Square told the public, in the autumn of 1997, that one of its most ambitious games might never leave Japan. The reason it gave was “sensitive religious issues.” The game was Xenogears, and the sticking point was easy to state and hard to ship: at the end of it, you kill God.
That fact did a lot of damage inside the company before it ever reached a player. The Xenogears localization was nearly shelved, then handed off, then abandoned by the people first assigned to it — until it came down to one translator who ended up directing, translating, and programming most of it himself. He slept at the office. He filed bug reports by fax. His name is Richard Honeywood, and he still calls Xenogears the hardest thing he ever worked on.
The Game Square Almost Left in Japanese
Xenogears almost shipped only in Japanese. At the Tokyo Game Show in September 1997, Square signalled that the game might not come to the United States at all, and pinned the doubt on its religious content. This wasn't a marketing tease. Inside the company, people genuinely weren't sure it could be sold in the West.
To see why, you need to know what the game is doing. Xenogears follows Fei Fong Wong across a world ruled from above by the floating nation of Solaris, and it ends with the party confronting Deus — an ancient machine weapon that the world worships as a god. Reaching that ending means killing it. The script is also thick with borrowed ideas: Jungian psychology, Freud, Nietzsche, and a steady current of references to Abrahamic scripture. Fei's own buried, violent second self is named, with no subtlety at all, Id.
That combination is what frightened the American side of the company. Some staff were sure a mainstream game about killing a God figure would draw religious protest, and a few worried it could turn physical — that the office itself might become a target. Proportionate or not, the fear was real enough to shape decisions. Xenogears was built by Tetsuya Takahashi and his wife Kaori Tanaka, pitched first as an idea for Final Fantasy VII before it grew into its own project, and it launched in Japan in February 1998 and North America that October. For a while, that second date was genuinely in doubt.
The Translators Who Walked Off the Project
The first team fell apart fast. Honeywood didn't start out as the translator. He was brought on to coordinate the effort, with Final Fantasy VII writer Michael Baskett leading the actual translation and two new hires working under him. Then Baskett left the company mid-project after a falling-out with management, and the two newcomers were suddenly carrying a game far above their level — dense with scientific jargon, psychological theory, and the exact religious content that had everyone on edge.
The shape of the project, start to ship.
They asked off. One of them was blunt about the reason: the fear that a religious group might take offence and come after the office. Both moved to other titles, and Honeywood was, in his words, “stuck there by myself.” The coordinator became the whole department. He directed the localization, translated it, and — because there was no one else — learned to build the QA versions and assemble the game himself.
The development team couldn't help. They'd already moved on to their next game and had no one to spare, so they taught Honeywood the technical work and left him to it. He went back and asked for a schedule extension of several months, knowing marketing wanted it sooner. It was, as he later put it, “the project from hell” — and by then he was the only one still on it.
No Internet, No Books, and a Cot in the Office
There was no internet to lean on. This was 1997 in a Japanese office, and the tools we take for granted now weren't there. The company had only just set up an internal network. Honeywood could email the American office, but there was no quick way to move data back and forth, and bug reports between teams went out by fax. There was no online encyclopedia to check anything against.
That mattered more than it sounds, because Xenogears assumes you can look things up. Its script leans on German philosophy and literature, on Jung and Freud and Nietzsche — material Honeywood had to understand before he could render it faithfully in English. Working in Japan, he had no access to the English and German books the game was quoting. So he went to the National Library in person, tracked the foreign texts down on the shelves, and taught himself the references one at a time.
The schedule bent for none of this. Honeywood stopped going home. He slept at the office night after night and turned up looking, by his own description, like a zombie. He has said plainly that the work suffered under that pressure — and the game bears it out, with a back half that leans hard on long narrated stretches where the earlier hours had actual play. That wasn't really a design choice; it was the visible edge of a person running out of time.
I nearly killed myself on that title. — Richard Honeywood
What the ordeal bought him, oddly, was trust. The team watched one person refuse to let the game ship broken and drew a conclusion from it: this was someone who cared about the work, not a hired outsider who'd turn in something shoddy and move on. That reputation outlived the crunch.
Killing God as a Jehovah's Witness
Honeywood was a Jehovah's Witness then. That single detail turns the project from a hard translation job into something stranger and more personal. The man tasked with carrying a game about killing God to the West held a faith that made the material sit heavily on his conscience — and it didn't stay private. When the elders in his congregation heard what the Japanese version contained, he ran into real friction over it inside his own religion.
