Every Xenogears Party Member, Explained

Xenogears asks you to learn nine characters twice. Every one of them is a person on foot and a machine in the cockpit, and the two halves rarely line up. The best bare-knuckle fighter in the party is not the best pilot; the thirteen-year-old who can barely throw a punch commands one of the strongest Gears in the game. So the Xenogears characters arrive in two shapes each, and the game — dense, reincarnation-haunted, in a hurry by the end — never once sits you down to sort them.

This is the sort. All nine party members: who they are, the Gear each one climbs into, what they do on the ground versus in the air, and where they turn up. Skim the table, then come back for whichever name you are trying to place.

Every Xenogears character at a glance

The party tops out at nine. They come from four corners of the world and three warring powers, they join across the whole length of the game, and every one of them fights in two completely different ways. Here is the whole roster in one place.

Xenogears runs two battle systems side by side. On the ground you fight hand-to-hand, stringing Deathblows out of button patterns; in a Gear you pilot a house-sized mech that runs on fuel and hits like a freight train until that fuel runs dry. Almost nobody is good at both. Hold onto that — it is the reason every party member below has a split identity.

Fei, Citan, and Bart: the Ignas three

Three of them start on Ignas. They are your on-foot backbone for most of the game, and they set up the pattern the rest of the cast plays against.

Fei Fong Wong is the one you can rarely bench. He is an amnesiac raised in the border village of Lahan, and on foot he is a bare-fisted brawler who spends most of the game as your strongest or second-strongest physical attacker — partly because he is always in the party, so his combos stay a step ahead of everyone else's. His Gear is Weltall, which grows into Weltall-2 and finally into the Xenogears itself, the machine the game is named after. There is a catch folded into him: a buried second self called Id, and when Id takes the controls, Weltall turns black and starts doing damage nothing else in the party can reach.

Citan Uzuki looks like the least threatening man alive — a mild country doctor from the hills above Lahan — and he is, quietly, the strongest character in the game. He carries the highest HP and the highest speed in the party, learns an outsized spread of support skills, and picks up a sword in the game's second half that hands him a whole second set of Deathblows. His Gear, Heimdal, is built to dodge; it is fast and slippery where Fei's is a wall. He also happens to have designed a good number of the Gears you fight, and the mild-doctor act is exactly that — an act, run on quiet orders from the sky-empire of Solaris. He joins at the end of Blackmoon Forest, barely an hour in.

Bartholomew Fatima arrives loud. He is the rightful heir to the kingdom of Aveh, currently running sand pirates out of a ship that dives beneath the desert because a coup took his throne, and he fights on foot with a whip that reaches clear across the field and an ability called Wild Smile that tanks an enemy's accuracy. His Gear, Brigandier, is the party's jack-of-all-trades. Two things make him worth watching. He is the first character to reach his Omnigear , Andvari, so there is a window where he is flatly the strongest pilot you own — before everyone else catches up and passes him. And much later he climbs into Yggdrasil IV, which turns out to be an entire administrative block that stands up and becomes a Gear. He joins in the Stalactite Cave.

Rico, Elly, and Billy: the mid-game turn

The game opens up in Kislev. The next three recruits arrive as the story leaves the desert and widens into the empire and the sky above it.

Rico — Ricardo Banderas — is the undefeated arena champion of Nortune, Kislev's capital, and you meet him the hard way: as the prisoner who flattens you in the ring. On foot he is the bluntest tool in the box — the hardest hitter, the slowest mover, and the least likely to actually connect. His Gear, Stier, is heavy armour wrapped around a fist, and its Omnigear, El-Stier, is one of the best machines you will pilot all game. He joins in Nortune.

Elhaym Van Houten — Elly — is the other half of the story. She is a Gebler officer of Solaris when you meet her, and she is also the Antitype: a soul reincarnated alongside Fei's for a hundred centuries. On foot she is a glass mage, weak in a brawl but one of the two best ether users in the game, fighting with rods and elemental magic. Her Gear is Vierge, a support frame. Everything about her reads like a permanent fixture — which is exactly what makes her the roster's one real heartbreak.

Billy Lee Black comes on as a soft-spoken Ethos priest and turns out to be an Etone — a sanctioned executioner whose job is purging the Wels, the horrors this world quietly calls Reapers. On foot he is a gunslinger-medic: his physical guns burn ammo, his ether guns do not, and he carries the deepest support kit in the party, the only character who can mend the whole party with a single spell. He is also made of paper, so keeping him standing is its own small game. His Gear, Renmazuo, is competent. The trouble is that healing does nothing in Gear combat, so the thing that makes Billy Billy switches off the moment he climbs in, and his value in the air tapers. He joins at the Yggdrasil, just before the Ethos transport ship.

