Great forgotten gem,
Sadly it was too ambitious of a project causing Disc 2 to be greatly shortened and rushed but at least the way they presented all the cut playable content was quite tasteful. I feel like it would have benefited from being split into 2 games but considering Takahashi left Square not long after this was better than having half of the story.
Another unfortunate thing is that the English sub was heavily censored so i hope we get a faithful fan translation some day.
The story is quite complex and you do need quite a bit of media literacy to properly understand everything the game is trying to say. This game desperately needs a remake but it will most likely never happen nore would i really want one without Tetsuya Takahashi involved. All in all this is definitively a forgotten gem and i believe more people should try it out.
Sadly it was too ambitious of a project causing Disc 2 to be greatly shortened and rushed but at least the way they presented all the cut playable content was quite tasteful. I feel like it would have benefited from being split into 2 games but considering Takahashi left Square not long after this was better than having half of the story.
Another unfortunate thing is that the English sub was heavily censored so i hope we get a faithful fan translation some day.
The story is quite complex and you do need quite a bit of media literacy to properly understand everything the game is trying to say. This game desperately needs a remake but it will most likely never happen nore would i really want one without Tetsuya Takahashi involved. All in all this is definitively a forgotten gem and i believe more people should try it out.
Que cachondeo.
Limitation breeds Crescens or whatever people say.
After playing through Xenogears these past two weeks and thinking more on it since completing it the other day, I get why there’s such a strong following for it and admire much of what it does right, though with a lot wrong, in spilling its guts for hours and hours on end. And I liked the winding journey, though many parts of it make it hard to fall into a deep love with it despite having so many moments of brilliance included. After rolling credits and trying to think of what it left for me after spending so much time with it, I honestly struggled to come up with a central, almost cohesive thread that draws in all its components which speaks to how spotty yet uncompromising Xenogears’ vision is.
Xenogears to me is reckless and inspired in how it shoots for the stars across various axises in unraveling a messy tale of religiosity, psychoanalysis, never-ending warfare and conflict, oppressive systems of power and dominion, and the question of free will, place and identity. All in the runtime of a 60+ hour ps1 game.
It doesn’t perfectly encapsulate each of these themes as best as it could and some topics land a bit immature than others; the conversation of Billy selling his body being one of the most awkward next to Elly’s sudden transition into a mother-y representation of Sophia and the weird increase in Fei’s chauvinism towards her in Disc 2. However Xenogears is pretty powerful in outlining an escalation in oppressive hierarchies and dominion over groups as the scale and scope of the game becomes bigger and bigger we each story reveal. Each new cage and tyrant to throw out becomes replaced by another individual or group that is pulling the strings before the rug is pulled out again to reveal and complicate the role and context of the antagonists even more. For its time it is pretty daring how committed the team was to constructing this web of power along with the strong heaping religious and psychoanalytic text and references interwoven into the characters and worldbuilding. For as lopsided the general experience Xenogears is, the narrative does a pretty bang up job in establishing mysteries and maintaining intrigue and mostly answering them in a sufficient way with disc 2 having so many thrilling and standout moments. For as familiar as these subjects are across games such as free will and rebellion being some of the most tackled, I find that Xenogears just did it in a more nuanced and interesting fashion than even newer games centered around the same topics.
Another memorable trait is the cinematography. It’s so wonderfully crafted in the cutscenes that still illicits an impressive scale that rivals rpgs coming out today. Pre-rendered backgrounds and set camera angles from games like Resident Evil and FF VII evoke strong moments of visual language that weren’t possible before but Xenogears pushes the envelope even further with the dynamic camera movements, color grading, and more slower pulls and weaves in establishing its mood and atmosphere. Even scenes with little motion like Bart and Sigurd’s talk at night on the Yggdrasil, the moonlight encounter with Grahf, and Fei’s confrontation with the Ministry in Solaris are beautifully done in combination with other elements bringing the scenes to life like the music choice and color contrast. Another memorable sequence is the beginning cutscene teasing the doom and calamity of Lahan with nameless, faceless mechs randomly targeting a remote village now in flames and the scene later in full emphasizing dread even further after having ample time to know most of the people, and it is an absolute gut punch; Citan’s detailed expression of fear with Fei getting into the random mech juxtaposed with the village destruction has stuck with me 60+ hours on, and this cinematic expertise just ramps up even more; it honestly makes newer games look like amateur hour with what it is accomplishing here. I could honestly gush about how inspired this game is from this angle top to bottom for way much longer.
