Perfect Works stopped being printed because the company printing it stopped existing. No rights dispute, no quiet slide out of the catalogue: DigiCube filed for bankruptcy on 26 November 2003, dissolved the same day, and Xenogears Perfect Works ~The Real Thing~ went down with its publisher. Everyone who wanted a copy after that was buying from somebody who already had one.
It took ten years and one month to undo, and the undoing was not clean. The book came back in 2014, sold out, and now changes hands for roughly twice what it was reissued at. The print history behind that number is stranger than the number is, and it starts with what sits between the covers.
What Xenogears Perfect Works Actually Contains
This is not an art book. It is 303 pages, A4, softcover, with a fold-out poster bound in at the front, published in August 1998 — about six months after the game itself. The English shorthand for it is "the Xenogears artbook", and that label survives contact with roughly half the page count.
History runs from page 6 to 17: the prehistory before Deus was built, then the ten thousand years leading up to the game. Social Structure takes pages 18 to 37 for the thousand years immediately before it — the founding of the nations, and the origins of both wars, Solaris against the surface and Aveh against Kislev. Geography gets sixteen pages, Monster twelve, Science twelve for the working theory behind Deus, the Gears and the nanotechnology. Then Gear opens at page 78 and does not close until 155.
Seventy-eight pages of machines: full-colour plates and specifications for twelve Gears, black-and-white work for the rest, concept art for Deus, the Seraph Angels and the pillars. The Character Gallery takes another seventy-four. Against that, the written world-building the book is famous for — History, Social Structure, Geography and Science together — comes to sixty. Both halves are real, but the proportions run opposite to the reputation: the pictures are the bulk, and the prose is the reason people still hunt it.
The Character Gallery is where the documentation stops being reasonable. Beside the plates, every character carries a personal data block: age, measurements, and the fragrance they wear. Not a scent named in the script — an assigned one, recorded and printed, for people whose sense of smell no PlayStation was ever going to render.
That instinct is the whole book. Xenogears is Episode V of six, and Perfect Works is the only reason anybody knows what the other episodes hold — Episode I in the Era of Interplanetary War, some fifteen thousand years earlier; Episode II in the Time of the Genesis, where the game's opening scene actually takes place; Episode III among the Zeboim. Episode VI is left blank. The book documents a series that was never made, and stops short of its own ending.
The back matter keeps the same face. Drama spends eight pages on a diagram plotting the events of the game against what every character was doing while they happened. Dark Summer, a short story by Kaori Tanaka, gets two. Tolone and Seraphita host an eight-page side story built around military vocabulary. There is a four-page essay on what the work was asking of the person playing it, and eight pages of indexed terms at the back.
How the Book Died With Its Publisher
DigiCube sold games in corner shops. Square set it up in February 1996 to put console software into convenience stores — dedicated fixtures in Seven-Eleven, FamilyMart, Circle K and Sunkus, where a game could be reserved at two in the morning. The first thing it handled was Final Fantasy VII. Alongside the software it ran a publishing arm: soundtrack CDs, the Ultimania guides, and books like this one.
The model held until it didn't. DigiCube posted a loss of around six billion yen for the year ending March 2002. The Final Fantasy film's failure in 2001 hit the parent hard enough that Square sold down part of its holding. In November 2003 the delay of Final Fantasy XII took away the recovery the company had been counting on, and on the 26th of that month DigiCube filed at the Tokyo District Court and dissolved, carrying liabilities near nine and a half billion yen. It was the first company on the Hercules market to fail.
What happened to the books afterwards came down to paperwork. Titles still selling had their imprint switched to Square Enix at the next printing and carried on. Titles whose rights could not be cleared again simply stopped — and those are the ones that turned expensive. Perfect Works was in the second group: the only official book about the game, out of print, with no publisher left to petition. Tetsuya Takahashi had left Square in 1999 to co-found Monolith Soft, so the people who made it were no longer inside the company that held it.
One month after the bankruptcy, somebody filed a request to bring it back.
Ten Years, One Request Page
The request went up in December 2003. The mechanism behind it is unglamorous: readers vote for out-of-print books on a Japanese reprint service, the operator negotiates with whoever holds the rights, and whatever clears gets printed again. Request number 21413 was registered on 28 December 2003, with the publisher of record listed as a company that had ceased to exist a month earlier.
Then it sat. A status note in March 2004 said negotiation information was still pending. In April 2004 the publisher was contacted by email. The next update that meant anything came in September 2009 — nearly six years later — when talks formally opened on the possibility of a reprint, batched with three other Square books: the Dewprism guide, the Chrono Cross settings book, and the SaGa Frontier 2 settings book. In July 2010 the operator checked on progress. Across July 2010, September 2010 and February 2011 it posted three more notices saying only that negotiations were continuing.
The votes accumulated underneath all of it, logged in public as the milestones passed: 1,400, then 1,500, 1,600, 1,700, 1,800, 1,900. On 14 January 2014 the reprint was confirmed, the count sitting between the 1,900 and 2,000 marks — which is why coverage at the time described it as roughly two thousand requests. Delivery was set for mid-March at 5,250 yen.
