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I'm replaying Xenosaga. Mostly for the benefit of my girlfriend who's been growing more and more curious about the RPG genre as a whole (she never got into it much before now and is relying on me to show her a lot and talk to her about why I enjoy it), but it's also part of an ongoing, months long effort to re-examine my biggest fictional influences. Most of my current RP hiatus is spent studying my roots as a creator and doing a lot of writing. It's been cathartic. I've rediscovered the Lunar games, re-watched some of the Slayers, am looking back at old books and planning on other games and shows like Rozen Maiden and FF6 and maybe some Suikoden. A lot of stuff has crept into my own writing over the years and it's fun seeing exactly where all this may have come from.
We're not far along, we just started the other day, but it's bringing back a lot of memories. Good and bad ones. It's the game with the most history for me, both as the game itself and the fandom/hatedom surrounding it.
It's also going to be used as a case study for how media can influence someone and what any series can wind up meaning for anyone. It's not so much an essay on Xenosaga itself, but more of a essay on influences that just so happens to be using Xenosaga.
(And before I continue, let's not turn this into a Xenogears vs Xenosaga debate. Both sides need to lay this argument to sleep. It is one of the most legendary unsolved internet debates and will probably remain unsolved and I am not here to damn anything or anyone. I find it perfectly feasible to live enjoying both or at least agreeing to disagree. As I said, this is about influences, not me critically examining the series, though wile I'd like to at some point in time, that time is not now. Anyone attempting this argument now will be ignored right out. I don't care which side you're on, either.)
I was 17 years old when I got my PS2. It was the first system I owned just on my own and not shared amongst everyone, bought with my own summer job money. I was really starting to get into my PLAY ALL THE RPGS phase then, thanks to the PS1/PS2 eras being a big time for them and was hungry for anything I could get my hands on. I found an ad for Xenosaga by chance on a corkboard of a local coffee house and watched one whole commercial for it and sought it out as a rental. I had no idea what to expect going into it. Nobody told me and I'd never heard of nor played Xenogears beforehand so I was completely in the dark. Every now and again that's refreshing; be optimistic, take faith it'll be entertaining, and boot it up anyways. Especially in this day and age with the ubiquity of the internet and mass easily findable information, it's good to just not research before hand every now and again.
Maybe it was because I was 17. Maybe it's because I was going in blind. Maybe it's because before then everything I played didn't get to such a grand scope of things as it did. Maybe it was Yasunori Mitsuda's music. I just knew I was playing something special and wound up getting the game shortly after as a birthday gift and devoting countless hours and playthroughs to it. We also got the internet up permanently in my house around the same time as this, so naturally it was the first thing I sought out was likeminded fans. This lead to both the best and the worst online fandom experiences I'd ever have, ones that would continue for years. Yeah, I look back now and realize what a naive noobass I could be back then around it, but dammit, I was excited and young and dumb. We're all allowed this awkward phase.
Xenosaga brought with it my first sense of online community. Of friends. Of enemies. Of flame wars and in depth discussion. It was my home. Wherever Xenosaga was, I was home. It got me to use IRC and meet people like me of my age and just bullshit around all day. I am still on that same IRC server now talking to these same people almost every day. Sure, the majority of the ones we spoke to then drifted away for whatever reason, but there's the fact there's me and some dudes out there who became lifelong friends because of a video game. We've had our differences, but we're still good friends, and at any time we'll go "Hey remember when Xenosaga?" and get incredibly nostalgic.
This game made friendship happen. Genuine, truest friendship. While it also gave me some of the worst idiots I've ever argued with, they're long forgotten, or only remembered now and again to laugh at their follies, then we move on with life again.
I grew a bit older and so did the series. Episode 2 came out as I turned into legal adulthood and it helped me think about that as I shifted my mindset from that of a child to one of a responsible grownup. I had things to do now. People I should support. Shit, I need a career now and maybe college or some soulsearching and what if I wind up married and uggh this adult grownup stuff sucks and is confusing, I'm going back to my game. The majority of the protagonists and antagonists in it were still quite a bit older than me at that point, so they helped me think and see like an adult and sort out my mind.
Though it also sparked curiosity. Look at this game. It's using hard science, quantum physics, religion, philosophy, all this big adult stuff in it and what does it all mean? Well I suppose it's time to find out. And so I did. It brought with it a passion to learn more about my world and how people think and believe. I discovered a love of theology and abstract sciences because of this, areas of study I still devote myself to.
Years later, long after the series had ended, I even wound up reading the actual book Also Sprach Zarathustra. I was having a hard time sorting my brain out and admitting my faults, and I wound up reading it over the course of a few short days. The book had a few problems stemming from Nietzsche's own struggles with homosexuality, reflected in his version of his era's misogyny and his obvious heartbreak over Wagner with him railing against poets, but on the whole I found it an invaluable source of advice. Create your own virtues, dedicate yourself to them, become the best you can be for you and others past, present, and future. Don't disappoint your past or future selves now.
