@Akashelia I’m finally able to access my main computer again, I’ll send you the info this weekend. That will leave you only one week to filthy preplay.
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Cool, if I manage to make it work I’ll report here that I’m ready to join the club 
I have never played any Xenogears ever, so that could be fun.
If people are good at using spoiler tags, and to specify if it’s a spoiler for the whole game or this week content for example, I won’t be too bad at filthy preplaying.
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), I’m up and running so count me in!
I’m curious what are others’ stories with Xenogears? Have you played this one before? Have you played other Xenogears? Which one is your favorite?
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In preparation of the Xenogears club, allow me to give you the official, objectively correct list of video settings to use in RetroArch:
No shaders
The (old?) default: non-integer bilinear
I don’t know if it has changed over the past few years but RetroArch used to default to non-integer-scale, bilinear filtered output:
This looks attrocious, especially on a big screen, and even if you decide to ignore more advanced shaders I highly recommend switching to unfiltered integer scale. And by “highly recommend” I mean that I’m going to bully you relentlessly if you post screenshots with the filtering on.
Nearest-pixel integer scale
You can switch to unfiltered integer scale by going into “Settings” → “Video” → “Scaling” and then turning on “Integer Scale” and turning off “Bilinear Filtering”:
Look, all the blurry mess is gone and we get some crisp pixels instead.
Now if we want to go beyond this we want to go down the shader rabbit hole.
Shaders
I recommend downloading the slang shader packs (you can do this straight from RetroArch using the “Online Updater” option and telling it to get the packages. Once this is done you can select the “Shaders” option from the “Quick Menu” and load ready-to-use presets that you can then tweak if you want:
There are a lot of presets to play with, the CRT filters are, unsurprisingly, in the “crt/” folder, although there also are a few interesting filters in the “presets/” folder. Here are a few recommendations (note that all these screenshots are compressed for these forums and are therefore not really true-to-life since CRT shaders don’t compress very well):
crt/crt-easymode-halation
A fairly lightweight filter (both in terms of computer resources and in terms of how much it tweaks the image):
crt/crt-hyllian-fast (and other crt-hyllian-* variants)
Another fairly lightweight filter:
crt/crt-royale
This is a very good and very configurable CRT shader, but you need a decent GPU and a high-resolution monitor (ideally 4K) to really benefit from it:
You can configure a huge number of parameters in the “Shader Parameters” submenu if you feel like tweaking things.
crt/crt-royale-ntsc-composite / crt/crt-royale-pal-r57shell
When I want to get the true 90’s experience, I use this shader that adds composite signal artifacting on top of the CRT shading:
Color bleed everywhere!
bezel/Mega_Bezel/Presets/MBZ__0__SMOOTH-ADV
If you feel like giving your GPU a workout you can opt for these extremely heavy shaders that simulate a full PVM monitor, bezel and curvature included:
I personally find this a bit gimmicky but to each their own.
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I only ever played this one and no other Xeno* game. I also never finished it (IIRC I lost my save because back then I never did any backups and my PC died…)
I definitely remember being impressed by the scope and production value of the game.
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Village chief might change shaders as much as he wants, but it wouldn’t answer the question of who is the owner 
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お主（おぬし） is just a polite and I guess somewhat archaic form of address, the masked stranger is entrusting him with a kid so I don’t think “owner” is appropriate here…
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Ah, sorry, I didn’t know the context 
But the point stays – changing shaders won’t unmask the masked man!
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Who knows, maybe there’s slavery in the world of Xenogears…
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I first played Xenoblade Chronicles 2, since I wanted a JRPG to play on the Switch. It’s odd for me given that I almost always play from the first game, but at the time Xenoblade was only available for the Wii so I skipped it. I regret that now given that there are explicit story links but I didn’t know that going in. Even still, I quite enjoyed it.
After that I found out about the larger Xeno series and decided I wanted to play them all eventually. So I played Xenogears using my PSP. This was after starting learning Japanese but I didn’t feel like my Japanese would’ve been good enough to play it at the time so I played in English. I found it to be a very interesting game but could detect that the English script had some of the classic translation jank that was common to the era. It was a fun time - though while I was playing my cat who I’d grown up with passed away so it kind of became my coping mechanism for a little bit. I’m looking forward to re-experiencing the game in the original language
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It was one of those games never released in the EU alongside Chrono Cross that people on the early internet raved about relentlessly – there were multiple awesome fan sites hosted on Geocities etc. Someone whispered that it was darker than Final Fantasy VII, which sounded cool to teenager me. I had just watched 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (original TV series) for the first time, and mecha drew me in, but it was the psychological content that kept me raptured. I felt like I was experiencing something meant for adults, which was a joy in itself.
