| Xenogears
-Veré magnum habere fragilitatem hominis securitatem Dei- First edition review (c) 2003 Rinku Hero. ____________________ Opening notes. This is my first review for the Heroic Episode. I chose Xenogears [1] first because it is huge: there is so much in it to review that it will make future reviews easier through creating a precedent, and also due to my relatively great familiarity with the game, as it is one of my favorites. As with all reviews in this publication, if you tend to worry about a review spoiling the story before you play the game or read the book, then don't read further. To get the optimal effect from the game it probably is best if you play the game first, but the intent (though I don't yet know how successful it will be) was that the review be of worth both to the person who knows nothing about the game and to the person who is friends with it. The subtitle of this review is my own selection and doesn't appear in the game; I think giving reviews an appropriate subtitle gives some indication of how the reviews here should be approached. It is a quote (in Latin) of Francis Bacon's: It is true greatness to have in one the frailty [mortality, delicateness] of a man and the security [fortitude, invulnerability] of a God.____________________ Contents. 1 - Xenogears overall.____________________ 1 - Xenogears overall. Xenogears, in spite of being rushed to completion, and having one major thematic confusion, is top notch. The skillfully directed structure has not yet been repeated in any game of its size. Xenogears is essentially literary (and for that reason I only with reluctance apply the term videogame to it, I'd prefer to have one word for videogames with a primary literary nature and another term for those with a primary game nature); its primary aesthetic value is its story, which is supported by its game, music, and visual art. It is obvious the designer knew this: there is no place where those supporting elements exist in opposition the main element. It is not that those elements are done poorly, only that they know their place (compare this to many games where the visual element steals primacy, or where primacy fights back and forth between game and story). So I will move first into the main beam of the game, and then to its supports. The existence of the gears, after which the game is named (the 'xeno-' prefix refers to the foreign or alien nature of the gears), is probably the most important element of the game. These gears are giant robots that humans pilot for battle and other purposes. The 'Giant Robot' motif is a common one in Japanese Anime, TV series, and games, and has been used very extensively. [examples go here]. Xenogears uses them in a way distinctive from other giant robot fiction: to highlight the difference between vulnerability and invulnerability. Throughout the game the contrast and comparison between these gears and the humans that ride them is returned to. No exaggeration: the gears are the single most constant and spectacular part of the game, always a reminder of what the game is and as we look into each branch, we'll see that the gear-human relation is ever-present. The game's name selection is wonderful. ____________________
Xenogears is set in a fantasy world, and like all fantasy worlds the world itself is a type of 'character' (or set of world-elements which can act as characters) just as important as -- and often more important than -- the rest of the characters. What made Tolkein's Lord of the Rings books so popular is mainly how detailed and inventive the world that it takes place in is. When you write a fantasy story rather than one based on this earth (either future, present, or past), the creation of the imaginary world is usually the first thing that has to be considered: you can't very well create a cast of characters or plan a sequence of scenes if you don't know where the people and actions take place in. Whether you specifically design a fantasy world for a specific plot or theme (as was done in the C.S. Lewis Narnia novels and as I think was done in Xenogears) or make the world first and figure out what kind of story you'll tell in it afterwards (as is more usual), the construction of the world must precede the full expression of the plot. The world of Xenogears is masterfully detailed; its origin as a farmground, its countries and their histories, its timeline of events, it even has its own measurement system. When I heard that the game's design document is over several thousands of pages long, it didn't surprise me. The quantity of work put into imagining this world and how inherently dramatic the world is surpasses most science fiction and fantasy novels I've read; only a very few are on its level: Dune,The Lord of the Rings, the Thomas Covenant series, and any multi-book series by Orson Scott Card. The nice and epic feeling of being in a world essentially different from the real world is constant; *** World-creation on this level is a very complex and rare talent, it's not something that can be picked up lightly, it can only be done by those who are obsessive about world-creation (usually this starts very young, in the first decade of life) who devotedly hone their world like a sculpture over several years, or decades. There has to be geniune interest in and love for the world that the game or novel takes place in. And there has to be documentation; lists and notes on various aspects of the world, maps drawn of it, but above all it has to be imagined internally, the author has to at times almost live in the imaginary world mentally through daydreaming. A created world it is a re-arrangement of what the person knows and values, an expression of the kind of world they would find interesting to live in. In some ways, world-creation for a fantasy or science fiction novel or game is the sine qua non of the greatest fiction artists. Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, Star Trek, even the Harry Potter world are classics and are cherished not primarily for the plotting or characterization or style of those novels, but for the imaginary world they take place in; enclosed in the presentation of those world is most of the aesthetic value of those works is contained. It is one of the greatest rewards to the artist to create a world of their own, to see that world in a novel or game, and to see it enjoyed by others. A caveat***: the presentation of such a world is not to be taken as the primary purpose of a fantasy or science fiction work; inasmuch as they are stories they should keep the story the goal, and inasmuch as they are games they should keep the game the goal. The created imaginary world is wonderful but be sure that what happens in does justice to it. In some areas of Tolkein's books, and some of the books themselves, the world steals primacy from the stories; this is particulary clear in the last parts of the third of his trilogy, it was as if he didn't want to leave the world after the climax had happned, and slowed down the ending to a crawl and an anticlimax in order to present more of his Middle Earth. Additionally, it's important to recognize that no world-creation is done ex nihilo, it is only a re-arrangement. It is a creation based on what the person finds aesthetically pleasing, the kind of elements included are those that make the author feel 'now this would be an interesting world worth thinking about'. In this case of Xenogears, the world the author found interesting was one that was created by a 'higher being' called Deus, a type of artificially intelligent world-destroying weapon, which rebelled against its creators, sustained damage from the attempt, crash landed on a planet, created a humanity solely for the purpose of repairing itself, and for thousands of years directs all of the world's major activities (through human tools). The rest of the world's construction revolves around that fact; there are basically three classifications of characters in the game (although some characters mix each side and change sides): a first, of those who accept its direction, a second, of those who that rebel against it, and a third, of those who do not know about Deus at all or believe in it only as a legendary benign creator -- the great mass of humanity. The world of the game does have 'inspirations' and precursors. The main precursor is the world of Chrono Trigger, many of the details of this world are evolutions of details in that world, and not only in details [5]. The idea of a world with giant robots is also not new, a huge genre exists for it in Japan (a lot of which is popular in translation, e.g. Voltron). The idea for the dystopic totalitarian city Solaris has precursors in the world of 1984 by Orwell and, especially, the world of Brave New World by Huxley. But the world newly-created here is still an original, it takes some elements from other fictional worlds but they are necessary elements arranged in such a way that they are irreplacable, there is nothing that is in the world just because it was in another fictional world, which can't be said for most other imaginary worlds created for games. The world of Xenogears has a heavily technological basis, making it what I'll call a fantasy with science fiction elements. Reincarnation exists but is explained through a type of DNA code which can transmit memory and personality. Immortality exists but it is explained as a consequence of nanotechnology. Magic exists but that is also explained by the hypothetical ether (which used to be a scientific theory but has lost its explanatory power). Giant human-piloted robots exist and their power source is something called the Zohar Engine, which also powers Deus. There are six widespread cultures in the game, each corresponding to a different country: Kislev (a Germany-like militaristic country that trives on competition), Aveh (the largest country, with the most freedoms but troubled by a recent coup), the Ethos-Etone Church (a Solaris-controlled mass religion which also creates and hunts down mutants), Nisan (an independent religious community), Shevat (a hidden, isolationlist, anti-Solaris city in the sky which virtually one on the land knows of), and Solaris (also a hidden flying city, the most powerful and long-lived, and the main institution of Deus' control). There is also smaller