59 questions people actually type into a search box about Xenogears, answered properly. Some are the obvious ones — how long it is, whether disc 2 is worth it, whether it will ever be remade. Others are the quiet mechanical truths the game never tells you: that dropping to low HP makes your strongest attacks more likely, that Billy’s middle attack outdamages everyone’s strong one, that the real damage ceiling is a shop-bought device almost no English guide names.
Where the English guides are thin I’ve gone to the Japanese ones, which have been mapping this game’s internals for over twenty years. Each answer names its sources, and links through to the longer piece if you want the whole argument.
A game about a hero who doesn’t know what he is. These are the answers it keeps behind the reveal.
The two combat systems, the hidden mechanics, and the builds the game never explains.
Disc 2 shifts from a full RPG to Fei and Elly narrating events in a dark room while a slideshow plays, with only a handful of dungeons and boss fights between. The long-standing fan belief was that Square simply ran out of money. Director Tetsuya Takahashi’s own 2017 account is more specific: the project was staffed almost entirely with young, new employees, 3D was brand new, and Square’s rigid two-year deadline made finishing the planned second disc impossible. It is a deliberate compression of a finished story, not an abandoned fragment.
Sources — EN: Kotaku (Takahashi 2017 interview) · JP: fan threads
Not in the way most people mean. Square’s executives suggested ending the game after disc 1, when Fei’s group escapes Solaris. Takahashi refused, believing that would leave players unsatisfied, and proposed the narrated disc-2 format specifically to tell the whole story he’d written with the staff and time he had. So the second disc is a compression of a complete story rather than a cut-off one — and the order to stop came from above, not from the schedule alone.
Sources — EN: Kotaku (Takahashi 2017) · community
The “ran out of money” framing is the popular myth; Takahashi’s account points at time and staffing, not budget alone. The core constraint was Square’s policy that every project ship in two years, combined with a very junior team learning 3D on the job. The real story of how disc 2 got cut down is closer to an argument than a bankruptcy — it reframes the second disc as a scheduling decision, not a financial failure.
Sources — EN: Kotaku (Takahashi 2017) · community
Yes. Disc 2 contains the story’s climax and resolution — the Deus reveal, Krelian’s plan, the fate of Elly and Fei — and cutting it would leave the entire plot unresolved. Many fans who dislike the presentation still consider it essential, and a vocal minority argue the concentrated storytelling is the best part of the game. The one universal complaint is text speed; budget patience for a lot of reading.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF, ResetEra threads · community
Three conditions must all be met: you must have progressed past the point where your Gears’ limiters are released (after the Shevat generator-defence battle, when deathblows are taught); the pilot must be level 50 or higher; and in battle you must build Attack Level to 3, then keep attacking or charging at AL3. Each turn at AL3 there’s a chance to enter Hyper Mode, shown as a percentage in the status window. Hyper Mode sets Attack Level to infinity for three turns.
Sources — JP: xenogears-capture.seesaa.net, xenoonline.com · community
Because the trigger chance is inversely tied to your remaining HP. Japanese sources give the logic: the lower your HP percentage, the higher the Hyper Mode chance — at around 50% HP the chance is roughly 25%, and it climbs as you drop further. Using deathblows nudges the constant upward too. This “weaker means stronger” design is barely explained in English guides but is core to fighting Gear bosses efficiently.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit FAQ), xenogears-capture.seesaa.net
Neither the sealed attacks nor Hyper Mode. Japanese min-max players agree the strongest option is the Gear “special device” (tokushu sōchi) build: equip Ether Doubler, (Big) Ether Stones, Power Magic and E-Circuit, then use the special device for enormous damage. The parts are buyable from Nisan, Thames and Shevat merchants and the Yggdrasil shop. This outperforms both Hyper Mode and deathblows, and almost no English guide names it as the game’s true damage ceiling.
Sources — JP: ceres.dti.ne.jp, urawaza.in · community
Because Billy’s Gear (Renmazuo) has a unique exception: its middle attack, the Ether Gun, scales off Billy’s Ether stat rather than the Gear’s engine output like every other Gear attack. Load him with Ether Doubler, Ether Stones, Power Magic and E-Circuit and use the middle attack, and he deals 3,000–5,000 — higher than other Gears’ strong attacks. It’s a genuinely obscure interaction documented on Japanese sites and essentially absent from English coverage.
