Spoiler warning: This feature discusses major events through the end of Disc 1 in Xenogears.
Xenogears is an unusually ambitious PlayStation JRPG. Its second disc changes into a largely visual-novel presentation, but the first disc builds one of the system’s most intricate science-fiction stories. The descent into Solaris, the hidden city above the world, gathers together the game’s ideas about identity, religion, class, technology and control.
It is also an excellent example of how a game’s systems can reinforce its themes. The city’s architecture separates its citizens by status, its machines decide who is disposable, and even saving progress transmits information to those in power. Solaris is beautiful, efficient and horrifying precisely because its residents have been taught to accept all three qualities at once.
Entering the city above the world
The story has already accumulated an extraordinary amount of material by this point. The colony ship Eldridge crashes into a planet beneath the words “You shall be as gods”. Centuries later, Kislev and Aveh are at war, while Fei struggles with traumatic memories, a fractured personality and the immense power of his Gear. Shevat, the floating city, the ancient conflict of 500 years earlier and the twelve Anima Relics all lead back to a much older mystery.
Ethos and Gebler manipulate the people on the surface, whom Solaris calls “lambs”, while the masked Grahf seeks to awaken Fei so that they can kill God. The result is a story that draws freely from science fiction, psychology, philosophy and religion. New revelations rarely simplify the situation; they usually expose another layer of competing agendas.
Director and co-writer Tetsuya Takahashi named Solaris after the classic Soviet film and novel Solaris, in which a conscious ocean manifests the deepest secrets of those who encounter it. In Xenogears, Solaris secretly directs and funds Ethos and Gebler, keeping the surface in conflict. Fei and his allies must destroy three gates before the city can be reached.
When the party first arrives, the characters walk upside down across the floating city. It is a striking visual joke and a useful warning: the assumptions guiding their journey are about to be inverted. Fei becomes separated from the others and lands in 3rd Class F Block, the lowest level of Solaris.
Worker Bees and manufactured obedience
Almost immediately, Solaris reveals its priorities. A prisoner protests that people work like machines and have lost their will. A security cube removes him, carries him over a huge pit and drops him to his death. The surrounding citizens do not object. Their concern is that his behaviour might damage their block’s ranking.
Solaris divides its population into three classes. The people of the Honeycomb occupy 3rd Class and are known as “Worker Bees”, providing the manual labour that keeps the city’s core operating. Their lives are treated as expendable, yet the hierarchy offers them a possible promotion. That promise encourages them to police one another, while the city’s contempt for surface-dwellers gives them an inferior group to look down upon.
The regime’s vocabulary is part of its machinery. Prisoners are not jailed or punished; they are “rearranged”. The procedure combines brainwashing with amnesia and is commonly used against escapees and dissenters. Even a desperate citizen’s appeal to God brings no help before the Honeycomb is dismantled and its inhabitants are processed.
Fei later meets Samson, a surface-born man who resembles Timothy, the friend whose murder helped trigger Fei’s psychological collapse. Samson provides a work permit, but an identity scan exposes him and he is vaporised. Solaris does not need a courtroom when a machine can make the decision instantly.
Comfort, consumption and the view from above
Solaris recalls the elevated city of Tiphares in Battle Angel Alita, although the game does not explicitly identify it as an influence. Both settings present a technologically advanced refuge above a violent surface. Both also reveal that abundance is reserved for a narrow elite, with a commercial middle tier helping to conceal the distance between the top and bottom.
Using Elly’s identification, Fei enters the 2nd Class district. The city’s levels are literally stacked by rank, with security barriers limiting movement between them. In Arbot Plaza and Etrenank, shops, hover vehicles and holographic advertisements make daily life appear prosperous.
The Central Control Bureau arranges marriages under the principle that good matches create good descendants. Citizens boast that science has eliminated crime, disaster and war. Meanwhile, game saves transmit data to the Control Bureau, a child plays with an Imperial Gear toy while shouting “Purge the Lambs”, and a resident dismisses the violence below as irrelevant.
A couple rehearses a dance with a holographic instructor, and one resident even admires Tifa from Final Fantasy VII. These ordinary details make the city feel lived in, but the Security Cubes patrolling every street expose the coercion beneath the comfort.
