Is Xenogears the Evangelion of video games?
By The Eva Monkey on Thursday, April 5th, 2018
You may not know this, but in addition to Evangelion, I’m also really into video games. Bridging that gap is more difficult than you might think, while there are quite a lot of Evangelion video games, none of them got an English release, and I barely got through Japanese 101 in college. I want to maintain my focus on Evangelion with the content that I produce, so I want to make sure that when I’m pushing something out to people, it’s something that they’re going to be interested in. And this brings me to Xenogears.
Over the years, I have heard two things about Xenogears. The first is that it is influenced by Evangelion, and the second is that it is like the Evangelion of video games.
I know very little about Xenogears beyond being passively familiar with some of the visuals. What I do know is that the game originally started out as an early concept for Final Fantasy VII, putting it’s genesis (no pun intended) sometime in 1994, which would have been prior to Evangelion’s release. However the game didn’t see actual release until early 1998, which is after both Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion had been released. So while Xenogears was conceptualized independently of Evangelion, it’s possible that it might have drawn influence from Evangelion during its production.
I’ll be playing through Xenogears and taking a look at whether of not the comparisons to Evangelion are valid, and I invite you to join me. I’ll be streaming on Twitch as well as to a channel on YouTube, where streams will be archived, so you can watch the stream live on YouTube, or later on if you like. However I’ll be focusing on the audience and discussion on Twitch. Links to both are down below. This is somewhat new territory for me, so I’m still working out some details. Please feel free to follow me on Twitch, and subscribe to me on YouTube, if you’re not able to watch live, there will definitely be an archive for you to watch later.