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Robots+Religion+Sigmund Freud+Anime= Xenogears
noir_blood
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Perhaps my favorite RPG of all time, and one that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough in this forum. Xenogears was released on October 1998, and it was one of Square's first rpg after the goliath that was FFVII. At first it was believed that it would not be published in America do to some religious overtones.
From Wikipedia:
Xenogears initially takes place on the largest continent of the Xenogears world, Ignas, where the nations of Aveh and Kislev have been waging war on each other for centuries. An organization known as the Ethos, which is a church-like organization dedicated to preserving the world's culture, has excavated giant fighting robots called Gears. Gears have had a major effect on the war and have almost entirely replaced the need for human infantry. Although Kislev was gaining the upper hand in the war, a mysterious army known as Gebler appeared and started providing assistance to Aveh. With Gebler's help, Aveh not only recovered their losses, but began making their way into Kislev's territory.
So what's so great about this game?
Probably the biggest thing Xenogears has going for it is the story. To try to seriously recap it in a few sentences would be doing the whole thing a disservice. Suffice to say, it deals with politics, religion, reincarnation, and the human mind. Also, there's giant robots, one that can even transform from a space ship and back.
The battle system-
Using a variant of the ATB system that we known from the FF games, Xenogears inserts a bit more depth to the procedue with the introduction of Action Points(AP) You start off the battle with a certain number, and every action uses a few up. You can store the ap points for bigger chains of commands, which are attributed to the square and x button. You can't just press circle and flip the channel if you want to win.
There are also the Gear battles, which is where the giant robots come into play. AP is instead replaced with a fuel gauge, and the robots also have special attacks, just like the characters.
The graphics-
I personally thought they suited the game perfectly. It is a mix of polygon backgrounds and sprites, ala the first Grandia. There are also several anime cutscenes sprinkled through out, although unfortunetly they are horribly voiced acted.
The Music-
Oh god, the MUSIC. Yasunori Mitsuda is the composer, and he also composed the music for the Chrono games. There's a strong celtic background to almost all the pieces.
Can I still find the game?
Yes. Amazon has several listed for 35 dollars, and you can even find it cheaper in ebay.
What else should I know?
Much of the lore and background story of Xenogears is detailed in a japanese only book titled Xenogears Perfect Works. It details the history of the Xenogear worlds and it's timeline.
Xenosaga- An RPG series published by Namco. It has many of the same people that worked in the original Xenogears, and many striking similarities. I never played the second or third game, so I can't comment if there are any actual links or not.
noir_blood on
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Wow....I can't even begin to think how that particular rumor got started. There is no scientology whatsoever in the game.
Also I do remember having played a demo of this. Some npc pinned me in a narrow walking space and wouldn't move out of the way so I had to power off.
I don't have the time to play this game.
But I love it so
Too many freaking games, head asplode
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
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Yeah, disc 1 was great, then disc 2 had to come along and break up the party.
PROTIP:
Final Fantasy VII was originally going to use the Xenogears engine. A new engine was forked from it, however the overworld shared much of the same code, along with much of the fieldscript system.
The engine evolved like this.
Xenogears -> FF7 -> Parasite Eve -> FF9 -> Parasite Eve 2
FFX was based off of a heavily modified Vagrant Story engine.
That, I did not know, but I'm imagining FFVII with Xenogears' art style and grinning wildly.
I'm relieved they changed the pace of the second disk. The story doesn't really slow down, they just change the viewpoint and remove the inner workings of usual in-game conversations. Also, I fucking love this game so much.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
WOW - Dark iron - Eldrick
PSN - HeavyE
Live - Heavy E
Also, Xenogears is total shite.
Take it from a man...of the sea!
Oo\ Ironsizide
XBL: Torn Hoodie
@hoodiethirteen
Also, yes, I definitely caught some links to the story in Xenogears... but there's a reason. They all come from the same series of books. Xenosaga is the first one - Xenogears, from what I remember, is like, number 6 or 7. What I wouldn't give to get translated copies of these books... Also, there's a complete guide, with story information, character backgrounds, in-depth everything, in JAPANESE ONLY, and is super-mega-rare. It's called Xenogears Complete, I think. A friend of mine had an electronic copy at one point, gave it to me but I lost it with a reformat. Unfortunately, there wasn't really anything there for me, cause of the language.
Any specific information, with sources, would be much appreciated.
Well, at least not in the first. The second improved, but Xenogears is still tops when it comes to fun combat.
