The Mystical Land of Pardes

You know, I just realized today: I think everything before Aquavy is boring as hell.

Also, Shitan = Stephen Colbert. Seriously - look at him.

You're welcome.

Okay, story. You have to keep in mind that we're finding it hard to take certain things about this game seriously - the dialogue, for example. The game might throw a dramatic scene at us, say the moment in Blackmoon forest when Elly threatens to shoot Fei, and as soon as she says "Drop your weapon!" (but he doesn't have any weapons!) my husband says on Fei's behalf - "I can't drop these guns!" and holds up his fists, and we all crack up. So much for drama.

Speaking of dialogue - after finding out Dazil doesn't have any parts for Weltall, Shitan decides it'd be a good idea to salvage broken down gears in the desert, and tells Fei to stay put like a good boy. So what does he do? Naturally he runs out into the desert, steals some poor soldier's motorcycle and leaves him to die (yeah, 'sorry' will cut it, I'm sure!), and follows the good doctor. As soon as Fei finds him - or rather, is found - somebody new crashes the party and confesses to instigating the Lahan incident for kicks.

Grahf: A greater power... is what I need to fulfill my mission. I sent those Gears into that land as a catalyst to awaken the power in you... To make contact with you.

Fei: As a catalyst!? You mean you caused that intentionally!?

Grahf: That's right. The death of your loved ones... And you powerless against it happening... The grief, the screams from your heart born out of the tragedy… There! That was the catalyst
for triggering your power.

[...]

Grahf: Hah, hah, hah... You resemble your father.

Fei: My father? You mean my dad? You know my father!?

Grahf: That was... a most delightful scream. I was enthralled by it. Nothing is more beautiful than a scream of death.

We were waiting for the dad line. I mean. It will live in my memory forever! But what gets me is Grahf's dialogue. I remembered him as more... oh, monolithic? Formal? Maybe that's Rune's fault - it was all him, and the game was actually lackluster. Grahf should be fucking Shakespearean, and instead he's talking like a cheesy cartoon villain. Alas. :/ For the record - since I think my post on this was locked - the original Japanese dialogue was slightly less redundant, in that it used two completely different words for "father" with different connotations, as follows:

グラフ：　ふふふふ。　…似ておるな。　　父親に。
フェイ：　父親？　　親父？　　お前、親父を知っているのか？！

We came to the conclusion "父親" is basically a way of referring to someone else's parents (vs. your own), while "親父" is more intimate and less formal; so in essence, Fei was just repeating what Grahf said verbatim, and then clarifying. I still think it's ridiculous and redundant, but this is Xenogears. And yes, this is more than anybody wanted to know. :P

This just furthers my theory that Square dropped a thousand page script on the translator's desk and was like, "Can you have this done in a month y/y? :D" That would explain everything!

Now back to the story. After Grahf verbally sucker-punches Fei, the Aveh army shows up to grab Weltall! And Shitan mutters that he should've guessed the army would be looking for it; bringing it into the desert was a dumb idea. I'm inclined to agree except for one thing: given Shitan's seeming motivation to get Fei the hell away from Lahan, and the fact that he's, y'know, A SPY, my theory is that every time something unlucky happens to Fei, Shitan did it on purpose.

So I'm just going to play the game with this in mind. It'll be fun! He couldn't have engineered Bart's trigger-happy appearance OR COULD HE, but he works it to his advantage pretty quick, now doesn't he?

Now that I've blundered my way through the damned stalactite cave and made it to Balthazar's place, I think Fei AND Bart are morons. They're perfect for each other.

Old Man Bal: Haven't you heard of this story...? They say that humans and God lived together in a paradise in the sky. With God's protection, there was no fear of death, and natural disasters were entirely unknown. Then one day, humans ate a forbidden fruit which gave them incredible wisdom. But God drove mankind from the paradise for their sin. Bitter at having been driven out of paradise, humans used the wisdom they had to make giants. With these giants, they planned to challenge God himself. But God poured his wrath down on them. All who defied God were destroyed. But God himself did not escape unharmed. Taking paradise with him, the wounded God buried himself deep beneath the ocean to sleep for eons. Before going to sleep, God used his remaining power to create right-hearted humans to live on this planet. These people are said to be... our ancestors.