Sources — JP: ceres.dti.ne.jp · community
You don’t buy or pick deathblows — you learn them by using normal attacks. Each of the three attack strengths (weak/AP1, middle/AP2, strong/AP3) is counted separately, and hitting the right combination of level and usage count teaches a deathblow. Using a deathblow doesn’t advance the counters, so you grind normal attacks to unlock new ones. AP7 combinations are “super” deathblows, and unused AP is stored mid-battle so you can chain deathblows via the combo (rensatsu) option.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org, xenoonline.com · community
Gears and their accessories have weight values. A heavy Gear carries heavy equipment with little penalty, but putting heavy gear on a light Gear drastically lowers its speed, so its turns come around far less often. This is why loadout matters more than raw stats — over-equipping a fast Gear can quietly cripple it. Mismatched weight is a common reason players feel a Gear “got slow” without knowing why.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · community
Xenogears has two parallel combat systems. On foot, characters use HP, Ether (magic) and deathblows built from weak/middle/strong inputs. In a Gear, you manage fuel instead of attacking freely — attacks consume fuel, engine output sets damage, and you can refuel mid-battle. Story beats dictate which mode you’re in. The fuel economy makes Gear battles about resource management, while on-foot fights are about deathblow chains.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · community
Gear power comes primarily from the engine (which sets both attack output and fuel capacity), plus frame, armour and accessories — each Gear has an output coefficient multiplied by engine output for its attack. For a damage build, prioritise the engine, then the Ether-scaling accessories (Ether Doubler, Ether Stones, Power Magic, E-Circuit) if you’re running the special-device strategy. Frame HP-recovery parts are strongly recommended for surviving the hardest Gear fights.
Sources — JP: ceres.dti.ne.jp, ja.wikipedia.org · community
System Id is Fei’s most powerful on-foot state, unlocked through story progression, in which his Id personality takes over and grants access to devastating deathblows like the Kishin Kokushō. It’s one of the strongest damage options for tough on-foot bosses. Note that even the Saint’s Pendant, which extends Hyper Mode, does not extend a System-Id-triggered Hyper Mode beyond the base three turns.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com, xenogears-capture · community
Two reasons players often miss: fuel management (running dry mid-fight leaves you helpless) and not exploiting the Hyper Mode / low-HP mechanic. Japanese guides stress equipping frame HP-recovery parts and deliberately using the low-HP Hyper Mode trigger rather than fighting at full health. Once you understand that low HP is an advantage for triggering your strongest attacks, the Gear bosses become far more manageable.
Sources — JP: shitaraba threads, xenoonline.com · community
Battling is a fighting-game-style minigame where you pit Gears against each other — and it’s not purely optional, because it ties into the main story at points. There’s also a card game (“Speed”). Battling is one of several ways Xenogears breaks up its structure with distinct minigames, and doing well can matter for progression, not just rewards.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · community
There are really two rankings, because the same nine characters perform differently on foot and in a Gear. On foot, Citan runs the show — fast, strong deathblows, excellent in Hyper Mode — while a character like Maria is nearly useless on foot (0–1 damage, no real weapon) yet pilots one of the strongest Gears in the game. So “bench” isn’t a fixed list: you field different line-ups depending on which of the two battle screens the fight uses. The honest short version is Citan and Fei almost always, and everyone else judged per mode.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com, community · EN: community
Who everyone really is, across ten thousand years and more than one life.
