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Post by toei on Mar 15, 2019 23:00:19 GMT -5
I loved Xenogears. It's one of the last game I remembered getting excited to get up in the morning just so I could play some more of it, like when I was a kid (that was probably 10 years ago). But it's not like Chrono Trigger, which is essentially flawless in what it does; all the dungeons in XG are too long and get tedious, especially the sewers. The good news is there aren't that many, and there's a lot of time between them. The battle system is fun, but you run out of new moves to learn too long before the end. And there's the rushed... not ending, but planned second half, though in play time it's much less than that, because it's mostly text with a few battles. Though I actually liked Disc 2 because of all the crazy things it talked about, it clearly wasn't half of what it could have been. But Disc 1 was at least 30 hours long, and everything good about Xenogears is extraordinary. And so I'd still give it a 9/10, despite clear flaws.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 16, 2019 0:25:00 GMT -5
Yeah, I think disc 1 was a 9/10, easily. Disc 2 was more like a 7/10, so we'll just average it to an 8/10. It's still a great game. I think the weirdest thing was how I ended up obtaining the game. The game was actually out of print for some time, and I pretty much had no way to get my hands on it. However, SquareSoft ended up doing another print run, and I remember placing perhaps my first online order on a lab computer in Bristol, England while I was doing a study abroad program. That was a nice coming-home present to myself.  |
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 16, 2019 20:13:31 GMT -5
Disc 1 is more like 50 hours from what I recall. That's my main argument for those knocking on disc 2, you get a LOT of game before the novel dump in the end. I guess that's not the best defense but by that point, I was already knee deep in love with absolutely everything about the game and loved where things went. The game was already text heavy throughout so I guess I just didn't mind. Definitely some major "What if's" near the end with some of the dungeons you only get descriptions of, but seriously as-is it's an incredible package and one of the best JRPG's in my book by a long shot. As for Xenosaga, the first game has definitely aged but moreso in the gameplay department. Story/cutscenes wise I still think it holds up really well. But there are major issues, one of the biggest ones being that 99% of the "dungeon" areas in the game have no BGM whatsoever and there is only ONE battle theme for the entire game, until the final boss who gets a new theme finally. I'm not even kidding, one battle theme for enemies/bosses for the whole ride. This is Mitsuda we're talking, so I just have to assume he was on a serious time crunch and didn't have enough resources to cook up another killer OST. What's there is great as usual, but it's nowhere near as good as the scores for the Chrono games and Xenogears. The issue I have with the gameplay is that the battles just end up taking longer and longer the further you get, classic fancy PS2 era JRPG's where your special attacks and animations end up taking forever to sit through yet you have to keep doing them. You end up having to do a lot of AOE special attacks against big groups of enemies, so it's just all really drawn out. I still love a lot about the game but yeah, kind of "hardcore fans only" territory. Which can be an issue being the first of the trilogy. The longest one too, takes about 40-50 hours at least. Xenosaga II I've played three times and finished the third time years ago. Took me a literal decade to warm up to this game because like Sarge alluded to, the gameplay is weird... yet when you finally understand, I actually think it's excellent. I would lovingly replay this game now. An old online friend of mine went to the extent of making a youtube video for me to explain the mechanics haha, which the game utterly fails to do. It's a bizarre system but easy to manipulate. For the entire game Jr, KOS-MOS, and Momo are the best characters to use, Momo ends up being the strongest because the elemental buffs stack on top of her magic attack stat which is the highest in the game, secretly making her the hardest hitter of them all. The real gist of what to do in this game, is you want to "Scan" every new enemy you encounter to learn their elemental weakness, then buff your allies with those "Elemental Sword" spells. Then you have to "Stock" up on some attacks and can easily "Break" them, which throws them up into the air and you can do some huge damage and combos. It gets pretty fun. I bet if you knew some of the tricks Sarge, you wouldn't think the levels were that crucial actually. However it's still no pushover with some of the mecha battles from what I remember. Also now for a serious suggested exploit, when you're alone with Shion in one part of the game it's recommended to grind a bit here. She gets exp insanely fast and all that exp carries over to everyone else, as if you were solo'ing enemies with each of them too. Easy way to power level. So yeah, the game completely fails to explain its battle system mechanics, there's tough bosses so it's recommended to grind for an hour or a few at one point with the Shion character, and Jin is wearing a kimono with sandals in space... definitely some flaws. Story wise Xenosaga II is amazing though, focusing heavily on Jr and Albedo (better Kefka) and the cutscenes are amazing. This game has two composers. Anime composer Yuki Kajiura scoring the cutscenes and events and the amazing Shinji Hosoe does all the BGM and whatnot. Frankly, I think Shinji Hosoe's music here is my favorite across the Xenosaga's. His style injects a lot of techno/drums and bass flair into it, which I think is super fitting with how much more high tech/intergalactic Xenosaga is compared to the others. I really wish he did all three games. Yuki Kajiura did all of III herself. You can tell a film/anime composer doing a game doesn't always work out, it's still a great OST with many standouts, but I would have preferred Mitsuda or Shinji Hosoe for sure.
