Limitation breeds Crescens or whatever people say.

After playing through Xenogears these past two weeks and thinking more on it since completing it the other day, I get why there’s such a strong following for it and admire much of what it does right, though with a lot wrong, in spilling its guts for hours and hours on end. And I liked the winding journey, though many parts of it make it hard to fall into a deep love with it despite having so many moments of brilliance included. After rolling credits and trying to think of what it left for me after spending so much time with it, I honestly struggled to come up with a central, almost cohesive thread that draws in all its components which speaks to how spotty yet uncompromising Xenogears’ vision is.

Xenogears to me is reckless and inspired in how it shoots for the stars across various axises in unraveling a messy tale of religiosity, psychoanalysis, never-ending warfare and conflict, oppressive systems of power and dominion, and the question of free will, place and identity. All in the runtime of a 60+ hour ps1 game.

It doesn’t perfectly encapsulate each of these themes as best as it could and some topics land a bit immature than others; the conversation of Billy selling his body being one of the most awkward next to Elly’s sudden transition into a mother-y representation of Sophia and the weird increase in Fei’s chauvinism towards her in Disc 2. However Xenogears is pretty powerful in outlining an escalation in oppressive hierarchies and dominion over groups as the scale and scope of the game becomes bigger and bigger we each story reveal. Each new cage and tyrant to throw out becomes replaced by another individual or group that is pulling the strings before the rug is pulled out again to reveal and complicate the role and context of the antagonists even more. For its time it is pretty daring how committed the team was to constructing this web of power along with the strong heaping religious and psychoanalytic text and references interwoven into the characters and worldbuilding. For as lopsided the general experience Xenogears is, the narrative does a pretty bang up job in establishing mysteries and maintaining intrigue and mostly answering them in a sufficient way with disc 2 having so many thrilling and standout moments. For as familiar as these subjects are across games such as free will and rebellion being some of the most tackled, I find that Xenogears just did it in a more nuanced and interesting fashion than even newer games centered around the same topics.

Another memorable trait is the cinematography. It’s so wonderfully crafted in the cutscenes that still illicits an impressive scale that rivals rpgs coming out today. Pre-rendered backgrounds and set camera angles from games like Resident Evil and FF VII evoke strong moments of visual language that weren’t possible before but Xenogears pushes the envelope even further with the dynamic camera movements, color grading, and more slower pulls and weaves in establishing its mood and atmosphere. Even scenes with little motion like Bart and Sigurd’s talk at night on the Yggdrasil, the moonlight encounter with Grahf, and Fei’s confrontation with the Ministry in Solaris are beautifully done in combination with other elements bringing the scenes to life like the music choice and color contrast. Another memorable sequence is the beginning cutscene teasing the doom and calamity of Lahan with nameless, faceless mechs randomly targeting a remote village now in flames and the scene later in full emphasizing dread even further after having ample time to know most of the people, and it is an absolute gut punch; Citan’s detailed expression of fear with Fei getting into the random mech juxtaposed with the village destruction has stuck with me 60+ hours on, and this cinematic expertise just ramps up even more; it honestly makes newer games look like amateur hour with what it is accomplishing here. I could honestly gush about how inspired this game is from this angle top to bottom for way much longer.

The meat of the experience that is Disc 1 is not too astray from the usual rpg fare at the time but it establishes its own language and identity very quickly from its first animated cutscene foreshadowing the inciting incident of the story. The story following Fei and the mystery around his powers and his role in this grander tale is so interesting to follow with each turn revealing darker truths that lead to his manifestation of his latent power. Elly is similarly a character with much to discover as the story progresses and I liked seeing her struggle to finding who she is and what she stands for and how it coalesces with Fei’s journey of self-discovery and growing to stand up and find his place in the world. Fei and Elly’s interactions are piecemeal initially before like the halfway point of the disc but the small moments still leave so much to ponder about and see where they both go not purely in a romantic sense but what they mean and represent existentially in the game’s world. Fei’s struggle with his own power and learning how to wield it to not continue the cycle of violence is an interesting interrogation of power that doesn’t fall into the usual “revenge/violence/power bad” camps that I feel most games fall into. Fei and Elly are the two most important characters to Xenogears’ story though they aren’t the sole ones that hold some relevance to its themes.

