It takes very little clicking around on this website to be able to put together that my favorite game of all time is, of course, the original Xenoblade Chronicles; if you happen to be one of the people reading this site who doesn't know anything about my niche special interest, it's a game about a big nerd who fights an army of killer robots with a magic laser sword that shows him the future. Simple enough setup! Then it dives deep into many, many heavily-foreshadowed twists and turns that recontextualize the entire setting and lore, culminating in a gained metaphysical understanding of the nature of the universe itself, which draws very heavily from Gnostic theology. It's a wild ride and it rules, is what I'm saying.

Enough about that, though; explaining all that is a lengthy and convoluted essay for another day. We're backing up a bit here. What was that about killer robots?

The primary antagonists of the game are a seemingly-endless army of man-eating machines called the Mechon. They also happen to be some of the most distinctively original-looking robots in video games in general; far from your average Gundam-copycat sleek armored things, they are elaborately decorated with opulent gold trim, bulbous and dotted with bizarre arrangements of eyes, and commonly draw from skeletal and insectoid motifs when they're not just completely alien-looking altogether. There's nothing in any game that feels quite like their aesthetic, and that's including the other games in this very series, which have never fully recaptured the visual identity that feels so defining to the first (and don't really feel like they've even tried all that hard, honestly).

This excuse to talk about them is also a means of getting some higher-quality images of them out there; aside from the Faces, just about all of these pictures were manually posed and taken by me! Wow! Each series comes in a variety of colors with assorted attachments; to keep things from getting redundant, models that lack notable differences from their peers outside of color scheme will be omitted.

But before we get to the littler guys, we need to pay tribute to their critical context.

Standing about ten miles tall at full height, the titan Mechonis makes up approximately half of the extant world. Millennia ago, it fought and died in a great battle against the Bionis, its organic counterpart; their massive corpses, still frozen upright in the position of their final strikes, would go on to become the homes of countless inhabitants who continue to perpetuate the war between the titans in spirit. From just about anywhere on Bionis, you can see the Mechonis' oppressive silhouette taking up a hefty chunk of the horizon, the glowing red points of its eyes piercing through even the thickest cloud cover.

As someone who was raised on Godzilla and thus has always had a fascination with Impossibly Big Monsters, this extremely cool setting almost certainly plays a major part in the reason this game grabbed me as instantly out of the gate as it did—you can tell by the username on a number of my linked pages that I thought this thing was awesome enough to build my whole online identity around it. (Its narrative role certainly also helped; more on that later behind copious spoiler tags.)

The Mechonis is a relatively straightforward humanoid shape, with a very wide and muscular-looking figure; it somewhat evokes a knight wearing a chainmail hood. Its chest juts outward into a simplified ribcage, and below that there is a deep vertical gap down the front of its stomach. The most distinctive part of it is, of course, its head: a long, nose-like point lined with fourteen red eyes and a cage-like mouthguard of sorts below, with a number of thin structures jutting downward from inside like a beard, overall resembling some kind of bizarre helmet. The inside of the neck behind the mouthguard is a deep hollow pit, and red points identical to the eyes are also dotted elsewhere across the titan's body; are those also eyes? Is the codpiece lined with eyes? It's open to interpretation.

While its right arm, bearing an absolutely enormous sword, flows naturally into its body and has a small "wing" of sorts on its shoulder, its left arm is considerably larger, surrounded by extra casing and attached to the torso with golden beams surrounded by enormous gears. It looks like it's been grafted on, because it has: it's a replacement constructed by the Mechon after the original was severed in the great battle, which still lies at the titan's feet in the endless sea below. Forming a bridge between the fallen arm and the Mechonis proper is one of several long, flowing bands stemming from its waist that trail behind its body; meanwhile, emerging from the top of its back are several immense sheets of metal, forming three rows of enormous structures of some kind. Spines? Wings? Their animation bones are labeled "hair", for what it's worth. Whatever they are, they're as long as the Mechonis is tall.

