Xenosaga 2 : Peaking on the Stock Market
Takahashi is one unlucky motherfucker, first laid off by Falcom (which to many would be considered a good thing) and then laid off by Square for being too ambitious, our guy simply didn’t have the best of run when it comes to realizing his grand project and Xenosaga was looking to be yet another one of his many failures. When Xenosaga 1 came out, Takahashi had envisioned a way to tell a grand sci-fi epic with tints of religious symbolism thrown into the mix in order to make up for what he couldn’t do with Xenogears. Borrowing a lot from his Perfect Works book Takahashi was set to accomplish his goal once and for all… or was he ?
The problem with being an author is that you tend to be a perfectionist and that perfectionism doesn’t bode well in an increasingly competitive market. Saying that Xenosaga was an ambitious project would be an understatement, the original Xenogears was already too much for Square to handle and Takahashi’s vision saw no brakes on the fast moving train that was releasing the original Xenosaga, the game was dense, rich in lore and in-universe terminology that might completely threw you out of the loop if you’re not paying attention. To say that I had to take mental notes while playing through the game in order to piece out whatever the fuck it was even trying to accomplish would be an understatement, this game is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and at times very subtle in its approach to both worldbuilding, political setup and characterization.
Something I failed to mention during my Xenosaga review was that the game came with in-depth glossary defining and explaining every single tiny details of the world and it is huge, there’s well over 275 entries in that glossary which unlocks as the game progresses and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t fully commit to reading all of them. I tried doing so but one thing I’m not super fond of when it comes to storytelling especially in video games is having to stop the progression of the story in order to read what is essentially an in-game wiki article. Final Fantasy XIII was especially guilty of this where most of the important part of the game’s setting and lore was found on a random backlog containing info about important story details that should’ve been naturally woven into the game’s natural storytelling and gameplay loop. Fortunately, I still think Xenosaga 1 and especially now having played Xenosaga 2 is clear enough in its cryptic nature that you can somewhat get the gist of it with context clues alone and consulting the glossary is only an optional thing.
All of this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Xenosaga’s massive commitment to worldbuilding and establishing a larger than life universe with conflicts on a galactic scale interwoven with deep psychological dive into characters' inner doubts and desires. A single secondary heck one might even say a tertiary villain which only appears in the first half of the game and never gets brought up ever again past that point after his inevitable demise manages to be an impactful and really interesting fella once we sit back and think about it. I still think the Cathedral Ship and the Encephalon parts of the game are absolute testament to Takahashi and Kaori Tanaka’s talent as directors and storytellers.
And I even failed to mention how much of Xenosaga 1 is tied to Xenogears in a way that’s very hard to notice if you’re not familiar not just with that game but it’s “Perfect Works” encyclopedia book as many concepts and ideas brought up in Xenosaga like the uncovering of the Zohar in South Africa, Lost Jerusalem, the Galactic Federation, the massive timeskip between the intro of the game and the rest were all elements present in “Perfect Works”
What I’m trying to convey here is that there is no feasible ways for Xenosaga or even the original vision for Xenogears to be completed and even the Xenoblade series only tied back to it thanks to the success of the first game which allowed Takahashi to give it “one more try” and by then the project has shifted so much in style, tone, setting, lore genre and everything that it’s even harder to know if this was really what Takahashi really wanted to tell. As I have yet to play Xenoblade 3 (been stalling it for a bit too long cause I was initially not that interested in trying it out) I can’t really talk on how the story ends up unfolding and if the team at Monolith Software managed to tie all of the series thematic loose end together in a satisfying manner but regardless we have to look at the facts here.
Xenosaga 1 was released with the idea that the series will eventually be comprised of 6 games which were supposed to cover the entire timeline of the universe from beginning to the end and going through a grand total of 3 different arcs separated by massive time gaps between them and change in party members with only Shion and chaos planned to become mainstay characters. And in the end, even as Xenosaga 1 was merely an introduction to that universe and world and was always meant to be, Xenosaga 1 still wasn’t complete itself. Several elements that were shown during its announcement didn’t make the cut and in the end Takahashi said that he was only working with 20% of his real power here.
Can you imagine how insanely absurd the scope of the Xeno project is ? If the Xenosaga we got was only 20% of what was originally envisioned for that first game then I don’t think 6 games would’ve cut it to tell the entire thing ! And it would’ve taken literal decades for it to conclude hoping for little bumps on the road. Overambition is eventually what brought Xenogears to be released in the state that it’s in, it’s not just Square cutting off funds and losing interest in a project that was admittedly too big for themselves, it’s just that Takahashi was a different beast altogether as far as video game creators goes !
Making a video game in the late 90’s and early 2000’s takes roughly 2 or even 3 years, Xenogears was given 2 years and they couldn’t fully finish it on schedule because Takahashi isn’t just an ambitious storyteller but a phenomenally ambitious director as well ! Xenogears decided to forego using pre-rendered backgrounds to tell its story, opting instead for full 3D environments ! Which was unheard of for a game of this ambition especially with how fresh and indiscernible the technology was for most of the staff working on the project and indeed Xenogears is one hell of an impressive game on a technical level.
This visual ambition carried over to Xenosaga and to the furthest extreme to the Xenoblade series was truly something to behold and something Takahashi didn’t lose over the years. Sometimes I am beyond shocked at how good these games look and how well these games run and how insane the level design and environment can be on top of everything else. Xenoblade X alone is a more impressive game than most modern games that came around its release and it was released on hardware that was much less powerful than the competition. Xenosaga was no exception to that rule, as Xenosaga still remains an impressive artistic flex for the console in the heydays of 2002 when it was released and freaking outsold Tekken 4 !
