Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"
Me: "sounds bad"
Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"
Me: "sounds sick"
Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)
Me: "sounds bad"
Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"
Me: "sounds sick"
Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)
there may not be a single video game that so perfectly encapsulates my entire personal approach to art as intimately and specifically as xenogears. as the second in what i consider a 'spiritual trilogy' of developmentally-intertwined and thematically cohesive squaresoft jrpgs including final fantasy vii (my favorite game of all time), xenogears (my other favorite game of all time) and chrono cross (one of my favorite games of all time), i feel that xenogears represents the bleeding-heart passion for nearly every specific niche in art that i'd built over my teenage years - mecha, political drama, 20th century philosophy and psychology, psychological drama and horror, religious studies and analysis, and the golden-age turn based jrpg, to name a few - combined with a tenacity and never-say-die attitude that could only belong to those crazy sumbitches that made this dream come to life, most specifically tetsuya takahashi, soraya saga, masato kato and yasunori mitsuda.
during this playthrough of xenogears (my fifth) accompanied by veteran xeno fans and wide-eyed newcomers, i had the opportunity to reflect on this game through several points of view all at once, reflect on my journey as an artist and a person, and what xenogears means to me now at this point in my life. i've lived the lives of many of xenogears' characters - i've been fei, i've been elly, i've been billy, i've been hammer, i've been ramsus - and the intricate web of connections, lies, deceptions, and relationships that are bound in xenogears' vast expanse feel closely related to me own. this is a game that breathes through me in a way virtually no others except its older sibling has.
xenogears encapsulates the purpose of discovery in the wide world of gaming more than ever now - this is a game which has essentially been deliberately pushed to the bookends of time, having the perfect works narrative constantly tweaked and redefined through the likes of xenosaga and now, loosely, xenoblade, and while its contemporary b-tier influence psx jrpgs like legend of mana, chrono cross and saga frontier continue to see re-releases and re-imaginings, xenogears stands tall all on its own merits, an amber bauble of its era. yes, it's a mess of a game, but i'd hardly change anything about it.
disc 2 is a common topic of controversy when it comes to xenogears, and i'm a vehement defender. in a period of the story where it feels as if the entire tone set up within the first major arcs has been dissolved and a hulking, ugly, hateful core rests underneath it all, disc 2 captures (albeit unintentionally, i know) a paranoid, scatterbrained approach that feels exactly as claustrophobic, distorted and maligned as i think it SHOULD. for a game in which the opening hour resolves in one of the most shocking moments in an early jrpg, the developmental segments of xenogears end up feeling trivial or sophomoric as a result, once the brush is put to the canvas and takahashi/saga's grand vision begins to take form. by early disc 2, almost every major jrpg plot point has been completed and resolved. the world is no longer ambitious and explorative. it feels cold. empty. bleak. what comes next? what happens after the story is told? with a stifled frown and heavy eyes, xenogears leads you deeper and deeper into its thematic core, the heart of its very purpose and means to exist. the game constantly guts you with the uncanny feeling of anticlimax. this is a cold dead world and yours is the path that will see it through to the end. this is a game that will challenge you to push through shortcomings and wears its blemishes and faults with pride. it knows exactly what it is, and when that miasma of dread clears and that final fucking screen appears and in bold letters it declares EXACTLY what it set out to be, a greater purpose in store that never came, you'll understand - if you're anything like me, if you and i see art similarly at all, you'll feel what i felt.
stand tall and shake the heavens.
during this playthrough of xenogears (my fifth) accompanied by veteran xeno fans and wide-eyed newcomers, i had the opportunity to reflect on this game through several points of view all at once, reflect on my journey as an artist and a person, and what xenogears means to me now at this point in my life. i've lived the lives of many of xenogears' characters - i've been fei, i've been elly, i've been billy, i've been hammer, i've been ramsus - and the intricate web of connections, lies, deceptions, and relationships that are bound in xenogears' vast expanse feel closely related to me own. this is a game that breathes through me in a way virtually no others except its older sibling has.
xenogears encapsulates the purpose of discovery in the wide world of gaming more than ever now - this is a game which has essentially been deliberately pushed to the bookends of time, having the perfect works narrative constantly tweaked and redefined through the likes of xenosaga and now, loosely, xenoblade, and while its contemporary b-tier influence psx jrpgs like legend of mana, chrono cross and saga frontier continue to see re-releases and re-imaginings, xenogears stands tall all on its own merits, an amber bauble of its era. yes, it's a mess of a game, but i'd hardly change anything about it.
disc 2 is a common topic of controversy when it comes to xenogears, and i'm a vehement defender. in a period of the story where it feels as if the entire tone set up within the first major arcs has been dissolved and a hulking, ugly, hateful core rests underneath it all, disc 2 captures (albeit unintentionally, i know) a paranoid, scatterbrained approach that feels exactly as claustrophobic, distorted and maligned as i think it SHOULD. for a game in which the opening hour resolves in one of the most shocking moments in an early jrpg, the developmental segments of xenogears end up feeling trivial or sophomoric as a result, once the brush is put to the canvas and takahashi/saga's grand vision begins to take form. by early disc 2, almost every major jrpg plot point has been completed and resolved. the world is no longer ambitious and explorative. it feels cold. empty. bleak. what comes next? what happens after the story is told? with a stifled frown and heavy eyes, xenogears leads you deeper and deeper into its thematic core, the heart of its very purpose and means to exist. the game constantly guts you with the uncanny feeling of anticlimax. this is a cold dead world and yours is the path that will see it through to the end. this is a game that will challenge you to push through shortcomings and wears its blemishes and faults with pride. it knows exactly what it is, and when that miasma of dread clears and that final fucking screen appears and in bold letters it declares EXACTLY what it set out to be, a greater purpose in store that never came, you'll understand - if you're anything like me, if you and i see art similarly at all, you'll feel what i felt.
stand tall and shake the heavens.
I get it now
“I am Alpha and Omega…
The beginning and the end…
The first and the last…”
I first played and finished Xenogears toward the end of February this year. Every day since 02/21/2021, I have thought about at least one aspect of Xenogears. Never have I played a video game that has entered my mind so relentlessly after finishing it. Since that day, I have wanted to write a review for the game, but I felt I had nothing to say that others before me haven’t already. I’m now going to make the foolish mistake of attempting to put into words just why I need to talk about it anyway.
“Those eyes were what scared me. When I looked in your eyes I saw myself staring back.”
Originally conceptualized as both a possibility for Final Fantasy VII and a potential sequel to Chrono Trigger, Xenogears did not receive the budget or support from SquareSoft as either game it could have been. This shows in its presentation graphically, opting for 2D sprites in 3D environments over the fully-3D visuals the team wished for. This could be considered “dated” by today’s standards, but if you enjoy games from the era as much as I do, you will feel right at home. By the second disc, the gap in budget and focus becomes painfully apparent as gameplay is sacrificed for the sake of finishing the story. This decision will not sit well with many, but I personally did not care much as the story content presented more than made up for the lack of consistent gameplay in the last third of the game. To make matters worse, Xenogears was meant to be the fifth part in a six-part series. Square even attempted to pressure the team into releasing Xenogears as disc one alone, but the team rightfully refused. Despite all these problems, Xenogears was finished (in a manner of speaking) and its message made clear to any who have played it.
"It's because they are weak that they can develop kindness... and never look down on people."
As with many RPGs worth mentioning, the story, characters, and world are what make Xenogears memorable, but that doesn’t mean the gameplay falls short in any regard. Combat is handled in two separate but linked forms—ground combat and Gear combat. Ground combat blends traditional ATB combat from Final Fantasy with a new Deathblow system. Characters perform attacks using the triangle, square, and cross buttons at the expense of Action Points (AP). The strength and AP cost increase from triangle to square to cross, but the accuracy decreases. This adds a layer of depth and strategy to the combat—should you risk a miss for higher damage or play it safe with weaker attacks? On top of this are the Deathblows themselves. Once you have reached the appropriate power level and experience in each attack move, characters will learn Deathblows—flashy and powerful combo finishers that make up the bulk of the damage in ground combat. AP can also be stored for future turns, allowing characters to unleash a flurry of Deathblow chains to decimate enemies.
As one might expect from reading the title, machines are involved in the form of Gears that will excite anyone familiar with the mecha genre in Japanese media. Gears perform differently in that characters must balance fuel supply and build attack power over multiple turns rather than simply performing Deathblows. Gears are customizable, allowing for more risk & reward-based strategies in combat. Should you focus on raw power? Maybe you’d rather have survivability with higher defense and more fuel efficiency.
“It’s okay not to feel ‘whole’. Even if you feel only partly complete, if you repeat that enough, it’ll eventually be ‘whole’. A part… is better than zero.”
The story of Xenogears is difficult to sell to anyone not already familiar with the game without spoiling something major in its narrative. Xenogears tackles a myriad of concepts and draws from a ridiculous amount of sources. Its influences range from numerous mecha anime to American novels and films to several paths of psychology and even a few different sects of religion. As I want to keep this review as free of spoilers as possible, I will only touch upon the themes in Xenogears lightly.
A war generations in the making finds its way to the village of pacifist Fei Fong Wong. The soldiers pilot giant weaponized mobile suits known as Gears. Caught in the crossfire, Fei takes control of a Gear himself to defend his village, thrusting him deep into the conflict. As he travels the world, Fei looks for a reason to fight, a place to call home, and sets out to discover his true self.
Through its characters and world, Xenogears tackles the horrors of war, the desire to change the world, helplessness and self-loathing, the impact of parents’ actions on their children’s psyche, psychological trauma and coping mechanisms in response, relationships that transcend lifetimes, the pursuits of retribution and redemption, fate, discrimination, god and the demiurge, the wakes of disaster brought about by blind faith, the loss of humanity through the evolution of science, the power of confluence, and last but not least—becoming whole.
Xenogears approaches all of these concepts with a surprising level of maturity and depth rarely seen in videogames during this period. Through its rough translations performed by mostly a single man, the messages of Xenogears are profound, thought-provoking, and long-lasting. I reflect upon its themes and narrative beats on a daily basis, simply because its impact is so strong.
“That dream changed me... That dream was the catalyst for me to resolve what my purpose was. I think I know now... What I have to do... That long, long memory of a dream... Perhaps it was the memory of my soul...”
The characters of Xenogears are a mixed bag ranging from outstanding to good to practically nonexistent. For a party consisting of nine playable characters, only five of them receive a notable amount of focus and depth. Fei Fong Wong in particular is what I would consider a true contender for the greatest and most engaging protagonist in any video game. Early on, Fei shows glimpses of a deeply flawed, but ultimately human character. As the player learns more about Fei, the intricacies that make up a truly complex individual shine magnificently through his struggles. I have never been so eager to learn more about the protagonist of a game than in Xenogears.
As the deuteragonist, Elly is a perfect compliment to Fei. Much like Fei, Elly has many human characteristics without feeling outlandish or without flaw. Her growth and connection to the central plot are unexpected and rewarding to say the least. She is one of the best examples of how to write a female character in my opinion. Though she is bound to another in the narrative, Elly can stand on her own with her personal conflicts and traits.
Citan and Bart are also worthy of note, but the rest unfortunately fall flat, becoming nothing more than background noise after their respective moment.
Though half of the main cast are not within the same ballpark as Fei or Elly, the villains more than make up for the weaker examples. Each major villain is given ample screentime and attention to fully develop them into human characters much like Fei. This is not a simple good versus evil plotline. Every major player has their stake in the world’s affairs for good reason, and conflicts are far from black & white.
"Music is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it makes people remember things they do not expect. Many thoughts, feelings, memories... things almost forgotten... Regardless of whether the listener desires to remember or not."
The music in Xenogears is simply phenomenal. Composed by SquareSoft veteran Yasunori Mitsuda—famous for his work on Chrono Trigger—the soundtrack of Xenogears is beautifully crafted with nearly every song being memorable and impactful. The only problem with the soundtrack is that it consists of under 50 songs. For a title that takes place over the course of 50 or more hours, this means that a number of songs are replayed at inopportune times, potentially lessening the impact of their original use. Despite that, it is easily one of my favorite soundtracks in video games and helps create unforgettable moments within the narrative. I cannot imagine Xenogears without it.
