Fantastic characterization!

So I started this game a few of weeks ago, I just had to put it on hold while I put SMT: Raidou Kuzunoha 2 in the bag.

And it is blowing my mind. Not because nothing like this has ever been written before (it absolutely has) but because the main character is so well written. This is no cliché reluctant-but-one-dimentional hero. This seems like a living, breathing person that has real reservations about what is going on, and argues intelligently against the way the story is unfolding. This is the kind of stuff that gets me fired up, the kind of stuff I'm used to reading by Stephen Donaldson, for instance. I mean, not as comprehensively or verbosely, obviously. But the fact that it is game dialogue and therefore pared down and minimalist, takes nothing away from the impact.

Ok, when last I put the game down 2-3 weeks ago, I had just fallen into a cave along with a giant asshole of a pirate leader. Hate at first sight, but I guess now we have to work together. Can't wait to see how this unfolds!

I keep meaning to play through this game again. I beat it twice in quick succession when it came out and put it away. Part of me worries it's like Final Fantasies VII, VIII and IX which did not hold up to my memory's standards of quality. It's my only remaining PS1 game that I know exactly where the discs are. My PS1 long ago bit the dust.

It is a very well written game. In my memory at least. Even the second disc where the game itself falls apart, the writing is still very well done. If Monolith remade this and finished the second half, I'd buy whatever Nintendo console it was on in a second.

Xenogears is a fantastically written game that sometimes undercuts itself by embracing some of the goofier anime tropes that absolutely do not fit the story being told.

Also, its so incredibly obvious that the game did not have enough development time, and its more than just the second disc being what it is. Pretty much every plot thread not directly related to Fei, Ellie, Citan, or Bart is never resolved, with most not even talked about again after their initial introductions. Likewise, the other party members don't even really speak again after they join the party full-time, much less have their goals resolved.

Even so, I love the game.

Its a great game, might want to avoid some posts in here for spoilers as you arent far in the game it seems. Not sure why people are doing that in posts where people clearly state they haven't beaten the game. :-/

Its been ages since I played through that last, but it really left a mark. Cant remember the names of just about anything, but the moments live on. The start of the second disc (on PS1) was a bit of a drag for me. But the whole part with the fighting tournament and escape from the capital, and the mystery of the fish faced guy (Wiseman) and Id.........so great

Game's pretty good for like the first 20 hours or so, then it becomes a miserable slog for the remainder.

While each character definitely fits into a specific archetype, by the end of the game it's incredible just how much complexity they ring out of basic RPG archetypes. Almost every character operates in a grey, very human area. I think a lot of this is owed to the game's central conflict; I won't spoil it for you, but it's something that a lot of high-minded critics are still asking for out of games today inasmuch as its a real dilemma of humanity, less a video game trope.

edit: also, you'll come to like the corny-looking pirate shortly after you're done with that dungeon, I'll wager. Most do. Also, if you don't find the game verbose enough yet, just you wait!

Really enjoyed the game when I played through it a couple years ago. I think the story suffers from trying to do too much, especially around the point where it wants to start talking about Freudian psychology and Gnosticism, but it did a lot of things that I haven't ever quite seen in another game, and it had some twists that legitimately surprised me. I like the characters a lot too, but all but three of them basically halt in characterization after a point, with a few never truly getting development. I really do think that this game this game could've been one of the greatest JRPGs of all time...if it had been finished. Man, is that second disc rough. Love it anyway though!

I thought some of the dialog got a bit weird, not sure if it is the actual line or the translation, but absolutely love the setting and its theme, I don't think the game as a whole would be as interesting if it doesn't go as far as it had. It was ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, since it is clear the game/series never got finish but I think if it aims any lower it would have just fall flat.

Not the best game, but one of my favorite...the other is Xenosaga because I am that guy.

@soimadeanaccount: Xenosaga is an excellent game though, much better than Xenogears. Couldn't comment on Xenoblade, I'll play it in like 20 years when I feel like buying a Wii/Wii U I suppose.

Oh I get so excited when people voice Xenogears love, let me tell you! Probably my favorite story of all time? It's a shame they ran out of time and/or money at the end but I love the flawed end product all the same. There was a site, Xenogears: God and Mind, that I frequented when I was playing the game in my teens. It collected a lot of useful FAQs about the deathblows and pieces about the philosophy and lore of the game. I still marvel at how much lore they managed to pack into one game.

