The Xenogears Story Nobody Has Read

Page 204 of Xenogears Perfect Works is not a diagram. It is the opening of a short story called Dark Summer — two pages of prose dropped into the middle of three hundred pages of timelines, cross-sections and Gear schematics. One of the two people who created the game wrote it, and it has been sitting there since 1998.

Nobody has translated it. Not officially, since Perfect Works has never had an English edition at all, and not unofficially either, which is the stranger half. Two large fan translations of the book exist and both stop well short of page 204. The story is named in English, in public, in a resource still being updated. What it actually says has never been written down in any language but the one it was printed in.

What Is Actually Sitting on Page 204

The story is two pages long. That is the whole of it — 204 and 205, with the Drama chapter ending on 203 and the Character Gallery picking up on 206 and running for the next seventy-odd pages. Turn past the spread and you would never know the book contained fiction at all.

Perfect Works is the only official settings book Xenogears ever received. DigiCube published it in 1998, the same year as the game: A4, softcover, just over three hundred pages, a fold-out poster bound into the front. Most of it is exactly what that description suggests. There is a fifteen-thousand-year chronology. Cutaway drawings of warships. An eight-page index of defined terms. And then, between the warship materials and the art gallery, two pages of someone telling a story.

Dark Summer is credited to Kaori Tanaka, under the pen name Clio Saga. She is better known now as Soraya Saga, the name she took around 2001, and she is not a guest contributor — she created Xenogears with Tetsuya Takahashi, who directed it. Before that she was a graphic designer at Square, a map designer on Final Fantasy V and VI, and the person who invented Edgar and Sabin Figaro and wrote their dialogue. She also wrote a Final Fantasy VI doujinshi filling in the Figaro family's background, which is the detail that makes Dark Summer legible. Writing prose in the margins of a game she had worked on was already something she did.

Why Xenogears Dark Summer Never Got Translated

No English edition has ever existed. Perfect Works was never licensed for translation, and the English-speaking half of the fanbase has spent nearly thirty years reading it through volunteers. That work is real and much of it is good. It is also unfinished in a specific, documented way.

Two large translations circulate. The first reached version 1.7 and was last touched in February 2004; its stated goal was to produce the first full translation of the book, and its own introduction records that every earlier attempt had failed. Its contents list carries headings for the Drama chapter, the gallery and a catch-all “other” — and those headings sit above nothing. They were never filled in.

The second got to version 1.10 in April 2004. Its version history is precise about the scope: the History chapter and the Science chapter in full, plus part of the Gear chapter. The 1.10 release added no new chapters at all — a glossary rewrite, formatting fixes, one corrected diagram, one restored page. It supersedes an earlier full-colour translation project abandoned before it.

Neither document contains anything at or near page 204. A third effort, a translation and preservation project still being updated as recently as last year, names the story and its author outright and states plainly that it has no plans to translate the whole book. Dark Summer is identified in English, in a maintained public resource, and left exactly where it is.

The pattern across all three is the same, and it is not mysterious. Translators went where the answers were. History, Science, Gear and Character are the chapters that resolve the game's puzzles — what Deus is, what the Zohar does, why Fei keeps being born again — so those are the chapters that got the hours. Fiction resolves nothing. It sat two-thirds of the way through a very long book, past the point where anyone's momentum held. No rights dispute, no lost manuscript: a stalled hobby project from 2004 and a page number nobody reached.

That has a consequence worth naming. When an English reader says “Perfect Works says…”, they are nearly always quoting the front half. Roughly the back third of the book — the fiction, the second side story, the critical essay, the afterword — has never been rendered into English by anyone publicly.

The Rest of the Book Nobody Reads Either

Dark Summer is not alone in there. Pages 280 to 287 hold a second and longer piece of fiction: an eight-page side story starring Tolone and Seraphita, framed around military vocabulary that turns up on an exam. A critical essay about the experience of playing the game runs from 290 to 293. The afterword on 302 and 303 works through three incompatible readings of the Time of the Gospel — the Gazel Ministry's, Miang's, and Cain's — before conceding the question is unresolved. That is a settings book arguing with itself in print.

The prose starts earlier than 204, too. Page 14 carries a titled vignette called Encounter, marked as an excerpt from an edited script, staging the first meeting between Elly's earlier incarnation and Krelian as literary prose rather than a timeline entry. Dialogue, imagery, an actual scene.

And then there is the detail rarely brought up. The character profile pages carry personal data — age, measurements, and a fragrance. A real perfume, assigned per character, with a written rationale for the match. Miang gets Calvin Klein's Contradiction, and the book explains the pick: she carries a destiny across an eternity with nobody to lean on, and the name means what it means. Eighty hours of Jungian apocalypse, and somewhere in the back of the official companion volume somebody sat down and chose a scent for the antagonist.

