What is Xenogears: Creid?

First, the score it comes from. The Xenogears Original Soundtrack, composed, arranged, and produced by Yasunori Mitsuda, was released on two discs by DigiCube on March 1, 1998, forty four tracks with two remarkable guests. The Irish singer Joanne Hogg, of the band Iona, sang Stars of Tears, a song cut from the finished game, and the ending theme Small Two of Pieces, documented as the first ending theme with lyrics ever to appear in a game developed by Square. A forty one voice Bulgarian choir sang The Beginning and the End, its lyrics written by director Tetsuya Takahashi and translated from Japanese to English and then to Bulgarian for the recording.

Creid followed in April 1998, Mitsuda arranging his own music with his group Millennial Fair under a deliberate idea: take the original album's Celtic thread and pull it to the front. Ten tracks, five vocal and five instrumental, mixing Japanese and Celtic music. The two Hogg songs return transformed, sung in Japanese by Tetsuko Honma to lyrics by Junko Kudo: Stars of Tears as Two Wings, Small Two of Pieces as Mobius. For the title track, Mitsuda wrote the lyrics himself in Japanese and had them translated into Gaelic, and the Irish singer Eimear Quinn sang them.

Creid set the pattern for Mitsuda's afterlife with this score. In February 2011 his own company, Procyon Studio, released Myth: The Xenogears Orchestral Album on CD and vinyl, fourteen tracks of the same music arranged for orchestra. A game famous for a story too big for its discs also has a score too restless for one album: choral, Celtic, and orchestral versions all exist, and the composer conducted every transformation himself.