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A moving and compelling example of why we fell in love with RPGs in the first place.
Xenogears
Developer: Squaresoft/Monolith Software
Platform: Playstation
Genre: RPG
When I was a kid, Super NES RPGs were my life. I couldn't get enough of Final Fantasy 4, Chrono trigger or EarthBound. Final Fantasy 6 devoured hundreds of hours of my childhood and Super Mario RPG stole every last second of my free time that it could manage. I loved RPGs so much because of a few key factors. 1) The story and characters were engrossing. 2) The games were long. A single $70 purchase would provide a game that would give me ten times the amount of longevity I could ever get from any other type opf game. I could pool all of my Christmas presents into a single SNES RPG cart and be satisfied for at least six months until my birthday rolled around and I could repeat the process with another game.
In recent years, however, that trend has been failing. I'm out of school, I have a full-time job and I've got other responsibilities that prevent me from vegging out in front of my TV for an excess of 100 hours on a single game. I simply don't have the time to devote to lengthy console RPGs anymore. I've recently taken much more to shorter, action or adventure-based games simply because they allow me much more freedom with my free time.
But, just recently I reverted back to my childhood habits. In late April, I was visiting a friend of mine in Denver during his last week of school. While there, I stopped by a local Gamestop and checked to see what they had available in their used PS1 bin. I checked each title, and upon coming to the end of the stack, I spied a game that I had been frantically trying to locate for a number of years: Xenogears. Priced at $20, I did not hesitate to snag the game merrily. Upon arriving back at home a few days later, I immediately popped it into my PS2 and began playing a game that would proceed to devour over 90 hours of my free time thereafter.
Story
Several centuries into our future, we have taken to the furthest reaches of space, abandoning our home planet in search of greater conquest and adventure. One day, the space transport ship, Eldridge, is rocketing through the galaxy carrying an entire city's worth of people. Suddenly the computer systems of the ship are attacked by an unknown assailant. This entity begins taking over every computerized action of the ship and starts killing off the entire passenger population. Several escape pods jettison from the hull and each one is shot down mercilessly by the ship's onboard defense systems. Realizing that not a soul aboard the ship will make it out alive, the captain initiates the self-destruct sequence. The ship is blown to pieces and the largest remaining part of the hull (the bridge coincidentally) crashes to the surface of a nearby uninhabited planet. From the wreckage emerges a single female with long violet hair...
Over 10,000 years later, the world has been re-populated with human life. On the continent of Ignas (the largest on the planet) two opposing countries vie for supremacy of the land. Kislev, the northern industrial city and Aveh, the southern desert kingdom. The war has been a violent one so far, with both sides pushing each other back and forth, neither side ever really gaining any true ground over the other. However, recently a third party has entered the fracas. An elite military force known simply as Gebler has interfered, providing Aveh with technology, manpower and intellect with which to obliterate the Kislev enemy.
In the heat of this war, people thrive in one specific field of expertise: the excavation, repair, maintenance and operation of massive humanoid battle mechs called "Gears". These Gears are the cornerstone of the war effort, providing the central source of firepower and technological strength for the opposing forces. Keeping the Gear industry organized and under control is a religious institution known as the Ethos. They provide the people with the knowledge, equipment and ability to maintain and co-exist with the Gears.
In the small mountain village of Lahan lives a young man named Fei Fong Wong. Three years ago, he was brought to the village by a cloaked man in a mask and left to the care of the people. Fei was badly injured and remained unconscious for several days before recovering. Upon awakening, he came to realize that he had absolutely no memory of his life prior to arriving in Lahan. He was only even aware of his name because one of the townspeople that took care of him told him after having been informed by the masked man. For the last three years, Fei has lived quietly and peacefully in Lahan, spending his days painting and teaching the local children martial arts. However, one day the war in Ignas spreads further than the people in Lahan would have ever guessed, enveloping Fei in the process and exposing him to a destiny and a curse that would determine the fate of all humanity.
That was certainly a mouthful! If any of that struck you as confusing, don't worry about it, I was a little lost in the beginning too. The plot in this game acts as the central motivating factor to continue playing. Through the course of playing Xenogears, I was not compelled to press on further because of the excitement over attaining a new Gear or a new Deathblow skill. I continually moved forward primarily in order to learn more about the plot and the fate of each of the characters. This game is one of the absolute best examples I can conjure of a plot done right. Everything about this story is captivating, engrossing and thought-provoking. The story is told in a completely uncompromising manner, and nothing is sugar-coated or dumbed down for the player. You either accept what the game gives you, and work to figure the plot out, or you pansy-out and quit. You won't be seeing cheesy resolutions to major problems and you won't be encountering soft responses to nasty situations. People are going to die, lives are going to be shattered and you will be left in the wake of it all. If you're looking for a truly emotional and endearing story, it's hard to find better than this.
Gameplay
Any seasoned veteran of traditional RPGs should have little trouble adapting to Xenogears' style. The game uses the tried-and-true Final fantasy style random encounter system (you know, you walk around for a while and suddenly, without warning, you're sucked into a battle). You still gain experience, you still earn levels and you still use items and magic in order to keep yourself alive. There's a world map, dungeons and towns just like you would expect from any Final Fantasy game.