As one of the two notable elements on the game's boxart, the imposing form of the Mechonis in the distance is easily among the game's most iconic imagery, perhaps second only to the titular blade itself. And it's very well-deserved! If you've got something you are going to be spending the entirety of a very long game looking at, you better make sure it's cool as hell.

The smallest of the Mechon are the M30 line, teardrop-shaped fliers who primarily act as scout and transport units and are less combat-ready than their larger peers. Each one is fitted with a spinning circle of hovering parts that keep it aloft and a simple weapon attached to the bottom: either a small gun, a slightly larger cannon, or a singular arm ending in a set of spinning blades. Outside of Mechonis areas, which adopt a separate naming scheme, they are frequently given a designation for their unit type that references a well-known hymenopteran—Wasp, Hornet, Honey Bee... and also Woodpecker, for some reason. You know, that famous bug everyone knows?

These guys aren't particularly standout, but they're distinctive enough for something as simple as they are. Their one eye is placed in such a way that they's always looking down, which makes sense as they're typically high in the air, but it has a side effect of making them look a little sad, which adds an endearingly cute quality to them on top of their overall roundness. At one point we see a Scout Unit returning to its boss, and it communicates in silly little beeples! Adorable.

Each of the earlier lines also has a prototype variant, found running rogue on the arm severed during the great battle that has since been reclaimed by nature. They resemble a "skeleton" of sorts compared to the regular model, a barebones and incomplete frame lacking the intricate casing of the finals and decorated with simpler gears, rusted and grungy and bent out of shape with age, and for some reason their eye arrangements are consistently entirely different compared to the finals. In the case of the M35 Prototype, the eye is pointing up instead and it's got an extra set of spikes coming out of its sides, and instead of a teardrop it's more of a vase shape that tapers back out at the top and has an extra gear spinning around the neck. That's about it, really.

About the same size are the earthbound scout units of the M40 line, with four spidery legs and an eggplant-shaped body suspended in their center. At the top of the body is a small drill-shaped gun (or, in the case of the black model, a big elaborate cannon), which it uses by tilting its whole body sideways to point at its target, giving it an even more spidery look! It has four eyes arranged along its sides, which you'd think would be aligned so that they all face upwards when it tilts its body, but instead they're off-center and give it the sense that there's little rhyme or reason here; a little disappointing given the missed opportunity to cleverly go even further into bug territory, but it adds a subtle chaos that enhances the alien feeling of the things.

Compared to the basic teal, the black model is one of the rare variations that actively changes major elements of the frame rather than just adding different attachments. It adds considerably more bulk to the legs, tapering out at the end like it's wearing fashionable little robot bell-bottoms, and instead of the simple hook feet it has two toes on each leg in a way that resembles the twin-clawed feet of real arthropods—overall, the first thing that comes to mind when I see them is "big stompy tarantula" (always a charming vibe). The Scout Unit Prototype, meanwhile, is the only Mechon with no eyes at all, and like the M35 Prototype adopts a more tapered vaselike shape compared to its finished variations, its lower body being just a simple orb peppered with a handful of spikes. The two-segmented body makes it the most spidery out of them all! Its legs are also decorated with a bunch of small, delicate-looking gears that make this one feel like the most likely Mechon to encounter being sold as an art piece at some old antique shop.

Moving onto the larger and more combat-focused series, the M50 units are functionally the basic foot soldiers of the Mechon (and also where the designation numbers start to get a little inconsistent on occasion; the M69 uses this model for some reason). They're dumpy, beetly-looking little things, stomping around on two legs curved like exaggerated haunches and bearing one or two scythe-like claws for arms. Their body consists of two simple pieces: the spherical engine, which pivots and jostles around loosely in its socket with the machine's movement, and the upper frame that serves as the attachment point for its limbs and gun (or an additional eye, in the case of the black model). The frame dips down at the front, ending in three front-facing eyes and two more on its sides, creating the effect of two different visages depending on which ones you focus on!

