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:
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)