Full Metal Daemon Muramasa : The Law of Unbalance

Mid
Kino
Abyss
Peak
Disasterpiece
Masterpiece
Kusoge
Kamige

The Law of Balance.

One man’s trash is another one’s treasure, in the infinite sea of contents constantly bombarded at us in the information age, few of them are able to stand out amongst the crowd. For better or for worse, some of them do manage to find their ways in the hands of niche communities which hails them as holy texts, sacred masterpieces that the common man simply couldn’t fathom looking at through a simple, unthinking, uncritical lens. Without necessarily attaining mainstream appeal some works are able to just change people so profoundly and impact their genre in such a way that it’s impossible to miss them if you dive deeper into certain corners of the cultural zeitgeist.

If like me, you happened to be one of the few people in the west to be interested in the phenomenon known as “Visual Novel” (a term I’m not particularly comfortable using as a descriptor for various reasons unrelated to this review), there are seminal classics that have made a name for themselves and one of them is the game we’re going to talk about today : Full Metal Daemon Muramasa !

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a game developed by Nitroplus in 2009 and written by the quite mysterious Ittetsu Narahara. The reason why I’m saying this is because the guy isn’t really known for being a visual novel writer let alone an artist, initially the guy was a kendo instructor who just so happened to find work at Nitroplus. Not much is known about the guy itself, I’ve tried looking him up online and only these few informations and the fact he worked previously on another game by the name of “Hanachirasu” (which I have not read and therefore won’t discuss in this review) that he created in order to “train” himself in the art of writing fiction. Both Hanachirasu and Full Metal Daemon Muramasa were works that were quite polarizing in their home countries and Narahara himself received many criticism towards his work but to what nature I couldn’t really tell through my research.

After finishing his work on Muramasa, Ittetsu Narahara would simply vanish into the either never to be seen again, the last time he made any sort of public statement was in 2019 as Muramasa was celebrating its 10th anniversary. He stated that he was not looking to work on more games and formally announced his departure from Nitroplus that year. While the man himself is quite mysterious, it is not a surprise that he ended up choosing Nitroplus to work on his game or perhaps Nitroplus chose him, again I’m not really sure.

Nitroplus is known for their catalog of dark and edgy titles, often depicting scenes of extreme physical, psychological and quite unfortunately sexual violence.
I’m going to be perfectly honest and it’s going to be apparent throughout this review, I’m not a huge fan of Nitroplus’s outing and it’s not for a lack of trying : From Saya no Uta to Demonbane to Totono or heck even their less extreme outing like Chaos;Head (which I have yet to finish), a lot of them initially clicked with me from the outside but the more I digged into them and the less I found their conceptual appeal to carry over many substance. It’s also not helped that Nitroplus’s way of handling dark subject matters tend to be pretty juvenile and dare I’d say immature. One of their favorite past-time is adding unnecessary rape scene to pretty much any of their works, all of these have seemingly the same goal : to enhance the dark atmosphere of their narratives and hammer down how dire and fucked up their setting is. But ultimately, I think there’s a point where not only do I think it’s “too much”, there’s also a point where it can feel somewhat misogynistic as any female is often treated as an available hole to be used by men and it’s not like Nitroplus ever actually comments or show the consequences of these terrible acts on the psyche of the victims, it’s all very fetishized and disgusting and yes, even Muramasa isn’t a stranger to that excessive amount of edge.

And before people call me a hypocrite for criticizing that aspect, I think I need to make my position clear on the subject before moving on to actually talking about the game. To me depiction of sexual violence and fucked up fetishes isn’t really an issue, after all I am an advocate for freedom of expression and I think every work no matter how agreeable they can be can have some value merely by existing and adding their own bricks to the foundation of culture as a whole. If we simply couldn’t represent or brought these topics up, ever, we would be no better than the people perpetrating these action in the first place because while Nitroplus work could be seen as pieces of art which normalize rape, completely erasing any and all sorts of representation regardless of relevance even the most graphic one would also simply be just as hypocritical as pretending these actions don’t exist in the first place. As bad as it is, these inhumane actions are a part of the human experience and as we’ll see down the line, Muramasa touches on the subject of morality and stuff so it’s not like that type of content doesn’t have its place inside a work like this.

But the thing is that eroge companies operate on the logic that they’re always and I mean always selling their products to people who buys them primordially for the erotic content and thus, one can imagine that the primordial core reason why these scenes exists in the first place is to titillate the senses of those who came for it. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, consumption of porn could be looked under a moral lens but in the specific case of eroge where the only people hurt in the process are a bunch of underpaid developers and translators I don’t think it’s all that necessary and who doesn’t love to jacking in in San Diego from time to time and find outlets to do so, it’s a natural desire and the porn you consume is only between you and god. In the end, it’s really a matter of representation and execution, in my review of Dohna Dohna, an AliceSoft game which historically had a huge propension for rapey content and “problematic” representation of sex, I stated that to me at least, it’s all a matter of framing ! I like sexy women (or men, let's be not exclusive here) being railed in all sorts of fashion for sure, but I also like when genuine thoughts are put behind it as I tend to have a fetish for narrative consistency more than I actually like sex.

AliceSoft games are designed with a lot of intent behind them, there’s a transparency on what type of games you’re playing as well as clear tone indicators on when you’re supposed to take a situation presented to you seriously or with several degrees of levity but in the end, the game also makes damn sure to remind you that you are in fact playing a porn game.

To compare with a Nitroplus game, Demonbane is a visual novel I read primordially to experience a silly light-hearted super robot adventure about heroes fighting evil creatures in the name of justice, love and all that’s good, it’s openly silly and deliberate in its tone and its inspirations. But why the fuck do I need to sit through so many random and terribly misplaced H-Scenes which completely kills the mood and at times pacing of everything. I just want to see cool robot fighting, why does the sex and most importantly, the rape has to be there ! And I mean yeah, there’s an argument to be made that Demonbane is based on Lovecraftian mythology and features heavy references to the works of the H.P himself which were dark stories featuring sex cult and stuff but Demonbane executes this without grace or any sort of subtlety. In Demonbane, you’d be playing normally as the characters are facing off against a spider monster but suddenly without warning, the game transitions into a weirdly misplaced and completely free H-Scene and it’s like… isn’t there a better context for this ?

For as much as Eroge has h-content in them, I always found their implementations to be wholly uneven across the whole medium. Some eroge want to say something with their H, others don’t and just want you to appreciate the view and some like Nitroplus titles and several others within the genre, are stuck in this middle ground when they feel compelled to add them out of convention rather than because they intended to implement them. Also rape, is the most vile act one can subject a human-being to so it makes for easy shock value. I don’t like that, I don’t care for that. Muramasa is already a pretty dark story and while some H-Scenes do serve a purpose narratively, and Kageaki’s sexual tendencies says a lot about his character (more on that later), the way the game handles that content and that subject matters within the framing of the narrative leaves a lot to be desired.

For example, in the first chapter of the game, we are the witness to a pretty heavy scene of physical torture done by one of the antagonist to a group of kids. The situation is already pretty bad, one of the kid loses his sight and a girl literally got her limbs cut off and these are conveniently shown out of frame but also the girl gets well… raped and this is where we go from a scene that should be terrifying in nature to something akin to an absolute clownfest. Suddenly the girl who up to this point never displayed any heavily sexualized features, is suddenly given a pair of developed breasts the size of Britney’s and an ass the size of Rihanna’s out of nowhere thanks to the power of CG (contextual graphics). But then their tormentor after cutting off her limbs (again shown out of frame because this isn’t what you came for) tasks another kid to rape her but since he couldn’t get hard due to how horrifying the situation was, the villain cast “erection 10” on his penis to keep it up again and again and eventually the poor dude literally piss on the corpse of her comrade. Later in a fight scene, it is explained that the reason the villain was even able to perform such a task is because he has the ability to control fluids of any kind including blood and of course urine and water in general since he proceeds to attack the main character with an epic typhoon attack after this explanation.

This is a scene from chapter 1 and what I would describe as a “Nitroplus moment” but at least all of these events were added in a torture scene so there’s some level of build-up to it, some scenes just happens randomly and without warning for the hell of it. You don’t get at any perspective from the victims and also the consequences of these scenes are never exploited within the narrative as the two characters involved are more busy being traumatized by their missing members and dead companion than the actual rape stuff.
This is all a bit irritating because otherwise, the story would still work without these explicit scenes, it’s a game talking mainly about murder, about what it means to kill and thus, it’s an already extremely violent game and that excessive use of sexual violence just feels forced and out of place. There is an “All-Ages” version available of course if that content turns you off completely but they censor it very poorly and also removes the violence which is an essential part of the game’s overall aesthetic and tone and thus the regular 18+ version is the most optimal and likely intended way to experience the game. The lack of thought, grace and subtlety put behind those is what irritates me and if you really want me to nitpick even further, I also think the game’s budget is too low to make them good, there’s only 2 or 3 CG’s per H-Scenes and very little dynamism or creativity so even as “erotic” scenes most of them falls flat on their goddamn face if you can look past the god awful framing.

Of course this isn’t my only issue with the game but I think this is probably the only real overall issue I can’t really excuse and I can’t really defend because it’s such a signature Nitroplus™ staple that pretending this didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the game or its credibility would be simply a lie…

So anyway, after making 99% of the people who were initially interested in the game flee to Mexico or something, I think we can finally start talking about the game itself shall we ?

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa, despite everything I’ve just said regarding its “erotic” content is a work most people would consider to be a “kamige” and kind of received a memetic legendary status amongst the crowd of Visual novel Reader known as “JOP’s”. JOP, short for “Japanese Only Patricians” (as opposed to EOP for “English Only Peasants”) is a nebulous subgroup of visual novel readers who have turned the act of learning Japanese and reading VN’s in said language into a way of life ! The JOP community hold certain titles in high regard and have transcended the mortal plane of existence to deeply enjoy the subtle and delicate prose of games aimed mainly at coomers and we respect them for it !

And for the longest time, Muramasa was kind of a JOP stronghold, an untouchable piece of fiction that no English speakers will ever get to read let alone understand. This is because Muramasa despite its appearance is a deceptively complex piece of work to tackle as far as translating it goes as someone need not just be fluent in the language but also need multiple extra layers of knowledge on top of it to understand it all. The game is full of ancient poems written in complicated ways, historical anecdotes that one needs to have a strong grasp on to convey especially since it’s all mixed with alternate history stuff and of course the entire language linked to martial arts and especially bushido which isn’t just a set of techniques that don’t have similar equivalent in English but philosophical concepts applied to the way of the sword. Ittetsu is a massive nerd on many subjects from history, philosophy, psychology, martial arts and all of these are portrayed in high detail in Muramasa.

All of these elements fundamentally goes against the very idea of translating Muramasa, it’s just something that for many years seemed completely impossible, it would take too much time, too much research and would cost way more money than most western VN publishers who already struggles to make it to the end of the month. But by some miracle of circumstances, JAST announced an English release of Muramasa for the year 2021 in what essentially became their biggest marketing powermove since the existence of the company and this new release received a premium treatment that was unprecedented in the industry.
On top of a brand new shiny limited edition, the game was translated by a guy going by the pen name of Makoto and edited by another one named Moogy, these two are well-known in the English Localization sphere for their excellent work on other Nitroplus works as well as other JAST releases. The translation started 2 years after the original release of the game in 2009 and took no less than 10 years to come to fruition, a monumental task when considering the material they were working with but somehow they pulled it off and they pulled it off exceptionally well. It’s rare when JOP’s or even native Japanese speakers praises localization efforts especially in the VN industry as the translation can often-time be sloppy or so different from the original text one might consider it fanfiction but not Muramasa, the translation was claimed by many to be of the utmost quality and astoundingly faithful to the original text and meaning. Some of my friends who have been fans of the game since its release even told me that the English release is pretty close to perfection, as if the game was initially written in English. Very little compromise was made to conserve the original tone of the game, the editor even commented how he wanted to change some lines to fit his own agenda but decided against it for authenticity sake, a bold move that is sadly not seen that often in this industry.

This is fundamentally this version of Muramasa that I’m reviewing today, so before anyone jumps at me because I somehow “didn’t understand something”, I might be inclined to believe you but I also wouldn’t care that much considering the sheer quality of the translation.

And I’m going to be real, this is something that the JOP’s certainly did not lie about, Muramasa is a complex read which requires pretty much all of your attention, the prose has a certain form of flow and poetry to it, some terms were kept as is and the game comes with an handy PDF guide for all of the more specific terms that they couldn’t directly translate because they’re concept unique to certain discipline. I’m not the type of guy who cares too much about how flowery prose can be as I’m not really a literary person usually, I care more about the impacts of the words than how their assembled in a phrase and if you’ve been reading my reviews, you probably noticed how much my 2nd language English make for some very stilted and unnatural scripts.

But I can only applaud how well-written from a technical standpoint Muramasa is, it’s genuinely impressive even when I’m not usually sensible to it.

The story takes place in Yamato, a fictional alternate history Japan in the 1940’s ruled on one hand by the iron-fisted and tyrannical Rokuhara Shogunate and on the other by the GHQ, an American force who recently established themselves in the region and are more or less trying to take over the place. In the world of Muramasa, warriors don’t simply just fight with swords and guns but with big suits of mechanical armor going by the name of “Tsurugi” (or “Crux” if you’re a filthy gaijin !). These are essentially tiny mechs and some of the more unique and powerful ones even possess something called a Shinogi which is a special power they can activate in critical situations and can do all sorts of things such as controlling fluids, controlling magnetic fields, create black holes, turn invisible and so forth and so forth.

But recently, a calamity coated in silver known only as “Ginseigo” who belongs to no factions at all has started going left and right and destroying different settlements leaving no traces in its wake.

But one man, piloting another mysterious Tsurugi by the name of Muramasa has made it his personal mission to track down and stop Ginseigo in its path of destruction, this man is Minato Kageaki, a somber, aloof and mysterious man with a troubled past and bound with a terrible curse : Those who chose to pilot Muramasa must follow the law of balance, for each foes one slay, a friends or lover must be slain in return !

After a small prologue chapter showing the struggle between Muramasa and Ginseigo, the game decides to start its first chapter in a very peculiar way by making you follow the point of view of boy by the name of Yuhi as he’s investigating the disappearance of one of his friend alongside two other comrades. This intro is meant to be a play on the typical visual novel scenario, with a regular boy living a regular life, constantly woken up by his childhood friend and the typical sleazy best friend character. This illusion won’t last for long however as quickly the chapter ramps up in intensity and reveals Minato Kageaki, a somewhat socially awkward cop who really is a convicted criminal working for the police to be the main protagonist of the game.

This is one of many instances of the game toying with the typical tropes and codes of eroge and visual novels, it seems that Ittetsu Narahara in many ways wanted to break the mold of that typical structure. I obviously don’t know the guy himself but he seems to be quite knowledgeable on the world of visual novel either through passive observation from his time working with Nitroplus in-between his time as a kendo instructor or because he really has an appreciation for the medium in the first place but unfortunately the little information we have on him as a person really can’t help determine if he has a fondness for those tropes or a deep seated bias against them. Nonetheless, I find the first chapter of Muramasa to be a terribly effective opener even if the climax of it is a bit ruined by the so-called Nitroplus™ moment mentioned earlier in the review. It establishes the world of the game rather well by putting us in the shoes of the little people and tricks us just long enough to make us think Yuhi would actually be the main protagonist (à la Simon from TTGL or Cruz from Needless) but alas this is promptly stopped by his hopes and dreams being coldly shattered by the blade of Muramasa having to obey the law of balance.

In fact, even that law of balance itself isn’t entirely explained to you from the get-go, while we can have somewhat of an understanding of it from context clues alone like the chant Kageaki says before mounting his mech or even how the story plays out, the game try to use a clever but slightly faulty designed route system in order to demonstrate it to us. Much like other games of the genre, making choices privileging one heroine over the other will make her affection towards us stronger, however whereas other VN’s would simply take these flags and addition them in the end to determine which route we’re going to end up on, here the game will show us the affection meter at the end of each chapter which is always share between the two heroines and a third party who participates in the episode and whoever has the most points by the end of the chapter gets killed ! So you need to do the opposite of what’s expected of you and try to make your preferred heroine survive by the end of the common route which is around the end of chapter five.

It’s an interesting system on paper and a rare attempt at ludo-narratively explaining to us how the law of balance work before explaining it to us but sadly there’s a few issues with how it works in practice and even if it’s suggested not to use a guide on your first playthrough that doesn’t mean one isn’t vividly recommended on subsequent ones.

For one, the conditions you have to meet by the end of chapter 5 can be a tad bit specific, at first I thought the goal was simply to keep one of the heroines alive by the end of the game but it turns out the conditions are a bit more specific than that…

You do have to keep either one of the heroines alive but also have a specific amount of affection point with them going into chapter 5, 3 for Kanae and 4 for Ichijo which is completely arbitrary and makes zero sense with the way Chapter 5 plays out ! Chapter 5 diverges just a little bit from the episodic nature of the common route and thus doesn’t actually introduce a third party, except there is a third party ! A random journalist Kageaki met at some point before chapter 5 and developed a friendship off-screen is killed off instead to make the story work… It's a bit awkward and honestly kinda makes the whole execution of the mechanic fall on its face (and spoiler : it’s not the only time where the game attempts at introducing game mechanics in a messy manner).

But enough about ludo-narrative consistency, this is a VN after all and thus the primary reasons you’re even experiencing this is for the story so let’s talk about it. The game is divided into a 5 chapter long common route, 2 other routes focusing on either of the two heroines Ichijo and Kanae and one final true route which is meant to wrap up the story in a somewhat satisfying way ! A typical structure for a game like this even with the original way the game handles its flag system.

The common route is a series of episodic adventures which sees Kageaki and the gang dealing with the local villain of the week. For the sake of clarity, at the start of the game, Ginseigo steals Kageaki’s sword and has divided into multiple “eggs” which were spread in the four corners of Yamato, once a person comes into contact with said eggs they become infected which doubles their power and erase their doubts but in return puts them on timer as each of those eggs would hatch at any moments turning the individual into a clone of Ginseigo and as it is established at the start, you really don’t want to deal with more than one Ginseigo !

This means that the first half of the game is a bit repetitive and predictable, Kageaki goes to a place, finds a villain to kill, there usually will be some token nice character who always end up dying despite the game’s best effort to make them likable as they have enough death flags to open a football stand during world cup and their usually would be one or several cool robot fights in the end. Out of all these episodic ventures, only chapter 5 deviates from that structure by instead being an expository chapter where Kageaki gets attacked by Psycho Mantis which gives the game a nice enough excuse to talk to us about Kageaki backstory.

The quality of each of these individual chapters greatly vary from one another but they’re usually not too long to complete, maybe like 4 to 5 hours each which is nice enough to spread out your play sessions, I’d say that overall I did enjoy most of these episodic chapters, the only one I wasn’t a huge fan of was the third one because it was kinda long, kinda boring, bogged down by a stupid plot and a lot of info dumps about shit which will ultimately not matter as well as scenes where the characters act like typical VN heroines which they never really do outside of a few moments mainly to take a jab at how cliché these are.

Speaking of the characters, I’d say this is yet another part of Muramasa’s I’m slightly mixed on. The game has quite a few of them but has a very uneven way of using them, they’re certainly not lacking in personality thought which I appreciate and the different interactions they tend to have between them is pretty good, however they also can end up being very undercooked. Kanae for exemple is one of the two main heroines of the game but I didn’t find her schtick to be particularly memorable, she’s a psychopath who loves to kill and will do so without question making her quite a dangerous foe. But the problem is that she’s written in a very inconsistent way, sometimes hating Kageaki and sometimes acting like a caring wife to him and that comedic aspect of the characters in contrast to her true role within the story never manages to make her all that interesting which will be an issue when discussing the true route of the game.

Ichijo fairs a bit better in that department, she’s an high school who has a blind idealistic view of justice, where she needs to defeat bad guys and take revenge on Rokuhara and their tyrannical reign, she is the typical shonen protagonist archetype, I found her to be really interesting from the get go, her introduction is one of the most memorable parts of the VN and she sees in Kageaki an absolute symbol of justice that she must follows in the step on which later down the line makes for some deeply fascinating character conflicts when the veil of lies is lift up and reveals the truth of Kageaki’s character (I also found a lot of her more softer moment to be infinitely more adorale and funnier than Kanae’s antic, honestly the only really good part of Kanae is her assistant Sayo which is a really fun character on its own).

Speaking of Kageaki, I found him to be the best character of the game unsurprisingly since he’s the main character and the vessel through which most of the game's thematic depth is channeled ! At times, Kageaki is the absolute epitome of an edgelord, going into existential dreads and using lines such as “Don’t need to show me nightmares, I live with them every single day” which makes my 13 year old emo phase flutters and cringe at the same time. However, I did find him to ultimately be a pretty endearing character, the guy is just… a huge weirdoe, he’s not fit for society and it shows, he’s blunt and honest to a fault even when it comes to rizzing the ladies which he absolutely sucks at ! He has a lot of weird habits and quirks that makes him entertaining and makes every situation he finds himself in pretty entertaining as a result.

In some way, he reminds of Rance from the Rance series only if Rance was a pathetic socially anxious worm with years of unresolved traumas and cynicism ruining his ego and sense of self ! In fact his self-destructive behavior is reflected even during the intimate moments he shares with the different heroines, since Kageaki seems to have lost control of his life, he tends to channel a lot of his desperate frustration and need for control on his partners which means that he doesn’t just make love to them… HE FUCKS THEM ! AND SOMETIMES WORSE ! And believe it or not, there’s a genuine explanation on why he’s like this in bed but I’m not a sexologist so I’ll stop there, we already talked about sex enough in the first part of this review anyway.

The most interesting part about Kageaki however isn’t just his personality and quirk that’s only one way to make a character endearing without making him just a simple pity party or a collection of clichés, it’s the struggle he goes through, the philosophy and ideology he develops through those hardships and how they clash with the ideals of other characters in the story and the world at large !
And in that regard I think Muramasa succeeds at keeping that aspect of the game thoroughly engaging in the long-run but not perfectly as we’ll discuss later when talking more deeply about the game’s different routes and how they complete and comment on these aspects. Kageaki is a man with a troubled past and a responsibility to atone for his mistakes and the crimes of Ginseigo which will later learn is his sister Hikaru who kinda went crazy and stole one of the family’s treasure to bring death and destruction upon the world and thus the personal quest of Kageaki is to stop her from doing all of this shit but sadly things ain’t that easy because of the law of balance we previously mentioned.

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a heavily philosophical game, it talks about justice, heroism and how these concepts can be twisted by different conflicting points of views and ideologies. It’s a story which explores the nature of what it means to kill for what you believe in and the morality behind murder. At points the game can seem simplistic in nature, after all the final message of the game is that killing people is always bad regardless of one’s reason for it and that peace is the noblest pursuit. At points it can feel like the game is doing a lot of sophistic centrist bullshit like “both side bad” and all that jazz or god forbid the “If I kill them, I’ll be the same as them” but I think that out of all stories I’ve experienced, Muramasa offers a pretty unique way of tackling these rather simplistic idioms.