The meat of the experience that is Disc 1 is not too astray from the usual rpg fare at the time but it establishes its own language and identity very quickly from its first animated cutscene foreshadowing the inciting incident of the story. The story following Fei and the mystery around his powers and his role in this grander tale is so interesting to follow with each turn revealing darker truths that lead to his manifestation of his latent power. Elly is similarly a character with much to discover as the story progresses and I liked seeing her struggle to finding who she is and what she stands for and how it coalesces with Fei’s journey of self-discovery and growing to stand up and find his place in the world. Fei and Elly’s interactions are piecemeal initially before like the halfway point of the disc but the small moments still leave so much to ponder about and see where they both go not purely in a romantic sense but what they mean and represent existentially in the game’s world. Fei’s struggle with his own power and learning how to wield it to not continue the cycle of violence is an interesting interrogation of power that doesn’t fall into the usual “revenge/violence/power bad” camps that I feel most games fall into. Fei and Elly are the two most important characters to Xenogears’ story though they aren’t the sole ones that hold some relevance to its themes.
Bart has an interesting arc around taking back Bledavik after being forced out by Shakhan and Ethos, but it also manages to weave in nice character development moments of him becoming more of a leader for the people to look up to while not abandoning the free spirited and brash energy exuberated so much when first interacting with him. Citan has just as much relevance as Fei and Elly to the story with a strong air of mystery around him that he knows more than he lets on and I like how the game plays with that tension towards the end of disc 1 in questioning whether he truly trustworthy as he seems or has an odd way of going about his membership in the group. These four make up a pretty strong cast that offer a lot of poignant moments related to the overarching political machinations. It is a shame that the rest of the playable cast feel mostly extraneous once they are introduced with their pivotal arcs (Rico, Billy, Maria, Emeralda) as the game begins to add and focus more on the central narrative and their various parts aren’t as immeshed in them or developed as much as Fei, Elly, Citan and Bart.
In general I feel that disc 1 is pretty solid at telling an intriguing story with nice reveals while weaving the player into it for a good chunk of it with the world/dungeon traversal and the combat, but I did find many glaring issues especially that hurt my experience: the dungeons are a massive sore point across the journey outside of how atmospheric and lived in they are. The elements of platforming weren’t as unwelcoming as I expected, especially Babel tower with all the talk of that being a prominent dropping point for many, but the high random encounter rate next to how same-y and backtrack heavy the sections can get just completely halt the pacing and make the dungeons maddening in their inclusion as I wanted them to end very quickly. I wouldn’t say they are completely purposeless since Disc 2 would be even more cutscene heavy than it is without them, but maybe the length could have been lessened or just straight up making random encounters more dependent on character level and progression to calm how frequent and mood breaking they are to the dungeons. Even outside the dungeons, the pacing becomes a bit rough after a pretty good run from the start of the game up to the Desert Despair chapter outside of the few caverns and the horrendous swimming and “stealth” portions of the Fatima Castle rescue mission. While there was still much to latch onto afterwards with the Solaris part in the final hours being pretty exceptional, the huge pause in Nortune and other locales with everything leading up to getting on Solaris felt less interesting to get through. Making this worse is Xenogears main battle systems to break up the traversal and cutscenes.
