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.
Seeing Ramsus being typed as a 1 rather than a 3 is a surprise, but it makes sense. He also feels more like he has a disintegration to 4 than to 9. That, and there's how similar he is to Cherenkov from Saga. Back in the XenoTen days, he seemed to be listed as having a social instinct. Would you say this still holds or not? I want to say he fits a self-pres 1, but I could be wrong. I might need to brush up on my knowledge about each 1.
ReplyDeleteDon Riso did not know about the instinct theory when he wrote the Personality Types book in 1987, that's why he came up with the theory of Wingtypes and Levels of health to explain differences between people of the same type. So when Takahashi and Soraya wrote Xenogears they were likely also unaware of the instincts. Therefore I will leave the instincts out of my analysis of Xenogears and Xenosaga characters from now on. I agree he resembles self-pres 1, though I think that's coincidental due to his 9-wing and disintegration into unhealthy Type 4. Billy comes across a bit like a social 1 because of his 2-wing.
DeleteSomeone was kind enough to approach me on Discord over the existence of this post. I'd have probably taken ages to find out otherwise, instead of cooking up a fast reply (d probably would have found out eventually anyway, given coming back to these games also, usually, means checking out the Study Guide again).
ReplyDeleteWill, of course, be glad to help in any way it's in my power to.
I think we talked by E-mail twice before. I tried E-mailing you a few weeks back but got no reply so I figured you may have changed your E-mail again. Could you send me another E-mail?
DeleteOh, I see. If it's the email I'm thinking about, it's likely one I've long since abandoned due to a plethora of issues. I'll send you an E-mail with a new address.
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