Rejoice, all ye! The time for feasting has come!

The Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- book translations are back, in a new section here on the Study Guide. This section will include all of the translations, including those by Gwendal and Spherix that were never preserved on the old XenoTensei project page. Now they will be made available again, for old and new Xenosaga fans to feast on when delving deeper into this detailed universe. Currently not all the translations are up since the whole thing requires a bit of work, but you can check the "Last updated" date to know when new pages have been added. (I won't mention new updates to it on this front page until the thing is completed.)

Also, the Study Guide now has jump links again. Jump links galore! You may have noticed this if you have been a regular visitor the last week or so in the History of Xenogears and Xenosaga section or the Xenogears' Guide to translation errors pages. But if you have not you can try them out now.

Having figured out how to do jump links on the blog there are now many possibilities for improving various sections on the site and what I had planned. I might even try to put up the Xenosaga III Perfect Guide translations eventually using a similar approach to the ODM. For more information on my plans along with previews, follow me on Patreon.

A short Xenosaga III era interview with VAs has been added

A short interview with the Japanese voice actresses for Shion Uzuki (Ai Maeda) and KOS-MOS (Mariko Suzuki) from Volume I of the 2006 Xenosaga III Weekly magazine has been translated by Lugalbanda. The two VAs mainly talk about a podcast they were doing on the official website around the time Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra was released in Japan, but it is one of the few Xenosaga III era interviews that I have been able to find so I thought it might be good to have translated.

Judging by the interview, it seems a lot of the show consisted of taking messages from the audience and even relaying some questions to the development staff. I wonder if anyone has saved any of those podcasts or if anyone fluent in Japanese ever listened to them? I never came across any discussion about it even back in the day.

Unearthing yet another early Xenogears staff interview!

It was sort of a good thing I got a Twitter/X account recently since it alerted me to another previously unknown interview with the Xenogears developers thanks to Linnaea who dug up the March 1998 issue of Famitsu PS in a tweet. Thanks to Siris who bought and scanned the magazine, and Will Bill who did the translation, we now also have this nice little interview preserved.

I have also updated the History of Xenogears article with some quotes from this interview. Probably this is the last early Xenogears interview we'll find. But then again, I thought the last one was also the last and there weren't any more. So who knows. Maybe another one will eventually get unearthed. I also know there are at least one or two Xenosaga interviews that were lost in time and never recovered.

Added an "About" page and starting a Patreon

I have added an "About" page for the study guide that provides some basic information about the site. You can now also follow me on Twitter/X if you want, though I am not sure how often I will be using it.

I have also set up a Patreon since economic times are tough and I think it makes sense to start earning something from my hard work over the years, especially if you want me to stay around and regularly be active on maintaining the site. I still plan on finishing it up regardless, but having supporters on Patreon will definitely motivate me to finish it quicker. Otherwise I might just go back to sleep for a while until another dawn wakes me up again.

As a special treat I have put up the first part of the Xenosaga Story Analysis on Patreon, which will not be published on this website for some time. I might also put up some exclusive stuff on there, and share plans for the site I do not normally share, but I have not decided yet. Translation work will not be posted on Patreon however, since I am not charging money for other people's work.

The History of Xenogears article has been updated

As regular visitors may already have noticed (especially if you have read through the History articles in the last couple of days), I have expanded the History of Xenogears article (Part 1 of the History of Xenogears and Xenosaga) with information that has emerged since the last update, including the early lore draft that Yasuyuki Honne shared earlier this year on his Twitter/X page for the game's anniversary.

Having not read through the article in several years I was able to look at it with fresh eyes and found that some parts needed to flow and connect better. So I re-arranged some parts and also properly introduced more of the other people on the development team rather than expecting people to already know who they are. I think it makes for a much better read now. But most of the additions are in the "Developing the game" chapter of the article.

I have also gone back to the original structure of the History article series by dividing Xenosaga Episode I and Xenosaga II/III into two separate articles or parts since I think it makes for an easier read. It also brings more room for other sections in the top cross-column on the site where I want to add sections for "Articles" and "Links." I have not really made any additions and modifications to the History of Xenosaga articles yet, but I plan to. I am just waiting for translations of previously untranslated Xenosaga Episode I lore pages that may be useful to reference and examine.

