ゼノギアス // Week 36 // FINALÉ

[Voi]

ゼノギアス // Week 36 // FINALÉ

Week 36	2026 July 11
Last Week	Week 35
Home Thread	ゼノギアス

Ending Point
Credit Roll

Visitable locations:

• Taura’s House/トーラの家
• Anima Relic 1
• Anima Relic 2
• Snowfield Hideout/ 雪原アジト
• Nortune (Kislev)
• Lighthouse
• Deus – large island SSE of Snowfield Hideout
• Duneman Isle/ サンドマンズ島

Gameplay

• Just keep heading down Deus. From here on it’s mostly Gear battling, so chara equipment doesn’t matter so much. If you have speed shoes, equip them ! Ether doubler on Ether-based characters, etc.
• There is an exit from Deus near the final save point, if you want to leave to level/upgrade/ect. Talk to the shopbot East of the save/party points to leave, but I think you have to traverse the dungeon again to get back.
• You can bump into the spheres surrounding the final boss to fight side bosses to lower the strength of the main boss. Up to you. There’s a nearby party selector you can use after each battle, so the game is clearly hinting at using the entire party to whittle down the boss and leaving Deus to Fei. You can even swap out Fei. It’s not subtle. If you are limited on equipment, you can freely unequip one character/gear and equip another to rotate good equipment.

Endgame Tips

• Speed Shoes on foot replace booster in Gears + Holy Pendent extends Gear’s Hypermode from 3 turns to 6. GREAT in Gears.
• Power Crisis can really amp up the power of Deathblows in sticky situations (like fighting Dragons…)
• Cash: Equip Trader Card and head to the Anima Dungeon #2, then fight the Croaker Tribes. You’ll get six Scales for each battle; sell them at Kislev at the B-Info store in Nortune or where the Ygg IV used to be (blue marker).
  Cash: You can sell extra Golden Vests/Hoods you can farm hear the Snoy Hideout for ~2900G each.
• EXP: Equip Hercules Ring, fight in the lower levels of Deus (not yet!!) to fight Power Seraphs near the Repair Bot (applies next week, we’re not heading there yet)
• If you get the super powerful engine for Fei’s gear that lowers fuel to 1000, you can equip the Z Charge restore (500 on charge) + the GNRS50 (50% increase in power) to body most things. GNRS50 stack as well.

Walkthrough
English Guide Ctrl+F WK60
Japanese Guide

Vocab

	Script	JPDB
CH62	Here	Here

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

• Oh, so NOW the gears can fly/hover…
• The end! What did you think?

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

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

[Akashelia]

The end

Loved the free falling into the laser beam tunnel
I would almost play a game with just that xD

Then I arrived to the boss(es) thanks to the help of the guide.
I made an attempt at the 4 mini bosses before the boss and barely survived one of them. As I feared, I was doomed and would probably not beat the game.
Then I could see two paths in front of me:

• dropping the game right here
• using hours to go back and grind, make money, try to equip better weapons and accessories

I didn’t want to do either of those things

Then I remembered this post in week 6 from simias…

@simias

Have fun staying poor.

(side note: I like how I remembered that post but not what happened in the game last week xD)
This made me think, if there are some tricks you can use to get some money, maybe there are some tricks that can help me win these fights…

And that’s when the third path opened itself to me: CHEATING

…Honestly, some of those things have been so annoying in this game, that instead of feeling bad for doing it, I only feel bad that I haven’t done it before

So, I activated the cheats "Infinite fuel during combat"s, and “Gears are healed up after combat”. The first one would have probably be enough, the second one was just a bit convenient. No infinite health or damage though, so it still felt like I had to fight a bit myself :x
Got through all the fights. Was easy enough but not a piece of cake, so kuddos to everyone who wins without the cheats, that will make me VERY impressed!

