The RPG is the personal
staple of console gaming and the prime reason I even own consoles to
begin with. Without them, my television would do nothing but show me
the wonders of the History Channel, Comedy Central and Cartoon
Network.
Many years ago, I picked
up a little game called Xenogears. It had it all: a powerful battle
system, a story that pissed a lot of people off, and a low
concentration of cut scenes to boot. It was an instant classic in my
book. So, without a doubt, I was stoked to be getting my hands on
Xenosaga, which (I am STILL uncertain about this because of company
changes and what not) may or may not be an actual prequel to
Xenogears, and if you know for certain, please tell me. Anyway, how
does this title stack up to a discriminating RPG fanatic like
myself? Well, read on and find out.
Visuals – Middle of
the Road
Visuals aren’t anything
to be impressed with here. Some visuals like the battle effects, are
well done but other forms aren’t so hot. First, character models
will be scrutinized: If you see a character clothed, they seem to be
fine but a problem arises when they try to do those “hot” scenes
(where female characters are seen with short pants). You can easily
see the relative primitiveness of the graphics engine in those
scenes as they are incredibly blocky and have strange connection
seams at joints. Many of the characters just look odd at best, like
the ever annoying Allen who looks not only like he fell out of the
ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, but also has the
constant expression that the world hates him (and for good reasons,
too).
Monster models are rather
limited in scope and not very detailed either. However, level
designs get the worst treatment in the game. The designs themselves
are bland and very boring; there isn’t much in the way of
exploration as everything pretty much sticks out in the open. Ship
corridors are Spartan in design with the exception of a few
destructible panels or potted plants. Random NPCs play an even
lesser part than your typical console RPG as they don’t have
anything but useless banter to say anyway.
Again, the only really
excellent visuals come in the form of battle effects, but they tend
to be WAY overdone, especially when a meager 10 jumps out of the
head of the enemy after sitting through a 30 second fireworks
display. Many times it almost feels like the military fighting
Godzilla: they use all the best weapons and explosions they can
muster, but it doesn’t faze him one bit.
Sounds – Most Annoying
First, I’ll talk about
the music. It isn’t all that bad, especially since the London
Philharmonic did a good chunk of it. The main problem, though, is
that the atmospheric music doesn’t change. You’ll hear the same tune
over and over again. This kind of tactic will make even the best
music annoying after a few hours. Also, a good portion of the game
is silent, which is a bad thing as it takes away from the fun of the
game.
Now we come to the
voice-overs. Oh, what did I do to deserve this punishment? The voice
acting is horrible, pure garbage. It makes me wonder why Namco
didn’t go the route of, say, Freelancer, and hire some professionals
to do the voice-overs. Every single line was screwed up; they were
either over-dramatized or spoken without any shred of emotion. Some
of the voices were just downright obnoxious, like Shion, who has the
voice personality of a lead pipe, and Allen, who played perfectly
into the annoying guy you wanted to run through with a rusty
pitchfork. The only voice that I could accept was that of KOS-MOS,
which is SUPPOSED to sound robotic and unnatural.
Sound effects fared a bit
better than the voice-overs, thankfully: gunfire, explosions, and
the rest are all well done although the gunfire could have been
slightly improved, as it sounds like they are running around with
9mm or .22 caliber weapons. Also, little things like footsteps add
to the atmosphere.
Gameplay – On Target
and Good
The gameplay (what little
there is anyway) is actually quite good. It plays a bit on the
battle system from Xenogears; you hit the buttons in a set
combination and it may unleash a powerful attack depending on
whether or not you have enough attack points saved up. The magic
system is decent and the biggest problem is due to the lack of any
real conflict in the game. You end up being relatively weak when
going against bosses, so you have to run around and find a special
save point so you can go back into a VR version of past levels to
gain your experience.
There is also a system
where you can spend points to improve or gain new abilities. After
each battle, you gain points in Skill, Ability, and Ether. Skill
allows you to “harvest” skills out of an item you have so you can
permanently affix it to your character. Ability allows you to
improve your combo moves as well as improve stats. Ether, which uses
a tree format, allows you to gain new ether spells. This puts a bit
of strategy in the game, like whether or not to improve your ability
to absorb ether attacks or increase the speed of your special move
so you can fire it off without saving up 6 action points as well as
a limited number of slots for how many special moves or ether spells
you can have available for your character in battle.
All in all, the whole
battle doesn’t have the same variety as that in Xenogears as the
number of special moves is rather limited, it does have that
improved strategy element attached to it.
There are a few
mini-games tagged on like a basic casino, a drill game, and a junky
robot fighter, but none of them are worth more than 30 minutes
(combined) in actual game time.
Story – Sappy and
Boring
The very backbone of an
RPG is the story. Without it, it is just another crappy action
adventure with some experience elements tagged to it. Honestly,
Xenosaga is a potentially great RPG with a crappy plot. Since the
story itself is totally irrelevant to the game and doesn’t make much
sense anyway, I don’t mind giving anything away.
The plot takes the
time-old tale of a rag-tag group that comes together under odd
circumstances to save all of humanity. Ho hum, not again. If the
premise weren’t monotonous enough, it gets even worse. The story
takes place ENTIRELY in cut-scenes, which I’ll get into later, and
most of the time they are just useless fillers to make the game
longer. There is a religious overtone in the game, but, unlike
Xenogears (which is obvious about it to the point of controversy),
it doesn’t show much. Maybe it is the total lack of understanding of
Mid-East born religions in general, but the only real references is
a password involving God and the Zohars, which not only being shaped
like a crucifix, are named after religious references. Otherwise, I
really don’t see much of a story here beyond Shion trying to come to
terms with her past, but that isn’t played on much beyond a couple
of brief flashbacks and a monster battle (which made no sense). It
seems that Namco took a few of their Tekken story writers and got
them going here.
Cut scenes – Why So
Many?
As much as I like story
driven games, I still adhere to the idea that I should be able to
PLAY them. The problem with Xenosaga is they don’t want you to play
it. The game starts out with this 45 minute cut scene that sets the
tone for the entire game. I put 38 hours into the game, but 32 of
those hours were easily spent sitting through inane cut scenes that
I was afraid to skip because of the off-chance that I would actually
get to something important. It wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if
these scenes weren’t so slow and boring and filled with poor
voice-overs and mind-numbingly bad dialogue choices as well as huge
fits of what looked like was a bad attempt at dramatic silence. I
buy a game to play it, not put the controller down and lounge back.
That is what my DVD player is for, and I would rather watch
Evangelion than sit through this because at least Evangelion
confuses me in a good way. I really hope this unfortunate trend of
stuffing in a load of cut scenes isn’t going to continue on much
longer, or the Japanese-styled RPG is going to go the way of the
CD-I game system.
An open plea to game
developers: please, if you cannot give me substance IN GAME, don’t
bother making an RPG. Cut scenes, when used correctly, are sparse
and rare.
Miscellaneous Gripes
The loading times suck,
period. It takes 10 seconds to get into and out of the character
menus and loading times between areas aren’t much better. I may be
spoiled by GameCube loading abilities, but this is pretty bad
compared to many other PS2 games that have recently been overcoming
the poor loading abilities of the system.
Bottom Line
Xenosaga is a solid
combat engine bogged down by a horrible story and total lack of
actual time to use that engine. It is a shame as the game that I was
actually able to play was really damned good, but the absurd overuse
of cut scenes, terrible voices, and ridiculously clichéd storyline
destroyed the potential that was within.