The M56 Prototype significantly reduces the upper frame, leaving visible the row of golden bands connecting it to the engine and segueing into a thin spine ending in a simple sphere with one big eye, which is quite frankly adorable. I'm pretty sure I had a screenshot of this guy as the avatar on my computer profile for a while. Just look at it. It's such a precious little thing.

The larger of the basic combat units, the M60 line is an asymmetrical, top-heavy series with a large bulbous head making up everything above its waist, tapering to a nose-like point at the front that is surrounded by four small eyes. Its right arm is considerably longer, and varies between several large cannon designs and a cylindrical three-pronged grabber designed specifically for snatching up people. On the other side is a stunted-looking, uselessly small arm that is sometimes replaced with a small secondary cannon with a frankly irresponsible number of barrels, along with an elaborate "crest" of sorts on the back of its head. Running between and behind its legs is a flat golden band forming a sort of tail. The strangely-designated M87 Prototype drops the nosepiece in exchange for three eyes (only one of which is still intact), its thin cannon is lined with nasty spikes, and its tailpiece is just a crudely-bent piece of iron.

The M60 series feel like this game's equivalent to Mario's Goombas in my mind, not for their relative power or lack thereof, but just because they feel so instantly iconic; these things have an incredibly distinctive, uniquely alien shape that doesn't quite look or feel like anything else. These enemies feel defining to the aesthetic of not only the Mechon, but the game as a whole.

Notably, the concept art for this series differs in one significant way to the final version: in place of the "nose", they are drawn with odd white masks that fully recontextualize their peculiar silhouette to resemble more of a hunched-over humanoid. The placement of the eyes on the prototype is most likely a leftover remnant of this concept (and may well even be the source of the prototype idea in general?). Presumably, this masked look was changed to reduce the feeling of these simple foot soldiers having something that can be construed as a proper face, something explicitly relegated to more specialized units we'll be getting to later.

Barring an oddly-designated M60 retriever, the M70 line consists of only two color variants of the same base: a cephalopod-shaped unit with a collection of tentacles, each ending in a cylindrical grabber attachment decorated with an extra hook and a set of three eyes. A row of even more eyes completely circles the body around its circumference, which is also the location of a handful of additional limbs, including three spidery legs for proper locomotion and four smaller finger-like appendages arranged across its front, making it look like it has a charming little Cthulhu face.

A robot tentacle monster has potential to be dime-a-dozen forgettable, but the key element that blesses this guy with all of its personality is the placement of the eyes at the base of each grabber, singlehandedly transforming relatively plain appendages into incredibly goofy-looking alien muppet faces made to recall long-necked dragons. It works whether or not the grabbers are open, because when they're closed the hook on the bottom becomes the lower jaw to a big cartoon dinosaur nose, like if Yoshi was a murder robot. They are absolutely ridiculous and I adore them. They look like they're about to break out into a silly song or skit where they bicker about how they're gonna get me and I'll be fully enraptured by it the whole time, and then they'll get me.

On an unrelated note, one of the models for this thing is designated M76/MOIST. I have an important obligation to share this knowledge.

The M80 line consists of tall, lanky humanoids that feel like crude mockeries of people, with simple spherical heads craned forward on long necks and bottom-heavy bodies with a ball-shaped base. Each one has two large, incomplete gears surrounding its torso like a simplified ribcage, and lanky arms ending in a paired set of pincers that spin the full 360 degrees on their axis (or, in the case of the fancier Mechonis-stationed models, a big old ether gun on the right). A spinning disc sits behind their left shoulder, while the right has some sort of attachment: a small wing for teal, a fuel canister for bronze, and a giant goddamn cannon for black, who also has a back-mounted canister of its own.

