And now back to our regularly scheduled program... and ooh boy, I get to talk about my two favorite things: Pretentious existential philosophical mumbo jumbo and giant robots. Lucky for me, Tetsuya Takahashi likes the sames things and keeps finding people willing to fund his games. In fact, this is the game that actually made me join a forum. My first forum was the former Ethos Sanctuary which lasted a good while before the drama of the series development and the fan community caused the owner to hate all Xeno fans, and ban everyone before he pulled the plug on the site. Good times.
Xenosaga, in general, is a spiritual prequel to Xenogears that eventually became it's own thing under the tenure of Monolith Soft. When Square told Takahashi and the Xeno team that they had no intentions of making any further games in the Xeno series, the team left Square and formed Monolith Soft and got a contract with Namco to create a new Xeno franchise. In truth, Xenosaga may be the poster child within RPG circles for the dangers that can be done concerning executive meddling, listening to focus groups, and the constant battle between artistic integrity and the reality of game business on a fresh IP. As I mentioned before, Kojima is about the only game director on the market that has somehow crossed the gap between weird ass auteurs design, and actually making something that is fairly profitable. Xenogears was a cult hit for Square, and in time, Xenosaga is a bit of a cult hit for Namco, but one I don't ever expect the company to ever address again outside of the occasional crossover spin-off. The damage the series took with each new entry ultimately killed the franchise and after replaying the franchise again last year; it has become a bit more obvious to me that many elements that were being set up in the first game were either dropped, or significantly changed in the sequels. Much like the half finished Gears, Saga also fails to give the players the true vision it really entailed.
Set thousands of years in our future, mankind has colonized worlds with ease, nanotechnology is the norm, and people live side by side with bio-androids called Realians. Mankind is under attack by a mysterious alien race called the Gnosis; these beings exist in a higher plane of existence, but can still interact with our world and cause untold damage. Professor Mizrahi studied the Gnosis Phenomena along with their connection to a mysterious artifact from Earth called the Zohar, which seems to have the power to warp reality and channel infinite power from other dimensions. His research institute, controlled by a religious order with connections to the Zohar, start a rebellion on the planet Militia which spreads to the rest of the Militian solar system. The war devastates the world, saw Mizrahi commit suicide, the planet Militia and the Original Zohar are sealed away into pocket space, and the Gnosis appearance skyrockets; leaving the Federation to deal with the new threat.
When the game opens, the planet Ariadne has vanished from physical space, and the Federation hastily sends a military unit to investigate to see if this was caused by the Gnosis. To offset the rush job of putting the unit together, the Federation are helped by the powerful corporate conglomerate Vector, who lend them a new space ship called the Woglinde. They are given the staff of Project KOS-MOS, an anti-Gnosis battle android, unique for being completely mechanical instead of usual Realian technology as a fail safe in case the Gnosis do show up. Shion Uzuki is the head researcher of the project, and despite KOS-MOS's future role, Shion has a motherly attachment to her due to her being a pet project by her secret lover and KOS-MOS' original designer, Kevin Winnicot. Kevin died during the original KOS-MOS' activation and Shion was forced to destroy her, but has since rebuilt her.
The mission feels off to everyone on board and it almost feels like the expedition is being controlled by other forces not connected to the military. The crew pick up a large artifact that is the only thing remaining at the sight where the planet is and quickly start heading home, which unnerves the crew. Eventually the Gnosis do attack the ship and Shion finds herself in a life or death struggle to escape.
That right there is about the first three or four hours of the plot. I could easily jump into the other storylines that present themselves in the plot, but that would be another five to ten pages worth of text. I feel I'm getting my point across when I say that Xenosaga Episode 1, is a story dense game. In fact the largest complaint against the game back in the day was that you watched it more than you actually played it, and that's not a lie in the slightest. After the initial tutorial dungeon, you won't see another for about an hour or two. If you're the type of gamer who likes a little gameplay with their huge heaping of story, then this is game for you.
