Finally decided to list all of these in one place rather than in a Twitter thread. Here I’ll sort it by date, include images of the covers, and link to any scans if there are any.
I’ll include any related Japanese terms to make them easier for people to search. For example, “Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon Xenogears VJump” in Japanese, even if that’s not necessarily the title of the magazine (what even is its title anyway?).
Search in Japanese for dates like 1997年11月18日 (1997 November 18th), for example, with each number before their respective kanji.
Japanese:
日 - Day
月 - Month
年 - Year
Xenogears release dates:
JP: February 11, 1998
NA: October 20, 1998 Xenogears Perfect Works release date:
August 1998
page 46-47, 70-71
Partial scans can be found here.
Interestingly, on one of the pages it calls Zohar the 事象変異機関 “Event Mutation Engine”, 1 kanji off of the final script’s name for Zohar, 事象変移機関 “Event Alteration Engine”. This could just have been misheard from one person to another though, as 変異 and 変移 both have the same readings.
Anywho, it says Zohar is being used to terraform planets, which is very interesting, that this could’ve very well been legit, that in the beta script Zohar could terraform planets. And the fact that in the final script (in PW) Zohar is on the station of Miktam04β as the planet is being terraformed.
Comes with the supplemental Pilot Manual Part 1. Full scans of all 3 Pilot Manuals can be found in my MEGA directory, under Xenogears>Images>Scans>Pilot Manuals.
Translation for the “What’s ‘X’?” interview can be found here. Not the same magazine (as above the interview you don’t see the “what’s X” text), but it is the same interview.
Afaik, it only has a full two page spread ad. A full double-page version of the single-page ad that you can find in the Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon VJump.
Japanese: チョコボの不思議なダンジャン ゼノギアス Vジャンプ
Entire back half of the magazine. Includes sketches and artwork that was later shown in Perfect Works. Goldmine of XG pre-release info and images.
It’s got a sticker sheet and a fold-out poster.
No full scans of this one yet. Siris bought a copy and was planning on scanning it. I’ve got my own copy that I will not take apart for scanning because of the pristine quality it’s in, but I have scanned some things.
The scans I got are here under the folder Xenogears>Images>Scans>Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon VJump; some of the transparent versions of scans have been edited beyond simply cutting them out. If you’d like pictures of it of pages that I have yet to scan, let me know.
Quick flipthrough here.
pages 76-81, 113
Japanese: 電撃プレイステーション
It’s got a memory card sticker sheet; Elements, the Captain/Hans/Franz, and tiled Dan, as well as a small “Xenogears”.
One of these pages describes the language that Elly speaks in the forest as not being gibberish and how it can actually be “translated”.
“The rule is that the Arabic official language Fusha is translated, then converted into the alphabet, and then read backwards in German. Here is the full text of what Elly says when she meets Fei. Using this as a basis, try translating other lines as well!?”
Developer interview with Takahashi and Tanaka after the release of Perfect Works. Mentions that they were wanting to make episodes 2 & 3 in other mediums, like anime or manga. Alludes to Xenosaga vaguely.
Scans here.
Partial translation here.
The Playstation vol.129 (11/Dec/1998)
Japanese: ザ・プレイステーション
pages 130-131
Only time that I’ve found Id’s portrait sketches that doesn’t have a screentone behind it like in PW.
No pages dedicated to XG, but several characters on a CHARACTERS BEST30 list, a Bart&Margie sticker in the sticker sheet, some fan art of Maria and Margie on those pages, perhaps more scattered.
I do believe someone is looking into getting this interview translated as of Feb/23/25. Other pages have since been obtained by Nov/17/25.
Partial translations here.
Are you looking for scans of western magazine features as well? I have a few old video game/anime/manga magazines that I’ve been reading through, and there are a few Xeno mentions.
Kind of a weird sort of magazine, but I ripped a segment on Xenosaga II from the DVD magazine Famitsu Wave. Here’s a YouTube link.
This is from the July 2004 and has the voice actresses for Shion, KOS-MOS, and MOMO going to the Monolith Soft office to poke around a little before they show off a trailer. I think it’s a cute little promo (´ω｀)
ohh, this is so cool!
(at 2:24) AH its the high poly character model!! It’d be so awesome if we could preserve the high poly models like this, especially the XG Gears that we most often only see in low quality scans. Like that one render of Weltall-Id only seen in one small image in PW that’s also half opacity
Thanks for sharing this!
Oh that would be so cool! I think there was another feature on that same Shion art in another magazine, so they seemed to like showing her off. I love how Shion’s VA gets excited to see her haha.
I always have some hope that there will be a random high quality print of character/mech art out in the wild we can stumble on, so maybe someday it will appear.
This is vital for anyone who wants a glimpse into the development of both games, great work. Very minor nitpick, but the January issues in 1997 are actually from 1998.
AH! How the heck how did I mess that up?? Thanks for pointing that out!
Where the heck did I get 1997 on the Chocobo’s/XG one when checking it a few times at different points?? Makes a lot more sense now, considering just how much info they had in them.
checks
And just recently I put them in proper chronological order in my bookshelf?? lmao wtf
Awesome, thanks for scanning these! I’ll link to them in the main post.
ooh~ I’ve never seen that variation of the PW cover WIP sketch, only the three others; and only one of which had Fei in it, so that’s cool to see another
Hey! I am so sorry this was messy after the migration and for missing it. Thanks for keeping it updated. As an aside, is there anything else I can patch for you here?
Very cool that you have recorded these btw. The magazine layouts are quite nostalgic.
Thanks for the feedback! I have some more volumes of Weekly The PlayStation with Xenogears content (period fanart) that I plan to scan and upload soon. I will post the links here when they are ready
Hey, no worries! It is what it is, some messes can’t be avoided in site migrations like this. I think all the photos were kept, which aside from the list itself was one of the bigger aspects here; all of the rest was able to be cleaned up in one dedicated evening of editing.
edit: (oh yeah, i forgot to remove that initial note after editing )
Nothing comes to mind right now, but I’ll be sure to let you know!
It’d be so awesome if we could preserve the high poly models like this, especially the XG Gears that we most often only see in low quality scans. Like that one render of Weltall-Id only seen in one small image in PW that’s also half opacity 
Makes a lot more sense now, considering just how much info they had in them.
I’ve never seen that variation of the PW cover WIP sketch, only the three others; and only one of which had Fei in it, so that’s cool to see another
)