The Xenosaga Topic of 2013

[Forsaken Lover]

So I'm a bit early. Consider ti my Christmas present to all of you. The gift of Xenosaga talk is the best gift of them all.



Best game in the Trilogy?
Yes.



WAH WAH WAH EPISODE 1 WASN'T WHAT I WANTED! THEY BETTER CHANGE IT!
.
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MY GOD THIS IS AWFUL CHANGE IT BACK CHANGE IT BACK



This game was pretty good.

Voice your Xeno thoughts and opinions. Favorite game, favorite characters, whatever.

[NeoCracker]

I don't think Episode 2 is as bad as most. Oh yes, there was a lot of smurf ups with it. But it did fix the Boost System, which I found entirely stupid in episode 1.

And while the main plot barely advanced, I loved the story of Jr., Albedo, and the whole U.R.T.V's plot points being expounded upon. And Dmitri is an awesome villain.

That said, Episode 3 is awesome.

[Necronopticous]

I like the one with all of the child molestation in it.

[Forsaken Lover]

hey man, I'll have you know that the girl being molested ended up really liking him. Hell, all the other girls he molested and mutilated liked him too.

Must be Crispin Freeman's voice.

[Wolf Kanno]

Crispin Freeman has that way with people, he is Alucard and Captain Tylor.

I liked the first game despite some superfluous game mechanics and some awful pacing with the story. I still consider the scene with Chenrenkov at the Cathedral Ship, that whole sequence actually made the entire slow pace in the beginning worth it and its my favorite sequence in the entire series.

I don't like Episode 2, they botched the dungeon design, the battle system is only good in theory but it made battles incredibly tedious and samey after awhile (which is why I'm not surprised FFXIII suffered the same problem since it practically stole this game's battle system). The character building system is awful and the games one sidequest ping pongs violently back and forth from terrible to competent. The story also feels like mostly filler compared to Episode 1 introducing the cast and conflicts, and Episode 3 completing them. I do like the U.R.T.V. story sequences and the E.S. Units are a huge step up from the AGWS despite the AGWS being more engaging from a gameplay standpoint.

Episode 3 is my favorite though I do feel Shion and KOS-MOS' character redesigns are a little too slutty... and the game feels absolutely rushed at the end and entire story sequences fall flat if you haven't been keeping up with the rest of the Xenosaga mythos. Yet the battle system and music are amazing in this game, the dungeon designs are much improved and the story overall is actually really good. Of anything, I'm just happy I finally got to (SPOILER)smack down Shion, cause I really feel she had been asking for it since the first game since she's pretty selfish about things and nearly gets the party killed several times throughout the series trying to protect a combat android designed to wipe out an alien menace and has a living god trapped inside of her that can potentially end the universe... and most of this is shown to you in Episode 1, yet she still coddles her... So you have no idea how many times I replayed that sequence.

I do feel overall that Xenosaga does lose itself with the philosophy and religious context, some stories bring up interesting ideas but then drops them and in later titles tries to bring them back in and act like it's been an underlying theme the whole time. I honestly don't feel the game gave a satisfying conclusion to the Realinas story. I also don't care for Wilhelm as a villain, partially because he spends two of the games on the sidelines just being overly cryptic about everything in the five seconds he ever shows up in, and his goal was interesting but I felt it came too late in the story and wasn't really brought in as neatly as the other plot elements.

Albedo, Yuriev, and Voyager are probably my favorite villains, Ziggy, Jr. and Jin are my favorite of the heroes. Mathews and the Elsa Crew are my favorite important side characters, while the Professor is my favorite ascended extra.

Episode 3 has the best soundtrack and I feel Pied Piper has the best story/writing.

[Forsaken Lover]

I thought Episode 1 had a quality soundtrack but Episode 3 simply had a larger quantity of quality. So many great boss and area themes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRsVhMBCgp4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIReESnbO0c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9GXF75D29k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTo__g57IPo

But I must say, Episode 1 has my favorite ballad.
Xenosaga Episode I - Escape (Pain) - YouTube

I never get tired of watching this scene. I've probably rewatched it more than any other part in the Trilogy.

[tony12]

The Xenosaga series was good however it is inferior to Xenogears in almost every way storywise.

I liked the second disc of xenogears because it kept all the story elements in. Xenogears had better developed and more interesting characters. And it's story was far supperior to that of xenosaga.


If I hadn't played Xenogears first I would probably think more of the Xenosaga games because I wouldn't have a story like that to compare it to. But since I did play Xenogears first Xenosaga felt like it fell a little short.

[NeoCracker]

...I'm just tempted to point you to my Xenogears playthrough thread so that I don't need to go into ever detail as to why you are wrong.

[Wolf Kanno]

^ You seriously don't want me to to turn that around and explain why Xenosaga is a meandering mess of half thought up ideas either.

[NeoCracker]

^ You seriously don't want me to to turn that around and explain why Xenosaga is a meandering mess of half thought up ideas either.

