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 unusually good, and sometimes can compare with the greatest novelists -- which is impressive considering the length and complexity of it (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 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 it malfunctions and destroys one of their planets, so they judge it too powerful ever to use again, and so exile it in a giant interstellar ship. While travelling toward exile the weapon rebels, takes over the ship, destroys all the crew but one, and due to the captain of the ship causing the ship's self-destruction the weapon crashes, heavily damaged, 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 other-dimensional being trapped inside the engine of the weapon has other plans, and gives some of its power and will to the surviving human male and to the first woman created (presumably not made out of the surviving male'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, which in itself contains the meaningful content of the game. After creating a seed situation as good as that one (no small feat but seed situations are largely more a matter of discovery rather than invention) there is still a lot of plotting to do (which is more invention than discovery). The protagonstic forces and the antagonistic forces (some of which are single characters, some of which are alliances or groups of them) which combat eachother and create the event sequence are moved around the world by the author who tries to create an interesting game as he can even though he should know the outcome already, in a process not very different from playing chess against oneself, not to win but to create a beautiful and dramatic event sequence that keeps the audience watching.

I should first draw attention to how similar this plot setup is to the idea of Lavos in Chrono Trigger (which was an earlier game by many of those 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 (cf. Shevat and 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 (has less extraneous elements, is more focused) and thus more pleasing aesthetically. The main difference between Deus and Lavos is also important: Deus created humanity goals, whereas Lavos just parasites off of it and influences its development for its goals.

I do think that understanding one does help in understanding the other (this is why I intend to review one after the other), this is true of any two stories written by the same author but especially true when the two stories are plot-cousins as these two are. So for best effect study both this game and Chrono Trigger.

There are some 'plot holes' which are not actually plot holes so much as questions whose answers were cut from the game due to time constraints. So you never fully learn 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, etc. There is probably a lot more to it that we 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 this leads to a trouble: it's challenging to critique a plot when the audience hasn't seen all of the plot due to no fault of theirs or of the game's author. It's even more challenging when you realize that it was originally concieved as the fifth episode of six parts, and that making those other parts was abandoned for a new series (called Xenosaga, which bears some simularities but was largely revised from scratch [3]). But the game is still very understandable even with the holes, and so I'll review what of it is in the game, and will slightly overlook the holes because of the special circumstances.

There is the main thrust of the plot as described above (in block 18), but also a series of complicating sub-plots, each based on a minor character and each resolved in short order. The minor playable characters (i.e., everyone besides Citan, Fei, and Elly), though do they add greatly to the story, operate largely as subsidiary stories, could have concievably been removed while keeping the main plotline intact. The subsidiary stories here follow a basic RPG tradition of giving each minor playable character their own area and conflicts to overcome, and then going one by one through each of them, saving the conflict of the main character for last (a creative varation of this is Final Fantasy VI, which was composed of nothing but combined subsidiary stories, without a main character). Aesthetics-wise, I'd say that subsidiary stories of minor playable characters can be anything, their only requirements are that they echo the main story in some aspect relating to the theme, begin after are resolved before the main conflict of the story, are interesting in their own right, and progress main plot of the game, or in other words 'co-operate' and share elements with the main plot's timeline. 

Examples of this substory co-operation: Emeralda's substory is a part of the main one in that Krelian used her to master nanotechnology needed for his alteration of Deus' revival, and Maria's substory about her and her father reveals more of the abominable nature of Solaris. But after this connection with the main plot is made, plotting a minor character's substory -- in RPGs especially, though this probably also applies to novels -- can be done largely apart from one another, as if they were stories of their own, with their own value conflicts, protagonists and antagonists, suspense and information flow, and climax and resolution. This is the key to making longer plots such as that in Xenogears -- a long plot is not simply a long series of events about one conflict, but a main plot lengthened by a series of minor conflicts, each operating as their own sub-stories but braided in with the main one; like a braid a long plot is composed of seperate short segments which are slanted diagonal lines of their own but also support a definite vertical total line.

