One of the coolest things about Square Enix’s HD-2D line, and its proliferation as a de facto brand of its own, is how it inspires energy for the future. After playing remakes like Live A Live and Dragon Quest’s new Erdrick Trilogy, it’s impossible not to think about what could be next. You see a lot of people talk about stuff like Chrono Trigger or any given pre-PS1 Final Fantasy, but I reckon there’s a clear frontrunner, a “Perfect Work” if you will, that in an ideal world would be in production already. I’m talking about Xenogears, the troubled cult classic that was almost Final Fantasy 7, then almost Chrono Trigger 2, and ultimately almost a full game of its own that’s arguably one of the most ambitious stories ever told in a video game.

Source: Square Enix

For a long time, despite always hearing about it, always being told I ought to play it as a RPG aficionado, I couldn’t get into Xenogears. I tried and tried, and always fell off for one reason or another. It’s slow, it’s clumsy, the localization is an (understandable) nightmare making it hard to read, and the combat system is a rollercoaster of cool and annoying. That’s before we even get to the elephant in the room. But towards the end of 2025 I finally buckled up and played the whole thing, thanks to a certain podcasting effort I’m a part of. That podcast, by the way, currently stands at over 10 hours long and it isn’t even done yet. That’s the kind of material we’re working with here. That’s the kind of analysis a game like Xenogears inherently warrants.

Xenogears is a lot of things. It’s a tried and true “JRPG” story about a simple guy with amnesia who is violently dragged from a humble village into a cosmic conflict. It’s a shockingly accurate portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s a massively ambitious takedown of organized religion, garnished with a dash of optimism towards human goodness and faith. It’s a martial arts epic. And, of course, it’s all that interwoven with anime-style mecha action. You can’t have a good 1990s existential crisis anime without giant robots, of course. That’s just the rules. It even pays tribute to several eras of mecha anime and manga across its runtime in elegant and fun ways without just blaring out references. In many ways Xenogears makes Evangelion look like fanfiction.

But Xenogears is also unfinished. It’s hard to truly explain what that means in a way that dulls the impact of seeing it for yourself. You can see the bursting seams, the limitations, the rough edges all throughout the game, but Xenogears hits its own brick wall the moment you swap to disc 2. The story almost turns into a visual novel, its voice changing to the past tense as characters literally sit in a chair and tell you what happens in front of static images, displayed on an otherworldly projection screen like a fourth wall-breaking slide show presentation. Every now and then you’ll play a boss fight, or a small dungeon, or get a cutscene, letting you experience big parts that made it past the finish line as intended. But the developers famously ran out of time, and chose to go this route instead of cutting the story off at the neck.

Source: Square Enix

A remake would give Square Enix an opportunity to answer a series of “what-ifs” that have followed Xenogears for nearly 30 years since its 1998 release. And it’s not just about fleshing out the content in disc 2 by adding more dungeons, rolling out the story traditionally, and adding god knows how many hours to its runtime. It’s also about hitting the localization with a team rather than one overworked person. It’s about addressing bugs and problems in combat. It’s about punching up the look and feel of Xenogears’ world, making it one in which you aren’t fighting an awkwardly spinning camera and blurry environmental assets, dungeons far too easy to get lost in, and weird platforming sections. HD-2D could be the banner with which Xenogears isn’t “fixed” per se, but hoisted back up with a remake far more productive than something like Chrono Trigger, which doesn’t need any help remaining one of the GOATs.

There are forces in the world preventing this from happening, of course. Xenogears wasn’t exactly a commercial failure or anything like that, with a solid critical reputation and enough sales even in North America to get that “Greatest Hits” relabeling back in the day. But its creators have since moved on from the company, mostly going to Monolith Soft where the “Xeno” subseries continues today with Xenoblade Chronicles. And that company is a Nintendo subsidiary. Now, Nintendo and Square Enix are no strangers to working together on things with a publisher/developer relationship (both Octopath Traveler and Live A Live started as Nintendo-published releases), but especially with director Tetsuya Takahashi running Monolith Soft and his wife, writer Soraya Saga (pen name) leaving the games industry last year, it could be a simple logistical impossibility. You probably can’t do a remake like the one I’m asking for here without the original writers on deck.

Source: Square Enix/UltimateGraphics

It’s not all hopeless. If you’re intrigued by all this and haven’t played Xenogears, there are a few ways to arm yourself with a better experience than simply playing an original PlayStation copy. Perfect Works, a hybrid art book/lore bible, is available online and translated by fans. Perfect Works is also the name of a massive mod effort to rebalance the gameplay systems, redo the localization, and more - and it’s almost ready for its 1.0 launch. These two things together might be the closest thing we’ll get to the ideal Xenogears, unless the stars align.

Source: Square Enix

But perhaps, with the 30th anniversary coming up soon, the perfect reasoning to give Xenogears HD-2D a shot could emerge. With enough demand, mecha enthusiasts, RPG sickos, and Square Enix historians could stand tall and shake the heavens enough to manifest this unlikely undertaking into reality. In the meantime, there’s always the podcast I’m working on. When it gets finished. Kind of a load-bearing word in these parts.

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He’s far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.

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