Citan Uzuki set Fei's broken bones, fixed the village's machines, poured the tea, and reported on Fei the entire time. The party's steadiest mentor — the man who always knows a little more about everything than he should — spent the whole first half of Xenogears watching the protagonist for the empire that secretly runs the world. Both things are true at once. Neither one cancels the other, and that doubleness is the whole design of him.
His real name is Hyuga Ricdeau; "Citan Uzuki" is a role he put on like a coat. Who he actually is, what a Guardian Angel does, why that title is quietly lifted from a science-fiction novel, and the question you finish the game still turning over — did he betray you, or protect you the whole way — all of it sits underneath that gentle surface.
This covers the whole of Citan's story, including the reveal and where he ends up. If you're still in the early hours and want to be surprised, come back after Solaris.
The Doctor Who Was Already Watching
The doctor is the disguise. Citan lives up the mountain path above Lahan with his wife Yui and their daughter Midori, tinkering with junk in his shed and treating whoever wanders up the road. He's one of the very first characters to join the party, and Fei's first real friend. He is also not from the surface at all. He was born in Etrenank, the capital of Solaris — the hidden empire that rules the world from behind a wall of cloud — and there his name was Hyuga Ricdeau. The kindly doctor is the thing he built to sit next to Fei without being noticed.
Citan's arc, from the man Solaris sent to the man who fights beside you.
He was born into the bottom of that empire — a third-class citizen, one of the "worker bees" Solaris treats as livestock. And everything warm about the doctor is real. He loves his family, he means his kindness, he's genuinely delighted by a broken camera he gets to take apart. That's what keeps the cover airtight: a performance you can see through is a bad disguise, but affection you can't fake is a perfect one. Even the family name is load-bearing — Perfect Works quietly implies "Uzuki" is Yui's surname, not his, which means the household itself is part of the scaffolding.
The game never fully hides any of it. From early on Citan deflects direct questions, slips away on errands he doesn't explain, and turns out to be far too strong for a country doctor — the fastest fighter in the party and nearly impossible to kill, in a game where speed is most of what wins fights. Yui plainly knows who he is; she's the granddaughter of a Shevat Guru, not an ordinary housewife. So most players spend the entire first half braced for the moment he turns on them. What's remarkable is how long the game lets that dread hang there without paying it off — long enough that "please don't be a traitor" curdles into "please don't leave, the combat is unwinnable without you."
What a Guardian Angel Actually Is
Guardian Angel is a rank. It's an elite post inside Solaris, answering directly to Emperor Cain, and Hyuga was appointed to it young. His standing order is short and cold: watch Fei, and report back on a schedule. Fei is "the Contact" — the one person alive whose power might either save the world or end it — and Cain wants to know which way it breaks. That's the surface of the assignment.
Underneath, the brief is stranger. Hyuga is there to judge whether Fei's power qualifies him as Ahnenerbe, and whether humanity could survive the coming "Time of Gospel" with nobody managing it from above. He earned the post the way he earned everything: Kahran Ramsus spotted his intelligence, sponsored him into the Jugend Military Academy over the objection of his class, and he rose through the Elements beside Sigurd, Jessiah, and Ramsus himself. The tidy backstory the game hands you first — that he walked away from Solaris in disgust once he saw its shiny new "merit" was the same old bigotry wearing a fresh word — is a cover story, written to fit the mission he never actually left.
The official setting book pins down a timeline English guides rarely spell out. Born into the third class as the ninth child, Hyuga entered the Jugend academy at 15, made Guardian Angel at 20, met Yui at 22, and came down to the surface at 26 — three years before the story starts. He'd sealed his twin swords about five years before that. The mild-mannered doctor you meet had already been the empire's watcher for most of his adult life.
The surveillance is more literal than it first looks. Solaris keeps eyes on Fei through the Memory Cube save points scattered across the world; Citan mentions, almost in passing, that they're pulling living data off them. Every time you save your game, you're feeding the people watching him. And the man's hands are never idle — the doctor who'll happily repair a bathtub also engineered a good deal of Solaris's war machinery, Gears included. The healing and the weapon-building came out of the same workshop; nothing about him splits into a good half and a bad half. It's all one person.
The Name Comes From Clarke
The title is a quotation. "Guardian Angel" isn't set dressing — it's pulled straight out of Arthur C. Clarke. His 1953 novel Childhood's End began life in 1946 as a short story called, exactly, "Guardian Angel." In it, a race of benevolent Overlords arrives to oversee humanity and steer it toward a transcendence it's far too young to understand — while hiding their true forms and their true purpose, and letting people stay suspicious of their kindness the entire time. Their supervisor speaks to the world through a single human liaison, and his name is Karellen.
Xenogears takes both halves of that book and puts them to work. Run Karellen through Japanese and you get Krelian — the game says as much outright — and Krelian does precisely what an Overlord does, forcing humanity toward a god of his own making. But the borrowing doesn't stop at the villain. The game hands the same book's title to Citan and makes it his rank. So the watcher who protects you and the watcher who informs on you carries a name that means both things at once, because in Clarke it always did: the Overlords are sincerely benevolent and sincerely not on your side. That is the exact shape of Citan Uzuki.
