sophia in matter. To ensure that the souls trapped in matter remain so, he resorts to the repeated suffering that is suggested to have influenced Nietzsche's philosophy of the 'eternal recurrence' where he writes of a demon that condemns human subjects to live out their lives in endless repeating cycles. Because the game was now only "Episode V", and the plan to release Episode II-IV in separate media fell through, Takahashi ended up putting them all into the game as fragmented flashbacks. Karellen was thus introduced rather late, and his story with Sophia and Lacan was only briefly told through flashbacks late in the second disc. Due to scheduling issues a scene of Karellen's first meeting with Elly during the attack on the Penuel convent had to be dropped, same with Citan's childhood tragedy and other scenes, and they ended up only being mentioned in Perfect Works instead:

Extract from unused script -- An encounter "You've come to kill me?"

...She spoke, standing before the man as though not afraid of her own death.

That expression devoid of thought. A face that showed him as separated from all others, alone in the world.

In contrast to this colorless -monochrome- girl, he is stained in red.

Those he had slaughtered, their blood stains his hands even now. And the man bathing in red, instead of answering her question, stands silent, while raising his sword over his head.

"...I see, thank you"

When did his will become a thing that could change? And all for a girl's gentle smile.

And for that brief moment, she shone with color.

How could such a pure and radiant smile exist in this dark world of everlasting hypocrisy and falsity, he thought.

This was the meeting of Elehayym and Karellen.

"Because of scheduling problems, some events were cut," says Tadahiro Usada, designer of monsters and NPC Characters in the game. "And some of them were where an NPC would appear once. And some of those were my designs...Ah well, just bad luck I guess. It isn't the first time (laughs). 'What, another one of my characters~...' is what I said, and I was pretty blue that day. The ones I liked the best out of all, were the Aveh soldiers." These scheduling problems and the ever expanding storyline would turn out to be the main problem with Xenogears' development, in contrast to the rumor that Square cut the budget - an assumption made purely by fans who felt a need to justify the approach taken for the 2nd disc of the game to its detractors, but with no basis in reality. Fans have asked Soraya about disc 2, but she has given no reply, which suggests it was intentional and that she, like Takahashi, is slightly embarrased of it: "It is now 6 months since Xenogears was released. Looking back on it, there are things that appear rushed that I must admit sheepishly, make me a little embarrassed. For that reason, this book is to try and correct some of that. Of course, "What's that, isn't it different from the game?" will probably be heard in anger at some point, but hey cut me some slack. (hah, ha)."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) As we can conclude from the above excerpt of Takahashi's comment, it seems he was adding to the storyline and making subtle alterations to it even after the game was released and tried to present a more elaborate universe in Perfect Works than that of the game, but we will get back to this later. Making Xenogears had been a great labor, and if you listen to it's main staff from that time you can't really blame them for making it easier on themselves with Disc 2.

"God that was hell," says Yasuyuki Honne, Finishing director. "The current map this time has small subtle traces where light might peek out at the cracks, or be buried deep, and all of these textures were added in. All this had to be considered for the overall effect. Out of all the staff working on this, how many hundreds do you think worked on the map? Things like light and shading and the mixture of both. Ultimately, the image boards for the map, topography, placement of towns, all had to somehow come together. The hardest thing of all was this great endeavor. I can tell you, I'm not going to go through it again. Do you understand how unbelievably huge this world is? How we ever finished it is still a mystery to me." Koh Arai (Design finishing - Map Design) said, on a night when he was not sleeping under his desk, "Even though I didn't know if it would ever end, my work was drawing various things and maps, figuring out modeling textures, tying together characters and events, and slowly but surely the game began to come together... It was tough and only a total nut would have gone through it. Something new sprang up from nothing...So this is how it's born, hm? It was really rough on the girls. I am a man you know." Mecha designer Yoshinori Ogura said "If you speak of the difficult labor of mecha design, how about design on transforming mechs? 'Here it must pull inward and revolve out...' 'Screw in tighter until flush with mount... make it bigger here...' are the kinds of instructions, it's gotta stretch here, make it go all the way over there, it gives you the feeling of making a puzzle after a bunch of mistakes one after another. However the result in terms of the transforming mechs came out pretty good, I think."

While Gear designer Junya Ishigaki recalls, "It would start with an unclear image, and with very hard work on my part finally come together. Looking back on it now, I thought the design-up took a long time, and I got a lot of calls from Square to try and pick me up once more many times. I am truly grateful to Square.

Upon thinking a little further, I've always loved robot design and doing my own CG. This time, I've had a truly wonderful experience. I definitely would love to make another game with this team." Although it wasn't the first time it happened to him while working on a game, Xenogears' composer Yasunori Mitsuda worked so hard on the soundtrack that he ended up in the hospital due to overworking.