There are many stories in the world which teaches values of pacifism and how spreading good is always better than succumbing to evil but a lot of these stories fail to actually convince us and reflect on why this truth should be absolute and if there’s even some nuance to it in the first place. It’s one thing to write a story about how “killing is bad”, it’s another thing to convince us that it’s ever true at all, after all, we live in a world drought in conflicts and tyranny, with powerful peoples controlling and toying with the lives of a lot of innocent people just for their own gain ! I won’t hide the fact that I’m a bit of an extremist myself, I think that we should do more political assassination and that you can’t change the world without breaking a few eggs and burning a few cars in the process. If you read my Cold Steel reviews or just read my writings in general, I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea of compromise and consensus, mainly because I live in a country where social progress is so slow because it abides to that single-minded mindset ! I’m all about picking a side and fighting the good fights in your own way ! I believe in the potential of humanity to transcend pain and evil and eventually progress into a cosmic age of enlightenment where everyone is their best selves and society is thriving instead of stagnating !

But I have never taken a life myself, especially a human one. The closest thing to it that I still remember fondly to this day is killing a goat for my consumption when I was a child and not feeling like eating it the next morning ! When life ends, there is no room for redemption, for punishment, for progress, killing is but a temporary solution and a last resort ! During the game Kageaki will have to concede his idea of justice to the reality of the law of balance he has to obey ! And at many points Kageaki is offered the possibility to stop the massacre, to live his own life on his own and maybe go into the forest or something ! He sees the situation he finds himself in as a tragedy, he refuses to call himself a hero because of the horrible actions he’s forced to commit and sees himself more like a demon even if that too is a way of coping with the reality of the act he commits !

Kageaki is a hypocrite with a goal and this goal is the elimination of Ginseigo, that’s the only thing that matters to him, the completion of his quest above all else.
Sacrificing himself and a couple of collateral damages in order to save millions of people, that’s the way Kageaki has to deal with this justice but is he even capable to go all the way and is it even right to do so ?

Kageaki despite his stoic nature is a profoundly good person who wants to do good, he can’t stand seeing injustice before his eyes, he’s just a normal guy who was forced into a path of bloodshed and needs to find meaning in the way of the sword. There’s a scene in chapter 4 where Sorimachi one of the best antagonistic characters in the game confronts him on this and it’s legitimately one of the coolest scene in the entire Visual Novel and the moment I understood that maybe just maybe under the brooding 2009 edge there was something to be found here than most other piece of work talking about similar subject matters don’t have.

Unfortunately, this is where my praise for the games kinda starts to deviate a little bit because the execution is a bit uneven across the entire package. Ittetsu Narahara has two wolves inside of him, one is a wise erudite old man with years of experience, knowledge and a personal philosophy he has forged through the path of the sword. It’s a man who never misses to inform you on little details and teaches you about stuff you may or may not give a shit about. Sometimes this gives the game a lot of flair, especially during battles when the action stops to talk to you about kendo techniques, about stances, about distances, range, and how effectively one could cut through steel or break an arm. There’s an entire fight within chapter 5 which is literally 30 whole minutes of 2 characters staring at each other trying to outplay the others and overthink their every move ! It’s the type of Baki The Grappler type of excessive attention to detail and tension which makes every fight feel more real than the last ! Even during the aerial mech battles with superpower involved there’s always a sense of suggested realism, weight and flow to each of them that make them tense and exciting even if sometimes they do tend to drag on for a bit too long.

However this way of writing also leads its way to a lot of pointless stuff that breaks the pacing and only exists to give more meat to the setting even when it ends up mattering very little. One problem I have with the way Muramasa handles its worldbuilding and internal political struggles is that they pretty much exist as set dressing and suggestion of something bigger than itself ! It definitely makes the world feels more like a complete package but sometimes the game will info dumps you for literal minutes about pointless details while completely overlooking others which could’ve been interesting concept to develop further like for example the whole “Tsurugi dies if you contradict their worldview” or something which is perhaps used twice to different level of effectiveness. This doesn’t really drag down the experience for me but it makes for very uninteresting and rather flat conflicts especially when it comes to how the game handles a lot of its characterization and darker elements.

Because the second wolf inside of Narahara is that of rebellious teenager who dresses in black, listens to Linkin Park, traces artwork of Sasuke Uchiha in his notebook during recess and calls people slurs on Call of Duty Black Ops II while boasting about how much he fucked everyone’s mom. It’s the sort of brooding almost comically excessive amount of edge which ranges from weirdly endearing as I won’t lie to have a certain fondness for that 2009 flavor of emo shit seeping through the crack of every piece of media imaginable but at times it also prevents you from completely taking the game seriously even when it wants to in fact, wants you to take seriously.

At times, Muramasa felt like the philosophical piece of literature people claimed it was with some dark and unnerving moments that wouldn’t be out of place in Berserk but more times than not it felt more like I was reading fucking Akame Ga Kill. The game has a type of humor which sometimes lands and sometimes doesn't and I feel like for the most part it’s there to anime-ify the setting or poke fun at certain conventions but you don’t really poke fun or make a commentary on anything by diving head first into that type of stuff. But also a lot of its darker aspect feels a bit excessive in a way that made just sigh more than anything and created a very predictable scenario. You know that if a character is usually nice and innocent and drops their entire backstory on you they’ll either get killed or worse in the next scene in the most over-the-top Final Destination type of way which is not helped by the fact that the game doesn’t really stop. Its villains are for the most part a series of caricatures with little room to think of them as anything more than a bunch of bad guys to eliminate which kinda makes the point the story is trying to make by the end hard to be sold on !

It’s hard to feel a level of empathy for characters that are meant to be so easily discarded, I think chapter 4 is one of the stronger chapter of the game especially because the action is cool and Sorimachi does his big epic speech while kicking Kageaki in the ribs but it’s also a shining example of the tone of the game working against its own design. In this chapter, Kageaki meets up a group of kids and eventually you know for damn sure because you’ve been conditioned by the structure of the story that these kids are gonna die in the most brutal way possible and yet the game will constantly tap dance around it in a “will-they, won’t-they'' ballet that felt really tiring. It also has the biggest villain yet, a racist american soldier who is impossible to reason with because of how bigoted he is and to show you how much he doesn’t care, he literally made a robot who is powered by fucking dead children because oooooooooooooooooooooh the edge ! Eventually the kids do die after Ginseigo pops up out of nowhere and lands on the island so hard it literally moves which is so completely off-beat with the rest of the chapter’s tone, it’s pretty damn inconsistent.

I think the villain being pretty one note and unquestionably evil like that for the most part is also just a consequence of this game's overall inconsistent character writing. The game has a lot of characters and while not lacking in personality and silly banters with one another, a lot of them end up feels way too undercooked, either because the game kills them in the chapter they were introduced in or because the game doesn’t really spend the necessary amount of time developing them or making them interesting. And while this can certainly be an issue for all the side characters who end up being rather shallow as a result, it is another problem when this happens to characters who are supposed to matter like Kanae, one of the main heroines of the story.

Which leads to probably the single biggest narrative dead-end the game ends up in, its route system. If you have played a visual novel before, especially one with multiple choices, you know that they tend to often alternate perspectives and alternate paths to the conclusion of a story. Route system have been a thing in VN’s since time immemorial and while some try to have a tighter more focused experience with no branching paths which we call “kinetic novels” this game takes the approach most games in the genre uses instead and at least in my opinion not to the game’s benefit. While I can acknowledge the originality of its flagging system and how approximately well it integrates itself to the story Muramasa wants to tell, once you start digging a little deeper we realize that there is a massive imbalance between each route in terms of quality and narrative pertinence.
Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is split into 2 routes, one where Otori Kanae gets to live called “The Nemesis” route and the other where instead Ichijo Ayane survives aka “The Hero” route, each offering a different end to our protagonist in his quest to stop Ginseigo and atone for his sins.

We’ll start with the route that I found to be the weakest part of the game by far, the Nemesis route. In this route, Kageaki is held hostage by the GHQ and forced to work for them as they’re preparing to drop a nuclear bomb onto Rokuhara's fortress. Kageaki ends up in this situation after being tasked by the Emperor’s son (which he’s been working with throughout the game as he was the one pointing him in the direction of his next target) to assassinate the Shogun. At first reluctant, since he doesn’t want to kill anymore than necessary in his goal to kill Ginseigo, he eventually accepts the deal but someone killed him before him. After that Kanae asked him to join her in the temple where the Prince and Kageaki father (who he also was working with, sorry to have missed on these details) as someone is planning to kill the prince under accusation of having orchestrated the Shogun’s assasination.

On his way to the temple, he’s slowed down by a Steel Jeeg copyright infringement which makes arrive late at the temple where Kanae proceeded to enter her own secret personal Tsurugi and kill Kageaki’s dad. Not realizing that his was Kanae behind the armor, he decides to get his revenge on the mysterious Musha but first he gets arrested by the GHQ where it is revealed that Kanae was the cousin of the little kid Kageaki killed at the start of the game and that she therefore seeks revenge. Kageaki however is actually thrilled about this information as he was looking for the person who would punish him for his sin and thus starts a very weird relationship between the two, each seeking the solace of death in one another.

The Nemesis route is conceptually, a good ending because it is the only ending in which Kageaki gets what he truly wants : Death and atonement for his sins. Thematically speaking, it’s a revenge story on both ends and one thing that I actually enjoy about both routes is that while some love blossoms between the 2 adversaries, the girl you chose fundamentally becomes the de-facto final antagonist of the chapter for different reasons. Nemesis route is also the only one to put an heavy focus on the consequences of Kageaki’s action throughout the common route as a ghost of his past eventually comes to haunt him midway through the story. It’s all very solid stuff at least on the paper but sadly, the execution is a tad bit underwhelming.

I think the issue mainly comes from Kanae, Kanae is a cold-blooded killer, a psychopath who loves to kill, in a game which does its darndest to convince you that killing his bad no matter the excuses, it makes for a pretty weak antagonist for Kageaki, instead of confronting Kageaki’s ideology and circumstances and pushing him in a new interpretations of them, Kanae is simply there to give Kageaki’s his sentence. You already know how it’s going to end and yet the game kinda lost me. Nemesis route is mostly just a lot of plot setup and political babble, most of which aren’t particularly interesting to sit through but another thing that drags this route is the over-excessive use of interactive segments which for lack of a better word are all pretty damn bad and makes you sigh everytime you engage in an action segment whereas so far, most of the action scenes played themselves. I ignore why they even did this except to embrace the adventure game nature of early visual novels while serving no real commentary at all, or maybe just to keep your attention.

Kanae is also a pretty undercooked character all things considered and a pretty inconsistently written one at that. On one hand, she’s pretty damn cool and badass because she’s just a crazy bitch which can rush inside a manor and kill everyone there to restore the honor of her family but on the other she also acts way too often like a typical housewife to Kageaki and I really don’t know how this contrasts even adds to her character arc since it seems to only be there for comedy sake. She’s also super underdeveloped to the point that her powers are only half-explained, she has bugs eye but we don’t know shit about it, her servant is an immortal vampire disguising as an old lady but we don’t know shit about it, she wants to avenge her cousin as well as the rest of her family but we barely know jack shit about the relationship she had with them.

Don’t get me wrong, the route has some nice action, but there’s not much juice to latch onto, not really a core-theme that’s developed, the relationship of enemy to lovers who seeks mutual destruction between Kageaki and Kanae is cool in theory but it leads kinda nowhere and lacks the impact than it could have ! If anything, the only reason why this route isn’t plainly skippable is because it sets up some background elements that will be further explored in the game's final route, other than that, it’s pretty disappointing despite some cool albeit underbaked ideas.

The hero route on the other hand…

IS ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT !

The route focus on Ichijo Ayane who after being gifted a Tsurugi by the name of Masamune from Sorimachi at the end of Chapter 4 learns that Kageaki, which she idealized as a grand hero of justice, turns out to be a cold blooded murderer who kills innocent people. As she confronts Kageaki, he doesn’t deny the fact and thus a fight between Full Metal Daemon Muramasa and Full Metal Providence Masamune begins ! Masamune is a tsurugi who believes in absolute justice and whose goal is to eliminate all Evil. Created during Japan’s war after the Mongol, its creator after witnessing the horrors and the atrocities caused by the Mongols was convinced that demons live amongst humans and these demons need to be eradicated.

Like the game precises, history has shown that neither side were either morally good or bad, much like every conflict in history it was all a bit more complex than this, however Masamune kept that blind ideal of Justice and decided to apply it as one of his laws. Masamune is fucking sick, it’s this blue mech who will do anything to triumph over evil and as such, as like a million techniques to do so, most of which involves using its pilots body parts as ammunition for its different techniques (it’s fine since Tsurugi’s can regenerate their pilots almost completely, it’s just terribly painful). It’s a rather clever visual way to clue us in on the true theme of this route and by extension the entire story of the game as a whole because as much as Masamune claims to fight for justice, this justice is a bit fucked up and twisted.

After an initial battle, Ichijo spares Kageaki after learning that he’s forced to obey the law of balance and propose to kill people in his steeds so that the law of balance never activates and he can accomplish his mission without claiming anymore innocent lives.

I absolutely love the Hero Route, if you have to read Muramasa, regardless of your first impression or what you may think of the game afterwards, it’s really for this route in particular. Everything is so tight, so focused, so perfect that the few flaws I find to the route are only H-Scenes related which I won’t further elaborate on. Because Kageaki pretty much plays second fiddle to Ichijo, he pretty much hides himself cowardly behind Ichijo’s idea of Justice. Ichijo is your typical shonen protagonist, hell bent on getting rid of Rokuhara for the evil that they represent and this goal aligns well with Masamune and his ideal of justice. However she will soon find out that justice is a feeble concept and that killing people regardless of how evil one might think they are carries with itself a huge toll on one’s conscience and that killing in the name of justice, inspires others to do the same and ignite the fire of everlasting conflict.

The route has so many clever ways to lead us into what the game is actually about that even if I do find some disagreement with the philosophy that’s portrayed, I can’t deny how effective a tale Muramasa is when focusing on these deeper philosophical questions. When confronting Ginseigo, she refuses to fight Ichijo, her adversary is Kageaki and she was slowing down on her conquest just so Kageaki would reach the truth of the law of balance faster and be a worthy opponent to stop her wrath but she only found a cowards who hides himself into a veil of lies. There’s a remixed flashback showing us what would happen if Kageaki had found Masamune instead of Muramasa and it’s simply brilliant in showing us that it wouldn’t be a better situation, in fact it would be even worse.

The law of balance is meant to represent the true meaning of what it means to kill, Kageaki believes in justice just like Ichijo and is willing to kill for it but each time, he has to kill an innocent but only he and he alone decides who is good and who is bad. The people he had killed up to that point, even the most evil bastard, probably also had loved ones or some people working under them, or some people that were hunting them. Killing only invites more killing, that’s what Kageaki’s mother told him before he was sent by circumstances in a path of blood and that’s what the law of balance is all about : If you’re willing to kill an enemy, you must also be willing to kill a friend because the act of killing is not to be taken lightly regardless on one’s reason to do it and especially when it’s in the name of the nebulous idea of justice !

The philosophy might be a bit hypocritical at first, Ittetsu Narahara simply doesn’t believe in one true justice, it doesn’t exist and it never will because true justice is just a matter of perspective. It awfully sounds like a “both side bad” or “If I kill them I’m just as bad as them” and it does, and to many people, this would be enough to cross-out the game as having a cringy almost spineless centristic ideology which by itself is biased on the idea that there is no good or bad sides and that fighting for something, for your own idea of justice is always “evil”.

The current world is draught in conflicts of all kind and it is always asked of us to pick a side, or else we’re simply seen as a spineless coward, that’s at least what I believe in, I believe that one should always fight their own fight and shouldn’t rely on neutral sophistry to justify passivity. But believing in something and killing in its name, is a whole different subject, the reality is that conflicts are eternal, humans will likely never achieve a point where everyone would be working together, it’s a bit pessimistic of a view but that’s what the game believes in.
Ichijo Ayane is directly confronted on this through a series of circumstances and is now forced to fight against Kageaki. Despite her ideology and entire worldview being broken, and realizing how bad it is for others to fight in the name of her justice, she decides to keep on fighting anyway as she believes that eventually if you keep fighting for what you believe is justice, humanity will keep fighting until true justice happens. This is then followed by an absolutely brilliant epilogue where a time-skip happens and both Kageaki and Masamune are dead only leaving Ichijou to inherit Muramasa and therefore inheriting the law of balance and by extension the will of Kageaki, enacting a more just idea of justice !

And here’s what the problem is with this ending, Hero Route simply just put Muramasa into a narrative dead-end because it pretty much went to the absolute extreme of what it wanted to tell as a narrative, at least that’s what I felt when finishing it and the guy who was reading it with me also agreed. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people I’ve asked told me Hero Route was their favorite part of the game by a huge margin. If the game actually ended here, it would be pretty much the ideal thematic ending to the story and as you know, I care more about themes than I care about wrapping up loose plotpoint since I can usually excuse a few plot-holes if the conclusion is satisfying.

But Muramasa sadly, doesn’t end on the Hero Route, it has one extra last “true route” which unlocks after finishing the first two. And while Hero and Nemesis are on different ends of the quality spectrum, the “Conqueror” route is kind of tip-toeing around the middle and I felt that for all that it proposes, I didn’t get much satisfaction out of it. I was expecting something that would build on the conclusion of either route and arrive at a somewhat wholly unique conclusion that would by some sort of miracle surpass what Hero Route was able to accomplish or even say something more.

And yeah, I’d say that most of my issue with Muramasa stems from that last route which is kind of tonally confused and not as tight or thematically charged as the Hero Route. First off, the route starts with a forced conflict between Muramasa and Kageaki on who gets to control the other or if they should work as one. It’s kinda tired, it’s kinda cliché, the conflict goes by fast and it’s only an excuse for Kageaki to start with the mentality he has by the end of hero route without going through the entire arc he went through in Hero route and already you can see how scuffed the conqueror route really is from the get go.

Since this is admittedly a fresh new start, all of the characters that are still alive and have a role to play in the story don’t really go through the same arc they did in their original route. It’s especially apparent for Kanae and Ichijo which you would expect to get an alternate or further development yet alone an actual role to play but despite being the main heroines of the first half of the story, they play second fiddle to Muramasa and Chachamaru which are the new superstar of the show and according to how much merch they got, the ones the marketing team wants you to care the most about.

From a storytelling perspective, I understand the existence of the true route being a necessity, Nemesis and Hero leaves a lot of on-going plot threads unresolved and a lot of mysteries about the world yet to be explored but it really doesn’t help the route from being just a collection of “stuff happening”. We start with an assassination attempt, then hours of monogatari-style comedy banter between Kageaki and ugh… Hikaru… (we’ll get to her), including a whole joke segment then it goes to a full war then some fucking TTGL shit.
There’s very little actual connective tissue between these sets of event and I must admit that the game kinda lost me for the grand majority of the route and while it’s not void of interesting ideas, a lot of these ideas end-up being served undercooked just to prepare the main event that is the final confrontation between Kageaki and Hikaru. For example, there’s a whole arc where Kageaki gets infected by one of Ginseigo’s egg and turns evil meaning that he joins Rokuhara for a short while and that’s an interesting idea on paper but one that drags for too long and doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s an attempt during this part to “humanize” each of the Rokuhara generals which could be perceived as just blood-thirsty bastard but these additional layers are nowhere near exploited well enough to completely turn your opinions of them on their head and tbf, the GHQ not getting the same treatment either kinda dampens the effect. Heck they even skipped Raicho’s fight despite being built up to be a super badass, what a goddamn fraud smh…

I like Chachamaru but I wish more was done with her in the end, even though her ending got snuffed despite having a badass premise, like why skip the fight there I don’t understand… Oh and she also gets graped by Kageaki at some point which heh… wtv I guess…

But at least Chachamaru definitely has more meat on her bones as a character than Muramasa which is just kind of bland and boring. You’d think the personification of the law of balance and her past as a human would give her some depth as being the one true partner of Kageaki but despite her design being right up my alley she gets a total of 1 (one) good scene where she meets one of the children from the start of the game and confronts the sins she committed with Kageaki, it’s probably my favorite scene of the whole route all things considered.

The biggest and I mean biggest black spot on my appreciation of the route however is the main antagonist of the story : Giseigo aka Hikaru. So to put full context on Hikaru, she is Kageaki’s sister who after a series of events in the past entered in contact with one of her family’s treasure tsurugi, Ginseigo. Hikaru has contracted an incurable disease which eats at her bones everyday and during her many periods of unconsciousness, she heard the voice of Ginseigo calling her. Kageaki, thinking her sister went insane (spoiler : she kinda did) after being manipulated by Ginseigo somewhat, decides to take up arms and is forced into a situation where he has to wear Muramasa and kill his adoptive mother. Throughout the game, Ginseigo served as more of an ominous figure, somewhat antagonistic to Kageaki but also pushing him to new height as a rival, she reminded a little bit of Grahf from Xenogears in that regard and the more you advance through the game, the more you realize that Hikaru is perfectly sane and is doing all that killing on purpose.

As opposed to Kageaki, she kinda works ? If you stretch that a bit ? Ginseigo is supposed to also answer to the law of balance but she managed to find a way to bypass it, because the law of balance forces you to slay a friend for every foe. But Hikaru kills indiscriminately and thus doesn’t have to answer to the law of balance, she seeks to ascend to godhood and transcend the concept of human morality, one of her powers being to erase morality within the mind of humans through a song which makes everyone kill each other pretty much. She could accomplish that goal very quickly but as it was demonstrated in the Hero Route, the one person who interests her the most is Kageaki with whom she has a lot of innuendo based conversation with. Hikaru sacrifices the world for her own sake, while Kageaki sacrifices himself for the world… simple enough… right… ?
But that’s what Hikaru represents thematically within the story and even then, that doesn’t really make for “main antagonist” material for me. She really works more as a stepping stone for Kageaki to realize something about his quest and defeating an opponent who actually has a frontal confrontation with his philosophy (literally every other antagonist that he faces) and that’s how the Hero Route uses her to great effect in my opinion.

But what are her motivations ?

Ok get ready for this…

Since she was born without a father to raise her, she started developing a weird daddy fetish. She desires a dad, she wants a dad that loves her and most importantly, she wants to kill anyone so that her daddy loves her and her alone ! AND ALSO SHE REALLY AND I MEAN REALLY WANTS TO FUCK HER DAD !

No I’m not kidding, that’s Hikaru’s whole motivation throughout the entire game, she just has an insatiable incest fetish and transcending the morals of men and ascending to godhood is the only mean to accomplish that goal because Kageaki read her bed stime stories about Greek Mythology and their incestuous relationships.