He was also the one asked to soften the game for the American office, and he started before the Japanese version had even launched. The clearest example is an organisation the original called the Church, capital C. The American side worried it read as the Catholic Church specifically, so for English it became the Ethos. The ending — the actual killing of God — was handled with more care than scissors: adjusted in its wording so it stepped around the sharpest offence while keeping the premise the whole game was built on.
What the American office asked to soften, and how it shipped.
Held together, the picture is quietly remarkable. Two of his colleagues had already walked partly because of this content; he stayed and worked on it anyway. These were among the first times Square's localizers negotiated content directly with a development team — and the person doing the negotiating was personally uneasy with the very thing he was arguing to keep shippable. He wanted to respect what the creators made and hold the English as close to their intent as he could. Doing both at once, on this game, is most of what made it the hardest job of his career.
Yahweh, the Pun That Named a God
The god you fight is named Deus. That's the name in the finished game, in both Japanese and English. But it wasn't the plan. During development the team intended to call the machine-god Yahweh, straight out of Abrahamic scripture — exactly the choice that had the American office bracing for backlash.
Honeywood argued against it. As he tells the story, somewhere in the middle of pushing back he blurted the Japanese slang “yabē” — roughly “that's dangerous, that's bad” — and it landed on the room, because the word sits close enough to “Yahweh” to work as a pun. The staff were amused enough that the boss picked the slang up as a nickname on the development floor. What actually shipped, though, was Deus — the name that reached players everywhere, with Yahweh left behind as the working title and the pun surviving only as a story the translator likes to tell.
The joke only works in Japanese. The slang Honeywood reached for sounds enough like “Yahweh” that the pun is audible in Japanese and invisible in English — which is why the anecdote gets flattened in English retellings into a simple “renamed for the West.” In fact Deus is the name that shipped in Japan too.
It's a small thing that points at a larger one. A translator is usually pictured as someone rendering finished text, but here the person translating the game quietly steered a naming decision on the source side, before a word of English was locked. That influence — shaping the original, not just carrying it across — is what the good ones do and almost no one notices.
What the Xenogears Localization Left Behind
The nightmare became the blueprint. Xenogears was the first time an English localization team worked directly with Square's developers instead of receiving a finished game and translating it at arm's length. Everything painful about that setup on this project turned into an argument for doing it better, and Honeywood is the one who built the better version. He's credited with founding Square's localization department, and the fixes came straight out of what Xenogears lacked: dedicated editors, translators seated near the development teams, and a proper ramp-up at the start of each project to build a shared glossary and settle how characters should sound before a line gets written.
He assumed the disaster had ended his standing with the team. It did the opposite. The same developers asked him back for their next games, Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy XI among them, and the department he started went on to set the standard the company is still known for. Xenogears itself never got a European release — no PAL version, then or since — but it sold well past a million copies worldwide and hardened into one of those games people rank among the best ever made, rushed back half and all.
If you've only ever known it as a cult classic, the Xenogears localization is the part of the story that usually gets cut — the one person, the fax machine, the National Library, the God he wasn't sure he should be helping players kill. Takahashi left Square not long after, founded Monolith Soft, and built Xenosaga and then the Xenoblade games in the same spirit. All of it grows out of a project that nearly broke the person who put it in your language — and the reason you can read it at all is that he refused to let it go.
Common Questions
Why was Xenogears almost not localized?
Because of its religious content. At the 1997 Tokyo Game Show, Square told the public the game might not reach the United States over 'sensitive religious issues' — chiefly the ending, where you kill a God figure, and a script full of Abrahamic references. Part of the American office feared protests, or worse, if it shipped. It nearly didn't.
Was the final boss really named Yahweh?
As a working name, yes. During development the machine-god was going to be called Yahweh. Honeywood argued against it, and the boss that shipped is named Deus — in both Japan and the West. So the common line that it was 'renamed from Yahweh to Deus for the West' isn't quite right: Deus is the name in the Japanese release too.
Who translated Xenogears?
Richard Honeywood, mostly alone. He was hired to coordinate the localization, but after the lead writer left the company and the two other translators asked off the project, he ended up directing, translating, and even programming and assembling the game himself. He calls it the hardest project of his career.
Did Xenogears ever come out in Europe?
No. It launched in Japan and North America in 1998 and never received a European (PAL) release, then or since. Players outside those regions have always had to import it or emulate it.