I have started reading the fan translation of Xenosaga Pied Piper, the never-localized J2ME phone game which the internet claims is nonetheless important to the plot, somehow

it is *immediately* xenogears-level batshit

a friend of the protagonist dies and then suddenly un-dies and then starts wandering around quoting Revelations while glowing runes appear on his skin

a doctor asks the protagonist about this and he's like "well he seems insane but nothing unusual"

protagonist is a cop/detective, so we get the usual detective-story thing where his boss is like "you're getting too obsessed with this case. You should take some time off to rest. Let one of your coworkers take over the investigation"

protag's response:

cops still do the miranda warning in like the year 6500

oh this rules

so in the main games they can use, like, psychic VR to enter a person's memories and like wander around their brain to learn things

in this game they use it on a *corpse*

they do it on a guy who JUST died to try to salvage some information and it's like super dangerous and time-limited because the neurons are physically decaying while their minds are connected to them

very fun sci-fi writing

okay I'm guessing whoever translated this was thinking of "drug" specifically in the sense of "drug abuse" and didn't realize how insane this sounds lmao

there's a fun bit in xenosaga 2 where it's mentioned that "doctor" is a dying profession, because the entire field of medicine is now basically "sprinkle some nanomachines on it" lol

okay now we've got cybercriminals with a special type of brain damage that makes them addicted to Posts and also allows them to *see the complex plane*

man this rules xenosaga 2 was WAY too normal but this is exactly the batshit awkwardly-translated anime nonsense I'm here for

okay I finished reading Xenosaga Pied Piper

it... kinda rules actually?

it's pretty awkward to read bc it's in script form rather than cutscenes or prose, but it's fun surrealist detective story with a lot of extremely cool sci-fi ideas

also does a lot to expand the most interesting plot thread of the main games, i.e. "hey what the fuck is the internet actually made of, because it's sure starting to look like we're using the galaxy-spanning neural network of a malevolent god to send emails"