Their heads had considerably more variety between models than most lines, with the basic teal having a chaotic arrangement of four eyes and two simple spikes on the sides, the black model keeping the spikes but having a single large eye on a smaller golden head, and the bronze (and an alternate black) gaining a sort of semicircular crest or headdress on top of its head alongside a smaller single eye. Their animations are notably twitchy, giving them an uncanny vibe to contrast their more anthropomorphic shape.

The M90 series, found exclusively on Mechonis, resemble big stocky beetles with four legs and long, scissor-like crab claws. They have a large wheel on their back that spins faster the more actively they move, and in front they have six eyes arranged in a half-circle to surround a small, needle-like gun that extends from their center. Most of the time, those eyes and gun are largely obscured by a rounded cover plate that flips up to reveal its full features; the top of the opening they rest in is lined with small rectangular tabs resembling a row of teeth, which when revealed recontextualize the entire visage to look like a big nasty mouth, the trim surrounding it becoming lips and the cover acting as a nose! Neat! Also a little upsetting!

The greatest thing about these guys is that their running animation is a brisk jaunt that takes full advantage of the bounciness inherent to the combination of their short legs and their arms being perpetually held in the air, which is actively delightful. I watch these guys do their silly little stomps and I am in love with them.

The titanic M100 series, designated Fortress Units, are quite possibly the largest enemies in the entire game, towering well over a hundred feet tall and patrolling the valley inside of the deep depressions running along the length of the Mechonis' sword. These are so big that they're the only things in the game with a separate, low-detail model swapped in when viewing them from a distance!

These guys draw heavily from the insect influences and cut a pretty distinct silhouette: they have an abdomen low to the ground that their back legs are connected to, which connects to the thorax via a long, thin spine that cranes up and back like a swan's neck, and then its head dips back down towards the ground on a long snakelike neck of its own. The thorax is also home to its enormous forelegs, a decorative set of smaller legs that dangle above its head, and of course, a Humongous Cannon. The head shape tapers out into a distinctive crescent shape like a hammerhead flatworm, with a smaller gun mounted under each far end, and suspended under the center is a big golden sphere with one big eye, but that's not its only one: inset on the top above it are two significantly smaller eye-orbs, the larger of which faces forward from the back and the smaller in front pointing straight upwards, where it is of no use to anyone. What are you gonna look at? The sky? You're the one people have to look up to see!!

Beyond the numbered series, there are also a handful of specialized combat lines that can be found patrolling Mechonis areas. The Offensive series resembles a knight, with a sword (or a club) and shield on the ends of its arms, along with a single eye and a gnarly-looking ribcage attached to its levitation engine by a thin spine. Its shoulder plates resemble elegant wings, particularly the lighter-colored pieces on the cycloptic model, and a spinning ring hovers behind its head, making the entire thing look like a freaky mechanical skeleton-angel. Which is sick.

The black model, meanwhile, is deliberately designed and colored to look like a mini-me of major antagonist Metal Face, who we'll be getting to shortly. In place of an eye, its head just has a simple horizontal spike sticking out of each side, resembling a nose piercing. You might remember that I mentioned earlier that the M40 prototype is the only Mechon with no eyes at all, and yet this one doesn't seem to have any either. What gives? I'm glad you asked:

There is, perplexingly, a single eye on the back of its head and nowhere else. What is it accomplishing there? What is it there to detect? It is even a sensor at all, or is it just for decoration? Who knows! The other model has it too, though.

The Defensive units are anatomically pretty abstract and a little hard to place. They consist of an intricately-decorated set of front plates, segmented like an insect's shell and tapering to a point at the bottom, from which a thin band wraps around their back to form a loop that extends out over the top of the front plate, and they have a set of two simple blade arms and ten long panels forming wings. The front plate includes a bulbous raised section forming a small, round hood that contains the eyes, giving the impression of a head. Its visual design alone reads as pretty heavily insectoid, but the way it's animated has it almost "swim" through the air like a fish; each of the individual wing panels moves independently with a fin-like flow and it uses its armblades as paddles.

