Within an hour of starting Xenogears, its hero has destroyed his own village. Fei Fong Wong, a young man with no memory of his life before he was brought to the village of Lahan, climbs into a stolen fighting robot when a battle spills into the village, blacks out in a rage and wakes to find the survivors staring at him. “As a player, you feel awkward and ashamed in the presence of these NPCs,” Edge wrote in a retrospective in 2007, a guilt that “perfectly mirrors that felt by your character”. From there Square’s 1998 PlayStation game takes in a war between nations, a split personality, a church that betrays its own followers and a god that turns out to be a crashed weapon. It sold half a million copies in Japan within months. Square nearly decided not to release it in America, and it never came out in Europe.
Fast facts
- Developer: Square; published in North America by Square Electronic Arts.
- Director: Tetsuya Takahashi, who created it with Kaori Tanaka (Soraya Saga). Producer: Hiromichi Tanaka.
- Music: Yasunori Mitsuda.
- Released: Japan, early 1998; North America, late 1998. No European release.
- Format: PlayStation, two CDs.
Square’s other RPG
Xenogears followed Final Fantasy VII and was measured against it from the start. Edge’s preview in January 1998 noted that many of its staff had worked on Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Takahashi had been one of Final Fantasy VI’s art directors, designing the Magitek Armor of its opening scene and its world map, and Kaori Tanaka had contributed ideas for its characters. Mitsuda had written most of the music for Chrono Trigger.
Where Final Fantasy VII walked 3D characters over painted backgrounds, Xenogears did the opposite: flat, hand-drawn sprites in a real-time 3D world that the player could rotate with the shoulder buttons. Edge found the effect “strangely reminiscent of SNES Mode 7”. Because the world was solid, exploring it was physical: in the 2007 retrospective’s words, “rooftops can be leaped between” and hidden items reached by jumping gaps, so that the game “often feels more like a platformer”.
Fighting with combos
The battles were a variant of Square’s Active Time Battle system, with its waiting gauges, but the menu of attacks was replaced by buttons. Each face button was an attack of different strength, each cost Action Points, and strung together they made combos “in the same manner as Tekken and Virtua Fighter”, as Edge’s review put it. Learnt combinations ended in special moves, and late in the game a character could spend up to 28 points in a turn. Some fights happened in the Gears, the giant piloted robots, where the player worried “about fuel loss and parts damage rather than hit and magic points”.
Edge thought the robots “such a stroke of genius that it’s amazing that they’ve never been so well integrated in a game before”, and expected Xenogears to become “the title RPG aficionados will claim as ‘better than FF’”. It later placed the game 86th in its list of the 100 best games, in January 2000.
A story about God
The 2007 retrospective described the plot as resting on “10,000 years of intricate history” laid out by a team of four scriptwriters before the game begins. Fei, it turns out, was abused as a small child, and his personality split into three parts that the game names after Freud’s ego, superego and id. He is also the latest reincarnation of a boy who survived a disaster 10,000 years earlier. The enemy, Deus, is an ancient weapon that crashed on the planet and created humanity so that it could harvest people to rebuild itself: “Fei is battling against his race’s very creator”.
Square’s own localisation staff were wary. Square Enix’s Richard Honeywood, looking back on the translation, recalled “mature, controversial themes, with an evil ‘church’ betraying its common believers” to an empire in the sky. Even names changed: the character Shitan became Citan in English. The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine gave it its award for best story of 1998 and noted that “Square almost didn’t bring this game stateside due to controversy over its religious themes”. Edge reported the same: the game “only narrowly escaped being side-stepped from US release”.
The second disc
The game is spread over two discs, and they do not play alike. On the second, Edge wrote, the story “relies ever more heavily on non-interactive cutscenes, granting the player only the occasional dungeon for variety”, after “time or budget restraints forced them to rush the game to completion”. Hyper described the same thing in 2005: it was “as if the development team ran out of time”. Edge’s review of Takahashi’s later Xenoblade Chronicles was blunter, calling the disc “essentially a series of placeholder cutscenes”. The retrospective’s verdict was that Xenogears showed “what can go wrong, and right, when a single-minded development team is given free rein”: the work of a director “whose imagination and ambition outstripped even the gargantuan budget SquareSoft allowed him”.
After Square
Hyper reported that the whole story had been planned in six episodes, of which Xenogears was the fifth; it presented this as a story told about the game, not a fact. The game itself supports the numbering: IGN Unplugged noted in 2001 that Xenogears “was described in its conclusion as ‘Episode V,’ part of an imagined six-part epic story”. What is clear is that the team left Square and formed Monolith Soft. Square kept the rights to Xenogears, so the new studio started again with Xenosaga for Namco on the PlayStation 2, which Edge noted ended “after just three of the six intended instalments”. Takahashi then directed Xenoblade Chronicles for Nintendo, a game Edge praised in 2011 for a “revised approach” that had “led to focus and a return to creative form”.
Sources
- Edge issue 54, January 1998, p. 45: Xenogears prescreen (sprites in a real-time 3D world, Mode 7, staff from Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, the Gears).
- Computer and Video Games issue 195, February 1998: Xenogears preview (Fei, the attack on his village, Tekken-style commands).
- Hyper issue 55, May 1998: news (500,000 copies sold in Japan).
- Edge issue 67, January 1999, p. 93: Xenogears review (US release, Square Electronic Arts, fighting-game combos, Gear fuel and parts, “better than FF”).
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 no. 5, February 1999: 1998 editors’ awards (best story; Square’s near-decision not to release the game in America; Hiromichi Tanaka, producer).
- Edge issue 80, January 2000: “100 Best Games” (number 86).
- Edge issue 159, February 2006: feature on localisation (Richard Honeywood on Xenogears’ themes; Shitan renamed Citan).
- Edge issue 180, October 2007, pp. 101–103: “Time Extend: Xenogears” (the opening, the history, Fei’s past, Deus, Mitsuda’s music, the Action Point system, the platforming, the second disc, the US release).
- IGN Unplugged issue 4, July 2001, p. 40: preview of Xenosaga (the team leaving Square for Monolith Soft; Xenogears “described in its conclusion as ‘Episode V’”).
- Hyper issue 144, October 2005: feature on the Xeno games (the second disc, the six episodes, the team leaving to form Monolith Soft).
- Edge issue 232, October 2011: Xenoblade Chronicles review (the second disc; Xenosaga’s three of six instalments).
- Edge issue 251, March 2013, pp. 125–127: the making of Final Fantasy VI (Takahashi’s Magitek Armor and world map; Kaori Tanaka, “co-creator of Xenogears”).