The pacing of this game is both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness, to say it's a slow burn is a bit of an understatement. The game spends the first several hours trying to get you up to speed with the setting and characters, and I honestly feel it does a pretty good job. It makes sure that you know the differences between your U-TICs from your U.R.T.V. and it has a helpful glossary you can access to help fill you in when the plot wants to be vague. It's actually kind of intimidating how many story threads are introduced right off the bat, and while it may seem like they are moving forward a bit too slow for people used to Final Fantasy's more "shock and awe" approach the game ultimately starts a rapid fire succession of major twists and dramatic moments. Where it succeeds is that the payoff for sticking with the story and characters is usually worth the wait in regards to the first title. Cherenkov, a spy for the U-TIC organization, kind of feels like he's just there and his story will likely resolve itself in a cliche storm, and then the game really takes a left turn, and you learn so much about him that transforms him into one of the game's more sympathetic antagonists.
The cast is both unconventional and surprisingly developed. Shion is a brilliant scientist, but is incredibly flawed as she often has poor social skills that make her seem more childish than the other cast membersDespite his misanthrope nature though, she's also incredibly sympathetic when it comes to Realians and KOS-MOS. KOS-MOS is pure badass fanservice with a healthy dose of mystery and sassiness she gives to Shion. The other party members also have interesting arcs and story's which often pair up with each other.
Ziggy was once a police officer who suffered a traumatic event that led to his suicide, but due to being an organ donor and the transhumanist Life Recycling Act, he was brought back as a cyborg with no means of self-terminating, instead he simply requests to have more and more of his flesh replaced with machines until he becomes a full robot. In contrast, his story entwines him with MOMO, an advanced Realian child, and the last creation of Mizrahi based on his dead daughter. She is more human than other realians and wishes to be treated so, especially by Mizrahi's widow, but the stigma against her kind prevents this. So we have a human who wants to be a machine teamed up with a machine that wants to be human. Jr. is contrasted with Shion, he runs the Kukai Foundation which protects and serves as a political voice for tranhumans created during the era of the Life Recycling Act, in truth, the organization is actually a paramilitary group made by the government to hunt down the remnants of the order that caused the Militian Conflict. While Jr. looks about twelve years old, he's actually twenty six, and his "father" is actually his clone younger brother. Like Shion, he was a child present during the Miltian Conflict and still carries the scars of the war with him.
The cast is wonderfully written and it doesn't take long to really get invested with their stories. Like Xenogears before it though, the real praise must got to the villains. I often feel that my love of FF villains dropped considerably after dealing with the antagonists of the Xeno franchises. Margulis is a grim military man associated with a religious order and basically sums up his deal with his iconic line concerning the disappearance of Ariadne as "what's a few billion lives to us?". While it would be easy to sum him up as some evil megalomaniac, Margulis is actually just loyal to the cause of his religion, and even shows courteousness to MOMO when she has her captured and finds Albedo to be utterly repulsive.
Albedo, my god, Albedo is the best thing about this whole franchise. Imagine Kefka with a sympathetic backstory, no real destructive magic, but traded it for true immortality, and he's voiced by Crispin "the voice of sex personified" Freeman. About the only good thing I can say about the sequels is that they did a great job, showing how completely multi-faceted this psychopath truly is. Albedo will ultimately steal the show for the rest of the game and marks a dark turning point for the plot as we begin to see the darker parts of the world and setting with him. In fact, his scene with MOMO is likely the most well known scene from this game, and possibly one of the funniest examples of where censorship actually made a scene look worse. Albedo psychologically tortures MOMO with both a madness induced psychological tirade with all the hamminess you would expect for something like that; and showing off his power to regenerate. In the original, he's brandishing a knife to cut off his limbs, in the censored version, he rips them off bare handed. Now which sounds more disturbing to you?
