Inside Perfect Works

Xenogears Perfect Works is 304 A4 pages long, and almost nobody reading this has held one. It was published in August 1998, about six months after the game, by a Square subsidiary that no longer exists. It has never been translated into English. The 2014 reprint sold out and hasn't come back.

So the book everyone reaches for when a Xenogears argument gets serious is, for most English-speaking players, a rumour with a page count attached. The architecture is worth having even if the book never is — six sections, a back half almost nothing in English has described, and a fifteen-thousand-year timeline that begins in the year 2001. Some of what's inside is exactly what a settings book should contain. Some of it is a short story, an invented system of measurement, and a page conceding the authors don't know.

What Xenogears Perfect Works Actually Is

It isn't a strategy guide. Perfect Works contains no boss strategies, no item tables, no route maps — not one page of it helps you play. DigiCube, Square's retail subsidiary, published it in August 1998, and it was supervised by director and scenario writer Tetsuya Takahashi, mecha designer Junya Ishigaki, and character designer Kunihiko Tanaka. That supervision credit is why the book carries the weight it does: this isn't a licensed volume assembled from the script by outside writers, it's the people who built the setting writing the setting down.

The format matters more than it sounds. A4, 304 pages, softcover, with a fold-out poster bound at the front. A4 is larger than most guide books of the period, and the book spends that size on diagrams — organisational charts, cross-sections, control-flow figures — that would be illegible at a smaller trim. Difficult terms carry annotations through the body rather than being exiled to the back, and a terminology index and afterword close it out.

For scale, a comparable Square strategy book of the same era ran around 470 pages and gave a handful of them to settings material not attached to walkthrough data. Perfect Works is 304 pages of nothing else.

Getting hold of one is the hard part. DigiCube went bankrupt, the book went out of print, and it stayed there — at least sixteen printings existed by 2001 and it still commanded resale premiums. A reprint arrived in April 2014 at 5,000 yen, after more than three years of negotiation with rights holders that began in 2009. It sold out. The standing reprint request has since passed 2,500 votes, the reprint is still listed out of stock, and used copies run well into five figures in yen.

The Timeline That Starts in 2001

The book opens on a claim. Its first section is titled The Truth of Episode V, and the claim is this: the story is woven across six large episodes, and the game is the fifth of them. The card at the end of Xenogears isn't a flourish — it's a position on a chart. The stated scale is fifteen thousand years, of which roughly ten thousand separate the birth of Deus from the game's opening scene. Episode VI is never mentioned again, anywhere in the book .

What follows that claim is not an essay. It's a dated chronicle, year by year, and the format is the point. It opens in A.D. 2001 with an eye-shaped object pulled from a stratum roughly 3.9 billion years old, which dating then places at around fifteen billion years — older than the rock it was in, older than the planet. It's designated MAM, for Magnetic Abnormal Matter, before a group of volunteer researchers give it the name Zohar. A margin note cites real panspermia theory and names Fred Hoyle.

By A.D. 2510 the Space Emigration Project begins and the calendar changes. Sixteen years later the emigrant fleet leaves Earth, which becomes forbidden ground and is renamed Lost Jerusalem. In T.C. 4767 the Zohar and Deus connection tests go wrong, the Wave Existence falls through the Path of Sephirot and is bound inside the Zohar, and the Eldridge comes down.

The Eldridge gets a full spec block: standing weight 27 billion tons, maximum width 42 kilometres, length 100 kilometres. Its captain is named — Special Forces Colonel Shigeyoshi Inoue of the Technology Research headquarters — for a man who appears only in the opening cinematic. Individual hull blocks are traced to places you walk through: the Babel block becomes Babel Tower, a plant block becomes part of Shevat, and the central block holding Razael lands as Mahanon.

The chronicle keeps that resolution the whole way. Zeboim ends in a nuclear war Miang engineers, taking over 90% of the population. Adoriel founds the Nisan teaching in 9088; Solaris is founded in 9164; Shevat goes up on top of Babel Tower in 9226. Sophia dies at 25 in 9500. Lacan's incomplete contact with the Zohar produces Grahf the following year, and the Diabolos take 96% of the surface. Fei, Elly and Bart are all born in 9981. Citan in 9970. The year 9999 is labelled, flatly, Game Start Time.

