ゼノギアス // Week 4 // Chapters 9 & 10

[Voi]

ゼノギアス // Week 4 // Chapters 9 & 10

Week 4	2025 November 22
Last Week	Week 3
Next Week	Week 5
Home Thread	ゼノギアス

Ending Point
When you enter a cave in your gear, with a nearby save point.

Screenshot

Gameplay
Gameplay notes: None

Unique Missables

Note that it is possible to skip an entire area, but none of the items are unique. Once you wake up in the transport ship, if you go right from the starting room and take the ladder up (near the room with a Survival Tent/サバイバルテント), you skip floor two.

"FMVs”

Chapter 09 (after a boss)

『誰だっ！』

『誰？……そうだ…俺はお前をよく知っている……お前は殺した……あの人を……』

『……あの人？』

『いや、殺したのは……』

『違う……ボクじゃない……ボクは……』

『……臆病者 お前だよ』

Chapter 10

『我らが一つとなれば！』

『このような形で貴様と再会するとはな……これも運命＜さだめ＞か 皮肉なものだ』

『だが……こやつだけは渡すわけにはゆかん……』

『ふっ……』

『たとえ……この身、砕けようともな！』

Walkthrough

English Guide Ctrl+F WK08 (the guide skipped a chapter number last week but not content) to go directly to relevant part of guide.

Japanese Guide

Vocab

	Script	JPDB	Renshuu
CH9	Here	Here	Here
NPC	Here	Here	Here
CH10	Here	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

• What do you think of our first non-tutorial town?

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!

[simias]

Who needs じしょ when you have したん？

[Saimin]

Whew, this was an unusually long segment, wasn’t it? At least time wise. But no problem, it was fun, and exciting story stuff. A lot happened this segment.

Week 4 (spoilers)

So, the bad guy just wants us to kill a goddess or something. Easy.

Shitan definitely knows a lot and apparently he has talked to a divine messenger or something? Or was that a dream/vision?
The religious themes are definitely coming in hard.

Not sure what else to say as a lot was hinted at but we probably don’t have enough information on most things to really figure them out, but I’m definitely intrigued to see where this is going.

Btw, Weltall is German for (outer) space, and Graf is German for count (like count of Monte Cristo)

Love the cinematography of the guy standing on a gear standing on a rock in front of the red full moon.

Oh yeah, I also loved the cinematography of the desert (beautifully done and vast), the tilted insides of the ship where you need to run against the current, and climbing the crane to the gear. It’s really almost like a Star Wars movie or a mecha anime, well done and big production values.

[Voi]

@Saimin

unusually long segment

It’s certainly our longest yet, clocking in at 84 minutes for a non-blind, native player, vs last week’s 61 min, and the first two weeks 45 min! Character count wise it is only slightly more than last week’s (9,888 vs 8,884) though.

Edit: I forgot to add the NPCs in, which brings it to ~16,838 characters.

[eagleflo]

Yup, felt like a bigger read than the last few weeks – but also because we are introduced to many new characters and get a wild amount of new information.

Hang in there and read slowly if need be, these chapters lay the basis for a lot to come. But bear in mind that we still don’t get the full picture, so it’s also ok to be a bit bewildered by the end of this week.

Spoilers and screenshots

This game just doesn’t miss any chances to introduce new giant mechanical vehicles. This time it’s a giant flying saucer. I loved the perspective shift all the way from フェイ to the saucer. Techwise we are quite far from the pastoral idyll of ラハン.

グラーフ standing on a mech gear standing on a cliff with the moon as a backdrop. Quite the entrance. This is the guy that carried フェイ to the village three years ago.

Many JRPGs end with killing a God, but here we have it right from the start.

The translated version of this screenshot has become very famous when criticising JP->EN translations.

“My father?
You mean my dad?
You know my father!?”

It just doesn’t sound so tautological in Japanese for some reason… but yeah, that’s what it says. Translation is hard.

In a flashback scene we get introduced to the 天帝. This was translated as “Emperor” in the English release, but I feel like this word is one rank above words like 帝王、皇帝、天皇. (According to JMdict it refers to the capital G God.)

This game loves to emphasise things by giving them furigana, and here we get to see that it’s not うんめい as usual, it’s さだめ. I assume picking さだめ here carries some additional connotations for a native speaker – I’m not at that level yet. If I had to venture a guess, it would be that さだめ has a more constrictive nuance.

By the way, 福音ふくいん literally means the Christian gospel; teachings and revelations of Christ. Also, the kanji for とき is actually 劫, こう, which I know only from the game of 囲碁 where it refers to being able to recapture a stone over and over. Seems very purposeful here…

I was 0% surprised that シタン knew シグルド ahead of time, by name. They both seem to be like handlers to their respective gear pilots. シグルド slips out シタン’s true (?) name, ヒュウガ. They both seem to feel powerless as to what has been set in motion… good bit of foreshadowing once again.