After the destruction of the surface gates, Fei must attend the Dedication celebration. The Emperor uses a political rally, military displays and fireworks to reassure the population. He calls the citizens his children, announces that the path to Mahanon—the place where God rests—has opened, and promises imminent immortality while describing the surface population as stupid beasts.
The performance combines nationalism, religious authority and spectacle. It is also an admission that the leadership is worried. Krelian, named after Karellan from Childhood’s End, appears to reinforce the message. Elly reveals that he is the real power behind Solaris, and his presence triggers a memory in Fei suggesting that the two knew one another in the past.
When law becomes automation
Krelian announces that Fei’s friends have been taken for disposal in the Soylent System. The threat confirms that Solaris has no meaningful process for justice. Security Cubes decide who is removed, rearranged or killed, often without human supervision. When Fei and Elly reach the 1st Class and no machines follow them, the city’s supposedly precise order looks more like unchecked programming.
The citizens nevertheless defend the system. They accept that a machine’s interpretation of the rules is valid, then punish anyone who refuses to comply. The hierarchy disciplines everyone, including the privileged. Erich, Elly’s father and a former Soylent System superintendent, fears being demoted to 3rd Class more than he fears imprisonment.
Elly’s home is enormous beside the Worker Bees’ cells and the 2nd Class apartments. She explains that her apparent parents are not her biological parents and that her land-dweller nanny may have been her real mother. Fei is astonished by the private bathroom, a small but telling measure of class difference.
Elly and Fei use Erich’s terminal to find a route into the palace. His password is her name backwards, suggesting a quiet affection beneath his official role. When Erich discovers Fei in the house, he calls security. Human guards treat him more cautiously than the automated cubes, but he still cannot protect Elly. She is arrested, her parents are detained, and Fei leaves her behind before later returning to the rescue plan.
On the way back down, the city continues as if nothing has happened. Shops remain open and people travel to work after the Emperor’s performance. Their passivity is understandable: resistance can mean execution or erasure. Solaris survives partly because its inhabitants have learned to act as though repression is normal.
From the garbage dump to the Soylent System
Fei reunites with Citan and Elly, who learns that her parents resisted long enough for her to escape. The route to their captured friends passes through Solaris’s refuse areas and the Soylent System. The game’s battles remain a welcome mechanical contrast to the bleak setting.
Human combat uses attack sequences and deathblows that reward specific combinations. Fei’s shouted finishing moves, Citan’s effortless martial arts and Elly’s fluid rod-and-ether attacks give the turn-based system an energetic, almost arcade-like rhythm. The Gear battles use similar principles on a larger scale, although fuel limits can make preparation essential. Better equipment and upgrades matter, especially when refuelling during a fight is difficult.
In the factory, Fei and Elly find food and eat while Citan refuses. The source of the meat soon becomes clear: a conveyor system carries human remains from an organism-experiment and disposal facility.
The Soylent System is an unmistakable reference to Soylent Green, whose film adaptation famously reveals that its food is made from people. The original novel, Make Room! Make Room!, did not contain that cannibalistic twist. Here, the horror goes further: humans and Wels are processed into food, while chemical additives help maintain the population’s Limiters and keep behaviour compliant.
The Neo Wels are further products of the same experimentation. One of the most unsettling encounters is Dorothy, whose condition reverses the usual rules: physical attacks heal her, while healing items hurt her. The effect makes her fight feel less like a conventional boss battle and more like an encounter with a body that has been fundamentally violated.
In another chamber, captives are being transformed into Wels. One warns Fei not to release him because he knows he is mutating. The factory is deliberately exhausting and easy to get lost in, but that discomfort gives the setting weight. Solaris is not merely an evil city; it is a system whose wealth depends on turning people into raw material.
The people behind the machines
Citan explains that the facility was once used to create humans 10,000 years ago. The Emperor and the Ministry were among the first humans. After the Diabolos Invasion, the governing ministry was killed and preserved only as data in memory banks.
The Soylent facility was intended to restore those figures and preserve the Emperor, but became an all-purpose centre for enslavement and experimentation. Memory Cubes transmit living data to the Gazel Ministry, which hopes to use it to resurrect physical bodies. The idea has an uncomfortable modern parallel in the way online services collect and exploit personal information.
Elly questions how Citan knows details hidden from Solaris officers. The lights fail, Fei is restrained by a Force Ring that interrupts his nerve signals, and the members of the Gazel Ministry appear on large screens as digital personalities.