Id is Fei’s dominant, murderous alternate personality — and one of the game’s central shocks. The gentle hero you control shares a body with the being that destroyed his own village and, in past incarnations, entire cities. In the game’s framing, Id is the original dominant self and “Fei” is a persona created to keep Id contained. Both are ultimately reincarnations of Abel, the boy who first contacted the Wave Existence 10,000 years earlier.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron), ResetEra · community
Grahf, the “Seeker of Power,” is Lacan — one of Fei’s own past incarnations from centuries earlier. Grief over the death of Sophia (a past incarnation of Elly) drove Lacan to make incomplete contact with the Zohar, which granted him immense power but twisted him. Fei resembles Lacan because he’s a reincarnation of the same soul. This is why the reincarnation theme is essential to following the plot, not optional lore.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron), NeoGAF · community
Elly is Fei’s love interest and, across the game’s 10,000-year cycle, the recurring counterpart to his soul — previously Sophia and others. She becomes possessed by Miang, the recurring “first woman” who serves Deus. The tragedy the game keeps returning to is that their incarnations find and lose each other repeatedly across history, most often through her death. It’s widely cited as one of the best-written romances in the medium.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron), NeoGAF · community
It’s implied, yes. The reincarnation cycle isn’t limited to Fei and Elly — the game suggests the other controllable characters have also lived multiple times across the 10,000-year span. This is deep-cut lore that Perfect Works expands on and the game only gestures at, which is why it surprises players who assumed only the two leads were bound to the cycle.
Sources — JP: Perfect Works · EN: NeoGAF
Citan Uzuki (Shitan in Japanese) presents as a kindly village doctor and Fei’s mentor, but is secretly a Solaris agent placed to observe Fei — a spy whose loyalties are genuinely divided, and who becomes a true ally. He’s also one of the strongest party members mechanically, especially in Hyper Mode. His double role is a mid-game reveal that recontextualises his earlier guidance.
Sources — EN: community · JP: ja.wikipedia.org
Krelian is the chief architect of Deus’s revival and the game’s ultimate antagonist — but his motive isn’t conquest. He once loved a past incarnation of Elly, and his goal is to ascend and merge with the Wave Existence, escaping the limits of flesh and dragging Elly’s soul with him. He’s a tragic villain driven by grief and a longing for transcendence rather than malice, which is central to the ending’s emotional weight.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron) · community
Miang (Myyah) is a recurring identity rather than a single person — a consciousness created alongside Deus that perpetuates itself by taking over host bodies across generations, acting on genetic programming to keep humanity on course for Deus’s revival. That “she’s always there” quality is why she can possess Elly. Understanding Miang as a self-propagating program rather than a mortal character resolves a lot of the plot confusion around her.
Sources — EN: ResetEra · community
Because of Id — Fei’s suppressed alternate personality, which seizes control under extreme stress and unleashes destructive power he can’t remember afterward. Early on the blackouts are a mystery (his destruction of Lahan is the first shock); the explanation is the long reveal of Id, Fei’s fractured psyche, and the reincarnation cycle behind it. The blackouts are a plot device, not a bug or a status effect.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron), NeoGAF · community
Fei defeats Deus and Krelian. Krelian, who sought to merge with the Wave Existence and drag Elly with him, is thwarted when Fei rescues her; Krelian then merges with the Wave Existence and vanishes into another dimension, and the Wave Existence is freed. Fei and Elly survive, and the reincarnation cycle that trapped their souls is finally broken — a rare unambiguously hopeful ending for a story this bleak.
Sources — EN: Medium (Negron), NeoGAF · community
Many players do. The plot juggles reincarnation, multiple identities per character, a 10,000-year backstory, gnostic cosmology and a mid-game POV shift, and disc 2 delivers huge exposition dumps quickly. A common recommendation is to accept early confusion and let disc 2 tie it together rather than trying to fully understand every reveal in real time. A plain-language walkthrough of the whole story helps afterward.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF, ResetEra · community
All three are built around an absent or broken father. Bart is the exiled prince of Aveh, fighting to reclaim a throne and a murdered royal line; Billy is a young gunman working for the Ethos whose father is a fallen, absent priest; and Rico is a Kislev arena champion who grew up a despised outsider, carrying the wound of a father who was a stranger to him. The three “fathers and sons” threads run in parallel and each carries a mid-game reveal, which is why they’re often discussed together rather than one at a time.
Sources — EN: community · JP: ja.wikipedia.org
Deus, the Zohar, the Wave Existence, and the cosmology the plot is built on.
Deus is an interplanetary invasion weapons system — a bio-mechanical war machine built by humanity, capable of generating its own version of humans. After it destroyed a planet and was deemed uncontrollable, humanity sent it away aboard the ship Eldridge. When the Eldridge crashed on the game’s planet, Deus began a 10,000-year plan to revive itself, cultivating the human population via Solaris as material to harvest. The “god” the party fights is this machine.