I find this interesting for a few reasons, and none of them are the right ones, just so you know. It's close enough to the Garden of Eden myth that when I used to think back (say, for fic purposes), I assumed it was more or less the same. As it turns out, it's more like a weird mix of Eden and... Babel? (Appropriate!) Yeah, that's it. Insert pretentious analysis here. My main interest was in the hilarious commentary on evolution that preceded it. "Pfff, that evolution crap? Clearly, according to these fossils, humans spontaneously sprang into existence ten thousand years ago!" And god is a machine. Who came first, Xenogears or Angel Sanctuary? (This is actually a difficult question to answer, as AS doesn't reveal the nature of its god until the end...)

Oh yeah, and there's the allusion to the opening movie that I totally missed the first time I played this game (forbidden fruit --> you shall be as gods) and the giants are obvious in context with the game, but sound like a thinly-veiled allusion to my favorite Genesis myth (Watchers). Only, this is the one story ripping off Genesis that doesn't use "the sons of god" for inspiration.

Unless - I wonder if there is an argument to be made for Watchers = omnigears. My memory of canon is too dim to offer any insight. It's just, considering the nature of the "god" in this legend, and that omnigears are kinda sorta a merging of pilot (human) and angelic equivalent... yeah, anyway. This is totally off in left field, I know. It could be useful, though. For those fics I will never write.

I'm kind of curious when and where the game will drop hints like the allusion to the opener, since it's almost too subtle for the kind of player I was when I first picked Xenogears up. :/ I was pretty dumb when I was eighteen. I don't think I even cracked open a bible until I finished this game. Then again, that's not unusual, if my classmates in college were anything to go by.

Huh, yeah, this was a pretty useless entry.

LMN moved to a new server a while ago, which I forgot to announce; in the process TC re-acquired the zenogias.com domain and added it to both Guardian Angels and The Nisan Sanctuary archive - so now you can see them with their original addresses, as well as the Lea Monde location we've all grown to love. This means people who see my old wallpaper graphics and use the zenogias URL on the side no longer end up at a porn site! (Ha ha, see, this is relevant to the topic introduced in the subject line.) This... is old news, actually, but I couldn't resist the obvious bad joke, so er.

I'm actually posting this so I can reference it later if I ever get around to writing those articles for the Analysis section at GA. The outlook isn't optimistic, but you never know.

.

There was a lot of talk about Bayonetta when it came out; I haven't played the game, so I won't pass judgment on either the creator's intentions or what his work actually accomplishes - or fails at, whichever you happen to think. acebullet and I were talking about nudity in games and how exploitative it is in each situation, which naturally brought us to Xenogears because, as those of you who have played the game know, there's a lot of nudity in the game, both male and female. What inspired this entry was the speedo scene - not because it's exemplary of how well Xenogears handles nude characters, but because it's exceptional in context with the rest of the game for being considered either funny or disgusting by the fan base.

On that particular topic, we speculated the scene would have been more serious if Ramsus's sprite were naked; the speedo inspires eye-rolling, wincing, and takes away from the real content of the scene, which is Kahr's dream and the following conversation between Grahf and Miang. It can't be argued that nudity would be too explicit, because the game sprites aren't detailed or refined enough to pose a problem; secondly, the game doesn't shy away from the issue in later scenes at all. Both Fei and Elly, as well as Emeralda, are shown with no apparent covering at other points in the game.

So, I would say that nudity in Xenogears is entirely a spiritual matter. It's used as a metaphor for birth (of the individual, of humanity), intimacy (physical and emotional), and the individual's spiritual state, just as the presence of clothes in scenes depicting sex or communion with god is a metaphorical barrier, as in the Ramsus and Miang scene, or a later scene between Kim and Elly.

Here's a list of scenes I'm thinking about:

Scene 1: game introduction, Miang on the beach before she creates her first "children"
Scene 2: after Ramsus's dream; both Miang and Ramsus are in bed and undressed
Scene 3: Zeboim ruins; Emeralda is formed and stolen from her nano-tank
Scene 4: Solaris; Elly's shower, which both she and Fei use, but their figures are misted out
Scene 5: Taura's house; Fei and Elly are healed in nano-reactors
Scene 6: Yggdrasil; Fei and Elly finally come together; technically two scenes, before and after
Scene 7: Fei speaks to the Wave Existence; note the presence of clothing
Scene 8: Zeboim, memory; just Elly, but Kim is present and half-dressed
Scene 9: within Deus; the confrontation between Fei and Krelian, with Elly present but asleep
Scene 10: ending sequence; Elly is freed; Krelian appears to help them and apologize

Other: each form of the Nisan angels (cathedral, Merkava)

My memory of the game is slightly misty, and the memorial album doesn't show everything via screenshot. Let me know if I missed any. Ten seems like too perfect a number.

