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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."
Square's US branch, for example, "wanted us to remove the word Church, with a capital, because it might appear to be the Catholic Church. So I was even having to go to the development team before the Japanese version launched, and I was telling them, 'Please tone down some of this stuff.'"
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."