The plot of Xenogears can be seperated first into three categories: 'pre-game plot', 'summarized plot', and 'game-time plot'. Game-time plot is everything that is dramatized in chronological order starting at when you first gain control of the main character; summarized plot is plot that isn't actually dramatized but summarized for you by the characters (this is primarily near the end of the game), pre-game plot is plot that is usually told via flashbacks and consists of anything taking place chronologically before the game begins -- and this last type contains 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.

I do think the game overused both pre-game plot and summarized plot, both of which should be limited to absolutely necessary information. The past of the game is interesting but, especially in a game, it's bad practise to spend about a fourth of the story scenes watching things that aren't happening right now. The exceptions: the best game flashbacks are playable -- the flashback in the city of Kalm in Final Fantasy 7, or the opening scene in Lufia as examples. The summarized plot was just inexcusable, what was summarized should have been dramatized. But the flashbacks, at least the necessary ones, would have been more interesting being played, even if in a limit way.

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): (1) 'Aveh', (2) 'Kislev', (3) 'Ethos', (4) 'Shevat-Solaris', and (5) '2nd CD'. Each of these 'parts' is about equal in length and involves some main conflict which is resolved in that part's climax, each involves a different kingdom.

(The game-time plot can also be seperated by playable character -- in the sequence of which they join and their mini-plots, going something like Intro, Bart, Rico, Billy, Maria, Emeralda, Citan, Elly/Fei -- but very often the sub-plots of each of these characters overlap eachother so I'll stick to an organization by kingdom/culture.)

Since the most 'landmark' part of a plot is its climax, I'll examine the five '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 exciting and not much of a conflict resolution.

This entire part of the game is after all 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 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). After the rescue itself, the failed attempt at overthrowing Shakahn is really just resolution and transition, a way to seperate Fei from his party and land him in Kislev as a prisoner.

Another arguable problem with this part-climax is that little is gained, in fact it's a downward movement: Fei's town is destroyed, Bart's group loses heavily to his enemies, and Fei winds up being seperated from his friends and captured. Margie is saved from Shakhan but, even though I like her as a character, she's not very important to the "cause" of the protagonists, it's only a small loss to Solaris. I do recognize that this setup -- early plot goes down, later plot goes up -- is common, but it still seems a bit aesthetically dubious to me, at least if, as here, it's not qualified with an "anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger" type element. The other four part-climaxes each have some gain associated with them: next (2) Elly leaves Solaris and Fei ovecomes his fear of fighting, then (3) the Ethos is destroyed, then (4) Solaris is destroyed, then (5) Deus is destroyed, so this is only a short downward movement and then a long rising movement (each greater than the las), so it's not as terrible as it could have been.

The part-climax of 'Kislev' is much better: Fei's conflict here is that he fears fighting but realizes he must fight to protect those people 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. Rico's conflict here is that he fights for no reason, has nothing he values to fight for but just fights anway. And Elly's conflict here is that she doesn't know who to fight for. So we have three related conflicts, all of which are resolved in the same action (the Kislev purge). This is really so skillfully done that I'm nearly at a loss to describe why this was so.

But I'll make the attempt. One major part of it was the highlighting the difference between Rico and Fei as they operate under slavery conditions, forced to fight for entertainment even while they refuse to fight for freedom. Rico's "no need for a reason" to fight attitude and Fei's "the fight was meaningless" attitude are both shown to be wrong in this part's climax, where Solaris' Geblar (including Elly) are ordered to purge Kislev from the planet -- Rico and Fei then see that the stakes are too great either to fight for no reason or to avoid fighting at all costs, and here also Elly finally decides to go against her group to fight for the side that she knows is the right one. There are other things that add to the structure here: the idea of a prisoner pecking order based on strength, the whole sewer area, and the nicely-timed introduction of Hammer ("Power is everything here! The powerless... the weak are just oppressed!"). 

