Everything below is on the retail USA disc (SLUS-20469) and reproducible
from a clean extraction with this kit. Paths are relative to out/.
Episode I's build system published each developer's personal working folder
straight to the retail disc. Eight Japanese surnames sit at the top of the
data\ tree, and together they sketch the team's org chart:
| Folder | Files | What this person owned |
|---|---|---|
simajiri/ (Shimajiri) |
1,227 | particle effects — 1,051 .esd + 170 .esp scripts; the largest folder on the disc |
yamamoto/ |
1,211 | battle data — 1,195 .bin stat/animation tables (one per playable character and variant), the battle BGM, and a private stash of movies |
tanaka/ |
110 | the casino minigames — slot, poker, and card art (slot_1.xtx, poker_1.xtx, CASINO.res, help_all.xtx) |
matumoto/ (Matsumoto) |
88 | per-zone map parameter tables (MC_UTA01.dat … one per map) |
nisimori/ (Nishimori) |
42 | battle result/announce UI, .rbg battle backgrounds (town, ship, aircarrier) |
endou/ (Endou/Endo) |
24 | the menus: save screen, shop, skill tree, ether tree, parameter-up tables |
yajima/ |
11 | title screen, ending and game-over art (gameov.jpg, end.jpg, gameover.vds) |
karakama/ |
2 | event items (evtitem.dat, itembox.dat) |
The engine addresses these paths by name — data\yajima\gameover.vds is a
string literal in the executable. By Episode III, Monolith had switched to
sober asset-type directories (bat/, ef/, evt/), so this is a
2002-only window into who sat where.
Staff surnames also show up inside the data: scene scripts cast NPCs as
CID_MORIYAMA and CID_TOGASHI, and the event planners each get a Java
constants class named after them. base.evt's xeno/plan package holds
the game-wide constant tables (ChrNo, MapNo, SceneNo, FlagNo,
EventConstants, PartyData, …) and, right beside them, F_Kojima,
F_Fuji, F_Konishi, F_Nakahara, F_Sakisako, F_Yone, F_Koji, and
F_Gash — one event-flag table per planner, so each scripter owned a
namespace of story flags under their own surname. (On disc these are
24-byte stub class files; the engine's JNI_loadClassDB supplies the
constant values at runtime.) The scripts even tell you whose flags they're
flipping: a leftover Japanese debug print reads
*********FUJI_24をセットしたつもり************** — "(I) intended to set
FUJI_24" — tying the F_Fuji class to its FUJI_## flag series.
Reference counts rank the planners by workload: F_Koji is referenced by
236 classes, F_Nakahara 131, F_Yone 105, F_Sakisako 33, F_Fuji
24, F_Konishi 6, F_Kojima 4, and F_Gash 0 (present but never used —
someone got a namespace and no flags).
The unused tail of each binary table-of-contents file is filled with the
string MONOLITHSOFT Xenosaga Episode.1 repeated end to end, phase-locked
to the file offset. It's simultaneously charming and a perfectly good
end-of-entries sentinel — this kit actually uses it as one.
Because the event scripts are compiled Java (see JAVA.md) with debug attributes intact, we can see exactly what development scaffolding shipped in retail scenes:
- An in-scene camera editor. Two dozen scenes carry
CameraTest/CameraToolharnesses, and nearly every big story scene has theCamHistorykeyframe recorder — a ring buffer of camera poses (CamHistory_set/get/del/clear, link tables, FOV tracking) that dumps recorded moves as spline data, with its banners still in the string pool:*********CameraHistory SPL*********,*************Focus Printout*************, and an overflow error (CameraHistory Overflow!!). The camera staff could record, scrub, and export camera moves live inside the scene — and all of it compiled into the shipping disc. - A render-capture tool. Four scenes (
SCE01007A1,SCE02001A,SCE02011,SCE02041) contain a completeCaptureTool: an interactive in-engine menu (Capture_SelectChr,Capture_SelectFolder) for capturing the scene as separated render layers, with color and depth passes. Its mode strings spell out the compositing pipeline:CaptureMODE ---Chr(pic+zpic),---MObj(pic+zpic),---Particle(pic+zpic),---SoftImage BG(pic+zpic),---All Screen.— note SoftImage, naming the 3D package Monolith's artists rendered backgrounds from. Banners still fire at runtime:*********CaptureTool Standby*****************,*********Capture Start!!!*****************. - Debug pad hooks. Scene controllers read
Xpad1Pinput withPADL3/PADR3fields and menu-select state, remnants of on-screen debug menus (menuSelected,selectMenufields in almost every scene). - Event flow breadcrumbs. Every scene logs
>>>>>>>>>> CUT /[$1]andEvent Out, and carries its flag/jump wiring as plain strings:XEVEFLAG:EV01005_F,XEVEJNAME:SCE01006— the whole story graph is greppable.
Not every "cutscene" is a cutscene: 25 bytecode-distinct copies of a
template class called SCEDummy fill gaps in the event chain. Each one
is identical except for two strings — the flag it sets and where to jump
next (XEVEFLAG:EV01005_F → XEVEJNAME:SCE01006) — so the entire story
flow is greppable as plain text across the class files. Its sibling
JumpBattle exists in 17 copies (one per ST90## battle-jump map).
