ゼノギアス // Week 12 // Chapter 20

ゼノギアス // Week 12 // Chapter 20

Week 11 2026 January 17
Last Week Week 11
Next Week Week 13
Home Thread ゼノギアス

Ending Point
After attempting to remove the collar , save in the room

Screenshot

Gameplay

Gameplay notes
  • None
Unique Missables
  • Depending on how well you do in the mook boss rush you get ranked differently which affects conversations and a few other minor things such as item sale prices.
  • When you attempt to remove the collar at the end of this week there a few mutually exclusive outcomes, depending on both your rank and luck. This ranges from getting up to 5000 gold down to nothing (except a unique scene).
"FMVs”

None.

Walkthrough
English Guide Ctrl+F WK19
Japanese Guide

Vocab

Script JPDB
CH20 Here Here
NPC Here [Missing?]

Discussion Guidelines
Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Avoid posting any information from later in the game than the current week’s reading. If it is necessary to doing so, it needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1”]).

Discussion

  • Which outcome did you get?

Participation

Will you be playing with is this week?
  • I am playing along.
  • I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this part yet.
  • I am no longer playing.
  • I’m just here for the discussion
0 voters

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

5 Likes
Week 12

I was Rank A and I think I got the most common thing happening, nothing. I tried to cheat a bit and save before and reload, but I don’t really know before what, maybe the outcome is already decided when you start talking with Hammer for example? Don’t need 5000 gold anyways!

Happy that we got to fight a tiny bit this week (I also got a bit of time in the water tunnel). Looking forward to next week :slight_smile:

6 Likes
Week 12

I’m not sure what the most common thing to happen is but before this week’s thread, I didn’t know there was any outcome for the collar removal scene except for the bad one: the collar blowing up. I think I played the game 3 times as a kid (ok more like 2 + 1/2) and got that scene every time.

But for this time around, I got 3500G! :smiley:

I really enjoy the grungy atmosphere around D block, although I think it’s weird that non-prisoners are allowed to live there, too. If the prisoners do something the soldiers don’t like the collar explodes, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily do much to prevent the determined ones from hurting other people behind closed doors. Is the idea that this is a hyper dystopian place where being a prisoner is only a small step below being dirt poor? There are so many kids around…

6 Likes
Week 12 Play Report

I remember having no idea what those floating orb heads were talking about when I played in English and tbh I’m still none the wiser. The babble is off the charts in those scenes.

I do quite enjoy D block, although it’s a lot smaller than it initially appears. Would’ve been nice to have a bit more to explore around there, but I guess hardware limits etc.

I got 4000G from attempting the removal, so that was a nice windfall.

6 Likes

Funny how epilepsy didn’t exist in the 90’s. Here I am, in my dark office, playing Xenogears, getting flashbanged every 2 seconds.

6 Likes

Keeping my grumbling to myself but for the record I’ve ended up sticking to club pace because I need to be prodded to keep going and having that weekly poke helps. Mainly just dropping in to say, as an insult to injury kind of thing, I sure did roll the get nothing result.

6 Likes
Week 12

I got nothing either!

I really liked the prison district. Very Midgard slum-esque. Nice mood, a lot of cute details. I wish we were more in control of the story instead of stumbling from scripted event to scripted event. I guess that’s just how Fei must be feeling too…

They even have trains! And I got to feed a dog!

Some really great visuals, feels like some 70s experimental scifi movie:

No idea what those people were talking about, but as long as I understand the immediate stakes of the plot (winning the tournament to get a pardon this case) I try not to worry too much about the large scale stuff. I can recognize JRPG pseudo-intellectual bullshit in any language!

Not sure why they felt the need to “furiganize” that:

Estelle-tier clueless moment:

6 Likes

New week!

3 Likes

Finished this week today…I’m catching up finally.

Wk12


I wonder if this was Fei? Because I don’t believe we’ve seen Vanderkam since Grahf gave him power or whatever.