When you think of long saga in video games, you can think of a few examples like Trails or even Yakuza, but even then they had to make compromises to keep the train going like reusing assets every game, keeping the standard of presentation lower, focusing more on text in sacrifice of the gameplay or exploration aspect. Working with a tinier budget can sometimes help to keep a franchise afloat in the long run without risking too much on the line and keeping the release schedule consistent to please fans and investors alike.
But not Takahashi, Takahashi is simply “built different”, the guy always keep pushing the boundaries of what was possible in terms of storytelling in this industry and how to present that story to the world in the absolute best way he can think of or at least that’s what he wants to do…
In the design document for Xenosaga 2, Takahashi stated :
“There are things that even if you try to plan for, you'll never be able to express. With games as a form of media no matter where you set it you have to make towns and all the little accessories you end up doing annoying work with games. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good medium for telling stories. I think it’s better to call it a media for telling narrative things. Without a doubt, there are things you can’t get across in a game.”
Mind you this is certainly coming from a deep place of regret and unease concerning the future of the Xenosaga project, he also stated in that same design document that he didn’t want the current state of the franchise to be static, he wanted the franchise to evolve and branch into other genres. I think what Takahashi really wanted to do was to make the Star Wars of Video Game franchise even Xenogears releasing its fifth Episode first was an homage to the ambition of George Lucas. Takahashi, a man who has worked on games for most of his life up to that point, openly admits that games are imperfect vessels for the art of creating deep impactful narratives because of all of the annoyances that come with making a game well… a game…
Part of me thinks that perhaps, Takahashi wasn’t meant to be a game director, maybe the medium of video game alone was too limiting for his grand vision because being a great artist doesn’t mean you’re good to work with as a manager. When I look back on Xenogears or even Xenosaga 1, the strength and weaknesses of these games couldn’t be more apparent. You’re not coming to these games for deep and interesting gameplay, you came here to experience some of the most brilliant, ambitious and thought provoking stories in the medium on par with novel series. Video games were but a conduit, a means to an end for Takahashi and it would take several years before the Xeno franchise would get a battle system and exploration which people would dare actually give a shit about.
And it’s when realizing that he was perhaps incapable of envisioning Xenosaga II coming on time in a way that satisfies him that he willingly quit the project to take time for himself away from all of the stress that was piling up. His departure would lead to Kaori Tanaka quitting the project too fearing that her writing talent weren’t needed anymore in this context. This wasn’t a forced change, it was something both parties consented to be the best possible outcome for the game. In the end, Xenosaga would go from 6 (maybe more ?) games to only 3 and Xenosaga II would be handled by an entirely different team with the scriptwriters kinda not being sure what to make of Takahashi’s script and the reception was mixed to say the least.
Xenosaga 2 is considered by many long-time fans of the franchise to be the absolute worst game in the Xenosaga series and even more so the Xeno franchise as a whole. It’s a game which is said to be so mediocre or even outright bad on a level of industry failure comparable to “Devil May Cry 2” in terms of a badly made misguided sequel ! Fucking DMC2 ! I’ve heard war stories about people going through this game, some of them outright giving up midway through to watch a let’s play on Youtube. And it’s not even just a gameplay thing either, people have genuine gripes with the story and how it was handled especially when it comes to tone. It’s so bad that I had 2 separate friends sending me 2 separate charts to explain the battle system to me to get it done with it faster (AND ONE OF THEM OUTRIGHT TELLS YOU TO SKIP THE GAME AND WATCH THE CUTSCENES ON YOUTUBE).
The new team in charge of developing the game took Takahashi and Tanaka’s baby, put it inside a microwave and distributed the work of art that it was supposed to be inside easily digestible product for the mass market and retooled it into an impersonal messy product which probably caused a lot of mental anguish for the young creative couple... but... against all odds…
It’s peak I’m afraid…
After reading through that long introduction contextualizing the game’s development and knowing of the game’s reputation, you’ve probably looked at the rating already and started raising a few eyebrows. “A 9 ? For Xenosaga fucking 2 ? Really ? Are you out of your damn mind ? Has the Gnome Juice finally gotten to you and now you can’t distinguish the taste of trash from the taste of well aged wine ?”
Well now my dear readers, I’m going to shock you even further. Not only do I think Xenosaga 2 is good, not only do I find the hate surrounding the game is vastly exaggerated, I also think the game is vast improvement on almost all fronts compared to the first Xenosaga and on some level even the untouchable freaking masterpiece that is Xenogears. I fail to see what in the fuck people find so bad about this game outside of maybe not vibing with the battle system.
You know what, let's talk about the battle system for a hot minute because it’s easily the biggest point of contention when it comes to talking about the game. Xenosaga 2 has a battle system which at first might seem familiar to Xenosaga 1, you have to press either square, triangle or circle in order to make combos, you have the turn order displayed on the bottom right side of the screen, additional effect applied per turn like more critical hits or point multiplier or something like that. You can boost ! And this time you can actually see the boost meter of the enemies which is definitely a nice touch given how boost is a major part of the battle system this time around and that’s pretty much it for the similarities. Because Xenosaga decides to revamp pretty much everything about the battle system and this is where things get really controversial with this entry.
In the first game in order to perform different actions you had to use AP which were always conveniently set in a way that you can do at least one action like a single combo or a single ether attack and if you wanted to use something stronger like a deathblow, you had to cancel out the first attack of your combo in order to build more AP to use a deathblow on the next turn, sacrificing a turn to potentially deal more damage the next which was a nice trade-off.
