The gameplay of Xenogears is by far the most important of the supports to the story -- but it's only a support. The interactive element of Xenogears primarily involves moving from place to place and fighting battles. The actual storyline can't be changed except in minor ways which don't influence the final outcome, and the order in which the storyline is presented also cannot be changed. Battles use a modified RPG battle engine, which I talk about in the next section; here I'm concerned with interactive element asides from the battle system. Now I should mentioned that my primary focus in game creation is the actual game part of it, I have no patience with anyone that thinks that a good story can make up for a bad game, so I'll be a bit more blunt here and in the next section than I have heretofore been in this review, simply because thinking in terms of gameplay is my specialty.

A lot of Xenogears' 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 which you can later feed it to Chu-chu, things like 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 non-obvious 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 neither ingenious nor exact. The rewards don't seem to match the accomplishments in any strong way, and most RPGs do the same type of thing so I doubt this was selected for its harmony with the story -- it only worked out this time that it worked with the story, but for many types of stories it would have been superfluous and there just for the fun of it.

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 but mistaken idea that 'mini-games' and 'side-quests' add depth to a game's world. 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, or what can be called sublinearity. 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 card game is particularly superfluous. Why, I repeat, why? What does the card game have to do with what the game is about? There isn't even an attempt at an excuse, it just lies there guilty.

But in justice a lot of the other out of the way gameplay elements do have to do with the story and do add depth, but these are usually the ones that require the 'search everything and talk to everyone' strategy. There's an interesting quest involving getting three badges and getting rewarded mightily for it. There is a special item that you can get early on if you save up enough money and buy it before the story leaves that town. There is a ring you can find and give back to its owner later. These types of things make exploration more fun than it would otherwise be. But except for the money-saving thing, it's still really only 'search everything and talk to everyone', there isn't much skill required apart from that.

The gear battling arena in Nortune is curious: one the one hand it's rather fun (in fact I found it 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 for both the battle arena and the normal gear battles.

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'.

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 (except for the fact that they are pretty large), 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 (not neccessary and not fun), although there are one or two 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. ***

You can jump while exploring, but just why was that included? It plays no greater role here than in Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, less even.

The text speed is not malleable; I, and many others, can't read at that speed with comfort, 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 overworld map, as if being visually ugly to look at wasn't bad enough, is hard to navigate and oddly empty of areas to explore or challenges to overcome. Why is it even traversable if there is no real interaction to it; why not just have a map of connected dots, as in Ys III or something? 

The number of playable characters, considering the number of story protagonists, is small. I would have made characters more temporary than permanent (a system more like Final Fantasy IV than VI), and added in at least Sigurd and Margie as playables, and possibly Ramsus too (for the end sequence).

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. It's the only real 'gameplay scene' in the game. The entire game should have been set up like this, and made up of these, it would have been a game of insurpassable wonder if that were done; in games, stories should be played, not watched, and there were uncounted missed opportunites I saw where gameplay scenes could have been constructed but weren't. 

Just as one example: in Kislev you become a prisoner, and are restricted in what areas you can travel to in the city. There was room there to make it more elaborate and fun and still related to the plot and theme: you could have had your area of exploration gradually increase based on your performance in the battle games; as it is, the victories and expansions of freedom are all pre-determined, it would have worked better to have a type of point system, involve the gameplay with the exploration freedom. That way it says something about freedom (that fighting for it is necessary and increases it -- the theme of that area of the plot), plus it would have given that area more of a feeling of going from slavery to freedom (since freedom of movement is an easily conceived concrete form of it), and given you something to do other than follow along with the one step by step path programmed in.

That's one example. As a general principle, the game would have benefitted by showing how perfection and freedom and the other ideas of the game work, not only in plot terms but in game terms.

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 the 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. It's only a minor plus though, but let's praise what pluses we can find.

But to counter every minor plus in the gameplay is a minor minus. This part appears arbitrary no matter how long I look at them: why use the four elements of fire, wind, water, and earth? It uses them in both ether attack organization and in the organization of a special forces group of Solaris. The game's setting atmosphere is religious, so why us a "pagan" (originally Greek I believe) categorization of matter? Why have so few 'good' element and 'evil' element based attacks?

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 (and there are only about 42 of them). There are only twp basic battle tracks (non-gear and gear fighting) and only one basic boss battle track; the basic battle tracks 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 so few 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 was needful.

But what is there is great. I do think the Chrono Trigger soundtrack (which he created at age 21) is slightly superior, but not being a music composer I can't say much to explain the cause of that preference. They are very similar soundtracks stylistically -- there is a music box song in each game (in both games they are variations on the main music theme), and the Xenogears Shevat track (track 2-05 on the soundtrack -- I'll use their numbers for reference since there are no officially translated English names for them) is similar to the music that played in Enhansa in Chrono Trigger.

One thing I like about the Xenogears soundtrack is that recurring melodies between tracks are used -- the introduction theme (1-01) and the Babel Tower (and later dungeons) theme (2-15) share one, and the main melody is contained in at least four seperate tracks: the music-box heme (1-6), the flying airship theme (2-10), the Maria and Chu Chu defeating Achtzehn theme (2-9), and the ending song (2-19). Also good is that they're not immediately recognizable as related, it's only after several listens that I saw the relation between those tracks, and there could very easily be some I missed.