The combat system is certainly the least conventional aspect of the game, considering there are esentially two different systems. The first is the man-to-man combat system. When out of your Gears, you fight enemies face-to-face. You are given a standard menu of options such as Attack, Defend, Item, Escape and "Ether" (magic). Each one of these options is executed just how you'd expect with the exception of the Attack option. When you choose to attack an enemy, you are allocated a certain number of Action Points with which to use however you wish. There are three levels of attack: quick, strong and fierce. Quick attacks cost 1 point, strong attacks cost 2 and fierce cost 3. Obviously, quick attacks are the weakest and fierce are the strongest, but on the flipside, quick attacks have the highest percentage of actually hitting the target and fierce have a much greater tendency to miss. You can mix and match the attacks however you like, just so long as you've got the AP to support them.
The other interesting aspect of the combat system is the list of "Deathblow" attacks for each character. These skills are special attack combinations that result in large combos or other devastating maneuvers. Each character uses the exact same list of inputs for their Deathblows (i.e. in order to execute Fei's first Deathblow, you hit quick then fierce. The exact same thing applies to all characters first Deathblows) and as such, it keeps the combat system from being too complicated. The Deathblows are absolutely critical to winning the toughter hand-to-hand fights in the game and as such you should spend an appropriate amount of time learning them. Actually receiving them is simple enough, but time-consuming. You just repeatedly use the Deathblow combination in battle until your character learns it. After learning the attack, the character will be able to use it whenever he wants at absolutely no cost. Many of these attacks are particularly entertaining to watch, especially the last few for each character at which point the attacks start becoming more superhuman and destructive. Watching Fei leap into the air and rain down a hailstorm of energy blasts upon his enemy is just too damned cool.
Then there's the Gear combat system. While in your Gears, the combat is structured differently than in the face-to-face battles. Each Gear has a set amount of fuel that must be spent in order to execute an attack, heal the Gear's HP or activate the Gear's Booster option. You only get one attack per round in your Gears, but you still get Deathblows. Every time you attack, your "Attack Level increases by 1, and starting at a minimum of 1 you can use a Level 1 Deathblow, or you can hold off and build your level higher in order to use more powerful Deathblows. Now, while this may not sound terribly different from the face-to-face combat system, it's actually much more diverse than you would imagine. Properly managing and balancing your fuel and HP is a tricky thing. Should I blow 1000 units of fuel to heal myself now or should I save it for when I'm really hurting in the upcoming boss fight? The thing that makes it tricky is that you have no ability to restore fuel quickly in a dungeon unless you stumble across a repair bot. You can use the "Charge" option during combat to recharge a small amount of fuel each round, but that leaves you quite vulnerable to attack and it doesn't actually do much good until you get some later items that allow you to regain a lot more fuel with the option. Outside of dungeons, there is always a Gear Garage in each town and on your ship, the Yggdrasil, that you can use to restore your Gear's HP and fuel instantly.
Outside of combat, you still need to equip your characters and Gears with new and better equipment in order to survive. Your characters equip standard stuff; new armor, weapons and accessories. Your Gears, however, are the fun part. You see, simply running around and fighting with your Gear is not going to make it tougher or stronger. Gears don't level-up. In order to improve your Gear, you need to plunk down a chunk of cash in order to upgrade it's most basic components: the Engine, the Frame and the Armor. The engine determines the Gear's attack value and it's maximum fuel capacity, the frame determines the Gear's max HP and the armor determines the Gear's defense and Ether defense. In addition to those things, you can also equip your Gears with three extra accessories that range from anything like extra armor to special chips that increase agility to items that allow you to regain more fuel each time you use the Charge option. Constantly maintaining and upgrading your Gears is crucial to your success, because most of the boss battles are done inside of your Gears.
Aside from that, the rest of the game is fairly familiar territory. If you're already a fan of the Final Fantasy series, then you should have no problem easing right into Xenogears' gameplay.
Graphics
This can be an odd one. The 3D standard of the Final Fantasy games has always been (up until the release of FF10, that is) pre-rendered 2D backgrounds with 3D character models. That's the system they used in FF7 through 9. Xenogears is the exact opposite. 2D animated sprite characters in 3D environments. It sounds odd, I know, but it works very well. The camera is always handled properly and you'll rarely comment to yourself about the sprites looking out of place or flat in comparison with the surroundings. All of the sprites are very well-animated, particlularly in combat. My only beef with the character sprites is that they're pretty badly pixelated when viewed up-close. It's a good thing that the camera stays swung back most of the time, providing much smoother sprites.
Now, while the character sprites are handled in 2D, all of the Gears are done in 3D and all of the Gear models are quite impressive. Each of the Gears has a distinct design and sense of character to them. I most certainly have my favorites and least favorites in that regard. Fei's Gears (mainly his second one) are probably the coolest in the game while I never found myself terribly fond of any of Citan's Gears. However, all are interesting and fun to play with in their own respects. If I have one beef with the Gears, it's that the animations could have used a lot more work. A lot of the movements and actions of the Gears seem too stiff to be believable sometimes. I realize that these are huge robots we're talking about, and robotic movement is a given in that territory, but it would have been nice to see things like inertia or weight being taken into account when animating the Gears.