However in this game, in order to perform more actions, make your combo longer and deal more damage you need to use stocks ! Stocks is pretty much the replacement for AP, there are 3 stocks, without any stock the only thing you can do is do a measly pathetic combo attack or use an ether which consumes MP. If you want to perform more attacks you first need to build up your stock meter at the start of each battle so yes, it does mean spending several turns getting wailed by enemies waiting for the stock meter to fill up before actually launching an assault but hold on ! I know it sounds bad but trust me ! I’m getting somewhere with this !
See because what good is to use combos when there are no deathblows in this game this time around which is a shame for certain but let me talk about break ! In the previous game, using the different button was just a way to use different combos and that was pretty much it, but here each enemy has zones on their bodies which need to be hit in order to break them ! These zones are separated in B and C zones, B zones correspond to the Square button and C zones correspond to the Triangle button ! Rarely, enemies will also have A zones which are tied to the Square button but outside of maybe the very first area in the game as well as one of the superbosses it’s usually B or C ! In order to break an enemy, you have to first find their zones, that zone can be BBC or CBB or BB or any combination of these 3 letters and once that’s done and the enemies break, they enter a state of break which makes them more vulnerable to attack.
And this is where the boost meter comes into play, much like Xenosaga 1, you can override the turn order by using a boost which makes the boosted character take priority in the turn order ! The main difference and honestly a welcome one in my opinion is that now the boost meter is shared across all party members and can be built up to three units just like stocks ! Other than that, building your boost meter works just like in XS1 meaning that the meter will be built with each successful attack you land on the enemies !
And I must admit that boosting was one part of the battle system in XS1 that I barely even used or at least used as a clutch to get out of a bad situation. Rarely did boosting in XS1 gave me a real advantage in fights and with how slow the boost meter for each character built up in that game, you rarely ever got to make use of it and when you do use it, it’s usually not that satisfying or even that helpful ! But not in Xenosaga 2, that game took the boosting mechanic from XS1 and made it make sense in the context of Xenosaga’s 2 battle system. Because you see after breaking an enemy, you need to immediately follow it up with a boosted character to follow up on that combo and then you can either launch the enemy in the air or down it on the ground and they stay that way as long as you keep boosting and keep piling combos onto the fool which deals massive amounts of damages.
There are a lot more that goes into dealing damage than just that however, on top of building up your stocks, you can had elemental attacks to your weapons in order to target their weaknesses, you can use an ether to boost your attack or magic depending on which character you use and eventually all of that combined after all that preparation ends up with you dealing an astronomical amount of damage if you play your cards rights and even more so if you use your attacks on certain turns such as using Momo on the ether boosting turn to make her attacks even more powerful than she usually does (yes Momo went from being completely useless to being your main damage dealer in this game, she’s a glass canon however but she does compensate by having an high evasion stat).
I can understand that this seems like a lot at first glance and a complete headache for those who only want to just mindlessly rush through fights like there’s no tomorrow ! It’s definitely a slower more methodical approach to combat and even regular encounters can last several minutes whereas in any other RPGs they would last mere seconds. I can definitely see the problems people have with it but you’re also talking to someone whose favorite Final Fantasy game is IX, whose favorite Persona game is 2, Pokemon Platinum and I’m an avid SMT player and you know the meme about SMT and buffing that’s a whole ass statement. Xenosaga’s 2 battle system works especially well against bosses which are usually single targets anyway and a bit less when there’s more than 3 enemies, which rarely happens but it does happen ! There’s also a dimension of placement which I didn’t start covering but nonetheless.
I really like this battle system ! And unlike Xenogears or Xenosaga, the battle system never grew dull or uninteresting to me because it’s the type of system which forces you to engage with it constantly and I get it, it’s definitely tiring ! In my Chained Echoes review I talked about how treating every encounter like an event or wasn’t the most optimal way to make a JRPG ! And while it may come from a place of wanting the genre to evolve beyond mindless attack button spam, RPGs tend to be long and I think it’s ok to have enemies which are just fodder and doesn’t require much thinking as you can put the challenge somewhere else like resource management, dealing with status effects or arranging enemies in certain ways which forces the player to think of the most optimal way to deal with them in the long run in the most optimal way possible.
It’s that same feeling that got me to appreciate the battle system from Xenosaga 2 so much, since battles take so much prep time, every fight plays out like a puzzle you have to solve and while in the hands of an uninformed player, the battle system can feel sluggish, once you get into the flow of it, it’s really satisfying. The battle system of Xenosaga 2 is a lot like sex, it needs time, it needs the right tools, the right preliminaries, the right mood and eventually once everything is in place you can climax all over your adversaries in a white beam of glory ! But I guess some folks are more into raw dogging like animals and you know that’s also fair, not everyone can enjoy subtlety in this brute world…
But even with how much I ended up enjoying the battle system of this game, it’s definitely not a perfect system or else it wouldn’t be so divisive to begin with. I think the problem with Xenosaga’s 2 Battle System is that in the end it’s not a very intuitive system and even the game itself struggles to explain how to properly play the game (the tutorial literally tells you to “figure the rest yourself” which is great game design alright). I think it’s better to get into Xenosaga 2 knowing exactly what works with the system and what doesn’t, which party members to pick and which ones to absolutely avoid (lol Shion) as well as choosing the right abilities to learn to make your life easier (Elemental Swords are such an essential part of combat it’s crazy to think it’s even an optional thing to begin with).
There’s also a few other mechanics I forgot to mention because they literally don’t integrate well to the battle system despite their best efforts. Dual Combo can be used when a character boost but you’re not skipping to get to their turn yet, assuming you’ve unlocked the combo in question (more on that later), you can dish out a Chrono Trigger style double tech but I literally never used it. Same for Ether Combo, apparently using certain sequences of Ether lead to Super Ethers but since offensive Ethers are useless you won’t be using them.
