The classic Xenosaga series is finally making its PC debut, but don’t get too excited because it’s a 2004 mobile game port

Bear with me here: the Xenosaga JRPG series belongs to the wider Xeno series, which also includes the lately-very-popular Xenoblade Chronicles games. The Xenosaga trilogy originally released for PlayStation 2, and the first two games were also ported to Nintendo DS.

You don’t need to be a JRPG or Monolith Soft fanatic to be aware of those classic PS2 JRPGs, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing Xenosaga: Pied Piper exists. It released exclusively for Vodafone mobile phones in 2004 (before the smartphone era) and not only that, it was never released outside of Japan. Guess which Xenosaga game is coming to PC, then?

Yes: Xenosaga: Pied Piper is coming to Steam at some unspecified date in the future, and it comes courtesy of the same publisher responsible for that recent Armored Core flip phone port. Pied Piper was also designed for flip phones and you can tell. Check out the trailer above.

Like Armored Core: Mobile 3, this port won’t add any modern quality-of-life improvements, nor is an English translation part of the deal. Not knowing Japanese will be an obstacle for sure, but the art style scales up really well: unlike the Armored Core port I think I’d actually try to play this.

Whether you have the patience or not, G-Mode’s efforts to preserve these ye olde artefacts are to be commended. And it’s probably the only Xeno game we’ll see on PC for a very long time since Nintendo owns the studio nowadays. Still, it does seem to demonstrate that there’s no reason why Namco Bandai can’t re-animate the other Xenosaga games for modern platforms.