Xenogears Improvements

[DarkBahamut]

Many people know that there were many issues during the making of Xenogears.
One including that FF7 was a hit RPG, so FF8 were obviously hyped and was being waited on. Xenogears production was altered, and a 4 disk game became a 2 disk game. Personally, Xenogears is in my top 3 games because of maybe the deepest storyline of all time.

But I always think what this game could have been. I just want opinions, would it not be awesome if they made the game 4 disks, the graphics were better, camera rotations were fixed, and OH LAWD, the slow text options were fixed?
FF7 being my favorite game of all time, I think this game could have the potential of being the RPG of all time.

But in disk 2, so many important things happen that aren't under our control and is just story-telling.

[ShinGundam]

Shifting from 4 disks to 2 sounds like an urban legend.

[NeoCracker]

Not sure if it was actually four disks, but it's obvious that game got a lot hacked out of it.

I may return to this thread with a massive list of shit to fix. ;P

[VeloZer0]

I am completely confident they could have wrapped the game up in an acceptable manner on the second disk had they had the budget to do so.

[NorthernChaosGod]

I really wish they would have had enough money and time to finish the game properly. The second disc is like all narrative. :(

[Del Murder]

Actually finish the game.

[NeoCracker]

1) Put in all the shit that was cut. Most notably Kislev.

2) Cut Pupu from the game entirely. Seriously, fuck that thing.

3) Give the church some actual pressence. The fact the church existed as a cover for Solaris amounted to nothing, as littlerally it get's fragged not just after your first visit, but by Solaris. As it is there was no real point to it.

4) For god sakes give us more info on some of Fei's past lives. As it stands, we get barely a glimpse into any lives other then Fei or Lacan, and it's not nearly enough to care or matter to the plot. Had you saw nothing about Fei making the Nano machines, and it was never brought up he had anything to do with it, nothing would have changed. If you are going to have it there, make me give a damn.

5) Make your magic useful. The entire game is nothing but hitting the same combo in a fight over and over. The exception is the haste spell, which is cast just so you can do that same combo more rapidly. Even Legend of Legaia got more use out of it's spells then this game.

6) Gear fights are pretty much the same as a normal fight, only longer because of fuel and having to build up to do the combo. Make the Gear fights feel significantly different from regular fights, or make them the same. Don't do this bare minimum change that does nothing more then make the fights last longer.

7) Rebalance the characters. Citan is way to damn strong compared to everyone else. When he gained the ability to haste himself I though, "You know, hit his group spell target first, then haste the party, it would be so powerful!" and my next thought, "Wait, why waste the turn? Citan is the only one that needs hasted anyway." This is a pretty damn accurate description.

8) When Final Fantasy X, no contest, beats you out for more unique monster designs, you have a problem.

9) Give some fucking life to these dungeons. Not even the platforming, just the dungeons themselves are so badly done. They are extremely linear, and in more then one instance so many rooms just look the same in a dungeon. Twice this causes problems with navigation, the big one being that last fucking dungeon.

I'd mention disk 2 plot dumps, but fix a few of my above issues and those would go away entirely.

[Bolivar]

Even if they attached gameplay to the narrative, fleshed out all the scenes they wanted, and smacked it all onto four discs, it would have been too smurfing long a game. I don't know how they'd split it without feeling like a BS cliffhanger, but it should've been split into at least two games.

Spend a few months polishing the dungeons. Cut down on the fat, add in worthwhile puzzles, and overall give them the right pacing.

Fine tune the combat. Tweak the levels/difficulty of the enemies as the story progresses. Make the dungeon crawling a test of how efficiently you use your resources, MP + items, like Dragon Quest.

Either get rid of the platforming altogether or fine tune it as well so it benefits the pacing and doesn't feel like a pain.

Definitely expand on the other past lives of Fei and apparently the past lives of the supporting characters, or however they tie into Gazel. 60 or so hours and I still don't have the slightest clue who Kim actually was.

[DarkBahamut]

Even if they attached gameplay to the narrative, fleshed out all the scenes they wanted, and smacked it all onto four discs, it would have been too smurfing long a game. I don't know how they'd split it without feeling like a BS cliffhanger, but it should've been split into at least two games.

The actual disk 1 could be spread out. So same gameplay, just spread it over 2 disks.

The actual disk 2 should be given the important gameplay missing and improvements, and will be the new 3rd disk.

The final dungeon could be disk 4.

[comma]

Not sure why we're talking in terms of discs when that was just a limitation of data storage 15 years ago. Do discs actually represent a significant segmentation of a game to people?

I agree with the OP. Xenogears is certainly one of the best RPGs ever made. The scope and focus of the plot and world are incredible. The game design was also superb, keeping in mind that the combat system was still relatively inventive at the time. I had a lot of fun playing it, anyway.

But it is a real shame that the game was rushed and the final act of the story was summarized. I read monotonous details of what was planned for the game, and it was never supposed to be four discs; it was just supposed to be longer and go into more detail. There was never supposed to be a single scene where Fei or Elly were narrating and explaining things.

To the person who said they should have touched more on Fei's past lives: Do you realize that Xenogears was only the fifth installment of the story? There were six planned in total. I forget why they chose the fifth to begin with, but there you go. There was an official book released in Japanese that had intricate details of the entire storyline, and someone had translated some into English. I wonder if all of that information is still online.