It was obvious the creators did their homework. They loved the series. They loved their fans. Despite all the trouble both Gears and Saga went through to be made, they did their best. There was love in every bit of it. I even had the guts to email Soraya Saga herself thanking her for being this amazing influence on me and that she was a hero to me; she replied back thanking me for my words and saying fans like me were her heroes in return. She drew me a picture of my favorite character, a piece I still have to this day. There's kindness and humaness to them not found in a lot of celebrities. Despite the criticisms launches against their creations, they remained gentle. That in and of itself inspired me to always do my research when creating and writing and to remember to be humble and kind to any fans I get.
The last game came out as I moved out of my parents' house with my grandmother to a whole other state. I was moved. I was growing up slowly. I was about 19 now and about ready to exit my teen years. This was it. I spent my time getting ready to see the series that had done this all to me end. I pre-ordered and waited, and once it got there, I played. And played. I only napped a bit here and there and refused to fully sleep until it ended. I dreaded it but I sought closure all at the same time. Not just closure for the game, but for myself. A few days later, it was done. I beat it as dawn rose one day, appropriately enough. I cried. Physical sobs, heaving on me, but also something else inside me cried then. I was moved, irrevocably so.
Childhood had ended for me with its endgame message of hope. Of accepting others' points of view, of trying to do the right thing, what the consequences of even that could be, and to just stand by your decisions and walk on to the future you make. It gave me friendship, inspired me own writing and habits, made me smarter and more studious and curious about our world, more accepting, and it helped me grow up at last. It's a game I can still bring up and bond with people over at random, be it because they love me for loving it or hate me for doing so, the other person and I are at least talking and making a connection of some kind. At least we're both feeling and experiencing something, and that's the most important thing to me.
Other series have impacted me hard. They've made me laugh or cry or nearly vomit in disgust. They've made undeniable marks on my own creations, but they mostly just did that; they stuck to my own creative work and not forcefully changing me beyond the need to be more heroic in real life.
Xenosaga is one of the rare few things I can say made me a better person because I should be.
I hope everyone can find something like this in their lives. No matter what the series is or how others feel about it, everyone should find something like this that they just feel this damn moved by. Be it a book, movie, cartoon, game, whatever it is, let it shake you. It's all equally powerful. Fiction is power, fiction is love, fiction is hate, fiction is where we find ourselves. Don't let anyone ever denounce the value we all find in this. It's why I too now wish to create and bring about these feelings in others; I care not for fame or money. I just hope I can stir such a revolution in someone else as thanks for having others bring it about in me.
This was a hard post to write, but in a good way. I actually cried a bit typing this all out. Those tears are proof of its mark in me, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
We're not far along, we just started the other day, but it's bringing back a lot of memories. Good and bad ones. It's the game with the most history for me, both as the game itself and the fandom/hatedom surrounding it.
It's also going to be used as a case study for how media can influence someone and what any series can wind up meaning for anyone. It's not so much an essay on Xenosaga itself, but more of a essay on influences that just so happens to be using Xenosaga.
(And before I continue, let's not turn this into a Xenogears vs Xenosaga debate. Both sides need to lay this argument to sleep. It is one of the most legendary unsolved internet debates and will probably remain unsolved and I am not here to damn anything or anyone. I find it perfectly feasible to live enjoying both or at least agreeing to disagree. As I said, this is about influences, not me critically examining the series, though wile I'd like to at some point in time, that time is not now. Anyone attempting this argument now will be ignored right out. I don't care which side you're on, either.)
I was 17 years old when I got my PS2. It was the first system I owned just on my own and not shared amongst everyone, bought with my own summer job money. I was really starting to get into my PLAY ALL THE RPGS phase then, thanks to the PS1/PS2 eras being a big time for them and was hungry for anything I could get my hands on. I found an ad for Xenosaga by chance on a corkboard of a local coffee house and watched one whole commercial for it and sought it out as a rental. I had no idea what to expect going into it. Nobody told me and I'd never heard of nor played Xenogears beforehand so I was completely in the dark. Every now and again that's refreshing; be optimistic, take faith it'll be entertaining, and boot it up anyways. Especially in this day and age with the ubiquity of the internet and mass easily findable information, it's good to just not research before hand every now and again.
Maybe it was because I was 17. Maybe it's because I was going in blind. Maybe it's because before then everything I played didn't get to such a grand scope of things as it did. Maybe it was Yasunori Mitsuda's music. I just knew I was playing something special and wound up getting the game shortly after as a birthday gift and devoting countless hours and playthroughs to it. We also got the internet up permanently in my house around the same time as this, so naturally it was the first thing I sought out was likeminded fans. This lead to both the best and the worst online fandom experiences I'd ever have, ones that would continue for years. Yeah, I look back now and realize what a naive noobass I could be back then around it, but dammit, I was excited and young and dumb. We're all allowed this awkward phase.
