The Shrine

Wow, TWO of my all time favourite games being released in the same week =)

This one and Faxanadu.

AWESOME! I never beat it because I got mad and accidentally cracked the 2nd disc in half. haha

I remember loving this game, but it took forever. Lots of dialogue, level grinding, and things to do/explore. I never replayed it, but i always remember thinking it was my favorite RPG for the system.

I started playing..... and I got sucked in!

The last time I played Xenogears was maybe a year or two ago. One thing I will say about Xenogears is that the first time through the game (from what I recall from ~11-12 years ago, it seems very slow. This is similar to Terranigma and a few other games. Mostly because the player does not realize the beginning of the game in terms of the context of the story that is yet to come. On future playthroughs, it is easier to see the significance of moments that previously seemed insignificant. I find the game does not at all feel slow in the beginning anymore.

I don't think Xenogears is same as Terranigma. The things that don't make sense in Terranigma really do make sense if you think about the context of the game. For example you can get to Dryvale way before you're supposed to go there but the location is set up so that you know it is a special place, but it's just unclear what you're supposed to do there until you're supposed to go there. It's also pretty obvious that your mission to save the world isn't as noble as it appears. Xenogears has a lot of things that make no sense for the sake of making no sense. It's similar to Xenosaga except there isn't even some kind of handy reference sheet to check stuff against. Characters would talk about or reference things that you absolutely have no idea what they are and that's not good writing.

I was more refering to how both games start out small and later on the action and story really begin to take off. In each game, the player will obviously know something bigger lies ahead, but the player in a first playthrough could not possibly know the truth about Solaris in Xenogears, and the history of the world, Zeboim civilization, etc... Similar to how a first time player of Terranigma could not possibly know the extent of the story and world of the civilization phase.

On future playthroughs of both games, I certainly grew to appreciate the early parts of the stories, knowing how they fit into the total context; they didn't feel slow to me on all future playthroughs, but a necessary portion in the total package.

I honestly didn't find Xenogears confusing though. I actually really loved the story. Although it is true there is a lot of allegory to Gnosticism, Judaism, Greek philosophy, Jung, Freud, and science fiction novels (Brave New World, Soylent Green, Solaris, etc...); although I never felt any knowledge of those was really necessary for understanding the game's story. I feel the references just make it cool; particularly since the game examines various points in about 10,000 years of human history.

Xenosaga I was less fond of, but part 2 and 3 had more interesting stories, but overall I liked the more complete and more epic feeling Xenogears plot.

There's a lot of stuff in Xenogears that's just a reference for the sake of being a reference. It's like Evangelion when Shinji was trapped in the Sea of Dirac. Why Sea of Dirac of all places? Probably so that they can throw out yet another obscure mathematical reference that 99.9% of the people will have no idea. I didn't know what it was until my friend looked it up in the official Evangelion encyclopedia.

Take the Zeboim civilization, the only relevance they have in the game is that they produced Emeralda, who is like the daughter of the 2nd Fei and the 251th Elly. There is also Big Joe. The civilziation was apparently destroyed by the 252nd Miang and there's a lot useless stuff you can learn about it through the game and Xenogears Perfect Works but ultimately the only impact is that they're some mysterious ancient civilization that made Emeralda.

On the other hand take Terranigma's city of Astarica. It's an equally nebulous 'ancient civilization that once had great power', but it lets you know who the heroes of the surface world are, even the ones that may not be obvious (Perel, for one). It explains Royd and Fyda's past, and it's also why the current hero is missing (he was killed). All the stuff is integral to understanding the story because otherwise it really doesn't make sense why the darkside Ark has to take over when clearly the lightside guys has been fighting Dark Gaia since forever.

Flip wrote:I remember loving this game, but it took forever. Lots of dialogue, level grinding, and things to do/explore. I never replayed it, but i always remember thinking it was my favorite RPG for the system.

The only real problem with the game is, much like FF7, the battle system ends up being a lot of hype and promise but after a great start, is regulated to a simple attack-get-your-special-then-kill combo. I loved how you had to hit different button combos to discover new attacks. However, especially without the ability to heal (to any usable level), it was all just attack as fast as possible by going to your specials. Even with the mechs. Unlike most, I was quite happy when you popped in the second disc and it was mostly story and very little playing.

Other than that, I thought the game was awesome. Great and relatively in-depth story (particularly for the time), beautiful graphics, great music....classic Square all the way. Worth the $10 d'load if you don't own a copy already IMO

Don wrote:There's a lot of stuff in Xenogears that's just a reference for the sake of being a reference. It's like Evangelion when Shinji was trapped in the Sea of Dirac. Why Sea of Dirac of all places? Probably so that they can throw out yet another obscure mathematical reference that 99.9% of the people will have no idea. I didn't know what it was until my friend looked it up in the official Evangelion encyclopedia.