The 3D areas are all very well-designed and some can actually come across as quite daunting at first. Walking through the streets of Bledavik (the Aveh capital) can actually be a bit confusing for a while as can navigating some of the other larger locales like a massive flying city or Nortune's Prison Block. However, none of them are so large that you will be perpetually lost in them. All of the game's locations become familiar very quickly and you'll have little trouble getting from one place to another.
The special effects are generally well-handled, although sparse. This is a second (maybe third) generation PS1 game, after all. You won't be seeing bump-mapping or dynamic lighting anywhere in this game. The majority of the SFX are delegated solely to combat effects like spells and Deathblows and they work in those areas.
The one final graphical aspect to evaluate is the cutscene selection. Ah yes, where would a Squaresoft Playstation game be without the cinema sequences we've all come to love since seeing Sephiroth skewer that tart Aeris? Well...it would be Threads of Fate, but I won't even dignify that with further discussion.
Back on topic, the cutscenes are a pretty mixed bag. The game doesn't feature very many of them, and what little there is has been divided into CG sequences and anime sequences. The CG sequences are great, as is to be expected, and it's thankful that there are probably more of them than anime sequences in this game. The anime scenes are a bit trickier. This game was released in 1998, the animation was probably done long before that and it clearly shows. The animation quality is very mid-nineties, looking a lot like something you'd see in an old episode of The Guyver. On top of that, the english dub isn't even passable. The lip-synching is some of the most laughably bad dubbing I've ever seen in anime and the voice acting is mediocre in it's best moments. The most impressive anime sequence in the entire game is actually the intro cutscene, which is a stunning combination of CG and anime. It's extremely well animated, well acted and well-dubbed. It is a sore disappointment to see that none of the following anime sequences lived up to the standards set by the intro.
But, like I said, there isn't a ton of anime in the game anyway. It's mostly CG work and that's the best stuff.
Sound
I'll start with the music. In a word, it's phenomenal. Nearly every piece of music in the game is extremely memorable and will crawl inside your head for weeks after hearing it. There is one simple explanation for why the musical selection in the game is so good: Yasunori Mitsuda. He's the man responsible for the music in Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Mr. Mitsuda went balls-out for Xenogears, creating a score that rivals that of Chrono trigger and is consistently and dependably exquisite. Every piece ranging from the combat music to the Shevat City theme (which will immediately summon memories of the Kingdom of Zeal) is fantastic.
The sound effects are, for the most part, reliable as well. The Gears clank and crash with robust metallic noise and all of the spells and Deathblows are accompanied by the appropriate sounds of chaos they merit. My only real complaint in the sound effects department is that I really feel there should have been more attention paid to environmental effects such as the sound of walking through snow or footsteps clocking on stone floors. I realize that these sort of effects were never really focused on in the Playstation FF games, but in a full 3D environment, it's nice to have those effects for the sake of realism.
Finally, there's the voice acting. I mentioned this one before, and I will re-state the above point by saying that, thankfully, the voice acting in this game is fairly minimal. The characters rarely speak outside of battle, and when in battle the voices are confined mostly to grunts and screams. The only other places that voice acting is prominently found outside of combat are in the cutscenes, and I don't think I need to reiterate how terrible the voicework is in those sequences. Thankfully, it's minimal.
Flaws
For the sake of convenience, I'll repeat all of my issues with the game here.
1) The character sprites are pretty pixelated up-close. At a greater distance they look much better, but when zoomed in, they can be a bit of an eyesore.
2) The Gear animations are pretty stiff and little to no attention was paid to the physics engine for the Gear animations. There's not really any discernible sense of weight or momentum to the Gears, and as such, the animations feel kinda fake.
3) The anime cutscenes can be a headache. The animation quality is not terribly impressive. Not horrible, but certainly dated. On top of that, the voice acting is simply atrocious. The dubbing isn't passable in any way, shape or form and the actual line delivery is wooden and flat. Thankfully, there's vey little of it in the game.
Overall
In the intro, I explained that it took me 90 hours to beat this game. I've heard from numerous people that they spent around 50 or 60 hours in order to beat it. Why did it take me so friggin' long to finish this game? Because it's phenomenal, and I wanted to suck every last second of entertainment out of it that I could. The story is simply unbelievable, the characters are some of the most interesting people ever created for a videogame and the atmosphere and feel of the entire package is simply amazing. If you happen to see this game sitting in a used bin for 20 bucks, you would do better just to punch yourself right in the balls rather than be stupid enough to pass this game up. If you have seen this game sitting in the used bin and you have already passed it up, go ahead and punch yourself in the testicles a few times right this second, because you're a foolish, foolish human being. Start scouring your local malls and find a copy of this game as soon as possible. It's worth every second of free time you can spare. You can thank me later.
Score: 9.4
 
Last edited by Raziel; 2004-08-26 at 01:58 AM.
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