A Xenosaga spin-off that was surprisingly important to the series’ story but was thought lost to the old Japanese mobile phone network it was released on has been recovered and shared online. The RPG Xenosaga: Pied Piper is once again playable, with a fan translation on the way.
“After many years of tirelessly searching for Xenosaga Pied Piper, the day has finally come where it has been preserved for everyone to experience,” wrote Vector Translations and Preservations YouTuber ValakTurtle. “This is truly a monumental moment for Xeno Series fans as it was the only missing game in the series.”
The game was dumped by an anonymous donor and made playable thanks to concerted preservation efforts by members of the Keitai Wiki Discord, as well as several individual users including one who goes by xyz and was the lead reverse engineer to get the game off the phone it was on. It’s currently still in Japanese, but ValakTurtle said a translation patch is expected to be finished a few months from now.
Xenosaga: Pied Piper was released in 2004 for the Vodafone Live mobile phone network after publisher Namco requested developer Monolith Soft create a mobile spin-off of the PlayStation 2 sci-fi series. It includes turn-based battles and a script written by series creator Tetsuya Takahashi and designer Soraya Saga, who had previously partnered on the creation of the philosophy-infused mech storyline that turned Xenogears into a PS1 cult hit.
The thematic sensibility and other elements of Xenogears were later pulled into the Xenosaga trilogy, which Xenosaga: Pied Piper ended up serving as a prequel to. It follows police detective Jan Sauer as he tries to uncover the perpetrators behind terrorist attacks on hyperspace travel routes. Things go off the rails from there, and eventually set up an important narrative tie-in to the rest of the trilogy, echoes of which are still present in the current Xenoblade Chronicles series for the Nintendo Switch.
In addition to the fan translation, a fan remake of Xenosaga: Pied Piper is also in the works. “It is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious and impressive fangames the Xeno Series community has ever seen thanks to the hard work of CycloneFox and their team,” wrote ValakTurtle. In the meantime, fans can still dream that the Xenosaga trilogy itself might still one day get an HD remaster collection for the Switch 2.
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