ones, like Lahan (where the game begins, a small peasant village). They are all quite nicely created, they're very 'colorful', 'organic', and life-like, they do feel like real cultures. There are also a number of cultures which do not exist anymore but existed in the game's past, presented in flashbacks and computer recordings, these give the game even more depth by adding a feeling of history to the world. This is actually a great achivement -- I can think of only a few other games with cultures this well done: Chrono Trigger, the Suikoden series, some of the later Final Fantasy games, and that's about it. Most tend to use generic dragon-and-castle cultures which all resemble eachother and feel like they're all the same place over and over again in new disguises. A few more notes about the above cultures: Solaris is done well, it's mind-controlling in accordance with the principles of Deus; it's a nicely done dystopia: notice how so many of its best and most talented citizens (Jesiah, Citan, Ramsus, Sigurd, Elly, Ramsus, the elements, even Krelian) deeply dislike how it is run and eventually defect; like all statist nations, only the weaker and most decadent citizens remain loyal to it, the more self-respect a person has the less they want to do with it. The people are human in appearance but there are some 'mutants' or 'demi-humans' as well. As Deus awakens it begins to turn humanity into horrible mutants to be used as elements of its regeneration and repair; but even before it begins to awaken variations of humans exist as part of activities of Solaris and Ethos religion (compare this to games like the Breath of Fire series, the Suikoden series, or Final Fantasy XI and X, where the demi-humans but without much or any explanation or purpose). I'm not sure what to think about the inclusion of dem-humans in the game, for although these are intersting mixes not often done: penguin-like people, a walrus-like person, and a camel-like person, etc., they seem to be for visual variety only -- they effect thes tory only minutely and I question whether the game would have worked much worse if Hammer or Rico were human in form. Unfortunately there is also a comic-relief race called the chu-chu (they resemble mice-like stuffed animals but can grow to giant size) whose existence doesn't really have a good in-game explanation and seem to be there for the sake of cuteness only. The non-human, non-gear, 'monsters' of the game are an odd bunch. There are dinosaurs living in forests, gryphons that can fly "1000 kilometers per hour", elves, kobolds, dragons, dwarves, golems, as well as some newly invented monsters. Most RPGs [4] and games in general and fantasy novels in general make this same dumb mistake of just selecting monsters arbitrarily based on what they think makes a cool scary monster and what have been used as monsters in other RPGs; I prefer something uniting the monsters of a game into a whole. The best examples of this are Kingdom Hearts and Ico: the 'heartless' of the first and the shadowy creatures of the second, despite being similar to eachother thematically are still distinct and have individual characteristics; you don't need to have a grab-bag set of monsters to give enemies individuality. This is not to say that the individual monsters are designed poorly -- a lot of them are interesting, such as the mutants (Wels) -- just that they have no unifying principle. The monsters don't even have the consistency of all being original createures (as in the Mario and Zelda game monsters): some are new creations and some are copies of actual animals or monsters in other games. So this is probably the worst-designed part of the imaginary world, though there is a paucity of good monster designers in the game industry today; so it's somewhat understandable (but not excusable). The technology of the world is designed with above-average competence, but Takashi is no scientist, so there are a couple of weird things that seemed objectionable to me (as a former biochemistry major with a long interest in nanotechnology), and though they may be unimportant to most of the game's audience it's my contention that if you are going to write a sci-fi story keep the science believable. The big unbelievability is: if nanotechnological assemblers exist, why would Deus need to use humans as organic parts to repair itself and build Merkaba? Couldn't it just use basic carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water and get the elements from there? Another is: a person's personality is supposedly stored in the DNA of every woman on the planet, and so that person can be 'reincarnated' through that DNA, but how does the DNA of people unrelated to that person store the memories of the person who died, at the moment the person died, even if they don't have children and there is no chance to transmit that information? Another oddity: the nanomachines installed the 'limiters' which can supposedly control thoughts, but I don't see any way that this is feasible; nanomachines only work on the molecular level, they wouldn't be able to distinguish one type of thought from another on the basis of chemicals (since at that level, as far as I know, all thoughts look alike); although possibly it could do something to limit thought by making the brain work more inefficiently, similar to how some drugs work -- but it couldn't prevent people from having rebellious thoughts per se -- I don't think it is at all possible to use nanotechnology to selectively see when a person is thinking about resisting authority, as the game claims. But as mentioned in the first section; the most important part of the world of the game are the gears, all the cultures (except one are two) are gear-using cultures, they're all influenced by the existence and use of the giant robots. They're used for construction, for treasure salvaging, for war, a lot of the townspeople's lives and careers revolve around them. The most important realization about the world of Xenogears, though, is that it was created in close concordance with the plot; the world's origins, its potential end, its power institutions, its wars, its religion, the giant gears piloted, all the elements of the imaginary world are there because they are are required by either the story or by other elements of the world. The idea of a world ofcreations slaying their creator Deus is the skeleton of not only the plot and also of the world. Poetically speaking, the world Nietzsche's announcement that "God is dead! We have killed him, you and I!"*** developed into a Japanese giant robot fantasy setting. ____________________
The characters are almost, but not quite, as well done as the world. On the good (successful and prosperious) side, in the front of them all is Fei, the first man's current re-incarnation, who overcomes more relentless problems than anyone else in the game (including having multiple personalities, which are presented quite accurately despite being misnamed schizophrenia in-game). There is next Elly, who is 'half' of the first woman's current incarnation, but like fei overcomes great problems (being raised to see all Earth-dwellers as non-human, the aftereffects of force-feeding her violence-inducing drugs), in pursuit of good. There is Citan, a literal doctor and a figural guardian-angel, who overcomes many obstacles with skill and reason (most notably his own pacifism). Bartholomew, an outcast prince of a kingdom, after a long struggle regains that kingdom. There is Billy, a young priest who believes he is purging evil but later realizes he's been working for evil, and despite this shock manages to change sides and destroy his former group (joining his before-hated father Jessiah who had realized the group's evil long previous). There is Emerelda, an artificial human, called the "ultimate 'work of art' ", created using nanotechnology by one of the first man's previous re-incarnations. I'll ignore Chu Chu, the comic relief character who was a mistake to include as a central playable character, since although she had one good scene the majority of the game she was used mainly for looking cute (she has the form of a stuffed animal) and for horrible puns (if you can call replacing parts of words with 'chu' punning). Take a moment to note how each of these work: the common element is overcoming some conflict and gaining a value -- the conflicts involved vary, but together constitute a rainbow, each conflict a different color and plot point along the central plot line conflict of Deus. On the evil (failing and flawed) side, most important is Krelian, an immortal (nanotechnology has been developed by this Deus-created civilization) who fell in love with one of the first woman's past re-incarnations and wasn't able to save her from destruction in that lifetime, consequently developed a quest for perfection, and consequently a quest to create a true god ("If god doesn't exist in our world, then... I will create god with my own hands!").