Take the Zeboim civilization, the only relevance they have in the game is that they produced Emeralda, who is like the daughter of the 2nd Fei and the 251th Elly. There is also Big Joe. The civilziation was apparently destroyed by the 252nd Miang and there's a lot useless stuff you can learn about it through the game and Xenogears Perfect Works but ultimately the only impact is that they're some mysterious ancient civilization that made Emeralda.

On the other hand take Terranigma's city of Astarica. It's an equally nebulous 'ancient civilization that once had great power', but it lets you know who the heroes of the surface world are, even the ones that may not be obvious (Perel, for one). It explains Royd and Fyda's past, and it's also why the current hero is missing (he was killed). All the stuff is integral to understanding the story because otherwise it really doesn't make sense why the darkside Ark has to take over when clearly the lightside guys has been fighting Dark Gaia since forever.

I felt the Zeboim civilization part of the game was a very interesting part of the history of Xenogears. For the duration of the game, Xenogears always presented the height of technological advancement as being around the time of the war 500 years ago; the current world is essentially built off of the ruins of that world which was destroyed by Grahf and the Diabolos. Xenogears showed only the very recent history, but at this point the world is actually 10,000 years old; one could assume it took over 9000 years of history to build to the technologically advanced Solaris Empire.

Then there is the discovery of Zeboim civilization, which fell 4000 years prior to various plagues (pollution and war in particular). The civilization is obviously vastly more populous than any other era yet examined in the Xenogears chronology; it also mirrored a civilization that mirrored a near future Earth (~2050-2200AD?) which contained many of the problems and regime types of 20th century earth on a larger. It was also a civilization whose technological breakthroughs were superior to that of Solaris. Here exists the perfect nanites that make up Emerelda, which Krelian was very interested in recovering in order to create the necessary parts of the Deus weapon to bring it back online. The Nanites were capable of unlocking DNA which exists within most human beings in the world; most pure in the first class Solarians. These humans then began mutating and eventually came to make up the body of the Deus weapon.

Yes fleshing out Zeboim was probably not necessary for the main plot, but the fact that it is fleshed out made it far more interesting.

Big Joe was a comedic side-plot, the game was more fun with its existence. It was never intended to be a part of the main plotline. In the end it leads the user to a way to upgrade Emerelda into a more powerful form, and also a very powerful Gear Shop.

The reason why it is explained in the game that there have been many generations of Miang is to establish that her character has passed down through all of history. Her main programming is to rebuild and bring the Deus weapon back online. Her purpose was to guide humanity, through its history, leading up the resurrection of the Deus weapon. It is also established that she carries memories from generation to generation. While Zeboim civilization seemed like the opportune time to resurrect Deus -high population and advanced technology- due to the pollutants the population of humanity was deemed too poor of a quality to become the parts of Deus. Miang was the one who judged that this humanity should be eliminated, and then she would start over again, this time with higher quality humans.

holy molyyyyyyyyyy!!!!

That is one of the games I've always wanted to play. I'll have to pick it up.

It is still one of my games out there.

GUUUAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

I am not trying to start a fight -- so leave any fanboyisms in yer butt.

...but you could not pay me enough to replay this. Like Flip, I have fond memories of it, but I remember what a slog it was as well. There's a point where revisiting old experiences you hold a great nostalgia for yields increasingly diminishing returns until you can't remember what was so great about that game/place/time. For me, anyway, leaving games like Xenogears in the past, remembering them a certain way, and finding new experiences is more exciting.

The pacing of Xenogears is ridiculously slow. It took like 60 hours to beat the game and they didn't even really go out of the way to stretch out the game. It was just that slow to get everything done. That was the first game I started using more than one save because there's no way I was going to replay it again to see certain parts again. It's the only RPG I liked that I did not play through more than once because it'd be an utterly painful experience to go through it again. There's a hack that lets you skip the dialogues without even reading them, and you know that is absolutely needed for the hour long stretches where you've a guy sit in a chair with the Pendant of Nesan or whatever that thing was called swinging for an hour while they tell you about their life story.

Blotus wrote:I am not trying to start a fight -- so leave any fanboyisms in yer butt.

...but you could not pay me enough to replay this. Like Flip, I have fond memories of it, but I remember what a slog it was as well. There's a point where revisiting old experiences you hold a great nostalgia for yields increasingly diminishing returns until you can't remember what was so great about that game/place/time. For me, anyway, leaving games like Xenogears in the past, remembering them a certain way, and finding new experiences is more exciting.

Sweet, we agree that I'm awesome. I approve.

Pacing is slow compared to games of 1998, but when compared to many of today's games, such as Mass Effect 2 and The Old Republic, it is much faster paced. Xenogears might actually surprise you with how well it stands up, and how well it lends itself to replays; I find it is actually one of the easiest games, of the last 15 years, to replay. The perspective of the player is also different on a replay, knowing the context of certain things - and there is also SO much material, that there are many scenes that feel very fresh - even after playing through them multiple times.