To mince words, the combat in Xenogears is god awful. It does not have a deeply engaging or even fun in a long term sense combat system, but it’s not a total loss to me since I came into this curious about the story and world. The on-ground combat is pretty basic with nice flourishes via animations of executing deathblows and the mix of martial arts moves and magic to keep it from becoming too sleepy. I appreciate the idea of the deathblow system but it deserved to be fleshed out more than what it was in the final result. Gear battles are far more appetizing with some battles exercising and requiring a bit more engagement like exploiting elemental weakness, conserving or going ham with fuel as a limited resource, and throwing on tools acquired in the world to speed gears up, increase their response rate and etc. It still amounts to a pretty basic system of things that don’t really escalate beyond the cool spectacle of seeing mechs lunk around and do deathblows. When the fatigue really set in, I just strapped on ether doublers on Billy or Emeralda and just went ham to get back to the interesting tidbits of the story. In combination with the menial dungeons and excruciating enemy encounter rate, I can understand why a lot of people dropped this and I’d probably do the same if the narrative and main character studies didn’t pull me as much as it did, especially going from disc 1 to disc 2.
That leaves Disc 2 which is another bit of disconnect for me from wider opinion of this game. So much discussion on XG involves a huge lament of what Xenogears could have been if disc 2 was “finished” with a vague assumption that disc 1 was pretty seamless, and I can’t disagree more. Sure the presentation of story events relegated to the main cast recapping them while sitting in front of screenshots of said events is a rough transition from disc 1’s stronger balance of player involvement and cutscene amount, but I found the section pretty compelling. It honestly makes me even more critical of the first disc’s shortcomings versus the second since for the most part the team manages to get across the major story events while not being delivered in a completely static and one dimensional way as much of disc 2 sounds at first. I love the moments of introspection that come from Elly and Fei as they are responding to and thinking back on the events of the story we have yet to see, and the sequence of Fei’s psychology and understanding and overcoming Id is pure cinema. Oddly, the feeling of a stage play, whether intentional or not, compliments the game’s musings on control and free will that I’m pretty fine with disc 2’s vibe despite wanting a few more real time cutscenes of the story sequences like the nano machines triggering the mutations of people several times in the story. I’m also probably giving this more defense since there is much less gameplay involved here which already alleviates the big slog that was this game’s dungeons and combat systems.
For all its faults, I was pretty satisfied with Xenogears after finishing it though I can’t discount how exhausting of a game this is to get through. It just unfortunately exists and is tethered with this game given its horrendous development and mismanagement as a first title for most of the people working on it. It also further points to how ambitious of a game this was trying to be despite the hard limits of the ps1 that maybe it could have been a very sickening ps2 game in a mostly “complete” state in another time. Even in the time now that is unearthing the grave of older series titles for new releases to create and remake, I’m not sure how/if something like this could be built up again today in all its glory and eccentricities. Remake discourse is an enormous, tiring blob where it feels like no one wins that I’d rather have a new title in the series rather than another try at “completing” Xenogears that will probably rob it of the charm and vision so specific to its time and circumstances, and in some ways that cannot be recaptured to me with the slippery slope of faithful recreations being a point of contention. Also unfortunate that this specific series is stuck to the halls of the ps1 and ps2 with the tricky licensing and separate paths all of its creators have taken since then to move on to newer things. At the very least Xenogears has inspired me to actually try out its successor series more despite a rough and confusing entry into the series many years ago with its messy second title on the switch. I’ll probably still have complaints about the gameplay though.
After playing through Xenogears these past two weeks and thinking more on it since completing it the other day, I get why there’s such a strong following for it and admire much of what it does right, though with a lot wrong, in spilling its guts for hours and hours on end. And I liked the winding journey, though many parts of it make it hard to fall into a deep love with it despite having so many moments of brilliance included. After rolling credits and trying to think of what it left for me after spending so much time with it, I honestly struggled to come up with a central, almost cohesive thread that draws in all its components which speaks to how spotty yet uncompromising Xenogears’ vision is.
Xenogears to me is reckless and inspired in how it shoots for the stars across various axises in unraveling a messy tale of religiosity, psychoanalysis, never-ending warfare and conflict, oppressive systems of power and dominion, and the question of free will, place and identity. All in the runtime of a 60+ hour ps1 game.