"When I compose for any game, I always first set up a "theme". In this project, I had a story in my mind that was far larger than any theme I had in any game. I was ready for pressure as big as it, though," he writes in the Original Soundtrack Liner Notes. And he continues: "The developing took time as I predicted, and I had the most difficult time. I anticipated it. Of course, because I was trying to do beyond what I had done. I often thought "Agh! I can't do this anymore!" followed by "..no! I CAN do this! I must!" and advanced little by little everyday. The sound team supported me alot. The sound programmer Hideki Suzuki and sound engineer Tomoyasu Yajima, recording engineer Takashi Nagashima, and the event planner Masato Kato... Without their help, my director Tetsuya Takahashi, and your letters, I couldn't have done this. Thankyou everybody.

[...]

Creating something out of nothing requires the most power. I haven't done anything but composing, but I think the same thing could be applied to anything. I often wonder "Why am I doing such a painful thing?", just like how mothers bare and grow their children. (I'm a man, by the way) Women who bore children say that they never want to experience the pain of giving birth again, but they often forget their pain as they grow their lovely kids. There is a never ending love in it.

[...]

This game has been created by a huge number of people. In the music field by its own, there are as much as a hundred people involved. It is certainly the biggest project I've ever been involved. [...] This [soundtrack] is filled with such hopes and wishes of many people. Ireland's air, Bulgaria's air, and Japan's air [...]"

- Yasunori Mitsuda (Xenogears Original Soundtrack Liner Notes) When Tetsuya Takahashi started to direct Xenogears, he found something "missing". There was something missing from the image he had drawn in his mind and the computer graphics in front of him. He knew that the lack of physical things such as time, quality, and determination were the reasons, and he had to sadly conclude that that was his limit, which resulted in the game's eventual feel of "incompleteness". However, when Takahashi decided to look at the graphics simultaniously with the music that had been finished he realized that he had also been saved by Mitsuda's music, and "I had to admit the importance of music," he says in the Liner Notes. "I also realized that I was being supported by many other people. Of course, there were some times when I was betrayed by someone. I could feel other people's feelings as we were desparate in the last moments. Still, I could not have come here without the help of all the people who tried to support me. Yasunori is one of the people who heavily supported me in Xenogears. Without his music, the game would have been a lot worse than our goal. My determination wouldn't have continued either. This soundtrack holds everything that enhanced me and this project."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears Original Soundtrack Liner Notes) At some point during development, as U.S. localization was being considered, the now long-time game localizer Richard Honeywood, who was new at the time, felt it was like translating a game in which God was the final boss. The attempt to include overt references to Judeo-Christian figures in the game would cause a few translators to quit - fearing a violent backlash - and prompted a change in the name of the game's final boss, "Yahweh", the terraforming weapon out of control.

Honeywood recalls in a Kotaku podcast in 2011, "It was the project from hell. Translators walked off it. One [reason] was that it was too technical... and....the other was the religious content. It was a game, where, at the end of the game you basically kill God. And - a secret thing - back then, they actually called it Yahweh." Honeywood was concerned that this bold bit of naming could offend portions of the game's audience, and confronted the development team - with unexpected consequences. "At a development meeting in Japanese I was saying 'You can't call it Yahweh. You can't do that.' I was getting exasperated, and in Japanese [I said] yabeh-o [the adjective yabai is Japanese slang for something dangerous, unfortunate or otherwise inconvenient], and they all laughed and thought it was the greatest pun ever. And so, the last boss was suddenly called Yabeh. [They] took every biblical reference they could and tried to twist it. One of the translators was a bit worried about this and was like 'I don't want to have fundamental Christians or other religious groups being upset and blowing up our office.' And I guess in the States, at that time, it was a concern. So I had two translators walk off it and I was stuck there by myself." Yabeh was then given a new name - "Deus" - which became the name for the Strategic Subjugation Weapon in both the Japanese version as well as the U.S. version, though Honeywood did add one reference to "Yabeh" in the U.S. game, during the Raziel computer scene, probably as an inside joke, while the name was completely erased from the Japanese game and Perfect Works. However, the rough sketches for Deus in Perfect Works' picture gallery have "Yahweh" written on them, which means that when they were ordered it was still going by the name "Yahweh". "In Xenogears, you had rather mature themes, with an evil 'church' betraying its common believers ('lambs' with Hebrew-sounding names) to an evil empire ('Solaris', a city in the sky whose inhabitants had German-sounding names, who slaughtered the lambs for use as Soylent Green). It was an obvious parable of WWII with sci-fi references thrown in. It also dealt with young priests being molested by the clergy, etc. Although this was fine in Japan (a country that has a long history of being betrayed by religion), the US distributors were trying to make me tone it down. They ended up forcing me to change the name of the 'Church' to 'Ethos', but I was able to get the themes across regardless, by careful rewording", Honeywood explains of some of the other name changes in an interview with squarehaven.com in 2006.