"You appear to be looking forward, but in reality you're only looking downward. You're only looking at yourself. Like that, you will find nothing."
Xenogears is not a perfect game. It has a number of production issues, a very shoddy translation, some unbalanced pacing, and the second disc is practically a slideshow. But, despite these shortcomings, I cannot recommend this game enough. With every new scene, questions are raised and seeds are planted to grow into awe-inspiring revelations and conflicts. To anyone that enjoys storytelling, complex characters, emotional moments, JRPGs, and insightful concepts… you must play this game. I cannot objectively give this game a full 10/10 simply for the problems caused by its scope, but in my mind, it is a masterpiece. Do not pass this one up.
STAND TALL AND SHAKE THE HEAVENS
The beginning and the end…
The first and the last…”
I first played and finished Xenogears toward the end of February this year. Every day since 02/21/2021, I have thought about at least one aspect of Xenogears. Never have I played a video game that has entered my mind so relentlessly after finishing it. Since that day, I have wanted to write a review for the game, but I felt I had nothing to say that others before me haven’t already. I’m now going to make the foolish mistake of attempting to put into words just why I need to talk about it anyway.
“Those eyes were what scared me. When I looked in your eyes I saw myself staring back.”
Originally conceptualized as both a possibility for Final Fantasy VII and a potential sequel to Chrono Trigger, Xenogears did not receive the budget or support from SquareSoft as either game it could have been. This shows in its presentation graphically, opting for 2D sprites in 3D environments over the fully-3D visuals the team wished for. This could be considered “dated” by today’s standards, but if you enjoy games from the era as much as I do, you will feel right at home. By the second disc, the gap in budget and focus becomes painfully apparent as gameplay is sacrificed for the sake of finishing the story. This decision will not sit well with many, but I personally did not care much as the story content presented more than made up for the lack of consistent gameplay in the last third of the game. To make matters worse, Xenogears was meant to be the fifth part in a six-part series. Square even attempted to pressure the team into releasing Xenogears as disc one alone, but the team rightfully refused. Despite all these problems, Xenogears was finished (in a manner of speaking) and its message made clear to any who have played it.
"It's because they are weak that they can develop kindness... and never look down on people."
As with many RPGs worth mentioning, the story, characters, and world are what make Xenogears memorable, but that doesn’t mean the gameplay falls short in any regard. Combat is handled in two separate but linked forms—ground combat and Gear combat. Ground combat blends traditional ATB combat from Final Fantasy with a new Deathblow system. Characters perform attacks using the triangle, square, and cross buttons at the expense of Action Points (AP). The strength and AP cost increase from triangle to square to cross, but the accuracy decreases. This adds a layer of depth and strategy to the combat—should you risk a miss for higher damage or play it safe with weaker attacks? On top of this are the Deathblows themselves. Once you have reached the appropriate power level and experience in each attack move, characters will learn Deathblows—flashy and powerful combo finishers that make up the bulk of the damage in ground combat. AP can also be stored for future turns, allowing characters to unleash a flurry of Deathblow chains to decimate enemies.
As one might expect from reading the title, machines are involved in the form of Gears that will excite anyone familiar with the mecha genre in Japanese media. Gears perform differently in that characters must balance fuel supply and build attack power over multiple turns rather than simply performing Deathblows. Gears are customizable, allowing for more risk & reward-based strategies in combat. Should you focus on raw power? Maybe you’d rather have survivability with higher defense and more fuel efficiency.
“It’s okay not to feel ‘whole’. Even if you feel only partly complete, if you repeat that enough, it’ll eventually be ‘whole’. A part… is better than zero.”
The story of Xenogears is difficult to sell to anyone not already familiar with the game without spoiling something major in its narrative. Xenogears tackles a myriad of concepts and draws from a ridiculous amount of sources. Its influences range from numerous mecha anime to American novels and films to several paths of psychology and even a few different sects of religion. As I want to keep this review as free of spoilers as possible, I will only touch upon the themes in Xenogears lightly.
A war generations in the making finds its way to the village of pacifist Fei Fong Wong. The soldiers pilot giant weaponized mobile suits known as Gears. Caught in the crossfire, Fei takes control of a Gear himself to defend his village, thrusting him deep into the conflict. As he travels the world, Fei looks for a reason to fight, a place to call home, and sets out to discover his true self.
Through its characters and world, Xenogears tackles the horrors of war, the desire to change the world, helplessness and self-loathing, the impact of parents’ actions on their children’s psyche, psychological trauma and coping mechanisms in response, relationships that transcend lifetimes, the pursuits of retribution and redemption, fate, discrimination, god and the demiurge, the wakes of disaster brought about by blind faith, the loss of humanity through the evolution of science, the power of confluence, and last but not least—becoming whole.
Xenogears approaches all of these concepts with a surprising level of maturity and depth rarely seen in videogames during this period. Through its rough translations performed by mostly a single man, the messages of Xenogears are profound, thought-provoking, and long-lasting. I reflect upon its themes and narrative beats on a daily basis, simply because its impact is so strong.
“That dream changed me... That dream was the catalyst for me to resolve what my purpose was. I think I know now... What I have to do... That long, long memory of a dream... Perhaps it was the memory of my soul...”
The characters of Xenogears are a mixed bag ranging from outstanding to good to practically nonexistent. For a party consisting of nine playable characters, only five of them receive a notable amount of focus and depth. Fei Fong Wong in particular is what I would consider a true contender for the greatest and most engaging protagonist in any video game. Early on, Fei shows glimpses of a deeply flawed, but ultimately human character. As the player learns more about Fei, the intricacies that make up a truly complex individual shine magnificently through his struggles. I have never been so eager to learn more about the protagonist of a game than in Xenogears.
As the deuteragonist, Elly is a perfect compliment to Fei. Much like Fei, Elly has many human characteristics without feeling outlandish or without flaw. Her growth and connection to the central plot are unexpected and rewarding to say the least. She is one of the best examples of how to write a female character in my opinion. Though she is bound to another in the narrative, Elly can stand on her own with her personal conflicts and traits.
Citan and Bart are also worthy of note, but the rest unfortunately fall flat, becoming nothing more than background noise after their respective moment.
Though half of the main cast are not within the same ballpark as Fei or Elly, the villains more than make up for the weaker examples. Each major villain is given ample screentime and attention to fully develop them into human characters much like Fei. This is not a simple good versus evil plotline. Every major player has their stake in the world’s affairs for good reason, and conflicts are far from black & white.
"Music is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it makes people remember things they do not expect. Many thoughts, feelings, memories... things almost forgotten... Regardless of whether the listener desires to remember or not."
The music in Xenogears is simply phenomenal. Composed by SquareSoft veteran Yasunori Mitsuda—famous for his work on Chrono Trigger—the soundtrack of Xenogears is beautifully crafted with nearly every song being memorable and impactful. The only problem with the soundtrack is that it consists of under 50 songs. For a title that takes place over the course of 50 or more hours, this means that a number of songs are replayed at inopportune times, potentially lessening the impact of their original use. Despite that, it is easily one of my favorite soundtracks in video games and helps create unforgettable moments within the narrative. I cannot imagine Xenogears without it.
"You appear to be looking forward, but in reality you're only looking downward. You're only looking at yourself. Like that, you will find nothing."
Xenogears is not a perfect game. It has a number of production issues, a very shoddy translation, some unbalanced pacing, and the second disc is practically a slideshow. But, despite these shortcomings, I cannot recommend this game enough. With every new scene, questions are raised and seeds are planted to grow into awe-inspiring revelations and conflicts. To anyone that enjoys storytelling, complex characters, emotional moments, JRPGs, and insightful concepts… you must play this game. I cannot objectively give this game a full 10/10 simply for the problems caused by its scope, but in my mind, it is a masterpiece. Do not pass this one up.
STAND TALL AND SHAKE THE HEAVENS
bart
This is a work from the time when Square was the strongest game company in Japan, both in name and reality.
If there is a point or an ultimate in storytelling in a game scenario, this work is the closest to it.
For me, this is one of the standards of "game scenario". When I play a game that deals with robots, especially a later one, I always think of this one first.
In this sense, "13 sentinels" was a failure. (I'll write more about it in my review of The 13 sentinels).
As a child at the time of its release, I was simply overwhelmed by the worldview, which was based on mythology and religion, with parodies and homages to multiple science fiction and anime.
To digress a little, let me explain the historical/cultural context in which this game was made.
Christianity is not generally understood in Japan (although some people are very passionate about it), so the heretical Gnosticism is not understood, nor is Nietzsche, who criticised Christianity itself, except for a few crazies. Freud, Jung and Adler have also gained acceptance in recent years, but only subtly.
I have no idea how this tendency to disregard religion has evolved in other countries.
In the case of Japan, the Aum Shinrikyo affair has led to a view of religion that can be seen as fearful, contemptuous or allergic.
In this context, with the exception of a series of works by Atlus (Megami Tensei and its offshoot, Persona), the culture of understanding and incorporating mythology and religion into games has died out.
Nowadays, myths and religions are treated as ornaments that look good and "seem to have a deeper meaning that we don't know what it is".
Again, For me, the standard of game scenario is this work. It's like a trauma.
It is both happy and unhappy.
When it was released,
“Wait, wait. I don't understand all that theological and philosophical!"
"Do you usually put in stories/parodies of minor works like this?”
"It's crazy! Whoever made this is crazy!"
I was like.
As of 2021, I played it again.
"It's crazy…”
The conclusion of the game is quite simple, however, despite all the mythological and philosophical themes and episodes.
Human weakness and strength, cruelty and kindness, ugliness and beauty. Above all, men and women. Fei and Elly are two people who make you feel all kinds of emotions.
It's easy to get caught up in the huge number of settings and deep themes, but the heart of the xenogears is the story. The later Xeno series forgot about this.
Xenoblade 2 has been released, but it's probably a strategic defeat. (I don't feel like playing.)
Not that it matters, but the Xeno series is like Woody Allen. (Repeating the cycle of masterpieces and bad movies)
I hate believers. A masterpiece is a masterpiece, and if it doesn't live up to that, it's a defeat, and if it doesn't, you're just a bad.
There's a lot more to say, but it's probably over 10,000 words, so I'll leave it to someone else.
Is it a something sign that this year (2021) there are some many good commentary videos on this game?
Explanations and videos of Xenogears that I thought were good. (Memo for myself.)
I think it's great what they're trying to do.
https://www.youtube.com/user/WarialaskyPlays
A clear explanatory video that goes beyond the Perfect Works. (Japanese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnCo3HQnRF0
A very challenging Xenogears video that goes beyond the strategy guide. (Japanese. He's crazy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvNteIg9dw
If there is a point or an ultimate in storytelling in a game scenario, this work is the closest to it.
For me, this is one of the standards of "game scenario". When I play a game that deals with robots, especially a later one, I always think of this one first.
In this sense, "13 sentinels" was a failure. (I'll write more about it in my review of The 13 sentinels).
As a child at the time of its release, I was simply overwhelmed by the worldview, which was based on mythology and religion, with parodies and homages to multiple science fiction and anime.
To digress a little, let me explain the historical/cultural context in which this game was made.
Christianity is not generally understood in Japan (although some people are very passionate about it), so the heretical Gnosticism is not understood, nor is Nietzsche, who criticised Christianity itself, except for a few crazies. Freud, Jung and Adler have also gained acceptance in recent years, but only subtly.
I have no idea how this tendency to disregard religion has evolved in other countries.
In the case of Japan, the Aum Shinrikyo affair has led to a view of religion that can be seen as fearful, contemptuous or allergic.
In this context, with the exception of a series of works by Atlus (Megami Tensei and its offshoot, Persona), the culture of understanding and incorporating mythology and religion into games has died out.
Nowadays, myths and religions are treated as ornaments that look good and "seem to have a deeper meaning that we don't know what it is".
Again, For me, the standard of game scenario is this work. It's like a trauma.
It is both happy and unhappy.
When it was released,
“Wait, wait. I don't understand all that theological and philosophical!"
"Do you usually put in stories/parodies of minor works like this?”
