Xenosaga : A Fine Enough Introduction
My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.
And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.
But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.
Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.
There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.
While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.
But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.
Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.
The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).
After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.
At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.
Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.
Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.
Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.
As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.
Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.
The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.
The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.
I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.
Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.
Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.
The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).
On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.
That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.
Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.
Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).
Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.
Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.
The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.
You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)
One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.
The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?
And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.
Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.
While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.
Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).
I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.
In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !
My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.
And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.
But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.
Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.
There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.
While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.
But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.
Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.
The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).
After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.
At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.
Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.
Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.
Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.
As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.
Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.
The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.
The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.
I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.
Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.
Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.
The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).
On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.
That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.
Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.
Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).
Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.
Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.
The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.
You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)
One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.
The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?
And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.
Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.
While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.
Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).
I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.
In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !