Quote Originally Posted by darkchrono View Post
I think the Shion storyarc pretty much got out as planned (though not as quickly as it was originally planned as they intended for the Shion story to be over and done with in two games in the beginning from what I heard).

However I believe they intended to have one or two more sets of characters that would take place many many many years after the Shion story ended. Much like in Xenogears where the group of Fei, Elly, and Bart were positioned thousands of years after the original story started and the old stories were just referenced to in Xenogears.

In the Xenosaga universe Shion's time on the clock would have been at the very beginning of the trilogy. Just like in the Xenogears universe the Eldridge was at the very beginning of the trilogy.

If you want to find out what may have taken place in Xenosaga a good choice would be to go ahead and play Xenogears. As the Xenosaga story probably would have ended up fairly similar to the way the Xenogears story played out (since xenosaga was basically just a re-telling of xenogears).
Id say playing Xenogears is the next best thing to a sequel for the series. When they say there was internal strife they meant it for this series. Shion's story arc was supposed to be Episode 1 only. I don't know how long it took before they realized they couldn't pull this off but an early and infamous trailer known as the "8min 8sec trailer" shows that Episode 1 was still half complete.

The trailer features mostly cutscenes of the first game but also features cutscenes from Episode 2 (using the first games engine no less) mostly the scenes of Jin fighting Margulis at Old Miltia (The second battle not the flashback. There was also a blatant reference to Xenogears in the background that was removed later), Jin talking to chaos at the Uzuki estate, a conversation between chaos and Nephilim that never happened, and a conversation between Jr. and Albedo that never happened. So, alot went missing between this trailer being shown and what we got.

After Episode 2 was released, one of the main writiers who left the project talked about everything that was removed from Episode 2's plot, it was never stated why this stuff was removed but implied that Monolith (not Namco) was trying to extend the series. The stuff listed as being removed from the story was basically the entire plot of Episode III. Meaning Episode 2 was originally supposed to end Shion's Story...

This series has been marred by some of the worst buisness decisions and internal fighting I've seen in ages. I was actually surprised we got Episode 3 and that it was so damn good. I say let it rest...