The ending animation was sweet.
And then this screen:

Wait what? where are the first 4 episodes? xD

Anyway, as crazy as it is, that’s it, IT IS DONE NOW, WOW! I wonder what I will do with my life from tomorrow (play FF4 probably), but in the meantime…

… Review time

The story at the beginning of the game was easy enough to follow: very much centered around Fei, who is about to witness the girl he loved get married to someone else, unknown backstory, then he killed everyone (!) but not on purpose, then people wanted him to fight and he resited, until he wanted to be in too, that was pretty interesting. But then it became too complex and a bit too hard to follow. Not only trying to figure out who wanted what in this world, who is coming from where, who is commanding who, and then in the end everyone became everyone or has been someone else and that was super confusing too xD.
Of course the fact that it is in Japanese doesn’t help as I am still far from fluent (also without the script on the side and sometimes the English playthrough, I wouldn’t have understood much), and the book club format (it has a lot of plus sides) has also this big downside that you play the game in fragmented sessions, and for me I find it harder to keep track of what’s happening or remember what happened more than six months ago. So I guess I can’t comment too much on how I liked the story because of that, for me it was mainly very complex and confusing…

I also didn’t always enjoy combat (I prefer non Gear than Gear combat, up until Elly was unleashed, but that’s also because I didn’t know how to heal in Gear for 95% of the game ), but I definitely didn’t get the most out of all the items / equipment / accessories / weapons we got and that would have probably helped (again, complex and confusing? :x)

There were also some very creative bosses. During my playthrough, I was sometimes getting annoyed at the weirdness because I just wanted to complete my assignment for the week, but I imagine being a kid in the 2000s’ with lots of time and no internet, must have been fun to try and figure out how to beat the game (and maybe learn how to use the items and accessories, not like me!).

Despite those things I had a good time playing the game! It had a lot of amazing camera work and nice scenery / locations with great moods.
And while it felt very serious plot wise, at the same it had so many fun / goofy moments which I loved. To only name a few: Mason’s rescue and failed goofy escape at the beginning of the game, being drunk at the festival, getting best ship only to have Bart shooting it down, playing hide and seek with kids, the Gears dangling on a chain in the Babel tower, the Chuu Chuu battling the hardest boss, etc. Not to mention the platforming xD

All in all I enjoyed playing the game and having the weekly discussions, not sure I would have played it all by myself!
Shoutout especially:

• @Voi for an amazing job at leading the club, providing the structure, making the threads organized and easy to find the important info for the gameplay
• @Sasabonsam for playing along with me till the end crossing fingers that you’ll manage fine the last bosses!
• @eagleflo for the insightful comments and many explanations,
• everyone else who played along at some point but has dropped since! not blaming you, this game sure wasn’t easy

Anyways, I’ll stop there, this post is not a level-60 post celebration and probably doesn’t deserve such a long post, even though participating in this club did take almost as long as some people take for completing Wanikani xD

[eagleflo]

I’m going to catch up soon! Now that you’re finished, you can enjoy Xenogears Perfect Works, the 300+ page official companion book that has tons of background material and explains the planned arc for Episodes I-VI:

Xenogears Perfect Works: The Real Thing : Squaresoft : Free Download, Borrow,...

No pressure on reading the entire thing, just flip around casually if you like.

[Akashelia]

Funny you just linked to this, now that I also finished FF3 I was going to have a look to at FF Ultimania and see what they write about FF3

[Sasabonsam]

We did it, we read all of Xenogears in Japanese

This week’s section

@Akashelia

I made an attempt at the 4 mini bosses before the boss and barely survived one of them. As I feared, I was doomed and would probably not beat the game.

Oof, sorry Akashelia, I really thought it wouldn’t be so bad. Thank goodness for cheats You made it, well done!!

The tunnel of lasers was pretty fun yeah, the maze it drops you into not so much. By the end I was running from encounters just to avoid the halo attack that half the enemies were throwing

The stuff I’d collected for my team thankfully managed to get me through the Deus bosses alright. Because I’d forgotten to outfit the rest of the crew I said screw strategy and bum rushed them all with my mains. That fuel sucking floor decal that you can’t use combos on was kind of annoying! Cut it a little close with the main Deus because of that, but hey I lived.

Forget the snake that eats its own tail, we have giant snake ミャン as the hotter and sexier symbol of self-destruction. It’s funny that this is the first of two club games I’m finishing this week that has an ouroboros as the final boss, though. This is my second ‘have hope for the future and rely on each other’ protagonist-antagonist debate in that time span, too. Oh jrpgs.

