This review contains spoilers
Xenogears is the messiest game I’ve ever played. There’s so much I love about this game and still so much frustrates me playing it.
I wanna start with what I think is the most fascinating thing about xenogears. I want to shoutout @NeonMorris’s review for the idea of xenogears using religious iconography, symbolism, kabbalah, psychoanalysis, etc not to comment on those things but rather to build and demonstrate the oppressive systems and structures governing society and the effects it has on the fracturing of people.
To take it a step further, the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox.
The intro of lahan village so effortlessly creates the facade of peaceful idyllic jrpg starting zone with funky characters, cool jokes, romantic tension, well-meaning people, and then shatters it in an instant sending the main character out into a world of political machinations and wars that have no meaning, and into his own fractured identity of a transplant of a transplant of a transplant.
This pattern continues, spiralling further and further into madness. First, a desert kingdom of an abdicated prince turned pirate because of a tyrant. But actually that tyrant is a stooge. He’s playing into the hands of some other force. But actually the real bad guy is not that force but rather this other empire of interlinking cells and prisons stepping on an underclass of demihumans. But actually it’s not the empire that’s bad but rather the ufo’s that visit the empire and give them shit to oppress people with and wage war for power with. But actually it’s the church running all of this shit, they’re the ones in charge to shepard the masses into a false and bloody heaven. Nope, the church is a front. Always been a front, duh. It’s actually these evil creatures that a priest must exterminate by stylishly shooting firearms out of the sleeves of his loose robes. Oh wait, those are just humans too, turned into nightmares by an oppressive force overseeing the church...
The rabithole continues, endlessly, until the discovery that god is an interstellar weapon who invented humans to be spare parts for his reviving body, and it’s like, what then? Was all of this meaningless?
It is in this futile but necessary exercise of breaking shackles of enclosure around the world of the player and the world of xenogears characters, only to discover yet another world of shackles on top of that one, in an endless domino effect, that defines xenogears for me. Even the symbolism, the religious overtones, the political intrigue, the gnostic lexicon, are all systems to rigidly structure the world. Everything is overflowing with keywords, references, and historical implications. Every question answered leads to tens more.
The game succeeds at expressing this aspect through scene structure. Most chapters in this game change the general loop of the game to create a “sub-game” that imitate the stakes of the next fake world of hierarchy the heroes are in. The kislev prison block section comes to mind as almost a mystery game of its own with distinct sections that all feel different, leading to an overseas section that feels completely different in style and tone. The “shape” of this game’s narrative is my favorite part about it.
In keeping with its gnostic message and spirit of the material universe being a cruel, twisted facsimile of the immaterial and spiritual world, the worlds of xenogears are each facsimiles containing each other like an endless matryoshka doll, even god itself. The search for truth can only be brought through a gnosis of human connection, something beyond the material, the bonds of people coming together and breaking through the systems of history, government, psychosis, etc. to find the true god, the god that resides in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man.. And so on.
A lot of what frustrates me about this game, however, is in the gameplay. While I like the structure of the scenes and narrative pacing, I don’t feel the game’s themes of oppression or shattered character psyche’s are expressed particularly well through the combat.
I think the parallels through on-foot combat and gear combat are cool in the sense that the gears represent a kind of exponential manifestation of the growing physical will of the characters.
On foot combat basically has 3 questions you need to keep in mind each turn.
Do you want to prioritize learning new deathblows (permanent skills that will make on-gear capabilities higher too)? If so, noodle around and press random buttons without causing a learned deathblow, knowing this is suboptimal for damage,
Do you want to use a deathblow to cause some short term bursts of damage? End your combo in a deathblow to do some damage, but you won’t gain much in the long term of this battle and the long term after this battle.
Do you want to stock up points to pull off a combo of learned deathblows? Use one or a few moves to do very little damage, to get little long term reward for after this battle, for the sake of doing a huge combo of all your current potential ability.
Spells and items add only but a little to these three key questions, but I would say on paper these make a generally decently interesting combat system. The problem is by the end of disc 1 most of the enemies act the same way and by disc 2 there are so few on-foot combat sections it barely matters at all. I don’t think the game has enough combat encounters to really push this system to what it can do.
The mech combat system is even simpler. You don’t want to run out of health or fuel, and you want to do attacks that maximize those perimeters. You can’t learn new abilities in gear, so you only need to consider the extent of the current battle and maybe battles after this one if you foresee trouble with fuel/health.
