Warning: Super-long and full of SPOILERS, if you care.
So I finally finished Xenosaga 3. And the entirety of the Xeno series itself, unless we're counting Xenoblade already.
So I think I'll take this time to really write down my thoughts of the series as a whole. The ending was so terrible it made me regret finishing the 3rd game, but the series is pretty notable and I sunk a lot of time into it.
To just get it out of way, my opinion on the gameplay throughout the series: Regular battles were mostly fun, I'd say XS2 was probably my favorite incarnation there. It was slower-paced, but managed to be almost challenging. Gear/AGWS/AMWS/ES battles were pretty terrible/forgettable throughout, though to XS3's credit, I actually enjoyed its ES battles. Good job, Monolith, only took you 4 games! XS2's 'Shion-I-is-a-helper' string of sidequests was painful and stupid.
Now, Xenosaga is less of game and more of a cinematic experience. That's what it sells itself as, and it really succeeds (in XS1 and XS2) at it. The cutscenes are long and lush, and it's easy to just sit back passively and enjoy the pretty explosions and dramatic temper tantrums. In fact, if you let the XS writers just spoon-feed you whatever they want each scene to mean without any connection to reality, I'd say XS1 and XS2 are quite enjoyable experiences. You won't even notice that Shion is a terrible human being, because Monolith said she was awesome and perfect, and why would little things like every-word-that-comes-out-of-her-mouth get in the way of what Monolith tells you is true? At least the music is pretty (in cutscenes).
For my part, I played XS1 back when it first came out. I also watched the XS Anime (based solely on the first game) when it first came out. For a long long time, this was my only experience with the Xeno series. And to the series' credit, I had a really hard time understanding the general negative reaction to Shion (and the rest of the XS series) from what I had played. Let's just go ahead and say this: XS1 is the high point of the XS series. It's not without flaws, but it's not a bad game in a vacuum, and even Shion, while impulsive and placed on a pedestal, is a tolerable lead character. Certainly, there are other RPG mains who are worse than what we got in XS1. A few years later, I finally got around to playing Xenogears, and I had a great experience with it. Before I started XS2 recently, I even re-watched all of the XS1 cutscenes to refresh myself on the plot. So I was at a complete loss to how a game series could have such a strong start and end up with the horrible negative reaction that had been vocally expressed on the internet.
My basic theory is that 'a good start with lots of potential and good ideas, followed by a terrible terrible letdown of an ending is far worse than a mediocre game from start to finish, with flashes of brilliance or humor.' I came to this conclusion after playing Eternal Sonata, which opened nicely enough, and more importantly, was a solid concept that played to a lot of my interests... and managed to string me along through the entire game before bitchslapping me with the most horrible ending ever. Yes, I still feel that Eternal Sonata's ending is worse than XS3. That should tell you people how bad Eternal Sonata's ending is, not make XS3 seem redeemable, by the way.
So Xenosaga 1 was an auspicious start to the series. It's also the main reason that the series was able to fall so far. XS1 introduces us to a few really solid ideas with some good presentation. The opening Encephalon sequence is a solid idea, and it does a good job of establishing what kind of world and game it's going to be. It's also boring, but if you go into it expecting a movie with lots of exposition, it goes by better than I remembered from first playing it. It introduces us to the concept of Realians and Androids and cool psychology-inspired Space Internet. It's a creative, or at the very least colorful, bit of sci-fi. Then we get the Gnosis Attack. This is where I feel that XS1 really succeeds at being a cinematic experience and also the start of setting itself up for failure. The Gnosis are a basically the coolest thing about the entire XS series in my opinion, and after this really awesome scene, they sort of cease to ever be important or meaningful again. They toss this plotthread faster than a strapless wiimote, and the series hurts for it. They spend far too much time really selling the Gnosis in this whole sequence, which is setting the tone of the series, to just yank it away in favor of the pseudo-religious bullshit.