I felt like I could understand バルト much better in Japanese than I ever did in English. Somehow the mannerisms and “template” are now much more understandable to me, including the whole friendship via battle shtick as we meet them.

The training wheels are coming off and we are getting properly into it now.

Hearing some of these songs after such a long time is such a nostalgia shot! Love the boss music.

[Daisoujou]

A lot happened

Forest, desert, caves, we’re really speedrunning the general RPG locations. We’re kinda speedrunning everything, the pacing is so fast. I saw the mention of a poll soon on club speed and honestly, based on the last couple weeks, while I’m usually advocating for going faster (and in the sense of feasibility I could totally handle it), I’m starting to lean towards liking this pace because it feels like a good chunk of things for people to talk about after the week already.

To try to jog my own memory: enter the new town → no parts for the fancy prototype military mech → we hear what Fei wants and Citan convinces him they need to move the mech because people will be around looking for it → follow him into the desert → encounter mechs who are shot by the mysterious villain who knew (killed?) Fei’s father → worm wrestling → taken prisoner by soldiers on a transport ship → Citan talks to God about the garden of Eden and their 5 year plan to find and revive god (not the same one I guess!) → pirates attack the ship → fight the pirate who values human life → fall into a cave together. Phew.

You can really tell how many RPGs were aiming to be the vehicle for big stories and flashy presentation. I still love the eye they have for setting up scenes.

I also was happy I remembered the reading あたう there.

Pretty in its own industrial way.

I tend to not like deserts in videogames, weird aesthetic hangup I have, but this one isn’t too bad. Part of it is spending extended time in an environment characterized by having a whole lot of nothing, but we don’t spend much time there at all.

I hope everyone else discovered this guy. I wanna bring him along.

I dunno if you all tend to be super thorough with new towns in RPGs, but personally I’ve never quite been that way. I like to walk through most of it, maybe check most buildings and talk to a good number of people to get the feel of the general local vibe, but chasing everyone down tends to be a little much for me. I imagine this game with its slightly disorienting camera and people moving around would be really hard on conversation completionists.

Anyway, it’s certainly hard to guess much at what’s going on but we’ve blown the scale to about as monumental as you possibly can right away so the potential is exciting. I think the game is doing the parts that it excels at very well, though the combat and exploration feels a little more along to compliment that experience, at least up to this stage. Which, I’m fine with games taking whichever focus they want in theory, just the feeling it’s giving me so far with how limited and brief the environments have been. Combat gave me enough deathblows this week to be entertained for now even if it’s fundamentally not asking much from me heh.

Online in a quick spoiler free search about pace cause I was curious what I’d find, people are calling it a slow burn! I dunno if that’s a poorly worded expression of not liking the ratio of the gameplay to story reading maybe, but this pace has been, to me, extremely fast. As stated above our club has has been playing an amount (very) loosely hovering around an hour of game per week and we’re having a dozen plot hooks vaguely dangled in front of us and getting in mortal danger multiple times a week.

@eagleflo

I assume picking さだめ here carries some additional connotations for a native speaker – I’m not at that level yet. If I had to venture a guess, it would be that さだめ has a more constrictive nuance.

Yeah I mean I don’t REALLY know but that’s the general vibe I’ve gotten from seeing it in things I’ve read, if nothing else it’s a much more stiff formal kind of term which in itself gives it a certain kind of weight.

[simias]

I just realized that 劫＜とき＞ and 連盟＜さだめ＞ was meant as furigana. I’m used to parentheses being used for that…

[simias]

I presume that this week feels a bit longer because there’s more gameplay and also you can spend quite a while exploring the town and talking with the locals (which I presume isn’t part of the 9,888 chars?)

W4

I really love the use of 3D this week. In town, in the desert… The camerawork would not be possible with pre-rendered backgrounds.

I also like that the areas are clearly designed with that in mind, parkouring through the town was amusing if ultimately pointless:

That’s badass too:

I also like that Fei pushed back a bit on Citan’s plan this week, that’s what I was missing last week. I guess I had to be a bit patient.

The sequence where Citan gets into the buggy and leaves and you’re immediately supposed to run after him is a bit odd however. I actually circled back through the town waiting for something to happen as exploring a huge desert on foot, with battles ongoing all over the place involving gigantic mechs, didn’t seem like a sound plan.

I heard somebody in town mention that the desert people had 潜砂艦 and I immediately got very excited for that, seemed like a cool concept.

Exploring the desert was pretty nice though, I liked not having any music, just the rustling of the sand. Very different mood from FFVII’s desert sequence (which I also enjoy). They managed to handle the scale pretty nicely I think.

“Fei, this is a JRPG, did you really think that you wouldn’t be killing god eventually? Let’s not waste time we only have two discs.”

光栄？栄光？

I find that in general I find that the plot of JRPGs must be considered on two different levels: the “moment to moment” story and the overarching plot.

