Created by Tetsuya Takahashi and his wife Kaori Tanaka as a proposal for Final Fantasy VII, it was allowed to be developed as its own project; first as a sequel to Chrono Trigger and then as an original game with a science fiction premise.

Xenogears received critical acclaim, with many calling it a work of art due to its heavy religious themes and elements of Jungian psychology.

It features two slightly different battle systems: in the first, the player controls human characters in turn-based combat manipulated through the sequencing of learned combos.

[2] Xenogears features both traditional anime and pre-rendered CGI movie clips by Production I.G to illustrate important plot points.

Solaris, ruled by Emperor Cain and an AI collective known as the Gazel Ministry, commands the Gebler army and the Ethos and secretly uses both to dominate the land-dwellers.

[10][11] According to the Perfect Works schematic (as well as the game's end credits), Xenogears is the fifth episode in a series of six, with events spanning multiple millennia.

Fei and Citan at first appear to be from this land, although it is later learned that they originate from the capital cities Aphel Aura and Etrenank of the floating countries of Shevat and Solaris, respectively.

[13] Significant non-playable characters include Krelian and Miang, both leaders of Solaris who seek to revive Deus, a mechanical weapon that fell to earth thousands of years ago.

As being the Contact and the Anti-type, Fei and Elly have been reincarnated several times, while the Complement, Miang, has awoken in hundreds of women down throughout the game's history.

[14][15] Xenogears centers around the protagonist Fei Fong Wong, an adopted young male in the village of Lahan, brought by a mysterious "masked man" three years ago.

[18] Fei is able to escape with the help of his friends, including a new one, prisoner Rico, but he and Elly are separated from the rest of the party and accidentally shot down by Bart.

[26] After Krelian manipulates Ramsus into assassinating the Emperor, the Gazel Ministry uses the Gaetia Key, an artifact that manipulates the DNA of massive numbers of humans around the world, turning them into mutants called Wels to collect flesh to reconstruct their god, an all-powerful war machine called Deus that crash-landed on the planet ten thousand years ago.

Lacan was a painter while Sophia was the Holy Mother of Nisan around the time of the war between Shevat and Solaris five hundred years earlier.

Krelian disposes the Gazel Ministry because they are no longer necessary and kidnaps Elly, the Mother, with Miang who must be sacrificed in order to revive Deus.

Amidst the confusion, Abel was separated from his mother and accidentally made contact with the Wave Existence through the Zohar, Deus' power source.

[30] When Deus gained full control over the Eldridge, the captain decided to initiate the self-destruct sequence in an attempt to destroy it.

Krelian confronts them, telling Fei he only sought to end the pain and suffering that comes with human existence by reverting everything back to when it all began, when all was one, to ascend to the realm of God.

[41] Takahashi had wanted to create the game in full 3D, but the PlayStation's capacities meant this could not be managed, resulting in the current mesh of 2D sprites against 3D backgrounds.

[39] The themes and story were greatly influenced by the works and philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as dystopian science fiction films such as THX 1138 and Soylent Green.

While it was popularly assumed to be due to budget constraints, Takahashi later revealed the full reason; as his team was inexperienced they were unable to create the entire proposed game in the expected two-year development time, so instead of ending prematurely with the end of the first disc, Takahashi offered up a compromise which became the second disc's content, allowing the staff to finish the game within time and budget deadlines.

[45] In a later interview, Honeywood stated that the biggest issue was with the multiple religious references, and the concept at the end of "killing God", which needed to be adjusted so that it remained faithful to the original premise while stepping around some content that might offend.

Honeywood may also have had a hand in the Japanese naming of Deus: the staff were originally going to call it Yahweh, and during his argument against it he said "It's dangerous" (ヤベーよ, yabē yo).

[65] DigiCube published both Xenogears Perfect Works and a memorial album named Thousands of Daggers, which contains the entire script to the game in Japanese, along with screenshots.

[88] It received a "Gold Prize" from Sony in May 1998, indicating sales above 500,000 units in Japan,[89] and proceeded to sell over 890,000 copies domestically by the end of the year.

[14] IGN, however, stated that despite having too many cut scenes and a sometimes confusing plot, "immersion is a key factor in Xenogears and the questions you may have about the storyline are all answered at some point in the game.

"[43] IGN claimed that "the most impressive feature in combat is the ability to use massive "Gears" or mechs", noting that Square's attention to programming these battles is made evident by how "visually satisfying" they are.

[73] Game Revolution praised the "absolutely spectacular and stunning" hand-drawn anime cut-scenes, but stated that they were sparse and poorly synched with the voice acting.

[76] Retrospectively, Edge commented that although it is "considered by some to be a multimillion-yen, convoluted science-fiction vanity project, Xenogears nevertheless remains one of the most keenly eulogized PlayStation RPGs.

[98] In June 2000, Sugiura Hirohide, president of Monolith Soft, said that a sequel was being considered before being cancelled due to the company's film investments at the time with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Tetsuya Takahashi was the director and writer for both Xenogears and Xenosaga and noted that "with our relation between Square, I think it is difficult for us to say it is a direct sequel or prequel".