*** Here in common is the failure to reach their value, either because that value is misplaced (Shahkan), because of a self-conscious self-doubt (Hammer), because of hatred (Ramsus),*** Another thing is: the sheer number of story characters in this game is probably the highest of any game's story -- it has about as many named characters as 1000+ page novels like War and Peace. And amazingly, unlike some of the characters in those novels (at least this was the case for me), it's never difficult to tell them apart or to remember who did what, though this may have to do with the visual aids (in novels you don't get distinctive portraits of each character when they speak). But besides the pictures, just how did they become so precisely and clearly defined? I think it's just plain skill in placing them; with only one or two exceptions each minor character does his role in the story and then gets out. It's in the less major and in the very minor characters, actually, are where I think the game shines at full brightness. I have never in any other RPG seen 'ordinary townsperson' dialogue as interesting, as coherent, and as wonderful as in here. People who are only in one or two plot scenes in the entire game (Yui, Midori, Alice, Timothy, Dan, old man Maison, Big Joe, the captain of the Thames, Primera, Samson, I could go on) actually are more developed and memorable than main characters of most other RPGs; it's not just their characters that are interesting but it's the amazing way the game manages to condense such a high degree of character in so little time on screen and so few lines. Since the number of characters is so large and I only lightly grazed them above, instead of trying to give them all the time thy require I'll go in greater detail into a few of the more interesting characters (Krelian, Ramsus, Cain-Gazel-Miang, Citan, Fei-Id-Coward-Grahf, and Deus), and leave the rest for as possible excersises by the reader. Krelian*** Ramsus*** Cain and he Gazel ministry were the first humans besides Abel and the first Miang, are the oldest-lived humans (almost 10,000 years old), and act as the pushed pawns of Deus. Cain from early on spread the first religion in order to control the people, best said in his words: "We are the people expelled from paradise and forced to live on the cruel surface of the earth. We who fill this land will once again return to the presence of God in paradice and live there eternally. That is the -Time- of the -Gospel-. That -Time- is at hand. We, the Gazel, must find God's resting place by then and resurrect him. That is our final prayer." It is unclear whether he actually believes that reviving Deus will bring paradise or not, but those he rules do believe it. He really has no personality other than that, which is appropriate because people who reject or give away their free will away to others, shifting the beneficiary of all their actions outside of themself, don't have much personality, and he and the Gazel are no exceptions. Cain, true to his name, kills the character Abel (the first incarnation of Fei) for objecting to Cain's religion and with the first Elehaym (the first incarnation of Elly) attempted to spread the idea of free will for humanity -- which makes interesting sense since a god based on destruction rather than creation (Deus IS a weapon, afterall) would probably have favored Cain over Abel. Miang is much the same as Cain and the Gazel, but in a sense even more exteme a puppet than they were, it's questionable whether she has a human mind since whenever she comes into existence it is like a virus, a complete overlay of a Deus-programmed personality over the previous person in that body. She is the most frequently recurring antagonist in the game and I imagine the most terrifying, since she can't really be killed and can enter even into who the person most trusts (as she does in the game to Fei's mother Karen and later to Elly).*** Citan*** I want to go into the 'three personalities' of Fei: the Id, the normal Fei that you see in most story scenes, and 'the Coward' -- these are very certainly the Fruedian ideas of the Id, the Ego, and the Superego (German words meaning 'it', 'I', and "more-than-I", respectively). I personally disagree (more than disagree: dislike) Freud's psychological theory; even though it was the first realy attempt at a systemization of psychology it is often completely unconnected with reality, so I was a bit disappointed to find it play such a major part in the game. The three elements named above are supposed to be the three basic parts of the mind, always in conflict with eachother: the first is impulse, basic needs and desires, short-term amoral will; the second is recognition of reality's limits, rationality, the conscious part of the personality (what we normally think of as the self); the third is morals, familial and social rules, interpersonal relations, duty; the idea is that the second mediates between the first and the third, but is weaker than either (except in those with very strong egos, who have 'self-overcome' (to use Nietzsche's term) the other parts of their personality in accordance with long-term logical thinking). Anyway: the three parts are different personalities of the main character Fei, and throughout the story*** The real star character of the game is actually Deus. It has the most space in 'Perfect Works' (an information book about the game released only in Japan), is the most complex, and the other main characters, and the plot itself, all revolve around Deus. They were created by it, and either serve it or are fighting for it; and in some cases they are a direct part of it. As Deus says in the first lines ("I am the alpha and omega"), Deus is the first character in the first scene of the game, and his death (and the escape of his engine) ends of the game; so in effect the game can be thought of as being in the tragic form, the tragedy of Deus's death. The main character Deus consists of four parts. Its brain Kadamony is made up of an organic-indeterminate part (composed of Persona, Anima, Animus) and a mechanical-logical part. I disagree with the insinuation that organic brains are less logical than computer brains, but it's not a main point about Deus so I'll overlook. The bulk of its body is Merkava, which is a huge organic ship for use as transportation trhough the stars (and also severs as the last dungeon of the game), which is protected by Seraphs (angels) who act like white blood cells defending it. The weapon system is an organic being that is the whole system's actual purpose (a weapon to destroy planets). And its power source is Zohar, which is a being from another dimension 'captured' and used to convert energy from its dimension to this one. In effect Zohar has a will of its own and fights Deus by acting through 'The Contact' (Fei) and other means. So Deus's goal is to repair itself and turn the planet into an embodiment of its body, and then (probably) to return to the humans who created and exiled it and destroy them, and Zohar's goal is to escape its confinement and return to its dimension, using the free will of humans as its ally; the player controls characters who are embodiments of the free will of humans. So Deus is more than the main character, but the plot, setting, and characters in one.*** The biological
element inside Kadamony divides into 3 regions, called the Persona, the
Anima,
____________________
The most important aspect of a story is its plot; an interesting world and interesting people would be nothing without interesting actions, or put another way, it's observing interesting actions that makes the people and world-elements which perform those actions interesting, not the other way around. The plot construction of Xenogears is usually good, often great, and sometimes can compare with the greatest novelists -- which is impressive considering the length (it can take up to 100 hours to finish). As I said in the first sentence of this review however, Xenogears was rushed to completion and much of the later sections of the plot are not filled out, with many cuts from what was originally planned. But even with these cuts, which do give it an unfinished feeling, it remains an epic and meaningful plot: A greatly advanced engine of unknown origin is created by trapping a being from another dimension inside it. This engine is then used by an advanced spacefaring human civilization to make a being for use as an interplanetary super-weapon, but they judge the weapon to be too powerful ever to use, so exile it in a giant interstellar ship called 'Noah's Ark' (or the Eldridge after a translation name-change). While travelling toward exile the weapon rebels, takes over the ship, destroys all the crew but one, and crashes the ship to an uninhabited planet. It then creates a new civilization on that planet, not in its own image but out of the DNA remains of the humans it killed, and thus Deus becomes a god. The being trapped inside the engine of the weapon has other plans, and gives some of its power and knowledge to the surviving human and to the first woman (who presumably was not made out of the surviving man's rib). The machine-god-weapon for thousands of years puppeteers the civilization of that planet (via genetic, religious, and other means), having created all of them for the sole purpose of repairing itself and giving it transporation off the planet (ever hear of something called 'humanity's purpose'? -- in this game, human life on that planet literally were given life for a purpose). Then, after the rise and fall of countless empires, cities, kingdoms, technologies, and cultures, comes the day when "The creations of god will someday be a hinderance... That is why they must be eliminated." In broad outline, the plot involves some humans, led by the present reincarnations of the sole surviving human and the first created human, discovering what Deus is and rebelling against first his institutions of control and then it itself thereby 'slaying god'. The humans now have the planet to themselves, free of a controlling purpose. After the battle the main semi-villain of the game leaves the planet with the Wave-Existence (a perfect being that was being held inside the alien engine), in an attempt to become one with perfection. The above is the 'plot-theme': the plot stripped to its essential conflict or situation, without any of the branches and sub-branches. After creating a seed situation as good as that one (no small feat) there is still a lot of plotting to do. The protagonstic forces and the antagonistic forces move around the world and combat eachother and create an event sequence which I do not have space to describe. To give even a good representation of the plotting elements and scenes require a doubling in this review's size, and isn't really needed, so I will selectively describe a few of my favorite plot conflicts. The Here I should draw attention to how similar this plot is to Lavos, and to Chrono Trigger (which was an earlier game by many on the Xenogears game design team). The plot of Chrono Trigger can be looked at as an early 'first draft' of the plot of Xenogears, with the similar but not identical idea of an alien monster that lands on a planet, advances that planet's civlization, feeds off of it, creates children, and then destroys the planet. Civilization in Chrono Trigger, as here, was created and intended to prosper for the sake of some giant thing almost beyond human comprehension. The plot of the game in Chrono Trigger, as here, involved freeing humanity from its enslavement by a world-owning creature. There were other minor simularities between the games as well, even