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...

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 !

Oath In Felghana : Ys perfected ?

If there’s one game so far that we constantly bashed over perhaps unfairly it’s Ys III : Wanderers from Ys ! And look, I’m sorry to all the people who enjoy the original iteration of Adol’s third adventure, after all why would they keep re-releasing the game later down the line if it was that much of a failure ? Well suffice to say that Ys III marked the end of Ys presence in the west for a long while, only returning to western shores with Ys VI in the 2000’s thanks to the help of Konami porting the game on consoles which was only a brief return but something was about to change within Falcom after the release of this game.

See, initially after releasing Ys 1&2 Eternal (the semi-complete remake of Ys 1&2 on which the Chronicles version available on steam is based on) the natural next course of action for the company was to do something similar with Ys III, pretty much taking the base game of Ys III and give it a graphical overhaul as well as some slight gameplay and progression adjustment. But the younger staff at Falcom were tired of releasing ports and remakes and decided to take things into their own hand, this led of course to the creation of 2 new franchises (Zwei and Gurumin), a new episode of the Ys franchise as well as the start of a new legend of Heroes subseries : Trails in the Sky.

All these projects will see moderate but significant enough success in Japan where the PC market wasn’t quite dead yet at the turn of the millennium and later down the line a small console was about to push Falcom even deeply into the top of its niche : The Playstation Portable. It’s simple every early 2000’s releases of Falcom will see ports and re-release on the PSP and thanks to many western publishers being interested in Falcom’s output and some good old word of mouth, Falcom went from a company struggling to revive from its ashes to a company somewhat recognized for their low budget but full of heart title.

But the idea of remaking Ys III was still in the mind of Falcom and thus, they decided that instead of making yet another overhauled port of Ys III since it was kind of the series blacksheep, they decided instead on completely remaking Ys III from the ground up. And thus, Ys : The Oath in Felghana was born !

There’s a belief I have when it comes to game remakes that I think should be widely more considered in this industry. Our society has commonly accepted videogames to be an art form as valid as cinema or literature and yet the consumerist nature of gaming and its tie to the evolution of technology forces us to always seek to upgrade our games to current standard. This leads to either a completely original product based on the original and only borrowing its rough plot outline and iconography, an enhanced version of the same game with different graphics and slight gameplay rebalancing (which would be closer to a remaster than a so called remake) or the more rare occurrence like FF VII Remake to be some sort of a meta-sequel and an extension to the original made first and foremost for people already familiar with the original (but still sell itself as something a newcomer can jump into no problem which is schizophrenia as fuck).

However, my issue with this lies in the fact that we mostly do that to good games, games that are considered classics of the medium and that’s where I’m really confused because if those games are classics ? Why do we feel like replacing them in the modern discourse with a new shinier version stripped of its context and mechanics ? Is there a point really ?
And this led me to another reflection. If the core idea of remaking something is to upgrade a videogame to be more palatable to modern audiences, why do that with good games ? Of course, the reason is oftentime “Money” but there’s also this deeper sense of hypocrisy in the gaming community that we wish the games we used to love could be as good as we remember them being ? If they made us feel something back then, they could make us feel something now but also we don’t want to be reminded of the rougher reality that games technically and mechanically ages. But if games can be good enough to become classics, why remake them in the first place ? That means they’re technically timeless, technically they’re a piece of history worth going back to and maybe modernizing it will make it lose its meaning rather than add to it ?

As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of remakes, but there’s one thing that I’m open to, remakes of games that never got that chance to shine under the spotlight. In our childhood we all had these games which we enjoyed but can’t really be called “all-time classics” and personally I think it’s much more interesting to see a game which had the potential to be great actually being given the chance to prove itself with a second take on the same ideas. I believe Ys III despite my virulent review of it was that kind of game for many people. In an era where the selection of games were pretty limited and accessibility was even worse than it is now, people just used to cherish what little games they could actually get their hands on and if that game happened to be Ys III well… You could be playing better but you could be playing worse really.

But Ys Oath in Felghana doesn’t just remake one of the series most infamous titles, it takes that blight upon the series legacy and literally turns a pile of shit into diamond because Oath in Felghana might be the best Ys game we’ve covered so far and I mean it !

Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III but first and foremost it’s the second game in the Ark Engine trilogy. Following the advance and game design prowess of its predecessors, Oath in Felghana sets out to literally perfect the formula left by its forefather. As such the gameplay segment of this review will be shorter than usual because most of what Adol can do in Ys VI, he can do here and yes even the Dash Jump which is still possible to do but not required anymore to clear certain gap or explore, it’s now just a speedrun tech like god intended.

However that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t change anything because on top of Ys VI’s mechanics a couple of new things have been added which greatly enhances the flow and overall dynamism of the game. Now the game has a sort of combo meter which doubles as an EXP multiplier, the more combo you make and the higher the multiplier is which can raise the EXP gain up to 2x the normal amount as long as you keep the combo going but that’s not all.

As you mash through enemies some of them will drop stat enhancing bonuses which works similarly to the combo meter whereas if you keep collecting said bonus the multiplier gets bigger and bigger as long as you don’t break out the chain. These bonuses can range from strength, defense and MP regeneration speed and once all of them are maxed out, you truly feel like an unstoppable god tearing and shredding through monsters which all comes back to that old comment I made about the Ys series pretty much being “Zelda for Doom-brained people”. This single addition to the gameplay really changes everything, whereas Ys VI was a slower more methodical game, this game wastes no time and the game feel is immaculate.
Another thing which pushes the players to do well is the boost meter, once full Adol can rush towards his enemies with doubled strength and speed which is very satisfying to activate.

Magic also makes a return, no more sword style changes this time around unfortunately but a selection of magic rings adding new moves to Adol arsenal which replaces the terrible magic ring system of the original game while making shoutouts to them. A grand total of 3 Magic Rings can be found throughout the game, one is a fire ring which allows you to throw fireballs in rapid succession or charge it for a bigger blast, the other is a wind ring giving Adol a circular attack which can be used both on the ground and in the air to cover long distances and last longer and is wider as you charge it (easily one of the best addition to Adol’s toolkit) and last but not least a thunder ring which allows you to punch through wall with a big fist which gives you a couple seconds of invincibility frames while doing so.