Kinda wish Xenosaga was more of a direct sequel than the knowing winks we ended up with. That trilogy is still good though.

Man oh man they put a lot of thought into Xenogears, even beyond what they show in the game. The Xenogears Perfect Works book has a ridiculous amount of fluff, going into great detail about a lot of things in the game. And the game goes well enough into detail about the world and characters on its own.

@fredchuckdave said:

I go back and forth between the two, the XS series are better games...maybe except XS2. I still stand by that XS2 killed the series revival, and the failure came from taking too many knee jerk reactions and haphazard changes due to feed back from XS1. The drastic change in art style, the clumsy combat system, item acquisition methods, change in some of the tone of the characters.

XS3 is excellent as a game, it felt like they finally hit their stride. If XS 1 and 2 or even just 2 is of that caliber I could see the series would have made it to its intended 6 episodes. Unfortunately it fell apart when it needs to wrap things up also not too unlike XG.

I too never played Xenoblade, and with Xenoblade 2 coming out I feel like I might be missing out on something. I could probably borrow a Wii/WiiU, but I don't think I will get or can get my hands on a Switch.

I vividly remember spending the first, oh, 10 hours of that game in perpetual anxious excitement over the next small allusion to Xenogears and scouring the internet for connections to Xenogears whenever something happened that I thought was a precursor to what was to come; I wasn't even disappointed that the game seemed so microscopically focused on what it was about and really dug it for what it was. But as it became more and more clear Xenosaga was going to have to be its own thing and not actually lead up to Chapter V before offering a Chapter VI I realized I didn't care to invest more time in the series and didn't play the other two. I played Xenosaga through a few times purely out of adolescent free time and really liked the characters and themes, I just really wanted to see some kind of huge time jump for the next one and was too disappointed by the idea it'd just be three games about Shion and KOS-MOS to continue.

@soimadeanaccount: 1 and 2 are great for story, 1 and 3 for gameplay; 2 is rough to get into but pretty fun once you are into it; also NA version has shitloads of content. Of course once you put it down you'll never pick it back up again for fear of the awkward combat system (which does have the most nuance to it out of any of the games, but only after you adjust to it which will always take time). 3 is rare which is nice; like Suikoden V (both amongst the best JRPGs on PS2, a system with almost a thousand JRPGs, though Valkyrie Profile 2 is still better).

Sure, I admit it: I warmed up to Bart, but I don't feel it's earned. This is a thing that books, games, films and other media do, that's basically cheating: Show a character's worst traits at first, so you hate them, and then show them in a much better light so you grow to care about them. So here we go from "You don't want to fight me? Coward! Hand over that mech, or you're dead" to "I just want to save my sister and my country, man". Anyway.

Teddy Roosevelt, I do also have the Xenosaga games, and I do plan to play them after this one. Next winter maybe - I've been playing too many huge stonking RPG's lately.

So I've been running around the desert grinding up my deathblows - and getting loads of close-ups of maybe my all-time favourite PS1 enemy model, the Tin Robo. No-nonsense and workmanlike in design, they even thought to put a guard-rail around the maintenance platform on the back. None of the awkward clipping/polygon-overlap that plague so many PS1-era character models. AND for some strange reason no texture warping. It is awesome - and they will always attack a gear if you have one out, even if they can never hurt it - while ignoring the tiny, eminently squishable humans that murder it slowly while they grind up their deathblows :-D

OK, time to get to work rescuing Margie.

@joques: Xenosaga is actually relatively short for a JRPG, 40ish hours each time out, maybe shorter for the first one if you avoid the minigames. I still tend to think 40 hours is the perfect length for a JRPG though it is rarely upheld; but holds true for Vagrant Story, VP2, Xenosaga, and the SNES Final Fantasies.

@nodima: Yeah that was almost exactly how my experience playing the first Xenosaga game went. In hindsight it probably winks and nudges the player a little bit *too* much (the Zohar stuff and don't even get me started on Fei/Abel and whatever the Elly lookalike was named) and I guess I never fully made peace with all of the references and allusions. I did manage to make it through to near the end of the second game and I actually own the third, but I'm not sure if my PS2's laser is strong enough to read discs anymore; I've sort of left it to collect dust.

