A Xenosaga fan named CycloneFox has just released a fan recreation of the Japan-exclusive mobile title Xenosaga Pied Piper for PC & Mac OS.
The fan recreation had previously been available as a demo on itch.io but has since hit version 1.0, as of two days ago. It features support for English, Japanese, German, and French (the French localization is described as WIP) and is described as "for Xenosaga fans who have had no chance of playing the original release of Pied Piper as well as attracting new fans to Bandai Namco's Xenosaga."
Xenosaga Pied Piper was released in 2004 for Japanese feature phones and was developed by Monolith Soft, Namco, and Tom Create. It is a spin-off from the Xenosaga trilogy and takes place prior to the events of the first episode, focusing on a story about a group of counter-terrorism agents (led by a character named Jan Sauer) who are on a quest to find and apprehend the person responsible for a string of murders.
For many years, the game was considered lost, due to Namco closing its online portal for distributing its feature phone games and fans having no idea whether any phones containing all the game's files still existed. This is undoubtedly why the development of this fan recreation, built in RPG Maker, started in the first place. However, earlier this year, in March 2025, it was announced that a copy of the game had finally been found and preserved and that it would also be receiving an English translation in the future.
This means that Xenosaga fans have gone from having no way of playing the spin-off to potentially two different methods, depending on when the English fan translation becomes available.
Here are some of its features:
- Localization: You can play the game in Japanese, English, German and French* (*the French localization is still WiP and does not cover the full game yet)
- No random encounters: Similarly to the numbered Xenosaga games you can see and dodge enemies on the field map, trap or surprise them from behind
- A battle system style more similar to Xenosaga Episode III with its turn order, boosting and Special Attacks
- Character faces by フォレスト (Forest): You can view the dialog faces in two modes:
- Classic: A slightly bigger character portrait inside the text-box
- Modern: A large character portrait outside the textbox to see more detail
- Music by wowbobwow: While the demo was still using stock music from RPG Maker and royalty-free music, the full version has a fully original soundtrack made by wowbobwow!
- Various features from the numbered Xenosaga games: As I am a passionate fan of the numbered Xenosaga games myself, I tried to turn this into a full Xenosaga-experience as much as possible, so I implemented features which are not even in the original Pied Piper:
- Segment Doors
- EVS plates
- Skill Trees
You can download the fan recreation here. It is also available to play in your browser of choice.