Author Topic: Connections with Xenogears  (Read 1554 times)

ZeaLitY

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Connections with Xenogears
« on: April 15, 2005, 04:55:27 pm »
Long ago, someone told me that Xenogears shares some parallels with the Chrono series, even wildly suggesting that it was at one time Chrono Trigger 2. He also told me that Lavos shared a connection with the Wave Entity.

Is there any validity to this? My RPG experience is limited, and right now I'm in a heavy playthrough of the FF6 translated version.

Anonymous

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Connections with Xenogears
« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2005, 10:59:38 pm »
Yep, there are definitely some connections.  Tetsuya Takahashi actually said in an interview that Xenogears was intended to be CT2 early in the writing phase--though who knows how much influence that had, since according to Kaori Tanaka the story took a pretty tangled course during development.  Anyway, for those that have played CT and not XG, here's a rundown.  (Note that these are major spoilers!  You are ruining some of your potential XG experience by reading further!)

-In XG, a intelligent planetary-invasion weapon ends up marooned on a planet and creates a base population of humans with the intent of absorbing the population after it has multiplied in order to repair its damaged biological parts.  The Lavos parallel should be obvious.
-XG's Shevat is a lavish, matriarchal floating kingdom featuring New Agey Yasunori Mitsuda music and three key scientists or "sages" named Melchior, Balthasar, and Gaspar.  Postings on Tanaka's FRIDGE confirm that this happened because Masato Kato worked on both games.  (Oddly enough, while CT's gurus were Hash, Gash, and Bosh in Japanese, the Sages of Shevat had the wise-men names on both sides of the Pacific, as far as I can tell.)
-This is a stretch, but XG has a really important event at the end of a "ominous enemy stronghold" area, then has the stronghold change form and uses a "remixed" version as the final dungeon, just like the Ocean Palace and the Black Omen.  The difference is that you don't actually play the dungeon the first time around.  However, there are a lot of dungeon-like areas that are glossed over in cutscenes on XG's Disk 2, and a lot of other evidence points to budget or time constraints affecting Disk 2's production, so who knows if it was intentional.

Leebot

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Connections with Xenogears
« Reply #2 on: April 19, 2005, 11:41:29 pm »
Quote from: Metacod
Yep, there are definitely some connections.  Tetsuya Takahashi actually said in an interview that Xenogears was intended to be CT2 early in the writing phase--though who knows how much influence that had, since according to Kaori Tanaka the story took a pretty tangled course during development.  Anyway, for those that have played CT and not XG, here's a rundown.  (Note that these are major spoilers!  You are ruining some of your potential XG experience by reading further!)

-In XG, a intelligent planetary-invasion weapon ends up marooned on a planet and creates a base population of humans with the intent of absorbing the population after it has multiplied in order to repair its damaged biological parts.  The Lavos parallel should be obvious.
-XG's Shevat is a lavish, matriarchal floating kingdom featuring New Agey Yasunori Mitsuda music and three key scientists or "sages" named Melchior, Balthasar, and Gaspar.  Postings on Tanaka's FRIDGE confirm that this happened because Masato Kato worked on both games.  (Oddly enough, while CT's gurus were Hash, Gash, and Bosh in Japanese, the Sages of Shevat had the wise-men names on both sides of the Pacific, as far as I can tell.)
-This is a stretch, but XG has a really important event at the end of a "ominous enemy stronghold" area, then has the stronghold change form and uses a "remixed" version as the final dungeon, just like the Ocean Palace and the Black Omen.  The difference is that you don't actually play the dungeon the first time around.  However, there are a lot of dungeon-like areas that are glossed over in cutscenes on XG's Disk 2, and a lot of other evidence points to budget or time constraints affecting Disk 2's production, so who knows if it was intentional.


Don't forget that Lucca showed up in the first village of XG!

But Lavos is parallel to Deus, not the Wave Entity. The Wave Entity is at best parallel to the "entity" of CT.

Anonymous

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Connections with Xenogears
« Reply #3 on: April 20, 2005, 12:02:40 am »
Yeah, that's what I was describing above.

Shadow_Dragon

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Connections with Xenogears
« Reply #4 on: April 28, 2005, 05:31:25 pm »
what happened with lucca in XG? i must've missed that

Radical_Dreamer

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Connections with Xenogears
« Reply #5 on: April 28, 2005, 09:45:57 pm »
Quote from: Shadow_Dragon
what happened with lucca in XG? i must've missed that


She's in the first town. She just talks about some game mechanic stuff.