Xenogears

Xenogears is a video game that consists of 3 releases

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Xenogears is a Square RPG featuring a cast of characters trying to save the world using giant fighting machines called gears.

Plot

While at first the game seems to be following traditional rpg territory, i.e. strange man in a rural village with memory loss sets off on an adventure, the game explores much darker themes and gets very complex toward the end. The game pretty much touches on everything: love, hate, loyalty, racism, religion, the nature of humanity, etc. The game is set in the world of Ignas where 2 great nations are at war: Aveh and Kislev. The game begins with Fei living in the and the whole village looking forward to the wedding of the year. But their normal lives are destroyed when their village gets caught in the crossfire of a gear battle between Aveh and Kislev. During the battle Fei becomes trapped and his only means of survival is to enter the cockpit of a crashed gear, but when he does, something stirs within him and he automatically knows how to control the gear. Using the gear he clears the invaders from the village, but the villagers turn their anger on Fei as he fought back and they blame him and chase him out of the village. The only thing Fei can do now is to try and find out how he knows how to pilot a gear and why this particular gear feels so familiar.

Combat

The game features random encounters where the player is thrown into battle randomly when walking around the world map and within certain areas. The combat is an interesting blend of real-time and turn-based action. Each character has an action bar that fills up depending on that character's speed. Once that character's action bar is full the battle pauses and it becomes their turn. This is not quite real time because the player is given unlimited time to plan out their move when a character is active.

Each character has three attack buttons signifying weak, medium, and fierce. Each attack takes a certain number of AP, and each character has 7 AP to use for attacks. By putting in special combinations (such as weak, weak, fierce) that character may execute a special technique called a deathblow. Each character has their own set of deathblow combinations that can be learned by inputting their commands. This makes the game a little tough without a list of known abilities because a player cannot use an ability unless they've input the command for that ability several times already. Also, certain deathblows can only be learned when a character reaches a particular level.

The game features a mechanic where a character can attack one or more times then press the cancel button to stop attacking in the middle of a combo. This allows that player to save any ability points not spent to use on their next turn. For example, if it is Fei's turn and he executes a weak attack then cancels the combo, he will have 6 AP left over. At the start of Fei's next turn he will have 13 AP rather than 7. A character can store a maximum of 28 AP. By having additional AP, characters can enter a mode called "combo" where they chain together the deathblows that they have learned to do stronger damage than individual deathblows would have allowed. Each deathblow performed during the combo will subtract its cost from the pool of AP available.

Gear Combat

In addition to the hand to hand combat the game also features battles utilizing big giant fighting robots called Gears. During some of the random encounters you can elect to jump into your gear at any point and stomp on your enemies, but mostly Gears are used in specific gear-centric environments where you fight mechanical monsters. The battle mechanics are slightly different but like the hand to hand combat it is based around combos and building up to a deathblow type attack. Instead of AP you have Fuel and attack level; each attack is broken into light, medium and strong and each one uses units of fuel , with light being the lowest. Every time you attack the enemy the attack level of the gear increases to the point where you can unleash a deathblow-like, combo special attack. There are 4 levels of special attacks 1,2,3 and infinity. If you reach infinity level your gear enters hyper mode which lasts for 3 turns and you can use super-powered special attacks and recharge fuel at a much faster rate. Hyper mode cannot be accessed until late in the game as to access it you need to have learned all deathblows for your gear. Gear combat has a few other options, there is a charge option which makes the gear recharge some fuel, there is a boost option which increases the frequency of your gears turns but it consumes fuel more quickly. You can also recharge your gears HP using the special option and finally you still have access to ether attacks in your gear.

Game Trivia

The religious content involved in Xenogear's story almost prevented the game from going to America.

The game's story, characters, and objects, have a great deal of symbolism, religious concepts, philosophical concepts, psychoanalytic theory, and science involved with them. One can argue that Xenogears is a reasonable game to write a thesis paper on.

The second disc of Xenogears has a reputation of being not as fine tuned as the first. Most believe this is due to a rush on development.

General Information Edit

Game Name	Xenogears
Platform(s)	PlayStation PlayStation Network
Publisher(s)	Square Co., Ltd.
Developer(s)	Square Co., Ltd.
Genres	Add a new genre Role-Playing (RPG)
Themes	Add a new theme Fantasy Sci-Fi Anime Martial Arts
Original US Release	Oct. 21, 1998 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases	XG, XGears
CERO	CERO: D
ESRB	ESRB: T