Of course during battle you also have to manage health and mana and this is where the one originality of the game shows its face, there is no shop and no money system in the game. Some people might find that strange but in all honesty Xenosaga 1 wasn’t really the best at handling ressources itself and a lot of the late game customization was heavily reliant on grinding barter items to sell, accomplishing cryptic and obscure task to get lots of cash or play the different mini-games that can be accessed at certain points in the story. This gave Xenosaga 1 a bit of a survival aspect to it where you rely mostly on what you find on the ground and Xenosaga 2 embraces that entirely. One thing that Xenosaga 2 surely did streamline however is the ability point system, for better and for worse. Since there are no shops to buy weapons and armor, everything is done through the ability system which is very different from Xenosaga 1.
In XS1, you got a shit load of different types of point that can be spend to upgrade certain parts of your character, Xenosaga 2 streamlined the process a little bit by fusing all of those different currencies into a single one called “Skill Points” which need to be spend on this board where abilities are classed by level and sublevels to what I could only compare to the RPG equivalent of a windows file explorer. In order to unlock these classes however, your character needs “class points”, these are not obtained in battle however you do obtain them for purchasing new skills in the shop (more specifically by purchasing every skill in a single class). Every character in the game can virtually learn any ability and if you happen to have a clear data file of XS1 on your memory card, you can transfer those to get a few extra points to get started when playing the game for the first time.
It’s kind of a daunting but ultimately kinda boring system, some skills are new ethers the character can use in battles, some are passives which apply directly to the characters when learned and others are equipable passives which replace regular equipment. It’s a boring system because it means that every character evolves in the same way, you could make an argument that you can’t possibly teach everything on the board without grinding so you need to specialize your characters through the system but really most of the class board abilities are pretty goddamn useless because they don’t work in harmony with the break and boost system.
You’re mainly going to focus your attention on abilities which can up your damage multiplier, or regenerate mana while stocking, or allowing you to boost even when the turn order is in your favor or starting the fights with stock and all of that jazz and that’s the most optimal way to play the game ! I think a lot of ideas when it comes to Xenosaga’s 2 gameplay should be expanded upon in a sequel so that a lot of the “fluff” gets better contextualized or cut entirely to make for a more well-rounded and less divisive system. Unfortunately the reception of this battle system by the community pretty much dooms it to being entirely replaced by the next game which is a shame however saying Xenosaga 2 had no influence on the rest of the franchise would be a straight up lie. The entire idea of Xenosaga 2’s gameplay system probably heavily inspired Monolith Software during the development of Xenoblade 2 which also had quite a slow methodical system about building up all sorts of weird effects before launching a big fuck you attack on the ennemies in battles which can take quite a while to get through even with regular encounters. Maybe a new playthrough of Xenoblade 2 will make me appreciate the system of that game more now that I kinda have the knowledge of which games probably inspired it (goat meets goat, what can you say o/).
“Ok fine Cani, so you enjoy getting fucked in the ass now that’s great, but surely you’ll have a lot of things to say against the story of the game huh ? Surely with that whole 3 pages long introduction praising the artistic integrity of the author's original vision was to tell us that the game is bordering on fanfiction territory and should therefore be shunned by the public… right ?”
Well actually, man I hate to say it but despite the respect I have for Takahashi and his work on the first game, I must also admit that I enjoyed the story of Xenosaga 2 way more than the first despite most of it not being written or directed by Takahashi. Ok I think it’s time to talk a bit about my taste when it comes to stories. I think I said in one of my Cold Steel reviews that the single aspect I find the most important in a story above all else are the characters and only second to that is theming or message ! What can I get out of this game, what was the intention behind it and did it succeed at delivering on said intention ?
Xenosaga 1 is a game with many praiseworthy aspects to its presentation and at times its story, but remember I did say I had trouble calling the story “good” because in the end Xenosaga 1 was too busy introducing us to the universe rather than making me entice to it ! It’s full of cryptic bullshit that one could only ever hope to understand after thoroughly pondering about the meaning of life and whether I’m already Half-Xehanort or something like that. It’s not a bad approach to storytelling, it’s slow, it’s methodical, it’s very academic but personally speaking I’m a man of action not words ! I think the worst offense a piece of art could do is making me feel nothing ! And even worse than that is making me feel frustrated (you’ve probably understood by now while I was talking about the series we should not mention the name of).
Xenosaga didn’t make me feel “nothing", but it wasn’t a particularly memorable experience either, I 100% acknowledge the artistry behind it but ultimately, I got nothing out of that experience but a thirst to know more which is already enough but it doesn’t help that game stand out on its own ! Xenosaga 2 decides perhaps because of the change in writer to re-focus the story on a more character driven one as well as trying to make sense of wtv the fuck Takahashi was trying to cook in the first game. And yes, am I frustrated that those answers didn’t come from the man himself who made me cry like a bitch watching a dude on a chair for 10h ? Of course I am ! But I also don’t think the job that was done with Xenosaga 2 was a botched job either ! It’s definitely a flawed story but one that I think I ultimately connected with more.