"It's crazy! Whoever made this is crazy!"
I was like.
As of 2021, I played it again.
"It's crazy…”
The conclusion of the game is quite simple, however, despite all the mythological and philosophical themes and episodes.
Human weakness and strength, cruelty and kindness, ugliness and beauty. Above all, men and women. Fei and Elly are two people who make you feel all kinds of emotions.
It's easy to get caught up in the huge number of settings and deep themes, but the heart of the xenogears is the story. The later Xeno series forgot about this.
Xenoblade 2 has been released, but it's probably a strategic defeat. (I don't feel like playing.)
Not that it matters, but the Xeno series is like Woody Allen. (Repeating the cycle of masterpieces and bad movies)
I hate believers. A masterpiece is a masterpiece, and if it doesn't live up to that, it's a defeat, and if it doesn't, you're just a bad.
There's a lot more to say, but it's probably over 10,000 words, so I'll leave it to someone else.
Is it a something sign that this year (2021) there are some many good commentary videos on this game?
Explanations and videos of Xenogears that I thought were good. (Memo for myself.)
I think it's great what they're trying to do.
https://www.youtube.com/user/WarialaskyPlays
A clear explanatory video that goes beyond the Perfect Works. (Japanese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnCo3HQnRF0
A very challenging Xenogears video that goes beyond the strategy guide. (Japanese. He's crazy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvNteIg9dw
Not putting stars because folk on this site are fuckin' weirdos about specific games, but I'm baffled as to how this became a beloved classic.
Playing it feels like treading treacle. I shouldn't have tortured myself by continuing on hours and hours after I lost all interest. I would usually drop something like that these days, but I had to know. I had to see what the fuss was about. Everybody who ever told me this was great should give me ten quid. How dare you?!
The game is spitting bible shit at me, and it just hits nothing. Lots of terms you know, but they feel empty. I want to blame the dodgy translation, but god (wahey) knows how accurate any of it is, because a quick google brings up either how it was painstakingly done to be as faithful (another one) as possible, or chucked together by one dude in a month. Whatever the case is, it regularly has conversations that just don't make any sense, and not because of weird references you might not know, but pure incorrect grammar, syntax, or replies that have no relation to what was just said. It's maddening.
The combat is such good fun with brilliant spritework, then they throw in mechs and you think "Oh baby here we go", but they fuck it. Combat inside your gear is tedious as shit. Your deathblows learned in normal fights allow you to do more moves when in the mech, but just using any of these moves requires you to do a series of weak shit attacks to build the power to perform a deathblow. It sounds kinda cool at first, but quickly becomes a chore on top of managing fuel as well as your health. Every fight inside your gears was an ordeal. They ruined giant robots.
I realise I have interchangeably used gears/mechs above. The game likes to do this too with all its various factions and races, or even characters with 2 or 3 names. This gets done seemingly at random and I had to go googling every time to check which person/faction/race they were referring to. At this point I still do not know exactly what Kislev, Zeboim, and Aveh are. It disnae matter. I'm done.
Disc 2 lmao
At one point during a lengthy visual novel part, I went "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME KARATE CHOP A GUY" out loud.
Playing it feels like treading treacle. I shouldn't have tortured myself by continuing on hours and hours after I lost all interest. I would usually drop something like that these days, but I had to know. I had to see what the fuss was about. Everybody who ever told me this was great should give me ten quid. How dare you?!
The game is spitting bible shit at me, and it just hits nothing. Lots of terms you know, but they feel empty. I want to blame the dodgy translation, but god (wahey) knows how accurate any of it is, because a quick google brings up either how it was painstakingly done to be as faithful (another one) as possible, or chucked together by one dude in a month. Whatever the case is, it regularly has conversations that just don't make any sense, and not because of weird references you might not know, but pure incorrect grammar, syntax, or replies that have no relation to what was just said. It's maddening.
The combat is such good fun with brilliant spritework, then they throw in mechs and you think "Oh baby here we go", but they fuck it. Combat inside your gear is tedious as shit. Your deathblows learned in normal fights allow you to do more moves when in the mech, but just using any of these moves requires you to do a series of weak shit attacks to build the power to perform a deathblow. It sounds kinda cool at first, but quickly becomes a chore on top of managing fuel as well as your health. Every fight inside your gears was an ordeal. They ruined giant robots.
I realise I have interchangeably used gears/mechs above. The game likes to do this too with all its various factions and races, or even characters with 2 or 3 names. This gets done seemingly at random and I had to go googling every time to check which person/faction/race they were referring to. At this point I still do not know exactly what Kislev, Zeboim, and Aveh are. It disnae matter. I'm done.
Disc 2 lmao
At one point during a lengthy visual novel part, I went "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME KARATE CHOP A GUY" out loud.
This review contains spoilers
Xenogears is the messiest game I’ve ever played. There’s so much I love about this game and still so much frustrates me playing it.
I wanna start with what I think is the most fascinating thing about xenogears. I want to shoutout @NeonMorris’s review for the idea of xenogears using religious iconography, symbolism, kabbalah, psychoanalysis, etc not to comment on those things but rather to build and demonstrate the oppressive systems and structures governing society and the effects it has on the fracturing of people.
To take it a step further, the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox.
The intro of lahan village so effortlessly creates the facade of peaceful idyllic jrpg starting zone with funky characters, cool jokes, romantic tension, well-meaning people, and then shatters it in an instant sending the main character out into a world of political machinations and wars that have no meaning, and into his own fractured identity of a transplant of a transplant of a transplant.
This pattern continues, spiralling further and further into madness. First, a desert kingdom of an abdicated prince turned pirate because of a tyrant. But actually that tyrant is a stooge. He’s playing into the hands of some other force. But actually the real bad guy is not that force but rather this other empire of interlinking cells and prisons stepping on an underclass of demihumans. But actually it’s not the empire that’s bad but rather the ufo’s that visit the empire and give them shit to oppress people with and wage war for power with. But actually it’s the church running all of this shit, they’re the ones in charge to shepard the masses into a false and bloody heaven. Nope, the church is a front. Always been a front, duh. It’s actually these evil creatures that a priest must exterminate by stylishly shooting firearms out of the sleeves of his loose robes. Oh wait, those are just humans too, turned into nightmares by an oppressive force overseeing the church...
The rabithole continues, endlessly, until the discovery that god is an interstellar weapon who invented humans to be spare parts for his reviving body, and it’s like, what then? Was all of this meaningless?
It is in this futile but necessary exercise of breaking shackles of enclosure around the world of the player and the world of xenogears characters, only to discover yet another world of shackles on top of that one, in an endless domino effect, that defines xenogears for me. Even the symbolism, the religious overtones, the political intrigue, the gnostic lexicon, are all systems to rigidly structure the world. Everything is overflowing with keywords, references, and historical implications. Every question answered leads to tens more.
The game succeeds at expressing this aspect through scene structure. Most chapters in this game change the general loop of the game to create a “sub-game” that imitate the stakes of the next fake world of hierarchy the heroes are in. The kislev prison block section comes to mind as almost a mystery game of its own with distinct sections that all feel different, leading to an overseas section that feels completely different in style and tone. The “shape” of this game’s narrative is my favorite part about it.
In keeping with its gnostic message and spirit of the material universe being a cruel, twisted facsimile of the immaterial and spiritual world, the worlds of xenogears are each facsimiles containing each other like an endless matryoshka doll, even god itself. The search for truth can only be brought through a gnosis of human connection, something beyond the material, the bonds of people coming together and breaking through the systems of history, government, psychosis, etc. to find the true god, the god that resides in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man.. And so on.
A lot of what frustrates me about this game, however, is in the gameplay. While I like the structure of the scenes and narrative pacing, I don’t feel the game’s themes of oppression or shattered character psyche’s are expressed particularly well through the combat.
I think the parallels through on-foot combat and gear combat are cool in the sense that the gears represent a kind of exponential manifestation of the growing physical will of the characters.
On foot combat basically has 3 questions you need to keep in mind each turn.
Do you want to prioritize learning new deathblows (permanent skills that will make on-gear capabilities higher too)? If so, noodle around and press random buttons without causing a learned deathblow, knowing this is suboptimal for damage,
Do you want to use a deathblow to cause some short term bursts of damage? End your combo in a deathblow to do some damage, but you won’t gain much in the long term of this battle and the long term after this battle.
Do you want to stock up points to pull off a combo of learned deathblows? Use one or a few moves to do very little damage, to get little long term reward for after this battle, for the sake of doing a huge combo of all your current potential ability.
Spells and items add only but a little to these three key questions, but I would say on paper these make a generally decently interesting combat system. The problem is by the end of disc 1 most of the enemies act the same way and by disc 2 there are so few on-foot combat sections it barely matters at all. I don’t think the game has enough combat encounters to really push this system to what it can do.
The mech combat system is even simpler. You don’t want to run out of health or fuel, and you want to do attacks that maximize those perimeters. You can’t learn new abilities in gear, so you only need to consider the extent of the current battle and maybe battles after this one if you foresee trouble with fuel/health.
It would be a lot better if you could get off gears mid battle, or if the game had more sections where choosing between being in a gear and being on foot had more of an impact, but more often than not, you have to be in one or the other, and most of the time you’re not even sure which it’s gonna be till you get in the dungeon, making choosing party members difficult.
I had like three party members with near maxed out deathblows with everyone else barely at half their movelists. The game is structured well for narrative, but it isn’t structured well to utilize its own systems, and the combat scenarios are not designed well enough to test the player on its own concepts.
Parts of it remind me of dragon quest 8, with the idea of sacrificing damage to build up future damage, and protecting yourself in that build-up. When it works, it feels great, but it stops working eventually. The gear combat on the other hand, mainly feels fun for delivering flashy animations and seeing the theatrics of these large things perform martial arts moves, but not much more than that. Spend more fuel for faster turns, and use my attack levels now or keep building up more for a larger one are about the only questions you need to ask with them.
The spell system works, but it feels very minimal and mainly included because they felt it was “necessary”. While eventually the magic system of the game is explained with intriguing lore, I found that it didn’t add that much to the combat system, mostly being very situational.
Character customization was similarly minimal. There are some choices to be made, but it’s neither particularly demanding, interesting, nor streamlined or user-friendly.
The game is being pulled in lots of different directions, certain parts of the game have things that are only ever used in that one part, and never mentioned again. Things like the weight mechanic, card game, gear battler, etc. While they are cool, I think it’s a bit too much and too messy, and as a result, nothing but cutscenes and narrative structure feels particularly concentrated on as the lead voice of the ensemble of these elements.
The narrative, although the best part of the game, isn’t without flaws either. I think many scenes are in need of editing and trimming. Some lines just go on for way too long, some parts of conversations are just absurd to me in delivery (billy telling bart he almost went into prostitution to be able to afford care for his sister, in front of all the characters he just met) feel hamfisted and overbearing. There are needless repetitions in the script, like: the player being explained the ignas/kislev war at the start, only for parts of it to be reexplained to fei later; fei being incapacitated multiple times in the game, sometimes for the same reasons; fei being nearly put in carbonite once to introduce carbonite as a concept, then the same scene happens again but this time they actually put him in the carbonite; nanomachines turning people into mutants several times in disc 2, etc. Stuff just seems to be happening multiple times when it didn’t need to and served little purpose.
Furthermore I was rather disappointed with disc 2’s storytelling style. When I saw screenshots and videos of people sitting in chairs, I got really excited to see what that was all about. But it didn’t really work for me. I think the visual of people in chairs suspended in space with giant objects floating around them gave me the impression that disc 2 was gonna be the moment where the game stops paying as much attention to the world and its properties and more on the characters and their issues, their minds, what makes them tick. But instead of that, the characters were simply almost recalling things that happened or they had done as if they were dreams of distant memories, with little focus on character writing aside from the first few dreams. While thematically making sense given the end-game revelations, I’m not sure of the tone they were going for with it. When the seated characters are spouting paragraphs of text, I still don’t know how to read those parts in terms of tone. Are they wistful? Regretful? Melancholic? Sometimes I feel like they should be, but it reads more neutrally in some scenes. While I think it looks great, it comes off clumsy. And it’s clear when playing the game that the game systems would not have been able to last long enough or be able to retain interest even if those sections were fleshed out, the combat, exploration, and customization would’ve gotten even staler faster had that been the case. And I wish there were some kind of explanation as to why they were dreaming all those scenes. Maybe something like they were all swallowed by the zohar modifier or being restructured into deus while fei was speaking to the wave existence, just SOMETHING to contextualize it.
