Transcending the Material: Xenosaga, Religion, and the Fear of Death
Xenosaga’s philosophically-crafted narrative still resonates years later
You are going to die. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are. It doesn’t matter what you try to do to stop it. It doesn’t matter if you spend your days worrying about death, or if you push that fear completely from your consciousness. Eventually — regardless of your failures, your successes, your mistakes, your worries, your loves, and your pains — you and everyone you know will cease to exist.
For many people, this is a point of great consternation, anxiety, and hopelessness. For others, this is a comforting thought against the pains of reality. Video games, like all great fiction, have spent much of their existence wrestling with the philosophies surrounding death, and eternal life.
A part of the great JRPG tradition, the Xenosaga trilogy attempts to assuage humanity’s fear of death by crafting a story thousands upon thousands of years in the making, one that spans from before when Jesus Christ walked the Earth to thousands of years into an unknowable future. It’s a saga of spiritual…