Anyway, in each case, character nudity seems to serve a kind of thematic purpose. Scenes one and three imply genesis or rebirth, literal both times, although there are also other implicit beginnings in those scenes (the beginning of the cycle of reincarnation, the plan to revive Deus). In every scene where Elly and Fei are stripped down together (four, five, six), there's some kind of emotional revelation going on as well; note that in scene eight, Kim's flashback, he's half-dressed, but she isn't at all (although I think she's covered, at least? again, I can't remember, and don't have a screenshot), which is the next point.

In scene two, Ramsus is wearing some kind of clothing; in scene eight, Kim is as well. In scene seven, Fei is shown dressed, even though in every other scene involving this kind of spiritual meeting, nobody is wearing clothes to my memory. In these scenes clothing would seem to be functioning as some kind of barrier - emotional, psychological, spiritual. When Fei first meets the Existence, just as when Lacan did, the meeting is incomplete because they need Elly.

Spiritually speaking, we have Miang's genesis, scene five, in which Fei and Elly both meet their memories of each other, the aforementioned scene with the Existence, and then the last two, in which Fei, Krelian, and Elly all confront the issue of their own humanity and the necessity of a god. In addition to that is the Nisan angels, which are always depicted nude, and symbolize the path to god. Considering all that, I'd have to say that while the character designs certainly exploit women if you want to look at it that way, the instances where people run around naked are completely serious.

There's probably more that can be taken from this, but I'm just stating the obvious conclusions, here.

Xenogears has more nude character portraits than any other game I can think of, which... amuses me. What a distinction.

This all started with with Milton, because Book 9 is about the fall of man, and you find quotes like ye shall be as gods, and-- of course I thought of the opening movie from Xenogears. (What else would I think of? Not the nature of sin, please.) Watching that reminded me of the other quote - I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:12) - which everyone is so proud of finding and reporting to me for GA's references section.

( The inference is pretty clear: )

The problem here is equating the Tree of Knowledge to the Path of Sephirot, which kind of seems to happen in the game, but not really. That is, the path to god is twofold - one way to get there is via Razael, which Krelian chooses to use. He chooses knowledge, Fei chooses... life. Or action. I'm not sure, but I think in Kabbalah, if you equate the sephirot with anything, the path is tied up with the Tree of Life, not Knowledge. Maybe I'm oversimplifying that. This is only a problem because Takahashi's script screws with what I actually read. I mean, what it's saying is that there isn't only one path - that's the meaningful, didactic lesson in this story. The entire game pounds that into your head.

Fei merges and releases with Zohar, in Grahf's words. That's the goal. So he ascends the path, finds the Existence, and returns. That's the basic mystic journey. I really wish I liked Fei more if he's going to be the quintessential mystic of Xenogears. I used to think of Krelian that way, but he does something else. He uses the knowledge to transform himself - and I guess in that way he's parallel to Enoch, who is the real Mystic of mystics - but I'm not sure how I feel about this. If Razael = Knowledge, he commits the sin of taking from the tree, and so he is the fallen man, and Fei is the transcendent, spiritually. The latter is true, but is the former? Krelian's crime is the willful use of his knowledge to do terrible things. That's the essence of sin - but knowing isn't.

I'm not any closer to how I want to read that quote. The answer is: there's no clean parallel.

Also, analytic skill? None here.

It's been so long since I played that I have to rethink everything I thought back when I cared more. Damn. I think the problem I'm having has a lot to do with my last playthrough and my last reading of anything Kabbalah or religious were both in '05. Milton doesn't count. I need to find some theology on the fall.

Maybe I won't write those editorials.

The translation of the last section was yanked from an old entry.

( Timeline and summary. )


( Birth as Cain's copy, his connection with Miang. )


( The Demon of Elul, the Elements. )

Ahhh. I forgot what a pain in the ass the Perfect Works is. Stupid book. Er. I didn't realize I was using 'Elul' instead of 'Elru' until it was too late. Oh well. :D

In any case, this sort of answers our questions about Bekka - since Kahr had not yet taken a humanoid form, I guess he just... latched onto Bekka like a parasite. That's kind of the implication. There must be more to it though, because that doesn't explain why or how. I guess you can reason that he was able to fuse with or absorb the kid because he was still in a malleable stage of development (a writhing mass of cells and such?), but... ^^;

Somebody needs to write up a theory on this and turn it into a story - but it won't be me!