And those invincibility frames are gonna come useful because the game seriously doesn’t fuck around, this might actually be one of the more challenging Ys games in terms of difficulty even on Normal Mode, one of the reasons to this difficulty switch is the fact that you can’t stack up on healing items anymore, in fact you can’t use healing items period. The only way to heal is to get healing herbs dropping from enemies which automatically heals a set amount or rest at one of the game's various save points. On top of that most of the enemies especially in the later stage of the games are much more aggressive and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not careful combine that with the level design having a bit more hazard than Ys VI did and you get a game which doesn’t fuck around.

Of course this means that this time around you actually have to master bosses pattern and defeat them without a get out of jail free card that can heal you mid-battles and when it comes to bosses I will say that Oath in Felghana has quite a lot of hit and miss in that department. Of course, all of them are better than their original counterparts and I will even say that most of them are actually better than the ones in Ys VI but one thing that kinda bothers me about some of them is just the sheer length of their pattern. Most bosses in Oath have a very small window in which you can actually attack them, the first boss in the game in fact is a prime example of this and is a bit too steep of a difficulty curve if you ask me for being so soon in the game. Some bosses like the Bird, the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon just plain don’t fucking work with how the colisions are handled in that game.

The bird and his goddamn flipping panel still gives me nightmare to this day because of how annoying it is to fight, the Fire Dragon just happens to be really tanky for no discernable reasons which makes the fight drag for longer than it should be and the Ice Dragon isn’t difficult per say but you can feel that this boss was designed so you can make heavy use of the thunder ring invincibility frames which isn’t all that natural of a solution and his patters are kind of all over the damn place.

But other than these few bad apples, I found the good boss to be especially good, shoutouts to your second encounter with Chester which might actually be my favorite boss fight in the entire series. Ys isn’t really known for having boss fights against human opponents but the Ark Engine had more of them and Chester II is an excellent example of an epic showdown between two swordsmen, his patterns are fast but fair and overpowering him is very satisfying. I wish more bosses in the series were designed like the Chester fight cause it’s pretty damn good in my opinion.
I also really liked the other non-human bosses aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, on average I’d say the boss design can range from either annoying or really good but all of them are especially challenging for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier.

As far as the gameplay goes, Oath in Felghana managed to fully understand what it means to be an Ys title in the modern age, the gameplay is a constantly flowing, never-stopping pumping action game which feels fresh, modern and exciting to play the whole way through. Every element of the gameplay just works and even if some people might still complain about minor things such as platforming not being that great once again, I can’t deny that the gameplay here is simply superb and easily the best the series has to offer.

But it wouldn’t be that amazing of a title if it didn’t also have something Ys has been known for since its first entry aka a solid story to motivate the player to uncover the mysteries of the lands. Much like the original game, the story here is rather straightforward and at first not really that interesting. The game follows the rough outline set by the original to a T, Dogi and Adol arrives in Felghana and meets up with Elena the local Adol James Bond Girl of the week, some tyrannical king is messing around trying to claim a bunch of artifact which could potentially awaken an ancient demon and Adol is on a wild goose chase to stop them while encountering his right-hand man Chester along the way.

It was a simple and basic story in 1989 and it’s still relatively as basic and simple in 2005 when the game came out, however I will say that the actual script of the game this time around isn’t nearly as hilariously bad as it was in the original. This is due in part to a much better localization work (courtesy of XSeed) but also a significantly enhanced and upgraded script to give the entire story a bit more flavor. One area in which we can see this improvement is with the main hub town of the game Redmont. Redmont in the original was a place you had to go back to from time to time to progress the story but as a place it wasn’t particularly interesting, NPC’s were forgettable and most of its iconic nature was due to its rather catchy music but here, the town got expanded significantly and is much more alive than in the original.

The game was released a solid year after the release of Trails in the Sky, the first game in the Trails series and it shows ! It’s in this game that the two series started to mutually influence each other and I will say that in the case of Oath in Felghana it’s definitely for the better here. What Felghana took from the Trails franchise is its intricate sense of detail within its script, each NPCs have their own name, their own life, their own routine and their dialogue changes for every advancement in the plot encouraging the player to check-in on them from time to time to experience micro-level story arcs or participate in side-quest.

However because the setting of the game is much smaller in scale, I think it works especially better here than in the Trails franchise, sure Trails has a more ambitious setting but if there’s one thing that I learned from playing those game is that the “Falcom Formula” tends to work better in the context of a small hub you come back to rather than an entire country which inhabitants kinda come and go and most thing they say enters one ear and come out the other. Another thing which reinforces this sentiment is the fact that each character has their own character portraits and even their own bit of voice acting which definitely helps imprinting Redmont as one of the more memorable Falcom towns in their catalog.

One thing I’m happy the game hasn’t taken from Trails (yet) is the way it handled side-quest, I haven’t really gone too deeply about side-content in this review but Ys Oath in Felghana kinda retains a very 90’s approach to going about side-content. From time to time as you check out on NPC or find new trinkets in dungeon, you can find side-quest none of which are particularly memorable (aside from one about an old lady losing her son and which was already a quest in the original game but much more developed here) but they add some cool content and some nice incentive to go explore and interact with the world as much as possible. While it’s true that it results it some content being missable, I never really truly mind that as it just feels more natural than putting those on a quest board which make side-content feels like chores instead of something you want to properly engage with and feel like a nice surprise when you find out about them.

I did mention that the game has voice acting which I will comment on, the game has both Japanese and English dubs, I went with both and I must admit that as much as the Japanese dub is excellent, I do like the somewhat goofier tone of the English voice acting which reminds me of how even goofier the original script was but one thing I think definitely sells it for me is the British Narrator !

See since Adol doesn’t talk, all of his interactions are written in green-text describing what he’s doing or saying but some genius at Xseed thought that it was worth adding voice acting over and it’s done through some Stanley Parable-esque narrator sarcastically reading the lines and I just find that fucking hilarious. The idea that everywhere Adol goes there’s an out-of-bound British dude hiding in the bushes narrating his entire life is just so perfect and so in-line with the idea we’re experiencing Adol story through his travel diaries that I wonder why it didn’t immediately became a mainstay of the franchise after this point.