None of this is filler. Takahashi's director's comment near the front sets out the shape: the middle of the saga's three broad episodes was meant to break into four sub-episodes, and those were originally intended for release in completely different forms — a simulation game, a novelisation, others — before all of it was crammed into one release. What shipped is two of those episodes with pieces of two more folded in.

“we didn't include a third of the full story” — Tetsuya Takahashi, Perfect Works, August 1998

He wrote that six months after launch, in a book he was also using to correct things the game had got wrong or never explained, warning readers that some of it would contradict what they had played. Read that way, the fiction stops looking like a bonus feature. It is the nearest surviving thing to the novelisation that never got made.

There is more of it outside the book. A Japanese Xenogears manga anthology collects short stories set across the past, present and future of the plot, and its opening chapter, Liquid Sky, is credited to Clio Saga — same writer, same pen name, same period. That one has been scanlated: a complete fan translation went public in 2019 after more than a year of work. Which is the proof that this material is reachable when somebody decides it matters.

Reading Perfect Works Without Japanese

The book is still buyable secondhand. It went out of print because DigiCube went bankrupt, not because anyone withdrew it. It returned in 2014, reissued by a Japanese publisher that brings back out-of-print titles on the strength of reader votes, released on 10 April that year at five thousand yen before tax.

That reprint is gone as well. The product page shows no stock and offers a restock notification instead, while the request page for another printing has logged 2,504 votes, with fresh ones filed in May, June and July of this year. The original edition had reached at least sixteen printings by 2001 and still went to premium prices, which tells you supply never once met demand. One collector records paying around ten thousand yen for a reprint copy in 2015, then watching the same book reach roughly seventeen thousand by 2022.

There is a smaller obstacle Japanese readers mention and English ones never do: the cover. The 1998 edition put an unclothed figure on the front, and buyers describe being reluctant to carry it to a shop counter — some missed their window entirely. A book can go rare for reasons that have nothing to do with print runs.

One more thing to settle before you trust any English rendering of this book, including your own. The retail localisation and the fan translations do not agree on what things are called, and one project prints its own substitution list.

The retail version does not automatically lose these arguments. Big Joe's real name in Japanese is a reference to a character from the boxing manga Ashita no Joe; an early fan translation misread a single character and produced “The Stone Joker”, while the retail localisation swapped in a Rocky reference and kept the joke intact. That is the correct call and the fan version is simply wrong. The maintained preservation project exists partly to publish second opinions like that one, with several translators openly disagreeing over the same paragraphs of Takahashi's own commentary.

So the shelf is still half-unread, and the gaps are specific rather than vague. The two essays, the critical piece at 290 and the afterword at 302, are where Perfect Works stops behaving like a wiki and starts behaving like criticism, and they are the obvious next targets. Dark Summer is two pages. Somebody with the book, the language and a free afternoon could close that hole permanently — and the comic anthology already proved the work gets finished when one person decides it should.

Common Questions

What is Dark Summer in Xenogears?

Dark Summer is a two-page prose short story printed on pages 204 and 205 of Xenogears Perfect Works, the game's official settings book. It was written by Kaori Tanaka under the pen name Clio Saga — the co-creator of the game, now better known as Soraya Saga. No translation or summary of it has ever been published in English, so while the story is documented and its location is known precisely, its contents are not.

Has Xenogears Perfect Works been translated into English?

Not officially, and not completely by anyone. There has never been a licensed English edition. Two large fan translations circulate and both stalled in 2004: one covers History, Science and part of the Gear chapter, the other covers a broader spread but leaves its Drama, Gallery and "other" headings sitting above empty space. Roughly the back third of the book — the short story, the Tolone and Seraphita side story, the critical essay and the afterword — has never been rendered into English publicly.

Who wrote Dark Summer?

Kaori Tanaka, credited in the book under the pen name Clio Saga. She changed that pen name to Soraya Saga around 2001, which is how most people know her now. Before Xenogears — which she co-created with Tetsuya Takahashi — she worked as a map designer on Final Fantasy V and VI and created Edgar and Sabin Figaro along with their backstories and dialogue. A Final Fantasy VI doujinshi expanding the Figaro family's history followed, so prose set in the margins of a game she worked on was already part of what she did.

Can you still buy Xenogears Perfect Works?

Only secondhand, at a premium. The original went out of print when DigiCube collapsed. A Japanese publisher reissued it on 10 April 2014 at five thousand yen before tax, and that printing has sold out too — the product page now offers a restock notification instead of stock. The request page for another printing has logged 2,504 votes and is still collecting them. One collector records paying about ten thousand yen for a reprint copy in 2015 and seeing the same book at roughly seventeen thousand by 2022.