Xenogears - Elehayym Van Houten ver. (Square Millennium Collection)

The Xenogears Elehayym Van Houten ver. Square Millennium Collection is the other half of the pair. Squaresoft's Japan-only Millennium Collection split Xenogears across two boxes, and this is the second, Disc 2 paired with an Elly figure and a Chu-Chu minifigure inside the trademark Square branded outer.

Xenogears is the JRPG that broke its own budget in service of a story that nobody else would have dared release. Fei and Elly's reincarnation arc spanning ten thousand years. The Zohar. Wave Existence. The Disc 2 visual novel format that everyone complained about and everyone secretly remembers as the best part of the game. We've all defended this game in arguments. Some of us still are.

This is the Elly set. Where the Fei Fong Wong ver. gave us Bart, this one centers Elehayym Van Houten herself, the half of the Fei-Elly pairing that drives the back half of the plot. Pair her with the Chu-Chu minifigure, the cat-eared comic relief who somehow becomes a forty-foot mech in Disc 2, and you have the strangest figure pairing in the entire Millennium Collection. That's the point.

Series 3, released November 30, 2000. Japan exclusive. Squaresoft never repressed this. Sealed copies are real estate.

For Xenogears purists, this is the canonical half. Disc 2 is where the game becomes itself. For Squaresoft completists, this set only makes sense paired with Fei Fong Wong ver. on the shelf. The two boxes together are the full Xenogears Millennium chapter. Anything less is half a story, and Xenogears doesn't do half a story.