I didn't want to do anything major. Here, have some characters nobody cares about. :P

( Dominia, Kelvena, Tolone, Seraphita. )


( Elly's Strike Team, Vanderkaum, other Solarian peons. )


Edit to add~

( On the Elements, from Kahr's profile; info on the Strike Team. )

I'm sorry, but even I don't care about Vanderkaum, poor guy. So I skipped the paragraph on his ship. :P

Okay, I have to ask. For those of you who use Japanese input in Windows, how retarded does it get for you? Because there are times I can type up whatever I need, and other times when it won't register common words, whether I type them correctly or not. It is such a pain in the ass to piece words together by individual kanji just because my program can't get it together during the full moon, or whatever the hell its problem is.

I can't get it to render 'tsuzuku' either, but that might be a genuine program flaw. Dunno. Am pissed off whenever I run into the issue, regardless. :D

( Jesse: profile is more or less complete with this installment. )

Now, back to our scheduled entries. >_>

It turns out I didn't have as much on Mystina as I thought, so she'll take a bit longer. What I have now is the "From the Developer's Room" box, , which is the same section I did for Jayle. The latter's relation to the knights wasn't what I needed, so I didn't do anything with her character sketch, but I'm much more interested in the insight Mysty's section will give for her character.

That can wait until tomorrow. :p I had a Suiko-themed entry that will also have to wait. Oh well.


Edit (06.30.07): corrections made with totorojo's insight~

Edit 2 (07.20.07): silly me. Shitan says during the game - or implies, anyway, as good as - that Billy was the cause of Jesse's 'shotgun wedding.' I guess that explains the timing of his marriage. :p

There's more - oh so much more! This book is well over three hundred pages, after all. I'll try not to spam you, between this and any pointless rambling I decide to do, but I mean... it's going to be hard.

Slicing this book out of its binding was the best thing I could have done. It's so much easier to work with now! I should've done this years ago.

( Primera. )

Stone better not be as much of a pain in the ass. :D

( Ethos and Orphanage: Bishop Stone and other related characters. )

Well, guys. I may suck at this, but it is helping me remember all of that kanji I thought I forgot! For that alone it's worth the effort. And look how I get sucked into doing work I wasn't planning to tackle:

( Jesiah: history box. )

The first entry, "While in Solaris" has been started, but I'll do that and Jesse's other entries tomorrow. I spent a lot of time on part of Prim's, and now I'm just tired of playing with Japanese.

I'm not sure I'll do the paragraph on why he left his family, since the game explains that to an extent, and the timeline tells us the rest. His summary paragraph expands on the timeline, and tells us that he left Solaris when he found out about the M Project... actually, I think I might bother with the first paragraph of the summary, never mind. (Geez, you know that if I do one, I'll do the other. -_-)

After all of that, I'm still not much closer to deciding what to do about that Billy fic.

.... okay, search for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn via library catalog is a big failure. Sigh. I really didn't want to PAY for that book right now, since I'm trying not to spend money by the bucketload. I didn't check my school library, so maybe that'll be more successful. ^^ Google gives me a long list of links for official pages (so, uh, which one is really the official page?), so I'll explore via lazy online research methods and see what comes up.

This is for a story, you see. Esoteric practices at the turn of the twentieth century have piqued my interest.

Also, reynardfox? I just found the old Uzuki family image file. :P ASGAFDASFDS

Aaaaaaanyway. OMG, I have more to say about Xenogears. (AUGH! Flashbacks!) But not that much, I promise. I was actually thinking more about Suikoden today, when I was awake enough to think about anything coherant. (The midterm paper I tried to write is hilarious.)

There must be a PW page or two on how Zeboim died, and I'm suddenly very interested in it. And while looking for it, I'm finding other things! Like:

Year 6081 (Ethos translation)
. . . Miang receives Kim's thesis and Miang, who is interested in advancing human evolution, meets up with Kim at the Federal Bureau of Medical Affairs. During the course of their conversation, Miang offers to sponsor a facility at which Kim may continue working on his research. Kim accepts the offer and again begins research and development on Nanotechnology . . .

This just gives me chills. I don't know why. The idea of Miang interacting with Fei or Elly in other generations is very interesting to me, because there's no precedent set by the game for how she would socialize with them. Besides the obvious, I mean. Part of me always wanted to think there would be a chilling spark of recognition deep down in either Fei or Elly, though they might not realize it. The game kinda sorta implies this when they show us Miang's transformations, where her host's hair morphs into that ridiculous electric purple.