Right from the intro, you can see how much the game has evolved from just a presentation standpoint, the action set pieces from the prologue are absolutely nuts ! Giving us a flash back to the conflict on Old Miltia and explaining Chaos deal in that conflict, this intro is so freaking cool and actually re-introduce mech dungeons into the series something that was missing from Xenosaga 1. Quick word on the mech sections tho, they’re easily the low point of the game for me gameplay wise, I actually enjoyed being able to summon your mech in battle like a Final Fantasy X summon and the customization was nuts even if it was a bit grindy to make good use of it in the long run. But here mechs got their own sections again, separated from the rest but usually speaking the level design of these sections are a bit uninspired and the combat is a more straightforward and limited version of the on-foot battle that I didn’t especially fuck with all that much. No combos, no everything, just charging a bar to unleash 1 (one) single big attack isn’t that great but at least the mechs designs are sick.
You can definitely feel this game was released in 2004 and Matrix was the craziest most hyped movie franchise of that period of time and it shows ! Very early on, you get introduced to Jin, Shion’s brother who is literally just a Citan clone ! He’s not as unhinged as Citan was in Xenogears but he does share enough similarities in terms of raw personality alone that I was still thoroughly entertained by his wacky antics. In this intro, we also get to see Jin’s rivalry with Margulis the chief leader of U-TIC the evil terrorist organization from the first game and every time these two meets, you just get the sickest most badass under the rain super well choreographed sword fight imaginable and you get two of those in the game it’s fucking crazy I love that shit !
In fact, I will that I got a lot of enjoyment out of all the action scenes this time around, I’m a simple guy, show me Kos-Mos waking up, turning her bed into a motorbike, launching to space and perform a freaking Gatai with Shion’s ship like it’s fucking Gunbuster and I’m all over that shit ! It’s in these moments you really can’t be fooled that this wasn’t made by Takahashi however, the team at Monolith Software already got a taste for over the top anime bullshit which is essentially how Xenoblade even came to be and was even allowed to go full shonen mode (Xenoblade is to the Xeno franchise what TTGL was to Gainax in response to Evangelion). The first game went for a colder, more creepy, atmospheric almost stifling vibe which reminded me of Dead Space or 2000’s a Space Odyssey. It’s full of perspective switches to these random politicians discussing important stuff outside of the main frame ! That’s because Takahashi is thorough with his world and wants to make you understand all of it and yes at times, some other aspect gets dwarfed in the process.
But here, the plot is definitely more focused on moment to moment action set pieces as well as character moments which isn’t something that displeases me at all. One thing that people complain a lot about the plot of Xenosaga 2 is its tone, compared to the first game, the team allowed themselves to just have a bit more lighthearted fun with the characters. For some reason, people hated the entirety of Second Miltia and the scenes that happen here. There’s a pretty infamous scene of Shion having to meet back with her brother which seems to have a falling out with before starting working at Vector and the whole scene is a bit silly. Some people found that scene monstrously cringey but I personally found it rather cute myself, we didn’t get to see much of Shion's actual personality in the first game since she was always so aloof and kinda distant so I dunno, I kinda like it here. In fact, I think these moments of levity were kind of necessary coming off of the first game which in contrast was harrowingly stifling in its atmosphere.
Getting the characters to breathe a little bit after the intense event of the first game by just interacting with one another in a relatively stake-free environment definitely helped me getting more attached to the cast and I think these were a great way to show how all of these unlikely allies ended becoming closer following the events of the first game. It sure is a brutal change of tone, but it’s not something that bothered and in fact it’s something that I welcomed, especially since much like the first game, shit starts hitting the shitting fan rather quickly.
While trying to recover the Y-Data, the key to unlocking the seal of Old Miltia and its secret, Albedo pretty much trapped everyone and managed to get away with it, helping U-TIC in the process which lead to a full scale war as U-TIC can now have their greedy palm on the Zohar and unleash whatever evil shit they want to do with it.
During the hacking process, we get to explore Momo’s subconscious world and that’s where we learn a lot more about who she is or rather who the person she’s a clone of was and her relationship with Jr, Albedo and Nigredo. Xenosaga 2 puts a lot more emphasis on Jr. this time around, a lot of the events of the game puts him on the forefront of the story for various reasons. I absolutely loved Jr. in the first game and I think the team at Xenosaga 2 understood that and just straight up made him the main character this time around. The decision to make Jr. the central character of the plot was apparently kind of a shady marketing one, they thought that focusing the plot on a male character would go better with the western audience. As such Shion and Kos-Mos which very much were the central figure of the plot in the first game were kinda shafted in favor giving Jr. and by extension MOMO who he has a romantic subplot with more scenes to shine.
On one hand, it’s kind of a shame because I actually like Shion and Kos-Mos and I find the idea of a genius engineer and her trusty sexy killer bot being the main protagonist infinitely more bold and original and there were still a lot of unanswered mysteries surrounding the past of these twos that I wish we could’ve explored further. On the other, Jr. clearly is the character who had the more stakes in the story of even the first game in my opinion and thus while the decision to make him the main character in this second entry might be a bit misguided, ultimately I think they still did a great job with him and especially Albedo ! Xenosaga is kinda meant to conclude the rivalry arc between these two and without spoiling too much everything about JrMomo, Albedo and Yuriev foundations are easily the best part about the entire game.
There is an attempt to still make Shion relevant into the story but I think it’s done kinda poorly. Not only because Shion seems to had a weird shift in her personality following the events of the first game which somehow made her more bitchy and at times mean compared to how she was portrayed in the first game for seemingly no reasons at all but also because most of the emotional crux of her story are tied to things we have yet to be briefed upon like who the fuck Febronia is and why is Shion so attached to her. There’s a pretty horrific scene near the endgame with Febronia’s sister which the closest the game gets from the horror vibe of the first game and the scene should be genuinely heart wrenching if I had been given more context to Shion’s relationship with Feb and why was she chosen to do all of these crazy traumatic adventure to seek the Zohar all the time. As for Kos-Mos, she gets a grand total of 2 (two) cool scenes and… yeah that’s kind of it… so much for being the mascot character amirite ?
