Finally finished this and it genuinely blew me away. One of the most ambitious games ever made with a scope that still feels huge decades later. Probably the most deep, unpredictable and utterly insane story I've seen in the medium. It covers any themes they could get past the censors - mental health, organized religion, free will, classism, genocide to name a few. (I don't think the ESRB played past 10 hours.) The presentation is outstanding with dynamic in-engine cutscene direction not over-relying on FMVs. It's a wonderful looking work in general with 2D sprites in dense 3D scifi environments and awesome mech / biblical / eldritch designs. When a lot of other RPGs on the console were using prerendered backgrounds these fully explorable multi-level populated towns seemed magic. The 360 camera made me feel like I was peering into little dioramas. I also enjoy the combat! Fighter style combo inputs either on foot or in giant mechs with complex mechanics and amazing animation.

It's well known that the developers ran out of time and money on the second disc and it becomes apparent with how the storytelling style suddenly changes and it's not nearly as open. This can even be felt in the music with how there isn't nearly enough unique tracks to cover all the different scenes and locations. So Xenogears is categorically unfinished. Disc 1 is really consistent though and by itself is more compelling and fully featured than other entire games. It was one of the longest of its day. If Square had given the team what they needed to complete it as fully envisioned with a Final Fantasy tier budget, it coulda been the best damn RPG ever. Even with those limitations and some frustrating moments, I think Disc 2 really picked up and reeled me back in, and the last hours were peak fiction.

I don't love everything about Xenogears, even the story - it's definitely not flawless and could be brutal to get through at times so I wouldn't usually give a "10/10" BUT I strongly feel that it's a work of art. That rating represents the huge impression it made on me and my respect for the vision and creativity. Anything less wouldn't be right. It continually impressed me for 50 hours and the gameplay remained fun. It's not easily recommendable because of its unintuitive design and sluggish English text speed (you NEED to apply a text speed code). But if you love Chrono Trigger and FF7 you owe it to yourself to try it out... I consider them a holy trinity of sorts.

...proof that drip and swag are all that matter in this world

make no mistake - i'm not just linking back to another review of mine for the sake of drawing attention to some obscure gem i happen to like. no - kileak just happens to be a complete and utter ripoff of iron angel of the apocalypse (or tetsujin in japan) by synergy inc. what the fuck is iron angel of the apocalypse? what the fuck is kileak?? why would one rip off the other??? all of these are valid questions you probably don't have that i will be answering anyway

i hardly believed it myself at first. but after booting it up and playing a couple stages, all i could think was "this is like if tetsujin ran smoother at the cost of its entire personality". and by golly - that's exactly the case!

y'see, tetsujin dropped in 1994 on the 3DO. i'd wager about three people in total played it outside of japan. maybe three and a half, but that's pushing it. anyway - like synergy inc, genki was a 3DO developer that released 'burning soldier', an fmv-based rail shooter just a couple months after tetsujin. so given that both companies had a thing for videos, cg and guns i don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to infer that some of the fellas over at genki played and got a spark of inspiration from synergy's negative framerate nightmare crawler

the similarities here are shameless. instead of controlling a mech that's ascending a tower you're operating a mech that's... descending a tower! enemies are laid out in alike fashion (though they tend to fight back more) and levels are totally corridor-based, only ever allowing you to strafe more than a few centimeters when inside the box-shaped spaces that link halls together. even the fmvs are nigh identical in how they're placed throughout the levels - being triggered either by interacting with certain objects or through codec-esque calls while walking around. see this for yourself

to kileak's credit, it does have significantly greater enemy variety (not saying much), better controls and runs at a pretty stable 60fps. on the other hand, it's just not fun. kinda hard to get invested in a shooter where you can infinitely stock ammo for weapons that have infinite range. literally 80% of the enemies in this game can be killed before even being encountered. this even applies to some bosses. shout out to the final one btw - i think i killed him before he even fired off a single attack. made me laugh pretty hard and in fairness, gave me more enjoyment than the rest of the game

anyway this is painfully mediocre and a pale imitation of something cooler. don't bother unless you're like me and you feel some irrational need to play the sole tetsujin-like

P3P is something that would have been a lot more novel at the time of its release. Having this big PS2 game on a handheld in 2009. The actual combat and dungeons are pretty much perfectly converted from the original console versions, but it's outside of this where it falls short. So much impact is lost in the cutscenes with this new visual novel style with no models or animations, or even any detailed drawings for important moments - just screenshots of the PS2 anime cutscenes at most. In general the presentation is a huge step down and can be pretty ugly, eg those abysmal AOA portraits. It's way less immersive with no actual city to run around. So this was fine for existing fans back then, but in recent times this has become the most played version of P3 by newcomers by FAR due to how easy it is to emulate, and since last year it's officially available on all modern platforms. It really sucks because FES is sooo much better overall and it's only purchasable on... the PS3 store.

The most notable change - I don't think Portable's full control combat is necessarily "superior". FES tactics system works perfectly fine if you aren't stupid, and every enemy was designed around that system so the balancing is now a bit messed up. I enjoy the styles of both. There's a decent amount of new content, some great social links added that made me see new sides of certain characters, and the option to play from a female perspective is nice to have even if it didn't change nearly as much as I would have thought. I do love the new songs Kotone has but you can tell Meguro was in P4 mode at this time because they don't really fit in with P3's style. In any case it's still hugely disappointing that we will never see an ultimate version with all content from FES and Portable. Gonna be missing some of this in Reload.