Quote Originally Posted by NeoCracker View Post
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.
Honestly if you didn't have a lot to complain about until the end then you must not of found much to complain about. What did you expect them to do in the second disc? Slice and dice the story all up like they did in Xenosaga or eliminate some of the gameplay and dungeons. I personally am glad the second disc ended up being the way it did. For starters the game was long enough already and they kept the story intact. If gameplay and dungeons is so important to you then you shouldn't be playing the Xeno games to begin with.

The purpose of the council was to give the player an idea of what the overall plot is during the course of the game. It's hard to figure that out because you really don't know what they are talking about during the middle of the game but towards the end and then in the second play through everything they say starts falling into place and you realize what they are referring to.

The Chu Chu race was the only beings on the planet prior to the Eldridge crashing. The council were the minds of the original people Miang/Deuss created and they were being saved on a super computer. Chu Chu isn't any less retarted then all the other comic relief characters we have in any other rpg.

I really think you could of used a second play through to piece more of the puzzle together. I think you went in looking for things to complain about and started griping about anything that immediately didn't make sense to you. It's hard to place all the pieces together in the first play through because the scope of the story is so vast.

Xenogears will always be supperior to Xenosaga. Xenogears was Takahashi's original idea and it came much closer to being what his original vision intended it to be then Xenosaga did. Xenosaga was only half of what it was originally intended to be.