Also, music.
Mitsuda still did Xenosaga Episode I's score, but I hardly noticed. The idea of him doing a score with the London Philharmonic was practically the reason I got the game, yet there was little to no music in that game at all.
There's so many levels and environments with nothing but silence.
Best JRPG ever? Best JRPG ever.
Throwing Nietzsche and Freud around doesn't automatically make something deep, y'know.
Second rule of Teacher Club: You DO NOT touch the kids.
One of my favorite things in the game is playing the card game as Citan, then losing. His sound bite for that makes it sound like he's about to cry.
See, I thought the opposite. Although innovative with gear fights, it could be improved. The story, on the other hand was amazing right from the start and never backed off. Part of the reason it was awesome was the fact that it had one, compared to most jRPGs which consist of basically "Get all 4 crystals" or "Stop the evil Bad Guy".
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Well, you're pretty muddled on the facts, so let me see if I can clarify.
For the record, there are no "books". The original planned story of the whole Xeno tale was to take place over 7 chapters. Now, for whatever stupidly silly reason, they decided to pull a George Lucas and start off with 6. As far as how the chapters would have gone, if you recall back to Xenogear's story, each chapter would have been each era we saw in flashbacks, with Ch.1 being with Abel and how he got on the planet, and so on all the way to Ch.7 which would have been a direct sequel/aftermath of Xenogear's story with the same characters. The guide you're thinking of is the only real book out there, but it's just a detailed guide of how the story would have gone, and not like a novel or anything.
Now, we get into one of the major inherit problems of trying to write and create a grand sweeping plot using media, in this case the videogame medium. It's never up to the creators, it's up to the publisher and the suits running it. I don't know what happened to Xenogears, but it's probably around the time that Square's Final Fantasy movie bombed and nearly took the company with it, and when they decided to focus on the real money maker, the FF games. So the creators took their story to Namco and made Xenosaga. This time starting at Chapter 1, and planning to go the whole 6-7 chapters with the story. But... it bombed, or at least wasn't received as well as they hoped. But, they soldier on, and make part 2, and it does even worse. So the suits step in, and can the series, but thankfully letting them get one last game out to tie up the loose ends. In the end, the planned grand story of the Xeno universe was slammed shut by the almighty dollar. There was also a lot of controversy behind the scenes too that also led to its demise. Wikipedia has info on that if you wanna look it up, and I'm sure there are other sites with more details.
Either way, that's mostly the story as I can remember it. It's also one of the reasons I'm a staunch opposer of game designers who say they're planning on making their series into a trilogy, like recently Heavenly Sword and Mass Effect. Because it's not up to them. If the first game does poorly, or even just "not as well as we had hoped" in business lingo, your story that you thought you had time to build on through multiple games is now tossed into limbo. Either to be heavily condensed, cut, and rushed into one more game, or even just gone, never to be resolved.
Elly is still my favorite videogame character. I would marry her in a heartbeat, my gayness be damned. I know there was a figure of her and one of Fei produced with a limited edition of the game in Japan. Wish I had it.
I think the thing that keeps me coming back is the love story. The cyclical tragedy of Fei and Elly's relationship was pulled off rather well, especially the Zeboim iteration. I played Xeno right before FF VIII, and while I was playing the latter, I kept thinking how poorly its love story, the major theme of the game, was executed compared to Xeno's.
Also, Citan kicks everyone's ass, and everyone should strive to become a MAN. OF. THE. SEA.
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
What was up with Citan, anyway? He felt like the strongest character from beginning to end. He so did not need a sword, but they gave him one anyway.
He definitely wasn't balanced. Great attacks, great elemental combinations, and great Ethers? That's a recipe for ass kicking. I don't think I ever used a party that didn't include him.
The thing that irked me about Citan wasn't his imbalance in combat, but that he was a crutch for the plot. It seemed as though every time context to a new plot point was needed, Citan would be the one to explain what was really going on.
As an aside, I read that some other posters have tried Xenosaga. I tried Episode I three or four times before completing it. It starts off slow, but the pace really picks up after the Cathedral Ship part. The end really feels Xenogears-ish, complete with another performance by Joanne Hogg.
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
It definitely reached for the stars, although that made its epic faceplant that much more grand.