It doesn’t perfectly encapsulate each of these themes as best as it could and some topics land a bit immature than others; the conversation of Billy selling his body being one of the most awkward next to Elly’s sudden transition into a mother-y representation of Sophia and the weird increase in Fei’s chauvinism towards her in Disc 2. However Xenogears is pretty powerful in outlining an escalation in oppressive hierarchies and dominion over groups as the scale and scope of the game becomes bigger and bigger we each story reveal. Each new cage and tyrant to throw out becomes replaced by another individual or group that is pulling the strings before the rug is pulled out again to reveal and complicate the role and context of the antagonists even more. For its time it is pretty daring how committed the team was to constructing this web of power along with the strong heaping religious and psychoanalytic text and references interwoven into the characters and worldbuilding. For as lopsided the general experience Xenogears is, the narrative does a pretty bang up job in establishing mysteries and maintaining intrigue and mostly answering them in a sufficient way with disc 2 having so many thrilling and standout moments. For as familiar as these subjects are across games such as free will and rebellion being some of the most tackled, I find that Xenogears just did it in a more nuanced and interesting fashion than even newer games centered around the same topics.
Another memorable trait is the cinematography. It’s so wonderfully crafted in the cutscenes that still illicits an impressive scale that rivals rpgs coming out today. Pre-rendered backgrounds and set camera angles from games like Resident Evil and FF VII evoke strong moments of visual language that weren’t possible before but Xenogears pushes the envelope even further with the dynamic camera movements, color grading, and more slower pulls and weaves in establishing its mood and atmosphere. Even scenes with little motion like Bart and Sigurd’s talk at night on the Yggdrasil, the moonlight encounter with Grahf, and Fei’s confrontation with the Ministry in Solaris are beautifully done in combination with other elements bringing the scenes to life like the music choice and color contrast. Another memorable sequence is the beginning cutscene teasing the doom and calamity of Lahan with nameless, faceless mechs randomly targeting a remote village now in flames and the scene later in full emphasizing dread even further after having ample time to know most of the people, and it is an absolute gut punch; Citan’s detailed expression of fear with Fei getting into the random mech juxtaposed with the village destruction has stuck with me 60+ hours on, and this cinematic expertise just ramps up even more; it honestly makes newer games look like amateur hour with what it is accomplishing here. I could honestly gush about how inspired this game is from this angle top to bottom for way much longer.
The meat of the experience that is Disc 1 is not too astray from the usual rpg fare at the time but it establishes its own language and identity very quickly from its first animated cutscene foreshadowing the inciting incident of the story. The story following Fei and the mystery around his powers and his role in this grander tale is so interesting to follow with each turn revealing darker truths that lead to his manifestation of his latent power. Elly is similarly a character with much to discover as the story progresses and I liked seeing her struggle to finding who she is and what she stands for and how it coalesces with Fei’s journey of self-discovery and growing to stand up and find his place in the world. Fei and Elly’s interactions are piecemeal initially before like the halfway point of the disc but the small moments still leave so much to ponder about and see where they both go not purely in a romantic sense but what they mean and represent existentially in the game’s world. Fei’s struggle with his own power and learning how to wield it to not continue the cycle of violence is an interesting interrogation of power that doesn’t fall into the usual “revenge/violence/power bad” camps that I feel most games fall into. Fei and Elly are the two most important characters to Xenogears’ story though they aren’t the sole ones that hold some relevance to its themes.
Bart has an interesting arc around taking back Bledavik after being forced out by Shakhan and Ethos, but it also manages to weave in nice character development moments of him becoming more of a leader for the people to look up to while not abandoning the free spirited and brash energy exuberated so much when first interacting with him. Citan has just as much relevance as Fei and Elly to the story with a strong air of mystery around him that he knows more than he lets on and I like how the game plays with that tension towards the end of disc 1 in questioning whether he truly trustworthy as he seems or has an odd way of going about his membership in the group. These four make up a pretty strong cast that offer a lot of poignant moments related to the overarching political machinations. It is a shame that the rest of the playable cast feel mostly extraneous once they are introduced with their pivotal arcs (Rico, Billy, Maria, Emeralda) as the game begins to add and focus more on the central narrative and their various parts aren’t as immeshed in them or developed as much as Fei, Elly, Citan and Bart.
