Human beings have a peculiar tendency to polarize themselves in relation to controversial issues. Heaven and hell, life and death, Pepsi and Coke. It's not surprising to think, then, that the particular brand of gameplay that the prefix "Xeno-" has been associated with-- long cutscenes, a deep (or pretentious) story, and minimal focus on actual interaction-- has brought a good many role-players to an impassable divide. The series inspires fanatical devotion and overwhelming disdain in its fans and detractors, respectively, much like the Jewish mysticism the story is founded on. The question becomes not whether the latest installment of the epic, Episode II: Jenseits Von Gut Und Bose is a good game or not, but if the title can even really be called a game at all.
After a brief flashback which introduces two new characters to the cast, the game picks up mere hours after Episode 1 leaves off; Second Miltia is saved and the crew of the Elsa von Brabant are coming in for a brief respite. Even at this seeming lull in the tale, dark machinations are already underway to reclaim what had been taken from the malevolent U-TIC Organization-- the Y-Data, a file encrypted and secured within party member MOMO's head. What exactly the Y-Data is and why it is so important soon becomes clear as a trap is sprung on the party, and things go downhill very rapidly from there.
In terms of graphics, the game is as stunning as you would expect from the pictures. The game's cinematics are rendered with exquisite detail, and even the minor flaws (such as hair occasionally clipping through clothing) don't seem to matter so much in the long run. In-game visuals are clear and crisp, and enemies such as the Gnosis and the various flavors of U-TIC grunts all have distinctive visual styles and can be recognized on sight without much trouble. The only real complaint in the graphics department is that on occasion some areas can be a bit too visually busy or distracting, causing you to wander towards an enemy without having properly prepared.
And believe me, you don't want to be caught with your pants down in this game. The battle system has been revamped with a new focus on tactics and strategy versus "mash Circle, get Exp, repeat". This is both good and bad. It's good because the thought process involved in battling bad guys makes switching out characters a must (and the game encourages this by allowing characters who do not fight to recover HP and EP) and adds an engaging layer of challenge to the dungeons; it's bad because as wonderful an idea as it was, some battles become too unfairly lopsided one way or another. This difference is usually related to the battle mode in use; character battles are harrowing, while you can easily mail in a performance during the E.S. battles (E.S.es being the new term for giant robots). Either your party is overwhelmingly powerful against certain types of enemies, or your party faces insurmountable numbers of foes who tend to go through turns like you or I go through oxygen molecules. In a modern RPG, death by random encounter is now the exception and not the rule, but apparently someone forgot to tell Monolith.
It's this dichotomy between nail-biting frustration at and coma-inducing apathy for the battles that helps to bring the gameplay down, but more than that the game's dungeons are pathetic. Admittedly there are some pretty devious puzzles in one or two dungeons, but for the most part the game is a linear set of challenges to encounter, solve, and move on from. Some puzzles reset after you leave, and others lock in the "solved" position, so it's entirely possible that you may have to go through dungeons upwards of three times to fully clean them out. In a game with very limited exploration outside of the labyrinths, it can be a bit irritating to know that you have to fight through 80% of a dungeon's battles just to get to the one thing you missed because the key was found three dungeons later. Some would say that that builds character; I call it laziness on the part of the designers.
One of the most engaging things about a Xeno game is the music, which heretofore had been composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. Mitsuda did not score Episode II, instead leaving that up to Yuki Kajiura. Kajiura is probably best known for her work on the soundtracks to the anime series Noir and .Hack//SIGN, where chanting and high-octane techno are the order of the day. The performances for Xenosaga are no different, with an explosive choral piece reminiscent of Don Davis' "Neodammerung" serving as one of the framing themes. The biggest problem that I have with the music is that as good as the cinematic score is, it only manages to highlight how absolutely god-awful the in-play tracks are. It's a shame that Namco, who had done such an excellent job scoring Tales of Symphonia, couldn't have managed to put in a better set of tunes for their new flagship series.
The voice acting, like the game itself, tends to polarize even the die-hard fans of the series. The cast underwent sweeping changes in the interim between the two games, and some fans expecting Lia Sargent or David Umansky's perfect performances to be encored will be disappointed. Then again, the returning cast members-- including Crispin Freeman and Brianne Siddall-- give new depth to their characters beyond the care they showed in the last outing. It's telling when the acting in a game ends up being one of the most compelling reasons to play it; needless to say we've come quite a long way from the "programmers acting badly in front of green screens" of Under A Killing Moon and the like.
I'm going to be honest here and say that you're likely not going to be playing this a second time through. Clocking in at under thirty hours if you rush, the game is considerably shorter than one would expect; the fact that the cutscenes have been greatly abbreviated serves to help this, but even with the truncated showtime, the whole thing begins feeling like a chore far sooner than it should. The tedium of "cutscene, obscenely hard battle, obnoxious dungeon, cutscene" wears thin after maybe ten hours. And don't think you're going to get away without spending at least a little time leveling.
Whichever side of the fence you sit on, it's probably safe to say that Xenosaga II is one of the better movies to come out in 2005; the problem, naturally, is that it started out with the promise that it would be more of a game than its predecessor. It's very hard to recommend the game on the merits of anything but the fact that the story maintains its level of intensity throughout, but the story that many advocate turns away those who're looking for more meat on their plate. Still, the series persists, and hopefully Episode III will make more of an effort to please everyone.
