The History of Xenosaga

Six episodes planned. Three delivered. None forgotten.

Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (PlayStation 2, 2002) opened the most ambitious storytelling project of its console generation: a six part science fiction saga about an artifact called the Zohar, the android KOS-MOS, and the alien Gnosis, told in cinematic sequences long enough to argue about. The trilogy that followed is the anchor here, with Episode I as its foundation.

THE MAKING

The Xenogears team starts again

Creator Tetsuya Takahashi and his wife Soraya Saga had once proposed their story as a Final Fantasy VII scenario at Square; rejected there, it became Xenogears. When Takahashi left Square in 1999, disagreeing with its focus on its major franchises and unable to fund his own project inside it, he founded Monolith Soft with fellow Xenogears staff and backing from Namco.

Xenosaga was proposed in 1999 as a six part series, and development of the first game began in 2000 under the codename Project X: two years, a staff of between sixty and one hundred, about twenty of them Xenogears veterans, with Takahashi directing and the scenario written by Takahashi and Saga. It is a spiritual successor to Xenogears, carrying its themes and design language into a new universe, not a sequel.

THE DESIGN

A film you interrupt with battles

The setting runs on deep references: the Zohar, an artifact tied to a god-like energy, a lost Earth renamed Lost Jerusalem, synthetic humans called Realians, and episode subtitles taken from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, over a structure steeped in Biblical imagery, Jewish mysticism, Gnosticism, and Jung. Shion Uzuki, a Vector Industries engineer, escapes a Gnosis attack with her prototype battle android KOS-MOS, and the questions begin.

The gameplay is traditional turn based combat built on Action Points, fought on foot and in mecha, but the proportions are the design: long, fully voiced cinematic sequences carry the story, and the ratio of watching to playing became the series' defining argument. Yasunori Mitsuda's score, recorded with orchestral forces, works the same way, treating whole stretches of space as silence.

THE EDITIONS

The trilogy, and the one Europe skipped

Episode I · 2002

Japan February 28, 2002, including a limited edition; North America February 25, 2003. Japan received an expanded Xenosaga Episode I Reloaded in November 2003, and the American game later joined the Greatest Hits line.

Episode II · 2004

Jenseits von Gut und Bose: Japan 2004, North America 2005, and Europe the same year. Of the whole trilogy, this is the only episode Europe received.

Episode III · 2006

Also sprach Zarathustra: Japan and North America in 2006, closing the series at three episodes instead of six.

The side paths

Xenosaga Freaks, a supplementary disc (2004); Pied Piper, a Japan only mobile prequel (2004); Xenosaga I & II, a Nintendo DS remake of the first two episodes (2006, Japan only); plus a manga and a television anime of Episode I.

THE RECEPTION

Admired, argued with, and cut in half

Metacritic · 83

Episode I was positively received, praised for its production and its story's ambition, the strongest critical showing of the three.

The cutscene argument

The dissent that followed the series: sequences of extraordinary length, an unfinished story by design, and gameplay some reviewers found stiff beside the film it interrupts. Too ambitious is the phrase journalists reached for most.

Sales · strong, then not enough

The first game sold strongly and earned its Greatest Hits pressing in America. The series as a whole was still judged a commercial disappointment against its cost and its six part plan.

The consequence

After Episode I, Takahashi stepped down as director to supervisor, a younger team took over, Saga later departed, and the planned six episodes were cut to three.

THE LEGACY

The road to Xenoblade

Xenosaga made Monolith Soft's name and nearly broke it: after the trilogy closed in 2006, Takahashi and the team began a new project specifically to rebuild morale. That project became Xenoblade Chronicles, and the Xeno line is now a pillar of Nintendo's catalog, with KOS-MOS still appearing in crossover games.

The trilogy itself remains stranded on the PlayStation 2. Bandai Namco producer Katsuhiro Harada has said the company analyzed the market for an HD collection and concluded it would not be profitable, which is why these three boxes, and especially the third, carry the weight they do in the collector market.