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INTERVIEW
PART - ONE / FIVE
Q:
Give us an outline of the Xenosaga story.
T: I know people may think this is a sequel to Xenogears, but this is an
entirely new game; I've gone back to square one to create it. Its
foundations are in SF. If you compare it to a movie, then it's a space opera
like Star Wars or Star Trek. It's a small part of a very long, epic story
which takes place over thousands of years, and since it's the beginning of
the story, it's been subtitled "Episode I".
Q: What is the basic theme of this game?
T: That's summed up in the second part of the subtitle, "Der Wille zur
Macht" [the will for power]. The people in this game are all living
with some past put upon them, filled with regrets and unavoidable destinies.
They all need to find their own identity, and they all need to find the
power to go on in life. That's the "desire for power" I wanted to
show in this story. The villians in the story are exactly the same; as the
game goes on, their wills begin to clash with those of other people.
Q: So it's going beyond the typical morality plays we see in most RPGs.
T: Evil is an abstract concept to begin with, after all. The characters the
player fights against all have their own logical reasons for what they do. I
think that concepts of "good" and "evil" all depend on
what point of view you're looking from.
Q: This game pits the human race against an alien life form known as the
Gnosis...
T: Well, the player's true opponents in this game are the humans themselves.
The human race has been divided up into two large factions, and you play a
member of one side. Then, above that, the Gnosis arise as another power in
the world.
Q: The Gnosis were the aliens you showed us attacking the spaceship earlier
while you were explaining the game?
T: Right. This effect hasn't been implemented yet, but they're actually
semi-transparent beings, like jellyfish. As a result things like walls and
most weapons have no effect on them at all. The human race can't combat
against them with conventional weapony, and so KOS-MOS and the AGWS were
developed.
Q: What's the difference between the two?
T: The AGWS robot is able to detect the presence of Gnosis beings. Gnoses
are vulnerable to attack only upon running into interference with some
physical matter; that's their only weak point. This interference takes place
only for a tiny amount of time, so the KOS-MOS android was developed to
force Gnoses into more substantial forms.
Q: KOS-MOS shows up as a character within the game. Does it have any emotion
at all?
T: It's been developed as an emotionless robot. As its battle systems were
drawn up along completely different lines from the AGWS, it was designed as
a female android.
Q: A character named Chaos was also revealed, so it's simple to see the
contrast you have between cosmos [order] and chaos in the two characters.
Will that become prevalent in the story?
T: Well, the "will for power" is borrowed from Nietzsche, so these
two characters, each carrying a philosophical meaning, have a lot to do with
the main theme. However, that's merely the way I think about the story. It
was deliberately devised not to be highly involved, so anyone should be able
to get into it easily.
Q: Come to think of it, the main character, Shion, starts out on a ship
named the Woglinde, which comes out of Nordic valkyrie lore.
T: That followed soon after Nietszche. He was connected with Wagner, so I
pulled it from there.
INTERVIEW
PART - TWO>>>
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