Xenosaga
The entire main team of Xenosaga with Tan-Elos in there for good measure

Background Information

Xenosaga (ゼノサーガ Zenosāga?) is a series of science fiction video games developed by Monolith Soft and published by Bandai Namco. Xenosaga's main story is in the form of a trilogy of PlayStation 2 video games. There have been three spin-off games and an anime adaptation. The Xenosaga series serves as a spiritual successor to the game Xenogears, which was released in February 1998 for the PlayStation by Square. The creator of both Xenogears and Xenosaga is Tetsuya Takahashi, who left Square in October 1999 along with Hirohide Sugiura. With financial investment from Namco, they started Monolith Soft and the Xenosaga project.

The first game in the trilogy, Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht was released in February 2002 in Japan, and in February 2003 in North America. Xenosaga Freaks, a lighthearted game with a playable demo for Episode II, was released in April 2004 in Japan, but was not released elsewhere. Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse was released in June 2004 in Japan and February 2005 in North America. Xenosaga: The Animation, an anime based on Episode I, premiered on TV Asahi in Japan on January 5, 2005. Xenosaga Pied Piper, a three chapter-long cellphone-based game depicting the history of cyborg "Ziggurat 8" 100 years before the start of Episode I, was released in Japan in July 2004. Released on July 6, 2006, Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra is the final title in the Xenosaga series; six episodes were originally projected, but by the time Episode III was released, Namco had already established that it would be the last entry, effectively cutting the series short. A retelling of the first two episodes titled Xenosaga I & II was released on the Nintendo DS in March 2006 in Japan.

~Wikipedia~

Standing in the Battledome

Xenosaga is an extremely powerful series, moreso than it was originally presumed (further evaluation similar to what was done with Xenogears helped with that). The series host a god character that observes the working of the lower world, a group of reality-bending, other-dimensional beings, an android (gynoid, sry Mike) with more to her than meets the eye and a villain (though could actually be viewed as the hero) who've been resetting the lower world with the help of a powerful artifact.

The cosmology of the series is farily simple, but massive. There is the Lower Domain and the Higher Domain. As it is described in the Perfect Guide, they are intimately linked, yet fundamentally separated. These two domains comprise the entire universe of Xenosaga. In the Lower Domain, there are two sides of the same coin; the Real Number Domain, or the domain of substance (human/life/etc) and the Imaginary Number Domain, or the domain of the soul (where consciousness exist). These two domains share no discerning dissimilarity and the only thing that makes one believe they aren't the same, is that one cannot exist in the other outside of special means. Along with these two domains, the entire Lower Domain is composed of infinite parallel universes. To make this even more of a page turner, XS decided that the Higher Domain needs to house many Lower Domains (that have been used as replacement upon the failsafe destroying the current lower domain), thus making it an extremely massive cosmology.

Off memory, there are two characters that are not from the Higher Domain that can destroy the entire Lower Domain if they so choose. On top of that, U-DO, who realisically can too (its power was used to allow a character that possibility), is not even the only one of its kind. Other than these heavy hitters, you are met with power anywhere from planet level to galactic in range. Speed is still a major issue, but a possible rough calculation gives the higher tiers around hundreds of thousand times the speed of light.

The only obstacle that keeps Xenosaga from ranking higher is that there is no evidence (shown, hinted, stated or otherwise) that links anyone in the series with the capability of affecting the Higher Domain, therefore leaving the series stuck at high-end multiversal despite having a cosmology much larger than that. Regardless, they stand as a very powerful video game verse, only falling to the top dogs of the VG universe like SMT, When They Cry, and Demonbane.

Supporters of the Series

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Character Profiles


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