In general I feel that disc 1 is pretty solid at telling an intriguing story with nice reveals while weaving the player into it for a good chunk of it with the world/dungeon traversal and the combat, but I did find many glaring issues especially that hurt my experience: the dungeons are a massive sore point across the journey outside of how atmospheric and lived in they are. The elements of platforming weren’t as unwelcoming as I expected, especially Babel tower with all the talk of that being a prominent dropping point for many, but the high random encounter rate next to how same-y and backtrack heavy the sections can get just completely halt the pacing and make the dungeons maddening in their inclusion as I wanted them to end very quickly. I wouldn’t say they are completely purposeless since Disc 2 would be even more cutscene heavy than it is without them, but maybe the length could have been lessened or just straight up making random encounters more dependent on character level and progression to calm how frequent and mood breaking they are to the dungeons. Even outside the dungeons, the pacing becomes a bit rough after a pretty good run from the start of the game up to the Desert Despair chapter outside of the few caverns and the horrendous swimming and “stealth” portions of the Fatima Castle rescue mission. While there was still much to latch onto afterwards with the Solaris part in the final hours being pretty exceptional, the huge pause in Nortune and other locales with everything leading up to getting on Solaris felt less interesting to get through. Making this worse is Xenogears main battle systems to break up the traversal and cutscenes.
To mince words, the combat in Xenogears is god awful. It does not have a deeply engaging or even fun in a long term sense combat system, but it’s not a total loss to me since I came into this curious about the story and world. The on-ground combat is pretty basic with nice flourishes via animations of executing deathblows and the mix of martial arts moves and magic to keep it from becoming too sleepy. I appreciate the idea of the deathblow system but it deserved to be fleshed out more than what it was in the final result. Gear battles are far more appetizing with some battles exercising and requiring a bit more engagement like exploiting elemental weakness, conserving or going ham with fuel as a limited resource, and throwing on tools acquired in the world to speed gears up, increase their response rate and etc. It still amounts to a pretty basic system of things that don’t really escalate beyond the cool spectacle of seeing mechs lunk around and do deathblows. When the fatigue really set in, I just strapped on ether doublers on Billy or Emeralda and just went ham to get back to the interesting tidbits of the story. In combination with the menial dungeons and excruciating enemy encounter rate, I can understand why a lot of people dropped this and I’d probably do the same if the narrative and main character studies didn’t pull me as much as it did, especially going from disc 1 to disc 2.
That leaves Disc 2 which is another bit of disconnect for me from wider opinion of this game. So much discussion on XG involves a huge lament of what Xenogears could have been if disc 2 was “finished” with a vague assumption that disc 1 was pretty seamless, and I can’t disagree more. Sure the presentation of story events relegated to the main cast recapping them while sitting in front of screenshots of said events is a rough transition from disc 1’s stronger balance of player involvement and cutscene amount, but I found the section pretty compelling. It honestly makes me even more critical of the first disc’s shortcomings versus the second since for the most part the team manages to get across the major story events while not being delivered in a completely static and one dimensional way as much of disc 2 sounds at first. I love the moments of introspection that come from Elly and Fei as they are responding to and thinking back on the events of the story we have yet to see, and the sequence of Fei’s psychology and understanding and overcoming Id is pure cinema. Oddly, the feeling of a stage play, whether intentional or not, compliments the game’s musings on control and free will that I’m pretty fine with disc 2’s vibe despite wanting a few more real time cutscenes of the story sequences like the nano machines triggering the mutations of people several times in the story. I’m also probably giving this more defense since there is much less gameplay involved here which already alleviates the big slog that was this game’s dungeons and combat systems.