Something as abstract as this runs the risk of not having much of a standout identity, but its animations honestly give it a ton of personality that I kind of wasn't expecting. The simple combination of the raised "hood" and the fact that the eyes are constantly pivoting around like they ARE the head go a long way towards making this thing feel alive, and the simplicity of its arms means they come across as sort of useless and makes it feel a little bit pathetic. It's actually pretty endearing.

The hefty Exterminator series patrol areas deep within the Mechonis, and they are easily the most heavily insect-influenced line out of everything we've seen so far, which is impressive given the motifs that show up in like half of these guys. Their limb layout is strongly reminiscent of a mantis, although the huge size of their abdomen, decorated with six small spikes on the bottom and four enormous pronged ones on top, is more similar to the proportions of a termite queen! They have an additional set of arms attached to the top of the abdomen which end in flat plates that it uses as a shield, retreating into its shell, and a raised plate on its back includes a decorative attachment modeled after a singular bird wing. It once again has a single red eye on a simple spherical head, this time decorated with obvious mandibles, and its "thorax" once again resembles a human ribcage.

The outright skeletal ribcage aesthetic keeps cropping up in these stronger guys, and that's because they're drawing directly from the motifs associated with someone much higher in the pecking order! Which brings us to...

So named for being the only Mechon with proper recognizable faces instead of haphazard clusters of eyes, the massive Faces are mysteriously immune to the Monado: the sword supposedly once wielded by the Bionis itself and the sole weapon capable of penetrating Mechon armor. This is where these become story-relevant characters; their sections will contain marked spoilers!

The first encountered, Metal Face, is the primary antagonist of the first half of the game; initially introduced leading a bloody raid on the protagonist Shulk's hometown of Colony 9 after a year of the Mechon licking their wounds, he kickstarts the whole spiraling revenge quest that acts as the story's inciting incident. In his first appearance he is menacingly silent, but later he's fitted with a fancy new speaker system that he uses to mercilessly taunt our heroes, turning him into a show-stealing villain who is extremely fun to hate.

Metal's design is immediately striking and heavy on the skeleton motifs. Contrasting his black frame is a chilling white faceplate that resembles a horned, stylized skull with two red eyes set in each socket, and its upper and lower jaws connected by golden bands that evoke stitches; his chest is modeled to resemble a ribcage covered in ornate decorations, and he has a slender golden spine connecting the upper and lower halves of his torso. His feet and shoulders are decorated with spikes shaped like they were taken straight off of a wrought-iron fence, and of course he's got massive, nasty blades for claws, each of which is about ten feet long(!). As is common to all Faces, thin veins run along its length that pulse with an ominous red light. This may be the most goth a robot design can get.

About halfway through his act of the story, he receives a heavy remodel, tricking out his design to be bigger, bulkier, and nastier. Unfortunately, that means he loses a decent bit of the skeletal motifs, but such consolidations must be made when you don't want your giant robot to be in danger of snapping in half under its own weight. The lower jaw and attached stitches have been replaced with a black jaw with three simple teeth and an exaggerated, blocky chin, and the horns are now a dull red, with a much more elaborate design that includes hoops for dangling earrings. His thin claws are made broader and more rectangular, like big meat cleavers, and are later augmented to pulsate with a green liquid bioweapon made from fluid siphoned out of the Bionis, designed to rapidly decompose organic life. The wings attached to his engine now have a more complex multi-tiered design, and the whole guy is just spikier all-around.

Notably, each Face in the original Japanese is named for the color of its armor, which left Metal here with the rather unfortunate moniker of... Black Face. Oops! This was obviously changed out of necessity for the English release, making him the odd one out and leaving behind only one remnant of the original reference to his color.