In fact, at some point, it is revealed that the Hikaru we see is some sort of astral projection and…

Ok so the plot eventually devolves into some weird conspiracy about reviving god who lives deep in the earth and is an alien who created Tsurugi millions of years ago and it leads to like a weird over the top space battle that somehow involves a completely out of place MATH PUZZLE ???? And parallel universes ???? And the fucking prefect dude from episode 2 reviving for some reasons ????

What the ???

Look, I’m a super robot fan, I love TTGL, I love Getter, I love Gaogaigar, Mazinger and I can name a few others easily. I’m an absolute fan of that over the top, reality bending, space-going, moon shattering, Asura’s Wrath fisting action but where the hell does any of this fit into the setting that the game presented up to that point ?

It’s like they wanted a spectacle fight for the final confrontation but somehow couldn’t just settle with the limitations of the game setting so they said, fuck it, we’re Demonbane now ! And I would’ve probably enjoyed this part a lot more if I actually fucking cared about what was presented to me ! If Hikaru wasn’t a complete joke of a villain whose way is too comical to serve as a good conclusion to the story, perhaps a good conclusion to Kageaki as a character but nothing else.

And the game also hinges on hiding a certain plot twist, that Kageaki was actually the father of Hikaru when not only was it the most obvious thing in the world to catch up on but also since it’s actually revealed at the end, it leads once again absolutely nowhere and I’m left there wondering if this game really needed the extra 20 hours it took me to go through the true route if this was going to be the conclusion they wanted to arrive at.
And like a bad joke, the story doesn’t actually end there, you get a whole epilogue, where it’s shown that Kageaki established some sort of Outer Heaven but worse and then another epilogue after that epilogue but actually a prologue to that epilogue, following Kageaki who after defeating Hikaru was mysteriously left alive and now has to cope with his existence.

This small part of the game however, is probably the actual good part of the true route, it explores how Kageaki could live after all that went through and how he could cope with that existence and what path to take from now on. The ending is pretty damn good and easily one of the most memorable parts of the game aside from some weird heap in logic to arrive at the whole “Kageaki decides to enact the law of balance on a global scale by creating Outer Heaven” which essentially is… what the hero route ended on… minus the whole Kageaki living and making an MGS reference part…

Oh and there’s also a sequel hook but sadly as of today, it kinda leads nowhere.

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a tough nut to crank for me, I think that at its best, it is the terribly intelligent and thought provoking work people claim that it is, Narahara is not a stupid guy, far from it and you can feel that he thought the theme he wanted to explore through and bring it to its absolute limit. Narahara wanted to tell an all-encompassing story which features all of his personal interests and combines them into one even when that can be a little awkward and irrelevant !

This gives FMD a “soul” of its own that you can’t find in most other works and I can easily see how someone could base their entire life philosophy around what’s being told in this game even if it’s up to discussion on my end. But is it fully well executed ? I’m not so sure, Muramasa can either be the highest of peak or the downest of Abyss with a lots of hills and valleys along the way, it’s a work who despite its main subject matter doesn’t really fight the right equilibrium to make all of these elements work at 100% of their capacity. There’s a lot of things the game leaves on the table never to cook anything with and yet they still managed to stretch that shit over 70 or so hours. It is a long game, it is a commitment but was it worth it ?

When it comes to this game, I think that I end up in a similar place than with “Higurashi”. I care a lot about specific parts of the game enough to say that I did enjoy it and have some actual respect for it. But so much of Muramasa is just nothing to me, especially the Nemesis and true route (outside of the blind guy and ending) which were underwhelming despite the neat ideas and narrative prowess they might have.

My recommendation if I wanted to be really petty about it, is to read the game with the Hero Route and stop there and only if by the end you wish to dig further then only I would invite you to read the rest to give yourselves your own opinion about it !

The True Route for me doesn’t do much more than what the Hero Route didn’t already accomplish much more gracefully.

It’s a tough game to rate and thus, It’s going to be the first review I’m gonna leave unrated until further notice. I'm glad to have played it however and I acknowledge how much of a cult title the game is as a whole but it’s not for me… It was simply… too unbalanced…

Why did no one told me that they made Mighty N°9 but good ?

Like this random ass crossover spin-off game is pretty much a remake of MN9 if it was actually made with care and effort behind it, the concept of customizing your own bullet while perfectible and easily breakable offers a lot of fun possibilities and the difficulty and level design is just right !

It's not the best designed 2D Classic Megaman by Inti Creates (that would be MM9 imo) but it's probably the second best

If you happen to be a part of the wall of shame that were the Mighty Number 9 credits, give this one a shot, you deserve it

I think that we, as a society

Should make more games about tiny girls using a drill to do platforming and stuff

But alas, we only got Drill Dozer, Gurumin and this

We're a couple of steps away from the perfect TTGL videogame

Dohna Dohna : A Colorful Ethical Paradox

AliceSoft is a company which always found itself in an interesting paradoxical crossroad when it comes to tackling heavy subject matter and putting it under the lens of morality. Being a eroge company and not the kind to half-ass the erotic side of their production like most Eroge seems to do out of convention (and for the most part to sell to a niche audience while bypassing censorship on more touchy subject matters) but embracing that aspect as part of their core identity puts them under a pretty unflattering light in the eyes of the general public. But AliceSoft being enjoyed mostly by a niche community of people on which its western side is the size of a small Italian mountain village means there’s not really any further or widespread discussions about the company and their works even within the fringe community of “Visual Novel fans” (I don’t like the etiquette but this is off-topic).

Usually the conversation ends as soon as it starts : AliceSoft is a porn game company, they make porn games for weirdoe otakus to jack-off to. And while we could end the discussion there, trying to be reasonable and actually explain why AliceSoft titles are more than the sum of is part is like explaining that there’s a difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, like it exists, but it’s really hard to explain the subtle difference without sounding like a pedophile yourself and in the case of Alicesoft without sounding like a porn addicted weirdoe (which I absolutely am btw… anyway where was I ?).

And this is where yours truly chooses to bite the bullet and actually defend the idea that while being a porn game company, AliceSoft's entire existence is fascinatingly paradoxical. On one hand, Alicesoft is an eroge company and one that owns the mantle and wears it with pride, the people working at Alicesoft define themselves as “eroge makers” which can even be found on their logo and it’s not like they’re shy about it. In fact, Alicesoft has always been very transparent about their main goal when making these games : They love eroge and they want to make eroge and thus they put a sisyphean amount of effort into delivering on the erotic front, not because they wanted to sell to a niche market, not because they want to be edgy but because they genuinely enjoy and have a clear passions for the act of drawing naked women doing the deeds and then contextualize them within a thinly veiled plot with characters and complex gameplay systems to accompany said drawings.

Just one look at the Alice Mansion which is this super cool Dev Room feature present in almost every single of their titles will show you how transparent they are about that fact. They are a bunch of goofy hornballs that likes to make goofy lewd shit to please a crowd of people already averted to that type of writing or find an appeal in eroticism and pornography. Porn artists at the end of the day are still artists, they vibe with different shit, they bond over their weird quirky love for superficial details like girls in glasses and the “moe” side of their misery, there’s a lot of thought that’s put behind these elements and it’s impossible to remove that aspect of their catalog because it would just result in a different somewhat truncated experience.

So you think that something like this can only approached through an ironic lens and appreciated only by complete sociopath especially since a lot of the fetishes displayed in those games ranges from pretty extreme to downright criminal (may I remind the RanSill audience that our boy Rance isn’t an UWU soft boy but an honest to god criminal AND a rapist ?) but if it was that simple of course, the company wouldn’t have any sort of following.
Because on the other hand, Alicesoft also wants to tell good stories and more times than not, stories which actually challenge the view and the morals of the people they are trying to cater to. Being founded in the 80’s where most erotic game developers were making a quick bucks selling cheap strip poker, mahjong, shifumi or quizz games without much thought behind it, they wanted from the outset to create interesting scenarios, worlds and characters to contextualize the action. Suffice to say that in my opinion it serves the purpose of rendering the erotic situations even hotter, goofier and/or horrifying depending on what the games are aiming for and help them make more memorable in the long run because you end up having something to attach yourself to beyond the typical plumbers and stepmom scenarios.

And while that’s fine and all, I don’t think this exaggerated attention to detail and care alone would’ve made people stuck with series like Rance or their other less popular productions and they would’ve most likely died to the general indifference of many. As soon as Rance 1, the game present Rance as an awful criminal that you don’t and should not relate to or sympathize with in any capacity but that doesn’t change that he is the hero and he has to face adversaries and he alone isn’t what’s wrong with the world at large and that if people like Rance are able to exist and succeed within such a setting it’s mostly because of deeper problem with the way the world around him works, which in Rance 1 is portrayed by Lavender, the ghost of a girl who was killed by Lia, the princess of the Leazas Kingdom to quench her twisted desires and which Rance promptly punishes in his huh… own kind of way.

Very early on, AliceSoft was already toying the line between indulgence and the criticism of certain moral failings that may lead people to sincerely engage and create this type of content in the first place. Toushin Toushi 2 all the way back in 1994 did the whole “Sans Undertale judging you for your sins'' thing a lil bit more than 20 years before it was cool by including within its game mechanics a morality system which affected certain parameters in your games as well as changing the outcome of some scenes with a very obtuse way of absolving your sins if you so desired.

It’s a game where the protagonist is very different from Rance or even Kuma the character we’ll focus about in a bit, he’s a dude with a girlfriend who sadly finds himself in a pretty shitty situation regarding her well-being and his own deeper desire to progress that relationship to the next level followed by a second half so brilliant and so thought provoking that I really don’t want to spoil it for you or analyze it in details here (maybe some other day ?). Suffice to say that a morality system works with the type of story TT2 wants to tell but the nature of the game being an eroge and thus feeling the need to cater to an audience who genuinely enjoys and likes that type of content is a bit of an awkward position to find yourselves in.

Mind you, I think part of the reason this came to come through for the most part is because Alicesoft is pretty mixed in terms of gender ratio within the company, and a lot of the hard hitting and brutal scenes from these games were written by a female writer by the name of Torii who did her damn best to add her personal female leaning vision in the core DNA of these burly sex stories mostly consumed by a male audience, to the point that the modern western Rance fandom is surprisingly left-leaning and feminist at their core because they could pick apart the more subtle thinly veiled themes that these games had to offer.
In fact, when Torii doesn’t work on a game, you can instantly feel it in the level of indulgence and a lack of subtlety in regards to thing she had previously installed like that cynical biting edge that comes through when shouting into the void that the world is complex and the winds of change can come from the most unlikely and at times unlikable people. I’ve already talked about this in my review on Rance IX if you care enough to check it and give you a proper idea of what I think Rance under a new author might look and sound like (spoiler : I’m mixed on a lot of narrative choices in that game despite enjoying it in the end) but that’s not why I wrote this lengthy introduction.

I wanted to show you that deeply, Alicesoft never forgot about consequences, they may be fetishizing stuff like sexual assault and everything but it’s only a filter through which they can tell stories about the deeper implications of said actions and the multiple consequences that can be born from them and how people explore their own insecurities about sex while still keeping a mostly fun and lighthearted tone to disorientated the distracted players. Kichikuou Rance, one of their most popular and widely acclaimed titles is a game entirely built on a push and pull gameplay loop based on facing the consequences of your actions, making tough decisions and having to adapt to them and accept them as they come. And while a lot of this was lost after Torii’s departure from the company, I believe one writer took the mantle of what she once wanted to accomplish with her works, and that writer is known as Dice Korogashi.

Dice Korogashi was part of a newly formed team of developers at Alicesoft that I will now refer to as “Team Dohna” for the sake of simplicity. When the question of remaking Rance 01 for a modern audience was brought up by TADA who initially wasn’t fond of the idea. He thought that if it had to happen it should be done under the same condition the original game was made in : by a fresh team of young developers, a risky bet for what will eventually become the newest best entry point into the series but a bet that paid off significantly in the end, since Rance 01 is considered by many as one of the best titles in the series and the other remake they worked on, Rance 03 saw even more praise by the general public which faith were starting to dwindle during the few dry years of the company after the release of Sengoku Rance.

Dice and team Dohna perfectly captured the feeling of the franchise and what made it work in the first place, and with a material as shallow and honestly not that great as Rance 1 they managed to pull a lot of its best quality while reinventing the game for a new audience, coupled with a lot of retroactive continuity stuff, a more fleshed out adventure and generally better more witty writing which reminded people of the good days where Torii was at the office.

It is no surprise then than Dice was brought onto Rance X to take the role of main writer replacing Yoroide Dragon who only served a minor co-writing role this time around, the guy understood his stuff and Team Dohna were perhaps even more passionate and talented than their mentors when it came to making fun games which pleased a grand majority of people.

Soon, Team Dohna will start working on their own original IP, a game that will shake the world with a stunning artstyle and a level of presentation never seen before for the company.
Is it all style and no substance ? Or is there more to it ? Let’s see for ourselves.
Dohna Dohna was originally announced in 2016 and went onto a long development period of 4 years after its announcement after the scope and technical aspect of the project found itself to be too big for Alicesoft and Team Dohna to handle in a timely manner especially with the addition of guest artist joining the fray to design all of the unique heroines of the game and of course COVID, anyway the game was eventually released in 2020 to celebrate 1 year too late the 30th anniversary of the company. It wasn’t director Ittenchiroku first title within the universe as there exist a sort of prototype of Dohna Dohna called Haruurare which was a small mini-game in the Alice 2010 compilation, although no english version of it is available, the main premise is roughly similar with an heavy emphasis on kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution which is what Dohna Dohna is mostly (but not entirely, we’ll get there) about.

The game takes place in the fictitious Asougi City, a modern Japanese metropole controlled by a big corporate conglomerate called “Asougi” who managed to claim its independence from the rest of world and establish a sort of cult of personality fascist regime with all the bells and whistles that come along with it such an heavily armed police force, propaganda everywhere, surveillance, “cleaning” drones and forced labor for anyone who steps too out of line with the system in place. To oppose the oppressive regime a couple of gangs whose goal is to trample on the establishment were founded, these gangs known as “Anti-Asou” clan engage in illegal activities such as property damage, stealing but most importantly the dangerous business of “hustling” which can be roughly translated by the act of kidnapping innocent women and selling their bodies to illegal prostitution.

You take control of Kuma, member of an anti-Aso clan by the name of “Nayuta” and the one managing the hustling business. he’s accompanied by other members such as Zappa the clan’s leader, Torataro the milf enjoyer, KiraKira your chainsaw wielding gyaru childhood friend, Porno the hypersexual loli and a slew of colorful characters joining the party as you progress through the game. Your goal on top of following the story is going to go inside various dungeons in order to “hunt” for potential new “talents” , bring them to your hideout and “train” them to perform well and bring you lots of cash during the “hustling” hours.

Let’s get something out of the way first before going in detail about this very peculiar premise. The game is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, it’s something that many people, even those of the mainstream gaming sphere who don't know about the concept behind the game have said. I would go as far as to say that out of all of Alicesoft’s 30 year old catalog of great games, this one easily has the best presentation of them all. Alicesoft being an eroge company means that they are of a relatively humble size and their games are relatively low budget compared to even low-profile indie games and thus are mostly carried by their sprite art and CG’s as it is tradition in that field. But here the game is just fucking popping, the illustrator Gyokai did more than an amazing job giving life to this game, the colours are flashy in a certain pop-way, the character design are ultra solid and most of all, the game has actual battle animation and those wouldn’t have to envy those of productions commonly found on Steam.

Many people say that Dohna Dohna feels like the “Persona 5” of Eroge and from an aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to deny, everything is so fluid, the UI is really nice, it feels like a proper professional game release and is far above the standards of these kinds of production, as far as the art go, the game is freaking gorgeous and I personally love it ! Even the H-Scenes are… well not to be a gooner but the art pops even in those.
One quick look at the Alice Mansion section of the game informs us that the team went for this sort of Hip-Hop, World End With You artstyle because they felt that telling a story in a modern city would make the visuals of the game rather dull and they wanted to contrast with the heavier subject matter of the game and that was a more than excellent choice, in fact I would even dare to say that some of the more… let’s say harsher and hardcore scene wouldn’t work nearly as well with an artstyle less detailed and with less flair, I gotta admit that I rarely praise H-Scenes but some of the H-Scenes in this game really made me stop to take care of important business if you know what I’m saying.

When I said earlier that the game was considered to be the “Persona 5” of Eroge, I also meant it a bit more literally as a lot of the main criticism people have towards the game because of this poppy artstyle combined to quite a dark premise meant the game was supposedly all style and no substance, that it’s just a fun game with fun mechanics and that the stories failed at delivering any thoughtful deeper commentary about the subject matter it was trying to tackle, I must admit, that was a bit of my impression at first. Like I said, it’s really hard to release an Eroge who very obviously indulges in some crass stuff while trying to sell and please to an audience of jerkers who are only there to appreciate the “art” and the game general tone didn’t really indicate at first that the story was going to take that whole “hustling” thing all that seriously and put it as an excuse to be primordially fun first and a bit needlessly edgy second. I was actually wary about this throughout my playthrough but then I remember that the person who recommended this game to me had a lot to say positively about the game’s handling of said topic and the deeper political themes the game tries to explore.

But to talk about these, we first need to understand how the game works. The game is divided in multiple phases, you have a hideout phase where you can buy items, manage your party, participate in character events to further your relationship with your party members and manage your “talents” (more on that later). After that, you have two choices, either spend the day “hustling” which will trigger the Hustling phase of the game or go on a “hunt” which initiates the Hunting Phase of the game AKA Dungeon exploration. We’ll focus on the hunting phases first as it is the more “video gamey” aspect of the game.

After selecting a dungeon, you move your characters on a series of linear branching paths which sometimes leads to an icon triggering a fight, giving you an item or triggering an event. The battle system of the game is actually pretty fun, it’s a less hardcore version of “Darkest Dungeon”, if you ever played that game, your characters and the opposite party are placed in a round of 4 and you have to slide them left or right before using their abilities, you have to consider placement because some of your abilities only work within a certain radius or only hit a certain row (which can be seen by a line connecting to where the attack will land) and also to avoid damages yourself, as some of the more fragile units could potentially get killed easily if they’re misplaced. While Dohna Dohna, doesn’t really have the same level of complexity of Darkest Dungeons with its permadeath system and various amounts of status effects (here most of them are just stats debuffs), it does have a few “puzzle” fights when it comes to recruiting talents ! Sometimes when on the field, you’ll hit a case with a girl icon, this triggers a fight with a talent on it and if you want to recruit it, you will need to defeat that girl last and so you need to time and use your techniques right as to clear all enemies before dealing with the talent who always die in one hit ! It’s a nice change of pace on top of the bosses which are also pretty damn fun and well designed.
The game’s difficulty on a first playthrough is “just right” and the character variety of your party is pretty damn solid, it’s also nice that you can swap party members at any time in battle and an unlimited amount of time to as to keep the general flow of battle intact and not punish the players too much for harsh decisions. Fights are usually not all that hard but there were some that took me by surprises with how challenging they were, combined with the entire resource management aspect of dungeon exploration. I have a few complaints with the game's systems however : for one, only the active party members at the end of a battle get any XP which is pretty annoying to keep everyone evenly leveled by the end of the game and two the enemy variety isn’t super high. I understand this was done because animating hand drawn sprites for every characters probably was already a huge time commitment as is but It wouldn’t have killed to at least have swap colored version with different aptitudes instead of just pulling from the same pool of generic soldier troopers with more HP for new zones, that’s no to say it’s always these types of enemies as some story dungeons switch things up when the other gangs are involved but still.

Another thing that I didn’t really enjoy was the weapon upgrade system, for some reasons, Alicesoft weapon systems have always been obtuse and RNG heavy for no reasons and Dohna Dohna is no exception. To get new gear, you need to first find the material and then buy it at the shop, problem is the game doesn’t tell you where to find these past Rank 2 and even if you figure it out somehow, you need to be lucky to be able to find said material in a dungeon during an hunting phase, it makes the endgame unnecessarily grindy if you want the most optimal gear to tackle the last few challenges of the game unless you want to spend a lifetime killing one tanky enemies in one of the late game areas while making sure they don’t send your ass to the shadow realm.

Speaking of buying items, the main means of collecting money in this game is through the “hustling” part which is where the game hides its true ludo-narrative experience. One thing that I’ve noticed when playing through the game is that this aspect of the game was pretty secondary, you need it to gain money and gain more resources but aside from the time the story requires it, the hustling is something almost entirely optional and even when you are forced to interact with it the requirement to progress to the next stage of the story is usually not that high.

At first, I thought this design decision was a bit odd. Why would the secondary mechanic of the game, arguably the one the marketing of the game was centered around and one of the main sources of inner conflict for our protagonist, be left being so optional ? The main answer one could arrive at is that much like the RPG aspect of the game, they wanted this part to not be too much of a weight on the players, especially the ones that were more familiar with RPG mechanics but not nearly enough with management simulators. After all, the Alice Mansion section of the game talks about how they wanted the game to remain easy and accessible in order to sell it to a larger audience as this big bright and colorful game celebrating 30 years of the company’s history.

But by actually investing myself deeper within that part of the game out of my own volition and also mostly so I could gather enough resources to mitigate the end-game grind, I think that I was understanding why they decided to do it this way as it says a lot about you the player and how you start naturally fitting in the shoes of the main character Kuma, experiencing a similar level of cold detachment as you invest more time in those mechanics.

Kuma is an interesting protagonist as far as the wider range of Alicesoft protagonist goes, unlike Rance he isn’t some lust and ego-driven asshole looking to dominate the screen time and the world while hiding his weaker side behind a veil of macho man behavior, unlike Seed from Toushin Toshi II, he isn’t an innocent constantly struggling with the morality of his actions and the vow he gave to his S.O. Kuma is a bit like Walter White from the Breaking Bad series, a man who after losing everything turns himself to a shady business and has grown colder and more indifferent in order to protect his own psyche from the harsh reality of the acts he’s committing. Kuma lost his family after they were used as experiments for Asougi which led him to a life of crime and joining the Nayuta clan. Nayuta, initially wasn’t fond of “hustling” as a business but Kuma began introducing it to the clan under the suggestion of “Mistress” a shop owner who gives out weapons and items to other clans around the city as “hustling” is shown to him to be the most optimal way to found Nayuta’s illegal and revolutionary activities.

Kuma sees hustling as just a means to an end, just something that he absolutely needs and has to do in order to avenge his family and further his goals within Nayuta. Kuma is a young man, still going to school during the events of the story even if his presence in class isn’t the most consistent, he even embarks his childhood friend KiraKira into that business which he probably didn’t want to do in the first place but much like anything in his life, dealing with a life of crime had terrible effects on his mind. Kuma being responsible for such a business had to grow distant and cold when dealing with “talents” and usually, he wants to deal with the hustling alone, not letting the other members of Nayuta handle that side of the clan activities and only focusing on the hunt. Of course, the other members interact with him throughout the course of the game, but they don’t really question him on that subject for more than a few seconds and it’s only when Kuma is gone from the team for a short while during the campaign that another member by the name of Joker takes the mantle temporarily and say something “well that was fucked up” and not much else.