The rest of the game plays out pretty well, with Metal Gear Ziggy, Albedo's madness, Cherenkov's past and subsequent fall, and even Shion manages to be decent lead, though they do manage to fail that up by having a scene with Jin in there. Jin and Shion's relationship is pretty much the most terrible thing in the series. Not only is Jin a fairly unsympathetic and melodramatic character, but anytime he is on-screen, he manages to make Shion even -more- of a bitch. In some ways, I could see what they were trying to do with their 'complex' brother-sister relationship, but this kind of family drama was always forced, poorly-timed, and never felt like it was developing. Luckily, it's kept to one scene in XS1. Towards the end, we get another Encephalon dive, which thanks to the opening of the game, doesn't feel hokey. It's nice to see that someone on the writing staff realized that the Encephalon needed this kind of setup to work. It gave me some hope. Encephalon dive is a pretty good step in exploring the mysteries that XS sets up. Honestly, I feel if they had actually just answered most of the questions right there in this game and ended the series, it would have probably been a much better experience on the whole. Anyway, despite the main cast not having accomplished their goals, the first game ends on a positive note somehow, with MOMO safe, and KOS-MOS breaking out the plot power and saving the ship. Not flawless, but nice start.
It was at this point, after watching all of those cutscenes again, that went and read Xenosaga: Pied Piper's script. This is the XS Japan-only cellphone game which basically chronicles Ziggy story as a human. It was actually pretty moving and while it raised quite a few questions (thanks to horrible things like chaos' appearance), it wasn't a bad self-contained story of sacrifice. More importantly, I got the feeling that it was intended to be its own full game, but Monolith decided to compromise. A lot of the concepts introduced in Pied Piper were brought up in XS: Missing Year and XS3, which I felt really served to tie the series together better than the mere 3 releases we received in America. Again, this little game served as proof that -someone- on the writing staff knew what they were doing.
Anyway, after all that, I finally started up XS2 and ...OH GOD IT'S HORRIBLE! I have to admit that the graphical changes were jarring. Despite not really liking XS1's large-eyed freakshow (MOMO is the most offensive), the newer, uncanny valley night-terror-inducing designs of XS2 were a step down. XS2 opens up roughly five minutes after XS1, and the game instantly begins to shift the focus away from Shion. Now, I would herald this as a great thing in hindsight. I know that Jr is a far better character than Shion in the long run. However, the series is really shooting itself in the foot with this move here. They've established our klutzy, impulsive heroine, and while not perfect, they have 3 games to make her into something intriguing. So they start out by ignoring her. Brilliant. Throughout nearly all of XS2, Shion is relegated to side roles, and she flubs every one of them. This is basically the start of Shion as an irredeemable bitch. More egregious is how the writers seem to think that suddenly shifting the focus -back- to her in the middle of Jr's story will make it somehow okay... when all it really does is make Shion into an attention-seeking self-centered whore.
Now, the game actually opened up with some exciting visuals and some scenes that took place in the past during the Miltian Conflict (this is the second time we get to visit this time period in as many games!). It serves as a cool opening for Jin and Margulis and if you turn your brain off, you can even ignore chaos' presence. Also, Jin will never be this cool again. In fact, in the very next scene we see him in, we're exposed to his and Shion's terribly forced relationship. The scene in which Shion emotionally and physically abuses her friends and brother in a bar. This sounds cooler than it is. Basically Shion has finally travelled back to her home planet after who-knows-how-long and she not only doesn't want to go home and see her brother, but when she runs into him, she hides and tries to avoid him. And then when he ends up finding her anyway, she outright blames him as being the reason she never wants to come home and even manages to abuse her friends a bit on the side when they ask about her curious behavior. It might have been intended to be comical, but the moral dissonance implications, scene set-up, lack of music, and terrible voice acting on Shion's part REALLY fuck that up.
Speaking of Shion's terrible voice actor, this new woman Olivia Hack managed to singlehandedly turn every line into the bitchiest sounding line possible. I don't know if she's just a terrible actress or if she's being directed terribly, but there were some bad bad choices made here. Even her once-throwaway lines where she's being unintentionally cruel to Allen and Miyuki come out as pointed barbs of abuse when this lady speaks. Christ, it's like the directors heard some complaints about XS1 Shion's voice being too gentle and high-pitched and told this new girl 'you're only allowed to act bad-ass and angry... all the time. In every scene. No, I don't care that this is a humor scene, put all your energy into being angry. People like angry. Man, I'm a genius director. I give people what they want.'
So the fail-o-meter for Shion has now reached critical mass, the point of no return, and we've just barely started the game. Oh wait, she changes clothes. Now she not only -sounds- and -acts- like a bitch, she dresses like one. The transformation is complete. It's at this point, when Jr and chaos are visiting Jin and Shion's home, that we get a little scene where Jin and chaos chat for a bit about the past and the nature of humanity, blah blah blah words. Anyway, chaos's new voice actor, Josh Seth, then delivers an unforgettable line about how Jr criticizes chaos's contemplative nature, saying 'chaos, you are so... slooow.' I want to link to a youtube clip of this, but I can't find it. Anyway, the delivery of the line is so awkward that it's hilarious and probably my favorite thing that chaos ever does in the whole series.
Anyway, then something wonderful happens. The game stops being about Shion. Suddenly, Jr and MOMO become the focus of the story, and there's epic car chases, and a bunch of fascinating backstory on, what else?, the Miltian Conflict. The game also takes this opportunity to deconstruct its awesome antagonist from the first game, Albedo, in a completely unexpected sympathetic slant. I was surprised how well they pulled it off after seeing him as a psychotic mass-murderering pedophile in XS1. It's a little hard to accept both sides of him as the same character, but this is still probably the crowning achievement of XS2 writing.
After all of that, we're introduced to Ormus, which is actually what was controlling U-TIC from the first game and... *shoots self*. No, I will not discuss XS political plot. I followed all of it very carefully while playing the games, stopping to look up all the religious references and making sure that I never confused which side any of the multiple double agents were on at any given time. Needless to say, the entire Ormus plot really failed. It was a veiled attempt at both revering and cutting down religion, and mostly just served as a distraction. The only important thing to come out of Ormus' existence was that they gave the player an idea of how much humanity fails in the XS universe, which is important as this failure is basically causing the universe to collapse thanks to the Space Internet, which is actually the collective unconscious. You're welcome, I just summarized XS plot for you.
Towards the end of XS2, we get the infamous Cecily and Cathe scene, which is Shion's only real purpose in this entire plot segment. And the only thing that Febronia did of any importance in XS1. In fact, right at the end of XS1, Feb says 'you have to save Cecily and Cathe', and that's the only plot-important thing Shion is supposed to do in XS2 (besides being a Good Samaritan and doing menial sidequests ARGH!). Again, this is a case of Monolith thinking that if they just use the right music and have one of the characters say something like 'Poor Shion, your life is so hard' that it will make whatever else they do in a scene come off as genuine emotion. So Shion suddenly jumps out in front of everyone, after all this time spent on developing Jr's relationship to the plot here, and suddenly starts screaming about how important Cecily and Cathe are to her and how she could never mercy-kill them, despite their being in a mutilated state of half-life and Febronia's ghost pleading with Shion to just get the fuck out of the way so that KOS-MOS can finish her job for her.
Oh well, at least there was a Space Pope. And a giant demonic spaceship hatching out of a planet (Miltia... again. You'd think we're done with this place, but don't worry, we've still got one more game to endlessly flashback here). And then a giant fuck-off we-used-planets-as-a-hood-ornament-for-this-thing spacecraft known as Abel's Ark randomly appears, and that was kinda cool. The point here is that XS2 uses a lot of cinematic effects to at least cover up its low points. You can forgive silly plot threads like Space Pope with a super-mech because you get to see KOS-MOS jumping in with her Space-Hanglider Super Cannon to blast the shit out of things. Well, at least I could.
Following XS2, I jumped right into XS3, but I took a lot more breaks in finishing that one. One of the breaks was long enough to sit down and read what happened in Xenosaga: Missing Year. Yes, apparently between XS2 and 3, an entire year goes by. More importantly, a lot of shit went down during this year. One might even guess (rightfully) that there was another whole game that was planned! Yes, XS:Missing Year (henceforth XS2.5) was originally slated to be its own game, but instead was released as bunch of flash videos on the Japanese website... No, I'm not kidding. Anyway, the content that was cut from the main series really hurts the games as a whole. Sure, Shion tried to summarize it at the beginning of XS3, but it was a bad summary and didn't cover any of the salient points of the game. The worst part being that they keep referencing it throughout XS3. And the references don't mention any of the important revelations of XS2.5.
A brief summary, since I would have much rather played XS2.5 than XS3. XS2.5 opens with Shion at Vector, not a great start, but there you go, and we learn that recently Gnosis have been appearing in populated cities so frequently that it's clear someone is somehow directing them. Blah blah, GNOSIS TERRORISM! Oh my God, the Gnosis are important again! Yes! Anyway, the game also introduces Doctus properly, and she goes around kicking ass and taking names, even beating up KOS-MOS. I imagine she would have been a playable addition to the cast. Especially considering that Ziggy, MOMO, and Jr. are nowhere to be found. Anyway, Doctus finds out that special Realian girl seems to be the target of the Gnosis Terrorism and she's being kept at Vector. Long story short: The Realian girl was made by Vector and was created with some data from Nephilim and can resonate with her. Yes, Nephilim actually is important in this game.
In the distant past of what we would call Present Day, the Zohar was found on Earth. One of the scientists who deciphered Lemegeton, the control program for the Zohar, decided to use it in an experiment. This experiment instantly phased his daughter, Nephilim, out of existence and she met U-DO in the middle of the Space Internet/UMN. She wasn't scared when she met him, and this surprised him, so she became the 'Beloved of God' and was able to access its power. Anyway, back in the real world, as you might have surmised, this Zohar experiment was a total failure. So much so that people all over the world were getting sucked into nothingness. What was left of humanity abandoned the planet as fast as possible and the entirety of Earth was sealed (by Wilhelm) to stop the spread of the Zohar contamination. The wills of some of the people who were sucked into the UMN continued to live on in fragmented form. Bits of the Lemegeton program were floating around as well, and that's how Mizrahi eventually created the Y-data and the Song of Nephilim and this new Realian model.
Nephilim's father also partially survived, and was using the Gnosis to try to find the Realian girl so that he could revive Nephilim's will in a physical body. Nice sentiment, but he was killing a bunch of people, so Shion et al go on an Encephalon Dive to stop him. Nephilim even tags along, possibly intended as a playable character. The little Realian girl gets possessed and turned into a boss at some point, so Shion has to kill her, which makes everyone emo. Nephilim forgives her, though, so it's all okay. After the trauma of learning about all the secrets Vector is keeping, Shion leaves Vector and joins Doctus. Also, there was a lot of stuff concerning Jin and Shion's relationship and they actually come to terms with one another and start acting like a family and WHY WAS THIS CUT OUT!? IT MIGHT HAVE MADE SHION LESS OF A HORRIBLE BITCH!? Well, probably not, but it would have been nice to understand why anyone treats her with any kindness at all after she basically abuses them throughout all of XS2 and 3.
Anyway, this leads right into XS3, where we open up with SPACE INTERNET DIVING! Actually, I found this whole section kind of cool. It's visually interesting and we finally get to play as some new PCs, albeit temps. Anyway, once the game gets started, it actually manages to be a fairly competent story, despite focusing on Shion once again. The Testaments have been a constant background threat for a while, and they are now the focus of the game. I admittedly like most of the Testaments, in no small part due to how their existence is something akin to the Gnosis but sentient.
So we get a little introduction to what will be T-elos, the mother of all fail. And then we find out that Kos-Mos is going to be scrapped due to a new super-weapon. The connection is easy to make. Anyway, there's a rather entertaining cinematic with T-elos and Kos-Mos doing some fighting before the inevitable scrapping. Also, 'Roth Mantel' shows up. This is such a terrible idea for giving Kevin screen presence before his actual reveal. It's also apparently German for 'Red Cape', which kind of ruins any possible surprise if you hadn't guessed who he was waaaay back in XS1.
XS3 suffers from a lack of cinematics, honestly. For all that people complained that the first two games were too much cutscene, not enough game, at least the cutscenes were entertaining. XS3 has a very small number of cutscenes, instead using voice-over and textboxes to tell nearly its whole story. While the acting is generally good (they got Shion's old VA back too), the visuals were really what allowed the player to just turn their brain off and enjoy what little fun the story had to offer.
Skipping all the fail, there's quite a few good sections of XS3. The game does a fun infiltration dungeon with Miyuki. There's some fairly entertaining space fighting scenes around the floating chunk of Earth. And the game really manages to show off some good antagonists here. Virgil's past was surprisingly engaging and honestly made all the nonsense with Feb in XS1/2 worth it. Voyager, despite not getting a lot of development in the main games, actually managed to have a meaningful scene or two with Ziggy and Canaan. Dmitri Yuriev, Gaignun, and Albedo were quite deftly handled as well - not as good as Virgil, but definitely a high point in the game. On Dmitri, I particularly liked how his goal was to Kill God. There's a lot of antagonists that basically have this same plot, but he handled it quite stylishly... and openly! He just comes right out and says it: I want to Kill God. I respect that, it's good to see someone at Monolith knew how to make that work. It wasn't endlessly covered in metaphors and symbolism and MYSTARY for a change. Thanks for that.
Also, KOS-MOS's new design is a such a massive improvement over the uncanny valley of failure that her XS2 design was that I have to include it as one of the highlights of the game.
And then Kevin shows up. And the Pellegri and Margulis. And then the scene of unlimited fail.
