Sections for the Xenosaga Episode I Official Guidebook and the Episode I Official Complete Guide have been added

The Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- book is not the only Xenosaga source book with lore content that is useful when it comes to Xenosaga analysis and referencing. Most fans know about the Xenosaga Episode III Perfect Guide and the slightly less famous Episode III Official Complete Guide as well. But there are more sourcebooks with lore content that is often overlooked, such as the Xenosaga Episode I Official Complete Guide, which I have now made a section for on the study guide along with the Xenosaga Episode I Official Guidebook.

Since I have been unable to acquire a new translator I decided to go with a machine translation for the moment. I know it is not optimal, but machine translations have advanced enough that they are not all that bad anymore. You can at least get the gist of what something is saying, and if I need to quote anything from it in the future I will probably just run those particular sentences with someone who knows Japanese. But I need to get these sections up so that I can progress with other articles that will or may reference parts in these books.

In defense of machine translations though, I will say that most of the older fan translations of Xenogears: Perfect Works and Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- were not better than current machine translations are, and in several instances, fan translations are actually significantly worse. Whenever the original text of an awkward or weird sentence done by a fan translator is run through a modern machine translation, 9 times out of 10 another translator will tell me the machine translation is actually better. The current Xenogears: Perfect Works scanlation from 2009 is so poor that a modern machine translation would actually have been preferable. Though back then the machine translation possibilities were just coming out and they were very inferior to what they are today, so back then Ichiban Manten and others did not really have a choice but to translate themselves with dictionaries and stuff just to get a general gist of what something was saying.

Back in the day there was also a slight elitism around who could read Japanese or not, with discussions often being shut down if the person making an argument could not read the original Japanese text. Knowing now that many of these fans who claimed to be able to read Japanese well enough did several translation mistakes, I am extremely wary of taking any one translator's word for anything, and if the text or quote is important enough as the basis for a theory or argument, then I will feel more comfortable if I have at least two translations of the same text done by independent translators who are not part of the same group. With machine translations having progressed to at least the quality of the average fan translator, we now have a much more egalitarian approach to Japanese text sources, and I fully intend to run most, if not all, translations also through machines from now on as an additional comparison with both fan translations and official translations when needed.

As an example, I decided to preserve jetfuel's old translation of the first page of the "remaining mysteries" section in the Xenosaga Episode I Official Complete Guide with machine translations provided next to them. I'd like you to read that, compare his translations that he "painstakenly translated" back in 2002, and honestly tell me you prefer them over the machine translations. I do not think most people will.

But do not worry. Machine translations, whenever they appear, will be clearly marked as such. In the lore books sections they will be marked with gray text. Using machine translation, I also finished up what was missing from Part 2 of the Official Design Materials book, mainly the interview with Tsutomu Terada. I do not think these last untranslated bits were worth bothering some translator's time to fully translate, and that is another reason why machine translation should be seen more positively, because there is a lot of text in these types of books and sometimes you just want to get the gist of things and not waste your own or somebody else's time.

Fictional works that influenced the Xenosaga series

I have of course not forgotten about Xenosaga. Here is the beginning of an article series centered on analyzing Fictional works that influenced the Xenosaga series. While playing through Final Fantasy VI I noticed that it had similarities not only with Xenogears but also with Xenosaga, so before I leave FFVI behind to analyze other media I figured I should also write the article covering Games that influenced Xenosaga. It has been added to the Articles section.

New article series: Fictional works that influenced Xenogears

I can finally present a new article I have been working on over at Patreon, centered on analyzing Fictional works that influenced Xenogears. While the plan is to cover influences from all kinds of media, I decided to start with an article covering Other games that influenced Xenogears. While this may not sound as interesting as influences from Anime, Cinema, TV, and novels, it is actually a vital article that is likely to get linked to and referenced in most of my texts going forward, especially when it comes to things like the History of Xeno and Takahashi's modus operandi when it comes to writing stories.

In combination with this I have also launced the new Articles section I had been planning to add for a while. I was originally going to start the Articles section with three other minor articles, but the slowness of translations and lack of available translators have caused me to postpone those articles. If any of my readers know Japanese well enough and are willing to help with translations of both Xenogears and Xenosaga material and interviews, but especially Xenosaga stuff, then please contact me.

Xenosaga Official Websites Translations

As regular visitors may have noticed, all the pages from the Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- have now been added, even if it is not 100% fully translated. At least the important stuff is there. I have now also made a page for translations from various Xenosaga Official Website information that may be of interest to preserve, especially for hardcore fans interested in the evolution of the story. It is interesting to see how similar some of the early descriptions of the story are to Xenogears Episode I from Perfect Works.

In addition, a previously unknown Xenosaga interview from Japanese magazine THE PLAYSTATION 2 VOL. 252 have also been discovered. However, only a fragment of what can be seen on a photograph has been translated thanks to Lugalbanda. I plan to add the info to the History of Xenosaga article whenever I get around to updating it.

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.