As the story progresses, Kuma kinda loses himself in his job, leaving aside his humanity in order to perform well and grow the numbers even larger, he lost himself in the sauce and it’s not even sure that he could even escape from it, he’s not even sure of why he was doing in the first place and why he’s continuing. This is why the hustling part of the game is very light and not too player demanding in my opinion, just like Kuma, you can just treat it literally like a side-hustle that you need to participate in even a little bit to progress in the game but if you want to perform better, you need more money, you need more numbers, you need better talents, with better stats and thus any further implication within that side of the game is only greed from the players perpetuating the cycle of violence and cruelty for his gains.

In the game, you manage your talents through the uses of a tablet showing different stats like their looks (how likely they’ll get picked up by clients), their techniques (how much money they’ll bring) and their mental health stat which is akin to HP in other game and when that reaches zero, the talent “breaks” and thus cannot perform as well and is a wasted asset that you need to dispose of. Talents also comes with a series of attributes which give bonuses during hustling for example by giving a “sexy” talent to a client that demands it means you’ll get more money out of them but in return they can also add attributes to them some beneficial and some not like making them blind or disabled, these attributes have different effects on the talent stat growth and stat decrease every time they participate in sexual activities with mental health almost always systematically dropping down each time.

Of course in order to keep your talent in check, you can feed them different training items which increases their stats so they can either perform better and for longer, you also need to make sure they stay on the pill so they don’t end up getting pregnant which is about as bad as them being broken and making them discardable. It’s in this aspect that I found my mind was starting to look at these talents like just replaceable assets, things that you can just break and replace by the next talent with better stats and initially, the game actually encourages such a playstyle because it’s more efficient to discard your broken talent and replacing them with newer, better ones than keeping them for too long.

This is encouraged by something called the “Hustle Appreciation/Desperation Day” : while you can hustle at any point during your playthrough, it is preferable to keep your girls for these special day which give more money and dedicate the other days to hunting in dungeons and progressing the story. Desperation day in particular is pretty good for your wallet, as the clients give way more money per hustle but in exchange sadly are rougher with your talents which reduce your talents mental health to mush, faster than it took me to write this review and give them a lot of bad attributes !

Realizing the reality of this situation, I started trying to invest more in my talents mental health, showering them with goods to boost their moods and I realized that it was kind of harder to do than just discard them but I didn’t wanna lose some of my best talents as they were a great asset to my business and I grew attached to them. It’s upon this realization that something clicked in my head, I asked the friend who recommended the game to me about tips on how to get more mental health items to keep my talents happy and not leaving them to which they responded that “Yes indeed, it is hard to take care of their mental health, but think about it, isn’t it worse to feed them lies in order to cope with their situation ? It’s not really ethically better to subject them to continuous trauma like that instead of letting them go” and suddenly it clicked, the true horrors of hustling were coming to me. I didn’t treat these poor women as people, I treated these poor women as assets…

I was turning into Kuma, colder, harsher, more disinterested, only caring about the well-being of my talents because I profited off of their pain. I thought that I was mitigating their suffering but truly, I wasn’t. Every Time one of my “talent” mental health started dropping, I was afraid to lose those I called “My best earner” (or “bottom bitch” like that one South Park episode about Butters turning into a pimp). And the complete irony of my line of thinking was put right in front of me when the last tier of mental health training item was literally making my “talents” read the fucking “Myth of Sissyphus” which is a touch of humor on behalves the developers but made me realized how much of an ass I really was when it comes to understanding what the game wanted to say. I was feeding these girls lies to make them feel like their work here was not as bad as it actually was and in the middle of all this, I forgot that this was a game about kidnapping innocent bystanders and forcing them into a life of trauma.

And the downward spiral of awful shit that I was committing naturally without question didn’t stop there. See in this game, there are “special talents” that you can recruit after passing certain points in the story. They usually come with better stats and a unique design provided by the many guest artists who worked on the game but that’s not all. Because these are unique heroines, they have stories attached to them that you can experience by unlocking events by meeting certain conditions, usually involving hustling them to specific people.
When this happens, an ero-scene plays, with a CG and everything and it’s there that the horrors buried deep inside this colorful game starts to show themselves in a much more “in your face” kind of way. See, one of the most interesting narrative decision when it comes to the game story is that the game is told only through dialogues, it’s not an unusual style for Alicesoft of course but the absence of 3rd person narration during the story was purposefully done as to not to embellish or hide the intents of the characters during the regular story sections. Every thought and every action that Kuma or other characters take or have is presented bluntly to you without flourish as to keep the flow of the story intact and the intent of the narrative clear with the exception of two cases scenarios : The Unique Heroine Ero-Events and the “humiliation” scenes that I’ll cover later down this essay.

Here the narration flips the POV from the players, to the victims depicted in the scene because let’s not mince any words, these are harsh, sexual assault scene and the “talents” that you set to the gutter are victims in this specific scenario. During these moments, you can clearly, hear, see and read every deeper thoughts of the story at large, heck one of the CG’s in the game also happens to be in first person view, giving you a frontal look at what it means to be in these people's shoes. Notice how I said “people” and “victims” and not “talent” here because in these circumstances, with the absence of the filters provided by the fluid UI and gameplay mechanics, you can only perceive them as human beings, being progressively destroyed by your actions. You could’ve avoided this, you could’ve just ignored the event requirements for these heroines, but you likely did so out of morbid curiosity or an empty goal minded interest in completing the game CG collection and now you are granted with your “reward” which is these intensely hardcore scenes of psychologically horrific abuse.

There are over 13 unique heroines that are this way and what I do actually enjoy about them is that while their fate is equally as horrible for each, they’re all on a different spot on the spectrum of trauma. Some girls, who lived in Asougi city, who believed in the good of the people living there and the system working for their own benefits, suddenly saw their entire world crumble in front of their eyes. Some of them, whose regular lives were already not enviable before you kidnapped them, see this activity as an escape from the far harsher reality that awaits them in the outside world as being sent to prostitution is marginally better than their previous life. Some of them, who never received or understood the concept of love and are receiving praises for the first time, finally feel values in this body of work. Some of them revel in this situation, as they were already inclined to work with you even if you didn’t force them too.

You might even think that some girl’s situation is “not that bad” until it becomes worse. One of the girls is a pompom girl who gets specifically requested by her childhood friend on behalf of his father buying a prostitute for him to lose her virginity. But after the sighs of relief from realizing that she only has to deal with someone she knows and can trust, it’s immediately followed by the second event where the guy breaks that trust to get out of a bad situation by offering her to his bullies. Feeling guilt over this fact, he starts menacing Kuma, who responds with a cold demeanor that he chose this, that he has his information and that if he attempted to do anything against him, he will expose him and that he need to find another solution and the best solution was simply to buy off the girl to be his private property, removing her freedom for good, just to be the one exclusive to her and give himself a good conscience.

Just like every road leads to Rome, the fate of these girls all end up in the deepest, darkest, places regardless of their circumstances or if they find new meaning in this wretched parody of what they call “their new life”. Whether you keep them around for longer because you wanna keep using their good stats to further your gain, or tire them until they can’t move and break them to replace them with others, in the end, you are always in the wrong, you are always doing bad things ! Your eyes were bigger than your stomach, you can and should’ve avoided this, you could’ve just participated “a little” but you went all in and even then you still participated anyway. Because while these heroines could express themselves directly to you as they were designed as such by the game, how about the slew of generic, interchangeable NPC talents that you sent to the gutter ? You probably only saw them as numbers on a tablet and nothing else.

This is what it means to be Kuma, this is what it means to lose yourself in something that you can’t control anymore. In the end, you’re no better than him, in the end the game molded you into what he become and it’s in this moment that you realize that much like Joker when Kuma leaves the party that the reality of hustling is much more fucked up and that you could probably never do it yourself and yet you did !

There are also other observations one could make of such a system, like how the game seems to privilege younger looking characters when it comes to distributing the beauty stat (with the more child-like ones systematically being S-tier and in high demand) or the fact that talking to your talents is yet another, pointless attempt at trying to sympathize with the victim of your crime and all of this starts to paint an interesting ludo-narrative tapestry that viciously hits where it needs to.

But see, this is where my praise for the game kinda comes to an end, because, the thing that is unfortunate about Dohna Dohna, is that this “style over substance” reputation isn’t entirely invented out of the blue. A lot of the systems that I did mention are secondary and we did see how it was an intentional choice but the problem is that the game expects you to play it in a certain way in order to get the most juice out of what it’s trying to do and this way is pretty counter-intuitive. I guess I haven’t talked about the main story but it’s because my thoughts on it are a bit of a mix bag. I think the cast is charming and the writing can be funny at times and yes, sometimes it can be thoughtful but it feels like it spectacularly ignores all of the narrative potential of the story told by the hustling mechanics.

It’s like Dohna Dohna is two facet of a coin, on the surface, if you play normally and doing the minimum to progress through the game, you realize that the story is a bit of standard and not that entertaining gang-war story with tints of themes of revolution and fighting against oppression, you’ve likely stories like these before and you’ve likely seen them done better. Heck, the game actually has heroines that are not tied to the hustling mechanic but are regular party members and the way the game writes and treats them is a bit… strange ?

When doing a regular playthrough of Dohna Dohna, you can participate in events with your party members to get closer to them and gather affinity points, they’ve become quite popular in JRPG’s these days but this mechanic took its origin from the dating sim genre to which Dohna Dohna is clearly a derivative of. Because this is an eroge, most of the events are for the most part erotic but in the end they all serve the purpose of getting Kuma closer to the girls and the rest of the gang and getting to know them better.

These are called “feelings” event and they’re all sorts of your typical romantic, weird and wacky sex scenario that you come to see from your average eroge with the character arc of said characters usually involving them discovering what sex is and the joy of having healthy regular intercourse with a respectful partner (who just happens to be a freaking criminal on the verge of psychopathy) and eventually falling in love with them or something. Of course, I am vastly exaggerating and there is some variation and some more complex arcs thrown in there but it’s in these moments that the game drops any pretends of being a deep commentary on the commodification of abuse, the cycle of violence and a character study on the fall of a broken man to dive head first into the typical kind of indulgent content meant to titillate the player’s noodlestick.

Combined with the main story itself barely acknowledging the hustling part of the game as an afterthought and you get quite a strange whiplash that might confirm initial expectations. It’s also not helped that the story itself doesn’t really care to explore a bit more deeply the conflicts that exist within its settings. There are 2 other clans that confronts you during the game, they are also Anti-Aso, also participate in similar shady business that you sometimes get to see but most often not but they never really expand on why these gangs who seemingly aiming for the same goal of taking down Asougi don’t actually work together. Is it because they have other methods that don’t fit with Nayuta’s mindset, or they’re using means that they don’t agree with ? It seems like the only reason these gangs fight each other is because it’s traditionally what happens in these types of stories instead of some more deeply rooted reasons.

This sadly has the unfortunate result of making the story go around in circle, never really progressing from hours on end and hinging on similarly repeated conflicts to create intrigues, drama and tension and while it can be entertaining and sometimes fun thanks to the writing being charming, it’s far too shallow to be able to tell an impactful story through the main mean in which the game communicates with you which are the characters, their dialogues and interactions. While there’s definitely some moments, they’re not really reflective of the main conflicts that exist within the world and what our characters are led to do in order to survive in it. The game does try to mitigate this by some neat twist near the end of the game, where it is revealed that in order to maintain the illusion of peace within its system, it had to create, manage and control the Anti-Aso clans from the shadow, manipulating them in order to create a criminal underworld where the more “problematic” citizens can give in to their deeper twisted desires. This reveal should’ve shook Kuma to his core especially when it turns out that Mistress, the shopkeep who led him to this life of crime in the first place, worked in tandem with Asougi’s CEO to maintain this masquerade.

During the final moments of the game, there’s a betrayal arc that ends as soon as it starts because of some friendship speech, there’s a big team-up of all the Anti-Aso clans working together and they try to attack and dethrone the wretched capitalist overlord and their big giant robot of doom. This ending while conceptually interesting concludes in a bit of a wet fart in my opinion, with the characters triumphantly exposing Asougi’s crime to the general public without actually dismantling the company and their influences and most importantly, without facing any real consequences for their action. It was in this moment that Kuma should’ve been punished for his crimes, and face his ultimate fate after realizing that all he did was for nothing and he can only bear guilt on his conscience for the rest of his life or face death but there’s none of that shit and it kinda throw me off a little bit.

You can definitely feel that perhaps, Team Dohna was planning to continue the story and expand on its world, characters and conflicts in a sequel and the multiple endings of the game is definitely opened to it, but with Team Dohna leaving Alicesoft to move on to greener pastures and Dohna Dohna being one of the last high profile games of their catalog that isn’t an exploitative gacha mobile game, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

And it’s a shame because this story in all of its classicism and in all of its shortcoming and lack of completeness and ludo-narrative consistency is the Dohna Dohna that most people who didn’t push the game further than the credits and the basic requirement to progress through the game will experience and it’s a fun story don’t get me wrong ! But, I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting out of Dohna Dohna feeling unsatisfied by its promising premise that ends up being nothing more than a gimmick at first glance !

The thing is that the game has a very counter-intuitive way to push you towards a deeper, more impactful experience which hinges on you being bad at the game. See, when I’ve talked about the heroine's events earlier, I didn’t mention that all of these feeling events have a “variant B” to them which completely flips the script on its head to deliver on some hard hitting confrontation of Kuma’s action and their consequences. To access these alternate events, you have to not participate in any events with the girl (and thus not furthering their relationship and rendering them less useful in battle) until a certain point in the scenario where they get kidnapped. If you fail to save them in a reasonable amount of time, you will witness something called an “humiliation scene” which is, you guessed it, them getting treated similarly to how the unique heroine in the hustling mode gets. While it does offer another H-Scene to complete your gallery, the deeper, long-lasting effect however is changing every subsequent “feeling events” you’ll do with them to have additional dialogues to reflect the traumatic events they went through !

This is a brilliant idea on paper, most of these variant B scenes are actually miles more interesting conceptually than their regular counterparts. One of them is literally Antenna, the goofy autistic hacker girl having some sort of an existential crisis when she realizes that Kuma might actually be as much of a monster as her aggressor and Kuma retorquing that it’s indeed true and that he doesn’t want to feed her lies by pretending the contrary. Or KiraKira trying to convince Kuma from stopping all this madness and trying to go back to a regular school-life as girlfriend and boyfriend with Kuma sadly refusing as he is in too deep to back down no matter how irrational it may be and how uncomfortable it makes KiraKira.

I say on paper, because, getting to the conclusion that the heroines are “more interesting with traumas than without” is a bit of an awkward statement to make as factually true as it may be. Some of them like Porno and Medico, still have solid enough arc regularly especially Porno since her relationship to Kuma is deeply tied to her troubled past and how she’s learning to cope with it in a very unhealthy way but for the grand majority, you’re better off reaching for the heroine bad endings, if you want the game’s tone to fit the harsh subject matters brought up by its gameplay mechanics and Kuma’s inner conflict. It’s also just kind of badly handled in execution, the requirements to even access these bad endings are so specific, and so hard to miss due to the game treating them as punishments for not playing the game right that it kinda misses the point and is where it would’ve helped if the game was just a tad bit more challenging and tad bit less forgiving when it comes to managing your time and your ressources.

Because as it stands, these bad ending variants feel like rewards rather than punishment because you need to actively seek them in order to make the story more engaging and the point the story wants to get at clearer. And unlike Rance IX, where its bad endings were kind of pointlessly edgy to please to a certain demographic without any meaningful addiction to the game story and what it wanted to accomplish, here you’ll actually want to get to them because otherwise, you just end up with a shallower experience and less completion percentage on your save file.

And isn’t it all a bit ass-backward ?

By treating that side of the game as just an optional, easily missable part of the experience, you ultimately sabotage the potential the story could’ve had in the long run and I don’t think that as it stands, Dohna Dohna can hold its ground naturally as a great entry in Alicesoft’s catalog without these pointless detour. But on the other hand, Alicesoft loves their replay value and also loves their generosity and providing their players with tons of contents to satisfy their craving for erotic gaming.

This is where the philosophical dilemma lies with Alicesoft production and more specifically with Dohna Dohna. It’s clear that the reason all of the story’s depth lied semi-hidden behind obtuse condition was only made this way to turn that darker side of the game into something that players are actively seeking and while the scenes in question can be very heavy in terms of atmosphere and content, I’m not a fool to suggest that to some people, these scenes actually feels like a reward regardless of the writers best effort to accomplish the contrary. Because of the way the game leads the player to that content but also because simply, some folks are just “into that shit” and there’s nothing we can really do about that unless turning the game into a family friendly RPG where these subject matters could barely even be brought up in the first place.

But for those who can set aside their fantasies to read between the lines and really absorbing where the game is trying to lead them, they will certainly find what they were looking for story-wise and learn a valuable lesson with this cautionary tale of a broken man, breaking a lot of woman in his path for what he believed was the right thing to do in order to survive and overthrow the system. Alas, I also hoped that the actual main storyline supported that line of thinking.

As a man in my mid-20’s playing eroge I can only admire and scrutinize the story from a media analyst perspective. I can also empathize with the subject matter and the characters interacting with it and also enjoy the game for simply being a fun game to pass the time. Unfortunately, I could never entirely relate to the pleas and the struggles of these victims because I am not one myself and thus perhaps my review might be just as shallow and disinterested as the story itself was to its deeper narrative elements.

With that out of the way however, I think that while Dohna Dohna is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I still think it’s one of Alicesoft strongest title and that while the attempt was a bit messy, I can only appreciate that they’ve tried and create a story that might connect to someone out there who will find more value in it that I have. However I have one last thing to share before finishing up this essay.

I’ve mentioned countless times during this review that the game was recommended to me by a certain person that I had yet to mention : My good friend Kitty, mostly known by its pen-name of “Antenna” or “.Farside”. if my review made you curious about the game or if you simply want a more thorough and engaged analysis of the work by someone with more insight on it as it unfortunately has a first-hand experience with the subject matter and felt deeply touched by it, you can check what its article on the game has to say about the game here :

https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

I highly recommend it personally, it’s better written than anything I could come up with myself and I consider this to be an essential companion piece to a first hand experience with the game.

I CLAPPED

THEY DID THE THING THAT GURREN LAGANN DID AT THE END OF THE MOVIE AND I CLAPPED

I CLAPPED WHEN JIN USED MISHIMA AND KAZAMA STYLE AND THEY PLAYED TEKKEN 3 MUSIC I CLAPPED

ALSO THEY GOT SAINT SEIYA SHIT IN THIS

IT WAS GAS

Ar Tonelico : Interesting yet unimpressive

Today ladies and gentleman, we are trying out a game which I wasn’t really planning on playing myself but since a friend of mine was really interested in trying it out and wanted to share the experience with me ! I decided to jump in since I wanted kind of a buffer game after playing 3 ultra-mega-ambitious RPG’s and didn’t wanna jump on playing (heck even re-playing for some) Xenoblade games just yet. With that said, the sales pitch he gave for being interested in Ar Tonelico definitely caught my attention. The friend in question is a composer and therefore is very interested in music as an artform, when he read about the universe the Ar Tonelico took place in, he was immediately charmed as it hits his sweet spot just right. He wasn’t the only one amongst my close mutual friends who recommended Ar Tonelico, he’s currently playing the game himself in Japanese, I had other friends who also like the universe and from what I’ve gathered from them, artistically speaking this is right up my alley.

Now I bare to mention that this is my first experience with a Gust title, Gust is a company mostly known for their long-running Atelier series which is an historically long RPG series which has existed since the PS1 and still comes out on a semi-yearly basis and are mostly focused on life-simulation, craftings and being “comfy” games rather than telling any sort of grand narrative. Not my cup of tea, as I usually tend to like my RPG to be a little bit more involved than that but I’m curious to try one of them someday. Ar Tonelico by comparison is an outlier in their line-up since it’s the closest thing to a typical RPG they’ve released however some light influence from the Atelier franchise can be seen here, to what extend I can’t really tell but crafting plays a somewhat minor role in the game design of the game.

The origin of the project is actually rather interesting, Akira Tsuchiya the main composer of the Atelier series as well as Ar Tonelico for which he also serves the role of director created the entire setting of the series while he was in college. It was initially the setting of a tabletop RPG he created for him and his friends to play in, over the years of course, he developed that universe until eventually, he was given the opportunity to adapt that tabletop game into an actual title for the PS2. Initially planned for the year 2000’s, the project continued to grow until it was released in 2006.

This means two things, one there are several and I mean several additional materials about the game from even before the release of the first game which will help you understand how absurdly well thought-out and unique the setting of the series is ! You can feel that a lot of work was put into creating that universe and describing how it works and the main component that holds it all together : Music and its effect on the world and on people as an art form. Second, that means that upon reading all of this, you probably will have quite a bit of high expectation coming into this game because of the sheer work that was put in creating it, from the concept arts, to the general artwork, to the setting and other stuff.

Music is an essential core-part of the Exa_Pico universe in which the series takes place in and the origin of life and the universe as it came to be is all rooted in musical science which is nuts even if I don’t understand a single speck of it. They even created their own fictional language called Hymnos which is designed specifically to sound good musically speaking and you got several beautiful vocal tracks in the game sung in said fake language and yes, if you’re willing to dig deeper, you can translate that shit ! It’s an actual language, it's nuts !
The game takes place on the floating continent of Sol Ciel, a long time ago humanity used to live on the surface and used the power of songs in order to accomplish all sorts of technological and medical advancement. The world is held together by a gigantic tower acting like some sort of supercomputer by the name of Ar Tonelico and people either live on its bases or higher up the towers in floating cities. A couple of years ago, a man-made tragedy whose origins has been lost to time divided the population of Sol Ciel between the Upper world and the Lower World with Ar Tonelico managing pretty much all of the world power. However, one day, viruses started attacking the Tower, it’s up to Lyner a Apostle of Elemia to deal with the issue, after failing to push back the virus menace, he takes an airship and crashes to the surface world after being tasked by a woman named Shurelia to find something called an “Hymn Crystal” which can stop the virus invasion.

Shurelia herself is a Reyvateil, a subspecies of humans that are mostly part machines and the only remaining people who can use the power of songs in order to accomplish all sorts of things through the uses of Song magic. Throughout his adventure, Lyner will meet 2 of those Reyvateil which are the main 2 heroines of the game Aurica and Misha (the latter of which seems to know him even if he doesn’t remember) as well as a bunch of colorful individual on his quest to find a way to stop the virus invasion.