to the extent of repeated character archetypes (the Three Wise Men who are masters of technology, a blue-haired semi-villain which is more on your side than you thought), locations (Shevat vs. Enhansa), and situations (losing and regaining the main character). Also, they both had cuts: both were originally planned to be much more than they finally were. The differences between these games are also worth looking at: Xenogears is longer (about three times as long), involves eternal recurrance instead of time travel, has a more serious atmosphere (the characters despite being of comparable ages are much more mature in Xenogears), and is more essentialized and thus more pleasing aesthetically. There are some 'plot holes' which are not actually plot holes so much as scenes that were cut from the game due to time constraints. So you never fully leran that Rico is the son of the Kaiser Sigmund (or how Kaiser Sigmund dies), or what Ramsus does after he gets over his hatred of Fei -- and there is probably a lot more to it that I don't know about that was intended to be included. As great as the game is, another year of production time would have done it wonders. So it's actually challenging to critique a plot when you haven't seen all of it due to no fault of mine or of the game's author. It's even more challenging when you realize that it was originally concieved as the fifth episode of five parts (with four previous incarnations of the first man and woman presumably being the recurring main characters of each). But the game is still very understandable even sans the missing plot and the missing prequels (fortunately, a portion of the development team thereupon left Squaresoft, and, under an excellent new name -- Monolith Software -- has under a new producer begun anew the series called Xenosaga [3]). The plot can be seperated first into 'pre-game plot' and 'game-time plot'. Pre-game plot is told via flashbacks and took place chronologically before the game begins, and this is not an insignificant amount of plot, at least a fourth of the story scenes of the game are either flashbacks or involve someone telling someone else about a pre-game event. The game-time plot can be seperated into roughly five 'parts', grouped by the country or culture that is explored during that time (and this is only my partitioning, the game itself doesn't partition): 'Aveh', 'Kislev', 'Ethos-Nisan', 'Shevat-Solaris', and '2nd CD'. Each of these 'parts' is about equal in length and involves some main conflict which is resolved in that part's climax. Since the most important part of a plot is the climax, and I already listed the whole-game climax (the defeat of Deus) which takes place on the '2nd CD' part, I'll examine the first four 'part-climaxes' and describe the main things that each part 'gets done'. The part-climax of 'Aveh' is the rescue of Margie from Shakahn. This is probably the most interesting part-climax in the game in terms of gameplay (which we'll see in the section on gameplay below), but in terms of story it's not much of a conflict resolution. This entire part of the game is the first part so understandably it concerns itself with introducing the world and setting up questions that will be answered much later; the goal of the beginning of a fantasy story is generally to present the fantasy world and the characters and situation as well as possible without making it feel like nothing is helping and no one is moving. This was accomplished here by exiling the main character from his village after he causes it some trouble related to his destiny or game quest (this is often done in RPGs -- e.g. Secret of Mana), and having him go out into the world and explore it. The main goal of this part of the game -- besides the initial destruction of the player's village and soon thereafter meeting the female Protagonist (which are over with quickly yet are skillfully executed) -- is helping a banished prince (Bart) rescue his cousin and then try to regain his throne. The rescue attempt climax itself serves a plot purpose but it's a minor one and was probably devised just to introduce characters in a most efficient way, most importantly the exiled prince turned pirate and his crew and some of the major antagonists of the game: Shakahn (an Ethos bishop who led a coup and expelled Bart, Ramsus (a person created by the semi-villain Krelian to slay the emperor of Solaris), and Miang (the main agent of Deus). The part-climax of 'Kislev' is better: Fei's conflict is that he fears fighting but realizes he must fight to protect those he values and himself; this is dramatized very well. We see him distrust fighting right from the beginning of the game in Lahan, it is echoed many times since then with ever-increasing consequences for fighting or not fighting, and it isn't really fully resolved here but it's resolved in the sense that in this part of the game he decides that he can no longer refuse to fight. *** The part-climax of 'Ethos-Nisan' is my favorite of these, and my favorite part of the game. *** The part-climax of 'Shevat-Solaris' is the destruction of Solaris. *** I'm going to skip a bit ahead, over most of the 'second CD', or the plotting of everything that happens in the game after the destruction of Solaris, because this part of the game was as aforementioned rushed: instead of dramatizing the story they hactually had the characters sit in chairs and tell you the story as a flashback while you wiere whisked from boss battle to boss battle. Plot that was supposed to have been dramatized with a dungeon, exploration, battles, and dialogue scene or two, where reduced due to time constraints to bad 5-minute summaries. The summaries even mention how difficult the dungeon was to et through -- as if it were direct out of the design document. In the worlds of another reviewer: "Xenogears is the best RPG game ever released. And the only one never finished." I can't review unfinished and undramatized plotting, but those summaries were enough to make me very sad about what could have been done and wasn't. For the ending area, the final 3 hours or so of the game, they again switched to dramatization; you could again move around on the overworld map and scenes stopped being summaries. *** ____________________
While preparing for this review I re-read the game's script, and one thing I noticed this time is that there aren't really that many cliché scenes, they're fresh through the whole game. The idea of a scene is to dramatize some amount of story within a local space and time: narrating some plot progression (an action or event) which simultaneously reveals information about the characters and situation/setting (the things that act and are acted upon). Plots in fiction are almost always seperated into distinct scenes, with any change in time or place being a change in scene; it's pervasive enough so that when a story isn't set up into a sequence of scenes something feels wrong. I think this, and I only just realized this while reading the script, is because even though real life itself isn't really dividable into scenes, memories are basically scene-like. The narative form of art is related to one person teling another person about the past (something they experienced themselves or heard of), and probably started off in humanity's past either as tales of semi- or non-existent ancestors, enemy tribes, animals, gods, legends, and myths, or relatedly, as lying about something that did not happen to you -- and I suspect that both of those processes use the same mental apparatus as memories, and the so-called false memories, themselves do: you re-create an image of a scene in your mind, from beginning to end in some one place and at some one time interval, as a scene. The memory isn't regularly or metrically time-measured, but jumps from important essential to important essential, dwelling more on some, less on others, and ignoring what wasn't stored in memory at all; in other words, unlike actual experience, time is distorted in memories, you don't experience a memory as if it were a video camera recording going at a certain speed, but in a jumpy yet chronological order, based heavily on 'what led to what' and 'what important thing came next'. Memory itself is a conceptual-triggered reconstruction, and not a recording, and so every element isn't in it, it's essentialized by what was important to store in your mind, each set up into 'space-time chunks', so when you tell others a memory or a group of memories (as when telling someone about a trip somewhere) it retains this character. So this is why I think fiction uses this localized scene format, its origin is our memory system. Consequently, this may explain why a lot of scenes in bad fiction resemble eachother, especially within a particular genre (though I dislike that term since it's just fiction as grouped by an audience's preference tendencies). There is the villain tying a girl to train tracks as a train approaches scene, the riding off into a sunset scene, and many other scenes that re-appear a lot in bad fiction but almost never appear in real life. This doesn't mean fictional scenes should be like real-life scenes, this just means that scenes should not be copied off of scenes in other fiction. There are also some types of scenes which are high-level categories and necessary exist in most fiction (war scenes, rescue scenes, climactic battle scenes) but I don't consider these cliché because they can be and should be done in new ways each time. By a cliché scene I mean one that feels like you deja vu -- in the sense of a current situation being similar to some other remembered scene. It's possible that Xenogears does have a lot of bad scenes that I simply don't recognize as such due to not being very familiar with the Japanese giant robot genre, but to me they're all very fresh. In the first town the ten-year-old brother of Alice (the person to be married the next day) says he'd rather have the player as a brother-in-law and then if you agree to run away with her says it's probably a bad idea but that he appreciates the gesture, and then in the next scene when you see Alice herself she says "Fei... Have you ever thought about things this way? If... If you had only been born in this village... And we had only known each other earlier on..." -- this is a wonderful