It's eventually revealed that the Faces are, in fact, being piloted by people who have been killed and abducted by the Mechon, the process that is initially attributed as "eating people". Their pilots have been given new, mechanized bodies, heavily modified with circulatory systems made to pump blood through their frame in the form of those mysterious red lines, designed to take advantage of the Monado's inability to harm the people of Bionis.

Metal Face is piloted by Mumkhar, a cowardly and spiteful man who fought alongside the Monado's previous wielder Dunban during a decisive battle against the Mechon a year ago, during the game's prologue. Driven by a jealousy over not being chosen to wield the sword which compounds into an intense, violent hatred, he does his job largely because it gives him an excuse to antagonize Dunban without consequence, setting the plot into motion by slaughtering his sister. He is eventually brought down by his own over-attachment, choosing to perpetuate the circle of violence when Dunban is convinced to spare him, and launches off an attack which knocks loose a spire that impales him in his hubris.

The prototype for the mass-produced Face model, Xord (or, at first, "Mysterious Face") is the introduction to the concept that Mechon can speak, which he does very much in an extremely loud and over-the-top Cockney accent. (Did I mention all the voice acting is British? Because it is.) Befitting his boisterous personality, he's a big, bulky bruiser with a hammer and a gigantic iron chin, his frame made up of round shapes designed to fold into a sort of bulb while in flight mode. He's notably forgetful and scatterbrained, and is also always talking about how hungry he is and wanting to eat people, which! Oh no!! Despite his hefty size, he's ironically actually the shortest of the Faces. He has a similar four-eyed arrangement to Metal Face, but the sockets are angled upwards in such a way that almost makes him look a little sad.

While much heavier-set at a glance, he actually has a body layout just like Metal Face: a bulky upper and lower half connected by a thinner spine. In this case it's just harder to see because the chestplate fully obscures the connection! His top half is similar to a large beetle shell, his backplate shaped like a huge abdomen that extends far enough to nearly cover his thrusters, and its underside deliberately textured to resemble an insect's. On top of this abdomen are two smaller decorative attachments (or maybe hanging hooks) that sort of evoke dinky, useless little wings. At the front, his head is surrounded by an exaggerated metal hood that curves upwards and mirrors the V-shaped collar formed by his chestplates, almost like someone popped the two pieces apart with a can opener.

Xord is the only Face whose pilot is not otherwise present in the story. Instead, his backstory is revealed when speaking to an NPC named Désirée who has multiple quests specific to Shulk; it turns out Xord was her father, a renowned blacksmith who used to run his own shop in the colony, who was among those who perished in the battle against the Mechon a year prior. His absent memory and aggressive nature are owed to the fact that he was already very heavily dismembered when his body was recovered, leaving him with little of his original self in both a physical and mental sense—the machine contains only his brain and a few other organs.

According to developer notes, as Xord is such an early prototype for his model, his major functionalities are still fairly flawed; his blood filtration system is limited and runs out of steam midway through his first encounter with the heroes, forcing him to retreat to appropriate facilities for a process analogous to dialysis. As a result, he is the only Mechon who actually does eat people, using his capture mechanism to extract blood from bodies and replenish his resources.

Named for the Greek goddess whose role is to enact divine retribution for hubris, Face Nemesis is a uniquely silver Mechon resembling an angel or goddess herself. Behind her head is a golden halo, and her small frame is filled out by gigantic faulds that form a wide skirt behind her; the central pieces, difficult to see in her head-on artwork, form a sort of pointed, inverted spoon shape that resembles an insect's abdomen, giving the design a subtly waspish vibe. A row of black diamonds along her thighs evokes stockings, and her head is bordered by two long... horns? Ears? ...whose interior is also lined with diamonds. Also, she dual-wields big swords. Cannot go wrong there.

"Hey wait!" I hear you say. "I don't see a face on this thing! Faces are supposed to have faces, right???" Correct! Nemesis has a built-in helmet of sorts, and her visor only flips up when she gets real serious.

