Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay this week. This is the first post in my new series about the video game Xenogears. This series is not going to be the only Content published by the Corridors of Time team in the coming weeks and months, but I think it’s a cool lens onto a lot of stuff I’ve written about up to this point, and will hopefully prove illuminating moving forward. At the end I include links to a few of the sources I’ve been relying on for context and so on. Anyway, have a good weekend!!!
I’ve struggled to introduce this series. I have half- or quarter-finished drafts contextualizing the game in terms of its team’s history, its philosophical and design influences; I have a close reading of the introductory cinematic. I’m going to make that stuff available at some point. But I think it’s worth zooming out a bit.
Here is the opening of Xenogears:
I’m not going to wade into what follows quite yet, but for the purposes of this letter it’s important to note that the opening cinematic (made by the studio behind Ghost in the Shell!) only really makes sense in light of revelations that come dozens of hours into the game’s narrative. The game’s exposition is, in an important sense, indigestible.
Xenogears isn’t unique among speculative narrative in not making immediate sense. How and how much to explain is a perpetual question with this kind of thing. In my experience, the trade-off is typically cast in terms of immersion. Explanation risks pulling us out of the fictional world, because people who live there in a world don’t need that world constantly explained to them, because they live there. But the opacity of this introduction is up to something different, I think.
The introduction to Xenogears is unassimilable in a few ways. For one, the introductory quote — from the Book of Revelation, the concluding chapter of the Christian New Testament — is presented without attribution or speaker. The epigraph, like the introductory quote, bears an uncertain relationship with what is to come. This isn’t a feature of a strange world which the characters encounter as normal, the meaning or use of which we can ascertain through context. It’s just kind of sitting there.
What the epigraph does do is give us a glimpse into one of the game’s primary symbolic modes. A few beats later in the video, we can see how, in time-honored SF tradition, Xenogears literalizes religious themes: the Biblical “Alpha” and the “Omega” become component parts of whatever it is that’s destroying the big ship (according to the Perfect Works, the ship, called the Eldridge, is like, dozens of kilometers long). I think it does this for a reason; we’ll get into that in the parts to come.
Bear with me, okay
I am going to take a moment here to acknowledge that it is very reasonable — perhaps saner than the alternative — to see this all as so much technobabble goofiness. And of course it is all so much technobabble goofiness, especially at this point in the game. In terms of suspended disbelief, Xenogears has a pretty high price of admission, at least at first.
For now, I’ll just say that one of the reasons I wanted to write about Xenogears is that I really do believe that, for all the incredible loopiness and heavy-handed intricacy of its lore, it is telling a story which resonates with ordinary experience and deep human feeling; the high-concept stuff is, I think, all in service of this resonance. The byzantine science-fictional scaffolding, somehow simultaneously over- and underexplained, might lose sight of that emotional core at times, but it’s remarkable how often the game sticks its landings. It’s a game about being caught within vast, terrifying, difficult-to-understand systems not of one’s own making—about the forms of life and care people create with each other within these systems, and about the possibility of extricating ourselves from cycles of suffering which feel cosmic but are made and sustained by people.
This resonance, I think, motivates both its religious and scientific symbolism, too: it is a story about the stories we tell ourselves about the universe. Like a lot of JRPGs, it mounts a sustained argument against determinism; it locates the threat of determinism in both religious and scientific narratives about what humanity is and can be.
Kaboom
I’ve been very slowly making my way through Jane Alison’s book on novelistic form, Meander, Spiral, Explode; while it’s very explicitly developing a theory of the novel, I think some of its terms are useful here. The book’s thesis is that nature provides formal models for thinking about unconventionally structured novels — hence the title: three structures which recur in nature and which do not bear much resemblance to the conventional five-act model.
In any case, I’m interested in explosions. Alison’s explosions are slightly different from the kind I think Xenogears is working with, but her writing on the structure of the explosion is useful:
Radial or explosive patterns are born of a nucleus, kernel, black hole, whether they spoke outward or circle…Narratives that strike me as radial are those in which a powerful center holds the fictional world—characters’ obsessions, incidents in time—tightly in its gravitational force. That center could be a crime or trauma or something a figure wants to avoid but can’t help falling into: something devastatingly magnetic.
The introduction to Xenogears doesn’t explain anything. Something catastrophic has happened. (It has, literally, exploded.) The game takes place in the shadow of a mysterious catastrophe, one laden with a kind of symbolic resonance that has no clear object; like life, the game starts too late.
Some of the stuff I’m relying on here
A really interesting commentary on the translation by the harshly named but friendly seeming Reddit user “EnormousHatred”
The fittingly named Xenogears and Xenosaga Study Guide blog
The exhaustively (and exhaustingly) comprehensive fan-translated "Perfect Works" guide to the lore (warning: spoilers abound, if you can make sense of them)
The Retrograde Amnesia and Resonant Arc podcasts (the latter of which I think is also a YouTube series?)
This Let's Play from the Let’s Play Archive