The T-elos scene. Oh my god. There's so much failure packed into this 20 minutes that it's hard to summarize. For starters, just before T-elos actually starts failing it up, Shion randomly passes out (this is about the 12th time in-game) and learns about her failure plot and Kos-Mos's plot and chaos is still around being MYSTARIOUS! As it turns out, KOS-MOS is Mary Magdalene, which is a stupid plot twist in and of itself. In fact, she's actually just a special Android created to be able to resurrect Mary Magdalene's Will. Okay, this is even stupider. Apparently Mary Magdalene had super powers. What? Seriously game? It's bad enough that you're now directly including religious figures into your plot, but superpowered Mary Magdalene? Alright, whatever. Oh, and Shion is apparently Mary's best friend from the time of Jesus. And she died, and Mary was sad and somehow that makes Shion important. Ugh. Oh look, there's Jesus. The absurdity of Jesus actually being in the game made me crack up at this scene. Oh, and chaos is there, I guess he's not Jesus after all (no, he is, don't worry... you weren't wrong, chaos is apparently the Gnostic Jesus. XS3 has plenty of Jesuses to go around)!
This kind of plot twist is inherently fail. There's just no two ways about it. You can't bandy around religious terms and symbolism to hint at deeper meaning to your story through parallelism... and then fanfic-rewrite the actual religion you based all your symbolism and terminology on. It would be like if Animal Farm had the actual Trotsky walk in at the end of the story and say 'man, these animal farm experiments worked out JUST AS PLANNED!'.
So following the flashback of fail, Shion wakes up and KOS-MOS is now suddenly Mary Magdalene because Shion remembered she was. Before the player can finish banging their head on a desk over that, T-elos shows up and claims that SHE is Mary Magdalene too. Yep, two Jesuses and two (possibly 3?) Mary Magdalenes. And now they must FIGHT to determine who the REAL Mary Magdalene is and who gets her fanfic superpowers. So after a horrible scene where the PC cast does nothing effectual against T-elos (note that chaos apparently just stands there and watches the whole failure fight scene), T-elos explains that she's going to take KOS-MOS inside of her so that Mary can reawaken properly, so she shoots Shion. Or at least, she shoots at Shion while KOS-MOS stands in front of her giving a 3-minute lecture while T-elos ineffectually continues to fire her popgun at KOS-MOS's back. The absurdity of the music with this oddly calm scene in the middle of the fight was hilarious.
T-elos, finally realizing that her popgun isn't doing anything, breaks out her final weapon - the Boob Cannon. When I first heard about this, I honestly thought people were joking, but no, the Boob Cannon is real and oh god oh god, it's the final nail in the coffin for anything good this series tried to be. You'd think it would be impossible to screw up Sexy Lesbian Robots Fighting With Boob Cannons, but you're sadly mistaken. Anyway, KOS-MOS busts out her OWN Boob Cannon and finally destroys T-elos (..yay?). And Shion gets all emo that she didn't know the real KOS-MOS until now. Because nothing can happen in this game that isn't about Shion.
Immediately following the scene of fail, there's EVEN MORE FAIL! What a bargain! Kevin is waiting in the very next room to remind us all of how much he and Shion fail, and even tarnish Allen some more. Let's take a look at Kevin throughout the series for a minute.
XS1: Kevin is a flashback character. He's just Shion's dead boyfriend and KOS-MOS's creator. We see a scene of him being a little awkward about what to say to her when she wakes up, which is the first and last time he's ever endearing. It immediately turns into a misogynistic rant about why he made Kos-mos female (this later turns out to be complete BS, since we know she's female because she's a vessel for Mary and he's just fucking with Shion).
We also know that he caused the sequence of events that led to his own death at the hands of KOS-MOS. In a vacuum, XS1 Kevin might seem like a tragic figure who was forced to or had some good reason for causing these events, and his death an accident. In context of the whole series, we learn that he did all of this just to make Shion feel like shit. Are you serious game!?
XS2: The Red Testament shows up for the first time. He doesn't do much and don't (or at least, you're not supposed to) know that he's Kevin at this point (his voice kind of gives him away). He just has a few enigmatic scenes with Wilhelm and the other Testaments near the end of the game. In hindsight, we realize that he's basically just been fucking with Shion all throughout this game, too. Setting up events so that Shion and her friends have to deal with more emotional trauma.