A Xenogears interview with Takahashi and Hiromichi Tanaka from 1997 has been added

An old Xenogears preview interview with Tetsuya Takahashi and Hiromichi Tanaka from the November 28, 1997 issue of Weekly Famitsu has been translated by trexalfa. There are some interesting things revealed in this interview, especially in regards to the connections between Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII. Like many people have speculated, the similarity between Fei and Cloud Strife is not a coincidence. Furthermore, it seems that both the Shinra company in Final Fantasy VII and the Holy Empire of Solaris in Xenogears derive from early ideas by Tetsuya Takahashi when he was still on the Final Fantasy VII team.

Takahashi also reveals that he intentionally gave Fei "amnesia" at the start of the game so that he could subvert this common trope later. It is an interesting read so be sure to check it out if you are interested in the development of Xenogears. Another interesting detail is that Xenogears also had the working title "Project X" just like Xenosaga later did. Since Xenogears also went by the working title "Project NOAH," I assume it changed to "Project X" later on during development when they knew the final title would start with an "X." I will try to add some of this information whenever I get around to updating the History of Xenogears article.

The entire Xenogears Story Analysis is now up

All parts of the Xenogears Story Analysis (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) are now up in the Story Analysis Section, including a fifth part devoted to material cut from the game.

Part 2 and 3 are mainly restorations of the old material, while Part 1 and Part 4 are almost entirely new writings with just a few bits moved to those sections to make Part 2 and 3 less long. But even Part 2 and 3 have considerable improvements, additions and corrections made to them, so the Xenogears analysis that was on the old version of the study guide should now be discarded and replaced with this version. Once I have restored something on this site, I would appreciate it if people do not keep spreading my old version of that material anymore.

Originally I was never satisfied with my "Plot Analysis" as I called it back then, since I never actually intended to make a complete coverage of the games' narrative. It simply seemed too big of an endeavor to summarize and analyze it all, and it was not something I had ever seen anyone else do either. But after getting requests to do something like that and seeing how it was probably necessary due to the many confusing parts of the story and dialogue, I eventually attempted it in the form of taking notes while watching the cutscenes. But the result was too disjointed and ranty. In the end I was only satisfied with some parts of it, and disliked the rest.

This time I have managed to construct the entire thing a bit better by examining it in the context of a narrative structure properly to provide better segments and focus. And the result is much better, to the point I can finally say I am mostly satisfied at last. There are a few parts I am a bit ambivalent towards, but I can't figure out how to write it better, so I leave it as it is for now. At first I did want to shorten the whole thing a lot more, similar to Part 1, but realized that there were a lot of details that I myself had forgotten about that I appreciate that I wrote down back then. So I did not want to discard as much as I thought I would.

But after working on restoring these articles I also remember why I got tired of analyzing Xenogears, with all the problems with the translation which is not just limited to the game but also the version of Xenogears: Perfect Works that is complete (the one by UltimateGraphics) which is also full of inaccuracies. Correcting all the errors out there is simply too exhausting. Even the transcription of the official English script that everyone uses (the one at GameFAQs) is badly transcribed and contains multiple errors. One of these errors even show up on the Xenosaga Wiki! Hence I urge anyone quoting the official script to instead use this new website I came across that ripped the script from the actual game files so that it is 100% accurate (apart from maybe the opening movie). Though who knows how long that website will be up. I used to use the script on Xenogears: God and Mind fansite which was also accurate, but that site neither exists anymore nor can it be accessed through the Internet Wayward Machine. This is the kind of tedious stuff Xenogears scholars have to deal with it.

Of course, it is precisely because of these problems that a study guide for Xenogears is necessary. But making one is not always fun. It took me several weeks longer to finish these articles even after I thought I was finished with them, due to the numerous things I had to double check with a translator to make sure I was not making theories based on flawed or inaccurate translations. Several rewrites resulted from this. I was hoping to be done by April with restoring the Xenogears Story Analysis, yet right now it is the end of June. I need a break from this so do not expect the Xenosaga Story Analysis to be be done this year.

But I will probably do some more work on existing pages this year. Already, both the Guide to translation errors and the Perfect Works section of the study guide have been given massive updates the last couple of days. And I am thinking of dividing the Translation guide into two pages, one for each disc of the game, to make it easier to find the lines you want to check. The History of Xenogears article is also overdue for an update.

Anyway, I have already made more updates to the study guide this year than I have the past four years so at least that's something. It was not something I planned to do this year but came as a result of me playing through Xenogears for the first time in over 10 years. I enjoyed the actual gameplay a lot more than I remembered, though some puzzles were surprisingly difficult and I had to look at some guides since I could not remember their solution at all.