Nations, Maps and an Ecology

Solaris gets an organisational chart. The Social Structure section runs from page 20 to page 37 and treats every polity as a political system rather than a location. Solaris takes four pages, opening with its crest — the Tree of Sephiroth, the same emblem carried on the Merkava's main cannon. Beneath it sits a power diagram with Emperor Cain at the centre, ringed by the Gazel Ministry, Gebler, the Ethos, the Holy Assembly and the Department of Strength, with the Defence Force head below. Each office gets a duty description, and some of them quietly answer questions the game leaves open : the Gazel Ministry is eight men existing as data on the SOL-9000, and Krelian holds Defence Force authority because Solaris has no national assembly to hold it instead.

Nisan gets a graph of the early sect's power structure and the schism that followed. Aveh, Shevat, Kislev and the Thames each get their own treatment, and the Thames page carries a small relationship diagram — friendly with the Yggdrasil, business partners with the Ethos. The Aveh–Kislev war is broken into force shares across five categories.

Geography runs pages 40 to 50 and is more thorough than it needs to be: a world atlas, an entire spread on the altitude of the world, per-nation maps for Kislev, Aveh, Solaris, Nisan, Shevat and the Thames, and finally the underground.

The Monster section is the one that surprises people. It runs pages 54 to 64 and opens by reframing random encounters as an ecosystem that shares the planet with people rather than as things that attack you. Creatures are classified on two axes at once — habitat, and whether they're natural or artificial — and then given invented biology. Hobgob is described as a fungus fused with an echinoderm structure, moving on tube feet. The Griffon gets kilometre-range eyesight and a top speed of 1,000 km/h; the Sand Shark gets degenerate eyes and a heart-lung function adapted for moving through sand, because it swims through it. Ground temperature on Ignas is put at 70 degrees. Then the section ends on a page headed Unknown Monsters, conceding that plenty of them remain unclassified — a catalogue admitting it isn't finished.

The Science Section Is the One That Changes the Game

Read this section first. It's the part that alters a replay, because it defines the vocabulary the game uses without explaining — most of which only surfaces once the story stops dramatising and starts narrating. Pages 66 to 77, and it states that job openly.

The Deus System is described as four transportable regions: the Zohar, the Deus main body, Kadomony, and the Merkava. Each gets a definition. The Zohar is the phenomenon conversion system, a pseudo-perpetual engine supplying drive energy on demand; the Merkava, at roughly 80 kilometres, has its name glossed as the chariot to heaven. Kadomony is the biological electronic brain, and it sits packed inside the pupil of the Zohar's eye.

The detail underneath is where it gets good. Kadomony's interior splits into a logical operation element and an indefinite operation element, both computing the same problem simultaneously and reconciling when the answers differ. Its biological element divides into Persona, Anima and Animus, with Persona built on a base program named Elehaym.

Slave Generators turn out to be a literal master-and-slave protocol. The Gear requests energy; the Zohar, as master, checks the request against a rated ceiling and supplies it. Overload is impossible by design. That ceiling is set by a Marking ordinary parties cannot alter — and Grahf is the only figure in the game able to raise one, which retroactively explains every fight where his machine shouldn't have been able to do what it did. Ether is the same protocol running through a person instead of a machine: direct communication with the Zohar, no generator in between. Anima Relics are called False Zohars, and fused with an Animus they turn an ordinary Gear into an Omnigear by opening a second, stronger channel.

The glossary runs real science alongside the invented kind — Fred Hoyle on panspermia, Einstein on relativity, Clausius and the second law of thermodynamics, K. Eric Drexler on nanomachines. And the Ether entry does something no strategy book has any business doing: it explains Christiaan Huygens' 1678 luminiferous ether, notes that it was disproved in 1905, and then states plainly that the game disregards that. The magic system is named after a piece of physics the book knows is wrong, and it tells you so in a footnote .

Every Gear, Including the Ones That Never Shipped

The Gear section is the largest block. Roughly pages 80 to 155, in three passes: main Gears with full stats, colour renders and long entries; every other unique machine with black-and-white art and a shorter entry; then Design Works, which is designer notes and artwork with no stats at all.

Then there are the units. The book doesn't use metric — it invents an entire measurement system for a world where nobody was ever going to measure anything.

Weltall Id gets its own separate entry on the next page, taller at 19.4 Sharls on the same chassis weight. Roughly thirty individual Gears are documented, down to machines you fight once and never see again — Calamity, Dora, Alkanshel, Haisho, Kenren, Tenpou, Wandknight, Swordknight, Aegisknight, Clawknight, Bladegash, Marinebasher, Grandgrowl, Skygene. Miang's Vierge C1 gets an entry. So do Hammer's and Jessie's.