Xenogears -- a fandom is born





When Xenogears was released, nobody in the Western world knew who Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga were, and the game mainly had it's appeal as a game developed by Square, the king of JRPGs at the time, but wasn't a Final Fantasy title, so the game only got attention from a few hardcore gamers at first.

These gamers mainly knew the title from the rumor that Square wouldn't bring it overseas due to it's heavy religious overtones, but not much more. The names that were regarded as most relevant at first were Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda, both whom had gained fame from the success of Chrono Trigger, and many gamers thus considered the game a successor to Chrono Trigger, where Deus could be likened to a Lavos 2.0 antagonist. Masato Kato was praised for the "script", as the credits mistakenly gave the impression that he was responsible for the screenplay, and soon his previous affiliation with Gainax had gamers try and force a connection with Evangelion, which had been gaining much fame in the West at the time. Since nobody knew of the game's origin or it's true creators, people wondered how Square, after producing mainly lighthearted games such as Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana, could suddenly come up with something as serious, complex, and intricate as Xenogears. Sure it had several tropes and references to previous Square games, most notably Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, but the storytelling had a completely different flavor to it and was unlike anything that Square or roleplaying had come up with before. Thus the theory that Square had adapted someones anime screenplay, or they wanted to copy the maturity, originality and genre of Evangelion started to emerge, and has unfortunately persisted to this day with some fans. This was also a time when JRPGs would finally break into mainstream gaming in the West with Square's Final Fantasy VII, the sibling game to Xenogears that had been in development at the same time and released only a few months before Xenogears. In fact, Final Fantasy VII would become the most successful JRPG of all time and made "Final Fantasy" almost a household name with both gamers and pop-culture in general, despite having an even worse translation than Xenogears. Final Fantasy VII's CG anime aesthetics, originality, over-the-top FMVs, attractive looking characters, addictive game play and cool, cyberpunk setting, drew gamers to it like moths to a flame, while Xenogears looked rather familiar, if not downright traditional and "clich�" in comparison, with a simpler and somewhat stale battle system. Thus Xenogears struggled to attract gamers who, if they even gave it a shot because it was another game by Square, often gave up on the game early on. However, it is still thanks to the success of Final Fantasy VII that Xenogears enjoyed a larger fanbase in the West than it probably would have had otherwise. Even European Square fans imported the game following the success of Final Fantasy VII in Europe, despite the fact that Xenogears never reached European shores. The North American game had a different tagline written on the back of the CD case. The japanese tagline had been a brief outline of the subject of the "tragedy" aspect of the game, ending with the line "God Only Knows", while the American marketing guys simply put "Stand Tall and Shake the Heavens" on the back. While the American tagline became very popular with fans, it actually doesn't have much to do with the story or the main message in Xenogears. In fact, the message in Xenogears appears to be that humans are imperfect, highly flawed beings, but that their weaknesses and "incompleteness" is what makes them capable of love and admiration for one anothers complementary strengths and helpfullness. The reason why many gamers had trouble getting into Xenogears, often giving up before the game even leaves the Ignas continent, may have been in large part due to the fact that the story was character-driven rather than action-driven. Mainstream movie screenplays and mainstream game screenplays, even Final Fantasy, tend to have action-driven plots. Writers who prefer writing action-driven stories tend to focus on logical thinking, rational analysis, accuracy and tend to rely more on the left side of their brain. These writers approach writing as a linear function and see the story in its parts and they like structure. On the other hand, writers who write character-driven stories tend to focus on aesthetics and feelings, creativity and imagination. These writers access the right side of their brains and enjoy playing with the beauty of language. They are more intuitive, and like to work things out on the page. Character-driven writers see the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. They are holistic and subjective, and can synthesize new information but are somewhat disorganized and random. Thus, subconsciously, most gamers expect a story where the Protagonist has an overall story goal, they like to know what stands in the way of achieving this goal and what they stand to lose if not successful. Most RPGs have a clear-cut baddie right from the start, and then pursues this antagonist for the entire game, with a hero that is commonly a soldier or a mercenary of some kind.

