Xenosaga Pied Piper (Demo)

This is (the demo for) a fan-recreation of Xenosaga Pied Piper, which originally released in Japan in 2004 for mobile devices. 

Xenosaga as well as all contained characters and stories are property of Bandai Namco. This fan-recreation is purely made out of passion for the franchise and is meant both for Xenosaga fans who have had no chance of playing the original release of Pied Piper as well as attracting new fans to Bandai Namco's Xenosaga. 

You can either download the game on Windows PCs or Mac, or simply play it in your browser on itch.io. For shorter loading times, I recommend downloading the game. The game is playable with Keyboard, Gamepad or Touch-Controls. However, certain features such as sneaking won't be possible with Touch-Controls. 

What is Xenosaga? 

Xenosaga is an RPG series released from 2002 until 2006 for the PlayStation 2. Like Xenogears before it and Xenoblade after it, it is the brainchild of Tetsuya Takahashi and made by Monolith Soft. 

Unlike Gears and Blade, Xenosaga takes place in a futuristic sci-fi setting in space. The gameplay often times takes a step back for its cinematic character-driven stories-telling. 

What is Pied Piper? 

Pied Piper takes place 100 years before the events of Xenosaga and tells the back-story of one of the series main characters, Ziggy. In Xenosaga, Ziggy is a Cyborg, but in his previous life, he was Jan Sauer, the main protagonist of Pied Piper. Jan and his team are a special Police squad who specialize in investigations in virtual space within the U.M.N.. During the plot of the game, they pursue the mysterious figure Voyager, who is responsible for countless crimes within the U.M.N.. 

How authentic is this experience? 

Honestly, even I can't tell you that. I'm putting in a lot of effort to recreate all story-scenes and dialogs as authentic  as humanly possible. From text-boxes, to character  movement and animations, I try to create an experience as close to the original as possible, without going insane. However, the amount of original assets on the web is very limited and I have to recreate most backgrounds, images, character sprites by hand from filmed footage off a tiny phone screen from the early to mid 2000s. (Thank you so much 桂樹!)

But the undeniable truth is that other than the story-cutscenes, most gameplay is lost and so I decided to fill the gaps myself. And in doing so, I want to add features from the other Xenosaga games like no random encounters, blastable traps and a battle system more similar to Xenosaga Episode III's. 

But the most immediate difference, you will hear is the music. Instead of original music (which is also not available) I'm using RPG Maker music as well as Royalty free music. Thank you, Gioele Fazzeri and OB-LIX at Pixabay.com

Differences

With these features I took creative freedom:

• Localization
  The main-language of this fan-project is English and I'm using a modified version of the fan-translation from zarathustra.kaisho.org and ValakTurtle. (Check out his playlist here) 
  But you can also switch to the original Japanese script in the game's menu and because I'm German myself, I also added a German localization for the demo. 
  I implemented a very simple way to localize any screen text with a straight-forward CSV file. 

• No random encounters
  I implemented follower enemies on the field, which try to behave similar to enemies in Xenosaga. Enemies can even hear you if you dash. 
• Trap enemies like in Xenosaga
  In dungeons, you will now find blastable barrels, which you can shoot to trap enemies, get easier back-attacks and get more points for special-attacks
• Battle system
• Higher quality character faces and art by フォレスト
  I modified the RPG maker game engine to be able to show higher quality character portraits while maintaining the original ingame size and feel. 
  This way I am not only able to display original art-works as well as possible, I also got the awesome support of フォレスト (Forest) who created original art just for this project. For those of you who don't know Forest, he created the legendary fan manga which also retells the whole story of Pied Piper and is another great way to experience it today. Check out his page on Nico Nico Douga.
  To be perfectly honest, even if the rest of my game looks really bad, it is worth playing it for his art alone!

How much will it cost? 

Nothing. My whole mission here is to make Pied Piper as accessible for anyone as possible, which is also why I added multiple platforms and languages. 

The game itself is meant to be free and I just want you to play it! 

Update

Update 2: Demo Update

The demo version has finally been updated to version 2.0! This is NOT a content update. The demo will still only comprise section 1 of chapter 1. But the following things have been changed: 

• A new music track has been created by wowbobwow which is a recomposition of the original game's track
• Backgrounds have been updated to be closer the original 
• Character sprites have been updated to be closer to the original
• Various bug fixes

The new update applies to all versions, Windows, Mac OS and Web.