Notes about Xenosaga

Gene Michael Stover

created 2005 July 12
updated Friday, 2005 November 25

Copyright © 2005 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.

Contents

• 1 What is this?
• 2 What is Xenosaga?
• 3 The Notes
• 4 Links
• A. Thanks
• B. Other File Formats
• Bibliography

1 What is this?

These are my notes about the game Xenosaga.

Xenosaga contains many references to many different things in life, so I made some notes.

For fundamental notes about the story or game, I recommend other sources in Section 4. Here, I'm mostly recording subtle details.

2 What is Xenosaga?

Xenosaga is a series of games for Playstation 2 & other platforms. As of 2005 July 12, two episodes have been released.

title	platform	publisher	release date
Xenosaga 1: Der Wille zur Macht	Playstation 2	Namco	2003 February
Xenosaga 2: Jenseits von Gut und Bose	Playstation 2	Namco	2005 February

Some relevant web sites include:

• Official site: http://www.xenosaga.com/
• Xenosaga 1 at GameFAQS: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/data/519264.html
• Xenosaga 2 at GameFAQS: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/data/917917.html

3 The Notes

Dammerung

The German word ``dammerung'' means ``twilight'' in English. See the entry for Elsa for some interesting details.

Durandal

is a very popular name in video games these days. Looks like it was originally the name of the sword of Roland. [1]

Elsa

is or has been many things. Looks like the oldest reference on Wikipedia is for the lioness which inspired the book Born Free. [2] I'm betting that the lioness is not the inspiration for the name of the ship in Xenosaga. Maybe the game designers just liked the name.

2005 October 14: The author Elsa Berstain (1866-1949) (a.k.a. Ernst Rosmer) wrote a play called ``Dammerung: Schauspiel in Funf Atken''. The title translates to ``Twilight: A Drama in Five Acts''. During World War 2, she was imprisoned in a German concentration camp because she was Jewish, but because she was a prominent person, she was not put to death by the Nazis.

Gnosis

is already a word in the English language. Here is the relevant part of the definition from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary [10]: ``esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth held by the ancient Gnostics to be essential to salvation''.

Aleister Crowley mentions a group called the ``Sovereign Sanctity of the Gnosis'' on page 59 of [5].

Hilbert effect

In the history of the real world, David Hilbert was a mathematician.¹ The Hilbert effect of Xenosaga, by which the extradimensional Gnosis are made vulnerable, might be a reference to Hilbert space, which are important to quantum mechanics.

Kukai Foundation

Kukai was a Japanese monk, scholar, artist, founder of Shingon Buddhism, calligrapher, engineer, linguist(?), & writer. [3]

I thought I read recently² that kukai also means forever sacrificing, or something like that. I can't find a reference now.

Realians

Realians are synthetic organic, manufactured humanoids.

The term ``realian'' is probably a reference to ``realien'' from Tomorrow's Eve, a novel by Mathias Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. He died in 1889, so the novel was written before 1889. Tomorrow's Eve also introduced the term ``android''.

Late in Xenosaga 1, there is mention that the first Realians were manufactured by Tyrell Corporation. Of course, Tyrell Corporation is the manufacturer of Replicants, another set of synthetic organic humanoids from the movie Blade Runner³

Nowadays, we think of robots as mechanical, but note that in the play Rossum's Universal Robots, by Karel Capek, the work in which the word robot was first used, the robots were synthetic organic, not mechanical.

Woglinde

She was a character in Wagner's Ring cycle. [4]

4 Links

1. The official(?) Xenosaga web site is at www.xenosaga.com.

2. GameFaqs has FAQs, reviews, & message boards for many versions of Xenosaga here.

Also see the references in the Bibliography.

A. Thanks

• Thanks to Namco for making Xenosaga.

• Thanks to Patrick for information about Elsa & Dammerung.

B. Other File Formats

• This document is available in multi-file HTML format at http://cybertiggyr.com/gene/xeno/.
• This document is available in Pointless Document Format (PDF) at http://cybertiggyr.com/gene/xeno/xeno.pdf.

I write almost all of my documents in L^ATEX ([9], [7]). I compile to PDF with latex, dvips, & ps2pdf. I compile to HTML with latex2html ([6], [8]).

Bibliography

1

Durandal.
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durandal.

2

Else the lioness.
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Else%5Fthe%5Flioness.

3

Kukai.
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukai.

4

Woglinde.
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woglinde.

5

Aleister Crowley.
The Book of Thoth.
Ordo Templi Orientis, O.T.O. International Headquarters / Postfach 332012, D-1418 / Berlin, Germany, 1944.
ISBN 0-87728-268-4.

6

Nikos Drakos.
latex2html.

7

Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach.
The L^ATEX Companion.
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1993.
ISBN 0201541998.

8

Michel Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz.
The L^ATEX Web Companion: Integrating TEX, HTML, and XML.
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.
ISBN 020143317.

9

Leslie Lamport.
L^ATEX: A Document Preparation System.
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1986.
ISBN 0-201-15790-X.

10

Webster, editor.
Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.
Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1984.
ISBN 0-87779-508-8.