Sources — EN: ResetEra, NeoGAF · community
The Zohar is a conduit to a higher dimension, and the Wave Existence is the entity pulled through it — a being from a plane where everything exists as waves of energy. When Deus first activated 10,000 years ago, the Zohar dragged the Wave Existence into this dimension, where it became the power source trapped inside Deus. The name Zohar comes from a real kabbalistic text. Fei calls the Wave Existence “God” when he meets it, though it’s not divine in any traditional sense.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF, ResetEra · community
Takahashi conceived Xenogears as one part — the fifth episode — of a six-part saga he’d outlined, which is why the story feels like it begins mid-history with an enormous backstory behind it. The other five episodes were never made at Square. This framing is documented in Perfect Works and is the reason the world feels far bigger than the events you actually play.
Sources — JP: Perfect Works · EN: NeoGAF, community
Not to follow the main plot, but Perfect Works — the official Japanese setting book — is the source for most of the deep background: the full 10,000-year timeline, the nature of the Wave Existence’s power, and the wider cosmology. Many English fans report it can add confusion as much as clarity, since it’s dense and was never officially translated in full. A section-by-section tour of what’s actually inside it helps. For the story as played, the game is self-contained.
Sources — JP: Perfect Works (Square official) · EN: fan translations
Beyond Perfect Works there is supplementary Japanese material — short fiction and setting documents like “Dark Summer” — that never received an official English release, deepening the backstory of the saga’s other imagined episodes. This is why Japanese fans often have context English-speaking fans lack, and it’s part of the “the game is one piece of something much larger” feeling.
Sources — JP: Perfect Works and supplementary material · community
Heavily, and deliberately. The plot draws on gnostic Christianity — a false, worldly god (Deus) versus a true higher reality (the Wave Existence), plus reincarnation and spiritual ascension. Names and symbols are pulled from these sources (the Zohar is a real kabbalistic text), and it also weaves in Jungian psychology — the “Id” personality. This dense religious-philosophical layering is a big part of the game’s reputation.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF, Medium · community
On the surface the Ethos is the world’s church — the institution that maintains faith, repairs Gears and runs the schools. The mid-game reveal is that it was never a church at all: it’s a control apparatus, built to manage the population on Deus’s behalf rather than to comfort them. It’s the game’s sharpest and most grounded argument — not about God in the abstract, but about what happens when an institution that claims to serve people is actually a weapon pointed at them.
Sources — EN: community · JP: ja.wikipedia.org
The rejected FF7 pitch, the young team, and the deadline that shaped disc 2.
Essentially yes — it grew out of a scenario considered too dark for Final Fantasy VII, so it was spun off into its own project. The two began development around the same time at Square, which is why Xenogears is nicknamed the “back FF7” (ura-FF7) in Japan. The exact “rejected FF7 plot” story everyone repeats is worth pinning down carefully, because the popular version oversimplifies it.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · EN: community
It was a deliberate inversion of FF7’s approach, driven by Takahashi, who felt pre-rendered CG backgrounds “couldn’t express the world.” The team committed to fully 3D, rotatable environments paired with hand-drawn 2D sprite characters. That gives Xenogears its distinctive look: dungeons you rotate the camera around and platform through, populated by expressive pixel characters. The 3D-background tech being brand new is also part of why the schedule slipped.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · community
The creative lead was Tetsuya Takahashi (writer/director), who later co-founded Monolith Soft and directed Xenoblade; his wife Kaori Tanaka — Soraya Saga — co-wrote the scenario. Music is by Yasunori Mitsuda, fresh off Chrono Trigger, and it was published by Square in 1998 for the PlayStation. The team was notably young and inexperienced, which Takahashi cites as central to both the ambition and the production troubles.
Sources — JP: ja.wikipedia.org · EN: Kotaku
The English localisation (by Square) softened some religious references and a few mature scenes, and the translation is often criticised as rough in places — but the game’s core content, including its dark themes and religious framing, largely survived intact, which was unusual for the era. The bigger “change” players notice is simply the slow text speed, never improved in any release.