As for the actual story however, I think it’s just simply told better, with more characters and more details to flesh out the setting and several other subtle things to tie it better to the rest of the franchise which started with Ys VI but continues here. Ys III was never meant to be an Ys game originally and so its story couldn’t really connect to the wider lore of the franchise and for the longest time it remained pretty separated from the rest as a standalone product. Here the game puts much more of an emphasis on its central prophecy and lore while putting Adol and Chester in the forefront of the story which is handled way better this time around. Even Dogi’s relationship with Elena and Chester is fleshed out more and it definitely feels like there’s an actual level of care and importance here.

Chester isn’t as goofy or as one note of an antagonist as he was in the original, he’s a goal oriented, cold as fuck motherfucker who’s ready to do anything to fulfill the prophecy in order to avenge his sister and his village. And it’s done with much more subtlety and finesse this time around, with climactic confrontation in the form of 2 boss fights which weren’t present in the original but also a lot of subtle foreshadowing about his true intentions as well as his doubts in carrying said plan. Even Elena is much better written this time around, she’s a sassy tomboy who cares deeply about her brother and Dogi’s well-being and is ready to pack a punch when deemed necessary.



Elena from Oath is one of the most underrated heroine in the franchise in my opinion and my only real regret is that all of these cool fanarts of her carrying Chester’s sword and armor isn’t an actual thing in the plot but some weird inside joke of the developers who likes to dress her up in many different outfits from across the series as a reward for completing boss rush mode in set difficulties (canonical cosplayer girl yippee !).

Even the progression of the story is slightly touched upon with some things arriving out of order from the original which lead me to talk about the overall structure and level design of the game which I think is one of the game's biggest strengths as well as its weakness. While the game is completely remade in 3D with that classic isometric view it is nonetheless mostly based on a 2D Action game which were separated in levels rather than a big world to explore. And even thought the game does a lot of effort to make the world feels less segmented (with the addition of a central overworld allowing you to listen to : “The Boys who had Wings” for more than 10 seconds), it nonetheless feels like a succession of random set pieces than a natural world which you can explore freely with tons of secrets to find.

Unlike Ys VI which took place on an Island and therefore could allow itself to be a bit more exploratory, here the exploration is kept to a minimum in favor of focusing on environments which feels more like levels than proper dungeon. This isn’t to say that it’s bad though, the game has definitely more of an arcadey feel than its predecessors already with the additions of all these combo meters to fill up and this structure definitely doesn’t feel at odds with the rest of the game. What does bother just a tad bit with the level design is that sometimes the game has troubles between being a 3D action game and wanting to pay homage to the original level design. While some areas take full advantage of the game being 3D, some areas definitely don’t have as much depth and are closer to 2.5 D than fully 3D environment, I like the attention to detail and you can point out some areas to how they were made in the original but it does create a bit of issues when it comes to the freedom of player movement.

The Ice Cave in particular is probably the worst area of the game, with lots of slipping surfaces, enemies that take way too much space and are way too aggressive which doesn’t mesh well with the 2.5d environments and a lot of pits you can fall into which brings you to a lower level and reminding you of the worse of Ys VI level design. But when the game hits, oh boy it does hit because now I need to talk about Valestein Castle !!!!

Valestein Castle was already the most iconic location of the original, featuring multiple paths, a spike in difficulty, multiple traps and hazards and literally the best fucking music in the entire goddamn franchise. But here everything about it screams pure fucking ludokino ! It’s easily to this day the best dungeon ever created by Falcom. When people tell me that Falcom can’t do good level design or even good dungeon design after witnessing their more modern output, I always point at this fucking dungeon in particular because it shows that back in the day Falcom was actually stacked with semi-competent level design which were able to put their whole pussy into making great and amazing dungeons to explore.

Valestein Castle has everything you could ask for, challenging combat encounters, a vast and open-ended structure, multiple subsections within it, a somewhat metroidvania style structure, memorable locales and set pieces with various traps, platforming challenges and lots of story events to keep you on your toe and of course that banging fucking soundtrack.

The Sight of Adol, this badass adventurer rushing to assault the castle of the local tyrannical king, jumping and slashing his way through countless corridors filled with traps and deadly enemies while rescuing the villagers you came to know and grew an attachment to and stopping Chester’s revenge plot from claiming more lives than necessary ending with a climatic climb on top of a clocktower, multiple boss encounters one of the best fight in the game with Chester and even the rare good instances of a good twist villain in Falcom’s history is truly awe inspiring and truly hype.

Valestein Castle is so massive and iconic that it feels like it could’ve easily been the climax of the game if it wasn’t for the aforementioned last minute twist which exist to tie the remake to the plotline of the original in some pretty clever way in my opinion at least, and while the final dungeon isn’t bad per say, it definitely pales in comparison to Valestein Castle in terms of how iconic the entire thing is and much like the original, the game ends on a somewhat less bombastic note but the final boss is actually pretty fun if I’m being honest so It’s aight.

I’ve praised the music of Valestein Castle, but the rest of the OST is also rather fantastic, one of the rare saving grace of the original was its soundtrack (to which you can listen to multiple version of it by switching it out in the pause menu) and here it’s still one of the best Falcom OST. Originally composed by Mieko Ishikawa which succeeded Yuzo Koshiro after its departure, the new arrangement were handled by Yukihiro Jindo and his team which did a fantastic job breeding new life into these tracks, in fact I’d say this is some of Falcom’s best arrangement work they’ve ever done when it comes to remaking a game. I also like the fact they didn’t play it safe and weren’t afraid to deviate from the original composition, Redmont theme is calmer and more whimsical, Boys had wings now has violins and Valestein Castle feels like the same track was put on steroid but even some of the less notable tracks were given a lot of care and if anything I just like the sheer variety of the composition here.

Oath in Felghana is what I personally consider to be the platonic ideal of the perfect Ys title, it’s a game which is short and to the point while remaining intense through on through. It’s a game which breathes with an air of adventure and freedom, it’s a game of constant motion rarely stopping to smell the roses, an all banger no filler affair which is fun, exciting, and amazing to play or even replay. Oath in Felghana is a game I often replay for fun because it’s simply just too damn fun and not wasting your time in doing so ! It has great level designs, amazing music and the most fun gameplay in the series yet !

