Xenogears (1998)

Finally beat after first finding out about it from internet music radio back in the early 2000s. I would have loved this back when it was released because it is up there with FF7, Chrono Cross and the best of SNES as one of the best jrpgs of all time. The story was cryptic to the point of not knowing what was going on, especially when viewing scenes where the main character was not present. Eventually, everything came together in multiple mind blowing reveals. The story and lore were fascinating and make me wonder how it relates to the Xenosaga trilogy. Do the games take place in the same universe, and if so which came first? After reading some lore outside the game I could see Xenosaga taking place before or after this game.

The game started off fairly easy and was very engaging with the button sequence combat system. I liked the tactical variety in enemies, such as armored enemies that required magic to kill, enemies that counter attack deathblows thus encouraging use of the combo system, and others. At first I tried to ration my attacks to defeat enemies with the fewest possible number of attacks and button presses, to build up AP for combos, but the combo system was mostly pointless. There were some fights where I just did a single weak attack to build up points for a big combo because regular deathblows were missing or being countered, or the enemy was healing. There were other boss fights where the 1 extra AP from each turn built up to allow a slightly more powerful turn near the end of the fight. But the combo system could have not been in the game at all for how useful it was. Before I had any deathblows I was trying to calculate the best set of moves to perform; lots of weak attacks vs high evasion enemies to minimize the potential damage loss from missing, and only the strongest attacks for easy to hit enemies. This was largely irrelevant though and I found myself either using the most powerful deathblow or specific sequences to try and learn more deathblows. I never unlocked all deathblows; only getting the triangle X series up to 7 AP, square X, and XX. I did not like the tedium of learning new deathblows, and the combat got a little stale doing the same moves over and over. I liked how the 7 point deathblows had different elemental damage, and it would have been better if the earlier deathblows had unique tactical effects to encourage mixing it up. Like giving debuffs and buffs, such as a damage or defense boost for not using the same one over and over, or specific effects for each. After about 10 hrs into the game I noticed the single worst thing about the game; the screen flashed with every party attack. It hurt my eyes and got to the point where I could not watch the battles. I would input the commands and look away until the end to see the damage. This was one of the worst design choices I have ever seen! Thankfully, it does not happen in gear battles. On foot battles also dragged out obnoxiously as every lengthy deathblow animation played out to FF7 and 8 summon levels of time wasting. This game really needed autobattle or an option to turn off animations.

Gear fights were much better, and fit better into the game than in Xenosaga series, where they felt tacked on. I enjoyed the interplay between on foot and gear sections, with tough enemies meant to be fought by gears that will wreck anyone not inside one. Reminded me of Metal Max, not like Xenosaga where 2 characters could not even use gears so the power difference was small. Gear combat was simpler but more tense due to the limitations with fuel and healing. Fuel should have regenerated slowly outside of battle. Charging fuel in battle was tedious and it made no sense not to be able to charge out of combat. I cheaped out on the first gear upgrades, which caused me to give up on the first gear boss. They were doing such low damage that it was faster to reset and buy better engines (but still cheap out on armor and hp). From then on I made sure to buy the best upgrades, but not for every character. The difficulty wavered from fairly easy to big spikes, though I felt much of the ease was from being properly prepared. I first checked a walkthrough for a map of the aqueduct, after I had made it to the end and wondered if I had missed anything. I found most of the game confusing to navigate, except for the few places with maps. Every place should have a map. My first game over was in Kislev sewers against a regular fish enemy. They hit hard, and I had to buy better armor because I mistakenly thought that Rico's starting armor was better than the store stuff. I even wondered if that was the boss, but I got him down first try.

The battling mini game was ok, though I felt the frames per second was too fast. I skipped it entirely at the end game because nothing looked worth getting. I am not a fan of mini games in general. I beat the battle solitaire mini game but found it incredibly annoying. The AI was so fast that the only way I could win was the pause the game every second and plan out my moves. I hated holding down O to move faster as it was impossible to do that and pause so often. It took many tries to win and I felt winning was largely about luck. This mini game would have been better turn based. I chose to use characters that were naturally more powerful at that point in the game, to cut costs. Generally I would pick the character whose gear came with the best free upgrades, and Elly to use the female only armor. Fei, Citan and Elly was my dream team. At Shevat I had the next game over from a random battle. A spinning blade enemy that could debuff defense and significantly powered up when 1 was killed, so the key was to spread damage out. I was using Elly and Maria and likely lost due to trying to conserve mana. 2 mages in the party was probably not the best idea, but I learned to nuke them down. I upgraded everyone's gears to handle the split party event, keeping Fei, Maria and Billy for what I expected to be the boss fight. I was disappointed in how the boss fight turned out, but this was a good example of making use of characters outside of the battle party size limit. This game had excellent flow of characters into and out of the battle party, while keeping reserve members leveled up. I loved this feature because it meant you can use whoever you want without worrying about spreading the xp thin or having underpowered characters. Next game over was the Shakan boss as I screwed up too much trying to figure out the gimmick. All I had to do was change Elly's equipment for more magic power; her aerod with high magic power did so much damage that it felt like cheating.