I played the game when it first came out (I was in college) and really loved it. Played 50+ hours and got all the way up to the early parts of the final dungeon before the need to grind to get my Gears in workable shape just killed off my interest. I was playing my roommate's copy, so we parted ways and I never got the chance to finish the game. I chanced upon a used copy several years later and gave it a shot, expecting to relive all of my wonderful memories ... and the game was total shit, a massive turd pressed onto disc. It's amazing what a few years of perspective can show you: the "epic" writing was contrived and simplistic, the "deep" storyline was mindless pop-psychology hacked together from the worst corners of anime logic and the "innovative" battle system was repetitive and dull. I got so tired of the heavyhanded foreshadowing and absurd symbolism that I just gave up on it.
The core of the story was actually interesting, or at least what I remember of it. It's a shame the plot was so thickly overgrown with heady bullshit. By the time you finally limp past the finish line of Disc 1 and are faced with Disc 2's endless walls of text -- where you no longer play the game and Fei feels content to just sit there and tell you about the game you're not playing -- it's clear the game is far too big for its britches. It's always the worst writers that insist they don't need an editor.
Although on the positive side, the game did give me the mental imagery of Chu Chu on a crucifix, which remains one of my favorite gaming moments of all time.
Actually, I should qualify that.
I don't want my universe saved by teenagers or elementary school students if there's no good reason for them to look like that.
Persona 3's plot requires that the main characters be high school students because of the layout of the game. I didn't like Ken for this reason: they could have done the same story with a teenager going to school with the rest.
But Xenosaga's ages made no sense at all:
Shiron: The head of R&D for a major corporation at age 20? Sorry, but no. Even if she was smart enough, no multi-billion dollar company is going to stake its future on someone who hasn't had years of experience.
Junior: The reason for him to look like an elementary school student was bullshit and creepy. Though I did laugh when he and Gaignun were tag teaming hookers or groupies or whoever those girls were.
chaos: Screw chaos. Learn to capitalize. Anyway.
KOS-MOS is alright. There's no particularly good reason (outside of standard anime fanservice) for the ultimate weapon to look like a girl, but at least she's not some bishojo wank fantasy like MOMO.
MOMO: Yeah, I said it. Bishojo wank fantasy. The fact that Junior is actually older than he looks makes the romance angle even creepier.
Ziggy was the only real adult in the crew for the first game, and why I never played without him when I had a choice. Jin was the other adult, but he wasn't terribly available through a lot of the game.
I'm not sure what happened with the characters in part 3. I lost interest when the ending of 2 bored me to tears.
Sorry for the hijack, but I had to get that off my chest.
Beyond her brilliance, there's a reason behind this:
1. The individual who called the Gnosis into our realm of existence.
2. Mary Magdaline's servant (Mary herself is two people -- the spirt is in KOS-MOS, while the body was used for T-ELOS).
Oh, chaos is Jeshua, btw.
A bullshit reason, but a reason nonetheless.
Junior, despite the "Hi, I'm Ash from Pokemon" voice acting, was probably my favorite character.
Agreed. And whoever decided to turn him into an emobitch in Episode II deserves to be fired.
I never really liked KOS-MOS all that much. Standard "I'm a cold, logical machine, but you know deep down inside I feel something" faire.
Question:
I liked Ziggy, but he didn't have a big part in II from what I could see. Jin annoyed the hell out of me. His voice actor sounded like Adam West, and he kept doing this weird "I'm patting my own shoulder/back" thing, which made no sense, unless you thought of him as Mayor Adam West. Which I did. It made Jin pretty funny to watch.
Switch: SW-3515-0057-3813 FF XIV: Q'vehn Tia
They were great games with great stories.
XBL - Foreverender | 3DS FC - 1418 6696 1012 | Steam ID | LoL
Yes, yes, all that is fine, but what would have been lost making her, you know, credible as having a doctorate? 30, maybe. 28 at the youngest.
He had a good storyline and attacks, but the entire thing was so sketchy. Nothing would have been lost by making him the same age as his brothers.
I don't even remember. This game had more wonky sci-fi mysticism than Star Wars. The fact that it could deal with topics that I tend to love in games... apocalypse, biblical themes, etc. and still be forgettable and bore the hell out of me is saying quite a lot, actually.
That's true, the game doesn't pull any punches when it comes to being frustrating. Tower of Babel, I'm looking at YOU!
My appreciation and enjoyment of the game increased with each time I played through it. The polar opposite of Lunker's opinion. Also, Xenosaga was a pretty bad excuse to continue on the Xenogears awesomeness, and to me it was profoundly worse.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!