I wanna say lastly, as cool as the idea of fei and elly as characters and entities are, I found a lot of the scenes between them, especially on disc 2, kind of bad. Elly is damselled way too often in this game needing the player to rescue her or help her in general, but by disc 2, Fei kind of speaks very chauvinistically toward her and it’s not clear if it’s meant to be read that way. I found it jarring and distracting from what should be an eternal romance echoed through time. Elly’s character in general felt very weak-willed for a lot of the game except for when she needed to not be and she suddenly became a mother Theresa figure to all the downtrodden(??), which felt rather sudden a development for me personally.
There were still some great scenes between them earlier on, I especially liked the ones where Fei tells her to stop doing those dang drugs and holds her gear down with his own, and the one where he shows her Kislev being destroyed on the ground level to show her the true effects of her staying in the army.
—————————————————————
Sorry if this review is all over the place, but this is a game that goes in so many directions it can be hard to keep track. I feel I really need to replay this game at least one to two more times to really even keep a handle on it, and probably read more perfect works, listen to more podcasts, play xenosaga, etc etc.
If it were my choice, however, I do not think xenogears works best as a game. I think if they were to remake it, it would be great to see it as an anime series rather than a game (although I would be interested in hearing opposing opinions on why the game aspects of this game help it). Since I am incapable of refraining, I’ve already spent many afternoons daydreaming how this story would look as an anime. I would personally keep the mixed media style of the game, and have the characters be animated in 2D (or 3D that looks identical to 2D thanks to shaders) similar to the art style they have in the game, but with slightly more realism and more shading on skin tone. The backgrounds would be either photographs or models, or at least realistically textured rendered metallic corridors when applicable, and the gears could be physically photographed models as well. I think it would make for a cool and experimental aesthetic beyond the typical 3d/2d type stuff seen in evangelion rebuilds.
I wanna start with what I think is the most fascinating thing about xenogears. I want to shoutout @NeonMorris’s review for the idea of xenogears using religious iconography, symbolism, kabbalah, psychoanalysis, etc not to comment on those things but rather to build and demonstrate the oppressive systems and structures governing society and the effects it has on the fracturing of people.
To take it a step further, the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox.
The intro of lahan village so effortlessly creates the facade of peaceful idyllic jrpg starting zone with funky characters, cool jokes, romantic tension, well-meaning people, and then shatters it in an instant sending the main character out into a world of political machinations and wars that have no meaning, and into his own fractured identity of a transplant of a transplant of a transplant.
This pattern continues, spiralling further and further into madness. First, a desert kingdom of an abdicated prince turned pirate because of a tyrant. But actually that tyrant is a stooge. He’s playing into the hands of some other force. But actually the real bad guy is not that force but rather this other empire of interlinking cells and prisons stepping on an underclass of demihumans. But actually it’s not the empire that’s bad but rather the ufo’s that visit the empire and give them shit to oppress people with and wage war for power with. But actually it’s the church running all of this shit, they’re the ones in charge to shepard the masses into a false and bloody heaven. Nope, the church is a front. Always been a front, duh. It’s actually these evil creatures that a priest must exterminate by stylishly shooting firearms out of the sleeves of his loose robes. Oh wait, those are just humans too, turned into nightmares by an oppressive force overseeing the church...
The rabithole continues, endlessly, until the discovery that god is an interstellar weapon who invented humans to be spare parts for his reviving body, and it’s like, what then? Was all of this meaningless?
It is in this futile but necessary exercise of breaking shackles of enclosure around the world of the player and the world of xenogears characters, only to discover yet another world of shackles on top of that one, in an endless domino effect, that defines xenogears for me. Even the symbolism, the religious overtones, the political intrigue, the gnostic lexicon, are all systems to rigidly structure the world. Everything is overflowing with keywords, references, and historical implications. Every question answered leads to tens more.
The game succeeds at expressing this aspect through scene structure. Most chapters in this game change the general loop of the game to create a “sub-game” that imitate the stakes of the next fake world of hierarchy the heroes are in. The kislev prison block section comes to mind as almost a mystery game of its own with distinct sections that all feel different, leading to an overseas section that feels completely different in style and tone. The “shape” of this game’s narrative is my favorite part about it.
In keeping with its gnostic message and spirit of the material universe being a cruel, twisted facsimile of the immaterial and spiritual world, the worlds of xenogears are each facsimiles containing each other like an endless matryoshka doll, even god itself. The search for truth can only be brought through a gnosis of human connection, something beyond the material, the bonds of people coming together and breaking through the systems of history, government, psychosis, etc. to find the true god, the god that resides in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man.. And so on.
A lot of what frustrates me about this game, however, is in the gameplay. While I like the structure of the scenes and narrative pacing, I don’t feel the game’s themes of oppression or shattered character psyche’s are expressed particularly well through the combat.
I think the parallels through on-foot combat and gear combat are cool in the sense that the gears represent a kind of exponential manifestation of the growing physical will of the characters.
On foot combat basically has 3 questions you need to keep in mind each turn.
Do you want to prioritize learning new deathblows (permanent skills that will make on-gear capabilities higher too)? If so, noodle around and press random buttons without causing a learned deathblow, knowing this is suboptimal for damage,
Do you want to use a deathblow to cause some short term bursts of damage? End your combo in a deathblow to do some damage, but you won’t gain much in the long term of this battle and the long term after this battle.
Do you want to stock up points to pull off a combo of learned deathblows? Use one or a few moves to do very little damage, to get little long term reward for after this battle, for the sake of doing a huge combo of all your current potential ability.
Spells and items add only but a little to these three key questions, but I would say on paper these make a generally decently interesting combat system. The problem is by the end of disc 1 most of the enemies act the same way and by disc 2 there are so few on-foot combat sections it barely matters at all. I don’t think the game has enough combat encounters to really push this system to what it can do.
The mech combat system is even simpler. You don’t want to run out of health or fuel, and you want to do attacks that maximize those perimeters. You can’t learn new abilities in gear, so you only need to consider the extent of the current battle and maybe battles after this one if you foresee trouble with fuel/health.
It would be a lot better if you could get off gears mid battle, or if the game had more sections where choosing between being in a gear and being on foot had more of an impact, but more often than not, you have to be in one or the other, and most of the time you’re not even sure which it’s gonna be till you get in the dungeon, making choosing party members difficult.
I had like three party members with near maxed out deathblows with everyone else barely at half their movelists. The game is structured well for narrative, but it isn’t structured well to utilize its own systems, and the combat scenarios are not designed well enough to test the player on its own concepts.
Parts of it remind me of dragon quest 8, with the idea of sacrificing damage to build up future damage, and protecting yourself in that build-up. When it works, it feels great, but it stops working eventually. The gear combat on the other hand, mainly feels fun for delivering flashy animations and seeing the theatrics of these large things perform martial arts moves, but not much more than that. Spend more fuel for faster turns, and use my attack levels now or keep building up more for a larger one are about the only questions you need to ask with them.
The spell system works, but it feels very minimal and mainly included because they felt it was “necessary”. While eventually the magic system of the game is explained with intriguing lore, I found that it didn’t add that much to the combat system, mostly being very situational.
Character customization was similarly minimal. There are some choices to be made, but it’s neither particularly demanding, interesting, nor streamlined or user-friendly.
The game is being pulled in lots of different directions, certain parts of the game have things that are only ever used in that one part, and never mentioned again. Things like the weight mechanic, card game, gear battler, etc. While they are cool, I think it’s a bit too much and too messy, and as a result, nothing but cutscenes and narrative structure feels particularly concentrated on as the lead voice of the ensemble of these elements.
The narrative, although the best part of the game, isn’t without flaws either. I think many scenes are in need of editing and trimming. Some lines just go on for way too long, some parts of conversations are just absurd to me in delivery (billy telling bart he almost went into prostitution to be able to afford care for his sister, in front of all the characters he just met) feel hamfisted and overbearing. There are needless repetitions in the script, like: the player being explained the ignas/kislev war at the start, only for parts of it to be reexplained to fei later; fei being incapacitated multiple times in the game, sometimes for the same reasons; fei being nearly put in carbonite once to introduce carbonite as a concept, then the same scene happens again but this time they actually put him in the carbonite; nanomachines turning people into mutants several times in disc 2, etc. Stuff just seems to be happening multiple times when it didn’t need to and served little purpose.
Furthermore I was rather disappointed with disc 2’s storytelling style. When I saw screenshots and videos of people sitting in chairs, I got really excited to see what that was all about. But it didn’t really work for me. I think the visual of people in chairs suspended in space with giant objects floating around them gave me the impression that disc 2 was gonna be the moment where the game stops paying as much attention to the world and its properties and more on the characters and their issues, their minds, what makes them tick. But instead of that, the characters were simply almost recalling things that happened or they had done as if they were dreams of distant memories, with little focus on character writing aside from the first few dreams. While thematically making sense given the end-game revelations, I’m not sure of the tone they were going for with it. When the seated characters are spouting paragraphs of text, I still don’t know how to read those parts in terms of tone. Are they wistful? Regretful? Melancholic? Sometimes I feel like they should be, but it reads more neutrally in some scenes. While I think it looks great, it comes off clumsy. And it’s clear when playing the game that the game systems would not have been able to last long enough or be able to retain interest even if those sections were fleshed out, the combat, exploration, and customization would’ve gotten even staler faster had that been the case. And I wish there were some kind of explanation as to why they were dreaming all those scenes. Maybe something like they were all swallowed by the zohar modifier or being restructured into deus while fei was speaking to the wave existence, just SOMETHING to contextualize it.
I wanna say lastly, as cool as the idea of fei and elly as characters and entities are, I found a lot of the scenes between them, especially on disc 2, kind of bad. Elly is damselled way too often in this game needing the player to rescue her or help her in general, but by disc 2, Fei kind of speaks very chauvinistically toward her and it’s not clear if it’s meant to be read that way. I found it jarring and distracting from what should be an eternal romance echoed through time. Elly’s character in general felt very weak-willed for a lot of the game except for when she needed to not be and she suddenly became a mother Theresa figure to all the downtrodden(??), which felt rather sudden a development for me personally.
There were still some great scenes between them earlier on, I especially liked the ones where Fei tells her to stop doing those dang drugs and holds her gear down with his own, and the one where he shows her Kislev being destroyed on the ground level to show her the true effects of her staying in the army.
—————————————————————
Sorry if this review is all over the place, but this is a game that goes in so many directions it can be hard to keep track. I feel I really need to replay this game at least one to two more times to really even keep a handle on it, and probably read more perfect works, listen to more podcasts, play xenosaga, etc etc.
If it were my choice, however, I do not think xenogears works best as a game. I think if they were to remake it, it would be great to see it as an anime series rather than a game (although I would be interested in hearing opposing opinions on why the game aspects of this game help it). Since I am incapable of refraining, I’ve already spent many afternoons daydreaming how this story would look as an anime. I would personally keep the mixed media style of the game, and have the characters be animated in 2D (or 3D that looks identical to 2D thanks to shaders) similar to the art style they have in the game, but with slightly more realism and more shading on skin tone. The backgrounds would be either photographs or models, or at least realistically textured rendered metallic corridors when applicable, and the gears could be physically photographed models as well. I think it would make for a cool and experimental aesthetic beyond the typical 3d/2d type stuff seen in evangelion rebuilds.
So many reviews have been written of this game, expressed more effectively than I'm able to, so rather than even try to put my thoughts together in a coherent review I'm just going to put a TL;DR at the top and vomit out random thoughts underneath (much like how this game approaches its storytelling... ooooooooh!)
TL;DR - I'm so conflicted about this game. 2.5 star reviews usually mean I'm lukewarm about the game, but in this case it's anything but. The game is so ambitious and large in its scale, with an inimitable soundtrack and sense of style that I can't bring myself to give it a negative review. But literally every aspect of its gameplay is a chore, the translation is clumsy, and its storytelling is needlessly clunky (more on this below) so I can't bring myself to give it a positive review. So 2.5 it is.