This adds up to a great and believable change in Fei, Rico, and Elly: when what is immediately endangered is very valuable to someone things suddenly become much clearer. And not only the city of Kislev was endangered, but the lives of those three as well, so it's more than a matter of fighting for unknown numbers of strangers: Fei went into battle only after he knew Elly was in it, Elly switched sides only after she saw Fei on the other side, and in Rico's case it was the city that he grew up in and loved. After this point, these characters (and incidentally, none of the other major protagonistic characters) never again question whether they should fight or who they should fight for or whether there is any reason to fight.

I'll go into detail on the presentation of this part-climax in the later part on individual scenes.

The part-climax of 'Ethos-Nisan' is my favorite of these, and my favorite part of the story actually. It also is almost completely without the main character Fei, he remains unconscious during the major events, and although it does in part revolve around trying to get him well and he does show up briefly near the end, it's still strange for the person the player is playing as to be gone for so long. It produces an interesting effect and has been used seldom (it's also in Chrono Trigger, notably), it has the effect of distancing the player from his or her character switching focus to one or more secondary character(s).

For the sake of this part of the game, Billy (a secondary character, part of the Ethos) becomes the main character, and the plot here centers on his gradual realization that the Ethos is an evil religion. The situation is set up well so that this would be a troubling decision: Billy believes the Bishop of the Ethos saved him and his little sister (who cannot speak) from a Wels attack which killed his mother while his father left them alone, and in gratitude to the Bishop he joined the Ethos, hunting down Wels for them. Billy also starts and orphanage. Later Billy's father returns, and gets treated with suspision, especially since he seems to be against the Ethos, who Billy views as a most noble institution.

Through a series of revelations, Billy grows doubtful of the Ethos. The main revelation is triggered by an attack on a too-independent sect of Ethos by Solaris, leading to Billy exploring the hidden underground of the main church. Eventually he takes his father's side and together they defeat the Bishop (who is revealed to have orchestrated the attack he supposedly saved Billy from). Billy's father's speech at this point is slightly badly written (ti's discursive and a bit cliché in wording) but still revealing of the point of this part-climax and worth posting as a summation:

Jessie: Billy, you know now, don't you? Stein's teachings were all a deception. That fabricated faith was just a worldly system for compensating those people with fragile souls. But, faith and god aren't things which are given to you from others, right? They are things you have to discover within yourself, and by yourself. Things that cannot be put into words, things that cannot be expressed... Isn't that what god is all about? 'Question not thy god, for thy god doth not respond.' The reason I taught you how to use a gun as a child was to save people. You say that guns are just tools for killing people. But you are wrong. 'Guns' don't kill people. 'People' kill people. Have you ever looked at the expressions on the faces of those reapers you have destroyed? It is an excruciating process to be turned into a reaper. To ease their torturous pain, they seek human blood and attack people in order to get it. But that does not vanguish the true pain within their hearts. There is only one way to be saved from the pain. That is by termination. Didn't all those reapers put out of their misery by you have peaceful looks on their faces? Your gun saved those people who were turned into reapers. It's not something anyone can do. The faith that enabled you to accomplish that was no deception... God exists within you!

One strange thing about part-climax that I have not yet figured out is the association of religion and guns: Billy, a priest, is also the only gun-toting character, and it doesn't seem to be just a coincidence (take another look at Jessie's speech above, guns are right at the heart of it), but I can't really figure out why. If I figure it out it'll be included in the next edition of this review, also, any ideas the reader has may be helpful [8].

The part-climax of 'Shevat-Solaris' is from the destruction of the Ethos church to the destruction of Solaris. A whole lot of background information is packed in this one section, this is where Krelian is introduced, where Fei and Id are revealed to be the same person, where we learn Citan is working for the emperor of Solaris, and so on. Nonetheless it's also packed with interesting events: the Tower of Babel is climbed and Shevat is arrived at, the 'gates' seperating Solaris from the rest of the world are removed, Bart recovers his Omnigear from its sleep and his kingdom from Shakhan, Solaris is infiltrated and explored by the heroes, Fei is  captured by Citan then freed by him, Elly's parents are killed by Hammer and Grahf, Citan and Jessie destroy the last gate in Solaris, Grahf and Miang are defeated in battle, and Solaris is destroyed by Fei (as Id). It's a very elaborate part of the story.

