Game Review:
Xenogears.
RPG (Duh)
1 Player (except during battling)
I've clocked about 70 hours and I haven't beaten it yet.
A mysterious dark gear rockets from the sky, and stops just short of the ground assuming an arms-crossed
pose. It begins to glow. A voice is heard from within the machine...
"I am Grahf, the Seeker of Professional Help... I mean Power! POWER! Dammnit..."
... don't mistake it, folks... in Xenogears, there's a whole lot of Psychology going on. There's also a whole lot of religion, a whole lot of politics, and a whole lot of giant robots - and everyone knows: you CAN'T go wrong with giant robots.
...
Well actually, you can. However, generally Xenogears is a very good game... if you're patent. First, let's get the bad things out of the way.
IT'S CONFUSING - For the first 50 hours of the game they hint at things vaguely basically causing the gaming public to go "What the hell are you talking about?" In the last 10 hours before the last dungeon they explain everything in one fell swoop... this game is VERY complicated and until they tell you everything you'll be wondering what the hell is going on.
Tax Bracket - In -Xenogears- characters 'tend' to randomly -place- quotes and dashes around 'words' for no good -reason-. At least they dont [DO THIS] like some games.
S l o w t e x t s p e e d - The text literally crawls in some places, and there's no way to speed it up by turning up an option or pressing a button when it's on screen. Add this to the fact that between a save point and a difficult battle always lies about twenty minutes of text, and shopkeepers tend to have conversations before letting you choose items- it gets annoying.
Disk Two - If you've played it, you know what i'm talking about. Once you beat the last boss of Disc 1, you suddenly have absoultely no control over the game. I'm not a big fan of non-linearity, but this is rediculous. Instead of getting instructions and then piloting your ship (and visiting towns, levelling up, and stuff, you're treated to page after page of narration (and poetry) where the characters tell you what they did and where they went... even worse, is when they tell you they explored these areas and stick you with fighting the boss. Hello, Square, did you lose your mind here? You do get fancy still screens, but that's really it until the time JUST before the last boss... you then get a chance to visit a total of 4 new areas (a town, two dungeons, and the final area), and most of the OTHER areas are innaccessable (for some unknown reason... the towns are there, you just can't go to them) - Basically the most important 20 hours of the game involves pressing x a lot... am I the only one that finds this kind of silly?
Pause Time - For some reason, during battle whenever something needs to be loaded it takes about twenty seconds for it to even start looking for the data on the disc. I spent the entire game fearing one of these freezes would decide to never kick out of it therefore effectively freezing up the game.
Bart's on-foot attacks - They take too damn long.
The worst oversight ever - The game for some reason involves many "Jumping Puzzles" where you have to judge your jumps and make it to the end of an area- this makes no sense to begin with since most of them are in your Gears, and they can freaking FLY, but the really, really annoying thing is that if a random battle starts you can still move around until it loads up the battle music/transition, but you can't jump... so unless you stop instantly when you hear the light reading sounds from your Playstation, you'll end up walking straight off the edge... this, combined with some of the really cheap things (there's a very difficult jump, and right after there's this platform that falls down if you stand on it too long (and you have to to get a good bearing on the next jump) so you spend 5 minutes making the first jump only finding you have to do it AGAIN
But it's not all bad...
But you know what? Despite all this, Xenogears is still an incredible game. The sprites are decent, the polygon environments are very cool looking, many of the gears are just kick-ass, the music is incredible, but all of this comes second to what is the richest story ever in a video game. Political strife, manipulation, religion, mental anguish, and various other themes are prevailent... with several groups interacting in many different ways, and 10,000 years of history to keep track of, it's not a simple game. Through most of the game you'll be saying 'wha...' but moments will come when you say 'Wow...' and 'So that's it...' and that's the driving force. Just trying to find out what the large cast of mysterious characters are up to.
The battle system is standard ATB, only you have three levels of attacks and certian combos of these attacsk can bring really powerful attacks- and also there are both on-foot and gear battles to add a lot of variety. Also, this game has the best battle transition ever instead of doing a blurry-spinny thing, the screen literally shatters while the music cues up. Oddly, a certian part of the game it never shattered and instead did an odd 'wobbly' thing, but the shattering resumed later.
All in all, it's an excellent game. Get it, if you can. That's all I have to say.
-webrunner, who has more MAD SKILLZ then Hammar ever will.
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