Random thoughts:
- First off. If this were an anime I'd give it 5 stars
- Enough has been written about how the camera angles and platforming make exploring a chore. But this game somehow managed to make talking to NPCs a chore too! The text scrolls uncomfortably slowly if you're a fast reader, and there is no option to change the scrolling speed. Then sometimes, NPCs will seem to finish talking (the text box even closes), but after 2 seconds they start talking again! This is usually just enough time for you to move on, see the dialog box reopen then close immediately because you walked offscreen, forcing you to go back and talk to the same guy again through like 5 windows of slowly-scrolling text.
- I was very enthused on the concept of deathblows and combos when I first started playing; there was a lot of potential to explore in that design space. I'd always felt that menu-based RPGs should give you multiple different 'free' moves (that don't use MP or items) rather than just one regular attack - for instance, one character could have a regular attack, a weaker multitarget attack, or a weak heal spell as 'free' options, which would give the player some strategic choice even if they were trying to conserve resources. The deathblow system could very much have been this! Unfortunately, the deathblows completely lacked depth as they were all single-target attacks of varying strength. The extremely fringe usefulness of combos meant that every deathblow but the most powerful one you currently had was irrelevant. In other words, rather than adding a layer of strategy to the game, the deathblow/combo system simply added tedium, turning "press X to win" into "press TTSX to win".
- I quite like the story - it's great stuff, even today. However, a pretty big caveat: if a story is going to have plenty of symbolism and require me to fill in missing gaps through inference, then two things are required. Firstly, the translation must be immaculate - not the case here. But secondly, I believe convoluted stories need to 'handhold' the viewer to some extent in terms of what is happening in the foreground of the story so that we can then make inferences about the background better. I don't think I described that very well, so here's an example of how the game didn't do it. At the beginning of the game, some giant robots land in the middle of your small village and start throwing down. A cutscene starts, you notice the cockpit of one of the robots is open, and you catch a glimpse of a mysterious figure inside. You then climb up into the mech, and... at this point I was expecting to get into a fight with the mysterious pilot, or have him jump out of the mech to escape, but nothing. I just started piloting the mech without any acknowledgement that there was anyone in the cockpit. Now the game eventually explains who the figure is (like 40 hours later) and then that scene makes sense... but I really wish they had just paid lip service to the fact that I'm not supposed to understand what happened yet. Just a throwaway line like "wasn't there someone in this mech? What happened to him?" Imagine that sort of writing but multiplied by many many times over the course of the game, and I spent 90% of the game in a perpetual state of wondering if I was actually supposed to understand what just happened and was just missing something obvious.
- Speaking of the story, its pacing had an infuriating habit of cutting away from the action that I cared about to focus on people I hadn't met yet spouting exposition I wasn't supposed to be able to understand yet. This was presumably to offer some 'bonus' for players who were going through the game a second time. There were two problems with this, however. Firstly, the scenes make for a very weak 'replay bonus' because they are completely irrelevant on your first playthrough. (Contrast this with say FFVII, where Cloud's narration of the past is relevant and interesting on first playthrough, then comes to take on an added layer when you view it through the lens of the second playthrough). But the other problem with scenes that only makes sense on second viewing is that unlike books by Diana Wynne Jones or movies by Christopher Nolan - both of which keep you confused for 90% of the way before finally offering payoff and incentivizing a second watch/read - Xenogears lasts 60 hours at a conservative estimate and much of its gameplay is a chore. I do like the story and wish I could catch more of the nuance of it, and I'm not averse to replaying games, but I don't think I'm going to come back to this.
- Despite most of my random thoughts above being rather negative, I did also like many aspects of it. It's probably dethroned Phantasy Star III from the top of my list of 'games that deserve a remake'. Its plot and ambition and multitude of interesting (but lacking in execution) gameplay ideas deserve a more polished game.
TL;DR - I'm so conflicted about this game. 2.5 star reviews usually mean I'm lukewarm about the game, but in this case it's anything but. The game is so ambitious and large in its scale, with an inimitable soundtrack and sense of style that I can't bring myself to give it a negative review. But literally every aspect of its gameplay is a chore, the translation is clumsy, and its storytelling is needlessly clunky (more on this below) so I can't bring myself to give it a positive review. So 2.5 it is.
Random thoughts:
- First off. If this were an anime I'd give it 5 stars
- Enough has been written about how the camera angles and platforming make exploring a chore. But this game somehow managed to make talking to NPCs a chore too! The text scrolls uncomfortably slowly if you're a fast reader, and there is no option to change the scrolling speed. Then sometimes, NPCs will seem to finish talking (the text box even closes), but after 2 seconds they start talking again! This is usually just enough time for you to move on, see the dialog box reopen then close immediately because you walked offscreen, forcing you to go back and talk to the same guy again through like 5 windows of slowly-scrolling text.
- I was very enthused on the concept of deathblows and combos when I first started playing; there was a lot of potential to explore in that design space. I'd always felt that menu-based RPGs should give you multiple different 'free' moves (that don't use MP or items) rather than just one regular attack - for instance, one character could have a regular attack, a weaker multitarget attack, or a weak heal spell as 'free' options, which would give the player some strategic choice even if they were trying to conserve resources. The deathblow system could very much have been this! Unfortunately, the deathblows completely lacked depth as they were all single-target attacks of varying strength. The extremely fringe usefulness of combos meant that every deathblow but the most powerful one you currently had was irrelevant. In other words, rather than adding a layer of strategy to the game, the deathblow/combo system simply added tedium, turning "press X to win" into "press TTSX to win".
- I quite like the story - it's great stuff, even today. However, a pretty big caveat: if a story is going to have plenty of symbolism and require me to fill in missing gaps through inference, then two things are required. Firstly, the translation must be immaculate - not the case here. But secondly, I believe convoluted stories need to 'handhold' the viewer to some extent in terms of what is happening in the foreground of the story so that we can then make inferences about the background better. I don't think I described that very well, so here's an example of how the game didn't do it. At the beginning of the game, some giant robots land in the middle of your small village and start throwing down. A cutscene starts, you notice the cockpit of one of the robots is open, and you catch a glimpse of a mysterious figure inside. You then climb up into the mech, and... at this point I was expecting to get into a fight with the mysterious pilot, or have him jump out of the mech to escape, but nothing. I just started piloting the mech without any acknowledgement that there was anyone in the cockpit. Now the game eventually explains who the figure is (like 40 hours later) and then that scene makes sense... but I really wish they had just paid lip service to the fact that I'm not supposed to understand what happened yet. Just a throwaway line like "wasn't there someone in this mech? What happened to him?" Imagine that sort of writing but multiplied by many many times over the course of the game, and I spent 90% of the game in a perpetual state of wondering if I was actually supposed to understand what just happened and was just missing something obvious.
- Speaking of the story, its pacing had an infuriating habit of cutting away from the action that I cared about to focus on people I hadn't met yet spouting exposition I wasn't supposed to be able to understand yet. This was presumably to offer some 'bonus' for players who were going through the game a second time. There were two problems with this, however. Firstly, the scenes make for a very weak 'replay bonus' because they are completely irrelevant on your first playthrough. (Contrast this with say FFVII, where Cloud's narration of the past is relevant and interesting on first playthrough, then comes to take on an added layer when you view it through the lens of the second playthrough). But the other problem with scenes that only makes sense on second viewing is that unlike books by Diana Wynne Jones or movies by Christopher Nolan - both of which keep you confused for 90% of the way before finally offering payoff and incentivizing a second watch/read - Xenogears lasts 60 hours at a conservative estimate and much of its gameplay is a chore. I do like the story and wish I could catch more of the nuance of it, and I'm not averse to replaying games, but I don't think I'm going to come back to this.
- Despite most of my random thoughts above being rather negative, I did also like many aspects of it. It's probably dethroned Phantasy Star III from the top of my list of 'games that deserve a remake'. Its plot and ambition and multitude of interesting (but lacking in execution) gameplay ideas deserve a more polished game.
logging this as playthrough 2, but it's really, like, playthrough 8 or something. it's actually been a long time since i played through xenogears, but for several years past its release, into the early '00s, i was replaying it at least once a year. it was easily my favorite game for that period. and then i moved to california and i didn't play games as much for a couple of years.
i'll briefly touch on how the material referenced in this game's writing—all the christianity, gnosticism, jewish mysticism, jungian and freudian psychology, evangelion, star wars, arthur c. clarke, gundam and macross etc—opened up new worlds to my still pretty young suburban teen mind. this is stuff pretty much everybody knows about xenogears. what remains interesting to me about this stuff is not just what's referenced, but how it's so intricately woven into an emotional worldbuilding fabric. soraya saga (let's give her some credit since tetsuya takahashi gets most of it—not to mention masato kato—even though she deserves just as much) really aimed for the stars here and it's evident in both the game's reputation for disastrous failure and in what was actually achieved.
another thing that still amazes me even revisiting it once more all these years later is the... well, i hesitate to call it 'cinematography', but the deliberate movement and placement of the camera during cutscenes. one moment early in the game that stands out in my mind is when fei and citan are preparing to leave blackmoon forest for the desert after camping overnight... suddenly there is a loud hum, and the camera pans up to reveal the blue sky through the trees where a mysterious giant craft flies over. almost like a large ufo passing over the woods (which always reminds me of the eerie water tower scene in the movie the flight of the navigator). keep in mind this is a game coming not long after the 16-bit era had ended, and even other 32-bit games were either opting to continue with those traditional overhead tile graphics or to utilize prerendered cgi backdrops. this was imo a huge moment in jrpgs' ability to create a sense of scope with camera movements. beyond scope, it is constantly mindful of framing, always seeking to express something. this push into 3d graphics and exploring what can be done was one of takahashi's primary motives for leaving hironobu sakaguchi's final fantasy team, and whatever one might say about the xenogears team's overall success at making a video game, i think this is one area where their triumph was undeniable. there was nothing else like it. well... except for grandia (which was out for the saturn several months before xenogears' jpn release). but i would argue that xenogears was actually more subtly expressive than grandia, while grandia also excelled at making very striking use of its camera. anyway. i didn't get to play any version of grandia until about a year after i first played xenogears, when we got the ps1 version in english.
one other thing i feel most people skim over when talking about xenogears is its sheer abundance of cute, funny, fascinating little bespoke interactions. i won't provide any examples here, but if you happen to play xenogears for your first time be sure to talk to every npc. explore everything. this game is teeming with life and that might be what i love about it more than anything else.
one thing to consider when going into this game, whether it's your first time or your 8th, is that the localization present here is very frequently VERY weird, to the point that it adds confusion to an already complex world and plot. take the intro fmv and the voiced line, "omega-one, they are attacking." this should have been "omega-one is attacking." this is an extreme example and it's not consistently so misleading throughout the whole game, but there are certainly times when, especially in hindsight, it's clear that sole translator richard honeywood was saddled with a completely overwhelming task. it's never so bad that things don't make sense with time and reflection, but there are absolutely going to be moments that leave you scratching your head.
so... 4.5 stars? it's pretty clear that this is a profoundly flawed game. i still think it deserves adulation. i even feel that some of its flaws and failures are fascinating in the way they highlight and vibe with some of the game's overarching themes. do i believe this was all fully and artistically intended? nope. of course not. but it is what it is nonetheless and what it is, to me, is one of the most beautiful games ever made.
so, ummm obviously this is by no means intended to be a complete and thorough review of xenogears...! there's plenty of that out there and i just wanted to jot down some thoughts as i play. i may log it again down the road. thanks for reading. 8)
i'll briefly touch on how the material referenced in this game's writing—all the christianity, gnosticism, jewish mysticism, jungian and freudian psychology, evangelion, star wars, arthur c. clarke, gundam and macross etc—opened up new worlds to my still pretty young suburban teen mind. this is stuff pretty much everybody knows about xenogears. what remains interesting to me about this stuff is not just what's referenced, but how it's so intricately woven into an emotional worldbuilding fabric. soraya saga (let's give her some credit since tetsuya takahashi gets most of it—not to mention masato kato—even though she deserves just as much) really aimed for the stars here and it's evident in both the game's reputation for disastrous failure and in what was actually achieved.