It would be a lot better if you could get off gears mid battle, or if the game had more sections where choosing between being in a gear and being on foot had more of an impact, but more often than not, you have to be in one or the other, and most of the time you’re not even sure which it’s gonna be till you get in the dungeon, making choosing party members difficult.
I had like three party members with near maxed out deathblows with everyone else barely at half their movelists. The game is structured well for narrative, but it isn’t structured well to utilize its own systems, and the combat scenarios are not designed well enough to test the player on its own concepts.
Parts of it remind me of dragon quest 8, with the idea of sacrificing damage to build up future damage, and protecting yourself in that build-up. When it works, it feels great, but it stops working eventually. The gear combat on the other hand, mainly feels fun for delivering flashy animations and seeing the theatrics of these large things perform martial arts moves, but not much more than that. Spend more fuel for faster turns, and use my attack levels now or keep building up more for a larger one are about the only questions you need to ask with them.
The spell system works, but it feels very minimal and mainly included because they felt it was “necessary”. While eventually the magic system of the game is explained with intriguing lore, I found that it didn’t add that much to the combat system, mostly being very situational.
Character customization was similarly minimal. There are some choices to be made, but it’s neither particularly demanding, interesting, nor streamlined or user-friendly.
The game is being pulled in lots of different directions, certain parts of the game have things that are only ever used in that one part, and never mentioned again. Things like the weight mechanic, card game, gear battler, etc. While they are cool, I think it’s a bit too much and too messy, and as a result, nothing but cutscenes and narrative structure feels particularly concentrated on as the lead voice of the ensemble of these elements.
The narrative, although the best part of the game, isn’t without flaws either. I think many scenes are in need of editing and trimming. Some lines just go on for way too long, some parts of conversations are just absurd to me in delivery (billy telling bart he almost went into prostitution to be able to afford care for his sister, in front of all the characters he just met) feel hamfisted and overbearing. There are needless repetitions in the script, like: the player being explained the ignas/kislev war at the start, only for parts of it to be reexplained to fei later; fei being incapacitated multiple times in the game, sometimes for the same reasons; fei being nearly put in carbonite once to introduce carbonite as a concept, then the same scene happens again but this time they actually put him in the carbonite; nanomachines turning people into mutants several times in disc 2, etc. Stuff just seems to be happening multiple times when it didn’t need to and served little purpose.
Furthermore I was rather disappointed with disc 2’s storytelling style. When I saw screenshots and videos of people sitting in chairs, I got really excited to see what that was all about. But it didn’t really work for me. I think the visual of people in chairs suspended in space with giant objects floating around them gave me the impression that disc 2 was gonna be the moment where the game stops paying as much attention to the world and its properties and more on the characters and their issues, their minds, what makes them tick. But instead of that, the characters were simply almost recalling things that happened or they had done as if they were dreams of distant memories, with little focus on character writing aside from the first few dreams. While thematically making sense given the end-game revelations, I’m not sure of the tone they were going for with it. When the seated characters are spouting paragraphs of text, I still don’t know how to read those parts in terms of tone. Are they wistful? Regretful? Melancholic? Sometimes I feel like they should be, but it reads more neutrally in some scenes. While I think it looks great, it comes off clumsy. And it’s clear when playing the game that the game systems would not have been able to last long enough or be able to retain interest even if those sections were fleshed out, the combat, exploration, and customization would’ve gotten even staler faster had that been the case. And I wish there were some kind of explanation as to why they were dreaming all those scenes. Maybe something like they were all swallowed by the zohar modifier or being restructured into deus while fei was speaking to the wave existence, just SOMETHING to contextualize it.
I wanna say lastly, as cool as the idea of fei and elly as characters and entities are, I found a lot of the scenes between them, especially on disc 2, kind of bad. Elly is damselled way too often in this game needing the player to rescue her or help her in general, but by disc 2, Fei kind of speaks very chauvinistically toward her and it’s not clear if it’s meant to be read that way. I found it jarring and distracting from what should be an eternal romance echoed through time. Elly’s character in general felt very weak-willed for a lot of the game except for when she needed to not be and she suddenly became a mother Theresa figure to all the downtrodden(??), which felt rather sudden a development for me personally.
There were still some great scenes between them earlier on, I especially liked the ones where Fei tells her to stop doing those dang drugs and holds her gear down with his own, and the one where he shows her Kislev being destroyed on the ground level to show her the true effects of her staying in the army.
