The Shrine

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>What are peoples opinions on Xenosaga in comparisson to Xenogears?</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>I like the pacing of Gears a lot moreso than Saga. Normally I don't mind watching cutscenes, but I've had to sit through so many in comparison to having so few moments to actually play it's beginning to make me sick a little. Thankfully they're skippable, otherwise I'd be pulling my hair out every time I died to a boss.

The music in Saga is kind of disappointing. I don't know about anyone else, but I actually like having looping themes for different locations. Sure, they might not be the best tracks on the OST, but they're better than absolute silence. In addition there's no unique boss theme, which rather blows.

Gameplay-wise though, Saga stacks up to Gears. Managing techs/ethers/skills is pretty fun, and the bosses can easily give you a run for your money. I don't really like the fact that the Gnosis don't drop gold when you kill them, though. I usually end up having barely enough cash to get new armor for everyone as a result. Technically you could make a case for it (why would aliens be carrying around gold at all?), but then you could ask the same of everyone else in the game.</div>

<div style='font: bold 10pt ; text-align: left; '>Kinda disappointed.... first off... AWGS (gears) are not needed whatsoever. Near the end there is one you can buy that costs an obscene amount of money, and so do all the upgrades for the other AWGS. I decided to forego getting mech stuff, and the next thing I knew, I beat the game (last boss took me like 5 minutes). I did find the overpowered attack (every RPG has one, KotR, etc), which kinda ruined what would have been a challenging battle, but even without it, I didnt touch my AWGS, just used tech skills. Lack of world map pisses me off, but seems RPGs are doing away with that aspect (new age technological ones at least, like FFX, yet XS had even less of what resembled of a world map). Fights were cool tho, and earlier on in the game I did actualyl find use for the AWGS. Still tho, game was WAY too short, music was blah (the very little of it there actually was). Cut scene hell, I like to play my games, not watch them... dunno bout you guys. They also gave into a continuation deal with not ending the current story line. Yes yes I know it's a "saga" but it didn't really resolve anything, and ended when the good stuff was just comming to surface.... IMO, Xenogears is by far the better RPG, but Xenosaga is still enjoyable, just a letdown if you think it can compare to Xenogears.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I really liked the last scene with Wilhelm, Chaos, Nephilim, and Abel. This is one area where the failure to tell you anything in the plot actually made that scene better because it's basically saying all the Gods of Xenosaga that you don't know anything about, even they are watching the outcome of KOS-MOS. But other than that, the plot is pretty minimal. There's more story that can be learned with the UMN keywords database than the game itself.

The bosses simply cannot kill you with the abundance of Ether Packs avaliable. Music is by far the worst I've heard from Mitsuda. Not only are the number of tracks lacking, they're not even that good.

The cutscenes annoyed me not because I can't play but they're usually just space battle firework shows where you get to see pretty lights in the sky going on for 10 minutes that tells you absolutely nothing. For the parts that are actually teling a story, I find them acceptable. Sure, you can probably read the text twice as fast as the characters can speak, but it's not exactly horrible. Xenogears's text scrolled slower than you can speak and it's still mostly a tolerable pace.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>They really abuse the Counter-boost concept to extremes. Like I said, this is the 2nd game besides Chrono Cross where defending is actually useful, but that's because that's the only action you can choose that won't attack the enemy and still able to charge up the AP bar.</div>