another thing that still amazes me even revisiting it once more all these years later is the... well, i hesitate to call it 'cinematography', but the deliberate movement and placement of the camera during cutscenes. one moment early in the game that stands out in my mind is when fei and citan are preparing to leave blackmoon forest for the desert after camping overnight... suddenly there is a loud hum, and the camera pans up to reveal the blue sky through the trees where a mysterious giant craft flies over. almost like a large ufo passing over the woods (which always reminds me of the eerie water tower scene in the movie the flight of the navigator). keep in mind this is a game coming not long after the 16-bit era had ended, and even other 32-bit games were either opting to continue with those traditional overhead tile graphics or to utilize prerendered cgi backdrops. this was imo a huge moment in jrpgs' ability to create a sense of scope with camera movements. beyond scope, it is constantly mindful of framing, always seeking to express something. this push into 3d graphics and exploring what can be done was one of takahashi's primary motives for leaving hironobu sakaguchi's final fantasy team, and whatever one might say about the xenogears team's overall success at making a video game, i think this is one area where their triumph was undeniable. there was nothing else like it. well... except for grandia (which was out for the saturn several months before xenogears' jpn release). but i would argue that xenogears was actually more subtly expressive than grandia, while grandia also excelled at making very striking use of its camera. anyway. i didn't get to play any version of grandia until about a year after i first played xenogears, when we got the ps1 version in english.
one other thing i feel most people skim over when talking about xenogears is its sheer abundance of cute, funny, fascinating little bespoke interactions. i won't provide any examples here, but if you happen to play xenogears for your first time be sure to talk to every npc. explore everything. this game is teeming with life and that might be what i love about it more than anything else.
one thing to consider when going into this game, whether it's your first time or your 8th, is that the localization present here is very frequently VERY weird, to the point that it adds confusion to an already complex world and plot. take the intro fmv and the voiced line, "omega-one, they are attacking." this should have been "omega-one is attacking." this is an extreme example and it's not consistently so misleading throughout the whole game, but there are certainly times when, especially in hindsight, it's clear that sole translator richard honeywood was saddled with a completely overwhelming task. it's never so bad that things don't make sense with time and reflection, but there are absolutely going to be moments that leave you scratching your head.
so... 4.5 stars? it's pretty clear that this is a profoundly flawed game. i still think it deserves adulation. i even feel that some of its flaws and failures are fascinating in the way they highlight and vibe with some of the game's overarching themes. do i believe this was all fully and artistically intended? nope. of course not. but it is what it is nonetheless and what it is, to me, is one of the most beautiful games ever made.
so, ummm obviously this is by no means intended to be a complete and thorough review of xenogears...! there's plenty of that out there and i just wanted to jot down some thoughts as i play. i may log it again down the road. thanks for reading. 8)
I don't think i'm capable of writing a proper review for this game.All i can say is,Xenogears is quite possibly the greatest work of fiction i have ever experienced
I love every aspect of this game to death except playing it.
worst 10/10 of my life
worst 10/10 of my life
“In those dreams…
I loved one woman
No matter the day
No matter the era…
That did not change…
Nor did her name”...
Xenogears is everything that art should strive to be and goes beyond any piece of work I’ve experienced. It’s everything I could ever truly want. Ever since first finishing the game in August of last year I’ve thought about Xenogears at least once everyday. All its moments have etched themselves into my subconscious. All those painful, passionate, and loving moments that make all of Xenogears become one whole. My revisit here was not me playing, but a dear friend of mine playing while I sat on the sideline and gave advice. It was an incredible time to both re-experience these moments and to share them with another person. We laughed, cheered, cried, and all the other emotions you could possibly think of. It made me fully realize that Xenogears is an important part of the person who I am now. It inspires me to keep on living and making the most out of an imperfect existence.
It also made me realize that this is also the most life affirming work of art ever created. Throughout the entirety of Xenogears there’s a strong emphasis on the power of the human connection. We follow Fei build on himself and his life experiences through the people that he meets. He has these moments with people that neither he or the player could ever forget. You could argue that characters don’t get enough time in their own spotlight, but it doesn’t really bother me too much personally. Mainly because of the moments and how they impact Fei makes it all the more worth it to me by the end. We humans aren’t meant to be alone and Xenogears reinforces this belief. This is represented beautifully by the one winged angel statues introduced in the Nisan cathedral. To me those angel statues are the personification of the emotional core of Xenogears. Those angels correspond with each other and they need each other to fly. I’ll have moments in life where I am bitter towards humanity and am frustrated to be amongst the horrible people that are out there. However there are also the people I know who are kind and caring, and have helped me become the person that I am today. Humanity is worth preserving because of people like them. The people who are embracing the ideas of love and coming together. That is the human experience, even in spite of everything we have each other, and that’s the most important thing of them all.
A whole lot of the cast in Xenogears come from broken and unfortunate circumstances. The game portrays these characters and their lives with a careful, complex, and tender understanding of circumstances. There is that coming together I mentioned earlier that creates the beating heart emotional storytelling of this game. These people are able to comfort each other in the help that they provide in their companionship. Bart gave Fei a home after the destruction of his village, the party were able to help Billy cope with what happened to The Ethos, they helped Maria confront her “father”, and then there’s everything with Elly.
Fei and Elly is the greatest romance ever written without a shred of doubt in mind. It’s a relationship that so perfectly shows what love is and how it transcends everything else. From their first interaction in the forest you can tell something special is there, especially when Fei was able to guess her name in an instant. Which hit me incredibly hard on this revisit, those who’ve played this game will understand why. Same with the scene in the Nisan cathedral where Fei says that Sophia reminds him of Elly. As we get deeper and deeper into the game we see their relationship get richer and richer. Showcasing that these two will do anything to help each other. At first they turned to each other because they had similar situations and that they could run away from them by being with each other. However they realized that they need each other out of true and earnest love, not solely because they are sanctuaries for their own problems. They are separate pieces that become whole when they are with each other. It’s that sort of loving connection that can topple any kind of cycle of tragedy that our universe can present us with. Fei was always told to “Live!” in spite of everything that had happened. No matter the day and the era that message never changed. However now both Fei and Elly have a home to return to. Love is the greatest power in the universe.
I loved one woman
No matter the day
No matter the era…
That did not change…
Nor did her name”...
Xenogears is everything that art should strive to be and goes beyond any piece of work I’ve experienced. It’s everything I could ever truly want. Ever since first finishing the game in August of last year I’ve thought about Xenogears at least once everyday. All its moments have etched themselves into my subconscious. All those painful, passionate, and loving moments that make all of Xenogears become one whole. My revisit here was not me playing, but a dear friend of mine playing while I sat on the sideline and gave advice. It was an incredible time to both re-experience these moments and to share them with another person. We laughed, cheered, cried, and all the other emotions you could possibly think of. It made me fully realize that Xenogears is an important part of the person who I am now. It inspires me to keep on living and making the most out of an imperfect existence.
It also made me realize that this is also the most life affirming work of art ever created. Throughout the entirety of Xenogears there’s a strong emphasis on the power of the human connection. We follow Fei build on himself and his life experiences through the people that he meets. He has these moments with people that neither he or the player could ever forget. You could argue that characters don’t get enough time in their own spotlight, but it doesn’t really bother me too much personally. Mainly because of the moments and how they impact Fei makes it all the more worth it to me by the end. We humans aren’t meant to be alone and Xenogears reinforces this belief. This is represented beautifully by the one winged angel statues introduced in the Nisan cathedral. To me those angel statues are the personification of the emotional core of Xenogears. Those angels correspond with each other and they need each other to fly. I’ll have moments in life where I am bitter towards humanity and am frustrated to be amongst the horrible people that are out there. However there are also the people I know who are kind and caring, and have helped me become the person that I am today. Humanity is worth preserving because of people like them. The people who are embracing the ideas of love and coming together. That is the human experience, even in spite of everything we have each other, and that’s the most important thing of them all.
A whole lot of the cast in Xenogears come from broken and unfortunate circumstances. The game portrays these characters and their lives with a careful, complex, and tender understanding of circumstances. There is that coming together I mentioned earlier that creates the beating heart emotional storytelling of this game. These people are able to comfort each other in the help that they provide in their companionship. Bart gave Fei a home after the destruction of his village, the party were able to help Billy cope with what happened to The Ethos, they helped Maria confront her “father”, and then there’s everything with Elly.
Fei and Elly is the greatest romance ever written without a shred of doubt in mind. It’s a relationship that so perfectly shows what love is and how it transcends everything else. From their first interaction in the forest you can tell something special is there, especially when Fei was able to guess her name in an instant. Which hit me incredibly hard on this revisit, those who’ve played this game will understand why. Same with the scene in the Nisan cathedral where Fei says that Sophia reminds him of Elly. As we get deeper and deeper into the game we see their relationship get richer and richer. Showcasing that these two will do anything to help each other. At first they turned to each other because they had similar situations and that they could run away from them by being with each other. However they realized that they need each other out of true and earnest love, not solely because they are sanctuaries for their own problems. They are separate pieces that become whole when they are with each other. It’s that sort of loving connection that can topple any kind of cycle of tragedy that our universe can present us with. Fei was always told to “Live!” in spite of everything that had happened. No matter the day and the era that message never changed. However now both Fei and Elly have a home to return to. Love is the greatest power in the universe.
"The only one who could have forgiven me is god."
xenogears is a game that i love to death, but xenogears is also a game that is very fundamentally flawed, and i think these two things can both be true at once.
the story is a mess of philosophies, kung-fu, mechas, and religious iconography stretched across a jrpg, and i say that with as much love in my heart as possible. there's also an unfinished second disc where the characters mostly convey the story through a chair in a dark void, which is a point of contention when it comes to this game. i dont mind the second disc and honestly it isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. after you beat the game you're greeted with an ending card that refers to this game as "xenogears episode v" which i assume is takahashi wanting to have gone a star wars-esque route but with how things turned out we obviously won't ever be getting that. the characters themselves are great and shine through despite a sloppy (by no fault of the translator) localization. bart, rico, emeralda, and krelian stand out to me after immediately finishing the game. as for the finer details, i genuinely couldn't tell you anything about what i just experienced, but i think that's fine and i wouldn't be a good medium for that anyway.
in terms of gameplay xenogears really starts to show its weaknesses. the combat system at first was really cool to me, i was really hoping it would've been fighting game combos but in a jrpg, but it was basically just having to do inputs for different moves, with most of them becoming obsolete once you get a new one, and encouraging you to not use your good moves for the sake of getting those same new ones. i'd expect most people would just get one good one early on and just leave it at that honestly. the ap and combos are also a cool system but still nothing too mechanically in depth.
gears are also really cool on the surface even if they fall into similar traps. they present them like there's going to be a complex customization system for the gears, but in the end it's just an armor system. it's not bad but it struck me as weird how much effort was put into the menu aesthetics for such a simple mechanic. there is also a minigame where you can fight other gears in an action setting. it's cool but not my thing.
outside of combat, xenogears decides to implement platforming, and of all jrpgs to do so, it's my least favorite implementation. the movement takes some getting used to but on top of that, the random encounter rate is so.. well, random that it's tedious to do any platforming at all. the dungeons are also kind of lame to navigate but there was only one or two where i really felt too confused.
despite all of the issues i have with the game, there's still a lot to love. xenogears, however, was sadly a sign of what would be to come for the xeno meta series, with troubled development and more up until xenoblade chronicles's success brought the xeno games a more stable home. i may not like the blade games as much as gears but i'm glad takahashi is able to tell the stories he wants without having to cut as many corners as he did here.
i think xenogears is the perfect game to demonstrate that the humanity and heart behind media can shine through much brighter than any of the mechanics or story beats or anything like that. it may not be perfect, but it's made a permanent spot in my heart, and is a game i'll think back on for years to come. please play it if you've ever considered doing so.
xenogears is a game that i love to death, but xenogears is also a game that is very fundamentally flawed, and i think these two things can both be true at once.
