Xenogears is a RPG developed and published by Square for the PlayStation on February 1998 in Japan and on October 1998 in North America. Originally, Squaresoft had intended to call the game “Project Noah”. The name was later changed to Xenogears for unknown reasons. It is the fifth part of a six-part story detailed in Xenogears Perfect Works; at the end of the game’s credits, “Episode V” appears on screen. [Infos from Wikipedia]
In April 2009 UltimateGraphics has translated the Xenogears Perfect Works in English, and it’s now possible to check many informations about parts of the plot that were left out of the games or changed before the release. The full translation can be found in here.
In the book we can find different design for the Omnigears and some unknown monsters. As Kid Fenris on the Lost Levels forum has pointed out, one playable party member, Margie / Marguerite / Maroeur, was reduced to a supporting role. Also, some characters illustrations that we can see in the book were not in the final game, but they were used as the character portraits during battles in the beta version.
Thanks to some articles on Xenogears: God & Mind, we can read about much more unused stuff still hidden in the game code, as various dialogue and text not actually present / or censored. “Point Bethlehem” is the name of an area that can be found in the text rip, but there’s no place with that name in the final game.
While the released Xenogears has 59 chapters (and a final epilogue) to play, we can find the name of 9 other chapters that were removed:
- 03. House On a Hill
- 05. Attack on Lahan
- 08. Broken Silence
- 09. Path to Aveh
- 53. Fall of Solaris
- 54. Shevat’s Move
- 55. Broken Ties
- 63. Waiting Death
- 67. Xenogears Wakes
Also, it’s possible to gain access to a series of Debug Rooms, in which we can see many deleted scenes, “new” areas and hidden extra’s.
As they wrote on X:G&M: “due to budget problems, lack of time, or perhaps merely a desire to forego work on Xenogears in favor of other projects, production on Xenogears was ultimately cut short, and the creator’s original vision for the game was never truly realized”. You can check X:G&M for more informations about the removed scenes and dialogues.
As Robert Seddon has made us to notice, there’s a Xenogears FMV (Stars of Tears) that exists in the game’s files and can be acessed from the debug rooms, but reportedly it isn’t used anywhere in the actual game. The song was included on the official OST, so in a sense it did get used.
Images:
Videos:
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I would like to add that Stars of Tears, while not directly played during the game, can be found in the Original Soundtrack (track no. 2).
I also remember that the original video can be seen by simply waiting long enough during the attract mode, but i’m not completely sure about this last info (too many time has passed since i went through this masterpiece ;) ).