The only real thing that stops Oath in Felghana from being a true JRPG classic much like its forefather is the things it unfortunately had to carry out of the original like a pretty barebone and unoriginal story which was modified to be better but only ends up as being serviceable. The setting of Felghana isn’t the most interesting one in the franchise either and I would even dare to say it’s a bit too vanilla for my taste despite the many improvements that were made to the script and overall direction to make it feel more lived in. It’s not a bad story but it’s clear that the gameplay, the level design, the music and just the general experience of playing the game does a lot of the heavy lifting to make it work.

But as it stands, it’s one of my favorite titles in the franchise and I even consider it to be one of its peak. But this isn’t the end of our journey with the Ark Engine as we still have one more game to cover, the 10th anniversary of the Ys franchise was arriving soon and as such it was time to go back in time ! Back to Ys’s Origins !! See you next time for another Falcom banger

Ys VI : A New Hope

After the release of Ys V and the mixed reception that it received, Falcom entered a bit of a creative slump not just when it came to the series but their general output as a company. None of the founding members were left at the company and the Falcom of the mid-90’s and onward was a vastly different studio than it was back then. Aside from releasing the next two games of the Gagharv trilogy which saw great success both in Japan and especially in South Korea, the company just wasn’t able to make new IP’s or even new games for that matter.

This was the start of a long era of Falcom just porting their old classics on newer hardware instead of making new games. During that time however, Falcom launched a lot of recruitment campaigns, boasting how great it was to work at Falcom (it was not, just for the record, there’s a reason literally all of the creative staff left the company and I’m pretty sure that even to this day it’s not a very pleasant work environment). These campaigns managed to bring on board a couple of really talented people notably two persons, one was Makoto Shinkai which we already mentioned in a previous review who did some stunning job animating and directing animated cutscenes for Falcom’s recent releases at the time.

Shinkai will leave the company shortly after the release of the PS2 version of Ys 1&2 to become the famous movie director that we know today but the other big guy Falcom recruited and perhaps the most important one was Toshihiro Kondo. Kondo was, like most of Falcom’s new recruit at the time, a massive fan of Falcom’s early output but he wasn’t just a mere fan, he was THE Falcom fan ! Ever since he was a child, Kondo loved playing RPGs such as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and while he has heard about Ys 1&2 through some of his friends talking about it at school, it’s when he picked up Ys III at a friends house that the trajectory of his life changed forever.

After the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” which became his favorite game of all time, Kondo who was at university at the time decided to launch a website for Falcom fans to gather, discuss on-going news about the company and sharing tips and tricks for the different games. Kondo got enough of a reputation with his fan website that working at Falcom wasn’t a pipe-dream anymore but a tangible reality and so he applied at Falcom as an accountant. Falcom however knew about his activities online and how he managed his fansite and since he was the only guy at the time who knew anything about the Internet, he was tasked to code websites to promote the different new releases of the company.

But at the same time, the younger staff at Falcom including Kondo were starting to get fed up with just releasing ports of old games and localizing South Korean RPG’s, they wanted more, they were getting ambitious and thus they stopped working on yet another port of Ys III to ask the CEO if they could start working on new games. Masayuki Kato was skeptical about the process, it’s been a while since Falcom hasn’t released a genuinely ambitious banger and Falcom didn’t have any sort of brand recognition anymore so he wasn’t sure any new release would take off. But against all odds, he accepted, splitting the company in two to make a subsidiary entirely dedicated to the development of new games.



First order of business was releasing the first new Falcom IP since 1994 ending up in the release of “Zwei : The Arges Adventure '' in 2001 releasing alongside the latest release of Ys 1&2 which inspired the team to do one crazy thing. It was time to bring Ys back, it was time for Adol to set out for a new adventure, an adventure that could very well be its last if the game couldn’t meet sales potential and proof that people were still interested in the franchise. For Falcom, it was about going big or going home… and they went big !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zcI5-bhVyk

Released for PC in 2003 and in 2005 on the PS2 for the rest of the world (the first time a new entry in the series was released in the west since Ys III all the way back in the 80’s btw), this new entry served both as a continuation of Adol’s Adventure in Ys V (tho chronologically it is now placed after Ys VIII) but also a sort of soft-reboot for the series. The game dev division at Falcom was composed of a small number of employees so you can definitely guess that Ys VI wasn’t going to compete with the rest of the industry. In 2003 and especially in 2005, there were a lot of good or even great JRPG’s on the market, especially of the action variety.

The philosophy of Falcom at the time (and something that has just barely changed ever since) was that they were fully aware they were making cheap games of smaller technical ambition but what they didn’t had in graphical or game design prowess, they were compensating with original and experimental ideas and a fuck lot of generosity even in their smaller less ambitious titles ! And while Ys VI definitely is starting to show its age in some areas, it nonetheless follows that line of logic.

For Ys VI, Falcom decided to built an entirely new engine that will retrospectively be known as the “Ark Engine” in reference to Ys VI subtitle : “The Ark of Napishtim”, an engine they will use for a grand majority of both their Ys and Trails line-up of games until 2012. And with a new engine comes a brand new artstyle, the series abandon its traditional top-down view in favor of a blend of pre-rendered 2D sprites (not unlike those of Donkey Kong Country to make a comparison) and 3D environment with fixed camera angle, a style reminiscent of many games of the mid 90’s such as Grandia or Xenogears.

But a new engine also meant a drastic change in the gameplay department. Bump combat was already a thing of the past the series desperately clinged onto and couldn’t fully transition from in 1995 and even with the release of Ys 1&2 Eternal a year earlier which reboosted interest in Ys and its peculiar mechanics, it was time for change ! Big Changes ! Ys VI is for all intents and purposes an extension of what was done with Ys V.

Adol now swings his sword with an actual attack button and can jump for some good old platforming but contrary to Ys V which had very slow deliberate control putting Adol at a full stop each time he wants to attack, here in Ys VI, Adol rushes to the enemies with a fast 3 hit combo that can sometimes be completed by a different finisher based on which sword you currently have equipped. On top of that, you can do an aerial attack as well as a very effective down trust but also a weird kind of situational plunge attack with a very weird and strict activation process (you need to move, wait, then move and attack at the same time it’s really weird).

Later in your adventure you will be able to find 3 different elemental swords which are going to be your main arsenal for the adventure. Each of them changes your playstyle, the water sword keeps your regular moveset but adds a circular attack at the end of your combo, the flame sword makes your attack stronger at the cost of the combo being slower and the thunder sword allows you to attack faster at the cost of power. On top of that and replacing the cumbersome magic system of Ys V, your sword can unleash a powerful magic attack once their magic gauge is filled up, adding a bit more tool to your already new arsenal.