the story is a mess of philosophies, kung-fu, mechas, and religious iconography stretched across a jrpg, and i say that with as much love in my heart as possible. there's also an unfinished second disc where the characters mostly convey the story through a chair in a dark void, which is a point of contention when it comes to this game. i dont mind the second disc and honestly it isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. after you beat the game you're greeted with an ending card that refers to this game as "xenogears episode v" which i assume is takahashi wanting to have gone a star wars-esque route but with how things turned out we obviously won't ever be getting that. the characters themselves are great and shine through despite a sloppy (by no fault of the translator) localization. bart, rico, emeralda, and krelian stand out to me after immediately finishing the game. as for the finer details, i genuinely couldn't tell you anything about what i just experienced, but i think that's fine and i wouldn't be a good medium for that anyway.
in terms of gameplay xenogears really starts to show its weaknesses. the combat system at first was really cool to me, i was really hoping it would've been fighting game combos but in a jrpg, but it was basically just having to do inputs for different moves, with most of them becoming obsolete once you get a new one, and encouraging you to not use your good moves for the sake of getting those same new ones. i'd expect most people would just get one good one early on and just leave it at that honestly. the ap and combos are also a cool system but still nothing too mechanically in depth.
gears are also really cool on the surface even if they fall into similar traps. they present them like there's going to be a complex customization system for the gears, but in the end it's just an armor system. it's not bad but it struck me as weird how much effort was put into the menu aesthetics for such a simple mechanic. there is also a minigame where you can fight other gears in an action setting. it's cool but not my thing.
outside of combat, xenogears decides to implement platforming, and of all jrpgs to do so, it's my least favorite implementation. the movement takes some getting used to but on top of that, the random encounter rate is so.. well, random that it's tedious to do any platforming at all. the dungeons are also kind of lame to navigate but there was only one or two where i really felt too confused.
despite all of the issues i have with the game, there's still a lot to love. xenogears, however, was sadly a sign of what would be to come for the xeno meta series, with troubled development and more up until xenoblade chronicles's success brought the xeno games a more stable home. i may not like the blade games as much as gears but i'm glad takahashi is able to tell the stories he wants without having to cut as many corners as he did here.
i think xenogears is the perfect game to demonstrate that the humanity and heart behind media can shine through much brighter than any of the mechanics or story beats or anything like that. it may not be perfect, but it's made a permanent spot in my heart, and is a game i'll think back on for years to come. please play it if you've ever considered doing so.
Story is peak and everything about this game from a presentation perspective is amazing.
Unfortunately the game has not aged well at all. The combat is extremely half-baked especially towards the latter half of the game where the it expects you to endure a shit ton of BS. I actually ended up enjoying Disc 2 way more than Disc 1 simply because it gives you less shitty gameplay and a lot more juicy story.
The dungeon design is boring and bland. The random encounter rate is completely fucked to the point where you won't even be able to walk 5 steps without an battle.
On top of that everything in this game is slow. Simply navigating UI, opening menus, and saving takes forever. Even the text scrolls at a snails pace with no way to skip or make it go faster. (This makes it doubly annoying when you have to reload a save after wiping to the game's semi-frequent bullshit boss fight)
I can't imagine how anyone would be able to get this through this game without save states and fast forwarding. Like please, if you're going to play this in the year 2023, play it on an emulator. You will want to kill yourself otherwise.
That said, even with all these flaws this is still Takahashi's magnum opus in terms of narrative as well as soul. I'm not kidding when I say that this game clears every Xenoblade game in terms of story and characters. Fei literally makes Shulk, Rex, and Noah look like loser virgins in comparison.
One thing that left much to be desired is the soundtrack. There are a handful of tracks I got sick if hearing by the halfway point due to how much they're spammed in cutscenes and battle sequences. There's also not a lot of particularly good songs either. Many of the best tracks only appear in Disc 2 or in scenes to supplement a tragic event. There were also a few times where I felt the song playing during a scene did not fit whatsoever with what was happening.
^All in all this game desperately needed more original and diverse tracks because many of them got repetitive fast.
tl;dr it's a great game with a story that makes it very easy to overlook some of it's flaws. It's very much outdated gameplay design-wise and lacks some of the polish that even JRPGs back in the PS1 era had. DO NOT play this game on anything but an emulator. The ability to fast forward and create save states are very much required to enjoy this game in the year 2023.
Unfortunately the game has not aged well at all. The combat is extremely half-baked especially towards the latter half of the game where the it expects you to endure a shit ton of BS. I actually ended up enjoying Disc 2 way more than Disc 1 simply because it gives you less shitty gameplay and a lot more juicy story.
The dungeon design is boring and bland. The random encounter rate is completely fucked to the point where you won't even be able to walk 5 steps without an battle.
On top of that everything in this game is slow. Simply navigating UI, opening menus, and saving takes forever. Even the text scrolls at a snails pace with no way to skip or make it go faster. (This makes it doubly annoying when you have to reload a save after wiping to the game's semi-frequent bullshit boss fight)
I can't imagine how anyone would be able to get this through this game without save states and fast forwarding. Like please, if you're going to play this in the year 2023, play it on an emulator. You will want to kill yourself otherwise.
That said, even with all these flaws this is still Takahashi's magnum opus in terms of narrative as well as soul. I'm not kidding when I say that this game clears every Xenoblade game in terms of story and characters. Fei literally makes Shulk, Rex, and Noah look like loser virgins in comparison.
One thing that left much to be desired is the soundtrack. There are a handful of tracks I got sick if hearing by the halfway point due to how much they're spammed in cutscenes and battle sequences. There's also not a lot of particularly good songs either. Many of the best tracks only appear in Disc 2 or in scenes to supplement a tragic event. There were also a few times where I felt the song playing during a scene did not fit whatsoever with what was happening.
^All in all this game desperately needed more original and diverse tracks because many of them got repetitive fast.
tl;dr it's a great game with a story that makes it very easy to overlook some of it's flaws. It's very much outdated gameplay design-wise and lacks some of the polish that even JRPGs back in the PS1 era had. DO NOT play this game on anything but an emulator. The ability to fast forward and create save states are very much required to enjoy this game in the year 2023.
One of the most complex video game stories with repetitive dungeon designs, repetitive soundtrack, a combat system that gets lame with every new move you learn because that makes old moves completely useless, frustrating random encounter system, horrible platforming, unskippable slow NPC dialogues, half assed second disc that is pretty much a visual novel with the worst dungeons in the game.
Oh also, this is my favourite game of all time.
Oh also, this is my favourite game of all time.
Gave myself a day to kinda just sit with the whole experience of my first playthrough. Xenogears is one of those games that kinda just existed within the culture in a way where I always heard people vaguely gesture at its greatness, but never actually got any full details about what exactly made it so great. So for years and years and years and years and years I kinda just kept putting it off, playing many other games before and after it, hearing about its complexities but never really the details as of what those complexities were. Finally experiencing it for myself I completely get it.
An experience that is some parts Neon Genesis Evangelion, some parts Gundam some parts sci-fi novels and films, Xenogears wears all of its inspirations firmly on its sleeve and proudly bears it all as it goes into its own psychological, religious explorations of the self.
The ways in which it talks about running away from your problems rather than dealing with them and how that inevitably comes to bite you in the ass, there's a quite good example with the martial arts tournament you enter that genuinely surprised me when it happened.
The ways it delves into how trauma can inform and explain behaviors, can cause people to drift one way or another instead of facing the real problems within themselves, be lead to more and differing kinds of abuses, or completely shut themselves down due to their inability to truly cope with the things that've happened to them. But it also firmly discusses how important it is to continue to live, to continue to fight and go on despite the struggles we face in life, how we have to take responsibility for ourselves and the things we do despite our traumas, that again our traumas can be an explanation for behaviors and actions you may take, but at the end of the day you have to be responsible for your own actions.
There are a few characters I do wish were able to get more from the story (Rico, Maria, Chu Chu) and the very clear rushing of things does absolutely fuck with what was clearly supposed to be this ambitious and sprawling experience, though I will say in spite of the clear rush job that Disc 2 ends up as, I genuinely still quite loved the way they handle the presentation and style. Some of the quick cuts are really sharp and effective, I dig the kinda play stage type beat they do for some of the cutscenes they didn't have time to fully make enviornments for, I like the way they frame each part from differing characters POV's. There's a lot of cool things that make that second disc really interesting, kinda reflecting episodes 25 and 26 of NGE in ways.
It's such a strange feeling in ways cause like I kinda despised the gameplay at times (ground combat relies a bit too heavily on deathblows and grinding them out where-as I feel like the Gear combat is a bit better balanced in terms of building up to your deathblows and having to strategically manage your fuel levels in interesting ways). But even though I wasn't huge on the combat or some of the dungeon design (fuck Babel Tower) the whole thing just really came together for me. Everything it was doing was absolutely fuckin aces, it honestly reminded me of watching NGE for the first time as a teenager AS WELL AS watching both Shiki-Jitsu and Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 with what exactly it was going for in its messaging and just how much it resonated with me. How much Fei's character arc resonated with me, how dense and packed of an experience it was overall.
I think I can safely say that I'm getting into the series cause I wanna see what else can come from anyone involved who was able to put this together.
An experience that is some parts Neon Genesis Evangelion, some parts Gundam some parts sci-fi novels and films, Xenogears wears all of its inspirations firmly on its sleeve and proudly bears it all as it goes into its own psychological, religious explorations of the self.
The ways in which it talks about running away from your problems rather than dealing with them and how that inevitably comes to bite you in the ass, there's a quite good example with the martial arts tournament you enter that genuinely surprised me when it happened.
The ways it delves into how trauma can inform and explain behaviors, can cause people to drift one way or another instead of facing the real problems within themselves, be lead to more and differing kinds of abuses, or completely shut themselves down due to their inability to truly cope with the things that've happened to them. But it also firmly discusses how important it is to continue to live, to continue to fight and go on despite the struggles we face in life, how we have to take responsibility for ourselves and the things we do despite our traumas, that again our traumas can be an explanation for behaviors and actions you may take, but at the end of the day you have to be responsible for your own actions.
There are a few characters I do wish were able to get more from the story (Rico, Maria, Chu Chu) and the very clear rushing of things does absolutely fuck with what was clearly supposed to be this ambitious and sprawling experience, though I will say in spite of the clear rush job that Disc 2 ends up as, I genuinely still quite loved the way they handle the presentation and style. Some of the quick cuts are really sharp and effective, I dig the kinda play stage type beat they do for some of the cutscenes they didn't have time to fully make enviornments for, I like the way they frame each part from differing characters POV's. There's a lot of cool things that make that second disc really interesting, kinda reflecting episodes 25 and 26 of NGE in ways.
It's such a strange feeling in ways cause like I kinda despised the gameplay at times (ground combat relies a bit too heavily on deathblows and grinding them out where-as I feel like the Gear combat is a bit better balanced in terms of building up to your deathblows and having to strategically manage your fuel levels in interesting ways). But even though I wasn't huge on the combat or some of the dungeon design (fuck Babel Tower) the whole thing just really came together for me. Everything it was doing was absolutely fuckin aces, it honestly reminded me of watching NGE for the first time as a teenager AS WELL AS watching both Shiki-Jitsu and Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 with what exactly it was going for in its messaging and just how much it resonated with me. How much Fei's character arc resonated with me, how dense and packed of an experience it was overall.
I think I can safely say that I'm getting into the series cause I wanna see what else can come from anyone involved who was able to put this together.
Basic bitch cliff notes understanding of the most mainstream psychologists and philosophers possible. Dan Hentschel says more about psychology than this garbage.
Most people nowadays that pick up Xenogears go in knowing it's going to be a good game, a great one, even. Word of its quality has spread gradually over time, primarily due to the success of its descendants; Xenosaga and Xenoblade. What people don’t seem to know is how ambitious it was.
The game having a good story is practically a given thanks to the names behind it, but it's the rest of the game that really impresses. Not only does the game have a ‘normal’ form of combat, in which up to three of your party members use their three attack types to combo their opponents into hell, there’s also gear combat. Gears are the mechs in this game, and unlike the normal characters, gears need to build attack level to combo, rely on fuel, and can’t be healed normally. The game switches between these two combat forms depending on the situation, and each of them are remarkably fleshed out, making it much harder to tire of combat than it is in most jrpgs.