But tonal inconsistency with Shion’s story aside, I found the general plot to be more easy to digest than the first one, maybe because it was more focus on giving us answer as well as developing the relationships each characters have to one another than simply throwing cryptic stuff in your face hoping you make sense of it. It’s definitely a more raw approach to storytelling but it’s one that works on me a bit more, a story focusing on character moments big and small and delivering full sales on them. The game still has a lot of mystery that the third game will have to answer but what I got here still was hella satisfying. The Subconscious Domain and the very end of the game definitely stand up to me as some of the highlights of the Xeno franchise so far. Albedo is a fantastic villain and this game only cements him further as one of the best antagonists in the genre for various reasons. The guy is a legit great representation of a truly psychotic mind with no filters whatsoever, wish he had more creepy scenes like the first game but his antics in this one are still a joy to watch.
The final confrontation of the game between Jr. and him will probably live rent free in my head for the rest of how long this new hyper-obsession will last and I will admit that the game managed to make me emotional during several places in the narrative. However, do not be fooled, this clearly is a different style than Takahashi, this isn’t a Takahashi story. You still get a small amount of what the original script might’ve looked like but even then you can see that whenever they try to imitate the first game pacing and approach to worldbuilding that the cracks start to show. A lot of revelations are done through boring expository dialogues with very little good direction to them, some twists are handled really poorly especially because of the way they padded the game in weird ways in order to just add an additional dungeon and the final boss is a complete joke both as a villain and as a boss fight in spite of a neat meta effect midway through the fight.
Well speaking of dungeons and exploration, let’s talk about that, the game is still as linear as the original and still suffers from a lot of pointless backtracking to progress the story but in terms of dungeon design, it’s a vast improvement over the original game. The original game dungeons really only served as set dressing for the story to take place in and at times felt like they were built out of convention for the genre rather than to be interesting, there were a few puzzles in them but it was really rare. One thing which definitely helps however is that now the game has actual music during gameplay ! It’s another point of contention actually, Yasunori Mitsuda the historic composer of the series left the boat on this one and was replaced by two composers. One is Yuki Kajiura which you’re certainly more familiar with for her work on anime such as SAO, Demon Slayers or Fate/Stay Night but if you’re a chad like me you first heard her work in the classic anime Mai-Hime, she was responsible for the cutscene track and she did an excellent job with those like she usually does for her work on anime. The other composer however is Shinji Hosoei, a guy who you may recognize as the dude who made the soundtrack of Ridge Racer and here the dude is responsible for the regular gameplay track and let’s just say the result is… well… interesting ?
There’s definitely a clear dichotomy between Kajiura and Hosoei’s track which doesn’t make the entire sound direction all too cohesive. Hosoei makes very “arcadey” sounding music which I personally don’t think is necessarily that great of a fit for Xenosaga as it should be, it’s a lot of weird Techno-Electro future sci-fi mambo jumbo can’t really describe it very well. Second Miltia and Kukai Foundation sound like happy mall music. That's really the best way I could describe it and the rest of the soundtrack sounds a bit stiff and odd. Personally speaking, I don’t mind how weirdly “beepy” Hosoei’s track sounds, I like the sound of mid-2000’s eroge and rpg maker tunes and these are pretty reminiscent of that in a sense. Also having actual background music during exploration definitely makes it less boring to go through them, it sacrifices atmosphere but oh well. Some Hosoei tracks work really well and some don't, and while I get the type of sci-fi vibe it was trying to convey, ultimately a lot of them felt a bit too artificial (but not unpleasant to my ear).
Kajiura’s soundtrack on the other hand goes super duper mega hard, of course she’s mostly responsible for the cutscenes but I think Kajiura was a great pick to follow up on Mitsuda’s more grandiose and orchestral score of the original game. I’m more of an in-game track myself because a lot of cutscenes track tend to come and go for me but re-listening to some tunes on the side really solidified how good of a pick Kajiura was for the cutscenes in the game with a very electronic yet epic style she’s known for in her other works. She really captured the vibe and essence of Xenosaga and it’s great.
But back to dungeon, I’d say that the dungeons in this game are a vast improvement not only on Xenosaga 1 which had “wtv” dungeons in my opinion and Xenogears, whose selection of good dungeons and environment can be counted on 3 fingers. Dungeons now have proper dungeon design, with tons of paths to explore, some nice amount of verticality and even the occasional puzzle to solve to spice things up. The game also has a lot more variety in its environment than Xenosaga 1, while it still retains the sci-fi core of the setting, the game isn’t afraid to spice things up with not just making up just from space station to space station. The environment from a visual standpoint is much more striking, from a lush mysterious otherworldly artificial forest to bustling futuristic cities as well as ruins under the sunset, the game kinda makes the most of the setting it presents and I’m all the more happy for it.
However, while I do find them better, do I find them good ? Well it really depends in my opinion, some design decisions in those dungeons can be quite questionable. The Subconscious Domain for exemple is a pretty cool place the first time around but did we really need to go through it a second time but with a winter aesthetic instead and the same enemies but swapped colors ? Especially back to back with no breaks like that ? That’s gotta be the weirdest way to pad game time I’ve ever seen but alas there’s also the Ormus Stronghold. The Ormus Stronghold is way too long and demands so much useless backtracking that it kinda makes me lose my mind a little bit. It’s also not helped that this dungeon is complete filler, it appears in the middle of nowhere halting the natural progression of the plot so we can have a few boss fights with the U-TIC organization which they somehow couldn’t fit somewhere else in the game.