And in XS3, we get to really see what Kevin is about. Unfortunately. First we see him as a young child losing his mother to Gnosis, and this is basically his whole stock Freudian reason for all the terrible shit he does, including, but not limited to:
1. Manipulating Shion into working directly under him at Vector so that she can manipulate Kos-mos for him.
2. Orchestrating the entirety of the events on Old Miltia that lead to the deaths of thousands of people and Realians.
3. Intentionally creating and releasing without proper testing the Combat Realians that killed Shion's family (which in turn caused the Gnosis phenomenon).
4. Conspiring with Sellers and Wilhelm to activate the Song of Nephilim in the middle of the Conflict, causing the brutal deaths and rampages of the Realians on the planet.
5. He even outright claims that he's been chasing pedo-bait Shion's tail since she was 8 years old. Ew.
6. While she's working for him at Vector, he basically lies and seduces her into becoming his fiancee, and, as previously mentioned, starts a sequence of events that leads to his death, solely to make Shion emo so that she'll grow more attached to KOS-MOS and revere Kevin's memory so that he can manipulate her more later.
7. He shows up in disguise as Roth Mantel to taunt all of Shion's friends and old co-workers with the knowledge that he's going to have KOS-MOS scrapped in favor of his new model. Again, just to make Shion sad and care about KOS-MOS more.
8. Once he reveals himself to her again as the Red Testament, he basically takes advantage of her confused mental state and tells her that her friends all hate her and that she can't do anything so she might as well join him so that he can use her (poorly defined) super powers to destroy the universe.
All of this fail, packed into a few minutes of cutscenes. And to top it all off... Shion learns all of this and is like 'Okay, Kevin-sweetie, whatever you say... I wonder why my friends don't want me to go with you? It must be because they hate me. Me, me me!'
And you know what? As an antagonist, Kevin doesn't seem like he's doing a bad job at first glance... but the game tries to make him out to be a martyr... as if anything he's doing is in anyway redeemable, simply because he didn't want his sextoy Shion to -die- (nevermind that he doesn't mind manipulating her and forcing her into depression, at least he doesn't want to KILL her, that makes it alright, doesn't it players?!). Die in a fire Monolithsoft.
So Shion is a weak-willed whore and goes to join Kevin. And then something wonderful happens. The party finally stops saying 'Oh Shion, your life is so hard' and tells her that this isn't cool dude, we're gonna beat you up. Yes, the game actually lets you have a boss fight against Shion. And Kevin too, for extra satisfaction. The fight is so easy that you could solo it with an underlevelled character, so enjoy stomping her into paste. In true anime fashion, we have now literally beat the sense into Shion. Maybe she's finally undergone a transformation? Maybe we'll see some improvement in our main heroine? Maybe someone at Monolith still remembers how to write a story without relying on musical cues to tell the player how to think about a scene!
No, Shion immediately starts spouting some self-righteous bull about how she's turning against Kevin because it's her will and doesn't care about any of her friends and blah blah you stupid whore.
Allen has a brief moment of cool in there where he grows a backbone and stands up to Kevin, but also displays some creepy stalkerish love for Shion with lines like 'Even if you never love me, I'll always be watching you'. To which Kevin replies 'Did you ever think that those kinds of feelings might be a burden on her?' and my first thought was DAMMIT GAME, why are you making me agree with Kevin? Anyway, the stalkerish bits are downplayed, so I'll give it credit for being fairly cool for Allen.
Anyway, then there's the final boss and ending and it's a bunch of poorly-handled reveals as to who Shion/Kos/chaos/Wilhelm/Mary/Nephilim/Abel REALLY ARE! Short answer: They're all Jesus now. Seriously, I can't believe it took them 3 games to finally tell us -anything- about who chaos was and it was the most headdesk-worthy and obvious answer possible. 'Chaos, you are so... slooow.'
Oh, and Wilhelm has reset time some unspecified number of times, which is Monolithsoft's winkwink-nudgenudge that Xenogears must have happened during one of those resets and that any continuity errors can be chalked up to events all happening slightly differently in the previous incarnation. Personally, this is the best plot twist that Monolithsoft managed to have, and it's by far the most subtle and has the least impact on anything in the main series of the games. It's also not even a particularly good plot twist, so it says something that it's the best one.
Overall, I have to say that I was really enjoying the series' ups and downs, even when Shion was failing it up in XS2 right up, until Margulis' death in XS3. At that point, the fail-o-meter maxed out and broke and merely watching the final scenes went a long way towards making the rest of the series' good points significantly ruined. I honestly regret playing through the end and I wish I had stopped just before Margulis' final scene.
