The Shrine

One of my pet peeves is a media (usually games) that expects you to read some source material for plot. Here I'm not talking about say you got Lord of the Rings where they try to stick true to the story but can't possibly fit everything there in the time so some events don't make a whole lot of sense and you got to check the source to find out what they can't cram in on limited screen time. Here I'm talking about say Xenosaga 1 or Final Fantasy XIII where you got this in game Wikipedia that tells you what some of the terms and abbervations that you can't possibly figure out what they mean in the game's context means. It's almost like an extra DLC for plot. Outside of movies, most non novel form of entertainment is at least long enough to get the basics of whatever you're trying to convey across. It's one thing if you're told there are 5 legendary whatevers and you only met one of them, and then later you decide to sell stuff on the other 4 legendary whatevers because they turned out to be popular. That's fine. But you shouldn't expect to know about a character that was never mentioned anywhere and what impact they had on the world.

I don't even understand why you'd do this, because while it's comparable to DLC, I'm pretty sure it's relatively rare you actually sell any DLC just because you left out a whole mess of plot details that's explained in the next DLC, and it's not like you need to go through all this loop to make DLC/spinoffs in any genre. Final Fantasy VII is a pretty self contained story and that didn't stop from all the spinoffs that come out when it turned out to be a huge commercial success. In fact, that contrasts very well with Final Fantasy XIII which seems to be considerably less successful than FFVII but just assumes all the 'please buy the next game to understand this big mystery' is somehow supposed to work. Heck, even Final Fantasy X-2 has more respect than that, as it's just a shameless magical girl spinoff but there was nothing in Final Fantasy X that ever suggested the goal of FFX was to transition into a magical girl spinoff.

Xenodaga episode 1 actually does something like Lord of the Rings with the UMN, which kind of acted like the game's internal Wikipedia. It's a bit like the game's appendices, the extra information is in there; but it's unnecessary,and really only for those crazy people who actually want to read pages and pages and pages of extra stuff. I personally never found it annoying to read all of that stuff because the background music was one of my favourite tracks I've ever come across in a videogame; and I really enjoyed the Xenosaga universe.

That said, there are definitely huge holes.

The game began series as an 18 parter; 6 parts which would roughly cover Xenogears episode 1, and then 12 more parts to cover the rest. Then it was reduced to 6 parts covering just episode 1. Then Namco wasn't willing to back more than 3, so it became a trilogy. Naturally, there's going to be lots and lots missing.

Xenosaga episode 1 was meant primarily to be an introductory phase. While part 2 was supposed to focus on elaborating the main conflict. Part 3, 4, 5, were supposed to focus on various portions of the escalation of the conflict, with part 6 being the resolution of it all.
So, naturally a lot of the elements in part 1 were bits that were just meant to be gleaned on, rather than fully developed. A bad idea in retrospect, but I would have loved to play the entire saga.

There's no way you could've known Virgil (I think that was his name) is addicted to eating Realien flesh without consulting the in game encyclopedia. It literally says he has some acronym disease and you have to look it up to see what it is, and sure since Xenosaga didn't actually find a way to make anything coherent that turns out to be totally irrelevant at least relative to Xenosaga episode 1 but it could've mattered a lot. That was a particularly egregious example though the rest of the game isn't quite as bad.

It's one thing you can have say the Hilbert Effect and never explain what it is because as far as the in game universe is considered it's this black magic that lets you actually do damage to the Gnosis. That's okay. Well in the case of Xenosaga it's obviously trying too hard to be grandiose and mysterious and that goes directly into the encyclopedia. The structure of Xenosaga is a lot like 'send more money for next episode even though this one wasn't even any good'. It's a general problem with DLC content where a lot of time you feel like the actual stuff is held back for the next game but it gets particularly stupid when the plot is missing in the base game. I'm totally cool with spending more money for an extra stage or an extra character or even an extra character, but I don't like having to consult outside sources for the plot. Usually it's a poor way to disguise the fact that the original story never made any sense anyway and still doesn't make sense after you consult the extra stuff. Unlike most DLCs, you can usually say like okay if character X sucked but character Y in DLC looks cool then you can make an educated guess on whether it's worth it even if you got ripped off on the base game. In the case of plot you usually just get ripped off twice because there's no reason to believe if you screw up the story the first time you'll not screw up again the next time. At least with something tangible like a character or even a costume you can see it and know what to expect. For example, FFX2 is pretty obvious as a magical girl dressing game, and it's easy to make your decision on whether you should buy FFX2 based on what you think about magical girl dressing games.