From the moment Skydive was first being tossed around as an idea for a project, Xenogears was high on the list of games to cover. In hindsight, it’s probably not the sort of game we should have tackled so early into the podcast’s run. Yes, we’ve made a good attempt at selecting some interesting games to dig into, but everything we’d done so far was a fairly short length or gameplay focused experience. We knew there’d be teething pains and juggling required with our schedules to make an RPG happen, but we knew it’d happen at some point.

Perhaps we bit off more than we could chew selecting Xenogears as our sixth game. But we were determined to do this right. Xenogears is a flawed game, and it’s one I personally didn’t actually enjoy playing for much of its run time. Nevertheless, I still must acknowledge that the sheer scope and ambition behind the game’s narratives, themes, and design decisions is utterly insane. It was too big a game for 1998, and it’s probably still too big a game now.

But the intent of Skydive was to go deep into these retrospectives, and so we did. Beat for beat, theme for theme, we have discussed Xenogears. We knew there was no way we could do it all in a single podcast; even so, I don’t think we expected it to take three days of recording to actually cover everything. But we did, and it’s hard to express just how satisfied I am with the result. It takes someone brave, foolhardy, insane, or all of the above to cover Xenogears like this, and I’d be shocked to find more than a handful of attempts to do what we did for Square’s equally insane 90s cult classic.

This Pre-Flight Check is going up in unison with the first part of our Xenogears retrospective. The first part alone is longer than anything we’ve done previously, and there are two more days of podcasts to follow. More than a dozen hours spent discussing and even longer editing have brought this behemoth to you, and you can access it right now by backing Skybox on Patreon. If you’re unable to support us, all these episodes will be released to everyone in three months time for free.

Let this episode stand as a monument to what Skydive is meant to be. There’ll probably never be a project we do quite like this ever again, what with the density of Xenogears‘ brain-melting narrative scale. We’re going to keep moving forward and improving on the show, but this is Skydive’s manifesto. I truly hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did making it, despite how long overdue its release is.

And speaking of the royal we, here’s what everyone else from the Skydive quartet has to say about Xenogears:

Brian: 

Xenogears is a truly wild game. It is deeply flawed and genuinely obnoxious to play at times, with so much repetition, padding, and exposition (which will be very familiar to any RPG fan) that I genuinely hated some of my time with it. That having been said, it has an engaging set of gameplay mechanics, largely excellent writing, and wrestles with philosophy, religion, and social governance in a way that an extreme minority of games do, all while painting that story on a canvas that spans the cosmos. As with all things, time and distance softens the extremes and allows us to focus on the larger takeaways, and after spending so much time playing Xenogears, and an absurd 15-20 hours talking about it, I’ve come away being glad I played it. Will has said he thinks this might be the definitive conversation about Xenogears, and with a squad composed of a Xenogears expert, two RPG experts, a religion and philosophy expert, all of whom have significant experience working as critics, I think he may be right. Xenogears is a long, sometimes arduous journey, but it’s one worth taking.

Lucas: 

Having to come up with more to say about Xenogears, after spending around 20 hours talking about Xenogears, is crazy. This is probably the most work I’ve put into a single video game I’ve ever undertaken, but I can’t say it wasn’t worth it. Xenogears itself was hard to get through for various reasons, but the conversation was awesome, and I’m glad we finally get to share it with our subscribers. Who knows if we’ll ever do something this absurd again, but if we don’t, it’ll be because Xenogears is uniquely suited for this kind of madness. So please enjoy the fruit of our effort, and if you play the game as well, make sure to look up DeathBlows.

Will:

The first time I played Xenogears was with my then-girlfriend-now-wife a decade ago. We were both working time-consuming, low-paying jobs (I was working at Disney; she was at a call center), and we only shared one day off a week. We’d spend that entire day together. And for several months, a lot of those days ended with the two of us playing Xenogears. Well, I played. She’d already beaten it, and she was there to guide me through. It was probably the ideal way to play the game as a first-timer. By the end, it had cemented itself as one of my favorite video games. To this day, it remains the most ambitious video game I have ever played.

The problem with Xenogears is that it makes every other RPG you play after it feel small. Small in terms of narrative scope. Small in terms of characters and the relationships they have with one another. Small when compared with Xenogears’ staggering, perhaps absurd ambition. Its story spans the cosmos and extends across thousands of years. It pulls from Gnostic tradition (if you really want to understand it, read The Secret Book of John) and canonical Christian myth and popular culture (THX 1138, Star Wars, Soylent Green, and so on). Its characters are built on the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jaques Lacan. It is as comfortable with discussing the concepts such as the id, ego, and superego and the mirror stage as it is reflecting on society, organized religion, human nature, and fate. And through all of that, it is, at its core, a love story written by a husband and wife about two people who find each other again and again across space and time. In hindsight, it’s fitting that I first experienced it with the woman I’d later marry.

Xenogears was monolithic. It was remarkable. It was utterly unique. It was… not to be. It is telling that while Xenogears is famously unfinished, and writer and director Tetsuya Takahashi has attempted to retell parts of Xenogear‘s story in each of his subsequent works (Xenosaga, Xenoblade), he has never again attempted to retell all of it. Xenoblade and Xenosaga are compromised versions of the original story, and Takahashi himself has admitted that he’s interested in doing more digestible, mainstream work these days. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever try anything on that scale again. What we have is likely all we’re ever going to get. That Xenogears exists at all, even in its incomplete state, is a miracle. That it’s a remarkable game in spite of – and sometimes because of – that is nothing short of a triumph. Even an unfinished painting can be beautiful. Playing it again was a chance to re-examine it, but my feelings remain unchanged: Xenogears is not the best RPG ever made, but it is the greatest, and we’ll never see anything like it again. So get a copy, grab a translated version of Perfect Works, and settle in. Whether it’s your first time or your tenth, I hope you enjoy taking this ride with us. Stand tall and shake the heavens.

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