Zarathustra: A Pied Piper Translation Project
Year: 2006
Date of Archival: April 29, 2021
Run by: chaoslace
Originally hosted at: zarathustra.kaisho.org
Status: Complete
Archive Link: Click here
The most complete way to experience the translation of Xenosaga: Pied Piper, a Japan-only cell phone RPG that gives vital backstory to party member Ziggy and is intended to be played between Xenosaga Episodes II and III. It has a deeply-moving story and it's just as criminal that it'll never be officially released now as it was back then. Most of it is lost media, with as far as I can tell this website having pretty much all the known screenshots that exist, at least of the cutscenes.
On a personal level, this is the website that made me start working on my own website. Some close friends of mine discussed wanting to back up the site from the Wayback Machine just in case, since the original Zarathustra site died in 2016, and I realized that I had the capability to do just that. With more people playing Xenosaga after being introduced to Xeno- through Xenoblade, I wanted to ensure that this vital part of the story was available. Plus, I'll be honest, I just love everything about this site. The translation is excellent, the layout is so good I aped it for myself (chaoslace, on the nigh-impossible chance you see this, thank you), and it really is amazing how fervent the Xenosaga fanbase was back then - a hardcore dedication you'll still see today. Seriously, an entire fan site with fan forum that people actually posted in specifically for this Japan-only cell phone game. How cool is that?
Speaking of the forum, as it stands this site is archived as of its final update in 2006. By this point the forum was deprecated, seemingly due to a phpBB update. That said, some raw data still exists in the files. Eventually I may attempt to restore and freeze that data somehow, but without the necessary database files I don't think that's within the scope of my knowledge. We'll see. I was able to find all but one piece of externally-linked fanart and have backed that up as well as well as changed those to internal links, just for safety's sake. Otherwise, I think we can consider this site complete.