All of this results in a much more dynamic and fun battle system which captures the fast momentum of the older bump-style game while also adding more complexities to the different enemy encounters in the game who now have a vast array of different behaviors that isn't just “walking randomly on the map, aggroing you and sometimes launching a very easily dodgeable attack”. With the added platforming and the 3rd dimension, the level design is also much more complex and interesting than in the other titles and Ys VI boasts some of the best dungeon and overworld area design the series has seen up to that point which is definitely helped by the setting of this game.

In this new adventure, Adol is wanted by the Romun Empire who chases after him and Dogi as they are chilling at a bar. They’re saved in the nick of time by Terra, one of the pirate bandit girls from Ys V who was following Adol after reconciling herself with her father, a famous pirate by the name of Adoc. Adoc is searching for a treasure that seems to be found on an Island inside of something known as the vortex of Canaan in what could be this universe equivalent of the Bermudan Triangle. Dogi thought that it was crazy to attempt such an expedition as no ship has ever survived the Vortex but Adol is still interested by the process and accepts to cross the Vortex. As they approached the Vortex however, they’re attacked by the Romun empire once again and Adol ends up shipwrecked on the island of Canaan when 2 Elf-Like girls by the name of Isha an Olha find him and bring him to the village of the Redha, the indigenous species native to the island.

At first, Adol isn’t welcomed as the Redha are in some sort of a conflict with humans as some of the castaways built a human settlement near the village which has sparked up conflict between the two villages and created many tensions over ressources and such but as you progress through the came and find a common ground between the two factions, he starts warming up to you ! So you’re off on your adventure, trying to find a way out of the island, find your friends and uncover the mysteries which inhabit it.

Ys VI definitely makes a drastic shift towards a more narratively driven story than its predecessor, whereas the old games will sometimes just have a short intro to contextualize your adventure before immediately sending you off, here the game takes his time to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mystery of the Island. The Island of Canaan by itself is the most complex and thoroughly interesting setting in the entire setting up to that point not only from a gameplay level as the layout of the area is pretty open and let you go pretty much anywhere with the only limit being how much hit can you take from stronger enemies but also a ton of small secrets, puzzles and platforming challenges to participate in which makes the Canaan Island the most fun place to visit in the series this far.



But also in terms of its lore, Ys VI serves as some sort of semi-reboot of the series and pretty much serve the same purpose as “Dawn of Ys” when it comes to fleshing out the universe of the series by finding connections to older titles and re-contextualize certain parts of Adol’s previous adventure with some clever and pretty interesting retcons. In fact, some elements from Ys IV were kept to explain the origins of the two goddesses of Ys and their relationship to the Eldeen but instead of being a race of gods, you discover that the Eldeen was instead a technologically advanced civilization who managed to put their souls inside of artificial bodies made of Emelas, the new super metal the franchise has introduced to explain pretty much everything in the franchise.

During your exploration of the Island, you will meet with Geis, a mercenary in search of his brother Ernst and investigating the titular “Ark of Napishtim” the game story is centered around, I mention him because the guy becomes kind of a rival character to Adol, showing up in a couple of entries after this game. I like Geis, the dude’s cool and he has 3 homonculus fairies showing that Falcom isn’t fully erasing the possibility of revisiting Ys V in the future (and boy are they teasing that Ys V remake…). Overall, I really enjoyed the story in this one, it’s fun, it calls for your sense of wonder and adventures. It doesn’t fail to have a few really cool symbolic moments the likes of Ys 1&2 and I’d say that as far as reimagining the series lore for the modern age goes, this one does plenty of cool stuff with the established continuity while still being an excellent jumping point for newcomers.

But as much as I can praise Ys VI for reviving the franchise and mostly succeeding in the process, Ys VI definitely suffers from “1st game syndrome” at times which makes a lot of the execution of these ideas leaving a lot to be desired. For starters while the game is around the same length as your average Ys title at the time (around 10h I’d say) making it a somewhat short and sweet experience, the game suffers from a lot of padding mostly coming from gameplay decisions which can grind on your nerves over time. I mentioned that Ys VI was perhaps one of the more “free” Ys games to date because of all the exploration you can do and how the game allows you to visit certain areas before you can reasonably go there but the way the game gates your progression is a bit wack at times.

Ys has always put an emphasis on its leveling system, with levels pretty much serving both as a difficulty slider and a way to gate keep progress, except that Ys VI will ask of you to do a lot of grinding much more so than any titles. In fact not being at the appropriate level for an area means you’re going to do 0 damages to enemies and while you could be avoiding them just to reach a chest with a neat piece of equipment or a cool accessory or items earlier on, oftentimes the trouble isn’t really worth the effort which I can say for another annoying mechanic…

Dash Jumping…

Dash Jumping isn’t required to beat the game but if you’re like me and want to explore every nook and cranny of the world, you WILL have to master the ancient technique of Dash Jumping. Dash Jumping is a secret mechanic the game doesn’t actually tell you about and at first when I looked it up online, I thought it was just some weird speedrun tech but nope, it’s an actual mechanic that the developers intended you to interact with. To do a Dash Jump you have to move the stick to the direction you want, wait approximately a second, move the stick again while simultaneously pressing the attack and jump button.
I didn’t lie when I said this looks like some ancient speedrun tech because how is anyone supposed to figure that shit out ! Just mastering the damn technique took me a solid hour of training but then the game expects you to do some insanely precise platforming with it, and when I say precise, I mean, jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, expecting the game slippery as fuck physics to bend to your will and doing so multiple times in a row.

There is another issue with the general platforming of this game though. I’m a big platforming guy and can handle the shittiest of platforming (I’ve become a master at navigating Deep Jungle in KH1 as a kid after all) but the main issue with platforming in Ys VI is that everytime you fall, you don’t simply fall to your doom and respawn with less health like in most games. Instead you get transported to a lower floor area and have to make the trip back to retry again which almost made me wish I played the PS2 version of the game with savestate (even if it looks uglier). This can make you waste tons of time if you’re not good with 3D platforming in a somewhat isometric view and the game is full of those. It’s a problem that’s common to most entries in the Ark Engine trilogy but at least they provide options for staying in the air longer and make platforming less tedious but here, screw double jumping and say hello to DASH JUMPING.