The size and positioning of her eyes, combined with the simple pointed chin with no mouth and the thinner bars bordering her face like mandibles, end up really bringing together the insect resemblance, again looking very wasplike. But she also has another secret, never actually shown in the game proper!

Going into a model viewer, if we flip her visor up all the way, we find that she actually has a huge third eye taking up her entire forehead! That's insanely cool and we just never see it! Criminal, honestly.

Nemesis does fall victim to the trope of "the token girl must be Small and Pretty and Delicate", but given her purpose and context it makes sense that she wouldn't be a big hulking bruiser, and in a sense it nullifies itself when you learn more about exactly who she is.

Its pilot is none other than the very same girl Metal Face murders in cold blood at the start of the game, Fiora, but when her cockpit is cleft open she mysteriously does not seem to recognize her loved ones and is speaking in another woman's voice entirely. In truth, she has covertly been made into a vessel for the goddess Lady Meyneth, the very soul of Mechonis herself, by the sister of Mechonis' self-proclaimed leader in hopes of bringing about a new age of peace—she is literally just here to fix this whole mess. Unfortunately, Fiora is consequently trapped inside of her own mind in a body she cannot control; she manages to ultimately break through in a moment of desperation, and the two begin to cooperate in their shared body because it turns out the Mechonis is actually a super chill nice person. She's just a cool mom friend. It just so happens that her true body is also the biggest, hulkingest bruiser in the universe.

Nemesis is named for her parallels to her namesake: pursued by Zeus as our protagonists pursue Fiora, and in the city of Smyrna was depicted as having two separate manifestations, each representing a different aspect of the goddess. Additionally, the twin-diamond motif that appears several times on Nemesis' armor actually has symbolic meaning—during the beginning of the game, Fiora wears a necklace with a single red diamond. As a Mechon, she now has two diamonds overlapping, because now she's got two souls in one body! Neat!

A deadly and coldhearted sniper, Jade Face is perhaps the most animalistic-looking Mechon in the lineup. According to developer notes he is explicitly designed to evoke the insectoid influence even moreso than his peers, calling attention specifically to his green color and the attachments on his jawpiece that resemble antennae, and his legs resemble a grasshopper's with two claws on each foot. His face, however, is more bestial, being blocky and sharklike with one large eye on each side and several divots resembling nostrils. His chin is once again exaggeratedly long, but the star of the show—and the key element that pushes the whole thing headlong into "terrifying" territory—are the troublingly human teeth, complete with separately-molded golden gums. The head is directly attached to the backplate, creating the effect of a broad reptilian neck lined with lizardy spines shaped like the teeth on a gear; underneath that is the more standard skeletal-looking neck leading into a ribcage much like Metal Face's, enclosed by the larger chestplate wrapping snugly around it.

Noticeably, he is dotted with additional red circles resembling eyes: six uniformly line his chest, while the ends of his forearms are covered with an arrangement of nine, strongly resembling the set of eyes on a spider (with an extra right in the middle). As the forearms are also loaded with simple twin claws that flip forward for close-quarters combat, that may well have been the intent—they become the spider's pedipalps! That rules!!!

Jade Face is piloted by Gadolt, the fiancé of the party's medic Sharla, who disappeared following a failed ambush against Mechon occupying their colony a month prior. Following Metal Face's downfall, it is determined that the Faces' primary weakness is their attachment to their past; Gadolt is the first to undergo the memory-wiping procedure, turning him into little more than a living weapon with absolute loyalty. However, despite his incredible aim enhanced even further by his new mechanical body... he still can't hit Sharla. Meyneth detects a trace of who he once was locked away in the back of his mind, and using a small amount of her divine power, breaks the control he is under. He returns shortly after to shield the party from a massive explosion, fulfilling his promise to live long enough to see Sharla safe.