I never had a PSX with a mod chip so first bleem! and then ePSXe were the way to go, both very early PSX emulators. All sorts of artifacts didn’t bother me once the scale of the story revealed itself. This was a time of ambitious JRPGs one after another and I think Xenogears might have been the most ambitious out of them all.
It was around this time that I also first played / read Planescape: Torment, with English dictionary close at hand. I feel like with Final Fantasy VII I still struggled a bit with the text, but by this point I had no trouble – with content that I’d say is much harder and draws a lot from “real” psychology & philosophy. Aced both of those subjects later in upper secondary school thanks to these two games. (These references are amusingly on the nose in a 小島 秀夫 way, all the way to character names.)
There is also the pervasive theme and imagery of religion in this game, but let’s talk more about that when we encounter it.
Last time I was playing in a hurry, racing to see what’s ahead. This time I’ll take it slowly with the club, enjoying the sights.
Back then it didn’t really occur to me that I was playing a translation – the idea of being able to learn Japanese with their weird writing system was still a leap too far to even consider, so for me the English version was all that existed. Now I’m very eager to see just how much did I miss with the translation – this was a translation project from hell, I’ve later learned, even more so than {FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII}. I’m looking forward to comparing the English and Japanese scripts as we go on.
I’m a certified Disc 2 lover even in translation, can’t wait for the original. Approach it with open eyes and you may become one as well.
There are also some fears, obviously. The game mechanics were good for the time, but this genre has certainly had some gameplay tentpoles that have aged poorly. I’m sure I will be able to endure the random encounters – from my memory there are a couple of places with just a bewildering rate on top of a pretty high baseline. This might be the biggest challenge we collectively face.
I never played Xenosaga series (Namco didn’t even release them all in the EU), but Xenoblade Chronicles was unmistakably by 高橋 哲哉 and I’ve since played every Xenoblade entry (in English).
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I played Xenogears as a kid, but never finished it. Did that a lot with games back then. I have some vague memories of the kind of stuff I think I got stuck on, so I’m really curious to see if I’ll recognize that when we get there this time.
Despite not finishing it the game really drew me in. I think a ton of it was going over my head given my age at the time, but it had this appeal none the less. I recall a lot of ominously hypnotic cutscenes (for kid me) really gave it this mystique to me at the time. Excited to see how it lives up so many years later.
I made a gesture at starting the Xenosaga trilogy once many years ago but didn’t end up getting too far; I’ll have to do that too. A little while back I played the first Xenoblade Chronicles in Japanese and it was… decent. Bit of a mixed bag for me but with enough interesting points I’m still planning to go on and see the others. Right now I’ve been stalling for a little bit hoping they’ll release a patch to make Xenoblade 2 run at 60fps on the Switch 2.
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I don’t even know how much I will notice the difference to be honest, I’ve never been picky with how things look, but the bullying sounds scary so I had applied the changes 
Ouch! Sorry about your cat. Will be very interesting to revisit now.
I even learned today that Created by Tetsuya Takahashi and his wife Kaori Tanaka as a proposal for Final Fantasy VII, it was allowed to be developed as its own project, as Takahashi had worked already on FFIV, FFV and FFVI (source is Wikipedia).
Will be super fun to try and find the FF influence in the game.
Interesting, so a few of you will be finishing it for the first time, nice!
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My friend let me borrow it but I didn’t get very far in (maybe 5 hours?). He raved about it (and a lot of other games he got me into), so based on his appraisal, I’m guessing it’s good.
Yes, Sailor Moon is the reason I know what halation means in English, my native language
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Nice, happy to see someone else that (almost) hasn’t played the game before 
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Psst. time to go over the first two sub-decks and hit a ton of ‘Add to front of review queue’ in jpdb.
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I just went ahead and added the whole deck to my list.
It’s number 6 in the queue though, and the highest number of unknown words so far, ouch
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Does it say that you already know 79% of the words? Because that seems pretty decent coverage already…
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For me 80% is when you’d get something out of the struggle. 90% is when it feels comfy. 92%+ feels breezy.
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