That brings up a lot of questions, though. Karen's hair didn't change. The excuse used to be that her hair was too dark, but that doesn't make any sense if the Miang program overrides everything. :p I think we later concluded that the purple hair shown in flashbacks was just a design element built into the game/story direction, so we'd immediately recognize her, even though her incarnations aren't literally identical.

But hm. Miang's presence might change the host's physical appearance as we thought; perhaps Karen's didn't change as drastically because she was still fighting for control. Rune and I played a lot with the potential psychological battle between Miang and Karen, and also Kahn and Grahf. (And this is no longer related to Zeboim, ha ha! ^^;;)

Year 6053
Miang awakens as twin sisters (M0611 and M0612).

What I want to know, in relation to the upper paragraph: where in hell is her other half? Did she off it and merge again? Did it affect her in any weird ways? Throw us a bone, here.

But this is what I was looking for:

Year 6082
From p.12: . . . a large shift of the tectonic plates sent Zeboim to the bottom of the ocean, and has thus disappeared from the face of the planet. -- and from p.13: an all-out nuclear war explodes, destroying more than 90% of the human population with bombings, residual radiation, and BC (bio-chemical) weapons.

I hadn't read this for a while, so while I was thinking about Zeboim's demise, all I could dredge up was the vague account we get in the game, which talks about nuclear war, but not much else. Since Zeboim is at the bottom of the ocean - in fact, it has to be below the ocean floor to survive the way it did - I thought something other than bombs might have been responsible for the destruction of the nation, at least in part. It's just so neat and clean, sitting down there, that I wondered if it might've been built underwater to begin with. Honestly, if the city was blown to the bottom of the ocean, why is it still intact? Earthquakes are not that kind!

Also, I admit - since Zeboiim was one of the cities of the plain in Genesis, destroyed along with Sodom, I kind of wanted to know for sure how Takahashi got rid of it. Come on, it had to be biblical in proportion. XD


Zeboiim is also on the brain because it's one of the elements that made me love Xenogears so much. Not the city itself, but the feeling I had when I discovered it, and when the game revealed its history. When I go down to the city ruin, or see the Mass Driver facility, it's like I'm looking at a piece of real history, or at least something so vast that it leaves me with the sense that there's substance there, or secrets to be found. I can't put a name to this - it's a little like awe, or reverence; it's like I'm looking deep into a well of vision and seeing things that could be.

I think Xenogears falls short of real verisimilitiude because of its blatant references to earth history and symbolism, but it comes closer than any other game I can think of, including Vagrant Story - though in all fairness, in terms of actual achievement, VS tops Takahashi's work. The feeling I can't put a name to is something I remember from my first reading of Lord of the Rings.

It's the subtle references that do it. Forgetting obvious stuff like names, what Xenogears did right, I think, was leave us with only subtle hints to the vast history that the team created for their storyline. The game gave us just enough that our imaginations could run wild. Even though I wish constantly that I had more information, or more consistent or reasonable information, I think this is one area where the game did everything right. (And it's where Xenosaga does everything wrong, but that's another topic!)

This is something I always keep in mind when writing real stories, so maybe I notice it more now. Not back when I played, but. It's interesting to think about what made me like Xenogears so much, since it has endured well enough that I'm still talking about it today, when I've lost interest in the fandom and fan activity, for the most part.


Next: what Hikusaak really does with his Circle Rune. (No, seriously, I mean it.)

Okay. I'm in a Xeno mood, so I guess that's what this entry will be about! And first on the menu is a really freaking old translation (maybe two years old?) of the Solaris pages in PW's "Social Structure" chapter. Not word-for-word, as I was still nitpicking grammar at that point. Don't even bother to ask me to go back and do it again, because I don't care enough. :P Corrections, however, are welcome.

( 'What are you reading, Amber-san? Those terms don't mean anything!' -- uhhh, that was reassuring. )

What a pain. I know I typed this before somewhere, but I couldn't find it. ;_;

That bit about Aveh, Solaris, and other random bits will have to wait until next time, I guess. I'm going to waste my time sorting Xenogears and Xenosaga posts into new tags, because 'xeno' is getting cluttered.


