A canon spin-off of beloved JRPG series Xenosaga was once feared to be lost media, but 21 years later, it's been preserved and is finally getting a fan translation

After 21 years, a Xenosaga game once thought to be lost media has been found and preserved online. Xenosaga: Pied Piper, originally released for Japanese phones in 2004, has been a sort of white whale for series fans for years, but a burgeoning preservation scene around Japanese mobile games has made sure this JRPG is not lost to history.

Xenosaga: Pied Piper is a spin-off of the cult classic PS2 JRPG trilogy from Monolith Soft and Namco, telling the backstory of the cyborg Ziggurat 8. It's a traditional, top-down role-playing game with turn-based battles, and by all appearances, a totally solid one – though it's the fact that it tells a canon story in a beloved series that's made it so sought-after by fans.

This game is just one of many big name franchise spin-offs released for Japanese phones in the '00s. Just before the global smartphone boom, Japanese "feature phones" – more properly known as keitai – were hugely popular, and that had publishers like Capcom, Konami, Square Enix, and Namco trying to stake their claim on these platforms with major new entries in popular franchises.

Many of these keitai games went far beyond the kinds of cheap shovelware you'd typically expect from franchise spin-offs on mobile devices, telling new, canon stories in established series like Persona, Final Fantasy, and yes, Xenosaga. The problem is, since all of these games were only released digitally, and are now tied to aging phone hardware, they're extremely difficult to preserve.

A DidYouKnowGaming video from last year does a good job of outlining the challenges faced by the keitai preservation scene. This community is importing old Japanese phones, typically sight unseen, and crossing their fingers they'll come across something usable. Games like Xenosaga: Pied Piper were originally released in episodes, and there's no guarantee that the original owner of any given phone will have saved every chapter before tossing their old device.

With all those challenges in mind, there was never any guarantee that Pied Piper would ever be preserved in a playable form. For years, Xenosaga fans relied on an ancient playthrough video series, recorded with a camera pointed at the game on a phone screen, to catalog its story content, and eventually produce a subtitled fan translation video series.

But now, the RPG has finally been preserved. You can find instructions on how to emulate the game in the description of this YouTube announcement from community member ValakTurtle. "I’ve already begun working on a full translation patch for the game as a member of Vector Translations & Preservation, alongside the romhackers in the Keitai Wiki’s server (shoutouts to Yuvi)," ValakTurtle adds. "A finalized version of my script, originally used in the captioned version of 桂樹's let’s play of the game, is serving as a basis with improvements being made to it. The patch is expected to take at least a few months to ensure the highest possible quality."

Great news for fans of Xenosaga's spiritual successor, too: Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is tied with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as the 3rd highest-rated game of the year on Metacritic so far.