I've often complained about games like FFX and XIII for railroading the player and forcing us to deal with their stories while stripping away the game side of things, but I've often also said that such a design can work as long as the player likes the story. This is one of those games for me, and thankfully, it does actually have slightly better dungeon design and mini-games than FFX, but like those games, if you can't get into the plot, this game will be an utter chore for you.
With that said, the game play side of things is actually step up from Xenogears. Battles are turn based and still use AP to determine the types of hits, Deathblows are gained purely from leveling now, but are separated by whether they are short range or long range. You now have to equip these moves and can have up to six of them on a character at once. All characters have their own spell trees, but once a spell is mastered, a character can spend extra spell points to learn another characters spell. So for instance, Shion has a group heal spell, but everyone else can actually be taught the skill once Shion learns it.
You can equip one accessory, but it's now possible to learn the special skills off of accessories and you're allowed to equip up to three of them. Despite how much the game tries to balance this, they ultimately fail, and this one aspect actually winds up breaking the game, as it's possible to teach every character a skill from an accessory that gives the same effect as the Valiant Knife from FFVI. It was still a neat concept, and gives a huge amount to customization. Some party members can also pilot A.G.W.S. which are mini-humanoid mecha with better defense and firepower than your party most of the time. These units can actually get some pretty great customization options in terms of weapon load out, but it pales in comparison to better mecha games like Front Mission and Armored Core. Still, I appreciate the concept and miss dearly once the series has the party upgrade to the Gears expys in later installments.
The crown jewel is the battle system, which introduces the Boost System and Event Slots. Like FFX, you can actually see the turn order in combat, and who gets to fight up to four people. As your characters dish out damage, they increase the boost gauge and once they have at least one boost saved up, the character has the ability to give themselves an extra turn as long as they are not already in the turn queue, this means you can interrupt enemy attacks or get some emergency healing done. This is especially invaluable due to the event slot. Every "turn" in battle gives a different bonus the game cycles through, such as a dramatic increase in the boost gauge, a guarantee critical hit from any attack, or even one that doubles the amount of skill and tech points you earn in battle. This system ultimately determines the course of the battle as you'll be wanting to make sure enemies don't get the good bonuses while also making sure to kill the enemy during the extra point bonus gauge. It adds a whole layer of strategy to battle especially since enemies can use boost as well, and they even get a special one that allows them to bypass the "only when you're not in the queue" rule allowing bosses to effectively have two or three turns a round. In fact, the boss battles in this game can be utterly brutal and the game is surprisingly difficult at times.
There are a whole wealth of other features I can go on and on about, but bottom-line, this is a wonderful hidden gem of a game on the PS2. I replayed the whole franchise last year in hopes of walking away from it with renewed love like I did with the Suikoden franchise, and instead walked away a bit more disappointed than I thought I would be. While I did decide that Episode 2 isn't quite the total train wreck I remember it being, Episode 3 aged poorly and felt way more like a rush job than I remember it being. In fact, with the exception of art direction, Episode 3 looks a lot worse in action than Episode 1, due to cutting too many corners with the character animation and using static models for the bulk of the dialogue; whereas Episode 1 had most of the story shown in cutscene. I wouldn't be surprised if Episode 1's cutscenes run on 60fps whereas I know Episode 3's run on 40fps. This is what I ultimately walked away from, was that more love and care went into the first title than the sequels. Episode 2 was mangled by executive meddling, and Episode 3 tried to salvage what it could with the story, and rushed out a conclusion cause the team probably knew an Episode 4 wasn't going to happen. This is especially grating because Episode 1 really showed the franchise had so much potential and despite the slow build up, I feel like the game left me wanting more, whereas the sequels kind of made me happy the farce was over.
Xenosaga Episode 1 is a wonderful title with some good ideas and questionable pacing. If you really want a good and deep sci-fi story that pulls in influences from other sci-fi greats like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Solaris; this is a game I feel is worth checking out, and who knows, perhaps you'll like the sequels as well.
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 08-19-2017 at 09:06 AM.
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