I think I still need to emphasize that a lot of work went into creating the setting of the universe and it definitely is an intriguing world which functions in a really unique and interesting way. I’d say that artistically speaking and in terms of ambition, the game holds its ground fairly well especially in the music department. Most of the music sung in Hymnos were composed and performed by the absurdly talented Akiko Shikata, a popular japanese singer specialized in chorus-style music, she’s mostly known for her work on Umineko these days for which she sung the opening of both the visual novel and the anime but she got her debut in the world of video game composition with Ar Tonelico. The music in the game in general is one of its strong suits, especially all of the vocal tracks, the rest of the soundtrack is of a rather standard quality even though not unpleasant…

Yeah standard…

Because see, this is where Ar Tonelico falls really short in my opinion, for such a unique setting and unique origin behind the creation of the game, the end-result is a bit of a wet fart if you ask my opinion. Story wise the game is divided in 3 acts, a classic plot structure but also not really. In most stories with 3 acts, you’d expect the 3 acts (called “Phase” in this game) to be a beginning, a middle and an end but in reality this game pacing is a bit all over the place. The game is short, capping at around 30h but at times, the story feels like they crammed the storyline of 3 separate video games into one title and it definitely shows, events goes by fast, characters arcs gets rushed, lots of things are left on the side and very little of the game’s promising setting is actually fleshed out or well established to the point that you would get more out of reading the Ar Tonelico wiki entry on the game than expecting the plot to tell you about the rather fascinating but ultimately fruitless details.

And when I say it’s the story of 3 games, I mean it, each game starts with an initial conflict kicking the plot into high gear followed by a series of small side-ventures and concludes into a climatic finale which makes you feel like you’re in the end of the game but actually you don’t. Heck Phase 2 even ends on a credit roll despite 10h still remaining on the counter…
The actual writing by itself is the most cookie-cutter RPG schlop you’ve seen time and time again and it’s not particularly good schlop either. The main character for exemple is a bland goody two shoe with a heart of gold, the brain of a bird and denser than the surface of Saturn. He will have his affection pursued by the 2 main heroines of the game which are no more or less interesting than him.

At the start of the game, you get the choice between either Aurica or Misha : Aurica has the better toolkit for battle, you get to use her for a lot more time and as such you will likely keep her in your party for longer just for her raw damage output alone, however she has the personality of a doormat, always needing Lyner to save her ass and never really speaking up about her problems or about anything really until the very late stage of the game. Misha is a bit more interesting, she’s supposedly Lyner childhood friend but he doesn’t seem to remember much about her, her role is central to the narrative as she is later revealed to be the star singer, a core part of the tower necessary to keep the viruses away with the issue being that she has to keep singing forever. However, while Misha has a bit more meat on her bone, she’s a pretty generic childhood friend archetype, she seems to have a lot of things going for her but it’s presented with no real finesse or substance whatsoever and a lot of the pay-offs about the mysteries surrounding her are honestly pretty underwhelming.

With 2 heroines put on the forefront and a main character who exists mostly for the player to project themselves on him, you guessed it, it’s one of those RPG’s with the central gimmick of its story being pursuing romance with either of these two ladies. The way of doing so is actually pretty unique, you first have to gather discussion topics around the world, discuss these topics by resting at a save point or an inn and then gather stamps to unlock part of their “cosmosphere”. Cosmosphere is a virtual world inside the Reyvateils mind that humans can access via a process called “diving” at a certain facility in the game. There are multiple layers to the cosmosphere that you unlock as you get to know the character better and collect more discussion topics, once inside the Cosmosphere however, the game pretty much turns into a visual novel where you spend a currency called “DP” which Reyvateils gain in battle in order to unlock certain scenes and complete the current level of the cosmosphere. It’s through this system that you’ll get to know the finer details of each heroine's backstory as well as the inner machinations of their mind but also craft new Song Magic for them to use in battle.

While a cool idea in theory, a lot of the cosmosphere revolve around humorous and pretty inconsequential story beat which tries to be serious at times but fail at delivering any kind of emotional impact, the game tries to have a lot of abstract narrative when it comes to the girls but ultimately fail at making any point brought up interesting. Some scenes are just empty trauma dumping without much added value behind it, humorous gag scenes or just random horny fanservice (with both girls having an entire level of their cosmosphere dedicated to BDSM shenanigans). Each level of the cosmosphere features one of the characters in a different outfit that you get to unlock by the end and gives advantages in battle which is pretty neat I suppose. The progression of the cosmosphere is also overall pretty linear and any additional tinkering you might do in them is just a waste of DP (spending thousands of DP to learn about lingerie without any added benefit gameplay or wise sure is something the game does) and even then the cosmosphere isn’t the determining factor to choose which girl you’re gonna end up with. On one hand, that means you will likely see all of the cosmosphere of both girls but also that means that there’s no penalty for prioritizing stuff.
Rather, the determining factor to ending up with one of the girls is a route split in the middle of the game with a choice pretty much locking you into one of the character routes like in a typical visual novel. The route split by itself is pretty cool for replayability but in the end very little actually changes between the two routes except that Aurica’s route focus more on the world and Misha’s route focus more on her perspective on the situation at hand and is therefore a more personal story and one which is most worth experiencing, the end-game is still the same no matter who you choose with only certain endings and scenes changing depending on which girl you chose. In fact, the girl you didn’t choose gets a bit shafted by the narrative and while they still might have a role to play, they won’t be doing much, that won’t stop them from still trying to pursue your affection as if nothing really mattered at all and their fate was sealed.

So who did I end up with ?

Neither, no that doesn’t mean you can fuck up and end up alone like in other similar type of games or that you can embrace the power of polygamy but in a surprise twist of event, the last 10h of the game introduces a new romantic option with none other than Shurelia, the woman who sends you on your mission to begin with and Lyner’s superior. When this happened, I was kind of lowkey confused, introducing a romantic plot line this late into the game after spending 20h with the main 2 heroines, that must mean they have quite a bit of confidence in their writing to pull off something like that and turns out it’s true because Shurelia is the best girl of the three. Her personality embraces the idea of gap moe, where there’s a clear distinction between her position of superiority to Lyner and how she actually is and wants to be treated, she has the most relevance to the overall lore of the series and all of her interventions are filled not only with cute interactions but interesting tidbits about the gameworld (about time we dived into it even if it’s a bit late). Her cosmosphere is a bit lacking, composed mostly of a made up scenario rather than anything really fleshing her out, but she seems to have lots of fun coming up with the silly nonsense in her head and that makes her strangely endearing in a way. I don’t know man, she’s just really neat and managed to steal the spotlight entirely upon joining your party.

The rest of the cast is fine, they’re all kinda cliché but their designs and personality are great, like I said the entire package doesn’t lack in charm but the execution is just a bit lacking, it’s kind of a bog standard JRPG plot with bog standard characters and character interaction and most of what’s interesting about the main premise and the setting of the game isn’t really well exploited or fleshed out at all and when they are it’s either sparse or too late to make an impact on me. I don’t necessarily dislike the game story but it probably won’t leave that much of an impact on me, it’s pretty forgettable and it’s quite a shame considering what we’re working with here.

But an RPG isn’t just a story and a set of characters it’s also a gameplay and here, I’d say that the game fumbles the bag a bit more. In theory, Ar Tonelico has a lot of cool ideas when it comes to its gameplay, the battle system is a mix of ATB system and something similar to the Valkyrie Profile franchise. You got 3 active party members and one Reyvateil which goal is going to cast spells by charging them up and unleashing them on the enemies, the goal is going to let your party member do chip damage and prevent your Reyvateil from dying or losing focus while she’s charging her spell, it’s all pretty neat stuff honestly…

Except the game’s easy as shit…

Most enemies in the game can easily be one shot by a well charged super blast if they don’t get one shot by your active party members and they can’t really fight back in any decent capacity. The overall game balance of this game is kinda below the gutter, the game has a lot of customization options like the “Grathnode” crystals which can be attached to any piece of equipment to give massive bonuses, one of which is just… more damage ? See, in this game you can add additional elemental effects to your weapon, the thing is that these don’t act like a buff but instead a separate state of damage entirely. So if you managed early on to stack 100 points in one elemental statistics, you’ll be dealing your own damage + elemental damages for a single normal attack, meaning you pretty deal 2x of your own damage output.

Even without these broken strategies however, it’s still very easy to cheese most fights, the 3 Reyvateils you get all have a wide variety of spells which all causes to deal massive damage in an AOE fashion and the dominant strategy for almost every boss fight in the game is to just charge your strongest spell to a ridiculous amount of percentage and one shot them that way, it works almost every single time and is the optimal strategy for most if not every fights. The battle system overall is pretty fun but the issue is that it’s mathematically impossible to make the most of it, heck at some point the game just run out of new enemies to throw at you so most of the enemies are literally monsters from earlier areas with literally the same stats and I wonder what was even the point of doing this ? There’s exactly two fights which managed to wipe my entire active part but with the way healing works in this game, you can save your ass super quickly and you pretty much need to make you unoptimized on purpose in order to see the game over screen (and these were the last 2 bosses of the game).

The dungeon design is also very barebone, I will commend tho, they have a pretty unique encounter system. It’s basically random encounters but with an indicator on the bottom right of the screen showing you when it’s gonna happen kinda like the moon phases in the SMT series, in fact after multiple encounters, you don’t have any encounters period which is neat. But yeah other than that, I found that the dungeon design leaves a lot to be desired, the game alternates between the same 3 themes especially once you start climbing up the tower and if it wasn’t enough, the game kinda blows its whole load in the first phase so several hours of both phase 2 and especially phase 3 are spent revisiting previous areas, so it’s recycling on top of recycling.

Speaking of Phase 3, I’d say that it kind of artificially lengthen the story, the reasons to kick off the new conflict is a bit weak and most of it consist in a random fetch quest around previously visited areas which concludes in somewhat of a wet fart but I heard it was done mostly to prepare the terrain for the sequel so I’m letting that slide. The game is also pretty cheap looking, for how good the artwork of the gam is, it looks more like a cheap mobile game rather than a console RPG from 2006 but maybe Gust couldn’t afford better which is a bit of a shame.

Overall, I didn’t had an unpleasant time with Ar Tonelico, but looking at the packaging, you’d expect something with a little bit more meat on its bone, it’s a plot bordering between baby’s first RPG and otaku pandering nonsense but you can’t deny that it has its charm. The game clearly suffers from a bad case of first game syndrome and I heard the sequel is at least marginally better and exploits the universe of the game better, so I’m staying curious about this.

Fun little tech demo for Celeste 6th anniversary ! I really enjoyed it !

The physic can be a bit loose but you definitely get used to it and I think they did a solid job reinterpreting Celeste gameplay into 3D.

I wish this was a full game (much like I wish Celeste 2 was a full game) but what's here is really neat !

Also Maddeline confirmed gay we love to see it !

Xenosaga 3 : A Beautifully Flawed Conclusion

The Xeno franchise, from a creative perspective is probably one of the most fascinating dives into the wonders of the human imagination. If you’ve been reading my reviews so far (and thanks for doing so, I’m putting a bit too much effort for something so insignificant) you probably realized more than anything, I’m deeply fascinated by the creative process behind some of my favorite and least favorite media. This always came from a place of trying to understand why certain things click with me when others don’t. I’m always trying to understand the appeal of even the things I find little value for myself to the point it pisses me off when I simply don’t get why “kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch so much” as that one commercial said.

I’m of the belief that every piece of art has value no matter how good or bad it is, as long as it comes from a sincere place of passion from its creators and not simply out of shameless greedy exploitation. Art is the most powerful tool for humanity to communicate, discussing things through words can be good for a time, but I think if you truly want to understand someone deep inside their souls, you have to look at what they make. Each piece of art collectively forms a puzzle that transcends our mortal bodies and can eventually lead us to understand why humanity in all of its flaws and all of its qualities is actually beautiful and infinitely fascinating. But in the world of media analysis, we tend to celebrate successes and shun upon failures, why is that ? To be fair, it’s pretty self-explanatory, when you succeed at something, you see a direct feedback of progress but a failure and especially a pretty bad one can make you crawl into a fetal position and make you think like you never actually evolve. But you do evolve, constantly, even through failure, you learn, your failure leaves a trace but it doesn’t have to be a wholly negative one and if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that one man’s trash can always be another man’s treasure.

From that perspective, it’s easy to look at the entirety of the Xenosaga Trilogy as well as its subsequent side-material as nothing more than a failure. It’s a project that was too big for itself, it’s a project with a second episode so tonally inconsistent with its two sister entry that it left a mark that was hard to recover from, it’s a franchise when the main vision from its creators was taken, sliced up, diced up, mashed up and broke into pieces to create an incomplete husk of what simply could’ve been. You’ve likely seen projects like these, the most recent exemple I have of it myself being Final Fantasy XV which to this day I still think should’ve not been released due to how much of what was the core of the project got lost in translation in a product that will feel eternally incomplete. FFXV left me with a sense of frustration, a feeling of what could’ve been if it managed to actually pull off everything it set out to do.

In a sense Xenogears was in a similar situation and yet, Xenogears is still celebrated as a monument of the JRPG genre, it’s a cult classic which still remained that way years into the future and which legacy can be felt throughout other projects both from the Xeno franchise but also other games as well. Xenoblade also managed to pull its teeth out and become the first somewhat uncompromised Xeno project and I believe they still go really strong. And then there’s Xenosaga, the awkward middle child stuck on the 6th generation console that no one really talks about. I’ve heard Xenosaga being described as a failed attempt to recapture the feeling of Xenogears but ultimately failed at doing so and didn’t leave much of an impact or some people even call Xenogears the prototype of Saga.
Nonetheless, Xenosaga is in an awkward position as far as the entire franchise goes. Xenogears, although incomplete, was able to tell the whole story of the one episode they could get out to the market and thus naturally had more staying power. Xenoblade games (maybe XB3 aside) are standalone enough in their individual stories for people to latch onto them and were released in an era where the general playerbase for these kinds of games were larger than ever and on some of the most successful gaming consoles of all time. And while both managed to rise into prominence in the gaming sphere, Xenosaga still remains somewhat niche due to its lack of accessibility and the discussion surrounding the game amounts to highlighting its failings rather than celebrating its successes.

Xenosaga is a series that was dealt the worst of hands and everything points out at Xenosaga 3 being a catastrophe, I might be one of the 2 people on Earth to have enjoyed Xenosaga 2 but I can also admit this game fell short in several areas when it came to its plotting mostly because it wasn’t a Takahashi game. And since the series wasn’t going to have its 6 episodes run time (although you might consider that with the addition of Pied Pier, Freaks and Missing Year it does amount to 6 games in the end) to tell the full scope of its story Xenosaga 3 was going to do the seemingly impossible task to conclude an ambitious projects without nearly as much prep time as it actually needed.

And did it succeed ?

I’m not keeping the suspense any longer, Xenosaga is once again a crowning achievement of the JRPG genre and seemingly the most perfect conclusion one could ever hope for the story in spite of its shortcomings (which exists and we’ll discuss them later down the line). Takahashi once again manage to untangle the mess that was left from the development cycle of the franchise and manage to pull it off in the end once again, he already did with Xenogears at the time but I think it’s doubly impressive here considering that what he had to come up with Gears Second Disc was for one game and Xenosaga was for 6.

However, information on the development of Episode 3 are a bit sparse compared to Episode 1 and Episode 2, I’ve tried looking it up online and couldn’t find anything substantial, the only video essay on the subject linked it to a comment made by Bamco’s PR Division which said they were satisfied with the end product and the sales this episode made. One thing is for certain however, unlike Episode 2, Takahashi was back on the project and while he isn’t the actual director of the game, he was pretty much overseeing the entire thing from beginning to end. But it wasn’t going to take simply making Xenosaga 3 and move on to save that sinking ship, that’s why in the wait period between Xenosaga 2 and 3 several project were greenlit by Bandai Namco in order to tie-in some of the loose ends left by the plot of Xenosaga 2.

The most significant of these side projects is Xenosaga 1&2 for Nintendo, a game I unfortunately didn’t play because it’s only in Japanese and no one seems to want to work on an English patch for it. It’s a demake of both Xenosaga 1&2 and from what I heard while it doesn’t actually change much about the plot of 1 it does expand significantly on Xenosaga’s 2 script to make it closer to the initial pitch for the game by Takahashi. Suffice to say, I’m really curious about this one. It's not often you see a JRPG franchise demaking their console releases for a portable system and seemingly make it a more complete version of the original, high budget and ambitious version of said game.
The other two side projects are a bit less ambitious and a bit more questionable when it comes to availability. The first one is “Xenosaga Pied Piper”, an episodic game released for the Vodafone 6, yes it’s a mobile game, yes it’s important and yes you will be regretting skipping on this one once you reach a particular part of Xenosaga 3, I’ve already made a mini-review of it on this website so check it out if you want to catch up on the epic Cani Review lore (or don’t). Same thing for “Xenosaga II to III : A Missing Year”, a frankly forgettable and kinda bad visual novel that’s the equivalent of an hour long infodump meant to tie the previous game to the next by explaining what happened between the events of the two.

If I have one complaint about this way of handling the wider story of the game is that the games in question are not super available in today’s age, these side games were never released outside of Japan and if it wasn’t for the work of several dedicated fans, they will be lost to time and understanding some of the deeper plot of Xenosaga 3 might be almost impossible. I say almost because Xenosaga 3 actually does contextualize a bit of the stuff from those games thanks to the return of the data log.

If this isn’t proof enough that Xenosaga 3 was once again handled by Takahashi, the Database from Episode 1 returns after its surprising absence from Episode 2. In my previous review, I mentioned that I didn’t really check the data base all that often most of it being a combination of laziness on my part, a reluctance to actually voluntarily stop my progression of the story to stop and read wiki articles as well the lack of clear indication of when, why and for what said data base got updated. However, I’d say the database from Xenosaga 3 is much better than the ones from Xenosaga 1 for many reasons, one of which is the fact the game actually notifies you when said database gets updated which is definitely a welcome push towards me actually checking it out and second, the database in question is separated into multiple categories instead of being filed up haphazardly.

Takahashi’s commitment to worldbuilding once again shines through in this game, not only from the database but also the fact the game leans more heavily on talking about the broader setting and all of the moving parts of the deeper lore of the world. Since Xenosaga 3 is meant to provide answers to all the lingering questions left by the first game and try to awkwardly fit in some of the elements of the second to better fit in with the greater whole, this return to form is more than welcome. The database itself is actually much more explicit than the one from Saga 1, not dwelling too deeply on superfluous unimportant detail and just delivering the answer straight to you ! Each entries also comes with a bunch of key-words to link them to one another making navigating the gargantuan story of Xenosaga much easier than it was previously and even if I still had questions near the end of the game, I’d say Xenosaga 3 did a solid enough job at solidifying my understanding of the world it was presenting and gave me much better appreciation for the efforts that were put behind its creation.

But you can also feel this return to form inside of the game itself, NPC dialogues are heavy on contextualization and worldbuilding, there are several areas dedicated to interacting with terminals explaining to you all sorts of esoteric sci-fi stuff and in general there’s a bigger focus on character inter-personal conflict, psychology and drama, something that was present in lesser amount in Xenosaga 2 but here Takahashi just pumped everything he could into every cutscenes and dialogues the game presents.
One thing that’s immediately striking from the start is the presentation of the game, you can feel that this was a late PS2 title and as such, the team at Monolith Software really made the best use of their experience working with console games by now. There are several moments in the game where I was just kinda blown away by how good it looks for a game of this era, especially because of the game's general art direction. Gone are the days of the weird doll-like face of episode 1 or the fugly wannabe realistic character model from Episode 2, here the game has once again a new artstyle which makes a great compromise between the more anime style of the first game and the attempt at realism of the second game. The characters really haven’t looked this good and moved this well in cutscenes. Unfortunately this is where one of my main gripes with the game’s presentation comes into place, there are fewer cutscenes this time around than they were in the previous entries.

While this does help the already excellent pacing of the game as we’re gonna discuss later down the line, a lot of the big story moments are told through a series of in-engine dialogues and text-boxes the kind you see in typical JRPG. I have nothing against this on principle but considering the propension of the series for overindulging in its cinematic flair, it was kind of awkward to transition from one style of storytelling to the other in what clearly feels like budget issues. These sequences are a bit less well directed than usual but they do have the benefit of being all voice acted which wasn’t the case of similar instances of dialogue boxes exchanged in the previous entry. A quick word about the dub of the game, it’s pretty damn excellent, the voice acting in Episode 2 was a bit awkward and there were some unfortunate voice cast changes along the way, for the most part all of the characters got back their voice actor from Episode 1. This includes Shion and Kos-Mos which delivers an outstanding performance on par with what they already delivered in the first entry and since this episode in particular focuses heavily on them as protagonists it’s definitely a welcome change.

I wouldn’t be complaining about that style of dialogue-based cutscenes if it wasn’t for the fact that the game often-times have actual cutscenes and boy oh boy what a bunch of cutscenes these are. The series was already known for having excellent cutscene direction all the way back from even Xenogears and this game is probably the apex of the franchise so far and approaches the kind of cinematic quality one can expect from the later entries in the Xeno franchise. There are a couple of intense moments of action which feels like they’re ripped straight out of some dope ass chinese kung-fu movies with excellent choreography to boot, these are an absolute joy to watch every time and an absolute hype fest. But even the less actioney scenes of the game were given proper care and attention on a similar level, and with Xenosaga you kinda realize that a game mostly composed of cutscenes isn’t really a bad thing as long as the people behind it have a clear love for the craft that is cinema. So many video games these days are trying a bit too hard to not be videogames, proposing heavily cinematic experiences which almost all the time approach just a shallow understanding of what movie-making is.

But from time to time, you get to see a game director with a clear passion and love for filmmaking and it shows, I can name the Metal Gear Solid series from the top of my head for kickstarting a similar philosophy but Takahashi clearly belong to the same school of thought as Kojima does. I already mentioned the clear inspiration from Kung-Fu movies but the entirety of Takahashi’s body of work with the Xeno Franchise oozes from inspiration from the most obvious ones like Star Wars or 2001 A Space Odyssey to more obscure ones like author films that I wish I could tell you about if I was more of a film buff.
Outside of the action segments, I can think of a couple of really evocative shot that would come straight of an arthouse film, that part where Shion reflects upon herself while completely nude (a sight to behold I know), cleaning the foam off of the mirror to show her face full of doubts and interrogation for the situation she finds herself in. That one horrific scene in the hospital where the monstrous updated combat Realians enter the room and mercilessly slaughter Shion’s mom as she’s hiding under the bed followed by a cutscene of a young Shion desperately trying to put her organs back (sadly censored in the English Dubbed version). The evocative first cutscenes of the game’s intro showcasing the downfall of Michtam, an intro that much like the first cutscenes of Xenogears will only make sense in several hours from now.

I could name a couple more of theses instances but I think the cinematography of the game is truly on point, which is a shame when out of the 10h of cutscenes present in the game only 5 of them are in this cinematographic style while the rest is presented in a rather dry format of dialogue exchange. But what little we do get in terms of raw actual cutscenes are simply fantastic and a massive upgrade from the previous 2 entries which were no less impressive in that regard. This level of cinematic flair however isn’t only found in the cutscenes but also in the actual exploration segment as well, the environment design clearly had a lot of thoughts put into them this time around, and the relative dryness of the areas from the first two games are not to be found here.