I will also say that as far as the combat system goes, Ys VI can still feel a little rough. While it’s still definitely more fast-paced and fun than Ys V, you quickly realize that the slow methodical approach to combat of that game isn’t fully gone yet. Enemies are brutal in this game and collisions and hitboxes combined with the traditional absence of invincibility frame in this series means you can get ganged to death by a bunch of smaller ennemies working together to fuck you in the ass ! I wouldn’t mind if the game provided enough tools for crowd control but sadly the closest it gets is the down thrust which deals multiple hits and as a hitbox that reaches wider than intended and well… you can guess how awkward that is to just jump and down trust everywhere to progress.

And don’t expect to rely on magic to save yourself either ! While I think the new magic system is definitely more on-point with the energy of the game than Ys V, I still think the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired. Each sword can unleash a single big magic attack once their bars are filled up but just one time ! Then it’s back to charging it by killing enemies, heck there’s even a boss midway through the game which has an entire gimmick based on that mechanic and it’s easily the worst boss in the entire Ark Engine trilogy, not so much because it’s a hard boss but because it’s BORING.

Other than that, bosses usually are pretty good, the boss design clearly had a step-up in reactivity and there’s even a few humanoid bosses this time around. The patterns are pretty fun to learn but the main issue comes with the difficulty of them being on average quite easy. Ys VI allows you to equip healing items before entering the boss arena and for the record there’s a grand total of 9 tiers of healing items which is way too overkill, it also makes dungeon exploration a bit smoother with access to the inventory being unlimited. Ys VI, keeps a lot of its older RPG roots but I don’t really think it benefits the experience.

However for those still looking for a challenge, this game was the first game in the series (and the first game in Falcom’s catalog) to introduce various 4 difficulty options ranging from Easy to Nightmare and exclusive to this game is the catastrophe mode which prevents you from healing midway through battle and make every enemy drop less money in general.
Another personal opinion of mine also comes with the music, while I can’t pretend the soundtrack is bad, it’s definitely a bit different that what we’re used with the series, the OST is calmer and more atmospheric, sometimes keeping the high energy octane stuff for bosses and action segments. I don’t dislike it and there’s a few bangers here and there but it’s not the soundtrack I go back to the most imo.

You can feel Ys VI being a transitional episode between two eras of Ys (if we forgot about Ys III and V which were the odd ones of the bunch) and while a lot of things about Ys VI still holds up, I do wish that by the time they had re-released that one, they actually retroactively added a lot of the elements introduced in the later two games (which spoilers are amongst my favorite in the series and I’m really excited to talk about them !).

However the game still retains a lot of charm and soul and that trademark sense of Falcom storytelling they experimented with the Gagharv trilogy slowly creeping its way into their other properties. For a modern gamer today, Ys VI feels like a rough transition but to the people who got to witness the grand return of Adol and his friend on PC and home console, it was pretty much a revolution which somehow manages to stand out amongst the crowd.

Ys VI marked the grand return of both Ys and Falcom in the realms of game development and while Falcom isn’t the prestigious and genre defining company that they used to be in the 80’s, the new team made sure to live up to the studio’s legacy by delivering varied, original and surprisingly charming titles for years to the coming decade and the advent of a certain platform is gonna help Falcom stuck out of the niche and approach the realms of the hidden gems mine.

But for now, Ys is going to take a break from advancing its continuity as the next title in the series will be none other than a remake of one of the least revered game in the franchise up to that point, it’s time to go back to the past, to go back to Felghana !

Ys V : The Forgettable One

The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.

Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).

In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.

Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.

The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…

One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.

When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.

Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.

Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !

One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?

Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.

The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.

The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.

The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.

What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).

Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.


Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).

Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.

To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…

WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?

The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.

One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.

Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.

First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.

But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).

The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.

The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.

If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.

It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !

Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)

What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !

Ys IV Part II : The Dawn of Peak Fiction

In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.

But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.

However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !

Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !

Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !

And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…

So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY

From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !

What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !

The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !

While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !

One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.

However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !

While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs

GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !

One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.

Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !

The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !


There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !

And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !

Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR

Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !

The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !

But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !

After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !

Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !

While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !

When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !

What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !

All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !

And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.

The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !

From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !

Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !

The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.

However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.

Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !

Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.

I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.

The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?

See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !

Ys III : A Misguided Imitation

Yeah, I’m feeling like doing some sort of Ys retrospective on this account, it might not work as much as my Trails reviews (much to my dismay, Trails is the more popular series of the two) but since I’ve already marathoned these games a while ago and never properly gave my opinion on them, I’d figure why not do it and spread some positivity back into my life !

That’s what I would’ve said if the game we’re going to talk about today wasn’t amongst the worst titles in the series…

Back when I played the Ys franchise, I did them in a peculiarly fucked up order, jumping from eras to eras and chronology from chronology. After playing Oath in Felgahna and loving the ever living fuck out of that game, I was curious to see the original title the game was based on, after all if the remake is this phenomenal it might be because the original game has some strength to it even if it will inevitably be more dated and after playing it, I was kinda shocked that this wasn’t straight up the game that killed the franchise for good because man that game sure is a stinker.

The first version of Ys III was released in 1989, a solid year after the release of the original 2 Ys titles, Ys was never planned to be a full franchise and in fact in all of the 16 games which compose the franchise (including remakes, and additional versions) only Ys II actually takes place in the eponymous floating island of Ys and only 3 games has Ys and its lore as part of its central plot point. I suppose the series kept the title for consistency reason but the initial plan was to end the series at Ys II (ironically subtitled “The Final Chapter”) since Falcom had other plans (like expanding their Dragon Slayer series into one billion subseries which will spawn other subseries like Trails a subseries of Legend of Heroes and a Subseries of the wider Dragon Slayer series).

In fact Ys III didn’t start its development as an Ys title, the team responsible for the game didn’t plan to turn the game into an Ys game but a totally new project but like I said in my previous review, something happened that dramatically changed the trajectory of Ys and Falcom as a studio for the coming decades, the release of a certain title called “The Legend of Zelda”, not only that but in 1989, we’d see the burgeoning of many other games that will define the industry and as much as Ys is considered a cult classic by many, it never truly became a classic, its impact on the industry being snuffed by the Big N corporation. As it’s usually commonplace in the industry whenever a game becomes popular enough to set a standard, lots of people rush to the occasion to imitate its formula and twist it in their own way to make a quick buck and you bet your ass Falcom was going to take a piece of the sweet Zelda pie !

