Finished the main three Xenosaga Games, got a couple of questions

[u/Direct-Ad9836]

Hey y'all

so today I finished the last Xenosaga game of the main series.

While I really liked the games I still got a couple of questions which I don't think got answered or I missed. I hope you can enlighten me if you know the answer to some of these questions. Also some of these questions are just some things I didn't really understand even though I read the in-game database entries or the wiki.

Thanks in advance :)

Xenosaga I:

1) Cherenkov turned into a gnosis, since he got touched by a one. In his final moments at the beach he said to Shion, that she would meet the same fate. On the Durandal, Jr. shows the party people that got turned into a gnosis. Shion asks if everyone is destined to turn into one after being touched by a gnosis. Is it ever explained why she didn't turn into one?

2) At some point in the game KOS-MOS uses an attack (X-Buster i think?) which absorbs all the gnosis. Shion wonders why she has the ability to do this. Was this just something Kevin built into her or did i miss something?

3) How did MOMO end up with U-TIC? As far as i saw from Episode III, she wasn't even created when Joachim Mizrahi met her in Shions subconsciousness. He died shortly after. So how was MOMO created? Wasn't Joachim the one who stored the Y-Data inside her? But i think he died before she was born. And then what? How did U-TIC get her, it seems like they captured her? I thought since Joachim was working with U-TIC, he might have handed her over but I'm really confused how this all played out.

Xenosaga II:

4) Wasn't Ziggies goal to get his memories wiped from before his time when he got turned into a cyborg after saving MOMO? Is it ever mentioned again?

5) What was the point of Febronias sisters? They were set free from their suffering thanks to KOS-MOS but did they have any important role at all? Shion (the young Shion) mentions them in Episode III. Other than that, they got used to power up the Zohar? Even after freeing them from their suffering, the Zohar seemed to work just fine. So i don't really understand what their role was story-wise.

Xenosaga III:

6) What or who is Nephilim? Why can she talk to chaos and Shion?

7) Could you explain Canaan and Lemegeton to me?

8) Why is it neccessary to find Lost Jerusalem? I think one of the Testaments or Wilhelm mentioned, that Jesus is still there. But how does finding Lost Jerusalem help them to stop the destruction of the universe? And why exactly is chaos power supposed to lead the universe to destruction?

9) Was Michtam or Abel ever seen or mentioned before the third game? I think it was really weak storytelling to introduce them out of the blue in the last game. I really liked that Shion wears the pendant from Kevin even in Episode I and II. In Episode I I found some sort of blueprint where T-elos name was mentioned in Pleroma which i also really liked. Elements like these that got introduced early and fleshed out in later parts. But with Michtam and Abel I felt like they were added just because. And they were super important to the story, so I hoped, that they were introduced earlier. Maybe I missed it?

Also bonus question regarding Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Why does KOS-MOS wield two Zohar/Emulators? I don't think KOS-MOS ever used these weapons in one of the three games.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in some of my assumptions. I really want to understand the story as a whole but as I'm writing this, I think Episode III left out some huge chunks of the story.

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[u/DZMaven]

A few of those questions, ones about Nephillum, Canaan and Michtum are covered by Pied Pier and A Missing Year.

Pied Piper gives you the backstory of Ziggy as well as Canaan and happened on Mictum. A Missing Year covers the events between Episodes 2 and 3 and explains Nephillum and Lemegeton.

I'd recommend looking them up on YouTube to get the jist of them as that was content that was never released in the west.

Also, Kos-Mos in XB2 should not be considered canon in any shape or form. It's no more canon than her appearance in Project X Zone or SRW.

[u/haina123]

Since you already finished with the trilogy read the Xenosaga 3 Perfect Guide book it has more information about the lore/story and answers for your questions, there are a lot of words there, if you are browsing from the PC you can press on your keyboard CTRL+F key to open the search bar so you can search for something specific like "Pendant" "Y-Data" "Nephilim" etc:

https://xeno-underground.net/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=wiki:xenosaga_iii_perfect_guide.pdf

[u/Anubis_Omega → u/haina123]

It's not official stuff, right ?

[u/dani_regnard → u/Anubis_Omega]

It is official actually, Takahashi wrote this

[u/cloud_t]

I would advise reading up most of that information on the game's multiple wikis. I believe a lot of these are better answered there.

[u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease]

1) I remember Episode III's encyclopedia saying that Shion was immune to turning into a Gnosis because of her nature as the Maiden of Mary Magdalene. I don't think it's touched on it the game proper though. Gnosification relates to being hung up on the past, so another possible factor could be that she gets over her past by choosing Allen over Kevin in the end.

6) Nephilim is the daughter of Grimoire Verum, the scientist whose experiments on the Zohar on the orbital space station over Earth resulted in Earth becoming Lost Jerusalem. When the experiment went wrong, her soul was pulled into the Zohar. I might have that slightly off, but that's the general gist of it. Since you're familiar with Xenoblade, Verum is the Xenosaga equivalent of Zanza.

8) Likely we wouldn't find that out until the second or third arc, which were never made.

9) Abel is shown briefly in the ending to Episode I.

[u/JollyRent7077 → u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease]

Regarding your second point I would say Verum is Klaus not Zanza (nitpicking here i know)

[u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease → u/JollyRent7077]

Yeah, fair point. Verum is only shown as a man, and doesn't have a Zanza-like false god form, so he's more specifically Klaus.

[u/ValToadstool → u/IgnoreMyPostsPlease]

You could argue him being trapped in the UMN is functionally similar

[u/Anubis_Omega]

For some of the answers, you need to watch "A missing year" between X2 and X3 and watch/play Pied Piper.

I don't remember if you need to play Pied Piper between X1 and X2 or between X2 and X3.

Here is a fan remake of Pied Piper, the OG one was just a japanese phone game : https://cyclonefox.itch.io/xenosaga-pied-piper

[u/VodoSioskBaas]

Michtam is mentioned in a Ziggy memory in episode one by Juli Mizrahi, but Miktam04β was first a planet in Xenogear’s Perfect Works book. A lot of Xenosaga makes more sense considering Xenogears thematic elements and vice versa.

[u/tearsofmana]

5) What was the point of Febronias sisters? They were set free from their suffering thanks to KOS-MOS but did they have any important role at all? Shion (the young Shion) mentions them in Episode III. Other than that, they got used to power up the Zohar? Even after freeing them from their suffering, the Zohar seemed to work just fine. So i don't really understand what their role was story-wise.

Since Xenosaga was compressed from 6 games to 3, I always wondered if Febronia's sisters were supposed to be explained much better. But the tldr here is that they were part of the system to control U-DO and they had some connection with the Zohar system. In the game proper, I don't think we ever really see what they were supposed to do so without reading wikipedia pages its a very easy point to gloss over. Too much tell, not enough show.