But by far the biggest offender when it comes to the dungeons are the way enemies are placed on the field. I think I said it in another review but I don’t think field encounter are the end-all be-all solution to random encounters and could be easily as fucked up as random encounter are in raw annoyance level and this game is no exception. There are way too many enemies per screen, forget about avoiding them because you will not be able to as they run way too fast, that is if you could avoid them in the first place. There are way too many mandatory encounters which makes the whole field encounter implementation feel pretty useless. One thing I also don’t get is why the monsters in the mech sections disappear for good and never respawn until you leave the dungeon but regular monsters respawn every time you change rooms and come back. Battles are already long enough like that and this only serves as making the fatigue of them even stronger.
It’s especially bad since much like the first game, the red door and red key sidequest is back and requires backtracking which was made significantly more annoying because of these inconsistencies in the level design department. In fact, this game has a lot more side-content than any previous games in the series, it’s a part of the game I’m definitely more mixed on however because while I do enjoy having so much content to chew on, let’s just say that it’s really hit or miss. So on top of the red door and red key sidequest from the first game, you get introduced to the Global Samaritan (or GS) path which is a system that allows you to talk to NPC and help them do different things. That sounds fair, there’s not that much side-quest either and these are completely optional so you can feel free to skip on them if you want, there are over 36 quests like that which ranges from : Fun little vignette, Puzzle Solving and minigames, tedious fetch questing and “Oh god did anybody playtested this shit ???”.
I’d say that all the minigames requiring you to play a small minigame, solve a puzzle or go through a mini-dungeon to fight a mini-boss were honestly fine and a nice distraction from the regular loop of the plot but as it is sadly tradition with games in the mid-2000’s that also mean that there’s a lot of side-quest which are simply about going places and either gather or distributing items and they’re pretty fucking terrible. There’s only 2 real cities in the game, Second Miltia and the Kukai foundation so any quest requiring you to fetch stuff is just about making back and forth between these two places and with how slow the movement of these games can be, they can be very very tedious. Fortunately, I’ve played this game on an emulator and thus I’ve allowed myself to cut on the tedium by activating turbo mode (ah the joy of modern day conveniences…). Some of these quests can also have success and fail conditions which can be very obtuse without a solid guide at hand and I really don’t understand why it’s even a thing given that the reward is given to you regardless of clear status.
And then, there are “these” types of quests, the type of side-content that just makes you question the sanity of the developers who put it into the game. One quest is a fishing minigame but it’s completely RNG dependent, there’s no strategy to be had here, you just cast your line and you wait for the fish to come, you get a 1 min timer for each attempt which I’m not even sure myself why it was even necessary. Another quest requires you to get a battery on Second Miltia, come back on the Elsa to use it on a machine that goes beep beep color to analyze a picture and whether this succeed or fail is completely RNG dependant and you have only 5 charges of said battery before having to go recharge it on the place you got it in the first place ! REALLY FUN !
Oh but the peak of the fun factor is Quest 32 ! Quest 32 requires you to sell items to a robot in order to settle a debt made by the Captain of the Elsa… There is no way to get money in this game so the only way to do so is to sell barter items and accessories which doesn’t even come close to covering 0,0001% of the cost. What you need to do (and this isn’t a joke btw) is backtracking all the way down the final dungeon, fighting the final boss, steal a specific on him, then go through all of the endgame, watch the credits (which is the only cutscene in the game that’s unskippable for some reasons) and repeat the process…
TWENTY
FUCKING
TIMES
YOU HAVE TO DO ALL OF THAT 20 TIMES IN ORDER TO GET SHAVE ENOUGH OF THE DEBT ! THIS IS RIDICULOUS ! AND THE REWARD ISN’T EVEN THAT USEFUL BECAUSE YOU’LL MOST LIKELY BE DONE WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME BY THE TIME YOU GET TO IT !
And that’s also something that kinda suck about these side-quest, it’s their shoddy implementation, there are no side-quest marker so it’s up to you to know when and who needs help and some of the quest can only be triggered by having specific party members set as leader and it’s never clear why. A lot of important and useful skills as well as the entirety of the double-tech system are locked behind those side quests which you know sucks if you want to make the most use out of the battle system and make your life easier but also some quests can only be accessed after beating the game for some reasons ???
Going back to red door and red key quests borrowed from the first game, they’re used primordially to obtain more skills but also get Erde Kaiser like in the first game but because they were a bit weird about it they hid some keys inside other red doors or inside specific sidequest so in the end if you wanna participate in the game lengthy post-game content, you will have to engage with them whether you want it or not.
Because yes the game has quite a bit of content after you beat the final boss, mostly tied to the now expanded Erde Kaiser sidequest. It’s pretty much just a silly plotline giving you a silly reason to explore kind of off-topic environment like a desert, a random factory or a Final Fantasy style flying castle until you reach a climactic showdown against the Dark Professor and his Dark Erde Kaiser and it’s pretty damn funny, there’s also several superbosses added specifically to the english version of the game to please the western market who just like content I suppose. If you’re not tired by the Battle System like me by the end of the game, I’d say these are worth a shot as it’s a pretty fun post-game in my opinion but not essential.
