Oooh, you got me interested, specially with that chapter 1 bit. Remind me, was the Kim era chapter 3? 4 I remeber as Krellian's, Lacan and Sophia's age. And would Xenosaga be kind of chapter 2 or another aspect of 1?
Xenosaga trilogy is pre-planet, so essentially episode 1, but expanded from the original Perfect Works plans. Xenosaga was going to be 6 games in 3 'episodes' in groups of two. So the first two games would be episode 1, the next two would be the on-planet Xenogears stuff, so episode 2 - 5, then the next two would cover episode 6. This failed when ep1 of saga failed to meet expectations and had to cut a bunch, so they changed the saga plans into 3 games covering only the first pair instead. Episode 3 ends when the Xenogears intro movie would start essentially.
The Xenoblade games do not fit into the Perfect Works episodes, but they share similar plot points because its still Takahashi. I suppose if you need to compare directly then XC3 is closest to episode V, but thats just because of the similar themes to Gears. When I said the episode 1 thing what I mean is that the Xenoblade trilogy is essentially a side story spinoff from a major event in the perfect works timeline. This is kind of hard to explain without outright spoiling things, but just think of how Earth vanished in Xenosaga, due to Zohar experiments, Xenoblade trilogy would be a spinoff from that point, not the main story with the immigrant fleet that leads into Xenosaga episode 1, but is instead a side story that starts from that same event. Inconsequential to the overarching story of Perfect Works, but still connected to it.
Kim was Zeboim, episode 3. I just grabbed my copy of Perfect Works to check but forgot there were no screenshots for each episode and I don't speak Japanese lol. Here is the translated version:
You can sort of match up events of some of the episodes with events in the Xenoblade games (2 and 3 only, 1 was never meant to be a Xeno game), but I don't think its meant to actually be Perfect Works episodes.
As for Xenoblade X, since from what has been said from the end of the XC3 DLC, I regard as the new starting point for Perfect Works, that would be the earliest point ever told. It's post Earth vanishing like Xenosaga, but before all the interplanetary colonies exist. It also starts with the ship crashing like the Xenogears intro, but I would still consider it to be episode 1 or episode 0 to an extent. That is if they still intend to keep X mostly the same with the probable re-writes they do now that they are doing Perfect Works again.