Edit: Looks like it is: http://www.xgam.org/xenogears/uncut/ This is the site I remember, anyway.

Edit 2: Xenogears Perfect Works translation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29956195@N08/sets/72157616593453778/

Then, of course, Xenosaga came along, and each game in that series was supposed to follow the plot of each of the original six planned games, but they decided to just keep following the same characters in the two sequels and ruined everything in the process. Xenosaga also just wasn't as interesting or fun as Xenogears.

Anyway, yeah, wishful thinking that they'd ever go back and fix Xenogears. It really would be cool, though.

[NeoCracker]

Xenosaga also just wasn't as interesting or fun as Xenogears.

...You know, this time, I'm just going to walk away.

[comma]

Not a bad idea.

[Vyk]

I never finished Xenosaga. I just couldn't stay interested. I loved Xenogears though. I put a good 80 hours into it each time I played. It was already a pretty massive game. I also loved how they managed to flesh out disk 2, with most of the narrative they intended to tell, instead of completely chopping up the story into more confusing bits just to shoe-horn in a little inter-activity. If games like Indigo Prophecy, and Heavy Rain can get away with being completely narrative driven games, I find nothing wrong with a little extra narrative focus in one of my favorite games. It would have been interesting to see what kind of game they ended up with if they were given the time and budget needed. It would have been one of the longest RPGs in history though. But it would have been pretty glorious

[Bolivar]

I actually didn't mind the narrative all that much since the story was awesome so far, but after Solaris I was done with the games dungeons for a while.

[Forsaken Lover]

Don't just dump the entire translation of the game on one poor sap and make him do it in a hurry. This game needs a full team of translators and give them a good while to do their jobs.

[krissy]

yeah i stopped playing it after the castle infiltration to rescue that sister in the desert
the battle system was terrible and i did not give a crap about anyone in the story

[Bolivar]

Yeah the game can be pretty hard to get into up to that point, but I thought that was when the story started turning around and ramping up.

[comma]

Yeah, that's still basically before you figure anything out about what's really going on.

[tony12]

Xenogears easily has one of the best stories ever told in a video game. I honestly really liked the second disc and thought it was fun having some time where you could just concentrate on unraveling this story and not worry about going through dungeons. I realize those who put a high level of importance on gameplay wouldn't like that but gameplay wasn't what Xenogears was supposed to be about anyways. Also I do have to ask for those that wanted more gameplay in the second disc exactly how long of game did you want to play. Xenogears was long enough already with just the narrative part and if you put all that narrative mixed in with gameplay the game would have easily gone well over a 100 hours for many folks.

[comma]

Over 100 hours would be fine. I remember my first playthrough taking around 80 hours. The main gripe I have with how the story turned into a summary at the end is just that it makes the game asymmetrical. It's like watching a movie where the plot unfolds on screen in the present, but then the last 20 minutes of the movie are still pictures with narration explaining what happened next. Would you rather have that, or a movie that's 40 minutes longer and more engaging?

[tony12]

That's not how I viewed that second disc comma. I viewed it as the story was the most important part of Xenogears and I was able to go through a part of the game that was all story. Now granted I always grew extremely bored of gameplay elements in games and viewed them as nothing more than things I had to go through in order to continue on with the story. Most people who play rpg's won't view gameplay like that though and those are probably the ones that would get frustrated with disc 2. It got to the point to where I all but quit playing any type of game other than sports simulations because I couldn't stand the gameplay elements in games any longer.

[Forsaken Lover]

The second disk by and large had a lot o the most fascinating and memorable story bits. I know some people who considered the gameplay and dungeon design of Xenogears so awful that the Chair Narration was a blessing. Me, I don't agree with that. (well, apart from the dungeons being crap) Even still, I think I would have liked Disk 2 more if there was less crappy Gear battles and more on foot battling.

[comma]

What was so bad about the dungeon design? I admit I got pissed when I fell off of that ledge on my way up to Shevat, but big deal. It's a 3D platformer with random encounters. I liked that aspect of it.

[NeoCracker]

It's bland, and in a few areas, most notably the last dungeon, the same room get's re-used a lot.

There is little variation in your path most areas, so dungeons are incredibally linear. Really the only RPG I have seen with worse design in terms of linearity (In general Digimon World 2, but that's for other reasons entirely) is FF XIII.

And the Platforming ranged from so insanely simple it was pointless, to fairly frustrating.

[Roogle]

Don't just dump the entire translation of the game on one poor sap and make him do it in a hurry. This game needs a full team of translators and give them a good while to do their jobs.

This presentation of this game could be improved tenfold by giving it a proper translation, such as what was done with Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions.

I'm not saying that the game should use the type of language that was used in that translation. I think it needs to keep a more sci-fi theme than a high fantasy theme. I mean to say that there are certain aspects of the translation which could be addressed better, such as when Elly speaks using terms unfamiliar to those outside of Solaris and it puts the translation of her terms in hyphens, making it seem as though she is speaking irregularly.

[comma]

Yeah, FFX is a lot less linear than Xenogears. :roll2 Really, there's absolutely nothing linear about it. Its dungeons are as linear as any other game's dungeons, aside from something randomly-generated.

Repetition in the last dungeon was due to time constraints.