Wish they'd release the Xenosaga trilogy on PSN but I'm sure that's a licensing quagmire with Monolith Soft.

Yeah 20-40 hours is perfect. I just recently finished Witcher 3 w/ DLC (150 hours for me), and SMT Raidou Kuzunoha 1 & 2 (80 hours combined) and Shadow Hearts (mercifully compact) - I dunno why I went straight into yet another huge RPG, but that's the way the chips fall sometimes.

Gear combat is weirding me out. Repairs are dirt cheap - WHEN they're available. But there is no in-combat repair, and when you're solo there just doesn't seem to be any tactical options, at least so far.

I just had a solo gear-fight against a bunch of named story-opponents - and the only viable option was to try and maximize damage output. I tried boosting, but that just ran out my fuel too quick. Compounding this was that it SEEMED like a gimmick fight were it's best to not attack the final opponent, but that just earned me a game over screen. Then back through a lengthy unskippable scene before I could get it right.

I like the on-foot combat in this game, but for now gear combat is something I just slog through to get at the good parts.

Edit: The scene directly following that meh fight was just astounding. Elly teetering between horror at what she's doing vs. horror of being expelled from everything she knows. Just so much more gripping than almost anything I've seen in games - AND pretty goddamned poignant considering the current political situation.

I really need to pick this up on PS3...such a classic.

On PS1, through Framemeister, projected on the wall, baby! Those pixels are humongous and so sharp they could split an atom!

I was 12 when this game came out, which is the perfect age to appreciate its bonkers story.

re: gear combat: since gears don't level up through traditional means, every gear-based boss fight can be a challenge (or not, depending on what the story needs), because the designers knew exactly how powerful you could be going into the fight. The on-foot/ in-gear split is great for letting you grind to high heaven while still restricting your power level based on where you are in the story. Chrono Cross had a similar system where your power level was based on story progression, and I love it.

I'm 43, and it's still the right age!

Xenogears is the goat.

Xenogears is my jam. It came out at the perfect age for me where the whole "challenge your notions of god and religion" thing was a real mind bender. I only remember little bits of the plot, but the theme songs for Dazil and Id are never far from my mind.

@joques: I require pics and/or video of this insanity.

@hassun: I tried to upload a pic, but there's something wonky about the servers today.

about 15 years ago i showed this game to a friend who then purchased a copy on ebay for over $100. a few months after it was re-released as a greatest hits. he was quite upset but still enjoyed the game despite that it was a victim of being released before it was finished.

Wait what? Xenogears and Shadow Hearts mention within the same thread!? If you played the first SH you must play the second, you can skip the third.

Some of the gears battles are kind of fucked. The hardest and most of the hardest fight in the game are gears battles. There are fights that pretty much requires you to do certain attacks in certain order and they must hit or you are better off restarting. One common trick is to get your combo to 3 (just use light attacks) and try your best and pray to the rng god to trigger level infinity. Later on in the game there are a lot of seemingly random accessories that are actually powerful when combined. The game doesn't really do a good job of telling you what they actually do however.

You will get something that let you recover in combat later, but they are kind of deceptive. Just remember fuel economy is a very real issue.

Just checked out the back of my Xenosaga case, and it boasts of "80 hour gameplay". Is that just typical early-aughts gamelength hype? I tend to mainline games and stay away from sidequesting unless you get really good rewards for them.

Man, I feel for poor Billy, I really do. I never had any religion myself, but I can imagine. Still, it's probably better in the long run to have a clean break like that!

Oh, for fucks sake. Who calls something "soylent", in 1998! 25 years after the movie! and expects it to be this grand revelation?!?

Holy shit you guys were not kidding about the second disc! I just sat through an hour or more of huge chunks of story just flung at me through storyboards! I was prepared for a higher ratio of custscenes, but this is ridiculous. I mean, does it go on like this?

@joques said:

Yep. For the most part, disc 2 is half hour of Citan in his rocking chair - boss fight. Wash, rinse, repeat. You do eventually get control again and get to wander the world to finish up leftover stuff before killing god. Is it actually a spoiler to say the final boss is god? I mean, it is a JRPG.. People were not kidding when they told you this game was unfinished.

