Where is Xenogears? That’s the question forever on the tip of the tongue of a very specific subset of classic Square Enix JRPG fans. It hasn’t been playable on modern hardware since it was released as a digital download on the PlayStation 3, and with the storefront there and on PSP/PS Vita shutting down in 2027, the game will soon become completely inaccessible. Could we ever get a remake? A good answer to that question was certainly not front of mind for Final Fantasy VII Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi when it was recently put to him.
Xenogears originally grew out of a proposal for Final Fantasy VII, and the latter even includes a direct reference to it. A reference has now been confirmed to exist in Revelation as well. When asked about why that was, Hamaguchi sounded as surprised as anyone. “So, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea that was in there,” he told FinalWeapon.net. “That was probably Toriyama-san or Nojima-san who put that in there just as a bit of fun to include. They were also on the original too.”
The interviewer followed up by asking about the feasibility of a potential remake of Xenogears, a game the director admitted he hadn’t replayed since it first released. “I do kind of remember playing it back in the day when it first came out,” Hamaguchi said. “Remaking something that came from that era, as an experienced person who has gone through the Remake series, sounds like a tough game to make.”
Giving any game the FFVII Remake treatment would indeed be an ordeal. Various people at Square Enix have reputedly mentioned how remaking Final Fantasy VI like that would take over a decade. That’s certainly one way to honor the company’s back catalog, though it’s hardly the only way.
But the tone of Hamaguchi’s response certainly doesn’t instill confidence that Square Enix has plans to revisit the game in any other capacity, either. If that’s the case, it would be a shame. Xenogears is an incredibly uneven game. The second disc is infamous for basically just being a visual novel with some boss battles thrown in. But it features some very memorable mechanics and some of the best storytelling ever attached to a Square Enix–published game.
Its director, Tetsuya Takahashi, is of course now working for Nintendo as the head of Monolith Soft. Where so many of Square Enix’s franchises that aren’t called Final Fantasy have run out of gas, Takahashi propelled the Xeno games into a sci-fi series that has spanned multiple consoles and narrative arcs. It’s hard to imagine any remake of Xenogears without Monolith Soft in the driver’s seat. It’s also equally hard to imagine Square Enix and Nintendo ever partnering to invest those sorts of resources into a revival of a game without a fraction of FFVII‘s notoriety that would likely have to be exclusive to Nintendo hardware.
At best, maybe we can get an HD port that would at least bring Xenogears to modern consoles as well as PC. Square Enix’s track record with these has been all over the place, but even a “smoothmaster” with bad text fonts would be better than nothing at all. And yet the fact that we got SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered before an HD version of Xenogears does not give me much confidence that we’ll see the latter any time soon (I’m still waiting on an HD remaster of Vagrant Story too, for that matter).
The dream, for me at least, is that we might get some bespoke Xeno collection that brings not just Xenogears but the Xenosaga trilogy to modern platforms as well. How great it would be to see the launch of Xenoblade Genesis in 2027 be followed up by having the rest of the Xeno games also playable on Switch 2. There might still be hope. There was a rumor going around earlier this summer that Nintendo may have stealthily acquired the rights to Xenosaga from Bandai Namco. Given the two companies’ close collaboration, it’s not impossible to imagine.
The only true tragedy would be if we somehow get all of the older Xeno games on a modern console except the original Xenogears. I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, fans may have to rely on an unofficial PC port effort that’s currently underway.
