Shoutouts to ValakTurtles on Youtube for uploading a captioned playthrough of this game.
Xenosaga Pied Piper is a short side-story released for the Vodafone 6 and written by Kaori Tanaka (Takahashi's wife an co-creator of the Xenoseries). It dives into the backstory of Ziggy at the time he was known as Jan Sauer, a police officer specialized in investigating crime related to the U.M.N Network (the virtual reality space which serves as both the Internet and the main mean of interdimensional travel in the universe of the series).
Since the game was released for a now defunct platform and no dump of the game has been uploaded online, it is effectively lost media and will probably remain as such for a long time unless someone manage to archive it.
Thus I had to resolve to watching a playthrough of the game with subtitles, however from the looks of it, it seems to attempt to translate the gameplay system of Xenosaga 1 on a mobile device and they seem to have done more than a commandable work at it even with the limited presentation which looks like something that could've come out of RPG Maker 2003.
Ziggy is a character that I already liked in the main games and the main series only partially hinted at his past and what might've caused him to commit suicide and eventually get recycled as a cyborg. This game is meant to tell that story in a more direct manner and as such does a really decent job at establishing Ziggy's backstory and the traumatic events that transpired here as well as his relationship to the mysterious "Voyager" a hooded figure who showed up briefly at the end of Xenosaga 2 and which Ziggy to have a vendetta against.
The script of the game is really good as it is to be expected by Kaori Tanaka's excellent work on the main series, however it kinda falls short as a mystery game. The identity of Voyager is way too obvious if you saw his design in Xenosaga 2 and can manage to put 2 and 2 together, so a lot of the plot become kinda sluggish certainly not helped by both the shoddy presentation which makes a lot of the more emotional bit of the game fall a bit flat.
The OST in particular sounds like the Arabic Nokia Tune which was probably to be expected given the platform this was published on but it really takes away from some of the scenes in the game.
I still enjoyed it in the end however, especially as a deep dive into the past events of the series as well as to complete Ziggy's character arc that I'm sure will conclude in an interesting manner in Xenosaga 3 (as he seem to have found another family with Momo and her mom which is a situation reminiscent of what he went through in that game).
I'm not gonna give a score to this one seeing as I haven't actually played the game but it's a neat little curiosity and company piece to the trilogy that I wish could be playable in some way in the future, it's nonetheless impressive how solid the game seems to be, an RPG on mobile phone is pretty damn impressive all things considered especially one taking place in a setting as rich and dense as the one from Xenosaga.
But still... getting stuck on mobile is some grade A Nomura bullshit
Ziggy isn't a step dad, he's the dad who stepped up !
Xenosaga Pied Piper is a short side-story released for the Vodafone 6 and written by Kaori Tanaka (Takahashi's wife an co-creator of the Xenoseries). It dives into the backstory of Ziggy at the time he was known as Jan Sauer, a police officer specialized in investigating crime related to the U.M.N Network (the virtual reality space which serves as both the Internet and the main mean of interdimensional travel in the universe of the series).
Since the game was released for a now defunct platform and no dump of the game has been uploaded online, it is effectively lost media and will probably remain as such for a long time unless someone manage to archive it.
Thus I had to resolve to watching a playthrough of the game with subtitles, however from the looks of it, it seems to attempt to translate the gameplay system of Xenosaga 1 on a mobile device and they seem to have done more than a commandable work at it even with the limited presentation which looks like something that could've come out of RPG Maker 2003.
Ziggy is a character that I already liked in the main games and the main series only partially hinted at his past and what might've caused him to commit suicide and eventually get recycled as a cyborg. This game is meant to tell that story in a more direct manner and as such does a really decent job at establishing Ziggy's backstory and the traumatic events that transpired here as well as his relationship to the mysterious "Voyager" a hooded figure who showed up briefly at the end of Xenosaga 2 and which Ziggy to have a vendetta against.
The script of the game is really good as it is to be expected by Kaori Tanaka's excellent work on the main series, however it kinda falls short as a mystery game. The identity of Voyager is way too obvious if you saw his design in Xenosaga 2 and can manage to put 2 and 2 together, so a lot of the plot become kinda sluggish certainly not helped by both the shoddy presentation which makes a lot of the more emotional bit of the game fall a bit flat.
The OST in particular sounds like the Arabic Nokia Tune which was probably to be expected given the platform this was published on but it really takes away from some of the scenes in the game.
I still enjoyed it in the end however, especially as a deep dive into the past events of the series as well as to complete Ziggy's character arc that I'm sure will conclude in an interesting manner in Xenosaga 3 (as he seem to have found another family with Momo and her mom which is a situation reminiscent of what he went through in that game).
I'm not gonna give a score to this one seeing as I haven't actually played the game but it's a neat little curiosity and company piece to the trilogy that I wish could be playable in some way in the future, it's nonetheless impressive how solid the game seems to be, an RPG on mobile phone is pretty damn impressive all things considered especially one taking place in a setting as rich and dense as the one from Xenosaga.
But still... getting stuck on mobile is some grade A Nomura bullshit
Ziggy isn't a step dad, he's the dad who stepped up !