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"

(Image credit: Square Enix)

These days, it's pretty much a given that you'll kill God – or at least some conception of an almighty deity – at the end of any given JRPG. In 1998, when Xenogears launched on PS1, the idea was the source of a lot more controversy. It was particularly troubling to translator Richard Honeywood, who describes his time working on Xenogears as something of a nightmare – and not just because of the religious content.

"You have to remember that the content was quite formidable: it's not only packed with references to Jungian and Freudian psychology, but it's also a game about killing god," Honeywood tells Time Extension. "At the time, I was a Jehovah's Witness, so that part of the subject matter was already kind of hitting my conscience, but some US staff were also scared about what the response would be."

This isn't the first time Honeywood's spoken about concerns over the religious imagery in Xenogears. "One of the translators was a bit worried about this and was like, 'I don’t want to have fundamental Christians or other religious groups being upset and blowing up our office,'" he explained in an older interview. As a result, two other members of the localization team walked off the project and Honeywood was "stuck there by myself."

Xenogears ultimately didn't generate much mainstream controversy (it did generate a reputation as one of the best JRPGs ever made), but Honeywood still had his work cut out for him trying to translate it with such dwindling resources. Handling the literary references in the game proved particularly challenging.

"Because I was in Japan, I didn't have access to English books, let alone German books," Honeywood explains in the new interview, "so I had to go to the National Library, where some of these foreign books were housed, to research these concepts and try to find out what they were in English."

Internet access was rare at Japanese companies at the time. "We couldn't just go on Wikipedia and research some of this stuff," Honeywood adds, "so, as you can imagine, it was a total nightmare!"

"In the end, I nearly killed myself on that title, and people knew it," he concludes. "People saw me sleeping in the office every night and coming up like a zombie. We got to the point where I hardly ever went home, and I was just trying to get that out. At that point, they realized, 'This guy really is passionate about our titles and cares about them.' So we're not giving it to some foreigner who will just turn around a shoddy translation."

Chrono Trigger writer and Xenogears composer's new JRPG, also starring a sick frog warrior, is coming to Switch and PC this summer.

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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