—————————————————————
Sorry if this review is all over the place, but this is a game that goes in so many directions it can be hard to keep track. I feel I really need to replay this game at least one to two more times to really even keep a handle on it, and probably read more perfect works, listen to more podcasts, play xenosaga, etc etc.
If it were my choice, however, I do not think xenogears works best as a game. I think if they were to remake it, it would be great to see it as an anime series rather than a game (although I would be interested in hearing opposing opinions on why the game aspects of this game help it). Since I am incapable of refraining, I’ve already spent many afternoons daydreaming how this story would look as an anime. I would personally keep the mixed media style of the game, and have the characters be animated in 2D (or 3D that looks identical to 2D thanks to shaders) similar to the art style they have in the game, but with slightly more realism and more shading on skin tone. The backgrounds would be either photographs or models, or at least realistically textured rendered metallic corridors when applicable, and the gears could be physically photographed models as well. I think it would make for a cool and experimental aesthetic beyond the typical 3d/2d type stuff seen in evangelion rebuilds.
I wanna start with what I think is the most fascinating thing about xenogears. I want to shoutout @NeonMorris’s review for the idea of xenogears using religious iconography, symbolism, kabbalah, psychoanalysis, etc not to comment on those things but rather to build and demonstrate the oppressive systems and structures governing society and the effects it has on the fracturing of people.
To take it a step further, the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox.
The intro of lahan village so effortlessly creates the facade of peaceful idyllic jrpg starting zone with funky characters, cool jokes, romantic tension, well-meaning people, and then shatters it in an instant sending the main character out into a world of political machinations and wars that have no meaning, and into his own fractured identity of a transplant of a transplant of a transplant.
This pattern continues, spiralling further and further into madness. First, a desert kingdom of an abdicated prince turned pirate because of a tyrant. But actually that tyrant is a stooge. He’s playing into the hands of some other force. But actually the real bad guy is not that force but rather this other empire of interlinking cells and prisons stepping on an underclass of demihumans. But actually it’s not the empire that’s bad but rather the ufo’s that visit the empire and give them shit to oppress people with and wage war for power with. But actually it’s the church running all of this shit, they’re the ones in charge to shepard the masses into a false and bloody heaven. Nope, the church is a front. Always been a front, duh. It’s actually these evil creatures that a priest must exterminate by stylishly shooting firearms out of the sleeves of his loose robes. Oh wait, those are just humans too, turned into nightmares by an oppressive force overseeing the church...
The rabithole continues, endlessly, until the discovery that god is an interstellar weapon who invented humans to be spare parts for his reviving body, and it’s like, what then? Was all of this meaningless?
It is in this futile but necessary exercise of breaking shackles of enclosure around the world of the player and the world of xenogears characters, only to discover yet another world of shackles on top of that one, in an endless domino effect, that defines xenogears for me. Even the symbolism, the religious overtones, the political intrigue, the gnostic lexicon, are all systems to rigidly structure the world. Everything is overflowing with keywords, references, and historical implications. Every question answered leads to tens more.
The game succeeds at expressing this aspect through scene structure. Most chapters in this game change the general loop of the game to create a “sub-game” that imitate the stakes of the next fake world of hierarchy the heroes are in. The kislev prison block section comes to mind as almost a mystery game of its own with distinct sections that all feel different, leading to an overseas section that feels completely different in style and tone. The “shape” of this game’s narrative is my favorite part about it.
In keeping with its gnostic message and spirit of the material universe being a cruel, twisted facsimile of the immaterial and spiritual world, the worlds of xenogears are each facsimiles containing each other like an endless matryoshka doll, even god itself. The search for truth can only be brought through a gnosis of human connection, something beyond the material, the bonds of people coming together and breaking through the systems of history, government, psychosis, etc. to find the true god, the god that resides in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man.. And so on.
A lot of what frustrates me about this game, however, is in the gameplay. While I like the structure of the scenes and narrative pacing, I don’t feel the game’s themes of oppression or shattered character psyche’s are expressed particularly well through the combat.
I think the parallels through on-foot combat and gear combat are cool in the sense that the gears represent a kind of exponential manifestation of the growing physical will of the characters.
On foot combat basically has 3 questions you need to keep in mind each turn.