[Spoiler image!] Gadolt's own design out of the cockpit also leans deep enough into the body horror aspect to be worth highlighting in its own right; his chest is left exposed, but is interrupted on the bottom by a thin metallic border that gives way directly to a hollow torso with a mechanical spine inside (something Mumkhar also had, and that Fiora SHOULD'VE had but Monolith were cowards). What's happening here? Did they take his original skin and just lay it over a metal frame? Is it synthetic? Where does man end and machine begin? His right arm also looks like nothing else on any of the others, keeping a natural form without any mechanical joints but covered in decorative gold trim and an unpleasant sickly gray discoloration, like all of its circulation has long been cut off. The ambiguity of whether that's just his real, dead arm or some weird soft-metal replacement is not great to think about.

Also called Gold Face, this colossus is the second primary antagonist and self-proclaimed leader of Mechonis; resembling a humanoid dragon with a massive tail, he towers over the other Faces at around 60 feet tall, and is described as the strongest Mechon ever built (and, in the original Japanese script, the first). As the only Face who lacks the more skeletal-looking neck, he gives the impression of a knight decked out in ornate golden armor. His ominous white mask evokes a skull to an even more abstracted degree, with two simple holes on each side the invoke the gap between the jaws and teeth below a small incline for a nose, and instead of sockets with inset lights he has six small slits resembling closed or squinting eyes which pulsate green. He is decorated with elaborate ornamental parts, including spiraling bands around his forearms and most notably a very tall forked plate encircling the thruster behind him, calling to mind the high back of a throne, and the end of his tail is directly likened to a priest's cane.

His visual framing and majestic gold-and-red color scheme feels deeply evocative of various depictions of holy figures... but the opulent nature of it also specifically draws to mind religious idols, bringing relevance to its unusual name: Yaldabaoth, meaning "Son of Chaos", is the name given to the Gnostic demiurge, an arrogant false god. The Mechon's long, reptilian tail may well have been designed with the intent to invoke the original Yaldabaoth's common depiction as a lion-headed serpent.

It is controlled by Egil, a member of the Machina, a Mechonis-born race of mechanical people long-lived enough to have witnessed the battle between the titans firsthand. Knowing the Bionis is merely dormant and due to reawaken once again, he created the Mechon in order to weaken it with the goal of wiping out its inhabitants, stealing away countless bodies that would provide energy to the recovering titan if they were allowed to be returned to nature. He becomes blinded to morality in his obsession with revenge, casting away the other surviving Machina and even Meyneth herself when they try to convince him to stop.

According to developer notes, while Egil himself lacks an immunity to the Monado, Yaldabaoth contains and integrates a number of stolen organs in order to achieve the same effect. Also, he wears a big ridiculous hat that Yaldabaoth also has; it's the backing frame directly behind the head. That kind of dedication to fashion should be admired.

Like Nemesis, Yaldabaoth is named for its pilot's narrative parallels to its namesake: the false god who created the material world, distinct from and antagonistic towards the true cosmic absolute that is the source of the divine spark which animates all life. This reflects Egil's relationship with Meyneth, whose will he defies even acting in her name, and his creations make a more material and destructive impact on the world around him compared to the more abstract domain of a real divinity. Moreover, it bears the same twin-diamond motif that Nemesis has to represent her two-souls-one-body deal, but in green rather than the red associated with Meyneth's divine light; this could symbolize Egil's mindset of believing he is acting as one with her will but lacking her actual blessing in the matter, especially given that green can be read as the "pure" color of a light without any divine influence.

Overall, these guys are an extremely cool set of villains! They contribute a very unique aesthetic touch to a game with an already distinctive look and feel, and they're among the many reasons I love it so much. It's a damn shame they've never really been replicated since... but maybe that's fine, because this game's story wraps up on a solid note that didn't really need continuing to begin with. Even still, they're a key part of what makes Xenoblade feel like Xenoblade, and it really just isn't the same without them.