Does he (he’s the Kislev king right? I’m not the only one who thinks he gives dwarf vibes am I?) knows that the “pirate” is Bart, the rightful ruler of Aveh? Also there’s a chest in this room…future area???

Grahf is meddling in Kislev affairs huh…


What kind of idiot messes with their doctor?

At least they’re nice enough to do their initiation by a save point…? What ARE these “memory cubes” to the people in this world, because they seem to exist and can collect information…?

we blew up


The anti-Morgana


I kind of believe him…Citan please don’t betray us. You’re currently my fav.

AOE zone out when the talking heads ramble?

6 Likes
Week 12

He is addressed as 総統閣下, which was also used for Führer once upon a time… the English translation localizes this as Kaiser. ジークムント is a demihuman, pointed ears in the portrait are a giveaway.

They found unconscious フェイ in the cockpit of ヴェルトール, which they said was stolen by Gebler from the 11th Development Base and had fallen into pirate hands.

To me it was a bit of a surprise how well ジークムント understands Kislev’s position, foregoing the opportunity to attack despite the setback for Aveh & Gebler forces. 「かいらいのシャーカーン」. I love the idiom 関の山.

Yet another new ship and a passenger that offers help to the ruler of Kislev.


They didn’t insist on getting anything out of it, but now that ジークムント mentioned it, she asks them to move the gear & pilot they seized to D-block… for yet unknown reasons.

Watching that broken film on repeat… yeah.

Haha, rest of the four got those replaceable sprites, but スザーン has this amazing reaper design.

There is just so much kind of unnecessary extra detail in every city in this game… I love it. The welder working on the gear in the background, chef’s kiss. The train that goes through the city. Midgar vibes indeed.

I would’ve read it ほんき without the furigana, so job well done here. :face_with_tongue: I’ve heard this っす style of speech many times before, but didn’t realize it goes as far back as 90s. Someone once described it as something that “cool kids” use, so it must be cool kids who are now pushing 40-50 in age.

兄貴 hits different than “bro”, I’m sorry…

ハマー speaks exactly like ウェッジ from FFVII.

I got the premonition of a destroyed city as well. I honestly do not understand why they added any other outcome here – playing with a bomb collar is dumb – and especially why pay variable amount of money as a reward. You can’t get the 5000 payout unless you really deliberate and sleep on it, which I find extra pointless.

In other news! I have a new hobby: decompiling PSX games. I found a few people had started working on Xenogears already, so I’ll join their effort (although they’ve started on the US version for now)… It will take some time, but maybe we can produce source code that compiles to the exact binary shipped with Xenogears. Check decomp.dev & https://decomp.me/preset/171 for more details.

5 Likes

How is it possible to end up with the same binary? Do you have access to the exact version of the compiler used to generate the original?

3 Likes

Well, we guess we do. gcc 2.7.2-psx + maspsx, compiler flags -O2 -G8 -g2 seems to produce identical binaries. You can take a look at something like https://decomp.me/scratch/pJprQ to get a taste.

Now if only C89 wasn’t such a horrible language LOL. The real art to this isn’t “get exact same assembly”, it’s to get all the way to readable C which could have been written by the devs… much harder than just “matching” a “scratch”.

3 Likes

Oh ok, nice. The optimizers back then weren’t as good, which I feel is both a good and a bad news for a project like this one…

3 Likes

At least I’m learning the ins and outs of mid-90s RISC & R3000 in particular… stuff like pipeline hazards we just don’t need to care about anymore.

“How do I make the compiler generate some NOPs here?”

It’s rather amazing that this works at all. They’re just about to complete Silent Hill.

3 Likes

Yeah MIPS 1 is a mess of NOPs, between load delays and branch delays…

I think MIPS2 removed branch delays at least. Which I learned because I tried to build some Rust for the PS1 like 10 years ago and back then LLVM didn’t go before MIPS2, so tried that and it sort of worked until I tried calling an external function and the toolchain would ignore the branch delay…

2 Likes