The difference here is you are, to the say the lest, a delusional sycophant. I have the clear advantage in this.

[Skyblade]

My question is "when are Xenogears and Xenosaga going to be released on PSN so I can play 'em on my Vita or PSP"?

[NeoCracker]

Xenogears is on PSN. That's how I played it.

[tony12]

NeoCracker it sounded like you were bitching any time you came across anything in Xenogears that you didn't understand right off the bat. That is actually what I felt made Xenogears really cool. It wasn't a story made for ten year olds like a lot of rpg's are. It actually made you think a bit. It really does take a couple play throughs of Xenogears to put all the pieces together.


Xenogears came much closer to Takahashi's original vision for the game then any of the Xenosaga series did. Xenogears gives you glimpses of what took place during all five episodes of the series and if you combine that with perfect works you get an even deeper understanding of what took place within all five episodes.


The only way Xenosaga even comes halfway as close to being as deep as Xenogears is if you include all that database stuff. And the characters in Xenosaga went through so many re-designs that they just ended up seeming like a chopped up mess.


Basically Xenosaga didn't come anywhere near what Takahashi originally planned. If Takahashi's original plan came to be Xenosaga would of all been one game and then Episode II would have taken place thousands of years later with a completely new cast of characters and so on and so on until they reached Episode VI.


But it was much more expensive to create a 70-90 hour long PS2 game then it was a 70-90 hour long PS1 game (and xenogears didn't have state of the art graphics anyway for the ps1 system). It would of been absolutely foolish for them to make such a financial investment for a game that they didn't even know was going to sell that well. Which is why the Xenosaga series ended up getting sliced and diced and it took three games to basically tell one story and at the same time just ended with that without giving any indications of what further episodes were to hold. And Takahashi and his wife ended up getting cut from the team before it was over.

That is why Xenogears is much better than Xenosga in my opinion.

[NeoCracker]

A lot of the things I immidiately came across and bitched about were either me just poking fun, (The stupidity of the 'I seek power, do you doesire power line' for example) or things that were legitamately dumb (Tim being in the second round of the tournament, Vanderkaum's outrageious stupidity), none of my real issues with the game came until pretty much near the end.

You had quite a few things that the plot just plain drops. Things like Rico's entire story. There are things that serve nor purpose, either symbolic or story wise, that were the dropped entirely nothing would change in game. The worst example of this is the council. I loved the council, they were great. But why were they really nescessary to anything? You get a lot of scenes with them, but it does nothing to help the overall plot. The slightly complex relationship between them, Krellian, and Cain was great at first, but due to a lack of any real interaction with the Council, it becomes moot. If it was just Krellian needing to subvert Cain, who stopped the activation of The Key, not one thing about the story would change.

The reason this bothers me so much is you have a lot of things going on that are completely pointless, yet disc 2 is nothing but a giant exposition dumb, as if they didn't have time to finish everything. All the important details are told in absurdly lengthy text dumps, yet there is all of this you do play through that is largely irrelevant and pointless.

Not to mention the shear stupidity of that smurfing fluffy thing, whose name escapes my mind. It kills the tension of Marie's scene where she goes to fight that giant mech. Not to mention the imagery of all the Gears being strung up to crosses is at best laughable when you see the giant crucified bunny man.

And while the Xeno-Redisigns did bother me, those designs were pretty much just cosmetic. The characters themselves remained pretty damned consistant from game to game. And I argue that even without the database, Xenosaga is by far the more ambitious plot of the two games, and did a hell of a lot better in terms of characters. At no point does anyone in your party feel like they really don't need to be there, a problem that happens with about half of your Xenogears cast. (Rico, Pupu, and Esmaralda could have been dropped entirely and you'd probably never notice the difference.)

And outside of story, Xenogears has some of the worst Dungeon designs I have ever experienced in an RPG. Effectively FF XIII being one giant hallway, beginning to end of the game, is about the only worse offender of bad Dungeon design.

Xenogears ended up being a ball of wasted potential, and some serious taxation on ones suspension of disbelief.

Edit: I know you have a response WOfly, but hold off. I want to have this argument with fresh blood.

[Forsaken Lover]

Hey, at least FFXIII's dungeons were nice to look at! Xenogears dungeons had no redeeming qualities at all.

Totally spot on about the party however. Xenosaga did a masterful job of keeping each character relevant and interesting and I felt they all received satisfying closure in Episode 3.

Well maybe not MOMO but I stopped caring about her after Episode 1. They just didn't...uh, give her the attention she deserved after that.
(SPOILER)

Overall I liked Xenogears more for a few reasons. First and foremost, Feia nd Elly. The whole Contact/Antitype love story was great and I'm a sucker for romance. I felt this tragic romance was also handled very well.

Xenogears also had a great lineup of villains. So did Xenosaga but I loved Lacan/Grahf. He's one of my favorite villains in any video game ever. You also have Miang who is the best bitch in all of gaming history. She makes Kreia seem kind and straightforward.

And...uh, I lost my train of thought. I hope that post works for now.