The Sad Reason We'll Never Get A Xenosaga Remaster

You might be familiar with the Xenoblade Chronicles, but not the Xenosaga series that started it all. The 1998 PlayStation title Xenogears, and its spiritual successor, Xenosaga, are Monolith Studio's sort of first draft for the eventual hit series Xenoblade Chronicles. Though not nearly as popular or celebrated, fans still have a fondness for the games. This is why the scrapping of a remastered collection came as heartbreaking news.

Yesterday, Bandai Namco game director Katsuhiro Harada let fans know via a tweet that yes, there were plans to remaster the original games into a single collection. But here comes the bad news: the plans were cancelled.

If there were a bunch of fans clamoring for a remastered collection, why didn't we get one? The answer, as it often does, came down to cold hard cash. According to Harada, the embryonic Xenosaga HD Collection "failed in a profitable market analysis." Basically, the bigwigs weren't convinced that the collection would sell enough copies to warrant the trouble of a remaster. In reply to Harada's tweet, fans expressed their disappointment, with one saying, "It's unfortunate since there's a lot of games that don't catch fire during their initial release but do over time and become cult classics building the audience that was originally hoped for. So anything released after such demand is still a gamble for the publisher in their eyes."

Others said that they could be mollified with an emulation of the original PS2 games for the PS4. We're not sure whether that will happen or not. Over the last few years, dozens of PlayStation 2 games were re-released on the PlayStation 4, but none of the Xenosaga games were among them. This is what originally gave gamers hope that a remastered collection was on the way. 

Yesterday, those hopes were dashed. Sorry, but that lack of profitability analysis has doomed a Xenosaga HD Collection.