It’s not my main gripe about the game because I understand that Xenosaga was going to be a six(?) part series at one point and that it’s hard to judge the characters and story based off of the first entry, but this was actually pushing me to my limits. These are some of the most one dimensional characters and while some of them, such as Ziggy, had their interesting and honestly really engaging startups, right when his section of the game ended, so any hope of furthering his character development did as well. Mere hours after rolling credits, I’m having trouble remembering their names and importance to the story.

The lack of story was hardly an issue but when paired with a nonexistent soundtrack, thats what really did me over. It’s not that the songs that are there are bad by any means and if anything I’m a fan of Yasunori Mitsuda’s work as I’ve even gone as far as playing games solely because his work was in it… but there’s no soundtrack here. Who thought it would be a good idea to have the normal battle theme remain the only constant battle theme throughout the entire game? There’s not even a boss theme, it just plays the regular battle theme. The game wasn’t ever extraordinarily hard but I would have preferred feeling a sense of differentiation when battling special enemies or bosses, but instead I was forced to hear this song the entire game. Tragically, when I wasn’t fighting slow and mundane battles that lasted an eternity (and then some thanks to the music), I was enduring silence. Like actual silence because there’s no overworld music unless there’s a crisis or something. Atmosphere matters and all and you want to show how empty outer space is or whatever underlying value there is to that strange decision, but man I’m seriously not begging to go from silence to that battle theme every 10 seconds. At one point I even preferred the silence because I got so sick of the battle theme and decided to make the silence permanent by lowering my volume to 0. Honestly that made the game just a little more bearable.

Outside of that, while the menus are a fucking monster and I couldn’t ever figure out where which option might lead to, I actually enjoyed the systems. You can extract skills from accessories and then equip 3 skills to characters, there’s a skill tree that while grindy at times, allowed you to “transfer” (the realistic term is copy) skills to other party members which was great since I could put a strong multi-heal skill on multiple characters at once. On top of those, you can also use points to raise your stats manually, which is great for customizing characters, and if you couldn’t tell already customizing is what this game does best without a doubt. I don’t want to make it sound groundbreaking or anything but it was always fun finding ways to break the game. Except when I had to grind. I love grinding but this game made me dread the thought of it.

Exploration in this game consists of either

1. Labyrinth hallways that you constantly get lost in if you have a short attention span and don’t know the exact place your goal resides (the ships)

2. Straight hallways with occasional detours to treasure (the ground levels)

The takeaway? They both fucking suck.

I should add that there are these decoders (keys) to secret doors that you can find and get some pretty good accessories from, and when you’re able to extract the skill from them, combat becomes much more fun because the battles are usually over in a turn or two. You’re able to revisit levels as you progress into the game, so that means you might find decoder 6 in a later level, and you kind of remember seeing door 6 in one of those earlier levels but don’t quite remember where, so you scour the entire level fighting the level 2 galactic hemoglobins to find it. Yes, it’s about as fun as it sounds (it’s not).

I’m sunk cost into this franchise so I’ll play the other two, but man… This fucking blows. Now I’m being told that Xenosaga 2 is even worse… fuck.