way to dramatize what the player destroys when his Id destroys the village. Beautiful scene. Ramsus (sent by Solaris to aid Shakhan) interrogates Margie, and she indirectly complains about being held captive by Shakhan and Shakhan's actions in general: Ramsus: I am Ramsus, she is Miang. We would like to ask you some questions.Beautiful scene: it reveals Ramsus as kind, but dedicated to his task, and Margie as polite but intelligent under the surface. ***more So what can we get from this? That to some extent scenes must relate to and lead to eachother -- a scene of a story alone is not a story -- but in another sense each scene must be an experience awesome in itself, capable of being enjoyed even without knowing what the scenes that happen after it are and even if you've forgetten a few things from the preceding scenes. In other words, a scene must be enclosed enough so that you don't have to know the whole plot to get some of the beauty of the scene, to some extent a plot exists for the sake of experiencing each individual scene that makes it up and to some extent the scenes exist for the whole holding-together the plot and shouldn't just be loosely connected, a good analogy is a necklace of pearls: the total story is the whole necklace, the circle of pearls worn as an ornament, the plot is the thread holding it together, and each scene is a pearl on the thread and should be whole in itself; the story structure without the beauty of the individual scenes would have no beauty, it'd just be a string around someone's neck. ____________________
The dialogue is triumphant in content but defunct in style, most likely owing to the translator from Japanese rather than to the original writer; it's not uniformly bad, but where it is good it is good in spite of and not because of the translation. To be fair, it does has some nice poetry-like gems, among my favorites: "There was a deep, deep, reason, deeper than the deepest ocean for doing what I did." -- Big Joe after stealing the player's money. "It's much easier to be given a place to belong than to make one for yourself. Being given one's place frees one from any risks. Misfortunes may be blamed on others. Under total surveillance there is no need to bear the price of maintaining one's identity. They simply live under the delusion of being an individual. What could be easier?". "My fist is the divine breath! Blossom, o fallen seed, and draw upon thy hidden power. Grant unto thee the power of the glorious 'Mother of Destruction!' " But I'm certain that a huge amount of style was lost and replaced during translation. Reading a Xenogears Plot Translation FAQ (by Zhou Tai An, available in the Xenogears section at http://www.gamefaqs.com) assured me of this. I compared his impression of the story, reading it in Japanese, with mine of reading it in English, and there seem to be a lot of lost style. Most important is that the Japanese has different levels of politeness, for example, a online story FAQ for the game says: "She [Alice] and Fei seem to have\had some kind of a relationship, romantic or otherwise, (they both speak in a very stitled [sic] fashion, as if they want to say something more but don't) but their speech gives no clue to as what kind it may be." Whereas when I see that scene, I see nothing of the sort -- much of the stiltedness and and hesitation was lost. There are many more examples. One stylistic element that was not lost in the translation is the 'camera movement' (there is no actual camera but the viewpoint of the screen can be thought of as one). I don't yet know much about cinematography and so didn't pay as much attention to it as I should have, but I know that I liked how the camera moves much more in this game than in comparable RPGs of the time, although I don't think it's at the level of Metal Gear Solid's camera work it's still well done here. The 'full motion video' story scenes (such as the introduction and the ending) are much more perfected in this aspect than the 'in-game graphics' story scenes, but even in the latter you have a lot of nice touches. Also nice is how the CD load-times are 'disguised' by a zoom-in effect whenever a new room is being loaded to memory. One of my favorite stylistic elements of the game -- although this may not be only stylistic -- is the increasing epicness of the game. When the player begins the game, there isn't much to it; you're a young man, a painter, in a small village, there is a doctor up on the hill, his wife makes good food. But with each new event more grandeur is added to the world: what is this, a giant robot? And there, a war between two countries? And another group that appeared out of nowhere and is assisting one of the countries? And the doctor is a master of martial arts? More and more objects are revealed as greater and more important than they first seemed. This continues on and on without relenting, and after sixty or more hours of this, eventually the kindly doctor on the hill is revealed to be a guardian angel sent by the emperior of the world, his wife was born in another secret flying city, and the main character himself is revealed as a 5th reincarnation of someone who was created to destroy that which created the world. This gradual increase in epicness is probably a large guiding principle in how the plot progression was decided, and though this isn't the only story in which it has been used, it's used extremely well here: every character when introduced seems less important than they finally are. Compare this too a similar stylistic device in the animated movie Spirited Away: in that movie each character and story element was first presented as scary, and as the plot progressed and you got to know the characters and story elements better, they became less scary and even friendly and benevolent; the pattern is give something one atmosphere on first presentation and gradually switch to an opposite atmosphere -- Xenogears goes from first-impression earthy small-town mundanity to final grand epic universal-scale importance, Spirted Away goes from first-impression dangerous fright to final enjoyable familiarity. A great subtheme dramatized by this is the idea that importance is not a zero-sum game: there is not some sum amount of it, it can be had by anyone; and that it has no limit, but can increase toward infinity. Another stylistic element that's worth going into is that the game went overboard with symbolism, most of which is either German (especially Nietzschian, Freudian, and Jungian) or Biblical-Hebrew. A lot of it is aptly placed (Emperor Cain, Abel, Id, Anima/Animus, Ouroboros, Elhaym), but a lot of it is overkill (The three wise men as gear engineers, Bartholomew Fatima, Noah's Arc (the Eldridge), ***), and a lot of it is just bizarre (a weaponsmith says: "This came out great! It was like turning plowshares into a sword!"; there is an item called Samson's Hair, which makes you temporarily stronger). And there is one exception to the above symbolisms, for some reason Norse mythology has one sole symbol: the Yggdrasil. Granted this is a symbol of the connection between heaven and hell (more precisely Asgard and Nibelheim/Niffleim) and so is arguably related to the game's theme, but even so this is much more excess than I think works aesthetically. Some symbolism was (perhaps intentionally) lost in translation as well -- Citan was originally Satan for example (which makes sense in that he is a fallen angel). This symbolism does conform with the religious atmopshere; the game is wrongly said to have 'religious overtones': this is not true, the entire game is about religion, it's no mere overtone. So the heavy symbolism is a mixed bag. My preferred policy toward symbolism is to use as little of it as possible, preferably only using actual recognizable words as symbols. Most people who play this game would not know what in the world all these weird terms (Yggdrasil and the Path of Sephiroth, or even Id and Anima/Animus) mean. Obscure symbolism is to be shunned in favor of symbolism that uses actual words. I do break this policy myself (Caduceus in Tilde and the Mask of :P, Enthusiasm in Before they Shoot You), so what I'm really objecting to is the *amount* of obscure symbols, it tends, especially for the person unfamiliar with them, to obscure and slow down rather than clarify. Returning to the background abstraction of the game, it is obvious the game's writer did more than take symbols from the above sources mentioned, their themes swim through the story. But what is the exact position of the game on religion? Nietzsche's death of God idea is part of it: it's in the very skeleton of the story about Deus (an entity that was not really evil, but just extremely alien and just didn't respect the free will of the humans it created) and the people desire to be free of the purpose of their creation; and the setup of the moralities and religion of most of the world, which was an ally of the life and goals of Deus and not of mankind. So there is a partial 'antichristianity' subtheme toward the villian-group of the Ethos: namely, that priests and religion seek to make people weak and docile, and despises the strong and noble. But it's not (sadly -- beause there was so much potential for it) 100% against what Nietzsche called the slave-morality either, but rather more like 75%. For example: Elly: I am so sorry... so please forgive me! I was wrong... I thought sacrficing myself in order to save others was the right thing to do... But my actions only brought sadness to all the people who I left behind. And that sadness gave birth to even more sadness.Other examples, worse: Elly says "A single hand cannot clap," and "Some things only the weak can feel... but weakness does not make them secure. It's because they are weak, that they can develop kindness... and never look down on people." But about religion in general, it is clearly positive. The Nisan sect of religion*** There will be more to say about this later, but I do think there is a pervasive higher-level internal contradiction to the theme which has echo effects in the style. The style, at its worst moments, shouts one way and then marches another way. The worst offenders are the love scenes; this makes sense since a person's worldview of love is often one of the most unexamined and contradictory