Do you want to prioritize learning new deathblows (permanent skills that will make on-gear capabilities higher too)? If so, noodle around and press random buttons without causing a learned deathblow, knowing this is suboptimal for damage,
Do you want to use a deathblow to cause some short term bursts of damage? End your combo in a deathblow to do some damage, but you won’t gain much in the long term of this battle and the long term after this battle.
Do you want to stock up points to pull off a combo of learned deathblows? Use one or a few moves to do very little damage, to get little long term reward for after this battle, for the sake of doing a huge combo of all your current potential ability.
Spells and items add only but a little to these three key questions, but I would say on paper these make a generally decently interesting combat system. The problem is by the end of disc 1 most of the enemies act the same way and by disc 2 there are so few on-foot combat sections it barely matters at all. I don’t think the game has enough combat encounters to really push this system to what it can do.
The mech combat system is even simpler. You don’t want to run out of health or fuel, and you want to do attacks that maximize those perimeters. You can’t learn new abilities in gear, so you only need to consider the extent of the current battle and maybe battles after this one if you foresee trouble with fuel/health.
It would be a lot better if you could get off gears mid battle, or if the game had more sections where choosing between being in a gear and being on foot had more of an impact, but more often than not, you have to be in one or the other, and most of the time you’re not even sure which it’s gonna be till you get in the dungeon, making choosing party members difficult.
I had like three party members with near maxed out deathblows with everyone else barely at half their movelists. The game is structured well for narrative, but it isn’t structured well to utilize its own systems, and the combat scenarios are not designed well enough to test the player on its own concepts.
Parts of it remind me of dragon quest 8, with the idea of sacrificing damage to build up future damage, and protecting yourself in that build-up. When it works, it feels great, but it stops working eventually. The gear combat on the other hand, mainly feels fun for delivering flashy animations and seeing the theatrics of these large things perform martial arts moves, but not much more than that. Spend more fuel for faster turns, and use my attack levels now or keep building up more for a larger one are about the only questions you need to ask with them.
The spell system works, but it feels very minimal and mainly included because they felt it was “necessary”. While eventually the magic system of the game is explained with intriguing lore, I found that it didn’t add that much to the combat system, mostly being very situational.
Character customization was similarly minimal. There are some choices to be made, but it’s neither particularly demanding, interesting, nor streamlined or user-friendly.
The game is being pulled in lots of different directions, certain parts of the game have things that are only ever used in that one part, and never mentioned again. Things like the weight mechanic, card game, gear battler, etc. While they are cool, I think it’s a bit too much and too messy, and as a result, nothing but cutscenes and narrative structure feels particularly concentrated on as the lead voice of the ensemble of these elements.
The narrative, although the best part of the game, isn’t without flaws either. I think many scenes are in need of editing and trimming. Some lines just go on for way too long, some parts of conversations are just absurd to me in delivery (billy telling bart he almost went into prostitution to be able to afford care for his sister, in front of all the characters he just met) feel hamfisted and overbearing. There are needless repetitions in the script, like: the player being explained the ignas/kislev war at the start, only for parts of it to be reexplained to fei later; fei being incapacitated multiple times in the game, sometimes for the same reasons; fei being nearly put in carbonite once to introduce carbonite as a concept, then the same scene happens again but this time they actually put him in the carbonite; nanomachines turning people into mutants several times in disc 2, etc. Stuff just seems to be happening multiple times when it didn’t need to and served little purpose.
Furthermore I was rather disappointed with disc 2’s storytelling style. When I saw screenshots and videos of people sitting in chairs, I got really excited to see what that was all about. But it didn’t really work for me. I think the visual of people in chairs suspended in space with giant objects floating around them gave me the impression that disc 2 was gonna be the moment where the game stops paying as much attention to the world and its properties and more on the characters and their issues, their minds, what makes them tick. But instead of that, the characters were simply almost recalling things that happened or they had done as if they were dreams of distant memories, with little focus on character writing aside from the first few dreams. While thematically making sense given the end-game revelations, I’m not sure of the tone they were going for with it. When the seated characters are spouting paragraphs of text, I still don’t know how to read those parts in terms of tone. Are they wistful? Regretful? Melancholic? Sometimes I feel like they should be, but it reads more neutrally in some scenes. While I think it looks great, it comes off clumsy. And it’s clear when playing the game that the game systems would not have been able to last long enough or be able to retain interest even if those sections were fleshed out, the combat, exploration, and customization would’ve gotten even staler faster had that been the case. And I wish there were some kind of explanation as to why they were dreaming all those scenes. Maybe something like they were all swallowed by the zohar modifier or being restructured into deus while fei was speaking to the wave existence, just SOMETHING to contextualize it.
