On The Potential of the Science Adventure Series

[Parzival]

[Spoilers for SciADV as a whole, the Xeno series as a whole, and the works of Philip K. Dick ahead]

Now that Steins;Gate Re:Boot has been officially given a release date for later this year, I know many are left wondering if it will be successful enough to keep MAGES, inc. afloat for long enough to finish and release Steins;???, let alone any plans for the series going forward.

Those in the know have long been aware that MAGES, the company behind the bulk of SciADV, is and has been in dire financial straits for some time now. Having declared insolvency in 2022 after Anonymous;Code failed to meet expectations, this despite having been bought out by COLOPL in 2020, presumably to aid in funding and to help keep the company stable. Despite this, many believe that should the company's flagship series keep failing to meet expectations, the whole operation may be shuttered by COLOPL and Science Adventure will go the way of the Infinity series. This thread isn't to discuss that in particular though, rather, it's to bring up why I believe this would be a great tragedy.

Few discuss how much SciADV seems to borrow or take inspiration from pulp American scifi author Philip K. Dick, if only by pure accident or cultural osmosis. Reality being more malleable than most would hope, shifting and alternative timelines, the world as computer simulation and seemingly paranormal phenomena as consequence of that fact, AI and robotics, what defines and makes us truly human, themes of being but an observation terminal or pawn in the machinations of forces outside our simulated world, alien satellites beaming special awareness and powers into the minds and vision of people- all describe SciADV, but also the work of the aforementioned Phil Dick (henceforth referred to as simply "PKD"). The brand of "current day or very near future but still high concept" science fiction that SciADV is arguably the pinnacle if a rare instance of in the modern day was really created by PKD back in his heyday of the 60s and 70s. What started as pulp work became the stuff of Hollywood adaptations in the 80s and though he sadly would not live to ride the beginning of the wave of his rise to cult status, his work continues to inspire generations of scifi creators to this day. Though to my awareness no one who has worked on SciADV has stated any direct inspiration from PKD, all the ideas the series tackles were popularized by PKD or at least brought into some degree of mainstream awareness by him. Indeed, arguably more so than his actual work the series largely seems to be inspired more from ideas he actually espoused that he believed were true. I recommend looking up his 1977 speech he delivered in Metz, France: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" and the book he wrote based on the experiences he describes in that speech: "VALIS". Most of the series seems to be based on the ideas in those 2 works.

Fewer still discuss how in particular Chaos;Head seems to have taken from a video game released approximately 10 years before C;H: Xenogears. Originally developed under the working title "Project Noah". This initially may seem like just coincidence but again, despite no official confirmation, when you look at the themes of that work and how the term Project Noah was still used in it, I don't think my assertion that elements of Chaos;Head and the series at large were inspired by it. In Xenogears, Project Noah is the name for one of the primary antagonist's plan to create God. Utilizing the remnants of Deus, an ancient AI weapon that crash landed on the world of Xenogears and created humanity to rebuild it over the course of 10,000 years, this antagonist works to this end with the added effort of making his own additions in order to create a God machine truly worthy of the name of Deus. When taken into consideration and compared to the plot of Chaos;Head, there's not only something to be said about comparisons between Norose and Krelian (the aforementioned Xenogears antagonist), but between Deus and Noah II. Indeed, one almost wonders if Noah II is named such in homage to the original, 1998 "Project Noah" and the machine "Deus" created in that game. After all, what is Noah II other than an artificial God? A machine capable of rewriting reality and controlling all of humanity describes both a fully powered Noah II and a fully powered Deus, especially when taking the Zohar which powers Deus and its "phase transition" abilities, which is basically analogous to gigalomania, and which is responsible for the magical ether abilities in Xenogears- much like how Noah II served to grant gigalomaniac abilities to porters and later the chaos child syndrome sufferers.

And what do Xenogears and Philip K. Dick have in common? Quite a bit, but the primary for our purposes thing is heavy influence from a discovery made in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in the immediate aftermath of the second World War...

[To be continued in a later post when I find the time. Feel free to reply and discuss regardless though]

[Maypews]

Hope you give us a followup on this! The post might not get too much interaction because there's a lot of requirements in order to read it (namely having completed all of SciADV AND Xeno) but at the very least I am waiting eagerly to see where it goes.