parts of a individual's worldview, due to world culture's odd and unstable view of it -- culturally there is an active resistence to understanding or thinking about it (the same is true for art), and a lot of faking it (the same is true for friendship and pride). In general the view of love presented in the love scenes if of the 'German idealism' worldview which Nietzsche attacked so much, which when diluted down to popular culture has become the idea of 'soulmates' and the like. And so you get a conflict between two opposing worldviews, a Nietzschian rejection of the dualistic distinction between the 'true world' and 'apparent world' vs. the embracement of the distinction. The style of the game probably wasn't fully understandable to me until I saw this. This isn't just in the love scenes but appears also, for example, in the Wave Existence and the non-worldly perfection that Krelian aspires to. The only major element of the style I dislike (apart from the very slow text speed forcing reading to a crawl) is that there are many 'loose terms' dropped in dialogue which are never explained and can lead to the player being unnecessarily confused -- e.g. the first scene mentions an 'internal plane', a 'main planet', an 'Alpha One', an 'Omega One', a 'Razeal Central' -- all of which the player is thereafter left in the dark, guessing. The first episode of Xenosaga had a type of database feature where you could look up every loose term in the game and get a pretty good explanation, and such a feature would have been just as helpful to this game. But beside that the style is just plain wonderful. There is a quote by Einstein that goes 'make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.' This applies not only to scientific explanations, and not only to nonfiction writing, but to aesthetics. Despite how long the game is it is condense. This is a word I tend to use a lot, but most of the scenes of the game are truly 'essentialized'. This is apparent even from the first scene, the prelude, which dramatizes Deus taking control of Noah's Ark, destroying the crew, and crashing to the planet. It sounds like a simple scene but it was made ultimate stylistically by the character of the captain: his detachment and self-control in giving orders to his fearful crew and especially his taking one last moment looking at a picture of his wife and daughter before initiating the self-destruct mechanism -- it manages to condensely make the destruction of thousands of people important by focusing on the thoughts and actions of one. This same principle is used throughout the game; another good instance is how the destruction of the village of Lahan focuses on two people in particular who were killed in it, the main character's two best friends, the day before their wedding. This principle is one of the best principles of style to keep in mind from the first element shown to the last: show as little as necessary but no less. ____________________
The gameplay of Xenogears is the most important of the supports to the story, although it isn't nearly as well crafted as the story itself. It uses a heavily modified RPG battle engine, but many of the choices of game elements appear arbitrary no matter how long I look at them: why use the four elements of fire, wind, water, and earth? A lot of the gameplay, like a lot of the story, is out of the way, it's there for those who look or replay the game but is often overlooked at first; things like taking a spider from a spiderweb in a corner of a house in the first town, you can later feed it to chu chu, or playing rock-paper-scissors against the best rock-paper-scissors player in the town. These extra parts of the gameplay center around rewarding these two things: observation of the nonobvious though going slow, and reaching perfection in games with townspeople, who award you 'badges'. The connection of these with the theme is clear and simple, but not ingenious and exact. The rewards don't seem to match the accomplishments in any strong way. There are some major gameplay inessentials: the mini-game of the cards, the few mini-games in Aveh (balloon-popping and the like), the hide-and-seek kid search for the key, and the 'weight' aspect of characters (which varies by what they eat), are poorly integrated with the rest of the gameplay, and are just excess and shouldn't have been introduced into the game at all. I really can't imagine why they are in the game, except for the common mistaken idea that 'mini-games' and 'side-quests' add depth to a game. I'm not against non-linearity (and in fact am against gameplay linearity), but 'mini-games' and 'side-quests' do not add non-linearity to a gameplay engine, they just add subsidiary gameplay engines. For a good example of non-linearity in a RPG without resorting to absurdities like the above, I invite you to play (or recall) the second half of Final Fantasy VI. The gear battling arena is curious: one the one hand it's rather fun (in fact more fun than the normal gear battle system), and does have to do with gears, and does have to do with a plot point in Kislev, but on the other hand its game system is completely cut off from the rest of the game, you fight with gears in this arena in a very different way than you fight with them normally. It's well-made, as a fighting game, but I don't see any good argument for just -why- it was made differently from the normal battles. What I would have done if I were director would have been to combine both gear battle systems into one engine, and used that one throughout. A couple of minor flaws which are small but inexcusable because they are so easily fixed. One, the amount of spells (ether abilities) in the game is strangely small considering the length of the game: in most RPGs, a character has several dozen spells, here it's about eight per person, and often they are all alike. They are also weak, and there is no real reason to use most of them. Half of any gameplay system is its 'verbs', and if you reduce the number of possible actions and make most of those actions uninteresting, you are left with an artificially choiceless system, which is sometimes called 'hammering the same button over and over'. Two, the overworld map, besides being ugly to look at, is hard to navigate and oddly empty of areas to explore or challenges to overcome. Three, the text speed is not malleable; I (and many others) can't read at that speed comfortably, so I often have to resort to waiting for it all to be displayed onscreen, reading it in one glance, pressing a button to advance, and repeating. The map design is half great, half awful: the 'danger map' (i.e., dungeons, areas where you fight and can die) map design of a game is extremely poorly done but the 'safety map' (i.e., towns, areas of safety) map design is extremely well done: The dungeons consist of linear jogs through unchallenging random-enemy infested environments, there is basically no exploration challenge except for the odd jumping challenge (unneccessary and not fun), although there are one or wo weak exceptions (such as the running sequence in Solaris) -- it's unsurprising but makes me wonder when or if RPG designers will ever learn a lesson from Zelda games and make dungeon solving involve skills beyond going from point A to point B. The first two Lufia games did it way back in the Super Nintendo era, so I don't comprehend why the rest of them neglect any real thought about challenging danger map design; it's as if Shigeru Miyamoto and one or two others have a monopoly on knowing how to design dungeon maps. A dungeon should not just be thought of as a map in which stuff is placed; it's a series of organized challenges which must be overcome in a way specific to that game's purpose. The explorable, safety maps are competent and at times brilliant. The cities are extremely large and fun to explore, not only owing to the townspeople in them but also to the map design. In many RPGs the cities all resemble eachother (in the worse ones, they all resemble cities from other RPGs), here, each city is an integral entity, with a distinct organization and architecture. Shops have signs, wells are in the right places, the very layouts fit their residents and the culture of the country: Lahan is out in the open, the Ethos establishment is underground, Nisan is arranged in a type of inward-facing circle and has its own mini-overworld map, Shevat has individual houses above a wide expanse of blue sky and linked only by thin walkways, Solaris reminds one of an intricate anthill. *** I'll now take a deeper look at the best gameplay sequence in the game: the rescue of Margie from Shakan early in the game. I think that this sequence shows how good the game could have been if it had kept to this level of quality in game-story integration. The sequence starts as the player enters the city of Bledavik. After exploring the town, eventually the plan arrived at is for Fei to enter the martial arts tournament to create a distraction for the soldiers (who are all fans), while Bart enters the Citadel and rescues his cousin Margie. The gameplay now begins to switch between the player's control of Fei and of Bart; where Fei seeks to make the tournament last as long as possible by stalling his victories. There are a sequence of battles and after each one, control switches to Bart for some time (I think it's equivalent time to how long the battle lasted). Each tournament battle is well designed, interesting both in story and in gameplay; most notable are the introductions of Big Joe (a recurring character who has only a small plot role) and of Wiseman, and the return of Dan (whose sister Fei killed back in Lahan); if you do not attack Dan in battle***. Bart's role is to swim through a trial-and-error waterway maze and then to go through a kind of Metal Gear Solid style soldier-evasion sequence. It is a possible alternative to lose the tournament (and miss some important parts of the story), with the number of soldiers Bart has to face in his rescue increasing greatly if that happens. But the goal is to stay in the tournament as long as possible, and the longer the battles go on the more time Bart has to get to Margie before the soldiers return. Soon after Bart finds Margie, Ramsus and Miang discover them, and one of the best battles in the game occurs. I have designed a good deal of RPG battles, and can easily say that this is one of the few RPG battles that really impresses me: it's an exemplar of a battle designed right. Miang stands behind Ramsus, as a 'second', and Margie behind Bart; neither can be targeted but both help their respective contendants** by healing and other means. Ramsus can attack or go into a mirror stance where he cannot be hit and counter-attacks when hit (if it were up to me, I would have upped the cannot be hit and counterattack rate for Ramsus during that stance to 50% or so, not 100% -- too predictable that way). Ramsus (and I wish this were true of more RPG bosses) can be afflicted by status effects, although Miang can heal him from them -- which has the net effect of delaying her HP healing of him. After some time, Fei arrives and joins the battle, which tips things in the player's favor. The whole sequence is well designed, fun while being challenging in a non-typical way -- it was the first time I died in the game, I believe. But what's so remarkable about it is that it is one of the few times in the game where actual gameplay accompanies the story and is used to enhance story presentation in a unique way. The entire game should have been set up like this. ____________________
