Characters
The characters of Xenogears were designed to allude to many psychological concepts, notably of Freudian and Jungian psychology. There is also an important character bearing the name of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The most obvious allusion involves the nature of the game's protagonist, Fei Fong Wong, whose Freudian id, ego, and superego are discussed at length throughout the course of the game. Fei had subconsciously repressed his memories because of his torturous childhood. However, his desire to remember elements of his past eventually leads him to discover the truth about his identity and his relationship with the character known as Id. This repression also relates to the Jungian concept of the shadow. Distinctly Adlerian in nature, however, are the actions of certain characters, such as Ramsus, whose actions are driven by an inferiority complex that stems from unconscious 'nodes' that often permeate exterior behaviors of an individual. Although not distinctly psychological, allusions to the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche are also found in the game. For example, there is the concept of the eternal return, which, in Xenogears, correlates to the recurrences of the Contact and the Antitype.
Read more about this topic: Characters Of Xenogears
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)