I wanna say lastly, as cool as the idea of fei and elly as characters and entities are, I found a lot of the scenes between them, especially on disc 2, kind of bad. Elly is damselled way too often in this game needing the player to rescue her or help her in general, but by disc 2, Fei kind of speaks very chauvinistically toward her and it’s not clear if it’s meant to be read that way. I found it jarring and distracting from what should be an eternal romance echoed through time. Elly’s character in general felt very weak-willed for a lot of the game except for when she needed to not be and she suddenly became a mother Theresa figure to all the downtrodden(??), which felt rather sudden a development for me personally.
There were still some great scenes between them earlier on, I especially liked the ones where Fei tells her to stop doing those dang drugs and holds her gear down with his own, and the one where he shows her Kislev being destroyed on the ground level to show her the true effects of her staying in the army.
—————————————————————
Sorry if this review is all over the place, but this is a game that goes in so many directions it can be hard to keep track. I feel I really need to replay this game at least one to two more times to really even keep a handle on it, and probably read more perfect works, listen to more podcasts, play xenosaga, etc etc.
If it were my choice, however, I do not think xenogears works best as a game. I think if they were to remake it, it would be great to see it as an anime series rather than a game (although I would be interested in hearing opposing opinions on why the game aspects of this game help it). Since I am incapable of refraining, I’ve already spent many afternoons daydreaming how this story would look as an anime. I would personally keep the mixed media style of the game, and have the characters be animated in 2D (or 3D that looks identical to 2D thanks to shaders) similar to the art style they have in the game, but with slightly more realism and more shading on skin tone. The backgrounds would be either photographs or models, or at least realistically textured rendered metallic corridors when applicable, and the gears could be physically photographed models as well. I think it would make for a cool and experimental aesthetic beyond the typical 3d/2d type stuff seen in evangelion rebuilds.
10 Comments
Great review that pretty much covers what I feel about this game too... It's a glorious beautiful annoying mess that probably should just have been an anime.
Thanks for the shoutout, really appreciate it! You pretty much hit the nail on the head on everything in regards to Xenogears' design (although I personally don't care much about the ludo-narrative dissonance in regards to the relation between gameplay and story; the combat is very fun if a bit shallow in the long run, imo the purpose is to be fun and enhance the sense of spectacle which it does well). Also damn I'd been planning to add a section in my eventual second write-up about how much I love the narrative's anime-arc type structure but wasn't sure how to articulate it, and you already did!
For me it will always be the most imperfect/perfect game ever made and this review helps articulate that, at least in my mind. Most of the dungeons in the game are godawful (excluding maybe 3 or 4 of them), a couple scenes are kinda awkwardly structured/written (tho that may partially be due to the rushed translation), and there are only like three fights in the game that bring out the full potential of the gear battle system which is pretty disappointing, but imo everything the game does right blows all the flaws out of the water.
About your point as to how this doesn't work as a game, I disagree and it was on replaying it a year ago now that I realized why it works best as a game and wouldn't work as well as an anime, because I was considering the same thing, and it comes down to the act of exploration itself tying to the narrative. Krellian's Lab was the eye-opener for me; the reason that that dungeon works so well in particular is that A) it's long as hell, you trudge through that thing, and in so doing you really feel the vast scope of the antagonistic forces at play, it's the cumulative moment where you're in the belly of the beast of the domineering power in the world and the breadth of it enforces the feeling of powerlessness in the face of it. And B) it'd be nearly impossible to convey that same feeling in an episodic show or even a film because of time constraints, pacing and editing (you experiencing the dungeon in one long continuous stretch, having to move through it yourself, vs experiencing it passively on a screen and in a fragmented manner). And I think that could be applied to the whole game.
Didn't mean to ramble, your review is quite good and helped bring clarity to some of my thoughts about the game so thank you.
For me it will always be the most imperfect/perfect game ever made and this review helps articulate that, at least in my mind. Most of the dungeons in the game are godawful (excluding maybe 3 or 4 of them), a couple scenes are kinda awkwardly structured/written (tho that may partially be due to the rushed translation), and there are only like three fights in the game that bring out the full potential of the gear battle system which is pretty disappointing, but imo everything the game does right blows all the flaws out of the water.