Xenosaga II is actually rather short, should only run 20-30 hours. Xenosaga III's back half is more epic than Xenogears to me. It's like every single main character has their own final boss rival, all these huge rivaliries coming to an end one by one. The final stretch is exhausting in an awesomely weird way, it's just so insane. They finally perfected the gameplay in every area here, the character battles are similar to FFX but even better, and then the mecha battles as I mentioned earlier are my favorite in the Xeno's. In Xenosaga II you only got to control 2 units per battle which was odd... but now it's 3 again finally and the battles are just awesome.
Now is this one flawed? Yes... suddenly there's a huge lack of cutscenes, at least compared to the amount that the first two games had. Instead more of this game is delivered in the Xenogears/PSX JRPG like fashion with tons of text boxes. Honestly, I didn't even realize this difference when I played the game myself but quickly realized it years later when I was looking up "movie cut" versions of the games, a LOT of this one is just text boxes and characters talking. Very strange? But yeah beyond that this game is incredible. It has a Bible sized database written by Tetsuya Takahashi himself that covers every little piece of lore imaginable. The world building in Xenosaga is truly on another level.
As it stands, Xenosaga III is still my favorite PS2 JRPG easily. This one is about 30-40 hours at most. It's hilarious how the time it takes to beat the trilogy combined is how long each of the new Xenoblade's are. But with Xenosaga you walk away having read several novels worth and it's just far more complex for the better.
Anyways yeah, I know Sarge is cool with them but that one guy who made that youtube video for me is probably the only person I've meant on the planet that loves this trilogy from start to finish like myself. It's nearly impossible to sell these games on someone with how much they change in between one another, for better or worse, it can be disorienting. Someday I want to replay them all with an undub and hear the Japanese audio, which I think would make me love them even more. The dub is very good though. Shion and KOS-MOS had bad voice replacements in II, but their characters weren't as important to the story arcs in that one. Their original voices came back in III thankfully.
I'm probably just a sucker for how the Japanese do cutscenes, but they're just so dang good in the Xenosaga's.
Mecha!
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Post by Sarge on Mar 16, 2019 21:37:38 GMT -5
I mean, yeah, the conclusion I came to with Xenosaga II is that the levels really didn't matter. It's all about exploiting the system.
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Post by anayo on Mar 17, 2019 16:26:27 GMT -5
I've already posted this before but it's worth repeating. In 1997 my mom would take me to Blockbuster and let me rent Sega Genesis games. They only cost around $2 for about a week so it was easy for me to try basically every Sega game in their inventory. One of these games was Battletech. It starts off OK, basically Desert Strike with mechs. You lumber around a map destroying objectives and fighting gun turrets, tanks, infantry, and other mechs. As a 7 year old I could complete the first stage pretty easily. Then the next stage took place on a red desert planet where all the landscape features looked like the Grand Canyon. I got completely overwhelmed by impenetrable waves of enemies. If memory serves, the demo screen at the start would show a swamp planet. I reached that planet exactly once. It was level 3 and it was even harder than the Grand Canyon planet, slaughtering me less than a minute into it. I was usually a pretty persistent kid back then, but after that I capitulated. About 20 years later I went to chibby 's house where we played a bunch of Sega Genesis games. One of them was Battletech. We beat the first level, moderately enjoying ourselves. I started to wonder if the Grand Canyon planet seemed so difficult because my hand to eye coordination wasn't that well developed or something. Nope! We got ravaged again. So we put the game back on the shelf. It hasn't moved since. |
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Post by Ex on Mar 17, 2019 17:25:01 GMT -5
XeogredAs far as the Xeno stuff goes... I own copies of Xenogear, Xenosaga 1-3, and Xenoblade Chronicles X. I've not played any of those yet. I used to own Xenoblade Chronicles but I sold it after I beat it (was a 7/10 for me). It is interesting how ambitious Tetsuya Takahashi is, he certainly has grand visions. Wasn't the Saga series supposed to have like 9 games in it originally? My question is does Xenogear's plot tie into the Xenosaga series directly? Any real relation there?