@soimadeanaccount: And to make things worse with the end-game gear battles, there's the large optional underground city area with the by-far best gear equipment in the game. No real hints that it's there either.

Well, just put it to bed. Struggled a bit with the final boss until I understood the importance of hyper mode. That's a pet peeve of mine: game mechanics that aren't relevant throughout the game, so you don't bother with them, but are crucial in the final boss fight. Oh, and the holy pendant that extends hyper mode from three to six turns. Oh, and that you don't get the best hyper mode attack until Fei is Lvl 70. Had to go back and grind out his last, measly level.

Holy cow, it's been a roller-coaster. All the story text dumps in disc 2 are a blur to me. I went through it all yesterday, and I couldn't tell you what happened. It's like learning a new skill: you have to do it, and not just watch it, for it to stick. In gameplay, you have to be there, do it, be involved, for it to stick. Just reading text - it might as well never have happened. I am beyond indifferent to everything that happened in Disc 2 except the final dungeon and final boss. I quite liked that final dungeon - but I had help of a map of all the switches and side passages. I cannot imaging fumbling my way through that labyrinth in 1998 with no help from Google.

But all in all memorable! Glad I got to experience it. But two hours into the text dumps in disc 2 I was about ready to put it down and never touch it again.

I'm glad you stuck with it. Xenogears is a game that deserves to be experienced. If they'd only finished that second disc...

Man, like an idiot I went straight into Xenosaga. Hope I don't burn out.

Xenosagas are each about half the length of Xenogears, so the whole trilogy is like 1.5 Xenogears.

I only ever played the third and don't remember much about it. I should probably give the whole trilogy a chance since Xenogears and Xenoblade Chronicles are two of my favorite JRPGs ever. Curse Monolith for siding with Nintendo! I never got to play Xenoblade Chronicles X and probably never will. There is a slim chance the Switch will be successful and manage to come to Korea and not be region locked or horribly overpriced and I'll get to play Xenoblade Chronicles 2 though!

I think they've already confirmed that the Switch is not region locked. IIRC Kimishima said that at the very start of the reveal in January. Did you not get the Wii U in your territory?

Yeah, the Korean WiiU release date kind of came and went with no release. It flopped so hard elsewhere, they didn't bother releasing it here. March 3rd is the only Switch release date announced, and it's not being released in Korea on that date. Nintendo.co.kr has two sections: 3DS and Wii. That's the original Wii. Their banner right now is the release of Pokemon Sun/Moon. Most likely, whether the Switch comes here or not depends on how well it does elsewhere. Thanks Nintendo..

Man, I feel bad for you. Could you not import both console and game from the US, or from Europe? Expensive, for just a single game, but still. I imported a NTSC-U PS1 console to my PAL region, but then I have a bunch of games to play on it.

@joques: A WiiU runs about $500 imported from Japan. I can't find one from an English speaking region. I suppose I could order one from the US or something, but import taxes when it arrives would be disgusting. It would most likely end up costing over $500. Korea protects its market. Even though they don't make any consoles here. At least nothing beyond a few handheld emulators. Try getting a phone here that isn't an LG or Samsung. Well, iPhones have become readily available, but only because there was a huge public outcry when certain parties tried to prevent iPhones coming to Korea.

That sucks, man!

I guess when your country produces so much consumer electronics, thay put in place huge tariffs on electronics, that don't differentiate whether this or that particular item is produced domestically. So console gamers are shit out of luck. I use a Samsung myself BTW, and am super happy ;-)

Tell me about it. My washing machine and fridge are both Samsung. The worst part of it is, Samsung charges more for their products in Korea than they do in other countries! Koreans have this weird perception of value: if it's expensive, it must be good! Too much disposable income, not enough consumer protection.

Yeah, Disc 2 is really rough. I had the same reaction the first time I saw it. Its even rougher when you realize that even relying on text dumps, they still weren't able to cram the whole story into the game; and that if you want to get the full backstory you have to go read a fan translation of the Xenogears: Perfect Works art book.

Yeah, after FF7 and the original Metal Gear Solid, Xenogears is my favorite game.

Dig around youtube for some explanation video on Disk 2 and the story on XG in general. In broad stroke XG story is the cyclical story before it was a big thing among games. You see bits and pieces of scenes from what is supposedly Episode 1 to 4 all leading to XG being Episode 5.