On The Potential of the Science Adventure Series

[Parzival]

[Spoilers for SciADV as a whole, the Xeno series as a whole, and the works of Philip K. Dick ahead]

Now that Steins;Gate Re:Boot has been officially given a release date for later this year, I know many are left wondering if it will be successful enough to keep MAGES, inc. afloat for long enough to finish and release Steins;???, let alone any plans for the series going forward.

Those in the know have long been aware that MAGES, the company behind the bulk of SciADV, is and has been in dire financial straits for some time now. Having declared insolvency in 2022 after Anonymous;Code failed to meet expectations, this despite having been bought out by COLOPL in 2020, presumably to aid in funding and to help keep the company stable. Despite this, many believe that should the company's flagship series keep failing to meet expectations, the whole operation may be shuttered by COLOPL and Science Adventure will go the way of the Infinity series. This thread isn't to discuss that in particular though, rather, it's to bring up why I believe this would be a great tragedy.

Few discuss how much SciADV seems to borrow or take inspiration from pulp American scifi author Philip K. Dick, if only by pure accident or cultural osmosis. Reality being more malleable than most would hope, shifting and alternative timelines, the world as computer simulation and seemingly paranormal phenomena as consequence of that fact, AI and robotics, what defines and makes us truly human, themes of being but an observation terminal or pawn in the machinations of forces outside our simulated world, alien satellites beaming special awareness and powers into the minds and vision of people- all describe SciADV, but also the work of the aforementioned Phil Dick (henceforth referred to as simply "PKD"). The brand of "current day or very near future but still high concept" science fiction that SciADV is arguably the pinnacle if a rare instance of in the modern day was really created by PKD back in his heyday of the 60s and 70s. What started as pulp work became the stuff of Hollywood adaptations in the 80s and though he sadly would not live to ride the beginning of the wave of his rise to cult status, his work continues to inspire generations of scifi creators to this day. Though to my awareness no one who has worked on SciADV has stated any direct inspiration from PKD, all the ideas the series tackles were popularized by PKD or at least brought into some degree of mainstream awareness by him. Indeed, arguably more so than his actual work the series largely seems to be inspired more from ideas he actually espoused that he believed were true. I recommend looking up his 1977 speech he delivered in Metz, France: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" and the book he wrote based on the experiences he describes in that speech: "VALIS". Most of the series seems to be based on the ideas in those 2 works.

Fewer still discuss how in particular Chaos;Head seems to have taken from a video game released approximately 10 years before C;H: Xenogears. Originally developed under the working title "Project Noah". This initially may seem like just coincidence but again, despite no official confirmation, when you look at the themes of that work and how the term Project Noah was still used in it, I don't think my assertion that elements of Chaos;Head and the series at large were inspired by it. In Xenogears, Project Noah is the name for one of the primary antagonist's plan to create God. Utilizing the remnants of Deus, an ancient AI weapon that crash landed on the world of Xenogears and created humanity to rebuild it over the course of 10,000 years, this antagonist works to this end with the added effort of making his own additions in order to create a God machine truly worthy of the name of Deus. When taken into consideration and compared to the plot of Chaos;Head, there's not only something to be said about comparisons between Norose and Krelian (the aforementioned Xenogears antagonist), but between Deus and Noah II. Indeed, one almost wonders if Noah II is named such in homage to the original, 1998 "Project Noah" and the machine "Deus" created in that game. After all, what is Noah II other than an artificial God? A machine capable of rewriting reality and controlling all of humanity describes both a fully powered Noah II and a fully powered Deus, especially when taking the Zohar which powers Deus and its "phase transition" abilities, which is basically analogous to gigalomania, and which is responsible for the magical ether abilities in Xenogears- much like how Noah II served to grant gigalomaniac abilities to porters and later the chaos child syndrome sufferers.

And what do Xenogears and Philip K. Dick have in common? Quite a bit, but the primary for our purposes thing is heavy influence from a discovery made in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in the immediate aftermath of the second World War...

[To be continued in a later post when I find the time. Feel free to reply and discuss regardless though]

[Maypews]

Hope you give us a followup on this! The post might not get too much interaction because there's a lot of requirements in order to read it (namely having completed all of SciADV AND Xeno) but at the very least I am waiting eagerly to see where it goes.

[Parzival]

[Part 2]

The year was 1945. A farmer just outside the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi discovers a sealed jar, long buried beneath the dirt in the waning months of that year. Contained within are codices of papyrus, nigh perfectly preserved from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, returning to humanity much knowledge of the at the time largely forgotten splinter Christian mystery faith: Gnosticism.