Besides the main combat forms, there are also side modes and mini games such as gear combat. Not the same gear combat as before, the battlin’ gear combat is a lot more comparable to an arena fighter (albeit much less fleshed out) giving the gameplay even more variety. There’s even a speed minigame, a goddamn fully built card game that looks pretty good even now.
Xenogears bleeds creativity and is fully deserving of its legacy. The game is far from perfect - there are some glitches and some party members feel a tad underdeveloped, for example - but it's a truly one-of-a-kind experience worth anyone’s time.
The game having a good story is practically a given thanks to the names behind it, but it's the rest of the game that really impresses. Not only does the game have a ‘normal’ form of combat, in which up to three of your party members use their three attack types to combo their opponents into hell, there’s also gear combat. Gears are the mechs in this game, and unlike the normal characters, gears need to build attack level to combo, rely on fuel, and can’t be healed normally. The game switches between these two combat forms depending on the situation, and each of them are remarkably fleshed out, making it much harder to tire of combat than it is in most jrpgs.
Besides the main combat forms, there are also side modes and mini games such as gear combat. Not the same gear combat as before, the battlin’ gear combat is a lot more comparable to an arena fighter (albeit much less fleshed out) giving the gameplay even more variety. There’s even a speed minigame, a goddamn fully built card game that looks pretty good even now.
Xenogears bleeds creativity and is fully deserving of its legacy. The game is far from perfect - there are some glitches and some party members feel a tad underdeveloped, for example - but it's a truly one-of-a-kind experience worth anyone’s time.
approaches the stage with 73809 page manifesto on xenogears' impact and its troubled dev cycle and why it is both one of the most interesting, rewarding narratives told in gaming history and one of gaming's most incredible dev journeys, from beginning as what was originally ff7 before being repurposed into xenogears and then being cut in half, and how legal battles have prevented it from ever truly being returned to in the manner it deserves
ahem
screams into microphone, tears running down my face
BROKEN MIRROR A MILLION SHAPES OF LIGHT THE OLD ECHO FADES AWAY BUT JUST YOU AND I CAN FIND THE ANSWER AND THEN WE CAN RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD, RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD
is dragged offstage while vocalizing the guitar solo
ahem
screams into microphone, tears running down my face
BROKEN MIRROR A MILLION SHAPES OF LIGHT THE OLD ECHO FADES AWAY BUT JUST YOU AND I CAN FIND THE ANSWER AND THEN WE CAN RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD, RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD
is dragged offstage while vocalizing the guitar solo
I think it's time for me to give up on this one. I've tried it numerous times through the years and even got decently far into it once... but it's just not super compelling to me. For being a 3D game with 2D sprites it just doesn't look that great and all around it feels very... almost but not quite. Besides the OST, which may be my most listened to OST after Chrono Cross. It's like this inbetween of CT and CC (probably because it literally was made between them).
I've heard this was originally a FFVII pitch, and then a possible Chrono Trigger 2 at some point as well, and it does have a lot in common with CT, not just the the soundtrack composer.
Anyway, I think I'm going to abandon this as a game and watch a playthrough instead. Considering how inspired by Gnosticism I am in my own projects it seems like a necessity to at least know the whole plot.
Edit: Just collecting my thoughts here while I watch a play-through, but this very much feels like a game completely led by its narrative and everything about it is in support of that narrative. Basically, there are no overly frivolous gameplay aspects, they're all there for the story. This could very much just have been a novel. Not sure how I feel about that, but it is an interesting way to approach a game.
The pacing is also pretty slow and there's a lot of dialogue to not say so much. That feels like a pretty common Japanese poetic choice. A lot of battle scenes feel like 61 episodes of DBZ.
I've heard this was originally a FFVII pitch, and then a possible Chrono Trigger 2 at some point as well, and it does have a lot in common with CT, not just the the soundtrack composer.
Anyway, I think I'm going to abandon this as a game and watch a playthrough instead. Considering how inspired by Gnosticism I am in my own projects it seems like a necessity to at least know the whole plot.
Edit: Just collecting my thoughts here while I watch a play-through, but this very much feels like a game completely led by its narrative and everything about it is in support of that narrative. Basically, there are no overly frivolous gameplay aspects, they're all there for the story. This could very much just have been a novel. Not sure how I feel about that, but it is an interesting way to approach a game.
The pacing is also pretty slow and there's a lot of dialogue to not say so much. That feels like a pretty common Japanese poetic choice. A lot of battle scenes feel like 61 episodes of DBZ.
Oh man, Square Enix, why have you forsaken this IP and won't give us a port, a remaster or even a remake of this amazing game :D Xenogears, even if it's obviously unfinished, is a fucking masterpiece. The themes addressed here are simply not found in current JRPGs which is super unfortunate. Among other things, it deals with the abuse of religion and power, human experimentation, racism, metaphysics and much more. The soundtrack is one of the best I've ever heard (Mitsuda at his best), the combat system (or rather combat systemS) is innovative and fun, the characters are almost all very well written and the story is the big highlight of this game. Unfortunately disc 2 really isn't finished but also not as bad as its reputation and yes, the story is completed and finished, only some passages aren't playable and are presented as a slide show.
The game is phenomenal, it's amazing that Square was capable of producing something like this in the past.
The game is phenomenal, it's amazing that Square was capable of producing something like this in the past.
this game is easily 4.5 stars but unfortunately due to time constraints in my review schedule i didn't have time to give it the last 2 stars.
😈😈😈The perfect video game for a maniacal psychology major such as myself 😈😈😈. Sigmund freud's theory of personality and carl jung archetypes in MY turnbased video game 😈😈😈a truly spectacular sight to behold..........................😈
This review contains spoilers
Quite honestly, considering this to be one of my favorite stories told in a JRPG. Everything, for lack of a better term, resonated with me and I cannot be more glad. My extensively long journey, encompassing 80 hours throughout the span of 2 months, has finally come to a close. That final screen damn near brought me to tears, I love this game.
Disc 1 just felt… perfect. I can't really describe it. I had so many qualms and issues while playing, but I can't put myself to say I really disliked much. The arena fighter mini-game was legitimately so hype, the game just kept surprising me over and over and the feeling is unrivaled in my experience. I spent so much time engaging in superfluous content that my playthrough was damn near double what I've heard about the playtime of others.
I don't quite fully understand the hatred for disc 2 to be honest, sure, some dungeons were sloppy. But to be honest, I actually kinda liked the change in direction (somewhat)? I will say that a lot of the action taking place through visual novel did stink. Though, it would also be a bit redundant to make the player go back and forth and back and forth, grinding out more and more. The visual novel segments are a great way to give a player a break from the combat without halting progression of the story.
Additionally, I absolutely LOVED the bonus content that takes place before fighting Deus. The interactions based on whom you had in your party were so bittersweet, and I loved that I would be able to have some connections with the characters just one last time. Closer to the actual end of the game (post-killing Deus) was just a constant wave of chills being sent down my spine, the anime scenes at the end just felt like the perfect way to top everything off.
I bought a copy of Xenogears for ~$120 and a PS1 for about ~$10, and I can say that playing the game through that on a CRT was absolutely worth the cost. I regret nothing.
Disc 1 just felt… perfect. I can't really describe it. I had so many qualms and issues while playing, but I can't put myself to say I really disliked much. The arena fighter mini-game was legitimately so hype, the game just kept surprising me over and over and the feeling is unrivaled in my experience. I spent so much time engaging in superfluous content that my playthrough was damn near double what I've heard about the playtime of others.
I don't quite fully understand the hatred for disc 2 to be honest, sure, some dungeons were sloppy. But to be honest, I actually kinda liked the change in direction (somewhat)? I will say that a lot of the action taking place through visual novel did stink. Though, it would also be a bit redundant to make the player go back and forth and back and forth, grinding out more and more. The visual novel segments are a great way to give a player a break from the combat without halting progression of the story.
Additionally, I absolutely LOVED the bonus content that takes place before fighting Deus. The interactions based on whom you had in your party were so bittersweet, and I loved that I would be able to have some connections with the characters just one last time. Closer to the actual end of the game (post-killing Deus) was just a constant wave of chills being sent down my spine, the anime scenes at the end just felt like the perfect way to top everything off.
I bought a copy of Xenogears for ~$120 and a PS1 for about ~$10, and I can say that playing the game through that on a CRT was absolutely worth the cost. I regret nothing.
fei LITERALLY gets top. beats out the rest of anything in this franchise so damn hard
I usually don't write real reviews on here but I feel like I really felt like this one deserved it.
I didn't really expect much of this game to be completely honest. I've been wanting to go through the entire "Xeno" series for awhile and as this is the first game, I had to play it.
This game is a fucking masterpiece. ...and I mean it. 90% of this game I was in genuine awe at what I was playing. I could not believe that this was a PSX game. Phenomenal music, phenomenal plot, phenomenal characters, phenomenal everything.
All of this to say, PLAY THIS GAME. I loved it, and I'm sure you'll love it too.
I didn't really expect much of this game to be completely honest. I've been wanting to go through the entire "Xeno" series for awhile and as this is the first game, I had to play it.
This game is a fucking masterpiece. ...and I mean it. 90% of this game I was in genuine awe at what I was playing. I could not believe that this was a PSX game. Phenomenal music, phenomenal plot, phenomenal characters, phenomenal everything.
All of this to say, PLAY THIS GAME. I loved it, and I'm sure you'll love it too.
Flawed or not, the only thing I could consider Xenogears as would be a masterpiece. Words simply cannot express how immensely deep this game goes as it may very well be the pinnacle of video game depth and lore.
I could go on forever about the MANY reasons why I think this game succeeds so greatly in various ways, but to put it bluntly I truly believe that Xenogears is the most intellectually and brilliantly written story of any video game (or form of media) I have ever experienced. The battle systems are flashy, satisfying, and fun, the music is nostalgic and beautiful (Afterall it was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda), the art direction is beyond impressive for a PS1 title (albeit sometimes the camera can be pretty jank in certain areas); but what really carries this game is it's unmatched narrative paired with not only some great protagonists, but arguably the best handled cast of villians in gaming.
With what the development team had going for the game in terms of an incredibly tight budget, a team composed almost entirely of amateur programmers, a single man working on 99% of the game's English translation (Richard Honeywood is the fucking GOAT), and a 2 year time limit to release the game, Xenogears turned out to be absolutely phenomenal in my eyes, flaws and all. Easily one of the best and most unforgettable experiences I will ever have playing not just a JRPG, but a video game in general.
I could go on forever about the MANY reasons why I think this game succeeds so greatly in various ways, but to put it bluntly I truly believe that Xenogears is the most intellectually and brilliantly written story of any video game (or form of media) I have ever experienced. The battle systems are flashy, satisfying, and fun, the music is nostalgic and beautiful (Afterall it was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda), the art direction is beyond impressive for a PS1 title (albeit sometimes the camera can be pretty jank in certain areas); but what really carries this game is it's unmatched narrative paired with not only some great protagonists, but arguably the best handled cast of villians in gaming.
With what the development team had going for the game in terms of an incredibly tight budget, a team composed almost entirely of amateur programmers, a single man working on 99% of the game's English translation (Richard Honeywood is the fucking GOAT), and a 2 year time limit to release the game, Xenogears turned out to be absolutely phenomenal in my eyes, flaws and all. Easily one of the best and most unforgettable experiences I will ever have playing not just a JRPG, but a video game in general.
Disc 2 dislikers won't survive the winter
It's a cool game, but it's absolutely insanely funny that the same general people behind this game would end up making the Xenoblade series. Comparing the most sexual moment in this game (arguably) - a scene where two people end up confessing their love, spend the night together, and you see one of them naked in bed - versus literally a second of Xenoblade 2 or 3, is so fucking funny.
Has a great first act and generally sticks the landing. You can forgive Fei for sitting on a chair for ten thousand hours in the 'middle act'.
Has a great first act and generally sticks the landing. You can forgive Fei for sitting on a chair for ten thousand hours in the 'middle act'.