Square Exit: Part 3

Particularly poignant this week after Friday’s release of the superb Xenoblade: Chronicles (which you should be playing), today we’ll talk about perhaps Square’s most famous prodigal son, Tetsuya Takahashi and the cats and kittens running the show at the Nintendo-owned Monolith Soft. Be sure to bring your DSM IV.

A lot has been said about Takahashi. Or rather, a lot has been said about his work. Straddling that razor blade-sized line between ambition and ludicrous hubris, Takahashi’s calling card for game making has been his penchant for Big Ideas. That isn’t to say his designs have been big, though Xenoblade certainly seems to counterpoint that argument. No, Takahashi’s work as a scenario writer and director seems hell bent on cramming as much psychology and religious allusions down the player’s throat they need only-released-in-Japan supplemental material to sift through it all. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Takahashi first started working for Square on Final Fantasy IV as an artist. Prior to that he worked on one game for Nihon Falcom before moving to the big leagues (that one game was released NA on the Tubrografix-16, and later remade for the PSP). And big leagues they were: concept art and design for Final Fantasy IV-VII, map designs for Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 (with our dude Kikuta), and art design for the first Front Mission (with our boys from G-Craft). This career arc effectively made him a proto-Tetsuya Nomura (and Jeremy Parish?) as he went from art duties to eventually running his own shop.
 
Xenogears

…but not before making Xenogears first. Perhaps his most beloved contribution to gaming, Xenogears is still frequently cited in silly arguments over Best RPG of All Time for its sprawling story of Jungian psychology and Christian iconography. Released in Japan a year and a month after Final Fantasy VII, it made some minor headlines in the US over a non-controversy revolving around its religious tones and imagery and whether or not it was going to make the localization cut. Square, now flush with dough from FFVII and freshly coupled with Electronic Arts for distribution help in 1998, released a small slew of games that year in NA to strike while the iron was hot (this included the spectacular Einhander, something else that you should all be playing).

Big Ideas were prevalent. Not only was there religion and psychology, gamers got their first taste of Takahashi’s penchant for Nietzschean philosophy – something else that would live through his game designing career. Perhaps it wasn’t gaming’s first example of an ubermensch, his id, the out-of-body automaton experience and an incomprehensible ending, but it may have been one of the most compelling at the time. If that last sentence means anything to you, then the 80+ hours of cut scenes during your first trip through will rock your socks.

Time has not been so kind to Xenogears. The then-novel blend of traditional 2D sprites and 3D mech models and backgrounds looks even more disjointed now than it ever did. The story, though frankly more mature in tone and execution than most other JRPGs out there even today, is overwrought, a little pretentious, and about as easy to firmly grasp Masters-level discrete mathematics. At the time, though, many players and reviewers looked upon Xenogears as a masterpiece of forward thinking game writing (if not design). Plus, they still had something to look forward to: The ominous, “New Hope”-style declaration that you just finished “Episode V” during the end credits.

You can grab a GH version of the game on eBay for roughly $35, or you could just be smart and download it on PSN for less than a third of that.

Xenosaga Series

But Episodes I-IV never wound up materializing; at least, not at Square. Even though the game sold well enough to warrant a Greatest Hits rerelease in 2003, Takahashi and crew (including another ex-Square employee; His wife, writer Kaori Tanaka) left to form Monolith Soft with a publishing deal from Namco. With this deal, we can assume that Namco was really ready to take a big leap into worldwide RPG development in a post-Final Fantasy X PlayStation 2 world. The deal with Takahashi and Monolith promised a six-game saga spanning releases all the way until the PS2 was on its deathbed. Appropriately titled Xenosaga, true believers of Takahashi’s past work were flipping their collective (consciousness) shit hoping that it would be the prequels that would lead to Xenogears. But this didn’t turn out to be the case. The notoriously cagey Japanese development ethos of Takahashi and co. neither confirmed nor denied any actual connections to Xenogears until after its release, and by then, fans were starting to connect the dots while wading through hour-long cut scenes.

It turns out that since Square owned Xenogears, any true sequel/ prequel wouldn’t really happen once the developers left the company. Instead, the world received the first part of a spiritual successor in 2003 (NA), chock full of Nietzsche, robots, and religion like its forbearer. But not being connected to his career at Square wasn’t really Takahashi’s problem, the marketplace was.

While well reviewed, the first Xenosaga game sold well enough to follow up with a Greatest Hits edition to the game, a Japanese rerelease called Episode I Reload, and a supplemental “game” called Xenosaga Freaks (also only in Japan). So far so good. Episode II (2004 NA), though, effectively tanked Takahashi’s magnum opus all by itself with its reworked combat system, plodding and introspective story, and re-tinkered visual style. The game sold badly, Namco restructured the deal, and Monolith had to finish the series with the next game. Luckily, Episode III would be regarded as the most even of the series from a gameplay standpoint, but again, Big Ideas were kitchen-sinked into the game, with an appropriately head-scratching dénouement.

The first two games be can had for a song off of eBay or any used shop that still carries PS2 games (a Record Exchange literally gave me a copy of Ep. I just to cut down on the amount they had. Not kidding). Curiously, Ep. III has turned into something of a rarity on eBay, fetching between $35-50 depending on condition.

Baten Kaitos and Nintendo

While still under the banner of Namco, a second Monolith team began co-developing games with tri-Crescendo (of Eternal Sonata sorta-fame; and yes, it really is capitalized like that) for the RPG-dry GameCube. Released in 2003 (NA), the fruit of that labor was the card-based Baten Kaitos. As most games on the GameCube went, BK didn’t burn up the sales charts even with its favorable reviews, but a sequel was still planned for both the GameCube and the DS in the impending years, with only the GameCube game, Baten Kaitos: Origins, ever being released (also to low sales). But this was still a turning point for the developer. The first BK was published by Namco, but at a time when the Cadillac of their relationship was turning into a lemon that was stalling fast. Nintendo, probably realizing that they needed a capable RPG developer, tested the water with Monolith and published BK: Origins themselves in Japan and North America. Evidently happy the results, Nintendo then bought a controlling share in Monolith from Namco in 2007, and acquired them wholly sometime after.

Post Nintendo acquisition, Monolith has been surprisingly quiet, all things considered. Three games were developed for and published by Namco Bandai in Japan, with two being Super Robot Taisen games (one actually making it to the US), but none of them were helmed by Takahashi. His only game until Xenoblade was for the DS; an RPG called Soma Bringer in 2008 that hasn’t been localized. The same year Monolith developed Disaster: Day of Crisis for the Wii, but it was only released in Japan, Europe, and Australia.