By: Erin
Posted: June 20, 2021
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So, growing up, I had very weird experiences when it came to playing video games. Until I was in high school, my screen time was pretty severely limited. I had to choose between a half hour of videogames or a half hour of computer time twice a day. This meant that I had to be pretty selective with what I did and how, and while I do appreciate that it made me learn to use my time wisely (to an extent…) it did mean that my experiences were fractured.
I had many ways I caught up with gaming news, learned about the games I wasn’t allowed to play, and experienced much more than the allotted half-hour increments. One of those methods was devouring as many gaming magazines as I could, another method was watching my brother play, and my final method was reading and re-reading the strategy guides and instruction manuals for various games. This brings us to Xenogears.
My Bible! Which is ironic, considering.
I watched my brother play Xenogears, and I read the strategy guide for Xenogears until the cover tore slightly. It was a really unique and interesting game, and it still is, and back in the day before GameFAQs truly blew up if you wanted to learn everything you could about a game you trusted the experts. After all, this guide says “Official” on it, so it must be good, right?
…Right?
Many, many years later, I was going through the old books and things that had survived our many moves when I unearthed the old strategy guide I used to love. I began flipping through it, more familiar with the game now than I was when I watched my brother explore Kislev as I played with Legos in the living room, and my blood ran cold as I came to a truly horrifying realization:
The people making this guide only had access to, like, two pictures of Xenogears protagonist Fei Fong Wong.
The title page of this absolute beauty.
Seriously, on every other page they had used the same piece of official art of Fei just standing there, menacingly! Fei Fong Wong, doing his “I have no strong feelings one way or the other” pose, stared into my soul as I once again read through a book that stood alongside such greats as The Westing Game or The House of The Scorpion on my bookshelf. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you the information in the book itself is not accurate – though my friends who know the game far better than I assure me it’s all completely wrong – but I am going to tell you that I was shocked at how many times these publishers could squeeze the same picture of Fei Fong Wong into a single tome.
This is literally page 2.
For perspective, above I have posted the cover and the first two pages of my personal hard copy of the BradyGames Xenogears Official Strategy Guide. In two pages, we have seen Fei three times. And now, we’re going to see him a whole lot more, because, my beloved reader, I will now proceed to document every single use of The Same Picture of Fei Fong Wong as seen in the BradyGames Xenogears Official Strategy Guide.
I would like to extend a special shoutout to whoever decided to digitize and upload this strategy guide to archive.org. I’ll be using that version to gather the images, but I’ll cross-reference with my own physical copy if need be.