Maria, Chu-Chu, and Emeralda: the outliers

The last three break the rules. Each of them ignores a system the other eight are built around — the Deathblow, the Gear, the human lifespan.

Maria Balthasar is thirteen, from the floating city of Shevat, and she brings a Gear her father built before Solaris took him away to build more. On foot she is the weakest fighter in the party, and one of only two characters with no Deathblows at all — she simply cannot do the combos everyone else lives on. What she has instead is Seibzehn, a long-range artillery Gear the size of a building, which she runs by voice: she pilots it standing on its head rather than sitting inside it. She can even call it to fire into rooms far too small for a Gear to physically enter. She joins in Shevat.

Chu-Chu is the strangest party member in the game, and it is not close. She is a knee-high creature from a near-extinct forest race, she was locked up alongside Bart's cousin, and she carries an open crush on Fei that the game plays completely straight while no one else notices. She is the other character with no Deathblows, and she has no Gear either — instead she grows to Gear size when her limiter comes off. In that giant form she does two things nothing else in the party can: she heals other Gears, and she fights without burning a drop of fuel. The game also stacks hidden bonuses on her that it never explains, doubling her attack in battle and pushing it higher still whenever Fei or Bart is hurt.

Emeralda is older than the rest of the party combined. She is a colony of nanomachines built four thousand years ago by Kim Kasim, one of Fei's past lives — which is why she spends most of the game calling Fei "Kim." On foot she carries no weapon; she reshapes her own arms and hair into blades. She joins as a child after the Sargasso ruins, and an optional visit to a certain lighthouse ages her into an adult, at which point her attack and magic climb and she starts gaining stats faster per level than anyone else you have. Her Gear is Crescens — fast, hard-hitting, thin-skinned.

Xenogears is really two games in one box — a fighting game and a mecha game — and it casts every character twice. — Pierre

On foot or in a Gear: who actually leads

The two lists don't match. This is the thing to internalise about the cast: sort them by their fists and you get one order, sort them by their Gears and you get another.

Only Fei and Emeralda show up on both sides. Everyone else is a specialist. Billy is a star on foot and a footnote in a Gear. Maria is nearly dead weight on the ground and a wrecking ball in the air. Rico is a blunt object either way, but a far better one once he is bolted into armour. Read a character once for their fists and once for their frame, and the roster stops being nine names and starts being eighteen small decisions.

Recruitment runs in a fixed order. The cast joins on rails, and the order maps cleanly onto the world: Fei starts the game, Citan falls in at Blackmoon Forest, Bart in the Stalactite Cave, Rico and Elly during the Kislev capital, Billy at the Yggdrasil, Chu-Chu and Maria once you reach Shevat, and Emeralda last, dug out of the Sargasso ruins.

Elly is the only one who leaves, which is why the line marks her apart from the rest. Knowing who is who is the door, not the room. Once you can tell all nine apart, the real questions open up: whose Deathblows to chase first, which Gears deserve your parts, and who to actually stand in your three slots for the fights that matter. There is a heaviness under this roster, too — a couple of these pilots were built to carry more than the finished game had room for, and their unused Omnigears sit in the data like promises the ending could not keep. That is the shape of Xenogears: nine people, cast twice, a few of them reaching for something the game ran out of time to hand them.

Common Questions

How many playable characters are in Xenogears?

Nine — Fei, Citan, Bart, Rico, Elly, Billy, Maria, Chu-Chu, and Emeralda. Most fight both on foot and in a Gear, but two of them, Maria and Chu-Chu, have no Deathblows and lean entirely on their machines — and Chu-Chu has no Gear at all, she grows into one.

Who is the best character in Xenogears?

Two answers, because the game has two combat layers. On foot it is Citan, for his speed, bulk, and a second set of Deathblows once he picks up his sword, with Billy and Emeralda close behind. In a Gear it is Fei's Xenogears, then Rico's El-Stier, Maria's Seibzehn, and Emeralda's Crescens. Emeralda is the safest single pick, because she is strong in both.

Which Xenogears character leaves the party?

Elly, permanently, after the second Anima Relic. She is the heroine and she rides with you for a long stretch, so it lands hard. Her Omnigear, El-Regrs, is the one party Omnigear you never get to pilot — she is out of your hands right before it would have become usable. Do not over-invest her Gear.

What are the Gears in Xenogears?

One per pilot, except Chu-Chu, who becomes one. Fei pilots Weltall (later the Xenogears), Citan Heimdal, Bart Brigandier, Rico Stier, Elly Vierge, Billy Renmazuo, Maria Seibzehn, and Emeralda Crescens. Most upgrade into a stronger Omnigear late on, though Maria's and Emeralda's upgrades were designed and then cut before release.