The so-called "Nag Hammadi Library", due to conflict and political upheavals in the region in the post-war years, would not achieve its first, public English translations until the 70s, where an adult PKD would get his hands on the translations and his life and worldview changed forever.

He would come to believe, due to certain purported experiences of his, that reality was something akin to a computer simulation- one where the outside programmer(s) could alter the flow of events, that is, change history; or manipulate certain people so as to more covertly shift the worldline away from predicted outcomes. He would claim to have been beamed foreknowledge of certain personal crises, knowledge of historical facts and languages he could not possibly have known, and awareness that time, the world, and the sociopolitical systems we live in were all together a kind of cosmic prison- illusions created by nefarious, demiurgic powers- by an alien satellite long since orbiting and observing the Earth that he named "VALIS" (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). This satellite was merely one node in the VALISystem, an envoy of this greater power seeking to aid humanity against the forces behind the Black Iron Prison that Dick saw us all imprisoned within by subtly nudging events, influencing individuals to steer history into desired outcomes.

I don't know when the Nag Hammadi material was translated to Japanese, but it was presumably and undoubtedly before the final script for Xenogears was put together. Either Tetsuya Takahashi or Soraya Saga or both would have read it before that because the story of Xenogears is as Gnostic as it gets in JRPGs. In Xenogears, the God most of the planet the story takes place on worship is revealed to be a false one. It is no God, but an incredibly powerful biocomputer artificial intelligence, a weapon created by an ancient, space faring humanity to serve as the ultimate weapon in an intergalactic war. After it proved to be capable of its own decisions, and destroyed an entire planet belonging to its creator faction, it was dismantled and slated for transport and presumably: destruction in another star system. However, it managed to awaken mid-transit and begin putting itself back together, reigning terror on the ship charged with its care. After the captain of the ship initiated its self-destruction as a last resort, the ship and the AI construct would crash onto the unknown planet below, killing everyone aboard in the process (save for 2). Deus was not defeated for good here, however, and it would implement plans using surviving instruments from the downed ship to begin its reconstruction by recreating humanity to use as the instruments of its own re-creation. 10,000 years later, the time would come. Thus begins the story of Xenogears.

A further reveal is made later in the story- that being that trapped within the Zohar (the object that powers Deus), is an entity referred to as a/the Wave Existence. It itself says to Fei (the protagonist) that if anything could be considered capital G God, it is it. Gnostic but with a twist, it describes life and the universe as we know it as being the result of itself overflowing and spilling out of its higher dimension of waves and energy of a sort.

What does this all have to do with SciADV? Well, aside from what I believe to be some clear Dickian inspiration, not much- but, maybe it COULD have more to do with SciADV? If the world is a simulation, what is the purpose of that simulation? Just for the Committee of the topmost, real layer to use to control the world? Maybe, but I think there's more going on in the world of SciADV than we're initially led to believe. What is the nature of Anon? Oh, sure, its US, but how? Why? Why do we and the Black Knight Satellite seem to be OUTSIDE the world layer system? Are we supposed to literally be on the topmost layer? The one true world outside of the simulation? If that's so then there are far more questions than I could possibly come up with potential answers for. I kind of doubt that, though. Chiyo is big on dudes like Musk, and he seems to think that the odds are that we're just one layer in a very real world layer system, and a lot of the facts of SciADV that only exist because of "expanded parameters" also are true of our world. Mass-Energy Equivalence (canonically real-booted by Einstein in SciADV), the Fatima Apparitions (their veracity not withstanding, SciADV seems to posit that the story at all would only exist in a world where upper layer entities made that phenomena occur), Cicada 3301, (report of) the Black Knights Satellite, etc etc.

So, then what? Perhaps there is a VALIS, a Wave Existence manipulating things on our behalf- and maybe, as I've posited in another thread- there is also a Deus. A false god, masquerading as a Committee of 300 men- but still nonetheless hell bent on human domestication. Maybe there are daemons, or aliens, or god knows what, hiding just beyond the load region. Maybe, in a world built on science, literally built BY science, and filled with stories that on the surface are about science, the observable, the material- the hearts of these stories hint that by the end, humanity will have to reckon with a simple but devastating conundrum. We can keep going along with inhuman, material systems of control that seek to domesticate humanity and make mere machines of us all, or choose to believe in and fight for things we can't see, can't observe, can't measure or touch or sense in any way. Will we give in to the Master Control Program, or swallow our pride and become like Tron, and fight for the users.

[Might elaborate more, depends on how this post does.]