Square Enix throws a bone to Xenogears fans on the classic JRPG's 28th anniversary, but with no remake or remaster in sight, folks are behaving exactly as you'd expect: "I'm on my knees here"

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Will Square Enix ever get over its apparent Xeno-phobia?

An anime-style cutscene in Xenogears
(Image credit: Square Enix)

February 11 marks the 28th anniversary of the beloved JRPG Xenogears, and Square Enix is offering one tiny crumb of a birthday cake: a single tweet acknowledging the game's existence. Still, that's the most official validation Xenogears diehards have gotten in years, and many are already taking the opportunity to beg for a remake. Or a remaster. Or any kind of modern release at all.

Square Enix's tweet is a simple celebration of Xenogears' legacy, calling it (via machine translation) "a new generation cybernetic RPG that radiates unparalleled originality." That's honestly a pretty fair description of the 1998 PS1 game's reputation, which looms large despite the fact that it hasn't gotten a rerelease since the PS3 era.

"You guys could, you know, make it accessible to new platforms," another reply politely adds. "Just saying, though"

"BRING IT BACK PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," as yet another commenter puts it.

There's another thread running through some of these posts – allusions to the impending PlayStation State of Play later this week. Would Square Enix truly make a social media post celebrating the game's birthday if something larger wasn't on the way? Well… yes. Tweets are free, and with 2.3k retweets this one has clearly driven a fair bit of engagement.

Director Tetsuya Takahashi would leave Square shortly after the release of Xenogears to found Monolith Soft. Now, decades later, the studio is owned by Nintendo and continues to build on Xenogears' legacy with its long-running Xenoblade Chronicles series. Whether Takahashi and Monolith or Square Enix will ever return to the game that started that legacy in the first place is now a decades-old mystery.

Xenogears translator had a rough time with the legendary PS1 JRPG, and not just because it's about killing God: "At the time, I was a Jehovah's Witness."

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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