Even after Solaris is destroyed, there is an extended resolution involving Shevat trying imprison Fei due to his excess power and his escape from them -- perhaps showing that Solaris isn't the only country capable of infringing on human rights.

The actual conflict of this climax can be looked at two ways: in the first place it is between freedom and oppressors. Slaves and slavery figure prominently: one slave is destroyed for trying to escape with Fei, another is destroyed for rebelling, ("Something's wrong with all of you! Working like machines day after day... You have no will!! This isn't living!! This... is... Stop it! Let go! Uahhhhhh!!!"). There is a lot of capture: Citan of Fei and Id, Solaris of the secondary characters, Krelian of Elly, and the Wels held against their will for experimentation. So in once sense it's a typical theme of evil empire vs. freedom fighters as has been seen so much in fiction (Star Wars is a clear-cut example).

In the second place, and probably more importantly, it is a conflict between freedom of information vs. secrecy (or controlled or censored information). Cain's double who goes in front of the public of Solaris on Krelian's orders figures in here, as does Citan's hidden agenda. The motives of the enemies are quite secret, it's also a secret that Id is Fei. What the people eat (Wels and the like) is a secret. Solaris itself is a secret city hidden from the rest of the world and unknown in it, in which its very people don't really know much of the outside world beyond what Solaris wants them to know. The fact that Hammer was working as a spy for Krelian is also a secret. That Elly is half surface-dweller is a secret (although sort of an open secret, its revelation still causes discontent). That Elly's father was the director of the Wels project was a secret. The fact that the 'memory cubes' (the devices used for saving) were all recording information for Solaris was a secret. The 'Uroboros Ring', discovered by Krelian in Elly's DNA, is called "information that isn't supposed to exist." So most of the main events and many of the minor ones during this part involve some conflict involving hidden information, and progress if achieved is achieved via the protagonists discovering that which their enemies don't want them to know. This theme is less frequent in literature (offhand I can think of only 1984), probably since it's harder to pull off correctly since it requires skill in keeping the player or reader guessing about what is what.

The second conflict was I think is the more prevalent and important in this part of the story, and I do think it works well here, although not perfectly: the actual destruction of Solaris wasn't triggered by some huge information discovery but rather was a simple matter of Elly being endangered and Fei becoming Id to protect her, after which she flies out to him and brings his normal personality back again, which is more melodramatic than dramatic. Could have been better, could have been worse.

I think the problem here is that this part of the story is too content-filled to have a clean climax, there is too much jumbled and pushed together in too small a space. This was probably unavoidable due to the numerous 'forces' converging at this one point, so I don't know what I would have done instead; just that I probably wouldn't have settled the structure of events actually used, it's hard to follow; it's exciting but it feels jumpy, like unruly hair.

I'm going to only skim 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 actually had the characters sit in chairs and tell you the story as a flashback while you were 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 words of another reviewer: "Xenogears is the best RPG game ever released. And the only one never finished" [9]. I can't review unfinished and undramatized plotting, but those summaries were enough to produce sadness toward 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. The actual climax occurs here.

After Solaris is destroyed Fei and company take part in an extended final battle against the remnants of Solaris (mainly Krelian, Ramsus, and the Gazel). The major plot element here is a worldwide mutation of all the people into Wels and various attempts to ease their suffering, slow it down, and so on. Then the final climax sequence begins, which is pretty interesting: Fei's group defeats some form of Deus but is captured by Krelian and Grahf, who crucify them and use them as bait to capture Elly (which they do). The Gazel ministry are killed by Krelian, and in an attempt to rescue Elly Miang is killed (by Ramsus, who thereafter becomes a protagonist -- see his section above) and Miang incarnates into Elly, where she reveals Deus' true purpose as a weapon and humanity's true purpose as its parts. Miang-in-Elly and Krelian leave and then revive Deus, which begins turning the world into its body (finally the villain of the game arrives), with the aid of Krelian's nanotechnology. No one can do anything about it because of a barrier around it so the world seems doomed, but Fei finds a way to come into contact with the Wave Existence (finally the hero of the game arrives) and through that integrates his personality (see Fei and Id's section above), and defeats Grahf. Fei here obtains the gear called Xenogears, and uses that (along with help from his allies) to destroy Deus. Krelian and Elly are escaping with the Wave Existence to its perfect universe, Fei follows them into the Path of Sepherot, defeats the Miang part of Elly (though this is sketchy), and returns with Elly to the earth.