The battle system is the heart of any RPG, and so gets its own section. In a sense there are two battle systems, fighting on foot and fighting while piloting gears; sometimes a mix of them both. The basic setup of it was a good idea, but its implementation wasn't readlly done with deft the game deserved. The fighting on foot systems was fine and in some ways better than most PRGs: the idea of it is that each character turn allows them to select some combination of three levels of attacks, each using a different using up their AP (action points). The order does change the effect slightly, so a level 1 level 2 is different from a level 2 level 1. This adds a good deal of variety and stragedy to the game, as different enemies have different defense levels to different level attacks, and stronger attacks tend to miss the enemy more than weaker ones. All of these are animated well and I found myself trying different combinations just to see how each attack looks for each character. The single best part about the battle system is the periodic increase in AP as the game goes on, you begin with four and end the game with seven; this gives the effect of the battles getting more and more epic as the game goes on. There are also certain combinations that lead to 'deathblows' or especially strong attacks wich also vary in effects, and these also increase and become more epic as the game goes on. Also, any AP left after a character's turn is added to a reserve which if it builds up enough can be used to cause chains of deathblows, and this only is seen in long battles (which is good -- I like the idea of being able to use more awesome attacks the more awesome the opposition is). It's a good solid system, but not extremely innovative. It's a basic RPG battle system with basic RPG battle system flaws: no interaction with the battle environment, a system of 'I'll hit you, then you hit me', and a tendency for boss patterns of 'you hurt me, I cure myself, you hurt me, I cure myself again, but you can't cure yourself'. The stats are the basic RPG battle stats: attack power, defense power, speed (although the speed system is handled nicely), accuracy rate, evading rate, hit points, magic points (called ether points here), magic power, magic defense power. I am so tired of this set because I could probably, without preparation, name a hundred games that use these exact same battle stats. The status conditions and the idea of ether elements are also basic RPG fare. What I might have tried to do was ditch the basic RPG battle system and create something that actually has to do with the idea of the game. To emphasize the disction between gears and humans, I would have made fighting as humans be much more tentative and vulnerable, with more moving around and dodging the enemy. To emphasize the idea of the one-winged angle as the nature of humans, I would have has more characters in battle at once than three and more interaction between groups and pairs, some type of 'I'll watch your back' system, and maybe some Chrono-Trigger style combination attacks (especially for the deathblows). Above all I would have had less battles, there are too many and they are too random. With gear half of the battle system the game fails with poignency. It starts out with an okay at first impression concept: gears would be much stronger in all ways than humans but require fuel, which is expended and cannot be refilled until you return to safety (exit the dungeon), forcing you to use them sparingly. Alas, fighting as a gear was too simplified, with fewer attacks possible, fewer deathblows, and much less to do, drastically reducing strategy in gear battles to hit and be hit. As mentioned above, I wish that an expanded version of the gear battle mini-game had been used as the gear battle system, there was so much potential for it. In both types of battles there is a very neat reward system where the items you get as a reward for battle depend on how fast you win the battle. While it sounds a bit unnatural it works well; there is more of an incentive to do your best in each and every battle than there is in most RPGs. The problem with the battle engine in general is that Takahashi is not a game designer, he's a good narrative artist and a good director but the battle system is just a variation of the basic RPG formula without much adaption to the needs of the narrative. There is too much distinction and discrimination between gameplay and story. If the game is in an interactive medium, use the interactivity! Not all battle systems need to use the same set of stats and the same idea of elemental magic, there are more vast lands and wild nooks and crannies of the turn-based battle system than anyone has dared to explore, content in the populated cities. Takahshi, you left the city and climbed high mountains to find your story, so why purchase the game engine from the supermarket? ____________________
The musician here is Yasunori Mitsuda, who has shown more talent than any other videogame composer I know of. As in his work in Chrono Trigger, and most RPG music in general, the music is built to fit particular scenes, characters, locations, and gameplay modes; as in the best RPGs, a gameplay location and character is almost defined by their theme song, it being made specifically for them and giving a degree of information about them otherwise not transmitted. Unfortunately there is much more game length than music, so by the end of the game you've lost count of how many times you've heard each music track. There is only one basic battle music and only one basic boss battle music; the basic battle music alone is probably heard over five-hundred times throughout the game. Why? If a game is this long, and so much time is spent in the battle system, I do not see the reason for having a mere four or five battle tracks. The truth is that although there is a lot of it (the composer spent up to 20 hours per day working on the music near the end of the production cycle and had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital at the end of it due to overwork) there still was not enough music for the game. As mentioned before, an extra year of production time would have done wonders. ____________________
Let us consider the visuals of the game [2].The basic structure of it is using 2D sprites on 3D maps, providing an effect that looks something like this: GRXG01.jpg (images doubled in size to make up for resolution differences, and will open in a new window). The sprites are typically 25x50 pixels, although they vary and can reach up to 35x60, and are 16 colors each: GRXG02.gif (Fei), GRXG03.gif (Rico). They are 8-directional (as you can see in GRXG06.jpg), and their size and animation style resmbles that of Chrono Trigger very much. They are superbly done, they are varied but still maintain a consistency of style, but not so much so as they all look like copies of one another, they are individualized even when looking at them from a distance. Some more examples of the sprites: GRXG03.gif (Hammer, Margie, Chu Chu, Maria, Dan, Elly). One thing I've noticed is that when they have their back facing the screen they are more in shadow than when they face the screen -- I'm not sure if this was intentional but it's noticable. They don't use black outlines, but often use darker shades near the edges. The maps are textured polygons, and can be rotated 360 degrees, but usually look down upon the map in a variable angle that ranges from a helicoptor like overhead view to a directly-looking-into-the-horizon side view. The sprites are drawn to work in both of those angles, giving a good versitility to allowable camera angles: GRXG05.jpg. Unfortunately, as you can see from that screenshot, the actual polygon textures are a bit grainy looking, this would be my major problem with the graphics of the game. It perhaps was due to the attempt to make every non-living thing a 3D object, but even so it could have been done a lot more competently. This only fully applies on the smaller scale; the 3D maps on the larger scale are nicer (although still grainy): GRXG08.jpg (Lahan, Kislev, Aveh, Nisan). Of course, art direction is more than just making the individual graphical elements of the sprites and maps and portraits and gear models and special effects, but the final test is arranging them in a visually pleasing way, and there the art director did his job: GRXG07.jpg. Another job
of the art director is to create a good visual-feedback system, informing
the player about the consequences of their actions visually. The most important
part of this is for any game is the font and the menu-symbol system. The
font is fixed-width, uses white on a dark background with a blue halo around
each letter, and is in an easily readable font face (which makes sense
in a game with this much text): GRXG10.jpg. Textboxes
use four lines of text and the portrait -- the text is sized rather larger
than I would have sized it. The menu system (GRXG09.jpg)
is simplistic but clear, and easily navigated by anyone familiar with RPGs.