Edit:
Oh, and - Roni Fatima. Nothing surprising here.

acebullet and I were talking about symbolism in literature on the way back from In-n-Out. (The food from which, by the way, was delicious as usual.) His art class is pretending to be a freshman English class at the moment, and we were reminiscing about the misery of high school English, in which teachers insist we discuss blatant symbolism and overinterpret every little thing.

Naturally, talk of blatant symbolism and over-interpretation led me to think about Xenogears, and various subjects of discussion over the- oh, is it eight years now? I feel so old when I say that.

But wait! This isn't about me making fun of Xeno fandom and my own inane rambling of the past (even though that would also be fun). It's more like... looking back at the symbols in the game that I recall, and trying to decide if any of them are really meaningful. There are certainly times when it isn't - the gears being named after Norse figures, for instance, which I still see no real point to - but there are bits and pieces that can actually be argued for. Of course, as with most symbolism, a lot of them are blatantly obvious. For example:

The emblem of Solaris: the sephirotic tree. I guess Solaris considers itself the path to god. (Really.) You actually can't read much farther than that and still have something that resembles the game.

Anima Relics: you can argue that naming them after the twelve tribes means something if you trace the relics back to the Gazel Ministry, but it starts to get mucked up around that point, and in the end, all you can really say is that the names sound religious (and therefore deep). I had an idea about this a long time ago, and I can't remember it.

Deus: is... god? Well, that's the surface reading, at least. Clearly we (and the characters) were supposed to think of it that way, but the name doesn't encompass the truth about Deus as he relates to the rest of the system, which is more complicated than this word.

Zohar: a difficult one. If you know something about the Zohar, it's blatantly obvious when you read what it tells Fei. If you don't know anything about it, you'll have no clue. Note also that the Zohar is very similar to the Monolith in 2001.

SOL-9000: related to the above, another 2001 reference, but it isn't... well, I guess it is like its namesake.

Soylent System: I'd never heard of Soylent Green when I played Xenogears, but if I had... :P (I still think what Shitan did there was an incredibly assholish move. XD I love him for that.)

I think I have to take back the second part of my judgement re: the Solarian Emblem, because you actually can take it farther, and still have something that resembles the motives of the Gazel Ministry. But like the Zohar, I don't think that's immediately obvious if you don't know anything about the background of the symbol. I'm guessing most people don't, and there's no reason they should know. ( More on that here. )

After thinking about this stuff, I decided that I thought Nisan's one-winged angels were the most effective "symbol" in the game, because they stood for things both obvious and not. A lot of it is obvious - dialogue tells you that the light or space between their hands represents the path to god, and also that they're unique as a symbol (compared to the symbols of other religions like the Ethos, I guess) because they have defined gender characteristics. After playing the game, they don't have to tell you that the angels symbolize the act of one human helping another and becoming whole, but they do anyway.

Part of what makes them effective is their multitude of meanings in the context of the game. It isn't always subtle, but they represent some of the most important themes in the game (humans gaining independence from god by helping one another; on the other side of the coin, humans joining together to reach god - which you can interpret in a few ways), and they're also representative of Fei and Elly specifically, and everything about their history. The angels have a really emotional function, which something like the instant horror of the Soylent System doesn't really live up to. I don't even like Fei, but his history with Elly throughout the ages did strike a chord, and the angels remind me of it every time I see them. They sort of embody both tragedy and hope.

The Zohar, while deep (and Deus, which gives it a second layer of interesting interpretive possibilities), doesn't really inspire the same kind of feeling. I have no sympathy for Zohar's dilemma. There's nothing in its existence I can relate to. It is - and is supposed to be - a really abstract part of the game that gives the story an underlying feeling of depth, if you follow what it's saying. And if you don't, it's just a bunch of gibberish. It's the one thing that is consistently misunderstood about this game. The Existence's dialogue, which is where all of the juicy information is, confuses people. That's why I don't think it's an effective reference, or symbol, or whatever you want to call these elements of the storyline.

The Nisan angels were easy to relate to and understand, even if you don't agree with their message. And every time you see them they mean something new, at least to me. Their meaning in Nisan's cathedral is completely different to the meaning I get from the image of the angels in Krelian's merkavah.

I once had an idea for a drawing where Krelian, standing on one outstretched hand, was reaching out to nothing - there would have been an empty gap where the second angel was supposed to be. It'll never see the light of day, because the Krelian shrine will never be finished, but that was the image I hoped to use in the layout.

It would've been nice to have all of these ideas back when I cared enough to see them through! But that's the way it is.