Rather than following this conventional template, Xenogears focused on actual drama and a main character who was reluctant to fight at all. Not only did the game not have a clearly defined conflict in the set-up, but it seemed as if the game's first tragedy was caused by the central protagonists themselves. Fei had destroyed his village in an out-of-control Gear, while Elly had been responsible for the Gears landing in Fei's village in the first place. For a casual gamer, or a fan of Final Fantasy VII, this was simply aggravatingly slow and awkward. The gamer would ask himself, "Where is the baddie? What is my goal? Why is Fei so whiny? Why should I continue to play this game? Does it get better?" Martin Johansson of the Swedish gaming magazine Super PLAY, who interviewed Takahashi in 2002, wrote in his article "Viljans Makt" (The Power of Will) that "Tetsuya Takahashi's strange adventure did not follow the established template that Square's games tend to follow. Instead of obsessively hunting the game's villain for hours, Tetsuya Takahashi wanted to provoke players into question themselves and their existence in an extremely complex science fiction saga; part anime, part game. Xenogears was a game that never truly fit into Square's repertoire, which was one of the reasons a huge part of the team left for Namco and Monolith Soft."

Of course, Xenogears does have a transition towards an action-oriented plot in the second half of the story, but the build-up is intentionally slow and puts emphasis on developing the characters, the story's themes, the poetic imagery and the story's mysteries and intrigues before it truly starts to take off. Those with the patience to play through the entire game while enduring its long cutscene segments were all rewarded with an enormously satisfying experience, save for a few detractors who couldn't let go of some of the game's flaws.

Since writers like Takahashi who write primarily about Character Emotional Development have a more random writing style and rebel at anything too structured, it comes as no surprise that the game contains numerous plot-holes, logic gaps and inconsistencies in some of the events depicted. It is likely that while the game's detractors, and even fans complain about these gapses of logic, for Tetsuya Takahashi these gaps can be joked about because they were never the point of the work in the first place. Takahashi's comment about how he doesn't know how Id changes his appearance from Fei in Xenogears: Perfect Works is somewhat telling of this, and more examples of Takahashi poking fun at his own concepts can also be found in Xenosaga's in-game database. While many gamers had issues, longtime fans of Square and Final Fantasy had a different attitude, feeling that Final Fantasy VII was just a messy and convoluted version of FF VI that was severely overrated and didn't measure up to it's previous installments. A prevailing sentiment among many of these gamers was that Xenogears had taken its place as their favorite game, and that Xenogears was what the next gen Final Fantasy franchise should have been. With Xenogears they felt that the genre had finally grown up. The game was released without any controversy whatsoever. Although a few Christian game reviewers gave the game negative reviews due to the premise of "killing God", many Christian gamers actually became fans of the game and were not offended. Rather, most of the criticism were perhaps from Atheists who felt that the game's religion and concept of "God" in Deus was too far removed from the real world to be provocative, and the potential for a compelling philosophical argument for or against Judeo-Christian religions and "God" was lost in the somewhat clumsy metaphor. After all, in the game the Church is promoting the theory of Evolution, a "lie", while the truth is a spin on Erich von D�niken's Chariots of the Gods premise, that our ancenstors were alien beings. In fact, with Zeboim looking like the present day world - complete with Christmas trees and a reference to Elvis - many gamers speculated that the planet was supposed to be Earth. At least up until Western fans started translating Xenogears: Perfect Works. As time quickly went on, and as both newcomers and longtime fans of the genre craved more JRPGs in the wake of Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears finally gained it's short-lived, but much deserved momentum due to word of mouth alone. Xenogears may not have had Final Fantasy VII's eccentric Japanese style and otherworldliness, but the story was ultimately much larger, with much more substance to ponder for those of a more cerebral predilection, not to mention being more relevant to our everyday existence and human history than Final Fantasy's more magical escapist fantasy world with quirky characters. Xenogears was hailed as having the greatest story of all time, a unique reputation the game has maintained even to this day in many gaming circles, finally reaching a peak in fandom in 2001-2003. The online Urban Dictionary lists the term "xenogears" as "The name of the best game ever made. Usually used to describe perfection. Opposite to Finaly Fantasy 8" and "most intellectually stimulating and emotionally deep RPG ever made." Of course, raising expectations like that has made a few gamers disappointed once they finally beat the game, but not to the extent that you might expect. After all, the game wouldn't earn this reputation if it didn't have something to say. One gamer made the following remark on GameFAQs in 2009: "This is the only game I have ever played that lived up to the hype. Maybe not "the best game ever" hype, but considering the hype for the story, it is amazing I actually thought this game was as good as it was." Tetsuya Takahashi eventually peaked fans interest after being repeatedly pointed out as the game's director who came up with the scenario, while Soraya Saga had begun talking directly to Western fans on the internet, kindly answering their questions about the game. Her original handle was Kanon Saga, then Clio Saga and finally Soraya Saga, SORA+YA, and Solaryear (the latter on deviantART and seems to be a pun on the similarity between the pronunciation of "Soraya" with that of the japanese pronunciation of "solar year" in English). Yggdrasil's Periscope Club was a Yahoo messageboard founded by Soraya Saga in 1999 that lasted until about the summer of 2000, but not many Xenogears fans knew about that place. I for one didn't, and I have had to rely on people's stories from that place for this and other articles. However, more than one person who visited that place has verified the information I provide as being genuine. One thing of interest is that Soraya didn't draw art of Elly or include Elly in her doujinshi's (comics) since she was supposedly irritated with Elhaym for being "too stereotypical", something she expressed at one point during the time of Yggdrasil's Periscope. While it is understandable, if not likely, that most women will find Elly to be somewhat stereotypical, especially in Japanese society with the "mother" aspect, the fact that Soraya would go on to write the character MOMO in Xenosaga, a girl that is just as stereotypical as Elly, makes it seem strange that she would be so hostile towards Elly. It makes more sense that she resented Elly for being her husband's ideal woman. I am really curious how Takahashi ever revealed that to her. Did he joke about it and she took it seriously, or did he actually never say it and she just assumed or "sensed" it? It seems rather funny that a guy would say to his wife, "This is my ideal woman." Of course she would be frustrated and maybe even envious after that, but Soraya has always maintained that their marriage is peaceful.