Disk 1 was fantastic. Disk 2 was considerably less fantastic, but still not as bad as the screen flashing. They told instead of showing with narration instead of dialogue, and being warped around instead of going there on your own via the world map. The mass driver where Elly split off from Fei should have been a classic dungeon adventure, with random battles, loot and a boss. Or at least a place to explore with no enemies. The actual dungeons were good but it hurt immersion to be warped there with no idea where in the world it was. And then there were the annoying gimmicky boss fights. The one that auto 1 hit kills a character every time it attacks, making victory more about how many revival items you stockpiled way back last time you had access to a shop. The one that heals to full after every attack and the only way to win was to let it lower it's own hp to the point where you could 1 hit kill it. There was story reason for that healing but why would it ever use an attack that lowers its hp when it would eventually auto win by never using said attack? The fight could have been better designed. Then the one with an attack that lowered the party's gear hp to 1 yet failed to have the speed, area damage or minions to take advantage of it. I am not quite sure how such an attack affecting machines could be a thing since this kind or move tends to be associated with dark magic and final bosses. I lost the fight directly after because there was no healing or fuel restore between, and I did not realize the way to win was to tediously charge fuel and hp back up while the boss did 0 damage as long as you didn't attack. Well Rico didn't have enough magic defense to take 0 damage so he very slowly died. By the time the end game opened up to being able to actually visit the overworld again, I was getting FF6 world of ruin vibes. Not enough landscape was changed and many previous places could not be visited. I would have liked to have seen some devastation, but all old areas looked exactly the same as on disk 1.

I chose Citan and Maria for my final party since they had the best gear equipment. Sucks that Elly was no longer available to use and I left sweet equipment on her! I did the lighthouse and desert optional areas. Fighting those dragons on foot was probably the most difficult part of the game, until I figured out how to survive the breath attack. I tried Citan's fire block magic but that did nothing, so I guess it was not fire damage. I gave Citan the yamoto belt to raise his hp high enough to survive, and Fei the dark armor, dark helm and dark coat to raise his magic defense high enough to survive. There was no hope for Maria and I probably should have used a different character. But going to the desert was mostly a waste of time and I skipped the 2 chests. I lucked into getting the best sword drop from the first dragon kill. I was adamant about solving the challenge of beating a dragon but after that I just wanted to get to the ending. I had enough money to buy the 3 of them the best gear equipment, including the omega max attack power but low fuel engines, a GNRS50 each, and a couple Z chargers. The final dungeon was still quite challenging and I had to use a walkthrough to figure out the puzzle. Wait, there were switches? The omega engines not having enough fuel to use healing equipment was a problem, but did not matter once I got enough 100% angel armor to deal with those 9999 attacks. It was weird how special damage types (like sonic and gel) were not used more. Beam attacks were most common. I loved how the final boss had optional battles to reduce the difficulty of the real fight, while allowing swapping characters but not saving or restoring. This meant everyone could participate and there was a tactical advantage to having every character well equipped so that you could defeat the mini bosses with the characters that would not be fighting the final boss. I did not have the others fit to fight, so I killed 2 mini bosses then went for the boss. I felt it would have been pushing my resources too far to kill all 4. It was a tough fight, especially without being able to heal at all. 1 person was dead and another critical when I won.

Fei was level 77 and a great balanced character, with attack, healing and buff magic. It was interesting to play as a monk protagonist instead of the usual swordsman. Citan was 74 and I gave him the speed shoes, so he absolutely owned. Good healer and support as well as having amazing speed, defense and offense. Maria was 71 and I found her a little lacking. Her gear was not as effective as the other 2, missing more often and doing a little less damage. Maybe she just needed a few more levels, or maybe accuracy boost. Bart was 71 and I used him for a while after he got his omnigear. I never used most of his magic. Billy was 71 and I loved his cleric magic but found keeping track of ammo to be slightly annoying so I did not use him as much. Rico was level 70 and he was good in gear but not good on foot. He took too much damage on foot and his higher damage did not offset his low speed. In a game where speed determines total number of actions, being slow is very bad. Emeralda was 70 and I only tried her out briefly. I had a lot of fun using Elly's nukes even though this game does not have many elemental vulnerabilities to exploit, and she was the replacement black mage. Lastly Chu chu, a silly mascot character that shouldn't even be in the game. I was getting a bit of Star Wars vibe from the game with these being the ewoks. She certainly has a niche being the only "gear" that can heal gear hp but needs a lot of work to compare to the others. I used her once for a boss fight and needed her healing to survive because I forgot to equip the other gear with accessories.