Ten years of a status page saying nothing, and then a book. — Pierre
The two-thousandth vote did not land until 8 January 2016, nearly two years after the reprint had already shipped. Then 2,100 in October 2016. 2,200 in January 2018, 2,300 in June 2020, 2,400 in February 2023, 2,500 in March 2026. The page is still open, it stands at 2,504, and it took new comments in May, June and July of this year.
What the Reprint Got Right, and What It Could Not
The reprint is a photograph of a book. It went on sale on 10 April 2014 at 5,000 yen before tax, matching the original's format down to the bound-in poster: A4, softcover, the same 303 pages. The January announcement had promised mid-March delivery at 5,250 yen; the slip carried it past 1 April, the day Japan's consumption tax rose from five per cent to eight. Three weeks late and three per cent dearer.
Put the two editions side by side and the differences come to almost nothing. The cover is the same image with a different publisher name on it. The colour sits fractionally off, possibly no more than variance between copies. The paper stock was chosen to sit close to the original.
The original production data no longer existed when the reprint was made. What came back is almost certainly a photographic reproduction of a finished copy rather than a fresh press run from the files — and it shows, faintly, in the type: letterform outlines sit slightly soft, and copying leaves its own faint line distortion behind. Readers who owned both editions describe the fidelity as startling in the hand and the artefacts as invisible unless the two books are open together.
None of it shows unless both books are open in front of you, which is a fair measure of how much it matters. The contents are unchanged. What the reprint did not do is answer the two things readers kept asking for: it is still A4, and Japanese readers have gone on requesting an A5 reissue years afterwards so the thing can be read in a chair instead of on a desk. And it added no English edition. There has never been one, in either printing.
You can tell the two editions apart from a single listing photograph, as long as the seller shot the front cover. The artwork is identical; the publisher name printed on it is not. Anything else a listing claims about "first edition" or "original" is worth checking against that one detail.
What a Copy Costs Now, and Why
The reprint sold out and stayed out. Before 2014 a good copy cost a Western buyer over two hundred dollars. The reissue landed at about fifty, and buying it from outside Japan was awkward enough — Japanese-only storefront, uncertain international shipping — that plenty of people who wanted one never got there. Four years on, buyers were noting that used prices had roughly doubled again. The game's twentieth anniversary in 2018 brought in a wave of players who had never heard of the book, and they went looking.
| Where | Edition | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher list price, 2014 | Reprint | ¥5,000 + tax |
| Publisher list price, today | Reprint (out of stock) | ¥5,500 |
| Auction average, 120-day window | Either | ¥10,755 |
| Specialist used retailer | Either | ¥11,000 |
| Second-hand chain | Either | ¥15,400–17,600 |
| Overseas listing, with poster | Reprint | US$175 + shipping |
The fold-out poster is bound into both editions and is missing from a great many used copies, which is the single most common thing a listing fails to mention. Sun-fading along the spine and creasing across the poster are routine at this age. Ask about both before paying, because neither is visible in a seller's photograph.
The pattern in those numbers is the useful part: the imprint barely moves the price. Originals and reprints sit at similar money, so the variables that actually decide what you get are condition and whether the poster is still bound in. Somebody in February 2016 assumed the reprint had made the book safe, and missed it because stock had already gone. The publisher's page still lists it, at 5,500 yen, marked out of stock.
So the price is not a hype tax. It is a 303-page book with exactly two print runs to its name in twenty-eight years, holding the only official account of four episodes of a story that was never told, unavailable for about ten of those years.
Which makes reading a listing properly worth something. Check which printing you are being offered, whether the poster is still there, and what the condition language is quietly admitting — sun-fading and creased posters are routine on both editions, and neither shows up in a seller's photograph. And the request page never closed. It took ten years the first time, and it is still taking votes.
Common Questions
Is Xenogears Perfect Works available in English?
No, and it never has been. There was no English edition in 1998 and the 2014 reprint did not add one, so both printings are entirely in Japanese. About half the book survives that anyway: the Gear section and the Character Gallery run 152 pages between them and are plates and specifications, which read fine without the language. The written half is where the barrier costs you something, because History, Social Structure, Geography and Science are dense prose.
Is the 2014 reprint the same as the 1998 original?
The contents are unchanged. Physically there are two real differences. The cover carries the reprint publisher's name instead of DigiCube, and the type is very slightly softer, because the original production data no longer existed and the reprint was made photographically. Both differences are only visible with the two books open next to each other.
How much does Xenogears Perfect Works cost now?
Auction sales over a recent 120-day window averaged 10,755 yen across roughly 48 copies. Specialist used retailers list it around 11,000 yen, second-hand chains at 15,400 to 17,600 yen, and overseas sellers from about 175 US dollars plus shipping. The edition barely affects the figure, so buy on condition rather than on which publisher is printed on the cover.
Will Perfect Works be reprinted again?
Nobody knows, and no second reprint has been announced. What can be said is that the mechanism that produced the first one is still running: the reprint request page is open, it stands at 2,504 votes, and it has taken new ones every year since the 2014 printing sold out. The first attempt took ten years and one month from request to release.
Is it worth buying if you cannot read Japanese?
Yes for the art, no for the answers. The Gear section and the Character Gallery are 152 of the 303 pages and they work as pictures, so the money buys you something real regardless of language. If what you want is the world-building explained, the material you are after is dense Japanese prose that Japanese readers themselves describe as hard going, and you will be paying four figures for pages you cannot use.