The last Zelda game at the time was Zelda II a start departure from the original game, trading its top down action RPG style for a 2D action platformers with an heavier emphasis on RPG elements (it’s the only Zelda game with anything resembling experience points and a leveling system after all and towns behave pretty much like your typical RPG town) and for many people Ys was already a Zelda imitator, having released a couple of months after the original Zelda game, Ys 1 was already living in Zelda’s shadow but unlike the aforementioned title, Ys shined in other areas such as storytelling, pacing, music and was at least in my opinion a generally more ambitious game.
So Falcom told the development team to change their project midway through development to turn it into an Ys game, the game was still planned to be a 2D action game but now it was decided, Adol will be the Luigi to Zelda’s Mario and Ys was set up to become a long-running franchise (one that will sadly always stay in the shadow of its main rival). The development of Ys III as you could probably guess was rough, changing a bunch of shit last minute to fit the aesthetic of a previous project onto a new almost already finished product wasn’t an easy task and it definitely shows in the final result of the game. Now mind you, back in the day, the gaming industry was a lot more fringe and the standard for what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” game was wildly different than it is today. I must assume that there’s a reason why to this day Ys III still has its fans amongst an older audience of people, if you enjoyed Zelda II and wanted more Zelda II your option was either this or well a whole bunch of action-platformers, it really wasn’t a niche genre at all so it doesn’t really excuse Ys III being this bad and it still makes me confused on how anybody could find this game good enough to make it successful, sometimes the market works in mysterious ways.

Once again, to keep it consistent with my Ys Book 1&2 review, I’m going to mainly talk about the PC-Engine version, it’s easily the best version of the game with the best overall presentation and most importantly for me the best version of the soundtrack only comparable to its modern remake (which is a completely different game we’ll talk about at a later date). However, while all of this is true, one thing you will quickly realize about this version of the game if you’re playing it in English is how noticeably awful the localization for this game is. Ys 1&2’s localization was honestly rather excellent with some exquisitely competent voice acting and a translation that managed to transmit how rich and detailed the world of Ys was and even stand tall against the more fleshed out script of the Chronicles edition of the game. But Ys III sadly did not get such a premium treatment, the voice acting is corny as shit with all the characters speaking like they’re in some sort of Shakespearian play and everything is like 10 times more epic and dramatic than they actually are which I wouldn’t mind if the story of the game wasn’t also kind of a dud…

But the way it’s translated is also so sloppy, some name got changed like there was a big demon dude called Galbalan in the original script but renamed to (I shit you not) FUCKING DEMONICUS ! During the intro of the game, the narrator attributes the sealing of this ancient creature to Adol when it is in fact an entirely different character called Genos… I mean they confused it so hard in fact that Genos is the character depicted on the American release of the game, a choice they’ll correct for the Genesis and SNES port who just has Adol in some sort of old pulp fantasy Conan the Barbarian artstyle supposedly to sell more copies to American children who can’t handle all that anime nonsense they got as the original cover art for the game (it’s not the first time this was done in the series, some ports of Ys 1&2 have some … questionable artstyle change to say the least). The game has some really corny dub but also ADOL TALKS and not just a little, he talks A LOT, it’s the most talkative Adol has ever been and will ever be and thank fuck they later decided to not let him speak cause his character arc is pretty damn dry but also while everyone is fully dubbed, Adol only speaks in speech bubbles which is so awkward in terms of presentation and is as expected very jarring !

But if it was only the localization of the game that was terrible then I wouldn’t be ranking it so low in comparison to other titles… no Ys III is also bad but like really freaking bad as a 2D Action-Game and I will explain why.
As previously stated, Ys III was trying to compete with Zelda II and I want to take your bias against that very divisive title on the side because after playing Ys III you’ll think that Zelda II was a masterpiece (it’s severely underrated and I will stand my ground on those position). Ys III replaces its tried and true bump system in favor of something a little more standard, a 2D side-scrolling action game. And at first, one would believe that it looks like an improvement, Adol has a lot of moves, can stab his swords in multiple directions, crouch, jump and all that jazz but it does not play well at all I’m afraid.

Adol controls like a broom on a stick navigating on a strange planet where gravity and physics seems to be weirdly fucked up, the hitboxes on all of his moves are ridiculously tiny and put you at risk of getting hurt very easily if you just do anything as to approach the enemy, the only move that seems to be consistent is rushing head strong while keeping the attack button on but even like that you will end up receiving unwarranted damages because of how the enemies are coded. Everything moves so chaotically on the screen at all times that it’s hard to avoid anything, tanking your way through the game is going to be your main option that at this point it might’ve as well be a game with bump combat !

It’s really hard to conceptualize but take some of the most basic 2D Action-Platformer you can think of and imagine if everything was moving at 10 times the speed, everything moved super erratically and there’s no invincibility frame so if an enemy follows you, it’s gonna keep siping your blood pool like a goddamn Capri Sun and your character controls like he’s on Mars and there’s no precision in any of your movement and believe me, you will not progress further than maybe the first screen of the first dungeon without a copious amount of grinding because it’s the only way you could physically conceived getting through this shit !

The first dungeon is a cave full of spiders, bees and all sorts of colorful insects and sometimes trolls which are either at feet height forcing you to crouch or up in the air forcing you to jump constantly and they also keep respawning everytime the scrolling goes away from their spawn point like in Megaman only slightly worse and you got a cocktail of issues plaguing this game combat to make it as unpleasant as possible. The level design is also pretty poor on average consisting of straight corridors which sometimes deviate a little for a secret room. We are far from the complex maze-like dungeons of Zelda II with a lot of variety in its challenges even for an NES game and it was released 2 years earlier ! Heck this isn’t even the first time Falcom worked on a title like this ! Faxanadu was released on the Famicom along the same year as Ys III and yet plays way better and has more interesting and intricate level design and a far more interesting world to explore !