One of my favorites in the soundtrack is the Solaris theme (2-11), mainly because (despite what many have said) it fits Solaris so much. You spend about a half of the game wondering what Solaris is like, thinking it a place full of evil and terror (which it is), and then you arrive and hear a light-hearted melody which sounds like it'd fit best in an amusement park or a parade. It works first because it's unexpected and a bit shocking, and second and more importantly because you realize that the people of Solaris (at least the higher classes) live within illusion that things are care-free and that Emperor Cain (and not even Cain himself, but a mock-up) and the Gazel have everything under control and each person doesn't need to think beyond his assigned task and his entertainment.

My absoute favorite is the Elly-Fei theme (1-9), it sounds like a typical instrumental love song at first but when I really paid attention to it I found the melody for it more beautiful than anything I've heard of its type.

Besides the music, the 'sound effects' should evaluated too. But since I know next to nothing about how to do so, so I'll just say I didn't think anything was wrong with them. Things did sound like what they were supposed to sound like.

The voice acting (both in anime movie cut-scenes and in the battles) are mixed. The voices in battle are very short and usually limited to one or two syllable sounds or words, and are fine. The voices in the anime movies are amateur and poorly dubbed, but there are so few of them that this isn't very distracting.

There is one lyrical song (actually three, but one of which was an out-take and the other of which is Bulgarian chanting -- see the last section for more on that one), which was recorded in English, and sung by someone named Joanne Hogg, who sings it pretty well. I don't really get the lyrics relation to the game, if any, so I'll not comment there. The lyrics, qua poetry, have a lot of relatively cliche phrases but with a couple of good depictions: "I paint your name in sound," "...and tears that never fall // but run through the heart."

Let us now consider the visuals of the game [2].

The basic structure of the visual system is to use two-dimensional sprites on three-dimensional maps, providing an effect that looks something like this: GRXG01.jpg (images increased in size to make up for resolution differences, and will open in a new window). This was a good choice, as before mentioned I think it adds the connotation of the human delicateness and detail and the gear largeness and invulnerability.

The visual character designs (currently available at ***) are competent and even above-average but nothing especially unique among Japanese game, manga, and anime visual character designs: the appearences, clothing, expressions, postures, colors, and the like do fit the characters well in most cases.

Taken almost directly from the character designs are the facial portraits shown with the textboxes -- a common, but good and important, custom in RPGs. They are 64x64 pixels. Most of the characters have one portrait used throughout, there are a couple of special alternate ones used here and there but the vast majority of characters just get one. Considering those restructions they are done well enough: ***, I only wonder why those restrictions were so restrictive -- I would certainly have made them larger and given them more varied expressions, even considering the great number of characters with these portraits and their limited time and funds, a game with as much text as this one really does require as much visual aid to the textbox flow as is possible. Something like the Playstation game Kartia's huge and numerous portraits would have been ideal.

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 resembles that of Chrono Trigger very much. They can of course be zoomed in and out with the camera and so their size is not an absolute 25x50 but a detail-level 25x50. I don't know how many frames each has but it's at not choppy when they move. They have standard walking positions and a couple of other special positions (nodding, laughing, etc.). 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. I agree with their sizes and frames, they work well for their purpose.

The 'battle system' sprites work in much the same way and are about the same size as the 'walk-about' sprites, but of course have a wider variety of frames for their various kicks and punches and so on. They aren't as well animated as, say, an SNK fighting game, but by RPG battle system standards they are pretty peerless -- many levels above the battle system sprites in the early Final Fantasy games, Lunar 1 & 2, Tales of Destiny, Star Ocean: Second Story, Suikoden 1 & 2,  and pretty much any other RPG that uses two-dimensional battle sprites -- only Valkarie Profile and a couple of other lesser-known games exceed Xenogears here.

The enemy sprites are well animated and work well, I just don't like their designs -- each individually is okay, but taken as a group there isn't much imagination to them as a whole. But that's a typical RPG problem so I won't dwell.

That's it for the two-dimensional; in the three we have more problems.

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).

Where they most matter the three-dimensional graphics succeed: the visual design and actual visual implementation (taking into account the Playstation's power) of the gears is perfect -- there was a lot pending on it so being, it better have been, and it was. Even within the giant-robot genre (although my experience is fairly limited in that genre), the gears of Xenogears are special. Each of the main playable characters (sans Chu-chu) and most of the other main characters have a gear specific to them, and often more than one (Fei has something like five different versions of his). These gears are  expressions of their rider's character, or perhaps more likely their ideal character, them at their best. They are beautiful both in their static original designs (also at ***) and their moving polygon models. By perfect I don't mean that they couldn't have been better or couldn't have been improved, only that they met their aim with so centered a bulls-eye that I have no complaints and all I can do is hope to learn how to show the abstracted highest spirit of mankind in the forms of giant machines, and point to it and advise others to do the same. In my esteem these are on equal footing with the Greek statues of its people and its gods.

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.

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.