About your point as to how this doesn't work as a game, I disagree and it was on replaying it a year ago now that I realized why it works best as a game and wouldn't work as well as an anime, because I was considering the same thing, and it comes down to the act of exploration itself tying to the narrative. Krellian's Lab was the eye-opener for me; the reason that that dungeon works so well in particular is that A) it's long as hell, you trudge through that thing, and in so doing you really feel the vast scope of the antagonistic forces at play, it's the cumulative moment where you're in the belly of the beast of the domineering power in the world and the breadth of it enforces the feeling of powerlessness in the face of it. And B) it'd be nearly impossible to convey that same feeling in an episodic show or even a film because of time constraints, pacing and editing (you experiencing the dungeon in one long continuous stretch, having to move through it yourself, vs experiencing it passively on a screen and in a fragmented manner). And I think that could be applied to the whole game.
Didn't mean to ramble, your review is quite good and helped bring clarity to some of my thoughts about the game so thank you.
@NeonMorris thanks! I wouldn't call it ludo-narrative dissonance (frankly that term is overused, often incorrectly), it's more that I just found the combat, for as much time is spent on that in this game, does not do as much to push the themes and ideas of the game or its core message, imo. On its own terms, I didn't find it that fun to fight battles outside of just experimenting to see what my characters could do, I think it's too easy most of the time to force me to make any concrete decisions (a problem of many combat systems starting from this era I think).
I agree with you that the overworld and exploration design do a good service to the game's message and aesthetic, and I actually really enjoyed most of the dungeons EXCEPT for the one you pointed out, Krellian's lab. You make a good point in saying that it forces you to trudge through a vast maze, like a rat suffering the machinations below the unseeable powers that be. However, in my experience, actually playing that dungeon did not make me FEEL that way. Because it's so long, the corridors so samey, encounter rate a little too frequent, and enemies not PARTICULARLY too difficult, rather than feeling like what you described, I felt a sense of alienation, like I was doing this for the millionth time and mostly going through the motions just to see the next cool scene to progress the plot. My mind began to wander onto other things, and I felt like I wasn't really there anymore. While the physical dungeon matches your description, the psychological dungeon as the player was more like a labyrinth of busywork. So in forcing myself through experiencing it actively, my actual understanding of the space and its design was very passive, and I actually believe a passive method of exploration, as you describe, of expressing the idea would be better in making the viewer interact with the ideas of the space as opposed to the numbness of it (that I experienced, at least). I don't believe that the aspects of episodic structure or filmic structure would cause detriments because through adaptation, the aspects that express the idea of a long labyrinthian lab representing the vastness of evil that requires a long, uninterrupted journey, requires even to be swallowed whole to even understand, would need its own techniques of the medium to be explored. Repetitive shots of corridors, minute variations of rooms, fatiguing repetitions of character actions, mixed with slight variations of unnerving visual material (like the stacked up save-points, the large creatures in tubes, the mutants) breaking the monotony ever so slightly before exploding in cathartic revelations, visually, rather than through dialogue, monologue etc, I think could be a good way (among others) of exploring the idea (and this goes with other ideas of the game) through a visual medium.
I think the Nerv HQ in neon genesis evangelion is a good parallel actually, for utilizing the entire span of the series to create the impression and sense of place of an endlessly large, encompassing spherical labratory space, even extending outside and into nature, that represents the pervasiveness of man's needing to own the world, the sins done through science, the forces at work trying to make the world theirs, and so on and so forth. I couldn't draw you a map of the place, but I still get the sense that it's endlessly large, despite being contained, with so many pockets of secrets, dark corridors, and horrible things lying in the cracks, below the facade of military righteousness and scientific manifest destiny.
Have you played the other xeno games? How do you feel about them?