I had to read the script for the final FMV because so much of it was lost to the background chorus. But! That meant I had time and energy to notice that カレルレン’s signature headband is exempt from the mindscape clothing ban.

Aaand, the end. Elly’s reunited with the team, humanity gets another chance to start over

Thanks so much @Voi for organizing the club and putting these threads up every week!! It’s been a ton of fun revisiting this weird and complicated story in Japanese. I didn’t realize how difficult the reading was going to be when we started but it was fantastic learning experience. I feel like I can read anything now, after all of that!

I don’t know how obvious I was about it throughout the club’s runtime, but I love this game. Some of that is from pure nostalgia sure, but the level of detail and thoughtfulness that went into exploring its themes was really unlike anything I’d experienced at the time it came out. Also I thought the robots and the deathblow system were extremely cool. I was like 11, ok. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to say that it had a major impact on my tastes as an adult, too. Give me this pixelated aesthetic along with a plot that’s as much a tragic, Escher-like puzzle as it is an adventure story any day

Thank you too @Akashelia for following along with me all this time! It’s been a pleasure and an honor and I’ll see you over in the FF4 threads soon, lol.

@eagleflo and @Voi I’ll be looking forward to more of your thoughts!

[Akashelia]

Yay, congrats must be feeling so nice!!
Was super nice to have your point of view of someone who really liked the game, made me like it more too and see the good sides

[Voi]

Aaaand done!

So I definitely rage quit yesterday at that octagonal tower area haha. It’s maybe the worst area in the entire game, although thankfully no enemies. I may or may not have followed along a video in the end…I would not have thought the dial things were switches or that the white lights on the back of the pillars were jumpable…

LMAO Bart: lets just bum rush it and be done. Honey I didn’t get trader card, I am not that powerful…

I don’t know if I’ve said this, but the boss music is my favorite.

…I wonder if Wavey knew that there’d be significant backlash and if they cared after being imprisoned for eons. And now that they’re gone there’s no ether power anymore either. Except maybe Fei, given his contact with Wavey.

(Also blah, flashing lights again)

Wormhole out of nowhere! And no clothes allowed, except Fei’s hairband and Krelians headband.

I do wonder if Wavey will go back to being part of a collective consciousness like before, or if something new will be sparked…another game maybe.

Krelian and Elly out here making sure we understand the core debate of the game before credit role.

I’m not following the logic that Krelian had to continue with his plan to go to the upper dimension Elly was saying?

Nice to see the planet recovering at the end! Not, uh, sure about humanity as a whole though.

Unfortunately the disc 2 really hurt the game–maybe if they’d spent the time on battling getting the core game built out things would have been different (I’m being mostly factious here but this is something of a pattern with Takahashi…). There is lots of character development that is critical to the point being made and the story told that fall completely flat because we are only told and not shown the progression. The non-Elly main cast also fell to the wayside, which was unfortunate. I’d mentioned it before but even a few simple text box additions would have built that out much better.

They could have had scenes if you visit Billy’s orphanage, of Bart addressing the survivors of his kingdom and leading them to the crashed Shevat, of any of the Solaris characters working with Shevat to set aside differences to make a workable refugee camp with supplies. Since Rico apparently knows his heritage, and also his resolution seeing what happened to Hammer, have him step up for Kislev and the mutated people in general, etc etc. Even just summaries with stills would have gone a long way. Ah well.

On a personal note, the sudden influx of highly technical text was super difficult. I had to look most of it up and remember almost none of it.

Overall a very ambitious game, with some very fascinating world building, but very poorly executed. I’m glad I played it! It’s very interesting to see the beginning of the Xeno series and the origin of some core philosophy that will evolve through the various Xeno games.

One thing I really love is the complex story, world building, and character backstories that exist in the Xeno games. These sorts of epic stories are really my jam and its clear a LOT of thought went into them and is hidden under the surface.

I think I’ll give the Perfect Works translation a skim tomorrow and post my thoughts on that too.

@Akashelia

didn’t know how to heal in Gear for 95% of the game

I am still impressed by this btw!

@Sasabonsam

read the script for the final FMV because so much of it was lost to the background chorus

the audio mixing of cutscenes in this game is terrible, good thing there weren’t many