So there really is no excuses for Ys III playing this badly and having such uninspired level design but on top of all that jank, there’s also the tedium of all the mechanics and the grinding making the game more of a slog that it actually is, I mean the game is only 6h long but you can at least expect 2 of these hours dedicated to either grinding for money and experience or managing your health by getting out of the dungeon after every boss fight because the people at Falcom had the brilliant idea to make the healing ring cost magic power which you will inevitably need to equip the Attack ring in order to defeat the onslaught of god awful bosses punctuating your adventure.


The bosses in Ys III are certainly the bosses of all time, they certainly have patterns but it’s about as wanky and badly programmed as the rest of the game so equip on your attack ring and pray to all the gods you kill the boss faster than it can kill you making a damageless run simply not happening. There’s also the magic system of the game which has been made worse, instead of cool super power you can unlock and add to Adol’s moveset, you get a set of ring giving you passive boost to your stats like more attack power or more defense at the cost of mana dropping every time they’re active, the only 3 rings which works are the attack, defense and healing ring, there are 2 more rings in the game but they have barely noticeable effects or outright don’t work in most situations ! You can now heal midway through battle with herbs but only one though, meaning that if it runs out, you can get your sorry ass back to the only town in the game to refill on your mana and herbs !

Speaking of which, all the incessant back and forth between the only village of the game, Redmont and the dungeons are also pretty godawful, Redmont is a truly forgettable places, its inhabitant complete no names and the badly translated slew of dialogues will make you bored out of your mind, they are about as helpful as using a spoon to cut a steak and they provide no flavor to the game’s world setting or god forbid the story ! The story is… pretty dry but with the corny ass voice acting and some odd localization choices, it kinda goes into so bad it’s good territory.

3 years after the events of Ys II, Adol leaves Lilia to go on a blowjob brother adventure with Dogi ! As they wander around the world (get it ? cause they’re the wanderers from Ys !) they eventually reach the shores of Felghana, Dogi’s home country. They go to meet Elena and Dogi immediately is a jerk to his childhood friends for no reasons at all but tbf I understand since Elena isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and has the intellect of your stereotypical blonde gal from the late 80’s. In the land of Felghana, there’s a bunch of monsters roaming around the place, rumor talk about the resurrection of Demonicus, an ancient demon which troubled the peace and tranquility of the land a couple of centuries ago and that the tyrannical Lord McGuire is trying to get his hands on the power of Demonicus thanks to the help of a mysterious mage by the name of Garland (no relationship to Jack Garland, the Chaos assweeper from FF1 and strangers of paradise), while exploring, Adol will also get confronted by Chester, Lord McGuire’s right hand man and brother of Elena but he’s working for his own personal agenda on getting revenge on McGuire for killing his parents as a child.

While the story is a bit dry and uneventful making the game progression very arbitrary with Adol getting swooped left and right from places to places on the world map (which is now a level select screen instead of an overworld which is incredibly lame) seemingly for no reasons to pad out the gametime (something Falcom will become champions at doing in the future), the way it's delivered through the dub is simply sublime and sometimes the plot just goes super off the wall like when at the end of the game for no reasons at all Elena who got captured by Demonicus, this eldritch abomination from ancient past, look at her brother trying to save her and telling him straight to his eyes “Chester please, stop this ceaseless cycle of violence, both you and DEMONICUS are living being with feelings !!!” which made me drop my controller and made me freaking hysterical for a solid 10 minutes before facing another shit ass boss to finish this shit ass game !



Suffice to say that I did not enjoyed Ys III, which will probably also prove that I’m not simply a mental boomer gassing up ancient games while shitting on modern ones but that I’m living being capable of critical thinking no matter the era and I will say it, Ys III is not a game worth experiencing in any capacity unless you’re really curious about the history of the franchise and have 6 hours of precious spare time to waste (which you could’ve wasted on better short experiences or filing your taxes which ultimately would be a more fulfilling experience than playing through it !).

It seems that with Ys III, Falcom learned zero lesson on what made the original two titles so beloved by many people. Instead it was a shallow imitation of a much better game and it even pales in comparison to other shallow imitations of Zelda II which were at least mildly competent ! A soulless cash grab which took a toll on the development team, a toll so bad they’ll eventually decide to leave the company to pursue greener pastures at Enix where they’ll operate for a short couple of years as Studio Quintet (one of my favorite gaming studio if you ask me which definitely deserved better than to be forgotten by time) where they’ll make a much better 2D side-scrolling action game combining all of the good elements of their previous titles narratively speaking but spice it up with some new and innovative ideas.

People will remember Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia or even Terranigma but most people will forget Ys III was even a thing and so should you and Falcom agrees since they made a remake of the game in the mid 2000’s which is miles better, changed everything about the original and is considered by many as one of the best Ys title.

So go play Oath in Felghana, I haven’t made a review of it yet but trust me, it’s freaking excellent and well worth experiencing over this piece of doodoo !

The one thing worth celebrating about this blight on the action genre is the music, this time mostly composed by the really talented Mieko Ishikawa successfully managing to hold her ground against Yuzo Koshiro more than excellent soundtrack from the first two game, Valestein Castle especially kicks so much freaking ass and is easily like my favorite track in the whole franchise if you ask me ! The soundtrack definitely captures the spirit of Ys better than everything else in this game !

But without the original development team to work on these titles what does the future hold for Ys as a franchise ? Well it’s a bit complicated, so complicated in fact it might be a two-parter with some additional parts down the line !

Stay tuned as next time, we’ll be talking about Mask of The sun which is… huh… certainly a video game…

I've been thinking about why I liked this so much. It's in no way a new concept; I've seen it done before. The story beats are fairly predictable, as is the ending. So what is it that makes THIS stand out? The world building? The setting? The pacing? The dynamic between Jude and Philia? The translation, even?
Yes. It's all of that, working in perfect tandem to create a masterfully told story. It's simple, yes, but beautiful.
I'm not a Tanaka Romeo fan in particular (I've only read Rewrite of his, other than this) but I'm sold on him being an extremely competent writer, without a doubt.

Really I'm almost shocked at how captivated I ended up being by the very believable world he built up. And in the short amount of time, how attached I was to Jude and Philia by the end. Philia in particular was the star of the show, her development by the end is just...ugh. I love it. So proud of her, as I know Jude would be.
She radiates "MUST PROTECT" energy to the highest degree I swear.

On a less serious note, I loved when Jude went full assault mode and dropped a bunch of savages using Promethean vision from Halo, fun times