I agree with you that the overworld and exploration design do a good service to the game's message and aesthetic, and I actually really enjoyed most of the dungeons EXCEPT for the one you pointed out, Krellian's lab. You make a good point in saying that it forces you to trudge through a vast maze, like a rat suffering the machinations below the unseeable powers that be. However, in my experience, actually playing that dungeon did not make me FEEL that way. Because it's so long, the corridors so samey, encounter rate a little too frequent, and enemies not PARTICULARLY too difficult, rather than feeling like what you described, I felt a sense of alienation, like I was doing this for the millionth time and mostly going through the motions just to see the next cool scene to progress the plot. My mind began to wander onto other things, and I felt like I wasn't really there anymore. While the physical dungeon matches your description, the psychological dungeon as the player was more like a labyrinth of busywork. So in forcing myself through experiencing it actively, my actual understanding of the space and its design was very passive, and I actually believe a passive method of exploration, as you describe, of expressing the idea would be better in making the viewer interact with the ideas of the space as opposed to the numbness of it (that I experienced, at least). I don't believe that the aspects of episodic structure or filmic structure would cause detriments because through adaptation, the aspects that express the idea of a long labyrinthian lab representing the vastness of evil that requires a long, uninterrupted journey, requires even to be swallowed whole to even understand, would need its own techniques of the medium to be explored. Repetitive shots of corridors, minute variations of rooms, fatiguing repetitions of character actions, mixed with slight variations of unnerving visual material (like the stacked up save-points, the large creatures in tubes, the mutants) breaking the monotony ever so slightly before exploding in cathartic revelations, visually, rather than through dialogue, monologue etc, I think could be a good way (among others) of exploring the idea (and this goes with other ideas of the game) through a visual medium.
I think the Nerv HQ in neon genesis evangelion is a good parallel actually, for utilizing the entire span of the series to create the impression and sense of place of an endlessly large, encompassing spherical labratory space, even extending outside and into nature, that represents the pervasiveness of man's needing to own the world, the sins done through science, the forces at work trying to make the world theirs, and so on and so forth. I couldn't draw you a map of the place, but I still get the sense that it's endlessly large, despite being contained, with so many pockets of secrets, dark corridors, and horrible things lying in the cracks, below the facade of military righteousness and scientific manifest destiny.
Have you played the other xeno games? How do you feel about them?
Its a shame you didn't like it as much as me but you generally seem to respect it which l can appreciate l think xenosaga 3 is the peak of takahashi personally.
I am playing xenosaga episode 1 right now! I don't know when/if i'll get to 3 but I would like to
thank you for reminding me to read this piece...i saw it crop up in my feed AGES ago when you first posted it but I was knee-deep in a project at the time and couldn't spare the time...worth the wait though! this is really good and resonates with a lot of the thoughts I have on the game, particularly the disappointment of Disc 2, which I feel fails to make the best use of shifting to prose. there's been some debate on whether this shift was budgetary or not but I do think, regardless of intent, it doesn't feel entirely purposeful, and the seams are never more visible than when the characters just straightforwardly narrate the act of going through a dungeon. i would actually love to see another crack at this idea in a JRPG, I think it has real potential
This comment was deleted
"the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox."
not sure how to say just how true this rings for me. it changed my whole perspective as a teenager. to the point that i'm reluctant to talk about just how profoundly i think it has resonated through my life and problems i have with depression and hopelessness. like... not that xenogears is responsible for all that, but it really pulled the curtains back on some things that i was only just beginning to understand back then.
A+ review, even though it seems like i have somewhat more forgiving feelings toward the game...!
not sure how to say just how true this rings for me. it changed my whole perspective as a teenager. to the point that i'm reluctant to talk about just how profoundly i think it has resonated through my life and problems i have with depression and hopelessness. like... not that xenogears is responsible for all that, but it really pulled the curtains back on some things that i was only just beginning to understand back then.
A+ review, even though it seems like i have somewhat more forgiving feelings toward the game...!
Thanks, both of you!
dwardman
2 years ago
Chrono trigger gave up most semblances of exploration and nonlinearity for a linear plot where you could rearrange the flow of conversations within that linear plot, and eventually subtly alter that linear plot for alternate endings (and giggles). I am referring to how most of your freedom in chrono trigger is given in terms of what order you speak to characters in a town, how you move about while speaking to them, etc. You're freed within the contraints of small rooms, even though you cannot leave those rooms, to put it one way.
Xenogears evolves that design further into a fully linear plot where not only do you speak and move during conversations wherever you want, but the game's camera is so zoomed in and the game intentionally withholds maps (it even states this directly in the tutorial house) that it's intentionally keeping the player a little confused and in the dark with a (somewhat shitty) compass to tell up from down. It wants you to be confused and stumble into houses or rooms and talk to npcs in your OWN order and have somewhat of your own adventure within these very linear confines. You are very much directing your own episodes of an anime even though the general season of the anime will be the same every time, the little moments in the episodes are yours to pilot and stumble as you see fit, even having the opportunity to layer some conversations over each other in the sound(text)scape of the scene. I think this game is a pivotal point of mutation along the timeline of rpgs and jrpgs especially in design values.