Someone recompiled the same .java template dozens of times with
different constants rather than parameterize it — very 2002, very
relatable.
A few favorites from the ~2,200 class files' constant pools (scene in parentheses):
"Damn slacker!!"(SCE01010) and"Both of ya morons, shut up!"(SCE02029) — localized dialogue sitting in Java constant pools like it's the most normal thing in the world."...Duh! I forgot to ask her out after work..."(SCE01012 — Allen being Allen, in bytecode)."KickEvent_case0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"(ST0231) — a debug print with fourteen exclamation marks."CameraHistory Overflow!!"— the camera editor running out of keyframe slots.*********シュミレーターで勝ってきました**************/…負けてきました…— "came back from the simulator having won/lost", battle-sim outcome hooks (and note the common シュミレーター misspelling of シミュレーター).*********全回復しました**************— "fully healed" (15 scenes).2Fの壊れ物を壊しました。次回は生成しません。— "broke the 2F breakable; won't respawn next time." The persistence model, narrating itself./[label(Temp Person)]— a dialogue speaker named "Temp Person" in 13 scenes' string pools.
These are EUC-JP bytes inside the class files (a spec violation that breaks naive tools — see JAVA.md); the kit's class map decodes them correctly.
umn/event00.txt is a placeholder U.M.N. event where the cast recite
Motorola CPU part numbers at each other — SHION and UKUN solemnly
exchanging MC68000, MC68010, MC68020. Programmer lorem ipsum,
shipped. (The MC_* map prefix suggests the same processor-family joke
naming runs through the map codebase too.)
yamamoto/mv/ — the battle-data programmer's private movie stash —
contains gamera.pss, named after the giant flying kaiju turtle, next to
kiss.pss, momo_a.pss, momo_b.pss, and gr.pss. Convert them with
browse --kinds movies and see what a Monolith battle programmer kept on
hand in 2002.
The sequenced BGM files embed their own metadata, and the retail files
literally carry the credit line Yasunori Mitsuda / PROCYON STUDIO in
ASCII. The catalog (browse/soundbanks/smd_catalog.csv) has its own
charm:
BATTLE1.SMD's note field reads "IBENT BATTLE" — a romaji typo of "EVENT BATTLE" (BATTLE2.SMDspells it correctly).BATTLE1andBATTLE2are both titled "Battle1"; both jingles are titled "Jingle2". Nobody updated the metadata.- Only ~10 sequences are real music (Battle1 ×2, LastBattle, Escape! ×3,
U.M.N. Mode ×2, Jingle2 ×2). The other ~110
ENV_*entries are tiny ambience stubs — the data-side confirmation of the game's famous near-silent field maps.
The decoded scene text (browse/text/chain0/scene/) keeps the writers' and
scripters' working notes inline, in Japanese:
cf0110.txt:;;;誰も歩いてない("nobody's walking around"),andrew_cfの代わり（仮）("stand-in for andrew_cf (temporary)"),モーションデータのロード。ファイル名で指定。("load motion data, specify by filename").umn/db_fileno.txtis a hand-commented index (// A,// B, …) mapping the U.M.N. database file numbers — a programmer's cheat sheet shipped as data.
matumoto/MC_TEST.dat— a test map parameter file; its sibling is unfortunately-but-genuinely namedtestes.dat.- Twelve
dummy.*placeholder assets acrosschar/,obj/,enemy/(dummy.lex/.xtx/.jnt,dummy_face.*) plussound/sed/DUMMY_C.SED— the engine's stand-in model/sound set. motion/oldm_cf.fpk,motion/oldw_cf.fpk— superseded "old" motion packs nobody deleted.- The audio pipeline's own rate-comparison set survives as
browse/audio/_RATE_TEST/after a browse run — the kit reproduces the comparison used to pin the 48 kHz stream rate.
A 2003 USA release ships the full PS2 hard-disk and network adapter
IOP driver stack: DEV9.IRX, HDD.IRX, PFS.IRX, ATAD.IRX, and
SMAP.IRX (the Ethernet driver), plus hdd.res/hddi.bin resources and
TitleHddInstall* functions in the OV02 overlay. This is PlayStation BB
plumbing — the Japanese HDD ecosystem — kept alive in a region where the
HDD wouldn't launch until 2004 and the install feature was never surfaced.
See HISTORY.md for context.
Not an easter egg, but the biggest gift on the disc: SLUS_204.69 and all
five overlays shipped with full ELF symbol tables — 8,100+ named
functions (xgl* graphics layer, Java_xeno_* script bridge, Poker* in
the casino overlay, TitleHddInstall*…). Episode III shipped stripped;
Episode I forgot. Combined with the Java layer's SourceFile/
LineNumberTable attributes, this is one of the most self-documenting
commercial PS2 discs known.
Build timestamp, for the record: Build:Nov 24 2002 11:02:50 (in
OV10.OVL), mastered 2002-12-02, released in NA February 2003.