Bart, Billy, and Rico each carry a reveal in their backstory, and this covers all three. Mid-to-late spoilers.
Three of the men who fight alongside Fei in Xenogears are built around a father who never shows up on the party screen. Bart lost his to a palace coup. Billy's simply walked out one day and vanished for years. Rico never knew his at all, and spent the better part of a decade trying to kill him. On the surface they're the muscle — the whip, the guns, the giant with the green skin. Underneath, each one is a study in what a father does to a son, and the game is unusually precise about the difference between the three.
They're worth putting side by side because the wounds don't rhyme. A murdered king, an absent priest, a stranger on a throne — three shapes, three answers, and only one of them ever really closes.
Bart: The Prince Who Took Up the Whip
Bart's father didn't break. Twelve years before the game, the chancellor Shakhan moved on the throne of Aveh — killed King Edbart IV, Bart's father, and put most of the royal family in the ground to take the country for himself. Edbart was held and questioned under a truth serum about the Fatima jade, the sacred stone his line had guarded for generations. He took his own life rather than give it up. Bart's mother, Queen Mariel, died in the same coup. Bart himself was a small boy.
He and his cousin Margie were imprisoned. Margie, as the future Holy Mother of Nisan, was handled with a certain care; Bart was not. He was whipped — and he took the whipping on purpose, standing between his captors and Margie, keeping the secret of the jade the way his father had. The scars stayed on him. So did the fear.
What he did with that fear is the part worth sitting with. Bart's weapon, for the whole game, is a whip. He didn't inherit it or stumble into it — he trained on the exact instrument that had been used to break him, until the thing that once controlled him was a thing he controlled completely.
Bart mastered the whip through brutal, blood-soaked training — deliberately taking the instrument that had been used to torture him and drilling with it until it was something he owned. The trauma wasn't healed so much as conquered: the thing that once had power over him became the thing he had power over.
Here's the detail almost everyone gets backwards. The eyepatch isn't the coup. Players see the scarred prince with the covered eye and assume the two belong together — the torture took his eye. It didn't. The whip scars are hidden under his clothes; the eye came later, in an accident aboard the Yggdrasil, when he threw himself into a failing generator and paid for it. What shaped how he fights is the wound you can't see — not the one you can.
And there's a quieter thing underneath even that. The "accident" is a cover story for a gift: his half-brother Sigurd gave up his own cornea to save Bart's eye, and wears a false one to keep it quiet.
Share what you gain with your brother. — Edbart IV's dying instruction to Bart
Sigurd is Bart's half-brother — same father, a mother from the desert people of Norn. Edbart knew Sigurd was his son, and his last instruction to Bart was that line. It's the one thing the murdered father managed to leave behind, and Sigurd honors it from the other side — serving as Bart's second and protector, giving up an eye without a word, never once reaching for the throne that could have been his. The father is gone, but the shape he wanted between his sons holds.
Billy: The Priest With Two Fathers
Billy was failed by two fathers. The first was the one he was born to. Jessie Black walked out when Billy was a child and disappeared for years — no explanation, no goodbye, just a father who was there and then wasn't. What Billy couldn't have known is that Jessie had learned something unforgivable about Solaris and left on purpose, so his children couldn't be interrogated over his defection. It was, in a bent way, an act of protection. To a boy raising his little sister alone, it was abandonment, and it read as nothing else.
Because he was raising her alone. His mother, Racquel, was killed by the Wels — the monsters the church sends its people out to hunt — when Billy was still a kid. She hid him and his sister Primera behind a clock and died holding the things off. Primera never spoke again. Billy, powerless and broke, came within an inch of selling his own body to keep the two of them fed.
Then the second father arrived. Bishop Stone — the churchman Billy would come to revere — pulled them out of it: took Primera into an Ethos facility, set Billy on the path to become an Etone, gave him a faith to stand on and something to point his life at. Billy built his entire self on that rescue. The Ethos became the father Jessie wasn't, and Bishop Stone became the man he would never let himself doubt.
The reveal takes all of it at once. The Ethos isn't a church; it's a front for Solaris. Those Wels that Billy has spent his life purging in God's name were people, transformed. And Bishop Stone — real name Stein — had loved Racquel, decided she'd defiled herself by marrying Jessie and bearing his children, and set the Wels on her himself, then cut them down afterward to walk in as the rescuer. He raised Billy on that lie, using the boy's own trigger finger to do Solaris's work and to nurse a private grudge against Jessie. The chosen father is the one who murdered his mother.
What saves Billy isn't the institution — it's the man who left. Jessie comes back, face and manner changed enough that Billy doesn't trust him at first. But in the final reckoning with Stone, whose Gear throws up a barrier nothing can touch, it's Jessie's Gear that cancels it, and Jessie's voice that gives his son something to hold: that the Wels he freed were in pain, that he ended it, that whatever God is, it isn't in the Ethos — it's in him. Father and son put Stone down together. Billy loses a false faith and buries a false father, and gets the real one back in the same stretch of the story.
Rico: The Son Behind the Locked Door
Rico's father thought he was dead. Rico is the Battling champion of D-Block — the prison district of Nortune, capital of the militarist empire Kislev — a huge demi-human on a three-year winning streak, living better than most free citizens and going nowhere. His father is Kaiser Sigmund, the man who rules the whole country. Neither of them knows.