The Ministry reveals that it is connected to the aliens aboard the Eldridge. Its members want to resurrect God, raise the ark and return to space so they can rule the universe. Solaris is only a tool. They also intend to use Bart and the other party members as vessels.
Citan has been acting as their so-called Guardian Angel under the Emperor’s orders, though his goals do not truly align with the Ministry. Krelian is pursuing his own plan as well. He discovers the Urobolos Ring in Elly’s genetic code, an allusion to the Ouroboros: the serpent that consumes itself and represents an endless cycle of life.
These revelations are dense enough that even repeated playthroughs can leave questions unanswered. Unlike modern games that explain every faction through encyclopaedias and codices, Xenogears often presents a clue, lets it collide with another clue and moves on.
Fei, Id and the fall of Solaris
The final escape accelerates the game’s conflicts. Ramsus, Elly’s former commander, is unraveling over his inability to defeat Fei. Citan turns against the Ministry. Bart and Billy attempt to remove their Limiters, which are largely psychological mechanisms encouraging obedience to the Emperor and Ministry. Elly, it turns out, never had one.
Hammer helps rescue Elly’s parents, then betrays the group after agreeing to deliver Elly to Krelian. Her mother dies while protecting her, and Hammer flees in shock. Grahf arrives with the Executioner and nearly overwhelms the party. Erich returns in a new Gear and orders Elly to escape, but Miang destroys his machine.
Erich’s death pushes both Elly and Fei beyond their limits. Ether surges through Elly, while Fei’s Gear awakens without a pilot. The sequence shifts into a full-motion-video assault as Weltall’s true form rises towards Solaris.
Id—the unconscious, unfiltered force within Fei—is released, and the resulting power destroys the city. Krelian and Miang appear to have wanted this outcome. Citan later explains that Id once served Grahf as an assassin and that Fei’s personalities have become dissociated from one another. The Emperor believes himself to be Anonelbe, a man of God, while the Ministry continues discussing its plans with Krelian.
The destruction of Solaris closes Disc 1. Disc 2 changes into a more compressed, visual-novel-like structure with occasional battles. The development team had run short of time and budget, and Square executives reportedly suggested ending the game after Solaris. Takahashi’s proposed format shift allowed the story to continue, although ending at the city’s destruction would have created an astonishing cliffhanger.
What Solaris leaves behind
Revisiting Xenogears in 2026 makes Solaris feel uncomfortably current. A future in which leaders preserve themselves as artificial personalities is not difficult to imagine. Nor is a society where workers live in fear, a comfortable middle class is distracted by consumption, and the people benefiting from the system insist that the suffering below is someone else’s problem.
Solaris wastes immense resources exploiting its population instead of using its technology to improve life for everyone. Cooperation might have achieved its goals more effectively, but the Gazel Ministry’s belief in its own superiority creates the rebellion that destroys its plans.
The game’s religious imagery also points towards Gnostic ideas of a Demiurge trapping humanity in an artificial world and preventing people from recognising their deeper nature. The Limiters make that concept physical: the population is constrained mentally and bodily, while the Anima-powered Gears represent a supposedly divine form of humanity freed from ordinary flesh.
Fei embodies the same conflict. His identity is divided into three broad aspects: the impulsive unconscious represented by Id, the self shaped through relationships, and the traumatised personality that tries to hold the others together. Xenogears uses the familiar JRPG adventure as a surface through which to examine those layers, then gradually removes the disguise.
That is why Solaris remains so fascinating. Its ideas invite different readings rather than delivering one tidy answer. The city’s leaders sought godhood and immortality, yet their arrogance produced the conditions for their collapse. Its people accepted a place in the hierarchy because belonging was safer than individuality.
“It is much easier to be given a place to belong than to make one yourself.”
Solaris is disturbing because its violence is not only spectacular. It appears in the vocabulary of administration, the convenience of surveillance, the promise of promotion and the ordinary citizens who keep going because resistance seems impossible. That combination makes its downfall tragic, wasteful and entirely earned.
For readers exploring the wider history of interactive entertainment, the RETROCADE Arcade Blog offers more features on classic gaming. If this story has you thinking about physical game spaces, browse the arcade machines, compare options in the Arcade Machine Buying Guide, or consider a compact bartop arcade.
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