Perfect Works / Episode I -- Transition towards "Xenosaga"





The now infamous book "Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~" was the result of more hard work by the main staff of Xenogears, "and should make the world of Xenogears even more enjoyable" says Ogura in it.

"[Perfect Works] shows a lot of the background of the work 'Xenogears'. But since it's from the creator and those of the staff, it ought to be very interesting and they worked very hard on it," Usada added. "The book contains many terms and ideas that were not fully explained in the game. To elaborate, those things that hardly appeard that underlie the events and were the background of much of the story, we wanted to have in print, even to some of the "absurd" official illustrations. We discussed all the particulars at length.

Also, this is meant to provide a service to those users who loved Xenogears and begged for more details (in the book we took great pains), so that just a little of the episodes and their time periods not shown in the story could be expanded upon. We even went so far as 'what were those things?' and 'what would the readers think?' (Hah, ha). So, the earlier things not spoken of would now be exposed, and this time, please read the book for a greater understanding of Xenogears' world.

As the months line up one after another, please keep looking over it forever.

--------1998 8/12 My house, listening to Snake manshou."

- Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears: Perfect Works~The Real Thing~) The book begins with an overview, and an introduction to the 6 episodes on pages 2 and 3:

EPISODE V The Truth The created world of the game 'Xenogears' is a single part within an infinite flow of history. The time scale involved is more or less 15,000 years. The story is told through six large episodes and this book will closely examine 'Episode 5' in order to guess at its ending. Due to the large amount of information about this world, it is possible to determine the cause and effect that takes place from past to the present. In order to bring the whole matter to light, we shall consider 'Episode 5'. Having heard the voice of the Producer, the facts that were not revealed in the story will now be known, and "the world's entirety" will be understood. At the time, 'Xenogears' touched their hearts and its 'truth' is reflected as light from a mirror. EPISODE I

Era of Interplanetary War

15,000 years before the story, humankind set out from earth and discovered a hospitable planet in the Archer constellation M24. It became known hereafter as 'Neo-Jerusalem' and once again, humans headed for the abyss of space. As a result, humanity enlarged the circle of living things to encompass almost the entire galaxy approximately 10,000 years ago... At the same time, the interplanetary war which had broken out intensified. The universe became the stage for the devastation caused by the winds of war.

The Deus System which appears in the story was developed in this era, but besides this phenomenon, this episode remains shrouded in mystery. EPISODE II

Time of the Genesis

Sentient life forms began to increase at this time in the world of Fei and the others... Cain became the humans' progenitor and was revered as the divine emperor. Abel, a survivor of the Eldridge's fall to earth, opposed the religion of Cain. Both he and Elly began to grope for a new way of life. This is the background for Episode II as the story advances. At that time, it was thought that Cain's own mission was to bring about the resurrection of Deus, and that he did not seek "humanity's freedom", the main point of the story. EPISODE III

Zeboim Culture

The stage for Episode III is close to that of the real world, it was the time of an advanced scientific culture. The level of human intelligence had attained its peak, but due to genetic damage, those unable to reproduce began to increase. Using nanotechnology, Kim (Abel's reincarnated form) worked towards finding a way to overcome this, 