There are two confusing things about the climax: first, what exactly is the final enemy: if it is Miang (my best guess) that should have been clearer; second, what exactly is the gear Xenogears: it has infinite energy, but where does that energy come from, if it unlike all the other gears is able to operate even after the Zohar engine is destroyed? These two question marks weaken the whole final part of the game, though only slightly. The rest is tightly fit together.

Complaints: the final part after Deus is destroyed is a bit too slow, the attle against the Miang part of Elly wasn't handled well and feels like an anticlimax after killing Deus itself; it may have been preferable to switch the order there, though that may not have been possible for plot reasons. Second complaint: Deus don't speak, it never says anything or explains itself (except through Miang, if that counts); it would have been nice to have something to give the player an idea of Deus' "personality," similar to what was done for the Wave Existence. Third complaint: Ramsus doesn't take part in the climax at all after killing Miang: he should have had some role in killing Deus for maximum aesthetic impact. Fourth complaint: the angels are supposedly made of not only the bodies of the humans turned into Wels, but their souls too, it would have been nice to see some of them be people the player knows: I might have tried something where several minor characters (maybe the Captain of the Thames or Yui or so forth) were turned into angels and had to be defeated in battle, with them portrayed as complete slaves of Deus; this would also have strengthened the whole slave vs. free distinction that this climax (and the whole story in general) is meant to deal with. In other words, the entire climax of a story is supposed to be the "payoff" point of the story, the rest of the story exists mainly for this point, and so many more elements should have been involved here which weren't, some of them have no excuse to not be here, like Ramsus. In other words, the climax needs to echo each previous chord in it, reminding one of all the major previous events and tying it up like the center knot in a really complex ribbon; this wasn't done perfectly here.

It's not all bad though. Some things to note about the climax: first, almost everyone on earth dies in their attempt of freeing themselves from Deus, especially the weaker ones who were not strong enough to resist being turned into parts of Deus. This is notable because it's reasonable and it appeals to the 'no cost for freedom is too great' truism. Second thing to note: that the atmosphere at the end is mainly one of liberation from oppression: the bird feathers, the "This is no longer their planet, this is your home planet that you
are now standing on," and so on, there are lots of deft touches here. Finally: note how the game ends without any speculation or anything like a 'this is what happened afterwards', it just cuts off, because it doesn't really matter, for the purposes of the story, what humans do with their world now, just that it's now their own. The specifics are of no importance compared to that.

In any plot with information to be revealed, the order that it is revealed has to be handled carefully: this is very apparent in murder-mystery novels but applies to all stories, it's sometimes called "suspence" because, well, information is suspended, or kept secret (but often hinted at), until the right time.

in Xenogears the suspense is especially important because the secrets to be kept and revealed are so many.

A closer look at some of the scenes of Xenogears, which are the building blocks of a story. I didn't get to go into as many scenes as I wanted to so I may add another one in the second edition of the review.

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.

An example: 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.

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.

Margie: I'm Margie. Actually, it's Marguerite. What do you want to know? My favorite food? I like cake, Chiffon Nisan is my favorite. I haven't had it in so long...

Ramsus: Marguerite, we want to ask you about the Fatima family treasure... I'm talking about the 'Fatima Jasper'. You see, I'm keeping the piece you had in a safe place. But I don't know where the other half is. Do you?

Margie: Nope. The one I had you took from me. You didn't even give me anything for it. Hey, the next time you come could you bring me some Chiffon Nisan? I used to eat it every day in Nisan. I don't think they make it in Aveh. Aveh used to have such good bakers, but I guess they must have all died in the war.