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 17, 2019 19:10:02 GMT -5
Ever heard of the Xenogears Perfect Works book? A glance over this is enough to showcase how insanely ambitious Tetsuya Takahashi might be: www.flickr.com/photos/29956195@N08/sets/72157616593453778/I was recently stumbling upon some lore/theory videos around XBX where a lot of stuff on the side of that game seems to still be fleshing out ideas and concepts Takahashi laid out here in Perfect Works. That's the last Xeno I need to play and beat but I generally don't hear much about the story and thought I usually read that Takahashi was pretty hands off on this one. I guess the good details are in the side quests and hidden away, per usual with some MMO open world style stuff... who knows, maybe I'll love it when I get around to it (cool to see it has playable mecha again unlike the other XB's). XBX does seem to be heaviest on the sci-fi after Xenosaga, planet colonization is a thing in this one I think. So that's cool, but yeah I love the worlds for all of them, but Xenosaga is super duper sci-fi compared to the rest. It's anime Mass Effect. To subtly connect a saga across three different companies and owners is remarkable haha. I read that in Japan from Sakaguchi or some Square Soft staff that they kind of just see "Xeno" as "a Tetsuya Takahashi game". That and name recognition/sales. But yeah, it's fascinating how metaphors and allusions continue to develop across the Xeno's, from Square Soft, to Namco, and now Nintendo... They're never officially directly connected but Xenogears and Xenosaga do cross over a fair bit, especially in Xenosaga III with child incarnations of characters that might look incredibly familiar from Xenogears, I'm talking the two main characters! The allusions are aggressive in this one, it's not just little cameos or nods to fans! There's the gold "Zophar" emblem statue stuff that seems to keep popping up in all of these too. So yeah, I'd say someone that has played Xenogears will get some extra out of Xenosaga. From there I think it's just recurring themes and similar scenarios/worlds, where one can easily imagine a lot of the Xeno's are set in the same universe in ways. Perfect Works lays out at least 5 main stories and when you beat Xenogears it says "Episode V" haha.
What we got out of Xenosaga and the "Shion Arc", was only supposed to be two games originally. It was indeed supposed to be a saga of like 6 installments at least with monstrous 10,000 year gaps and stuff (so yeah don't worry at all about Xenogears or Xenosaga not being conclusive, they are for sure!) Supposedly one of the middle games was going to be a remake of Xenogears too. I forget the details of the rest, one arc of a game or two was going to cover some big war and maybe more on the Gnosis aliens in Xenosaga, but I'm not sure. The main details just seem to be that the Shion Arc got extended and Xenogears was going to be remade at some point.
KOS-MOS is in Xenoblade 2 but it's a pure fan service cross over thing. Pretty fun though, it's neat that Namco and Nintendo play nice. There's a small rally for a Xenosaga HD Trilogy to happen and even Harada of Tekken fame has publicly told fans to make their voices heard so maybe Namco would consider it (I could even see Monolith Soft doing it for them or helping out), but yeah. Only a few people out there that enjoy rambling about this franchise like myself. lol
Whether any of this further boosts your interest, excites you, or scares you away from them... I have no idea.  
I don't want this to sound like it belittles the games themselves at all, but I've been of the mindset that if Xenosaga were perfectly adapted into a ~100+ episode anime it would probably be my #1. EDIT: There is a short OVA, but it only covers like 10% of the first Xenosaga and changes some weird things. I still enjoyed it a good bit though.
Glad we're still on topic too. Mecha are a big deal in Gears/Saga. 
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Post by Sarge on Mar 17, 2019 20:56:21 GMT -5
I'd say small nods for series fans, but nothing that directly ties in.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 18, 2019 21:34:58 GMT -5
So, out of curiosity, did anyone play the MechCommander games? My understanding was that they're a sort of RTS-style of game, and I think I remember them being well-received. I don't have the sort of chops to judge whether an RTS is that good, though, or whether they've stood up until now.
Also, how about Heavy Gear? I remember my brother playing through the first, and also having the second, but our CD drive had issues reading the disc. Very annoying. I think I do have another copy that reads fine, and I'm also guessing the other one reads okay in another drive, too.
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Post by Ex on Mar 18, 2019 22:00:47 GMT -5
did anyone play the MechCommander games? I played the Gold version of the original many years back, although only about half the first mission. It seemed incredibly difficult, likely because I didn't read the manual first. I can't say if the game was actually good or bad based on that limited experience. I prefer turn-based to RTS in general though. RTS always seems to devolve into the same strategy. I played the original HG back in the late '90s. I remember being unimpressed with it, thinking that MechWarrior II was a lot better. I didn't spend enough time with it to be sure. IIRC I thought the rollerskates (or jets) on the mech's feet were a good idea? Man that was a long time ago. Honestly there's a lot of '90s mecha PC games I barely played. Stuff like Metaltech: EarthSiege, Shattered Steel, Ultrabots, and Slave Zero come to mind. I should start working on a '90s PC mech game collection actually. There's so much stuff I missed back then, due to being oblivious to it during its time. |
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