Bart has an interesting arc around taking back Bledavik after being forced out by Shakhan and Ethos, but it also manages to weave in nice character development moments of him becoming more of a leader for the people to look up to while not abandoning the free spirited and brash energy exuberated so much when first interacting with him. Citan has just as much relevance as Fei and Elly to the story with a strong air of mystery around him that he knows more than he lets on and I like how the game plays with that tension towards the end of disc 1 in questioning whether he truly trustworthy as he seems or has an odd way of going about his membership in the group. These four make up a pretty strong cast that offer a lot of poignant moments related to the overarching political machinations. It is a shame that the rest of the playable cast feel mostly extraneous once they are introduced with their pivotal arcs (Rico, Billy, Maria, Emeralda) as the game begins to add and focus more on the central narrative and their various parts aren’t as immeshed in them or developed as much as Fei, Elly, Citan and Bart.

In general I feel that disc 1 is pretty solid at telling an intriguing story with nice reveals while weaving the player into it for a good chunk of it with the world/dungeon traversal and the combat, but I did find many glaring issues especially that hurt my experience: the dungeons are a massive sore point across the journey outside of how atmospheric and lived in they are. The elements of platforming weren’t as unwelcoming as I expected, especially Babel tower with all the talk of that being a prominent dropping point for many, but the high random encounter rate next to how same-y and backtrack heavy the sections can get just completely halt the pacing and make the dungeons maddening in their inclusion as I wanted them to end very quickly. I wouldn’t say they are completely purposeless since Disc 2 would be even more cutscene heavy than it is without them, but maybe the length could have been lessened or just straight up making random encounters more dependent on character level and progression to calm how frequent and mood breaking they are to the dungeons. Even outside the dungeons, the pacing becomes a bit rough after a pretty good run from the start of the game up to the Desert Despair chapter outside of the few caverns and the horrendous swimming and “stealth” portions of the Fatima Castle rescue mission. While there was still much to latch onto afterwards with the Solaris part in the final hours being pretty exceptional, the huge pause in Nortune and other locales with everything leading up to getting on Solaris felt less interesting to get through. Making this worse is Xenogears main battle systems to break up the traversal and cutscenes.

To mince words, the combat in Xenogears is god awful. It does not have a deeply engaging or even fun in a long term sense combat system, but it’s not a total loss to me since I came into this curious about the story and world. The on-ground combat is pretty basic with nice flourishes via animations of executing deathblows and the mix of martial arts moves and magic to keep it from becoming too sleepy. I appreciate the idea of the deathblow system but it deserved to be fleshed out more than what it was in the final result. Gear battles are far more appetizing with some battles exercising and requiring a bit more engagement like exploiting elemental weakness, conserving or going ham with fuel as a limited resource, and throwing on tools acquired in the world to speed gears up, increase their response rate and etc. It still amounts to a pretty basic system of things that don’t really escalate beyond the cool spectacle of seeing mechs lunk around and do deathblows. When the fatigue really set in, I just strapped on ether doublers on Billy or Emeralda and just went ham to get back to the interesting tidbits of the story. In combination with the menial dungeons and excruciating enemy encounter rate, I can understand why a lot of people dropped this and I’d probably do the same if the narrative and main character studies didn’t pull me as much as it did, especially going from disc 1 to disc 2.

That leaves Disc 2 which is another bit of disconnect for me from wider opinion of this game. So much discussion on XG involves a huge lament of what Xenogears could have been if disc 2 was “finished” with a vague assumption that disc 1 was pretty seamless, and I can’t disagree more. Sure the presentation of story events relegated to the main cast recapping them while sitting in front of screenshots of said events is a rough transition from disc 1’s stronger balance of player involvement and cutscene amount, but I found the section pretty compelling. It honestly makes me even more critical of the first disc’s shortcomings versus the second since for the most part the team manages to get across the major story events while not being delivered in a completely static and one dimensional way as much of disc 2 sounds at first. I love the moments of introspection that come from Elly and Fei as they are responding to and thinking back on the events of the story we have yet to see, and the sequence of Fei’s psychology and understanding and overcoming Id is pure cinema. Oddly, the feeling of a stage play, whether intentional or not, compliments the game’s musings on control and free will that I’m pretty fine with disc 2’s vibe despite wanting a few more real time cutscenes of the story sequences like the nano machines triggering the mutations of people several times in the story. I’m also probably giving this more defense since there is much less gameplay involved here which already alleviates the big slog that was this game’s dungeons and combat systems.