I liked this game so much that I immediately started a new game and played through again. This time I used a walkthrough but it turns out there were only a couple things I missed. I learned how to properly unlock deathblows and planned ahead to optimize power and costs. I used Elly much less knowing that she would leave, and she was the only character that did not learn all deathblows. I did however use her aerods with 3 power magics, an ether doubler and + ether accessories to 1 hit kill several bosses. I skipped the rock paper scissors side quest because it was a ridiculous waste of time for lousy rewards. I missed the rock sidequest in Shevat on my first playthrough, so I got those items this time. I used Bart and Rico a lot more than my first run, just to learn their deathblows. I again did not use Billy much but made more of an attempt to stock up on ammo for him. It was definitely worth playing through again to better understand the story. A new major revelation came to me at the tower of Babel. On my first playthough I wondered what previous civilization would expend the resources to build such a massive tower, and why the control rooms were oriented the wrong way. Some kind of accident must have happened to it. I completely forgot about the opening movie on my first playthough, but having it fresh in my mind it was obvious that Babel was the starship impaled into the planet.

Before going to Solaris and ending the disk, I did the battling minigame. I had planned to get the GNRS50 and speed shoes, imagining how much easier they would make the upcoming bosses. Looking at the costs I figured if I earned at least 1000 battle points for each fight this would not be too bad. I got 175 points per fight, and lost points for losing. It took 2 hours to tediously grind enough points for that GNRS50, and the speed shoes cost twice that. No way am I doing this annoying mini game for 4 more hours, especially when I knew speed shoes can be obtained easily at end game. I used Citan and Emeralda for the rest of the game, and found her to be an excellent character with decent damage, powerful nukes and high speed. I wrecked most of the gimmicky bosses, except the 1 right after the guy that reduces hp to 1 because none of the gears had high enough magic defense to take 0 damage. So I had to buy some ether armors. I even beat the Alpha Welltall that was not supposed to be won, but it was a very close fight. The walkthrough said to have a lot of magnetic coats, but I only bought half of what it said. I gave Bart response circuits instead, but it was not enough and he died early on. Fei was doing over 7k damage with that GNR while Emeralda was nuking for 3k, and they barely won. At the end game I farmed 2 speed shoes from those slug enemies while learning everyone’s deathblows, then did all the optional content. Emeralda with that 2nd yamato belt and goddess robe for magic defense could survive the dragon’s breath attack. It took a couple hours or so of farming dragons to get Citan’s best sword this time, and I got those 2 chests I skipped. I came into the end with 100k more money than last time and was able to max out everyone’s gears. Fei, Citan and Maria got the omega engines with gold armor. Everyone else got the high fuel engine, some with the gold armor and some with the balanced magic defense armor. I then blew the rest of my money on GNRs so that Fei had 3 and Citan had 2, and an extra Z charger. Fei was doing almost 9000 damage with the basic weak attack alone. This insane damage output, combined with Emeralda exploiting elemental weaknesses, killed the angels so fast that I did not need angel armor. Then I had Maria, Bart and Billy wreck the final boss’s minions before completely wiping the floor with the main team, switching accessories between them.

Despite having a few serious flaws, this is one of the best jrpgs of all time. The best parts were the enthralling story, world building, characters and pacing (except disk 2). Disk 2 certainly could have been better, especially if it was made to the same amazing standards as disk 1, but I do feel the game is already plenty long and full of content. I am neutral on the game’s platforming; some of it was very annoying but the penalty for failure was just try again and get more xp/loot from random battles. The laser dodging flying sequence in the final dungeon was pointless. The music is wonderful.

9.4/10

I'm still stuck in Kislev, and I'm bored out of my mind with this game. I'm the champion of the lame gears ultra-low-budget-Tekken battling mini game. I killed the lame sewer monster after navigating its lame sewer maze.

And I just don't care.

Maybe I should just give this game its 2 stars, toss it into the Hall of Shame, and play something fun instead. I don't think I'm up for another 40 hours of terrible anime-ass anime.

I've convinced myself. Another game abandoned... You suck, Fei.