The main, high level plot gets murkier and murkier with more and more players introduced with unclear motives. I’m not a huge fan of that honestly, I don’t really engage with “Borzur asks Maratina to do shady stuff for Lord Gozor which involves the empire of Baraban and a plot to assassinate the prophet Kazorin” stuff. It’s just a whole lot of namedropping with no clear stakes and I lose interest really quick.

The “moment to moment” stuff is good though, it’s always fairly clear where you need to go and what you have to do, the action moves fast and you go from setpiece to setpiece with very little filler. And you still get some time to explore towns at your leisure.

[simias]

@Daisoujou

I dunno if you all tend to be super thorough with new towns in RPGs, but personally I’ve never quite been that way. I like to walk through most of it, maybe check most buildings and talk to a good number of people to get the feel of the general local vibe, but chasing everyone down tends to be a little much for me. I imagine this game with its slightly disorienting camera and people moving around would be really hard on conversation completionists.

Yeah I definitely explored most (all?) areas but didn’t attempt to trigger every single line of dialogue. I enjoyed the small wordbuilding elements like the pump room (obviously important in a desert) and the guy telling you it’s used to feed the Church’s 工房. And indeed you can see the thick pipe connecting this building to the big church dome nearby.

@eagleflo

By the way, 福音ふくいん literally means the Christian gospel; teachings and revelations of Christ. Also, the kanji for とき is actually 劫, こう, which I know only from the game of 囲碁 where it refers to being able to recapture a stone over and over. Seems very purposeful here…

I don’t know if you meant the word on its own or the kanji in general, but 永劫 is semi-common in my experience. I didn’t know that’s where Go’s “ko” came from though! Flashback to 20+ years ago when I played some Go… Fun connection.

Also I see in your screenshots that the game holds up pretty well even upscaled. That’s not a given for games of that era. It does make the 3D world/2D sprites clash even more though.

@eagleflo

The translated version of this screenshot has become very famous when criticising JP->EN translations.

It’s weird that they even felt the need to stick so close to the original script here, and even put more emphasis on the word choice for some reason. I feel like “Father…? My dad? You know my dad?!” would do the job just fine while not making it sound like Fei just discovered the word “father”.

[Voi]

@simias

isn’t part of the 9,888 chars

Yeah I goofed and forgot to add the NPC character count into my spreadsheet…my bad everyone. That’s an additional ~6950 characters, bringing the total to ~16,838. I’ll do a scrub later tonight to see if I made that mistake anywhere else, and edit the home post appropriately.

[simias]

It’s no big deal, I think it makes sense to focus on mandatory text for this purpose.

[simias]

By the way regarding pace, I agree with @Daisoujou. On one hand I could go faster, on the other it’s true that the weeks are already pretty dense with things to talk about.

It’s not like the FF1 club where some weeks the main event was “we crossed a bridge”…

[Voi]

Pacing poll is up on the home thread! It’ll be up until December 4th.

[Voi]

Being lazy on my vacation and breaking my play sessions into 2-3 chunks.

Dazil

Citan and that church guy sure were polite to each other. And don’t think I didn’t see that he used われわれ with him but 我々 with Fei just before!! I’m sure it implies…something…? about his character interactions but I don’t know enough to say what. I do know I’ve seen children speech often written without kanji to contrast with adult speech but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Also non-military gears are a thing?? Interesting.

Also interested in seeing Fei start to assert his opinions! Citan is probably right that the gear needs to be moved away from the village to keep it from becoming a battlefield again. I also thought it was interesting he didn’t oppose Fei’s wish to eventually return to the village to help rebuild, even though he did seem to have reservations. I’m tentatively in the “Citan is well meaning” camp.

(also LOL at the guy in the corner definitely listening in on what has to be a sus conversation from his view).

I ALSO did not miss Citan also being suspiciously informed about the latest Gear models for both キスレブ and アヴェ, nor that fact that ヴェルトール is apparently a top of the line new model…that he knows how to fix.

Anyway Big Joe is my favorite NPC of the region so far.

Onto the desert! Tomorrow.

[simias]

Your comment about the spelling of われわれ reminded me that there’s a kid in one of the houses that speaks in a weird nonstandard mix of hiragana and katakana, it’s the first time I see that.

[Saimin]

Pics or it didn’t happen

[simias]

遺跡を発掘するために大人の人がたくさん来るんだよー。大きな「ギア」に乗ってさー。

I guess it’s meant to convey that those are unfamiliar words for the kid and maybe he pronounces them awkwardly? For words like 遺跡 or ギア that makes some sense, but ため or 人? No idea. Also notice the おおきな→おっきな

[eagleflo]

Yeah, this raised my eyebrows as well. Maybe he is speaking those words somehow awkwardly? There is some meaning behind it… there must be…

At least it fits the trope “children don’t speak in kanji”.

[simias]

While visiting the houses looking for that kid I found a different one with an even less coherent speech pattern:

It starts with the same イセキをハックツ and きすれぶ in hiragana for some reason but then you have normal “adult” kanji usage.

[eagleflo]

Maybe this kid is already familiar with some 教育漢字?