Xenosaga brought with it my first sense of online community. Of friends. Of enemies. Of flame wars and in depth discussion. It was my home. Wherever Xenosaga was, I was home. It got me to use IRC and meet people like me of my age and just bullshit around all day. I am still on that same IRC server now talking to these same people almost every day. Sure, the majority of the ones we spoke to then drifted away for whatever reason, but there's the fact there's me and some dudes out there who became lifelong friends because of a video game. We've had our differences, but we're still good friends, and at any time we'll go "Hey remember when Xenosaga?" and get incredibly nostalgic.
This game made friendship happen. Genuine, truest friendship. While it also gave me some of the worst idiots I've ever argued with, they're long forgotten, or only remembered now and again to laugh at their follies, then we move on with life again.
I grew a bit older and so did the series. Episode 2 came out as I turned into legal adulthood and it helped me think about that as I shifted my mindset from that of a child to one of a responsible grownup. I had things to do now. People I should support. Shit, I need a career now and maybe college or some soulsearching and what if I wind up married and uggh this adult grownup stuff sucks and is confusing, I'm going back to my game. The majority of the protagonists and antagonists in it were still quite a bit older than me at that point, so they helped me think and see like an adult and sort out my mind.
Though it also sparked curiosity. Look at this game. It's using hard science, quantum physics, religion, philosophy, all this big adult stuff in it and what does it all mean? Well I suppose it's time to find out. And so I did. It brought with it a passion to learn more about my world and how people think and believe. I discovered a love of theology and abstract sciences because of this, areas of study I still devote myself to.
Years later, long after the series had ended, I even wound up reading the actual book Also Sprach Zarathustra. I was having a hard time sorting my brain out and admitting my faults, and I wound up reading it over the course of a few short days. The book had a few problems stemming from Nietzsche's own struggles with homosexuality, reflected in his version of his era's misogyny and his obvious heartbreak over Wagner with him railing against poets, but on the whole I found it an invaluable source of advice. Create your own virtues, dedicate yourself to them, become the best you can be for you and others past, present, and future. Don't disappoint your past or future selves now.
It was obvious the creators did their homework. They loved the series. They loved their fans. Despite all the trouble both Gears and Saga went through to be made, they did their best. There was love in every bit of it. I even had the guts to email Soraya Saga herself thanking her for being this amazing influence on me and that she was a hero to me; she replied back thanking me for my words and saying fans like me were her heroes in return. She drew me a picture of my favorite character, a piece I still have to this day. There's kindness and humaness to them not found in a lot of celebrities. Despite the criticisms launches against their creations, they remained gentle. That in and of itself inspired me to always do my research when creating and writing and to remember to be humble and kind to any fans I get.
The last game came out as I moved out of my parents' house with my grandmother to a whole other state. I was moved. I was growing up slowly. I was about 19 now and about ready to exit my teen years. This was it. I spent my time getting ready to see the series that had done this all to me end. I pre-ordered and waited, and once it got there, I played. And played. I only napped a bit here and there and refused to fully sleep until it ended. I dreaded it but I sought closure all at the same time. Not just closure for the game, but for myself. A few days later, it was done. I beat it as dawn rose one day, appropriately enough. I cried. Physical sobs, heaving on me, but also something else inside me cried then. I was moved, irrevocably so.
Childhood had ended for me with its endgame message of hope. Of accepting others' points of view, of trying to do the right thing, what the consequences of even that could be, and to just stand by your decisions and walk on to the future you make. It gave me friendship, inspired me own writing and habits, made me smarter and more studious and curious about our world, more accepting, and it helped me grow up at last. It's a game I can still bring up and bond with people over at random, be it because they love me for loving it or hate me for doing so, the other person and I are at least talking and making a connection of some kind. At least we're both feeling and experiencing something, and that's the most important thing to me.
Other series have impacted me hard. They've made me laugh or cry or nearly vomit in disgust. They've made undeniable marks on my own creations, but they mostly just did that; they stuck to my own creative work and not forcefully changing me beyond the need to be more heroic in real life.
Xenosaga is one of the rare few things I can say made me a better person because I should be.
I hope everyone can find something like this in their lives. No matter what the series is or how others feel about it, everyone should find something like this that they just feel this damn moved by. Be it a book, movie, cartoon, game, whatever it is, let it shake you. It's all equally powerful. Fiction is power, fiction is love, fiction is hate, fiction is where we find ourselves. Don't let anyone ever denounce the value we all find in this. It's why I too now wish to create and bring about these feelings in others; I care not for fame or money. I just hope I can stir such a revolution in someone else as thanks for having others bring it about in me.
This was a hard post to write, but in a good way. I actually cried a bit typing this all out. Those tears are proof of its mark in me, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 10:09 pm (UTC)From:I like the part about Soraya Saga and her response to you. It's wonderful when creators of fiction react like that to the fans of their work.
The stories that did this for me as a teenager were themselves about the power of stories (Sandman, as much as I'm loath to admit it now given the pictures that conjures up of overenthusiastic, clueless, vaguely creepy goth girls). Which is kind of meta, I guess.