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.

Study Guide Update

I am currently in the process of fixing up some things around the study guide, having reorganized the interviews a bit, adding stuff to the Xenogears translation guide and Perfect Works sections (as you may have noticed if you are a regular visitor), and I also want to make updates to a few other articles. The story analysis pages for Xenogears are more or less finished but they need proofreading before I publish them, and since these pages are much longer than the first page it will take a few more days. I ended up dividing the whole thing into four parts, but the second part is already published now.

I am also looking to come into contact with Gwendal, Trexalfa, and Quiddity/Sheamon if any of you guys are reading this. It doesn't matter if you happen to read this in 5 or 10 years from now, contact me anyway if you can. My E-mail can be found in my blog profile here on Blogspot, or you can just reply to this blog post.

From now on I will also add a "[Last updated]" notice somewhere at the beginning of each article so that, in the case of people saving the study guide pages for their own personal archives like last time, they can check to see if they have the latest update saved for each page. This was something I originally had on the old website but for some reason did not retain when I moved to this blog. But hopefully it will not be necessary for people to save these pages since the reason I restarted the study guide project on this blog was to make sure it stays up this time.

And speaking of that, I decided to listen through Retrograde Amnesia's Xenogears podcast lately since I heard from people that they often reference this study guide, and I was a bit surprised by their first comments near the end of "Xenogears Podcast 4: Booze is My Life Companion [Dazil]":

Chris: "According to the translation notes on the, um, there's a great website I found called the Xenogears and Xenosaga Study Guide..."

Eric: "That sounds wonderful."

Chris: "Yeah. Somebody put... Whoever this person is I love you. Somebody put a bunch of interviews and translation notes and all kinds of things about this game on a old Blogspot site."

Eric: "Great. So it will be gone in a couple of years."

Chris: "Yeah exactly... With the intent of preserving this information. But anyway, according to the translation notes on this site, ..."

I don't know why they think this study guide might be gone in a couple of years because it is on Blogspot, but as of this year (2024) the study guide has been up on Blogspot for 8 solid years, which is longer than the brief 3 years it was originally around as a website hosted by XenoTen. 8 years is also longer than Zenosaga.com and many other big Xenogears and Xenosaga sites were around for in the past. Part of the reason I did not let someone else host the study guide was because I have seen how almost every Xenogears and Xenosaga fan site have disappeared from the net already. But moving the material to a free service hosted by a big global corporation like Google that has been around since 1999 and is still here will likely make it stay up for a long time, unless something seriously bad happens to Google.

I am also pleased to see that the Wayward machine has been saving this blog with all the images intact, should anything happen, although I suspect that the images on the Wayward pages are only visible because they link directly to this blog and if the blog disappears so will most of the images on the pages saved on the Wayward Machine.

Anyway, I'm not sure how this blog/website looks on all the browsers out there, but if anything looks strange or off let me know. If you have problems posting comments then try a different browser since that solved the problems I had responding to comments for a while. Most browsers also have a feature to zoom in and make the pages larger if you think the text and images are too small. When I first started this blog I was using a lower resolution and I am unsure I should make any changes to the size of the layout and text at this point.