Honestly, I actually wish that the game had more locations to explore, for example, the user never sees Jugend Military Academy; where Citan, Ramsus, Jesiah, and Sigurd trained - and later Elly. Where they did various experimentation with the Drive, causing latent abilities to come out.

Err no, the game was physically very slow. The random battles are many and took a while to clear because of loading time plus the general pace of the game. The text scrolling speed cannot be sped up and you literally have segments where the character talks straight for an hour with no way to skip it without using hacks. The maps are generally pretty big too. Even with the second CD basically skipping just about all dungeons it's still a very long game. Could easily take 100 hours if you actually have to go through the standard dungeons for all the places they only mentioned during the hour long talking part.

A game like the Old Republic takes a while simply because MMORPGs are designed to take about 200 hours to go from level 1-50. If there was a way to skip leveling up, you can finish the story part of the Old Republic in under 10 hours and half of that would be traveling time. In Xenogears there's probably 10 hours of unskippable dialogue in the main game.

Don wrote:There's a hack that lets you skip the dialogues without even reading them, and you know that is absolutely needed for the hour long stretches where you've a guy sit in a chair with the Pendant of Nesan or whatever that thing was called swinging for an hour while they tell you about their life story.

The fact that it exists is telling.

but... the shirt.

Xenogears was a game that could've benefit from voice acting because even a slow talker talked a lot faster than the speed the game text scrolled at which cannot be modified, and further when they realize they got 10 hours of non skippable spoken dialogue hopefully someone would've realized to either cut some of it down or give you the option to skip them altogether. I guess the original scrolling speed was okay in Japanese since the language is more concise, but in English it's mind-boggling slow.

I was speaking about the pacing of the actual story, and moving through the game; Xenogears covers more ground in shorter periods of times when compared to many adventure/RPG games nowadays.

On your text print speed comment:
That's a huge exaggeration, because the dialogue typically prints in less than 1 second, and the only times a frame takes longer than 2 seconds is in the very rare situations where some sort of comedic/dramatic outburst occurs (there were a few of those involving Shakan, Hammer, and the Elements). Plus I typically read dialogue out loud (yes, I admit it =P) and the text does print quite a bit faster than a voice actor would read it (similar voice acted sequences in Final Fantasy 13-2 and Mass Effect 2 take about 5-8 seconds)... Except for a couple of sequences in Xenogears on the second disk where it prints out very slowly. If they ever do remake the game, I do hope it comes with voice acting =)

On dialogue style:
Xenogears is also more streamlined than certain other games.
In many RPGs/adventure games nowadays (including Mass Effect 2, The Old Republic, and Final Fantasy 13-2), you typically have to continuously select dialogue options from a list, so that ends up slowing down the dialogue much more, and also causes it to flow at an unnatural pace; this is fairly obvious in Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy 13 where everything is voice acted; there will be a conversation going, and then every 15-30 seconds, there is a sudden pause while you decide from the list which dialogue option you should choose next (and you can't just idly click through it because you might accidentally screw up the game and miss an item or important information) and the conversation halts every 15-30 seconds while you select the next section. This both slows the pacing, and also breaks up the conversations to an unnatural sounding state. Dialogue is certainly slower paced in the games I mentioned than it is in Xenogears.

On the issue of large areas:
While areas in Xenogears are rather large in size, the current games today are both larger and characters move more slowly than they did in Xenogears. The slower movement is a result of the change in camera perspective. With the overhead perspective in Xenogears, a large room might take 4-5 seconds to sprint cross (because they can get away with characters running at Usain Bolt speeds without it looking odd), but something the same size takes ~20 seconds to run across in games with the camera perspective in games like The Old Republic.

On the length of the game:
100 hours to finish Xenogears is another exaggeration, it takes me 60-65 to complete the game, talking to all characters, reading aloud all text, and completing all side-quests. Also, the amount of story fit into that 60-65 hours is greater than Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, and Final Fantasy 7 combined. I don't find the long length of the game to be an issue when it has a very high density of high quality story telling. In fact, I wish it were longer, and had even more to it.

Anyway, I am not complaining about the pacing of newer games; I find their pacing fine. What I am saying is that I don't think complaints on the pacing of Xenogears are justified when you find even slower pacing on recent games acceptable. I don't think the pacing in Xenogears is an issue at all. Now I am not saying that Xenogears isn't without flaws and room for improvement - all I am saying is that those flaws don't prevent the game from being (what is in my a opinion) a phenomenal experience without any equal in the areas where it excels.

I think that you might be a little surprised at how great Xenogears is on a replay. It is one of my alltime favourite games to revisit; and I'll admit, I actually enjoyed it more on replays than I did the first time I played it; particularly the first 15-20 hours of the game or so. The replay is a very different experience than the initial play, largely because the story telling style is in such a way that it will present a segment, but it is only later on that you really discover the full context of that segment, and its significance in the greater story.