The setup for that is one of the ugliest things in the game, and it happens before Rico is even born. The Committee — the church's Kislev branch, which Sigmund had stripped of power — took its revenge by getting to his pregnant wife, the Empress Anne. Her physician, a planted agent, dosed the pregnancy with drugs that forced the child's demi-human traits wide open. Rico was born visibly, unmistakably one of the underclass his own father's empire looked down on. The Committee banished mother and child, told the Kaiser — away at the front — that both had died, and set about stoking demi-human hatred across Kislev as policy.
So Rico grows up as the thing everyone is taught to despise. Anne raises him alone, sick and shunned for having borne a demi-human, and dies of it when he's about ten. He steals to survive, gathers a gang of boys with half-formed ideas about tearing the government down, and at eighteen takes a shot at the Kaiser — not knowing, not for a second, that he's aiming at his own father. It lands him in D-Block, where the fighting eventually makes him a king of a kind.
The recognition, when it finally comes, is the coldest version of this the game could have written. Framed and cornered in the palace, Rico ducks into the Kaiser's private chambers — a room sealed by a lock that reads DNA, coded to open for Sigmund and his wife and no one else. It opens for Rico. Standing inside, a buried memory of his childhood surfaces, and he understands what he is. But his father gets only a hint of it — a puzzled note that the sealed door somehow let a stranger through. They're pulled apart. Sigmund vanishes from the story. There is no reunion, no scene where either of them says the word out loud. The only thing that ever recognizes Rico is a genetic lock.
The knife under all of it: Sigmund is a demi-human too. He's the last of Elru, a people Solaris wiped out — pointed ears tucked under his hat, passing as fully human his whole reign. He rules a state that persecutes the exact blood he hides. Rico can't pass, and is broken for it; his father can, and isn't. Most players remember that Rico is secretly a prince and forget that his father is secretly the same kind of outcast the son is punished for being.
Three Wounds, Three Answers
Three fathers, three different wounds. Line them up and the game's precision shows. Bart's father was murdered, and the wound is a throne and a scar; his answer is control — he takes the instrument that hurt him and makes it his. Billy's father left, and the wound is an absence; he plugs it with a borrowed faith, watches the faith turn out to be a cage, and closes the wound only when the real man comes back to stand beside him. Rico's father is a stranger, and the wound is a recognition that never becomes a reunion — his own blood opens a door, and that's the whole conversation.
| Bart | Billy | Rico | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The father | Edbart IV, King of Aveh | Jessie Black (and Bishop Stone) | Kaiser Sigmund of Kislev |
| What happened | Murdered in Shakhan's coup | Abandoned him; his mother murdered | Never knew him; believed him dead |
| The wound | A throne and a scar | An absence, filled by faith | A recognition, never a reunion |
| His answer | Masters the whip that hurt him | Reconciles with the man; destroys the false one | His blood opens a sealed door — nothing more |
| Does it close? | Managed | Closes | Stays open |
If you want the honest ranking, only one of these wounds actually closes. Billy's does, and it closes for a specific reason: a person comes back and puts himself in the room. Bart's is managed, not healed — turning your pain into a tool you're good with is a real answer, but it isn't the same as setting it down, and he carries the scars for the whole game. Rico's stays open on purpose. The writing gives him the recognition and deliberately withholds the reunion, and that withholding is the point: some wounds never get the scene where the father turns around.
Once you see the pattern in these three, it's everywhere. The same engine runs the whole game. Fei, the man they all follow, was shaped past recognition by what his own father did to him. Climb to the top of the story and you find Krelian trying to build a God with his own hands, and the thing the entire plot orbits — Deus — sitting at the center as the Mother the whole world keeps trying to wake. Bart, Billy, and Rico are the small, human version of Xenogears' largest subject: children made by their parents, for love and for ruin. They're the easiest place to start seeing it — and once you have, the rest of the game reads differently.
Common Questions
Is Bart's eyepatch from his torture?
No. The whipping in the coup left scars, but they aren't on his face — the eye is a separate, later injury from an accident aboard the Yggdrasil, when he rushed into a damaged generator. There's a hidden kindness attached to it, too: his half-brother Sigurd gave up his own cornea to save the eye and wears a false one to keep it quiet.
Why does Rico hate the Kaiser if the Kaiser is his father?
For most of the game he has no idea they're related. And the demi-human persecution that wrecked his childhood ran through Kislev on the Kaiser's watch, so the man makes an obvious target for his anger. The cruel part is the misdirection: that persecution was engineered by the church's Committee, and Sigmund is himself a hidden demi-human. Rico spends years trying to kill the one person alive who shares his blood.
Does Billy ever forgive his father?
Effectively, yes. He never gets a clean apology, and he's wary of Jessie right up until it counts — but by the end they're fighting side by side against Bishop Stone, and it's Jessie who hands Billy a way to live with what the Ethos made him do. The blood father is the one who comes back for him. The chosen father is the one he has to destroy.
Are Bart, Billy, and Rico related?
No — there are no blood ties between them. They fall in with Fei separately, from three different countries. What connects them is the pattern: each is a man built around what a father did or didn't do. Xenogears tells that story at every scale, and these three are where it's cleanest.