For all its faults, I was pretty satisfied with Xenogears after finishing it though I can’t discount how exhausting of a game this is to get through. It just unfortunately exists and is tethered with this game given its horrendous development and mismanagement as a first title for most of the people working on it. It also further points to how ambitious of a game this was trying to be despite the hard limits of the ps1 that maybe it could have been a very sickening ps2 game in a mostly “complete” state in another time. Even in the time now that is unearthing the grave of older series titles for new releases to create and remake, I’m not sure how/if something like this could be built up again today in all its glory and eccentricities. Remake discourse is an enormous, tiring blob where it feels like no one wins that I’d rather have a new title in the series rather than another try at “completing” Xenogears that will probably rob it of the charm and vision so specific to its time and circumstances, and in some ways that cannot be recaptured to me with the slippery slope of faithful recreations being a point of contention. Also unfortunate that this specific series is stuck to the halls of the ps1 and ps2 with the tricky licensing and separate paths all of its creators have taken since then to move on to newer things. At the very least Xenogears has inspired me to actually try out its successor series more despite a rough and confusing entry into the series many years ago with its messy second title on the switch. I’ll probably still have complaints about the gameplay though.

You are Henry David Thoreau. You have just moved into a cabin by Walden pond. You fish, you observe nature, and you explore the woods you now call home. After a few days, you walk down the path to your family's house in Concord, where your mother has done your laundry.

I don't want to relitigate Thoreau's laundry habits. The critics and angsty English students have done that plenty without my input. More interesting is the mere presence of the word "laundry"—a word that doesn't appear once in the source text, here presented matter-of-factly to the player— which is an early signal from the game that it has a deep understanding of its source and an awareness of its criticisms. That makes it probably the best direct book to game adaptation I have played yet (and not just because of the lack of competition).

Walden is not a book about survival, and neither is this a game about survival. The punishment for failing to manage resources is minimal. Like the book, it's a game about becoming intimately familiar with a small slice of nature, about exploring and reexploring the same areas until the specific trees become memorable. Like the book, it's also about continuing to exist in society, not reject it. Concord itself is a significant enough hub of activity in the game that the player has the option of beginning the day in it instead of in the cabin. The game approximates Thoreau's visitors from the book with brief anti-slavery missions that serve to anchor the time period to a historical context but ironically lose a modicum of humanity. I imagine this was to get around the constraint of having to model and animate more humans. If that was the choice made in order to have the humans who are in the game look as good as they do, then it was the correct one.

That mission the game inherits from the book is somewhat counteracted by the attempts to make it a more typical video game. Points of interest are marked on the map, which resulted in a couple days of my Thoreau min/maxing his stamina in order to sprint to each. Shortly before winter I realized I forgot to buy an important upgrade and spent a full day grinding out money. Those moments seem antithetical to Thoreau's experiment but I suppose that's the nature of making it a game. Perhaps it's a different kind a fail state, one where the player failed to maintain Thoreau's narrative.

On the technical side, the game has exactly the amount of jank you'd expect from a game that launches with multiple arts endowment logos instead of corporate logos. Thankfully they never impede the experience except for one area where the jank overlaps with the artistry: the voice acting. Thoreau is played by Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild, Speed Racer) in a performance so inert I was surprised to learn from the credits that not only is he professional but a voice I should have recognized. The other performances, most notably Jim Cummings as Ralph Waldo Emerson, are serviceable at worst, so there's a stark, grating gulf in emotion when the bulk of the narrative sounds like it's being sight-read off a page yet attributed to a character for whom "inspiration" is a resource in need of active management by the player.

But you don't need to engage with Thoreau's audio or even his writing, which is the beautiful part of adapting this as a video game. I'm not a particular fan of Walden (the book) but it does irk me to see people criticize it for what it was never meant to be. I worry the same will happen to Walden (a game). This is not a survival game or an exploration game. It's a re-re-re-exploration game with some survival elements included, for you. If you want.