Xenogears Atlas Fan Port Shows Rebuilt Battles and HD Texture Restoration

Xenogears Atlas is moving beyond its initial reconstruction work, with the latest development update showing the fan made PC project’s battle system running alongside newly restored textures, sprites, portraits, and cinematics. The project remains unofficial and has no involvement from Square Enix, but its scope is beginning to look considerably broader than a straightforward compatibility port.

Built in Godot, Atlas is reconstructing the original 1998 PlayStation game from data extracted from the original discs rather than simply running Xenogears through an emulator. The earlier build already recreated the introduction, Lahan Village, dialogue, items, equipment, scripted sequences, and other systems. The latest Weekly Progress video now shows combat working for the first time.

"The battle engine is ready too. Not fully, but the base is there."
— Quote by: Xenogears Atlas developer

The current implementation reproduces the appearance and underlying mechanics of regular battles, although development is far from complete. Gear battles remain a larger challenge because they use systems that differ from combat on foot, meaning the footage represents an important foundation rather than a finished recreation.

Visual restoration has also become a major part of development. Full motion videos are extracted losslessly from the original discs at 320 x 224 and 15 FPS before being processed with SeedVR2, a video restoration model that analyzes sequences of frames together to reduce flickering. Earlier experiments with Real ESRGAN and Real CUGAN were discarded after producing unstable colors, flicker, and incorrect lettering.

Text proved particularly difficult. One repeated problem changed "You shall be as gods" into incorrect wording during processing. The developer found that rendering the footage at 1080p provided enough image information for more accurate lettering, while individual shots can still have their original text blended back in when necessary.

Textures are receiving similar treatment, with individual texture pages taking roughly 6 to 14 seconds to process. Original transparency information is preserved and colors are constrained to Xenogears' existing palette to reduce visible seams between neighboring assets. Character sprites and portraits can be processed at 2x, 4x, or 8x resolution.

All of this restoration work is currently performed locally on a GeForce RTX 5080 with 16 GB of memory rather than through cloud processing. That GPU should not be interpreted as a requirement for eventually playing Xenogears Atlas. It is the hardware being used by the developer to generate the restored assets. No final PC requirements have been announced.

The visual work marks a noticeable evolution from the project’s initial reveal, when the priority was reproducing Xenogears as accurately as possible before applying graphical upgrades. The original reconstruction philosophy, detailed when Xenogears Atlas first demonstrated its Godot based PC rebuild, remains focused on maintaining the behavior and presentation of the PlayStation release rather than redesigning it.

There is still no public release date, and the project remains at an early stage. Square Enix has also not announced an official Xenogears PC port, remaster, or remake.

The rebuilt battle engine matters more than the sharper textures. Visual restoration can make a 1998 game easier to revisit on modern displays, but recreating combat accurately is what begins turning Atlas into a genuine native PC reconstruction rather than an HD texture project.

The restoration workflow is also showing some restraint. Instead of accepting whatever an upscaling model produces, the developer is correcting lettering, preserving the original palette, and retaining source elements when the generated result is inaccurate.

Atlas still has a huge amount of work ahead, particularly with Gear combat and the later portions of the game. But the project is increasingly demonstrating what an official Xenogears PC release could look like without abandoning the visual identity of the original.

Would you prefer an official Xenogears remaster that stays close to the original like Atlas, or a complete remake with modern 3D visuals and redesigned combat?