The Design Works block carries Ishigaki's sheets, including machines that were cut and never reached the game . A vessels section documents the ships: the Yggdrasil across four pages, then the Excalibur, Lightforge, Ezekiel, Hecht, the Sand Cruiser and the Goliath. Deus itself is in here too, along with the Malakh Angel, the Seraphs and the Deus Pillars — all treated as designed objects with their own pages. The G-Elements Gear gets a two-page spread. Xenogears — the Gear, not the game — gets pages 144 and 145.

The Character Files and the Strange Back Half

Forty-odd characters get files. The Character section runs pages 158 to 195, and its reach past the party is what stands out. The Lahan villagers get entries. So do Elly's strike team, the Thames crew, General Vanderkaum, Joshua Blanche and Sigmund. Fei and Abel share page 158; Kim gets 159, Grahf 161 to 162, Id 163, Elly 164 to 165, Sophia 165, Miang 166 to 167. Krelian gets 172 and 173. Emperor Cain and the Gazel Ministry get 174 and 175, including a full list of the Anima Relics and which figure each one bonds to.

And on page 187, Big Joe gets a complete canonical biography . Heavyweight champion, five hit films, a Wimbledon Grand Slam, a baseball triple crown, and a Pulitzer Prize — then brain damage after slipping at an awards ceremony, then an accidental cryogenic freezing. The joke character was documented with the same seriousness as the emperor of humanity.

The entries also mark where the game's account is incomplete. The Kadomony entry gives the version the game tells you, then adds a line .

The truth isn't so shallow. — Perfect Works, page 10

The back half is the part English coverage never reaches. After a Drama section and a Character Gallery come the Gear settings collection, a main-Gear design gallery and a vessels settings collection. Then a short story called Dark Summer, then a section titled Image Photograph ~if~, then a feature on the military terminology that appears in Tolone and Seraphita's exam. Main Staff of Xenogears follows. So does a closing critical essay asking what the work was trying to ask of its users. The terminology index and the afterword close the book. Citations run as far as page 286, so there's substantive material a long way past the character files.

If you only ever read two sections in translation, make them History and Science. History turns the card at the end of the game into a coordinate — Episode V of six, with four behind it and one that was never written. Science is the section that changes a replay: once you know the Slave Generator is a permissions system and Ether is the same permission granted to a person, a good deal of the game's dialogue stops sounding like poetry and starts reading like documentation.

What the book won't give you is the rest. There's no Episode VI. No interviews. No liner notes for a soundtrack that deserved them, and no bibliography for a story built visibly out of other people's books. It documents a world exhaustively and then stops at the edge of the one it came from. Whether that was restraint or just the end of the schedule, the fax sheets don't say.

Common Questions

Is Perfect Works canon?

Yes. It is the only official settings book Xenogears ever received, and it was supervised by the game's director, its mecha designer and its character designer — that is the setting's authors documenting their own work, not a licensee reconstructing it from the script. Two honest limits, though. It never addresses Episode VI, so the sixth part of the arc it describes is nowhere in it. And several entries explicitly flag that they are holding something back rather than pretending to completeness.

Has Perfect Works been translated into English?

Not officially, and it never has been. What exists is unofficial fan translation work of varying completeness, and it is uneven by section: the History, Science, Monster and Character sections are the best served, while the Drama section and the back-matter prose — including the short story and the closing essay — are barely covered at all.

How long is Perfect Works, and what format is it?

304 pages, A4, softcover, with a fold-out poster bound at the front. The size is doing real work — A4 is larger than most guide books of the era, and the book fills it with organisational charts, cross-sections and control diagrams that would not survive a smaller trim.

Can you still buy Perfect Works?

Not new, in practice. The original edition went out of print when DigiCube went bankrupt. A reprint arrived in April 2014 at 5,000 yen before tax and has since sold out; the standing reprint request has passed 2,500 votes and the reprint is still listed out of stock. Used copies routinely run well into five figures in yen, and the 1998 first edition costs more than the reprint.

Do you need Perfect Works to understand the ending?

No. The ending is legible on its own terms, and the game earns it without help. What the book adds is different from what you need: the material the game compressed into narration in its final stretch, and the mechanical basis for concepts the game names without defining. It makes a second playthrough read differently. It does not rescue a first one.