Ramsus: That is too bad. I don't know much about cake, but I'll see if I can find some for you next time. 

Margie: Thank you, Ramsus. I'll be waiting.

The following scene is the climax of what I called the second part of the game: Solaris is purging Kislev, Fei is attempting to save the city, and Elly is part of Solaris' escort and stands in his way. In it, you get the first clear statement of the main conflict of the game, and the scene where Elly goes from being on the villain side to being on the hero side.
 

Fei:You're kidding? What are you doing here, Elly? I thought you agreed to get out of the 
military! Elly:That's asking for too much! I'm an officer of the Gebler forces! 

Fei:Then, you're saying this is also one of your duties!? 

Elly:Yes! My duty is to escort the Hecht. And to eliminte all enemies that get in its way... 
So you better get out of the way... Cause if you don't move then I'll have no choice but to 
eliminate you! 

[Elly attacks Fei.] 

Fei:Are you serious? You do know what you're doing, don't you? How can you say that knowing 
where that ship is headed and what the outcome may be...? 

Elly:... 

Fei:C'mon, Elly! Say something! 

Elly:I know! I do understand what I'm doing! 

Fei:Then...

Elly:Change. How I wanted to change... I've thought of changing, but I couldn't... I don't 
have the freedom like you do! 

Fei:Freedom? Me? 

Elly:Yes! Am I wrong? To be able to choose where you belong... To be able to fight alongside 
those who believe in their own cause... Even if you have much more anguish to deal with... At 
least you have the freedom to choose your own path! Unlike me...! 

Fei:Then why don't you do that too, Elly? 

Elly:If I could, I would already be doing it! But I can't... This is my place. And that's how 
it is here! ...So ... please, understand... 

Fei:Elly... I don't have a place to belong to either... 

Elly:Huh? 

Fei:...Bart and his crew, even their whole ship are all missing... They disappeared after the 
battle with Gebler. So, I don't have a place to belong to anymore... 

Elly:Really... Then, why are you fighting now? Who are you fighting for? 

Fei:Do you enjoy this? 

Elly:? 

Fei:Barging into someone else's country, and destroying the place... Dragging innocent people 
into becoming victims... Do you enjoy fighting that much!? Is it that much fun for you to 
watch people die!? 

Elly:Don't be ridiculous! I would never find pleasure with that! 

Fei:If that's the case... then come with me! Let's go! 

Elly:Ouch! What? Just come! 

[Fei brings Elly to the roof of a building which overlooks D Block.]

Fei:Look at this town! Take a good look. This is what you've done! Does the word, 'duty' 
justify all of this? Does it!? Elly! 

Elly:But thats all that was left! 

Fei:You're still saying that? ......It's just not like you. If you don't want to then don't 
do it. You shouldn't have to force it just to have a place to belong to. 

Elly:... 

Fei:What was I fighting you for just now? ...... You wanted to know? I don't really know. I 
know I was helping Bart and the others. But I still don't know what I should do. Maybe I'm 
just looking for a place to fit in. But I thnk it' better to fight then do nothing. If 
fighting help you or your friends even a little bit, then it's worthwhile. That's... not 
nothing. ......It's something. 

Continuing the above scene I'll examine one final scene, which is in the resolution after that scene.
 

Fei:It... seems like we've drifted further off. ...Constantly drifting... 
Sounds like me right now. 

Elly:What do you mean? 

Fei:I've just been drifting around... being led by circumstances. 

Elly:No... that's not right... In Aveh, you helped Bart when he needed it. 
And in Kislev, you gtave your all to defend, to save everyone. You've even shown 
concern for me many times. 

Fei:No... I'm just no good. 

Elly:Why? 

Fei:Probably deep inside, I'm not really trying to help. Somehow, I get the 
feeling that all I've done I did because I wanted to be needed. That if I did 
something for them... then maybe, I'd have a place to belong... There's a side 
of me that comforts itself like that. That doesn't mean I don't want to help. 
But, that doesn't mean I really want to help either. It might not be 'nothing', 
but it sure isn't the 'whole' either. I'd been drifting, led around until I met 
you, Elly. Now, wer're staranded out in the ocean. I'm sorry... I got you 
involved... 