____________________
I only now, after three times through the game and a final time reading the script, gained real certainty what the theme it is. This difficulty derives from one of the game's troubles: there is a conflict between what the characters say and do. The expressed theme of Xenogears (that which is the spoken claim of motive of by the characters) is largely evil when taken at face value: the idea that humans are, and should be proud, non-perfection, and moreover that this aspect of humanity is its defining feature, and gives rise to the essential nature of humanity: kindness love friendship justice and so forth, and moreover still that if we were to reach perfection we would no longer be human -- and this is held up as the difference between humanhood and godhood. To anyone who has seriously thought about this, this is obviously a false theme, and quite repulsive. But a quite competing event theme (that which comes out of the plot of the game) sings a different tune, here we have a grand "Stand Tall and Shake the Heavens!" theme about humanity breaking free of an authoritorial and controlling God which created civilization, riding in technology (gears), a creation of Man, and slaying God, which is supposed to be emblematic of a rejection of an outside gift of perfection and immortality and standing on one's own feet. So on the one hand we have humans being more perfect than god (they were able to slay him, afterall), and on the other we have this rejection of perfection. This dismayed me, and I sought for a solution for a day and a half, and finally, I had it: I now realized how these can be reconsiled. The concept 'perfection', in this game, is often obfuscated with the concept of 'imperviousness / indestructability': while similar, they are not the same, and this concept confusion weakens the theme and is the game's ultimate literary flaw. Compare "Humans don't need perfection, their imperfection is what it is to be human" and "Humans don't need indestructablity, the possibility to be destroyed is what it is to be human" The latter is true, the former is not. Humans can be and should be 'perfect' (I'm using the term in the moral sense here), but can not and should not be 'impervious' (or more exactly, protected by a higher power so that their choices cannot harm them). Our conditional nature (that is, the fact that we need to work at existing and will die if we don't act) *is* an essential feature of humanity and is what (at least in part) gives rise to kindness love friendship justice and so forth. , but is presented with so much power and skill that this can be almost overlooked. The actual theme of the expressed in the plot structure is slightly different from this. The is perhaps best said by the main character of the game, in the final confrontation: "Well that's alright too... We don't have to be perfect. Actually, being imperfect makes mankind live by helping each other... That's what being human is... That's mutual understanding! That's 'unity' and 'love'... I'm glad... no, I'm proud... to be human!" This abstraction is written with geometric exactitude on every major character, scene, and location, from the Nisan Sanctuary's statue of two one-winged angels (which represent humans and each require the other in order to fly), to the existence and use of giant war robots (called gears), to , to. The story is not a tale or a yarn, but an organism: in it every tone tacitly holds all the others. There are also some interesting 'sub-themes' to the game -- by that I mean themes which don't apply to every character scene and location and to the plot as a whole, but themes which apply to some subset of the story. one of the clearest in the game is the difference between the Ethos and the Nisan churches: *** ____________________
Here I'll highlight some of the effects of the game since its release -- this is not a normal part of reviews but I think it should be, since in large part the measure of a game's worth can be guaged by its actual effects. It is however extremely hard to get much data on the effects, but I'll take what I can find. The game's fans appear to be fewer in number than the most popular RPGs, but still pretty numerous***; it has the same types of effects other RPGs do: fan fiction, fan sites, fan art, fan novellizations, people dressing up as game characters, people naming their screen names after characters, and the like. This seems to happen for RPGs a way other types of games don't, individuals after playing them desire to communicate about the game and add to the game expirience; many writers start out writing fan stories with the world and characters of stories they like, many visual artists start out by drawing characters they like. I note this and move on, instead want to concentrate on some of the more subtle but still life-changing effects, and effects on games made after it. I can speak best of my own experience: When I first played the game (1998) it was before I knew anything explicit about philosophy of art and before I knew that I was going to be a game designer; this game changed both of those. It wasn't a sudden 'aha, I think I'll learn philosophy and treat game design more seriously and make games this great', but it was a beginning. It is one of the few RPGS, if not the only RPG, which I played twice in a row. During the preparation of this review I read through several hundreds of reviews of this game, and not one of the reviews evaluated it in a mundane fashion (this is not to say the reviews were good -- here as everywhere reviews can be boiled down to variations of 'what I liked and didn't like about the game' -- but there was always a strong impression on the reviewer), a good percent of them awarded it the 'best game I've ever played' or the 'worst game I've ever played' status. Christian reviewing sites had the most interesting reviews; along with the expected 'this game is evil incarnated into a game' type of reviews there were actually some positive reviews that felt the game was very pro-Christian (especially the Nisan church element of the game), and even someone who said he was converted to Christianity by the game (!). Among my friends and acquaintences who have played the game, it's usually at the top of their list of favorites or very near there. The common denominator is that without exception everyone who has played the game has a strong stance on it: and not just a moderately strong one. It has been said of the novel Atlas Shrugged that reading it will either change your life or scare you to death, and while responses to Xenogears are not exactly as strong as to that book, it is reminiscent of that type of phenomenon, and one of the only games I can think of where it happens at all. I'll give some more indications of how strong the effects of the game are. There are people who have played this 100 hour game seven times; to put that in perspective, that is almost as much time playing Xenogears as the time high-schoolers spend in a year of high-school.*** ____________________ Working Temporary gear element
literary excellence
biblical symbolism
-music at solaris feeling of
progression
excellent gameplay
touches
oddities
to look up
setting elements?
ending song philosopical
elements
inessentials
1. Xenogears, sometimes with the subtitle Stand Tall and Shake the Heavens or God Only Knows, was released for the Sony Playstation in 1998, copyright Squaresoft, now Square Enix. 2. Unfortunately I had to take some of the screenshots used above from other websites and I don't remember where they all came from, but they are most likely among websites mentioned in the below references section. This isn't really a technically legal problem because the screenshots are all (c) Squaresoft 1998. Since I do find it impossible to review the game's visuals without showing actual visuals, I included them, but meant to use screenshots only as quotations from books are used. 3. The game series Xenosaga, by Monolith Software, and its relation to Xenogears will be discussed in my forthcoming (very distantly forthcoming) review of the full Xenosaga series. 4. For more on the nature, concept, and definition of "RPG", I have decided to write a forthcoming article on that genre, probably to be finished by episode #000002. 5. For more on the relationship between Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, look for my forthcoming (very closely forthcoming, perhaps next issue) review of Chrono Trigger. "There are 5 of the main staff workers from Xenogears working on Xenosaga, being Tetsuya Takahashi (the Big Cheese in both games), Yasunori Mitsuda (Music Composer in both games), Kunihiko Tanaka (Character Designer in both games), Tukumi Sakura (1 of the three Production Designers for Xenosaga, but was the Gear Designer in Xenogears), and Yasuyuki Honne (Art Director in both games). Honne and Mitsuda both worked in Chrono Chross, and both of them, including others, worked on CT." Q: In Xenogears, the items you got after boss battles depended on what you did and how long you took to win... T: It's the same way this time, too. The fewer turns you take, the more experience points and bonus items you can acquire. I want players to pursue the limits of what's available to them strategywise, both in and out of battles. With all the skills and finishing moves players can build up their own personal style of fighting; there's a lot there for players willing to put in the time. ____________________
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