The game reminded me of the works of Kitase on the Final Fantasy series, more specifically the PS1 entries. While Xenosaga 3 doesn’t use pre-rendered backgrounds like them, it keeps the locked camera angles of the original 2 games but this time uses it to really enhance the presentation of all the areas you’ll traverse. The Tutorial Dungeon alone shows how much of a technical jump we made, with lots of moving parts and lots of sprawling camera angles and cinematographic shots telling a story of its own. One scene in particular struck me as particularly hype and it’s when you enter the Merkabah on the second disc, your mechs just diving inside the enormous space fortress in something that looks like something straight out of freaking Star Wars, or the distorted yet imposing vistas of Abel’s Ark ! At several moments during my playthrough I was simply in awe at how good the game looks and holds up for a game released in 2006, thanks to this commitment to spectacle, cinematography and an absolutely killer art direction.

On average the dungeon design of the game retains most of the qualities of the dungeon design from Xenosaga 2, the same team who worked on that game also worked in Xenosaga 3 and you can clearly see the progress between the two games in terms of game design. You still get a few puzzles, some of them much more fun and less obtuse than the ones from the previous game, there’s a lot of moving parts to each areas, lots of space to avoid the enemies this time around (and the enemies themselves aren’t raging bulls rushing to you with the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog) and most important of all very little in the ways of unnecessary backtracking.

These are easily the best areas and dungeons in the series so far if we’re not counting the Xenoblade games I’ve already played which operate on a completely different design philosophy. The younger team of Monolith did an excellent job with the areas this time around and I’d say than more than just serving as set dressing for the plot to shine through, Xenosaga 3 actually feels like a properly well designed and fun videogames.
But of course, all of this would matter very little if it wasn’t for the game's impeccable sound direction, unlike the previous game, Yuki Kajiura composed the entirety of the OST for Xenosaga 3 making for a much more tonally cohesive soundtrack than that of the previous entry. And my god, she did more than an excellent job at this, no shade to Yasunori Mitsuda, the historic composer of the franchise but I think this has easily become my favorite soundtrack in any Xeno games aside from maybe X. Right from the get go, the dungeon music sounds like actual music from an RPG and not some rejected arcade shmup blurb, we go from jazz, to rock, to orchestral, to epic choir music that goes “HAHA HAHA HAHA OOH AAAH OOOH AAA LALA SALI YADIDADI DADIDI”. The soundtrack is so freaking excellent this time around and actually stuck in my mind for being used even outside of cutscenes and while there is still some moments of silence during gameplay to enhance the atmosphere of the game, these are easily more welcomed than they were previously, much like how Xenogears managed its own soundtrack.

A couple of standout track I can name from the top of my head, like Hepatica, Godsibb, Fatal Fight, Febronia, Promised Pain, Abel’s Ark and of course how the fuck can I not mention the ending song “Maybe Tomorrow” which makes me emotional every time I listen to it like I’m some 15 year old emo girl stuck to her ipod nano in 2006. I’m not a music expert of course so I can’t really go into much detail on why I think the soundtrack is fantastic but sometimes, it’s just something that you feel rather than something you can explain with words. Anyway Kajiura is a goddess and I need more of her compositions in my vein.

The only real issue I have with the sound direction however is that several areas of the game have these “alarm” sounds, which is a repeated line by some robot lady going like “Activation of the Song of Nephilim, all personnel must evacuate immediately” and while it does had an effect in the most urgent and intense moment of the story, the fact that this is a repeated occurrence in a lot of the dungeons in the game quickly start to get a bit grating. Especially when the frequency of the “alarm” is repeated probably every 5 seconds on loop, I don’t get why they couldn’t just stick that one to a cutscene and just let us enjoy the soundtrack in peace.

Which leaves me to talk about the new battle system of the game. Once again, the gameplay of Xenosaga has seen a massive overhaul but this time I must admit that I’m a bit more divided on the change. In this game, there are no combos to do with the Square and Triangle buttons, no AP’s, no Deathblows, No Event Slots and even less so Stocks and Break Zones from Episode 2. The only remnants of the old battle system is the turn order and the boost mechanic, the entire battle system has been streamlined to a frankly quite absurd degree. Now the game has a more standard type of menu based battle system, tech attacks are now just stronger attacks you can use out of a menu which costs EP like the Ether attacks which are still present in the game. The game features now a more classic “break system” you’ve likely seen from a lot of JRPG past the release of FF XIII which I was actually quite surprised to see since Xenosaga 3 was released a whole 3 years before that game (and makes me wonder which game actually did that dreaded mechanic first).

Some attacks deal “break damage” at the cost of reduced regular damage which fills a red gauge below the enemies health bar, once that bar is filled, you can initiate a “break” which leaves the enemies vulnerable and unable to act for 1 or 2 turns depending on how when you break said enemies. You also have a break gauge yourself, so you need to check that.
Boosting is back and serves the same purpose as the old games but with some differences. Just like Xenosaga 2, you and the enemies can both hold 3 units of Boost but now on top of using boost to override the turn order, you can instead use your boost units to launch “Special Attacks” which are this game’s version of Deathblow from the older titles. Using a Special Attack allows you to conserve EP but also if you happen to finish off an enemy with one of those, you get an extra amount of experience, skill points and gold at the end of a fight, so it’s always good to use them to make your characters stronger.

Now the reason I’m a bit divided towards this battle system can’t be really evident at first so I’m going to address the one positive of such a system, everything goes a lot faster than in the previous two games. Entering in contact with an enemy instantly transitions into the battle screen without any transition whatsoever and fights are usually done in a matter of seconds whereas they could be taking a couple of minutes in the previous two games. Add to that the fact that the series added a back attack where you can deal more damage to enemies for one turn if you approach them from the back and battles are generally over faster than it takes to say “Xenosaga II”. A mechanic I think I didn’t explain in the previous two reviews also get a big change that’s kinda welcome, traps, in the previous game there were some weird tanks you could shoot which sprayed an area of effect on the field which not only stopped the enemies on their track but also gave you an advantage in battle if engaged them in that state. Well in Xenosaga III, instead of these traps being installed at certain strategic points of the levels, you actually carry those traps and can place them on the field yourself and upon shooting them, they’ll act exactly the same. I guess it would be a neat tool to use for speed runners and you can carry up to 10 of them before having to restock them at a shop. I personally saw very little use for them during my playthrough as I found getting behind the enemy to be surprisingly easy to do in this one.

But anyway, it does make fights faster but I also think this streamlining kinda removes a lot of the depth and uniqueness of the series core battle design philosophy since Xenogears. Xenosaga 1 was an improvement over the original system and Xenosaga 2 was a re-evaluation of it to try and see how to make it more engaging. I will say though, that as a staunch defender of Xenosaga’s 2 battle system, I was kinda disappointed by this admittedly expected turn-over. I think that ultimately what I dislike about the new battle system is that there’s so much more that could’ve been done with at least the battle system from Xenosaga 1 for exemple and that just make the system more basic didn’t necessarily created a better or more interesting battle system, just one you can be kinda over and done with faster.

I also have a bit of a confidence to make, I’m getting a “break” fatigue as of late and even though this game predates the “break” fads we see in many modern JRPG, I couldn’t help but sigh at the new battle system for having something like this. I’m not blaming the game here, I’m blaming myself for not being able to enjoy that mechanic after so many games using it. I never found a break/stagger system to actually add anything of value to battle for the most part, it’s just a waste of time, it’s just annoying to do piss poor damage all the time until you fill up a gauge that lets you finally have fun… It’s just kind of tiring…

It’s also not helped by the fact the game is pretty damn easy all across the board. Very early on in the game, you get several options to trivialize encounters and bosses, like spamming Erde Kaiser summons which you get one very early in the game and can be casted by all party members this time and not just Shion.
Another thing I’m not too big on is the progression system, it’s a much more linear system where characters fit into tightly defined roles, but whereas the original game allowed you to switch things around and mix and match your party’s abilities this game is sadly very straightforward. Skill points can be spent on a skill tree that looks more like a skill fork than a tree, very early on you are tasked with choosing between two branches, one branch makes the character go through the path of the role they were given in the previous game and the other a sort of alternate job. If you feel especially crazy, you can pick the alternate path but usually speaking it’s better to stick to the main one and stick to it until the end to unlock the Master Skill which is a powerful ability with a variety of effects. Throughout the game, you can obtain a bunch of books allowing you to add a couple more branches to the skill tree, but this is sadly quite a superfluous addition.

Most battles in the game are going to be heavily reliant on you using Tech and Ether to make higher damage and deal with the enemies faster, so a lot of the difficulty comes from managing your EP’s, this rarely becomes an issue since you have 7 party members at pretty much all time ! However I do enjoy the fact that residual EXP and Skill points are a thing now and that the game incentivizes you to use the entirety of your party instead of a select few, much like Xenosaga 2, you can switch out party members during battle which is always a nice plus.

I won’t say the battle system is bad whatsoever, but it is flawed and rather dull at points, most boss fights play out exactly the same and it’s very easy to cheese them. Boosting is such a non-component of the battle system that I even wonder why it was still implemented anyway and they must’ve felt the same way as I did while making the game because they had to give another purpose to boosting in order to not make it almost irrelevant outside of keeping up combos and finish enemies faster. Even the main superboss designed for the battle system doesn’t manage to actually do anything interesting with it, which is kind of a shame. I think with the experience Monolith gained on the first two games, they could’ve managed to make a fast paced version of the older system too instead of making it this way.

It’s hardly a complaint since I still find the battle system effective and fun to break, but not one that particularly impressed me in the long schemes of things. Of course this isn’t the only side to the coin of the game battle system as we now have to discuss the mech fight and for once, I am much more enthusiastic about those ! Not only is there a decent degree of customization this time again but I also think this is the best mech combat in the entire series this far.

The game uses a fuel system much like Xenogears but instead of being a consumable like in that game, it just determines the number of times you can attack in a single turn which is determined by the type of weapon you’ve equipped and their cost in terms of fuel consumption. You also have the possibility to activate “Anima Mode” filling an Anima gauge by landing successful attacks on enemies, you can stock up to 3 Anime gauge depending on where you are in the story and during this mode which last for 2 turns, you can either use a powerful special move, or attack the enemies while only consuming half of the fuel necessary to use your attacks. Attacking during Anime mode can sometimes activate a random ambush which is an all-out attack of your entire party against a single target, there’s also co-op attacks outside of Anime mode where only 2 characters wail on the enemy. You can also heal in battle by charging which also serves as a guard which can come handy.
While a bit more gimmicky than the on-foot battle, I did find them to be thoroughly more engaging than them which is surprising since usually it’s the other way around. Some of the best bosses in the game like the 2nd Margulis Fight which is the apex of fiction, happen during the mech combat and I’m really glad there are a lot more of them this time around and a lot more dungeons designed around E.S exploration. I had a lot of fun with this system which is surprisingly deeper than one might expect at first glance, sadly it does suffer from the same issue as the rest of the game for being quite easy outside of a few encounters using unique mechanics you have to figure out midway through the fight (like the aforementioned Margulis encounters). Much like the on-foot battle, a lot of them are done and over pretty quickly which is actually a plus.

Overall, I’d say the battle system being fast definitely does help the excellent pacing of the game, the previous two Xenosaga games were kind of a slow burn both in terms of story and in their gameplay but Xenosaga 3 goes at a brisk pace at all time, it’s always engaging, there’s always something going on and there’s rarely anything to stop your progress. One thing that’s a bit regrettable however is the lack of side-content to engage with compared to Xenosaga 2. While the side-content in Xenosaga 2 leave a lot to be desired, the sheer quantity of them made the game quite generous especially when it comes to its post-game. Here the side-stuff has been severely downsized, there’s still a couple of mostly puzzle based optional dungeons and 2 superbosses but the bulk of the side content is in the red door/red key quest present in all previous games.

In a surprise twist on the formula however, the Erde Kaiser Quest has been nerfed a little bit in favor of integrating that silly plotline within the actual main story. It’s a surprising choice for sure to make the two comedic side-quest characters actually important characters in the plot but their contributions mostly amount to justifying narrative shortcuts when it comes to technological stuff. But I do find it hilarious that the whole Erde Kaiser thing is actually important to the plot now with Kos-Mos herself being implemented with some of Erde Kaiser’s features after being beaten to a pulp and not being able to keep her new design for long. You can still summon Erde Kaiser in battle, in fact they’re now just regular summons a la final fantasy that you can acquire through the red door/red key thing, you get access to all versions of Erde Kaiser from throughout the franchise, sadly they all share the same battle animation but they compensate with raw fire power, and they made the already trivial regular encounters even more trivial.

The ending of the Erde Kaiser plotline however, is actually peak fiction, acquiring the final Erde Kaiser demands you go through a few steps which includes a boss fight against Wel… I mean Omega Id from NOT Xenogears and another boss fight against the strongest Erde Kaiser which frankly exists to break the late game in half if you’re too tired of the combat system by the end (or if like me you’re crazy enough to finish that game at 4am and you just want to fucking sleep). The conclusion to the quest made me a bit emotional and filled me with the burning passion for giant robots (the thing chicks dig).

Last but not least, there’s Haqox which… is a lemmings clone… it’s the main mini-game available and it’s surprisingly difficult and ramps up in difficulty quite a bit, I was not big on said mini-game but after a while I got used to how it works even if some stages broke my goddamn finger. Completing the game allows you to see the cutscenes with Swimsuits which is a fun bonus for all of your effort and I mean who doesn’t wanna see Shion in a bikini heh ?
Alright enough bubbling around, if you’re playing a Xeno game especially a pre-Xenoblade era game at that it’s clearly not to talk about extraneous detail such as how the gameplay hold up or if the dungeons don’t want to make you kill yourself. First and foremost, you’re playing a Xeno game to experience the amazing stories told by Takahashi and his wife Kaori Tanaka (which I doubt actually worked on the game, like I said, I found very little info on the development of that one). And so how did Takahashi manage to save Christmas once again when everything seemed to be against this game succeeding in doing so ?

The story takes place roughly a year after the event of Xenosaga 2, after a couple of shenanigans involving Gnosis Terrorism and the uncovering of a conspiracy involving Vector Industries, Shion lost her trust for the company and decided to leave it in order to join Scientia, an anti-UMN terrorist group which also wants to know what the deal with Vector is. Meanwhile in the void of space, a floating landmass by the name of “Rennes-le-Château” (an actual city in France btw) has appeared in the middle of space, it’s said to be a part of Lost Jerusalem the home of origin of humanity. Dmitri Yuriev is also up to some shenanigans, after coming back from the dead which seems to bother absolutely no one, he took his place back in the government to start working on a new super weapon by the name of “Omega Res Novae” piloted by a mysteriously familiar looking “Abel” which will not be the only time Takahashi is bordering on copyright infringement. But wait that’s not all, a new scientist is in town and has created a robot very similar to Kos-Mos by the name of T-Elos and they’re about to scrap Kos-Mos which is unacceptable !!! Especially since we need Kos-Mos to save the crew on the Elsa after these dimwits got stuck into a pocket dimension after orbiting a bit too close to the big French rock.

From the get go, we can see one thing about the story which is pretty cool, the story is back to focusing on Shion and Kos-Mos, I had nothing against Jr. taking the lead in the previous game (especially when it was so damn raw) but the story of Shion and Kos-Mos has been the central hook of the original premise for the trilogy and it was about time we get some closure on that front. Like I said earlier, the pacing of the story is honestly quite excellent, the entire premise that I’ve talked about pretty much summarizes the first few hours or so of the story ! It’s intense, there’s tons of moving parts, an extensive attention to detail when it comes to developing the lore and the setting of the game, we’re definitely inside a story that was written by Takahashi and I love it ! The story is really thoroughly engaging from start to finish, aside from one fillerish dungeon which exists solely to make yet another Xenogears reference, every event that takes place advances the plot in some way or another !

This frantic pacing made me play the game for hours on end. We go from revelations after revelations from one powerfully emotional and philosophical moment to the next, it’s like experiencing the highs of Disc 2 of Xenogears but as if it was an actual game. Speaking of Xenogears, Takahashi really didn’t give a fuck this time around, knowing full well this might be the last chance he’ll get to direct a Xeno game, he just bombards the story with all these parallels which will certainly please older fans or people who checked out Xenogears.

I’m a bit mixed on these references and parallels because I fail to see how they contribute to the plot, aside from tying Xenosaga to the grand project of Takahashi aka “Parralel Works” but it’s nonetheless really fun to witness how much he got away with. I mean there’s a certain part in the end where I can hear the team at Monolith Software being like “We cannot pass this opportunity to get a 3D Model of Elly ! WE ARE GETTING ELLY IN 3D DAMNIT !”.
There’s also a part of the game I was a bit skeptical about at first until it turned out to be absolute kino, there’s a “kinda” time travel plot line in the middle which is the game excuses to do the traditional tour of Old Miltia this time around however, we will be witnessing the events that lead to the tragedy that unfolded on this cursed land ! It’s a really long part of the game which takes probably half of the game runtime but I think it was worth every second of it and the implications of time-travel in the series opened a few interesting things for Shion as a character.

Speaking of Shion, I’ve heard that many people hate Shion in this game and on average she’s easily the most unpopular Xeno protagonist by a large margin but honestly… I really don’t get why, I have tons of complaints about the story especially in its later half but none of these issues are Shion related in the slightest. In fact, I wish more female leads in games, manga and anime were written with the same level of pertinence as Shion is. Shion goes through a lot in this game and arguably she has been going through a lot for a lot of time, but she never actually worked on herself, she was always distant and aloof as well as brash and borderline suicidal in the first game. What she goes through in Episode III isn’t a sudden shift in behavior that was brought about for the convenience of the plot or to serve the theme of the story, it was something that was already established in the first game albeit in a more subtle manner.

Shion does a lot of shitty, awful and at times unreasonable things in this game, she acts very rashly to what’s happening around her. Shion isn’t a happy person, nobody seem to understand her and she has been carrying traumas of the past and she now sees the possibility of finally reaching happiness for the very first time in her life and she’s about to take the chance, even if that means turning her back against the people she hold dear and even turning her back against the universe. In this game, we also learn a lot about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Kevin and let’s just say not everything was as lovey-dovey as they seemed at first. Their relationship is clearly manipulative, even if Kevin claims she is doing all of this to make Shion happy. Shion, giving in to his lies, is torn apart by the avalanche of information rushing through her mind right now. Shion is a broken character, a broken human being and it’s not just something that’s shown and serves just as a cheap way to evoke a feeling of forced relatability to the player, in fact only few people will probably relate to Shion since her situation is very specific to only a couple of people. But what the game asks of you is empathy. Even though I wanted to punch Shion at one point in the story, I also think Takahashi did a more than excellent job at humanizing the character !

She is profoundly human and written so realistically that I’m sure that it could throw some people off, she’s a perfect representation of somebody falling for a toxic relationship once again, of someone willing to go back to her abuser because in the sea of her own traumas, it seems like the only beacon of hope in a hopeless world ! She is stuck, trapped, in the clutch of the man she loves so dearly despite him being the absolute worst fucking dickhead imaginable, but I also think every decision Shion takes are believable ! It’s hard to work the fine line between a caricature of a broken person and someone who is realistically and believably broken. It’s not enough to have a character display self doubts and go “boo hoo my life sucks”, for a character like this to work, you have to make a good character first and then make a good broken character second ! Making them humans instead of just a function inside of a wider narrative ! And Shion is ultimately an excellent representation of that and it makes her path to healing even more powerful and poignant (also ALLEN IS THE GOAT !!!).
Xenosaga III manages to create a powerful narrative about breaking from the cycle of pain, about how a small wave can reach to the far end of the cosmos as long as you scream loud enough for people to hear it ! Shion isn’t the only one to get an amazing treatment in this game however, I’d say that all the characters which had yet to have some level of conclusion to their arc managed to shine through and brilliantly so ! I can’t believe Takahashi managed not only to nail the Febronia plotline that was teased since the first game as well as making me care about fucking Virgil, a random guy who dies near the beginning of the 1st game only to come back as one of the Testament which are the main antagonistic group of the game. All the scenes involving Virgil and Feb managed to make me so fucking emo it’s kind of unbelievable.

In fact, I’d say that characters coming back to fulfill one last wish as Testaments is actually a pretty damn cool idea in concept, usually I’m not a huge fan of returning characters for the sake of fanservice but here it’s not for that sake and they actually do serve a purpose in the story at large. In fact, they even manage to nail the whole “true mastermind” plot line by giving it some interesting ramifications and devastating effects to some characters ! Shoutouts in particular to Margulis which boss fight is easily the best one not just in this game, not just in the Xenosaga series but in the entire Xeno franchise ! I keep listening to Fatal Fight every single goddamn day since that fight happened, the sight of this man being betrayed and left like a dog, losing everything he believed in but finding purpose in the one thing that hasn’t abandoned him yet, the one thing that won’t disappoint him, a fight to the death against his rival ! AAAAAH IT’S SO PEAAAAAAAAAAAK !!

However for how gripping and engaging the story is, that fast pacing does have some consequences especially at the tail end of the game. You can feel that the game was meant to finish around the time of your confrontation with Dmitri Yuriev but the game still had a bit more things to tell and the final dungeon kinda rushes through what little hanging plot thread was left in the story ! It’s a bit of a shame because I would’ve loved to see the conclusion to these arcs presented in a more thorough and developed way ! This doesn’t take away too much from how I enjoyed those but I can’t help but think several things about the game weren’t properly closed off. For example, I do love the final scene of Albedo in this game, but I wonder if there was even a point in bringing him back to just serve second fiddle to the main antagonist of the game and have maybe 3 lines of dialog at best (you don’t even get a boss fight against him whereas you fight every testament in the game at least once !). Deep down, I feel like the Albedo plotline should’ve been dropped or at least developed a bit better. I think Albedo already had a decent conclusion by the end of Xenosaga II so I felt the additional screen time to be kinda pointless.

The story also delves a bit more heavily on direct references to Christianity and I was a bit scared at first but it’s handled with a surprising level of tactfulness, it managed to completely avoid blasphemy and not being too chuuni which I’m always a bit afraid of when you go deeper in that territory.

Despite all of these rushes however, the ending of Xenosaga 3 is absolutely insane. From the moment Shion betrays the party all the way to the end credits I was crying not just out of sadness but out of sheer admiration for the craft ! It’s one of the most beautiful endings I’ve ever seen from this medium and even if it’s clear the story Takahashi wanted to tell wasn’t yet complete, in the end, I think the story we got was good enough !
Xenosaga 3 is a freaking generational game, it’s a game which leaves an impenetrable mark in the mind of those who play it and solidify Takahashi as a master of his craft. So many conclusive pieces of media tend to drop the ball hard with empty fanservices, awkward plot delivery with artificial stakes sometimes in favor of said fanservice, too busy with paying-off the storyline than actually saying something with the work. But not Xenosaga 3, it’s a game which does suffer a bit of growing pain that’s something we can’t ignore unfortunately, but I can excuse a lot of the game shortcomings because of how well it wrapped up everything that matters and delivered a powerful story which spoke to me as a person, with characters and a universe I had a tough time saying goodbye too by the end of the credits.

