For all its cutscenes, there's a lot of unanswered questions and missing background information in Square's revered RPG Xenogears, likely left out as the studio rushed production due to budget and time constraints. Square cleared up a bit of Xenogears' convoluted plot with the release of Xenogears Perfect Works, a book featuring production notes, artwork, character profiles, information on the IP's intended six episodes (Xenogears was episode V), and more. Unfortunately, the book was only published in Japan.

While partial English translations have been available for several years now, Xenogears fan Ultimate Graphics proved his supreme devotion to the game by spending five months translating Xenogears Perfect Works, and then dropping the localized text back into its 304 pages. Finally, those of you who've waited over a decade for a complete account of Sigurd Harcourt's piercings, visible and hidden, can rest at ease.

Ultimate Graphics warns, however, that much of the Xenogears Perfect Works's information is already in the game, albeit buried in what seemed like hours of dialogue between Citan and Fei. "The game was perhaps not the right venue for a story of this magnitude," he says, "and it's plainly obvious from this book that they were still hashing out facts right up to the game's publication. An unfinished masterpiece."

The scanlation can be viewed here, but if you'd rather not click through and download hundreds of Flickr pages, the Something Awful forums has put up a torrent for the translated book. Ultimate Graphics also has other completed projects worth looking into if you're a Xenogears fan -- which you probably are if you've read this far -- such as a complete graphic script and a full mapping of the game created with screenshots.

[Thanks to Matthew "Fort90" Hawkins who tipped us to the scanlation's release.]