While developer Monolith Soft has gone on to do great things alongside Nintendo with the Xenoblade series, the Xenosaga games have effectively been dead since the final entry launched in 2006. But now, at long last, there are signs of life. An obscure spin-off of the JRPG series called Xenosaga: Pied Piper is getting a modern release on Steam and Switch.
Xenosaga: Pied Piper was originally released for Japanese feature phones, also known as keitai, in 2004. That was an era when major Japanese publishers were rushing to establish a foothold in the rapidly expanding mobile market, and Pied Piper is one of many titles far more ambitious than the "mobile game" moniker would lead you to believe. It's a full, canonical side story to the main series, offering an episodic story and traditional turn-based combat.
And it's now coming to Switch and Steam via publisher G-Mode (thanks, RPG Site). G-Mode has spent the past several years offering similar modern ports of feature phone games, including tie-ins to notable series like Persona, Armored Core, and Harvest Moon.
There is, of course, one key caveat for those of you here, reading this English-language article: the Steam store page for Xenosaga: Pied Piper confirms that it'll only be available in Japanese, like previous G-Mode releases. I wouldn't be surprised if fans take it on themselves to do the translation work in the future, but for now, you'll need to bear that in mind.
You might've seen Xenosaga: Pied Piper in the news last year, when fans managed to preserve the game and start building their own translation of it. It's unclear if this new release has any connection to the fan-driven work that saved the game from becoming lost media, but either way, it's nice to see proper publishers doing preservation work, too.
But the real notable bit about this release of Pied Piper is that it's the first official Xenosaga release in decades. The original games haven't even been ported – much less remade or remastered – for modern platforms, even as Xenoblade gathers more and more new fans for Monolith Soft's games. Here's hoping this launch marks more than just a one-off.
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