At times, I even wonder if I don’t prefer it to Xenogears, the gap is really close, but both games, as broken as they are, do deliver on their promises. Takahashi might see the Xenosaga series as a failure, heck maybe you’re seeing the series as a failure after completing it ! But as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t regret going through the series and experiencing Takahashi’s wild ride. And maybe who knows, Xenosaga isn’t over, there’s tons of stuff left to uncover, the Xeno series is not over yet, Xenoblade proves that the Perfect Works plan has still delivered all of its secrets. Maybe someday, Xenosaga will once again be brought up in the light, I really wish it does, I wish the game would receive at least an HD port if not a straight up sequel…

But this is a far off dream for now, but who knows a wave can travel the universe and change the course of history… so yes it’s a dream for now but maybe not for long, maybe one day Xenosaga will shine and ve celebrated for the cult classic series that it is…

Maybe this day…

Maybe tomorrow...

Thanks to MrRPGCrazy for uploading a subtitled playthrought on this one on Youtube

Xenosaga II to III : A Missing Years is a small browser based huh... visual novel I guess ? Released in 2006 and meant to bridge the gap between Xenosaga 2 and Xenosaga 3

I was told to watch this to better understand Xenosaga 3 so I'm not sure yet how essential of an entry this is but regardless on whether or not it ends up actually being important doesn't change the fact that it is... pretty bad...

Calling this thing a visual novel would be an insult to visual novel, it's more of a powerpoint presentation with voice over and a few text dump thrown here and there which exists solely for the purpose of infodumping us a ton of info which may or may not be essential for Xenosaga 3.

The Plot centers around Shion and Jin investigating some Gnosis related terrorism, apparently a boy and a girl have been able to summon Gnosis thanks to an earlier version of the Song of Nephilim called "Lemegeton". The girl is a special 100 Series Realian (yes another one...) who has lost her memory and is trying to find a guy named Grimoire who might hold the secret to the Lemegeton. But the girl is sought after by both Vector Industry who's been hiding a few secrets from Shion and an Anti-UMN resistance group named "Scientia" formed by Ziggy's former comrade in Pied Piper.

The story itself is just kind of wtv, most of it just amounts to just explaining to us a bunch of stuff in the laziest most straightforward way possible. The presentation is pretty damn bad, the audio-mixing is equally as terrible and the central plot is just trying to manipulate us into giving a shit about some random no-name gothic lolita chick which is related to Shion in a way that just feels like she's there to add more to Shion's backstory and trauma than to be an interesting character worth crying over instead. Between the Death of her parents, her estranged relationship with her brother and the whole deal with Febronia which we have yet to be given any explanations about, this just felt tacked on and kind of unnecessary, feels like some weird fanfiction at times even (yes even more so than Xenosaga 2).

I feel like the plot about Grimoire being Nephilim's Father and trying to bring her back could've easily been better integrated in the main game and even then for what this add to Nephilim's character it's pretty damn frivolous, but I guess I'll see if they do anything with that in Xenosaga 3.

I don't really recommend this one unless you're really crazy about series completionism.

Shoutouts to ValakTurtles on Youtube for uploading a captioned playthrough of this game.

Xenosaga Pied Piper is a short side-story released for the Vodafone 6 and written by Kaori Tanaka (Takahashi's wife an co-creator of the Xenoseries). It dives into the backstory of Ziggy at the time he was known as Jan Sauer, a police officer specialized in investigating crime related to the U.M.N Network (the virtual reality space which serves as both the Internet and the main mean of interdimensional travel in the universe of the series).

Since the game was released for a now defunct platform and no dump of the game has been uploaded online, it is effectively lost media and will probably remain as such for a long time unless someone manage to archive it.

Thus I had to resolve to watching a playthrough of the game with subtitles, however from the looks of it, it seems to attempt to translate the gameplay system of Xenosaga 1 on a mobile device and they seem to have done more than a commandable work at it even with the limited presentation which looks like something that could've come out of RPG Maker 2003.

Ziggy is a character that I already liked in the main games and the main series only partially hinted at his past and what might've caused him to commit suicide and eventually get recycled as a cyborg. This game is meant to tell that story in a more direct manner and as such does a really decent job at establishing Ziggy's backstory and the traumatic events that transpired here as well as his relationship to the mysterious "Voyager" a hooded figure who showed up briefly at the end of Xenosaga 2 and which Ziggy to have a vendetta against.

The script of the game is really good as it is to be expected by Kaori Tanaka's excellent work on the main series, however it kinda falls short as a mystery game. The identity of Voyager is way too obvious if you saw his design in Xenosaga 2 and can manage to put 2 and 2 together, so a lot of the plot become kinda sluggish certainly not helped by both the shoddy presentation which makes a lot of the more emotional bit of the game fall a bit flat.

The OST in particular sounds like the Arabic Nokia Tune which was probably to be expected given the platform this was published on but it really takes away from some of the scenes in the game.

I still enjoyed it in the end however, especially as a deep dive into the past events of the series as well as to complete Ziggy's character arc that I'm sure will conclude in an interesting manner in Xenosaga 3 (as he seem to have found another family with Momo and her mom which is a situation reminiscent of what he went through in that game).

I'm not gonna give a score to this one seeing as I haven't actually played the game but it's a neat little curiosity and company piece to the trilogy that I wish could be playable in some way in the future, it's nonetheless impressive how solid the game seems to be, an RPG on mobile phone is pretty damn impressive all things considered especially one taking place in a setting as rich and dense as the one from Xenosaga.

But still... getting stuck on mobile is some grade A Nomura bullshit

Ziggy isn't a step dad, he's the dad who stepped up !

Xenosaga 2 : Peaking on the Stock Market

Takahashi is one unlucky motherfucker, first laid off by Falcom (which to many would be considered a good thing) and then laid off by Square for being too ambitious, our guy simply didn’t have the best of run when it comes to realizing his grand project and Xenosaga was looking to be yet another one of his many failures. When Xenosaga 1 came out, Takahashi had envisioned a way to tell a grand sci-fi epic with tints of religious symbolism thrown into the mix in order to make up for what he couldn’t do with Xenogears. Borrowing a lot from his Perfect Works book Takahashi was set to accomplish his goal once and for all… or was he ?

The problem with being an author is that you tend to be a perfectionist and that perfectionism doesn’t bode well in an increasingly competitive market. Saying that Xenosaga was an ambitious project would be an understatement, the original Xenogears was already too much for Square to handle and Takahashi’s vision saw no brakes on the fast moving train that was releasing the original Xenosaga, the game was dense, rich in lore and in-universe terminology that might completely threw you out of the loop if you’re not paying attention. To say that I had to take mental notes while playing through the game in order to piece out whatever the fuck it was even trying to accomplish would be an understatement, this game is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and at times very subtle in its approach to both worldbuilding, political setup and characterization.

Something I failed to mention during my Xenosaga review was that the game came with in-depth glossary defining and explaining every single tiny details of the world and it is huge, there’s well over 275 entries in that glossary which unlocks as the game progresses and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t fully commit to reading all of them. I tried doing so but one thing I’m not super fond of when it comes to storytelling especially in video games is having to stop the progression of the story in order to read what is essentially an in-game wiki article. Final Fantasy XIII was especially guilty of this where most of the important part of the game’s setting and lore was found on a random backlog containing info about important story details that should’ve been naturally woven into the game’s natural storytelling and gameplay loop. Fortunately, I still think Xenosaga 1 and especially now having played Xenosaga 2 is clear enough in its cryptic nature that you can somewhat get the gist of it with context clues alone and consulting the glossary is only an optional thing.

All of this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Xenosaga’s massive commitment to worldbuilding and establishing a larger than life universe with conflicts on a galactic scale interwoven with deep psychological dive into characters' inner doubts and desires. A single secondary heck one might even say a tertiary villain which only appears in the first half of the game and never gets brought up ever again past that point after his inevitable demise manages to be an impactful and really interesting fella once we sit back and think about it. I still think the Cathedral Ship and the Encephalon parts of the game are absolute testament to Takahashi and Kaori Tanaka’s talent as directors and storytellers.

And I even failed to mention how much of Xenosaga 1 is tied to Xenogears in a way that’s very hard to notice if you’re not familiar not just with that game but it’s “Perfect Works” encyclopedia book as many concepts and ideas brought up in Xenosaga like the uncovering of the Zohar in South Africa, Lost Jerusalem, the Galactic Federation, the massive timeskip between the intro of the game and the rest were all elements present in “Perfect Works”
What I’m trying to convey here is that there is no feasible ways for Xenosaga or even the original vision for Xenogears to be completed and even the Xenoblade series only tied back to it thanks to the success of the first game which allowed Takahashi to give it “one more try” and by then the project has shifted so much in style, tone, setting, lore genre and everything that it’s even harder to know if this was really what Takahashi really wanted to tell. As I have yet to play Xenoblade 3 (been stalling it for a bit too long cause I was initially not that interested in trying it out) I can’t really talk on how the story ends up unfolding and if the team at Monolith Software managed to tie all of the series thematic loose end together in a satisfying manner but regardless we have to look at the facts here.

Xenosaga 1 was released with the idea that the series will eventually be comprised of 6 games which were supposed to cover the entire timeline of the universe from beginning to the end and going through a grand total of 3 different arcs separated by massive time gaps between them and change in party members with only Shion and chaos planned to become mainstay characters. And in the end, even as Xenosaga 1 was merely an introduction to that universe and world and was always meant to be, Xenosaga 1 still wasn’t complete itself. Several elements that were shown during its announcement didn’t make the cut and in the end Takahashi said that he was only working with 20% of his real power here.

Can you imagine how insanely absurd the scope of the Xeno project is ? If the Xenosaga we got was only 20% of what was originally envisioned for that first game then I don’t think 6 games would’ve cut it to tell the entire thing ! And it would’ve taken literal decades for it to conclude hoping for little bumps on the road. Overambition is eventually what brought Xenogears to be released in the state that it’s in, it’s not just Square cutting off funds and losing interest in a project that was admittedly too big for themselves, it’s just that Takahashi was a different beast altogether as far as video game creators goes !

Making a video game in the late 90’s and early 2000’s takes roughly 2 or even 3 years, Xenogears was given 2 years and they couldn’t fully finish it on schedule because Takahashi isn’t just an ambitious storyteller but a phenomenally ambitious director as well ! Xenogears decided to forego using pre-rendered backgrounds to tell its story, opting instead for full 3D environments ! Which was unheard of for a game of this ambition especially with how fresh and indiscernible the technology was for most of the staff working on the project and indeed Xenogears is one hell of an impressive game on a technical level.

This visual ambition carried over to Xenosaga and to the furthest extreme to the Xenoblade series was truly something to behold and something Takahashi didn’t lose over the years. Sometimes I am beyond shocked at how good these games look and how well these games run and how insane the level design and environment can be on top of everything else. Xenoblade X alone is a more impressive game than most modern games that came around its release and it was released on hardware that was much less powerful than the competition. Xenosaga was no exception to that rule, as Xenosaga still remains an impressive artistic flex for the console in the heydays of 2002 when it was released and freaking outsold Tekken 4 !



When you think of long saga in video games, you can think of a few examples like Trails or even Yakuza, but even then they had to make compromises to keep the train going like reusing assets every game, keeping the standard of presentation lower, focusing more on text in sacrifice of the gameplay or exploration aspect. Working with a tinier budget can sometimes help to keep a franchise afloat in the long run without risking too much on the line and keeping the release schedule consistent to please fans and investors alike.

But not Takahashi, Takahashi is simply “built different”, the guy always keep pushing the boundaries of what was possible in terms of storytelling in this industry and how to present that story to the world in the absolute best way he can think of or at least that’s what he wants to do…

In the design document for Xenosaga 2, Takahashi stated :

“There are things that even if you try to plan for, you'll never be able to express. With games as a form of media no matter where you set it you have to make towns and all the little accessories you end up doing annoying work with games. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good medium for telling stories. I think it’s better to call it a media for telling narrative things. Without a doubt, there are things you can’t get across in a game.”

Mind you this is certainly coming from a deep place of regret and unease concerning the future of the Xenosaga project, he also stated in that same design document that he didn’t want the current state of the franchise to be static, he wanted the franchise to evolve and branch into other genres. I think what Takahashi really wanted to do was to make the Star Wars of Video Game franchise even Xenogears releasing its fifth Episode first was an homage to the ambition of George Lucas. Takahashi, a man who has worked on games for most of his life up to that point, openly admits that games are imperfect vessels for the art of creating deep impactful narratives because of all of the annoyances that come with making a game well… a game…

Part of me thinks that perhaps, Takahashi wasn’t meant to be a game director, maybe the medium of video game alone was too limiting for his grand vision because being a great artist doesn’t mean you’re good to work with as a manager. When I look back on Xenogears or even Xenosaga 1, the strength and weaknesses of these games couldn’t be more apparent. You’re not coming to these games for deep and interesting gameplay, you came here to experience some of the most brilliant, ambitious and thought provoking stories in the medium on par with novel series. Video games were but a conduit, a means to an end for Takahashi and it would take several years before the Xeno franchise would get a battle system and exploration which people would dare actually give a shit about.

And it’s when realizing that he was perhaps incapable of envisioning Xenosaga II coming on time in a way that satisfies him that he willingly quit the project to take time for himself away from all of the stress that was piling up. His departure would lead to Kaori Tanaka quitting the project too fearing that her writing talent weren’t needed anymore in this context. This wasn’t a forced change, it was something both parties consented to be the best possible outcome for the game. In the end, Xenosaga would go from 6 (maybe more ?) games to only 3 and Xenosaga II would be handled by an entirely different team with the scriptwriters kinda not being sure what to make of Takahashi’s script and the reception was mixed to say the least.
Xenosaga 2 is considered by many long-time fans of the franchise to be the absolute worst game in the Xenosaga series and even more so the Xeno franchise as a whole. It’s a game which is said to be so mediocre or even outright bad on a level of industry failure comparable to “Devil May Cry 2” in terms of a badly made misguided sequel ! Fucking DMC2 ! I’ve heard war stories about people going through this game, some of them outright giving up midway through to watch a let’s play on Youtube. And it’s not even just a gameplay thing either, people have genuine gripes with the story and how it was handled especially when it comes to tone. It’s so bad that I had 2 separate friends sending me 2 separate charts to explain the battle system to me to get it done with it faster (AND ONE OF THEM OUTRIGHT TELLS YOU TO SKIP THE GAME AND WATCH THE CUTSCENES ON YOUTUBE).

The new team in charge of developing the game took Takahashi and Tanaka’s baby, put it inside a microwave and distributed the work of art that it was supposed to be inside easily digestible product for the mass market and retooled it into an impersonal messy product which probably caused a lot of mental anguish for the young creative couple... but... against all odds…

It’s peak I’m afraid…

After reading through that long introduction contextualizing the game’s development and knowing of the game’s reputation, you’ve probably looked at the rating already and started raising a few eyebrows. “A 9 ? For Xenosaga fucking 2 ? Really ? Are you out of your damn mind ? Has the Gnome Juice finally gotten to you and now you can’t distinguish the taste of trash from the taste of well aged wine ?”

Well now my dear readers, I’m going to shock you even further. Not only do I think Xenosaga 2 is good, not only do I find the hate surrounding the game is vastly exaggerated, I also think the game is vast improvement on almost all fronts compared to the first Xenosaga and on some level even the untouchable freaking masterpiece that is Xenogears. I fail to see what in the fuck people find so bad about this game outside of maybe not vibing with the battle system.

You know what, let's talk about the battle system for a hot minute because it’s easily the biggest point of contention when it comes to talking about the game. Xenosaga 2 has a battle system which at first might seem familiar to Xenosaga 1, you have to press either square, triangle or circle in order to make combos, you have the turn order displayed on the bottom right side of the screen, additional effect applied per turn like more critical hits or point multiplier or something like that. You can boost ! And this time you can actually see the boost meter of the enemies which is definitely a nice touch given how boost is a major part of the battle system this time around and that’s pretty much it for the similarities. Because Xenosaga decides to revamp pretty much everything about the battle system and this is where things get really controversial with this entry.

In the first game in order to perform different actions you had to use AP which were always conveniently set in a way that you can do at least one action like a single combo or a single ether attack and if you wanted to use something stronger like a deathblow, you had to cancel out the first attack of your combo in order to build more AP to use a deathblow on the next turn, sacrificing a turn to potentially deal more damage the next which was a nice trade-off.
However in this game, in order to perform more actions, make your combo longer and deal more damage you need to use stocks ! Stocks is pretty much the replacement for AP, there are 3 stocks, without any stock the only thing you can do is do a measly pathetic combo attack or use an ether which consumes MP. If you want to perform more attacks you first need to build up your stock meter at the start of each battle so yes, it does mean spending several turns getting wailed by enemies waiting for the stock meter to fill up before actually launching an assault but hold on ! I know it sounds bad but trust me ! I’m getting somewhere with this !

See because what good is to use combos when there are no deathblows in this game this time around which is a shame for certain but let me talk about break ! In the previous game, using the different button was just a way to use different combos and that was pretty much it, but here each enemy has zones on their bodies which need to be hit in order to break them ! These zones are separated in B and C zones, B zones correspond to the Square button and C zones correspond to the Triangle button ! Rarely, enemies will also have A zones which are tied to the Square button but outside of maybe the very first area in the game as well as one of the superbosses it’s usually B or C ! In order to break an enemy, you have to first find their zones, that zone can be BBC or CBB or BB or any combination of these 3 letters and once that’s done and the enemies break, they enter a state of break which makes them more vulnerable to attack.

And this is where the boost meter comes into play, much like Xenosaga 1, you can override the turn order by using a boost which makes the boosted character take priority in the turn order ! The main difference and honestly a welcome one in my opinion is that now the boost meter is shared across all party members and can be built up to three units just like stocks ! Other than that, building your boost meter works just like in XS1 meaning that the meter will be built with each successful attack you land on the enemies !

And I must admit that boosting was one part of the battle system in XS1 that I barely even used or at least used as a clutch to get out of a bad situation. Rarely did boosting in XS1 gave me a real advantage in fights and with how slow the boost meter for each character built up in that game, you rarely ever got to make use of it and when you do use it, it’s usually not that satisfying or even that helpful ! But not in Xenosaga 2, that game took the boosting mechanic from XS1 and made it make sense in the context of Xenosaga’s 2 battle system. Because you see after breaking an enemy, you need to immediately follow it up with a boosted character to follow up on that combo and then you can either launch the enemy in the air or down it on the ground and they stay that way as long as you keep boosting and keep piling combos onto the fool which deals massive amounts of damages.

There are a lot more that goes into dealing damage than just that however, on top of building up your stocks, you can had elemental attacks to your weapons in order to target their weaknesses, you can use an ether to boost your attack or magic depending on which character you use and eventually all of that combined after all that preparation ends up with you dealing an astronomical amount of damage if you play your cards rights and even more so if you use your attacks on certain turns such as using Momo on the ether boosting turn to make her attacks even more powerful than she usually does (yes Momo went from being completely useless to being your main damage dealer in this game, she’s a glass canon however but she does compensate by having an high evasion stat).
I can understand that this seems like a lot at first glance and a complete headache for those who only want to just mindlessly rush through fights like there’s no tomorrow ! It’s definitely a slower more methodical approach to combat and even regular encounters can last several minutes whereas in any other RPGs they would last mere seconds. I can definitely see the problems people have with it but you’re also talking to someone whose favorite Final Fantasy game is IX, whose favorite Persona game is 2, Pokemon Platinum and I’m an avid SMT player and you know the meme about SMT and buffing that’s a whole ass statement. Xenosaga’s 2 battle system works especially well against bosses which are usually single targets anyway and a bit less when there’s more than 3 enemies, which rarely happens but it does happen ! There’s also a dimension of placement which I didn’t start covering but nonetheless.

I really like this battle system ! And unlike Xenogears or Xenosaga, the battle system never grew dull or uninteresting to me because it’s the type of system which forces you to engage with it constantly and I get it, it’s definitely tiring ! In my Chained Echoes review I talked about how treating every encounter like an event or wasn’t the most optimal way to make a JRPG ! And while it may come from a place of wanting the genre to evolve beyond mindless attack button spam, RPGs tend to be long and I think it’s ok to have enemies which are just fodder and doesn’t require much thinking as you can put the challenge somewhere else like resource management, dealing with status effects or arranging enemies in certain ways which forces the player to think of the most optimal way to deal with them in the long run in the most optimal way possible.

It’s that same feeling that got me to appreciate the battle system from Xenosaga 2 so much, since battles take so much prep time, every fight plays out like a puzzle you have to solve and while in the hands of an uninformed player, the battle system can feel sluggish, once you get into the flow of it, it’s really satisfying. The battle system of Xenosaga 2 is a lot like sex, it needs time, it needs the right tools, the right preliminaries, the right mood and eventually once everything is in place you can climax all over your adversaries in a white beam of glory ! But I guess some folks are more into raw dogging like animals and you know that’s also fair, not everyone can enjoy subtlety in this brute world…

But even with how much I ended up enjoying the battle system of this game, it’s definitely not a perfect system or else it wouldn’t be so divisive to begin with. I think the problem with Xenosaga’s 2 Battle System is that in the end it’s not a very intuitive system and even the game itself struggles to explain how to properly play the game (the tutorial literally tells you to “figure the rest yourself” which is great game design alright). I think it’s better to get into Xenosaga 2 knowing exactly what works with the system and what doesn’t, which party members to pick and which ones to absolutely avoid (lol Shion) as well as choosing the right abilities to learn to make your life easier (Elemental Swords are such an essential part of combat it’s crazy to think it’s even an optional thing to begin with).

There’s also a few other mechanics I forgot to mention because they literally don’t integrate well to the battle system despite their best efforts. Dual Combo can be used when a character boost but you’re not skipping to get to their turn yet, assuming you’ve unlocked the combo in question (more on that later), you can dish out a Chrono Trigger style double tech but I literally never used it. Same for Ether Combo, apparently using certain sequences of Ether lead to Super Ethers but since offensive Ethers are useless you won’t be using them.
Of course during battle you also have to manage health and mana and this is where the one originality of the game shows its face, there is no shop and no money system in the game. Some people might find that strange but in all honesty Xenosaga 1 wasn’t really the best at handling ressources itself and a lot of the late game customization was heavily reliant on grinding barter items to sell, accomplishing cryptic and obscure task to get lots of cash or play the different mini-games that can be accessed at certain points in the story. This gave Xenosaga 1 a bit of a survival aspect to it where you rely mostly on what you find on the ground and Xenosaga 2 embraces that entirely. One thing that Xenosaga 2 surely did streamline however is the ability point system, for better and for worse. Since there are no shops to buy weapons and armor, everything is done through the ability system which is very different from Xenosaga 1.