Elly:It's okay. Don't worry about me. I've been thinking about why I'm here. 
I could've just gone back. But for some reason I didn't... Probably because you 
said it's better to do something thatn nothing. I think that's why I felt I had 
to do something. It's OK not to feel 'whole'. Even if you only feel partly 
complete, if you repeat that enough, eventually it'll be 'whole'. A part... is 
better than zero. You're right... I'm sorry... 

Fei:If we're saved... will you go back? 

Elly:I probably won't go back to my squad. Right now, I really don't want to 
be there... Besides, I could probably do something else... I don't have to be in 
the army. So, I'm thinking of going back to my country. 

Fei:Is that possible? But what about the army? 

Elly:It's not like anyone knows what I did. They've probably already 
classified me as MIA. 

Fei:Hmm. I hope atleast you'll survive. I'm sure you'll find what you want to 
do in your life. 

Elly:You said... something about...being comforted. 
Fei:Yes. 

Elly:Don't be so hard on yourself. Everyone wants to be needed at times. All 
of us want to give something inside ourselves to others to be accepted. ...Even 
me. Remember how you forced yourself to eat those emergency rations? 

[Earlier that day...] 

Fei:UUUURRGHH!! 

Elly:Hey... are you okay? I told you not to eat such a gross looking animal. 

Fei:It tastes horrible. The last time I had food this bad was doc's cooking. 

Elly:? 

Fei:But unless we do something, we're going to die. 

Elly:I guess there's no other way. I was hoping to save this a little 
longer... This should hold us for another day... But it's only for emergency 
calories so I can't promise how good it'll taste. 

Fei:Huh!? What? It's dry and crumbly? 

Elly:I thought so.. You don't like it, do you? 

Fei:Wha? N, no... It's good. Yeah, ah, it's great. Whatever you'd share with 
me couldn't be that bad, could it? 

[Back to the present...] 

Elly:You forced yourself to eat those rations earlier, didn't you? For me to 
survive, it would have been better not to share it. But, watching you... It made 
me feel a little better. 

Fei:For your own sake? 

Elly:Yes, for my own sake. Selfish, I admit. But, I think it's okay to be 
that way at first. But little by little you learn about your own happiness... 
and someday you are able to share that important part of you with somone else. 
Some... day. Ah... 

Fei:? What's up? 

Elly:...Nothing. It just felt as though I've told you the same thing long 
ago... It must be my imagination. I couldn't have said it to you before, because 
we've only just met, haven't we? Yes, it's probably just my imagination... 

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 style is the manner in which the content of the game was presented. It's difficult to examine this apart from the content itself but certain stylistic habits can be identified and examined.

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. For example, the sentence patterns disporportionally fall under the standard stale SVO (subject, verb, object) pattern, which may be due to Japanese sentences virtually always being SOV, so the translator might have just automatically made sentences SVO without trying anything skillful or tricky. Also a major menace is the huge excess of elipses (those ... things) in dialogue. Some are okay, but the amount of them really bogs down the reading and makes the characters mentally come off as slow speakers.

To be fair to the translator, it does has some nice gems, once in awhile. Some worth reading more than once even apart from their context: 

"There was a deep, deep, reason, deeper than the deepest ocean for doing what I did." [Big Joe, about 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?"

"Humans are imperfect, foolish life form... I will show the greatness of a perfect life form! Achtzehn, the combination of human wisdom and the strength of steel."

"To be human is to be able to pick your own path in life..."

"This is reality. Let's go."

It's safe to say 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.

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 uses religion as a major device, but 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.

Fei: Elly... That isn't wrong. To sacrifice yourself for others is a noble thing... Even if it were to benefit yourself, it's no problem. There will always be a person healed... One or the other... Love gains its original shine only when there's an interelationship between the giver and the receiver. It is incomplete when one or the other is missing. The two are one. It was you, Elly, who taught me that. I believe that is what it means to be human. I can now understand the true importance of it.

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 is that 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.