Sources — EN: community · JP: comparison notes
Sales, and a hard internal rule. Xenogears sold 891,675 copies in Japan against a Square guideline that a title needed roughly a million to justify a sequel — a shortfall of about 108,000 copies, and not one a slow-burn later corrected. Combined with Square’s focus on the Final Fantasy line and the friction the team had faced, no direct sequel was greenlit. The team instead left and built the follow-up ideas elsewhere as Xenosaga at Monolith Soft.
Sources — JP: sales figures, community · EN: community
The hidden items, rare fights, and conditional rewards Japanese guides map and English ones skip.
Yes — a rare enemy called “Dragoso” (not a true dragon) appears in a specific area and is a genuinely tough fight because you battle it on foot rather than in a Gear. Defeating it yields strong weapons and armour (including high-end gear like Mumei and the Millennium Helm). It’s the kind of missable optional encounter Japanese guides flag and English walkthroughs often skip.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit) · community
Examine the flowerbed on the east side of Citan’s house early on to find the “Green Ring.” Late in the game, at the snowfield hideout, an NPC trades you the Heracles Ring for it. It’s an easily missed two-part chain — you grab the Green Ring hours before you can use it — and it’s documented on Japanese cheat sites far more clearly than in English.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit) · community
Give the Mermaid’s Tear (obtained in Lahan) to the old woman deep inside the southeast entrance of the snowfield hideout — but only while the post-Zeboim version of Emeralda is in your party — and you receive an item. It’s a conditional, easily missed reward with a specific party requirement English guides rarely state precisely. Despite rumours, there is no “mermaid town” in the game.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit), xenogears-capture · community
At the lighthouse area, follow the path inward to a plaza; near its centre is a manhole (easier to find on foot, out of your Gear) leading to an Emeralda growth event that affects her later form. It’s an optional character moment tied to an obscure hidden passage — the kind of thing Japanese completion guides map and most English playthroughs miss entirely.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit) · community
Hammer has 48,000 HP and enters a self-destruct mode at roughly half health. The Japanese-recommended approach: prep System Id on Fei and Hyper Mode on your other pilots, then burst him down fast — Fei spamming Id deathblows, Billy on Jessie Cannon, Shitan in Hyper Mode. Killing him is worth it because he drops the Buyer’s Certificate, which unlocks valuable item access; skipping the fight loses that reward.
Sources — JP: xenoonline.com (Eiwigkeit capture) · community
The Saint’s Pendant, sold for a limited time in Nisan, extends Hyper Mode from three turns to six when equipped — a significant buff for Gear boss fights. The catch, per Japanese sources: it does not extend Hyper Mode entered via System Id, which stays at three turns regardless. It’s a limited-window purchase, so it’s easy to miss.
Sources — JP: xenogears-capture.seesaa.net · community
A surprising amount of hardware was fully designed and then scrapped — not concept sketches but complete design sheets, with heights, generator figures, frame tolerances and armament, for machines that never appear on screen. One quiet detail the cut material reveals: every Gear’s stats are indexed against a baseline machine called the Aveh 01 (a “400%” rating means four times that baseline). The paperwork for this game’s cancelled Gears is more complete than most games’ finished ones.
Sources — JP: Perfect Works, design sheets · community
Mitsuda's score, the gnostic frame, and the anime it is forever compared to.
Yasunori Mitsuda, immediately after his breakthrough on Chrono Trigger. The soundtrack is widely regarded as one of his finest — orchestral, ethnic and vocal elements woven together, with the ending theme “Small Two of Pieces” featuring vocals. His score is frequently cited as a major reason the emotional beats land as hard as they do despite the disc-2 presentation.
Sources — EN: community · JP: OST liner notes
The ending vocal theme, “Small Two of Pieces”, is sung in English with an Irish-influenced arrangement, performed by Joanne Hogg of the band Iona. Mitsuda worked with Celtic textures across parts of the score, which is why the ending has a distinctly non-Japanese, folk-hymnal quality unusual for a 1998 JRPG.
