I have never been as disapointed with a game as I have been with Xenogears.

This game has an absolutely beautiful, late 90s anime-ps1 aesthetic that I cannot get enough of. And it has a very promising premise. The first couple of hours of this game are very good actually.

But eventually, it falls on its face and becomes an absolute unsufferable mess.

The story is ambitious, yes, and it aboards themes you very rarely see in games, especially considering when it released. However I dont think this means we should give it pass for ambition. Many many games were very ambitious yet failed.

What appealed to me about this game was the numerous esthetic resemblances between it and Neon Genesis Evangelion. And I can say that Xenogears goes into Freudian psychology even deeper than Evangelion did. But that dosent mean its story is well told. Again it starts off pretty good, but regularly takes detour to introduce you to new party members who have a mini arc and then never become relevant again. Factually speaking, the game would have had more than enough with Fei, Elly, Citan and Bart. And its not just this, the worldbuilding is admirable but ultimately detracts from the game more than it adds, because the game regularly expects you to take hour long infodumps on you and make sense of it. The second disc basically becoming a visual novel out of nowhere due to frankly poor planning by the developpers only aggravates this.


But the real falling of Xenogears is the gameplay. Now if Xenogears was a book, or an anime, maybe the issues I listed with its story and presentation could be forgiven, but its not. Its a game.

The battle system is awful, the combo system sounds so good, until you realise you cant keep your build up between battle making it a useless gimmick to be used against bosses and nowhere else.

The dungeons fall into the typical JRPG trap of being absurd mazes with no rhyme or reason, with an added bonus of awful camera angles and piss poor platforming.

The pacing is the worst through. You will go hours navigating these mazes, hoping for a story section to come, only to be bombarded with info for an hour. Creating a vicious cycle, where when you're in gameplay, you hope for cutscenes, but when you're in cutscenes, you hope for gameplay. When I realised this, I just.....couldnt lie to myself about how much I hated this. No amount of deep dive philosophical talk will make this experience enjoyable. And the fact that Evangelion exists just I can go get my 90s-Mecha-Anime-that's-actually-a-philosphy-thesis fix elsewhere.

Truly a remarkable game, let's not kid ourselves. But I can't stand it and I never want to touch it again. It's an energy vampire.