For all its faults, I was pretty satisfied with Xenogears after finishing it though I can’t discount how exhausting of a game this is to get through. It just unfortunately exists and is tethered with this game given its horrendous development and mismanagement as a first title for most of the people working on it. It also further points to how ambitious of a game this was trying to be despite the hard limits of the ps1 that maybe it could have been a very sickening ps2 game in a mostly “complete” state in another time. Even in the time now that is unearthing the grave of older series titles for new releases to create and remake, I’m not sure how/if something like this could be built up again today in all its glory and eccentricities. Remake discourse is an enormous, tiring blob where it feels like no one wins that I’d rather have a new title in the series rather than another try at “completing” Xenogears that will probably rob it of the charm and vision so specific to its time and circumstances, and in some ways that cannot be recaptured to me with the slippery slope of faithful recreations being a point of contention. Also unfortunate that this specific series is stuck to the halls of the ps1 and ps2 with the tricky licensing and separate paths all of its creators have taken since then to move on to newer things. At the very least Xenogears has inspired me to actually try out its successor series more despite a rough and confusing entry into the series many years ago with its messy second title on the switch. I’ll probably still have complaints about the gameplay though.
Seemed kinda mid, might give it a second chance
Finally finished this and it genuinely blew me away. One of the most ambitious games ever made with a scope that still feels huge decades later. Probably the most deep, unpredictable and utterly insane story I've seen in the medium. It covers any themes they could get past the censors - mental health, organized religion, free will, classism, genocide to name a few. (I don't think the ESRB played past 10 hours.) The presentation is outstanding with dynamic in-engine cutscene direction not over-relying on FMVs. It's a wonderful looking work in general with 2D sprites in dense 3D scifi environments and awesome mech / biblical / eldritch designs. When a lot of other RPGs on the console were using prerendered backgrounds these fully explorable multi-level populated towns seemed magic. The 360 camera made me feel like I was peering into little dioramas. I also enjoy the combat! Fighter style combo inputs either on foot or in giant mechs with complex mechanics and amazing animation.
It's well known that the developers ran out of time and money on the second disc and it becomes apparent with how the storytelling style suddenly changes and it's not nearly as open. This can even be felt in the music with how there isn't nearly enough unique tracks to cover all the different scenes and locations. So Xenogears is categorically unfinished. Disc 1 is really consistent though and by itself is more compelling and fully featured than other entire games. It was one of the longest of its day. If Square had given the team what they needed to complete it as fully envisioned with a Final Fantasy tier budget, it coulda been the best damn RPG ever. Even with those limitations and some frustrating moments, I think Disc 2 really picked up and reeled me back in, and the last hours were peak fiction.
I don't love everything about Xenogears, even the story - it's definitely not flawless and could be brutal to get through at times so I wouldn't usually give a "10/10" BUT I strongly feel that it's a work of art. That rating represents the huge impression it made on me and my respect for the vision and creativity. Anything less wouldn't be right. It continually impressed me for 50 hours and the gameplay remained fun. It's not easily recommendable because of its unintuitive design and sluggish English text speed (you NEED to apply a text speed code). But if you love Chrono Trigger and FF7 you owe it to yourself to try it out... I consider them a holy trinity of sorts.
It's well known that the developers ran out of time and money on the second disc and it becomes apparent with how the storytelling style suddenly changes and it's not nearly as open. This can even be felt in the music with how there isn't nearly enough unique tracks to cover all the different scenes and locations. So Xenogears is categorically unfinished. Disc 1 is really consistent though and by itself is more compelling and fully featured than other entire games. It was one of the longest of its day. If Square had given the team what they needed to complete it as fully envisioned with a Final Fantasy tier budget, it coulda been the best damn RPG ever. Even with those limitations and some frustrating moments, I think Disc 2 really picked up and reeled me back in, and the last hours were peak fiction.
I don't love everything about Xenogears, even the story - it's definitely not flawless and could be brutal to get through at times so I wouldn't usually give a "10/10" BUT I strongly feel that it's a work of art. That rating represents the huge impression it made on me and my respect for the vision and creativity. Anything less wouldn't be right. It continually impressed me for 50 hours and the gameplay remained fun. It's not easily recommendable because of its unintuitive design and sluggish English text speed (you NEED to apply a text speed code). But if you love Chrono Trigger and FF7 you owe it to yourself to try it out... I consider them a holy trinity of sorts.