Sources — EN: community, OST notes · JP: liner notes
They share a year, iconography and a traumatised-boy-in-a-machine premise, and the comparison is made constantly — but the honest account is that they arrived largely in parallel rather than one copying the other, and they diverge sharply on where they land emotionally. It’s worth separating the real parallels from the assumed ones.
Sources — EN: community · JP: production dates
The game leans on Jung, Freud and Nietzsche explicitly — “Id” is Freud’s term, the collective unconscious is Jungian, and the will-to-power framing is Nietzschean. These aren’t decoration; the names and structures map onto the plot’s ideas about a fractured self and buried drives. It pairs with the gnostic religious layer to give the story its dense reputation.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF, Medium · community
Almost everywhere — and the names give the whole game away. Fei’s past life is named for a psychoanalyst (Lacan), the villain Krelian nods to a Clarke novel, every country on the map is a month, and the Gear roster draws on four European languages. The naming is load-bearing: it encodes the reincarnation and gnostic themes in plain sight.
Sources — EN: community · JP: Perfect Works
Life arriving from space is a real scientific hypothesis, not Xenogears’ invention — Svante Arrhenius gave it its modern form in 1903. The game’s timeline names it directly, and the whole “where humanity came from” cosmology rests on it. It’s one of several places where the game builds its fiction on a real theory rather than pure invention.
Sources — EN: community · JP: Perfect Works
How long it is, how to play it now, whether a remake exists, and whether it holds up.
A full playthrough is roughly 50–60 hours, though the slow text speed inflates the real-time figure considerably. Disc 1 is the bulk of the explorable playtime; disc 2, despite covering the climax, is shorter and more passive because so much is narrated. There’s relatively little optional side content compared to some contemporaries, so completion time doesn’t vary as widely.
Sources — EN: community · JP: community
Xenogears was re-released as a PSOne Classic on the PlayStation Network (playable on PS3, PSP and Vita), but it has never received a remaster or a modern-console (PS4/PS5/Switch/PC) release, and it has never been remade. Legitimate access today is limited and increasingly awkward as those older storefronts age. Square Enix has not announced any new version.
Sources — EN: community · JP: release history
No. Despite persistent fan campaigns — especially the argument that a remake could finally realise the planned disc 2 — none has been announced. Takahashi and his team are occupied with Xenoblade at Monolith Soft, and the IP has sat largely dormant at Square Enix. The game’s scope is often cited as a reason a faithful remake would be enormously difficult.
Sources — EN: TechTimes, community · JP: community
Neither, legally — Xenosaga is a separate series made after Takahashi left Square to found Monolith Soft, and it can’t use Xenogears’ story directly for rights reasons. But it’s widely understood as a spiritual reboot, reusing many ideas and much of the backstory from the imagined “Episode I” of the Xenogears saga — similar themes and cosmology (the Zohar, gnostic elements, a Wave-Existence-like being) without the same continuity.
Sources — EN: NeoGAF · community
Only thematically and by creator, not by story. Xenoblade is also a Takahashi/Monolith Soft project, and certain Xenogears ideas resurface in it — but the three “Xeno” series (Xenogears, Xenosaga, Xenoblade) are legally and narratively separate, sharing a creator and recurring motifs rather than a single timeline. There’s no canonical thread linking them.
Sources — EN: ResetEra, NeoGAF · community
For players who value story and can tolerate dated presentation and slow text, yes — it’s frequently called one of the most ambitious narratives in the medium. The reincarnation saga, the Id reveal, the religious themes and the Fei/Elly romance are why it keeps a devoted following. The caveats are real: rough translation, a passive disc 2, and no modern release. It’s a landmark for the story, not the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Sources — EN: ResetEra, NeoGAF · community
It went out of print for about a decade and resold for four figures, because its publisher, DigiCube, collapsed — there was no rights-holder left to petition for a reprint. It was eventually reprinted only after a roughly ten-year fan campaign through a Japanese reader-vote reprint service, where enough votes let the operator negotiate a new print run. Even so, be warned: it’s dense Japanese prose that Japanese readers themselves call hard going, so a four-figure original is pages you likely can’t read. A tour of what’s actually inside is the cheaper way in.
Sources — JP: reprint-service history · community
Book 1 is free.