Most players clock the Karellen-to-Krelian link eventually; it's one of the game's better-known nods. Far fewer notice that Citan's job title comes off the same shelf — that the gentle doctor spends the whole game wearing the name of a Clarke story about overseers you are right to distrust. Once you've seen it, the game has been telling you how to hold him from the very first time a character says the words "Guardian Angel." The unease isn't you being paranoid. It's the text doing its job.
How the Reveal Recolors Everything
The mask comes off underground. It happens when the party breaks into Solaris and reaches the Soylent System — the facility where the empire renders human corpses into food and medicine. Elly feels it first; she starts to press Citan, and he simply stops pretending. He is Hyuga Ricdeau, Cain's agent, and he has been since the moment Fei met him. The horror of what Solaris does to people and the horror of who your friend has been arrive in the same room at the same time, and the game lets them amplify each other.
There's a small, awful beat there that players in Japan never forget: offered the food, Citan quietly declines — not from squeamishness, but because he already knows exactly what it's made of. He's the only one at the table who isn't horrified, because he's the only one who was never in the dark. It's the coldest he ever reads, the single moment the warm surface goes completely still.
The reveal doesn't erase the early scenes — it re-lights them.
I was on a secret mission by orders of Emperor Cain, to monitor Fei. — Citan Uzuki
The reveal works because it re-lights the early game rather than erasing it. The deflected questions weren't modesty — they were a professional deciding what the party got to know. The errands weren't errands — several were reports to Cain. The too-strong-too-soon recruit wasn't luck of the draw — it was a Guardian Angel travelling in plain clothes. And none of the kindness turns out to be fake, which is the unsettling part. The warmth and the surveillance ran down the same wire the whole time, and the game had been showing you that wire for hours.
Does He Betray the Party, or Protect It?
He plays the villain exactly once. Every party member carries a Limiter — an implant Solaris uses to breed awe of the empire and smother any hostility toward it. To get it out of them, Citan poses as an enemy and traps his own friends into the surgery that frees them. Fei, knowing none of that, takes him for a real traitor and knocks him flat. When they square it away afterward, neither one apologizes; the entire reconciliation is "You're a bad one, Doc," answered with "It's my nature." The one time he truly acts against the party is the act that lets the party stand up to Solaris at all.
So the honest answer to the question is no — he doesn't betray you. He's a spy for the whole game, but he's Cain's spy, and Cain's faction wants the same thing Fei does: humanity cut loose from being spare parts for a god. That aim runs directly against the Gazel Ministry that nominally outranks him. The guardian and the informant were never actually pulling in opposite directions — they only looked like they were, which is exactly the trick the "Guardian Angel" name was warning you about.
After Solaris falls, he stops performing entirely. He unseals the twin swords he'd kept sheathed for years and finally fights out in the open, and he brings out Fenrir — the Omnigear that Yui's grandfather Gaspar had been holding "in case." Out of his Gear, he can still cut down machines several times his size — he was never the weak link you feared losing. And when Fei and Elly drop out of the story for a stretch, it's Citan who steps forward to narrate, the keeper of the backstory finally allowed to say things plainly. Watch him long enough and "guardian" turns out to have been the truer word all along; the spying was only ever the shape that protecting Fei had to take.
That's the real reason the doctor rewards a close look. He's the whole game in miniature — a benevolence bound to a hidden design, a kindness you're right to distrust and right to trust anyway. Once you can read him, you can read the rest of the machine he belongs to: Krelian building his god, Cain working quietly against it, the Gazel Ministry hunting for bodies, and Fei carrying a ten-thousand-year-old fight he doesn't remember starting. Citan is the readable edge of all of it. Start with him, and Xenogears opens the rest of the way up.
Common Questions
Does Citan betray you in Xenogears?
No. Citan is a Solaris Guardian Angel who spends the whole game watching Fei for Emperor Cain, but Cain's aim is to free humanity from Deus — the same thing Fei is fighting for — so he's never actually working against you. The one time he acts like a traitor, trapping the party into surgery, is how he strips out the Limiter holding everyone back. He stays with you to the end.
What is Citan Uzuki's real name?
Hyuga Ricdeau. He was born in Solaris as a third-class citizen and took the alias Citan Uzuki when Emperor Cain sent him to the surface to watch Fei. Perfect Works suggests "Uzuki" is actually his wife Yui's surname, which makes the whole doctor-with-a-family life part of the cover.
Why is Citan so strong so early in the game?
Because he isn't a village doctor — he's a Guardian Angel and one of the best swordsmen in the world, travelling incognito. He's the fastest character in a game where speed decides fights, and later he unseals a katana and the Omnigear Fenrir. The overpowered-early-recruit feeling isn't a balance quirk; it's the character telling you something before the plot does.
Is the "Guardian Angel" name really an Arthur C. Clarke reference?
Yes. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End grew out of a 1946 short story titled "Guardian Angel," about benevolent overseers guiding humanity toward a hidden purpose. Xenogears pulls the antagonist Krelian's name from that book's Overlord, Karellen — and gives Citan the book's title as his rank. Both come from the same source, and both mean protector and watcher at once.