In XS1, you got a shit load of different types of point that can be spend to upgrade certain parts of your character, Xenosaga 2 streamlined the process a little bit by fusing all of those different currencies into a single one called “Skill Points” which need to be spend on this board where abilities are classed by level and sublevels to what I could only compare to the RPG equivalent of a windows file explorer. In order to unlock these classes however, your character needs “class points”, these are not obtained in battle however you do obtain them for purchasing new skills in the shop (more specifically by purchasing every skill in a single class). Every character in the game can virtually learn any ability and if you happen to have a clear data file of XS1 on your memory card, you can transfer those to get a few extra points to get started when playing the game for the first time.

It’s kind of a daunting but ultimately kinda boring system, some skills are new ethers the character can use in battles, some are passives which apply directly to the characters when learned and others are equipable passives which replace regular equipment. It’s a boring system because it means that every character evolves in the same way, you could make an argument that you can’t possibly teach everything on the board without grinding so you need to specialize your characters through the system but really most of the class board abilities are pretty goddamn useless because they don’t work in harmony with the break and boost system.

You’re mainly going to focus your attention on abilities which can up your damage multiplier, or regenerate mana while stocking, or allowing you to boost even when the turn order is in your favor or starting the fights with stock and all of that jazz and that’s the most optimal way to play the game ! I think a lot of ideas when it comes to Xenosaga’s 2 gameplay should be expanded upon in a sequel so that a lot of the “fluff” gets better contextualized or cut entirely to make for a more well-rounded and less divisive system. Unfortunately the reception of this battle system by the community pretty much dooms it to being entirely replaced by the next game which is a shame however saying Xenosaga 2 had no influence on the rest of the franchise would be a straight up lie. The entire idea of Xenosaga 2’s gameplay system probably heavily inspired Monolith Software during the development of Xenoblade 2 which also had quite a slow methodical system about building up all sorts of weird effects before launching a big fuck you attack on the ennemies in battles which can take quite a while to get through even with regular encounters. Maybe a new playthrough of Xenoblade 2 will make me appreciate the system of that game more now that I kinda have the knowledge of which games probably inspired it (goat meets goat, what can you say o/).

“Ok fine Cani, so you enjoy getting fucked in the ass now that’s great, but surely you’ll have a lot of things to say against the story of the game huh ? Surely with that whole 3 pages long introduction praising the artistic integrity of the author's original vision was to tell us that the game is bordering on fanfiction territory and should therefore be shunned by the public… right ?”

Well actually, man I hate to say it but despite the respect I have for Takahashi and his work on the first game, I must also admit that I enjoyed the story of Xenosaga 2 way more than the first despite most of it not being written or directed by Takahashi. Ok I think it’s time to talk a bit about my taste when it comes to stories. I think I said in one of my Cold Steel reviews that the single aspect I find the most important in a story above all else are the characters and only second to that is theming or message ! What can I get out of this game, what was the intention behind it and did it succeed at delivering on said intention ?

Xenosaga 1 is a game with many praiseworthy aspects to its presentation and at times its story, but remember I did say I had trouble calling the story “good” because in the end Xenosaga 1 was too busy introducing us to the universe rather than making me entice to it ! It’s full of cryptic bullshit that one could only ever hope to understand after thoroughly pondering about the meaning of life and whether I’m already Half-Xehanort or something like that. It’s not a bad approach to storytelling, it’s slow, it’s methodical, it’s very academic but personally speaking I’m a man of action not words ! I think the worst offense a piece of art could do is making me feel nothing ! And even worse than that is making me feel frustrated (you’ve probably understood by now while I was talking about the series we should not mention the name of).

Xenosaga didn’t make me feel “nothing", but it wasn’t a particularly memorable experience either, I 100% acknowledge the artistry behind it but ultimately, I got nothing out of that experience but a thirst to know more which is already enough but it doesn’t help that game stand out on its own ! Xenosaga 2 decides perhaps because of the change in writer to re-focus the story on a more character driven one as well as trying to make sense of wtv the fuck Takahashi was trying to cook in the first game. And yes, am I frustrated that those answers didn’t come from the man himself who made me cry like a bitch watching a dude on a chair for 10h ? Of course I am ! But I also don’t think the job that was done with Xenosaga 2 was a botched job either ! It’s definitely a flawed story but one that I think I ultimately connected with more.

Right from the intro, you can see how much the game has evolved from just a presentation standpoint, the action set pieces from the prologue are absolutely nuts ! Giving us a flash back to the conflict on Old Miltia and explaining Chaos deal in that conflict, this intro is so freaking cool and actually re-introduce mech dungeons into the series something that was missing from Xenosaga 1. Quick word on the mech sections tho, they’re easily the low point of the game for me gameplay wise, I actually enjoyed being able to summon your mech in battle like a Final Fantasy X summon and the customization was nuts even if it was a bit grindy to make good use of it in the long run. But here mechs got their own sections again, separated from the rest but usually speaking the level design of these sections are a bit uninspired and the combat is a more straightforward and limited version of the on-foot battle that I didn’t especially fuck with all that much. No combos, no everything, just charging a bar to unleash 1 (one) single big attack isn’t that great but at least the mechs designs are sick.
You can definitely feel this game was released in 2004 and Matrix was the craziest most hyped movie franchise of that period of time and it shows ! Very early on, you get introduced to Jin, Shion’s brother who is literally just a Citan clone ! He’s not as unhinged as Citan was in Xenogears but he does share enough similarities in terms of raw personality alone that I was still thoroughly entertained by his wacky antics. In this intro, we also get to see Jin’s rivalry with Margulis the chief leader of U-TIC the evil terrorist organization from the first game and every time these two meets, you just get the sickest most badass under the rain super well choreographed sword fight imaginable and you get two of those in the game it’s fucking crazy I love that shit !

In fact, I will that I got a lot of enjoyment out of all the action scenes this time around, I’m a simple guy, show me Kos-Mos waking up, turning her bed into a motorbike, launching to space and perform a freaking Gatai with Shion’s ship like it’s fucking Gunbuster and I’m all over that shit ! It’s in these moments you really can’t be fooled that this wasn’t made by Takahashi however, the team at Monolith Software already got a taste for over the top anime bullshit which is essentially how Xenoblade even came to be and was even allowed to go full shonen mode (Xenoblade is to the Xeno franchise what TTGL was to Gainax in response to Evangelion). The first game went for a colder, more creepy, atmospheric almost stifling vibe which reminded me of Dead Space or 2000’s a Space Odyssey. It’s full of perspective switches to these random politicians discussing important stuff outside of the main frame ! That’s because Takahashi is thorough with his world and wants to make you understand all of it and yes at times, some other aspect gets dwarfed in the process.

But here, the plot is definitely more focused on moment to moment action set pieces as well as character moments which isn’t something that displeases me at all. One thing that people complain a lot about the plot of Xenosaga 2 is its tone, compared to the first game, the team allowed themselves to just have a bit more lighthearted fun with the characters. For some reason, people hated the entirety of Second Miltia and the scenes that happen here. There’s a pretty infamous scene of Shion having to meet back with her brother which seems to have a falling out with before starting working at Vector and the whole scene is a bit silly. Some people found that scene monstrously cringey but I personally found it rather cute myself, we didn’t get to see much of Shion's actual personality in the first game since she was always so aloof and kinda distant so I dunno, I kinda like it here. In fact, I think these moments of levity were kind of necessary coming off of the first game which in contrast was harrowingly stifling in its atmosphere.

Getting the characters to breathe a little bit after the intense event of the first game by just interacting with one another in a relatively stake-free environment definitely helped me getting more attached to the cast and I think these were a great way to show how all of these unlikely allies ended becoming closer following the events of the first game. It sure is a brutal change of tone, but it’s not something that bothered and in fact it’s something that I welcomed, especially since much like the first game, shit starts hitting the shitting fan rather quickly.

While trying to recover the Y-Data, the key to unlocking the seal of Old Miltia and its secret, Albedo pretty much trapped everyone and managed to get away with it, helping U-TIC in the process which lead to a full scale war as U-TIC can now have their greedy palm on the Zohar and unleash whatever evil shit they want to do with it.
During the hacking process, we get to explore Momo’s subconscious world and that’s where we learn a lot more about who she is or rather who the person she’s a clone of was and her relationship with Jr, Albedo and Nigredo. Xenosaga 2 puts a lot more emphasis on Jr. this time around, a lot of the events of the game puts him on the forefront of the story for various reasons. I absolutely loved Jr. in the first game and I think the team at Xenosaga 2 understood that and just straight up made him the main character this time around. The decision to make Jr. the central character of the plot was apparently kind of a shady marketing one, they thought that focusing the plot on a male character would go better with the western audience. As such Shion and Kos-Mos which very much were the central figure of the plot in the first game were kinda shafted in favor giving Jr. and by extension MOMO who he has a romantic subplot with more scenes to shine.

On one hand, it’s kind of a shame because I actually like Shion and Kos-Mos and I find the idea of a genius engineer and her trusty sexy killer bot being the main protagonist infinitely more bold and original and there were still a lot of unanswered mysteries surrounding the past of these twos that I wish we could’ve explored further. On the other, Jr. clearly is the character who had the more stakes in the story of even the first game in my opinion and thus while the decision to make him the main character in this second entry might be a bit misguided, ultimately I think they still did a great job with him and especially Albedo ! Xenosaga is kinda meant to conclude the rivalry arc between these two and without spoiling too much everything about JrMomo, Albedo and Yuriev foundations are easily the best part about the entire game.

There is an attempt to still make Shion relevant into the story but I think it’s done kinda poorly. Not only because Shion seems to had a weird shift in her personality following the events of the first game which somehow made her more bitchy and at times mean compared to how she was portrayed in the first game for seemingly no reasons at all but also because most of the emotional crux of her story are tied to things we have yet to be briefed upon like who the fuck Febronia is and why is Shion so attached to her. There’s a pretty horrific scene near the endgame with Febronia’s sister which the closest the game gets from the horror vibe of the first game and the scene should be genuinely heart wrenching if I had been given more context to Shion’s relationship with Feb and why was she chosen to do all of these crazy traumatic adventure to seek the Zohar all the time. As for Kos-Mos, she gets a grand total of 2 (two) cool scenes and… yeah that’s kind of it… so much for being the mascot character amirite ?

But tonal inconsistency with Shion’s story aside, I found the general plot to be more easy to digest than the first one, maybe because it was more focus on giving us answer as well as developing the relationships each characters have to one another than simply throwing cryptic stuff in your face hoping you make sense of it. It’s definitely a more raw approach to storytelling but it’s one that works on me a bit more, a story focusing on character moments big and small and delivering full sales on them. The game still has a lot of mystery that the third game will have to answer but what I got here still was hella satisfying. The Subconscious Domain and the very end of the game definitely stand up to me as some of the highlights of the Xeno franchise so far. Albedo is a fantastic villain and this game only cements him further as one of the best antagonists in the genre for various reasons. The guy is a legit great representation of a truly psychotic mind with no filters whatsoever, wish he had more creepy scenes like the first game but his antics in this one are still a joy to watch.
The final confrontation of the game between Jr. and him will probably live rent free in my head for the rest of how long this new hyper-obsession will last and I will admit that the game managed to make me emotional during several places in the narrative. However, do not be fooled, this clearly is a different style than Takahashi, this isn’t a Takahashi story. You still get a small amount of what the original script might’ve looked like but even then you can see that whenever they try to imitate the first game pacing and approach to worldbuilding that the cracks start to show. A lot of revelations are done through boring expository dialogues with very little good direction to them, some twists are handled really poorly especially because of the way they padded the game in weird ways in order to just add an additional dungeon and the final boss is a complete joke both as a villain and as a boss fight in spite of a neat meta effect midway through the fight.

Well speaking of dungeons and exploration, let’s talk about that, the game is still as linear as the original and still suffers from a lot of pointless backtracking to progress the story but in terms of dungeon design, it’s a vast improvement over the original game. The original game dungeons really only served as set dressing for the story to take place in and at times felt like they were built out of convention for the genre rather than to be interesting, there were a few puzzles in them but it was really rare. One thing which definitely helps however is that now the game has actual music during gameplay ! It’s another point of contention actually, Yasunori Mitsuda the historic composer of the series left the boat on this one and was replaced by two composers. One is Yuki Kajiura which you’re certainly more familiar with for her work on anime such as SAO, Demon Slayers or Fate/Stay Night but if you’re a chad like me you first heard her work in the classic anime Mai-Hime, she was responsible for the cutscene track and she did an excellent job with those like she usually does for her work on anime. The other composer however is Shinji Hosoei, a guy who you may recognize as the dude who made the soundtrack of Ridge Racer and here the dude is responsible for the regular gameplay track and let’s just say the result is… well… interesting ?

There’s definitely a clear dichotomy between Kajiura and Hosoei’s track which doesn’t make the entire sound direction all too cohesive. Hosoei makes very “arcadey” sounding music which I personally don’t think is necessarily that great of a fit for Xenosaga as it should be, it’s a lot of weird Techno-Electro future sci-fi mambo jumbo can’t really describe it very well. Second Miltia and Kukai Foundation sound like happy mall music. That's really the best way I could describe it and the rest of the soundtrack sounds a bit stiff and odd. Personally speaking, I don’t mind how weirdly “beepy” Hosoei’s track sounds, I like the sound of mid-2000’s eroge and rpg maker tunes and these are pretty reminiscent of that in a sense. Also having actual background music during exploration definitely makes it less boring to go through them, it sacrifices atmosphere but oh well. Some Hosoei tracks work really well and some don't, and while I get the type of sci-fi vibe it was trying to convey, ultimately a lot of them felt a bit too artificial (but not unpleasant to my ear).

Kajiura’s soundtrack on the other hand goes super duper mega hard, of course she’s mostly responsible for the cutscenes but I think Kajiura was a great pick to follow up on Mitsuda’s more grandiose and orchestral score of the original game. I’m more of an in-game track myself because a lot of cutscenes track tend to come and go for me but re-listening to some tunes on the side really solidified how good of a pick Kajiura was for the cutscenes in the game with a very electronic yet epic style she’s known for in her other works. She really captured the vibe and essence of Xenosaga and it’s great.
But back to dungeon, I’d say that the dungeons in this game are a vast improvement not only on Xenosaga 1 which had “wtv” dungeons in my opinion and Xenogears, whose selection of good dungeons and environment can be counted on 3 fingers. Dungeons now have proper dungeon design, with tons of paths to explore, some nice amount of verticality and even the occasional puzzle to solve to spice things up. The game also has a lot more variety in its environment than Xenosaga 1, while it still retains the sci-fi core of the setting, the game isn’t afraid to spice things up with not just making up just from space station to space station. The environment from a visual standpoint is much more striking, from a lush mysterious otherworldly artificial forest to bustling futuristic cities as well as ruins under the sunset, the game kinda makes the most of the setting it presents and I’m all the more happy for it.

However, while I do find them better, do I find them good ? Well it really depends in my opinion, some design decisions in those dungeons can be quite questionable. The Subconscious Domain for exemple is a pretty cool place the first time around but did we really need to go through it a second time but with a winter aesthetic instead and the same enemies but swapped colors ? Especially back to back with no breaks like that ? That’s gotta be the weirdest way to pad game time I’ve ever seen but alas there’s also the Ormus Stronghold. The Ormus Stronghold is way too long and demands so much useless backtracking that it kinda makes me lose my mind a little bit. It’s also not helped that this dungeon is complete filler, it appears in the middle of nowhere halting the natural progression of the plot so we can have a few boss fights with the U-TIC organization which they somehow couldn’t fit somewhere else in the game.

But by far the biggest offender when it comes to the dungeons are the way enemies are placed on the field. I think I said it in another review but I don’t think field encounter are the end-all be-all solution to random encounters and could be easily as fucked up as random encounter are in raw annoyance level and this game is no exception. There are way too many enemies per screen, forget about avoiding them because you will not be able to as they run way too fast, that is if you could avoid them in the first place. There are way too many mandatory encounters which makes the whole field encounter implementation feel pretty useless. One thing I also don’t get is why the monsters in the mech sections disappear for good and never respawn until you leave the dungeon but regular monsters respawn every time you change rooms and come back. Battles are already long enough like that and this only serves as making the fatigue of them even stronger.

It’s especially bad since much like the first game, the red door and red key sidequest is back and requires backtracking which was made significantly more annoying because of these inconsistencies in the level design department. In fact, this game has a lot more side-content than any previous games in the series, it’s a part of the game I’m definitely more mixed on however because while I do enjoy having so much content to chew on, let’s just say that it’s really hit or miss. So on top of the red door and red key sidequest from the first game, you get introduced to the Global Samaritan (or GS) path which is a system that allows you to talk to NPC and help them do different things. That sounds fair, there’s not that much side-quest either and these are completely optional so you can feel free to skip on them if you want, there are over 36 quests like that which ranges from : Fun little vignette, Puzzle Solving and minigames, tedious fetch questing and “Oh god did anybody playtested this shit ???”.

I’d say that all the minigames requiring you to play a small minigame, solve a puzzle or go through a mini-dungeon to fight a mini-boss were honestly fine and a nice distraction from the regular loop of the plot but as it is sadly tradition with games in the mid-2000’s that also mean that there’s a lot of side-quest which are simply about going places and either gather or distributing items and they’re pretty fucking terrible. There’s only 2 real cities in the game, Second Miltia and the Kukai foundation so any quest requiring you to fetch stuff is just about making back and forth between these two places and with how slow the movement of these games can be, they can be very very tedious. Fortunately, I’ve played this game on an emulator and thus I’ve allowed myself to cut on the tedium by activating turbo mode (ah the joy of modern day conveniences…). Some of these quests can also have success and fail conditions which can be very obtuse without a solid guide at hand and I really don’t understand why it’s even a thing given that the reward is given to you regardless of clear status.

And then, there are “these” types of quests, the type of side-content that just makes you question the sanity of the developers who put it into the game. One quest is a fishing minigame but it’s completely RNG dependent, there’s no strategy to be had here, you just cast your line and you wait for the fish to come, you get a 1 min timer for each attempt which I’m not even sure myself why it was even necessary. Another quest requires you to get a battery on Second Miltia, come back on the Elsa to use it on a machine that goes beep beep color to analyze a picture and whether this succeed or fail is completely RNG dependant and you have only 5 charges of said battery before having to go recharge it on the place you got it in the first place ! REALLY FUN !

Oh but the peak of the fun factor is Quest 32 ! Quest 32 requires you to sell items to a robot in order to settle a debt made by the Captain of the Elsa… There is no way to get money in this game so the only way to do so is to sell barter items and accessories which doesn’t even come close to covering 0,0001% of the cost. What you need to do (and this isn’t a joke btw) is backtracking all the way down the final dungeon, fighting the final boss, steal a specific on him, then go through all of the endgame, watch the credits (which is the only cutscene in the game that’s unskippable for some reasons) and repeat the process…

TWENTY
FUCKING
TIMES

YOU HAVE TO DO ALL OF THAT 20 TIMES IN ORDER TO GET SHAVE ENOUGH OF THE DEBT ! THIS IS RIDICULOUS ! AND THE REWARD ISN’T EVEN THAT USEFUL BECAUSE YOU’LL MOST LIKELY BE DONE WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME BY THE TIME YOU GET TO IT !

And that’s also something that kinda suck about these side-quest, it’s their shoddy implementation, there are no side-quest marker so it’s up to you to know when and who needs help and some of the quest can only be triggered by having specific party members set as leader and it’s never clear why. A lot of important and useful skills as well as the entirety of the double-tech system are locked behind those side quests which you know sucks if you want to make the most use out of the battle system and make your life easier but also some quests can only be accessed after beating the game for some reasons ???
Going back to red door and red key quests borrowed from the first game, they’re used primordially to obtain more skills but also get Erde Kaiser like in the first game but because they were a bit weird about it they hid some keys inside other red doors or inside specific sidequest so in the end if you wanna participate in the game lengthy post-game content, you will have to engage with them whether you want it or not.

Because yes the game has quite a bit of content after you beat the final boss, mostly tied to the now expanded Erde Kaiser sidequest. It’s pretty much just a silly plotline giving you a silly reason to explore kind of off-topic environment like a desert, a random factory or a Final Fantasy style flying castle until you reach a climactic showdown against the Dark Professor and his Dark Erde Kaiser and it’s pretty damn funny, there’s also several superbosses added specifically to the english version of the game to please the western market who just like content I suppose. If you’re not tired by the Battle System like me by the end of the game, I’d say these are worth a shot as it’s a pretty fun post-game in my opinion but not essential.

Xenosaga 2 is a game that makes me feel awkward about myself, I’m the kind of person who has a lot of respect for the artistic integrity and the artistic vision of certain authors and seeing as this game is considered almost like fanfiction in the community and single-handedly ruined the Xenosaga plan for them is kinda comical. Because if anything it’s really good fanfiction and a really good improvement on some gameplay and presentation of Xenosaga (and yes that also includes the character design but mostly for the boys, the girls kinda look mid in that more realistic artstyle…). The finale, although a bit rushed is kind of phenomenal, the cliffhanger at the end truly hooks me up to learn more about it in the sequel and even if the game has some awkward design decisions much like any Xeno-games really, I’d say that it is better than the sum of its parts. I fail to see how this game isn’t a straight up improvement over the first one aside from some tonal inconsistencies which didn’t phase me that much and a battle system which is an acquired taste but that I found infinitely more engaging and fun than the first game or even gears. The dungeon design is better but still leaves a lot to be desired however.

In the end, it’s the story which got me, a story of brotherhood, the pain of immortality, what it means to be human when you’re born in a different set of circumstances and how to overcome all of this to become truly whole. It’s some Xeno stuff right here that I love, Jr. is a fantastic character and so is Albedo which has easily ascended in my list of favorite JRPG villain but everything else from the action to the emotional stuff was pretty damn great and I also want to see what Dmitri Yuriev is cooking…

Also damn I can’t believe Kondo stole everything once again, Takahashi (not director here) is the goat ! Xenosaga 2 is the goat ! You guys are just mean and this game is peak !

See you next time for when I cover the epic conclusion to this… broken but still grand Xenosaga !

Xenosaga : A Fine Enough Introduction

My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.

And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.

But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.

Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.

There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.

While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.

But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.

Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.

The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).

After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.

At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.

Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.

Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.

Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.

As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.

Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.

The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.

The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.

I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.

Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.

Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.

The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).

On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.

That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.

Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.

Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).

Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.

Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.

The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.

You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)

One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.

The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?

And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.

Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.

While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.

Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).

I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.

In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !

Ys Seven : The Odd Duck

During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.

Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.

Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !

This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.

But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.

See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !

As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.

There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !

And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.

Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.

However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.

So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.

With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.

Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.

Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).

The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.

Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).

But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.

As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.

Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.

The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.

So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…

They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…

With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.

Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.

I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.

He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.

I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.

After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).

But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.

Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.

Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.