Xenosaga 2 is a game that makes me feel awkward about myself, I’m the kind of person who has a lot of respect for the artistic integrity and the artistic vision of certain authors and seeing as this game is considered almost like fanfiction in the community and single-handedly ruined the Xenosaga plan for them is kinda comical. Because if anything it’s really good fanfiction and a really good improvement on some gameplay and presentation of Xenosaga (and yes that also includes the character design but mostly for the boys, the girls kinda look mid in that more realistic artstyle…). The finale, although a bit rushed is kind of phenomenal, the cliffhanger at the end truly hooks me up to learn more about it in the sequel and even if the game has some awkward design decisions much like any Xeno-games really, I’d say that it is better than the sum of its parts. I fail to see how this game isn’t a straight up improvement over the first one aside from some tonal inconsistencies which didn’t phase me that much and a battle system which is an acquired taste but that I found infinitely more engaging and fun than the first game or even gears. The dungeon design is better but still leaves a lot to be desired however.
In the end, it’s the story which got me, a story of brotherhood, the pain of immortality, what it means to be human when you’re born in a different set of circumstances and how to overcome all of this to become truly whole. It’s some Xeno stuff right here that I love, Jr. is a fantastic character and so is Albedo which has easily ascended in my list of favorite JRPG villain but everything else from the action to the emotional stuff was pretty damn great and I also want to see what Dmitri Yuriev is cooking…
Also damn I can’t believe Kondo stole everything once again, Takahashi (not director here) is the goat ! Xenosaga 2 is the goat ! You guys are just mean and this game is peak !
See you next time for when I cover the epic conclusion to this… broken but still grand Xenosaga !
Takahashi is one unlucky motherfucker, first laid off by Falcom (which to many would be considered a good thing) and then laid off by Square for being too ambitious, our guy simply didn’t have the best of run when it comes to realizing his grand project and Xenosaga was looking to be yet another one of his many failures. When Xenosaga 1 came out, Takahashi had envisioned a way to tell a grand sci-fi epic with tints of religious symbolism thrown into the mix in order to make up for what he couldn’t do with Xenogears. Borrowing a lot from his Perfect Works book Takahashi was set to accomplish his goal once and for all… or was he ?
The problem with being an author is that you tend to be a perfectionist and that perfectionism doesn’t bode well in an increasingly competitive market. Saying that Xenosaga was an ambitious project would be an understatement, the original Xenogears was already too much for Square to handle and Takahashi’s vision saw no brakes on the fast moving train that was releasing the original Xenosaga, the game was dense, rich in lore and in-universe terminology that might completely threw you out of the loop if you’re not paying attention. To say that I had to take mental notes while playing through the game in order to piece out whatever the fuck it was even trying to accomplish would be an understatement, this game is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and at times very subtle in its approach to both worldbuilding, political setup and characterization.
Something I failed to mention during my Xenosaga review was that the game came with in-depth glossary defining and explaining every single tiny details of the world and it is huge, there’s well over 275 entries in that glossary which unlocks as the game progresses and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t fully commit to reading all of them. I tried doing so but one thing I’m not super fond of when it comes to storytelling especially in video games is having to stop the progression of the story in order to read what is essentially an in-game wiki article. Final Fantasy XIII was especially guilty of this where most of the important part of the game’s setting and lore was found on a random backlog containing info about important story details that should’ve been naturally woven into the game’s natural storytelling and gameplay loop. Fortunately, I still think Xenosaga 1 and especially now having played Xenosaga 2 is clear enough in its cryptic nature that you can somewhat get the gist of it with context clues alone and consulting the glossary is only an optional thing.
All of this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Xenosaga’s massive commitment to worldbuilding and establishing a larger than life universe with conflicts on a galactic scale interwoven with deep psychological dive into characters' inner doubts and desires. A single secondary heck one might even say a tertiary villain which only appears in the first half of the game and never gets brought up ever again past that point after his inevitable demise manages to be an impactful and really interesting fella once we sit back and think about it. I still think the Cathedral Ship and the Encephalon parts of the game are absolute testament to Takahashi and Kaori Tanaka’s talent as directors and storytellers.
And I even failed to mention how much of Xenosaga 1 is tied to Xenogears in a way that’s very hard to notice if you’re not familiar not just with that game but it’s “Perfect Works” encyclopedia book as many concepts and ideas brought up in Xenosaga like the uncovering of the Zohar in South Africa, Lost Jerusalem, the Galactic Federation, the massive timeskip between the intro of the game and the rest were all elements present in “Perfect Works”
What I’m trying to convey here is that there is no feasible ways for Xenosaga or even the original vision for Xenogears to be completed and even the Xenoblade series only tied back to it thanks to the success of the first game which allowed Takahashi to give it “one more try” and by then the project has shifted so much in style, tone, setting, lore genre and everything that it’s even harder to know if this was really what Takahashi really wanted to tell. As I have yet to play Xenoblade 3 (been stalling it for a bit too long cause I was initially not that interested in trying it out) I can’t really talk on how the story ends up unfolding and if the team at Monolith Software managed to tie all of the series thematic loose end together in a satisfying manner but regardless we have to look at the facts here.
Xenosaga 1 was released with the idea that the series will eventually be comprised of 6 games which were supposed to cover the entire timeline of the universe from beginning to the end and going through a grand total of 3 different arcs separated by massive time gaps between them and change in party members with only Shion and chaos planned to become mainstay characters. And in the end, even as Xenosaga 1 was merely an introduction to that universe and world and was always meant to be, Xenosaga 1 still wasn’t complete itself. Several elements that were shown during its announcement didn’t make the cut and in the end Takahashi said that he was only working with 20% of his real power here.
Can you imagine how insanely absurd the scope of the Xeno project is ? If the Xenosaga we got was only 20% of what was originally envisioned for that first game then I don’t think 6 games would’ve cut it to tell the entire thing ! And it would’ve taken literal decades for it to conclude hoping for little bumps on the road. Overambition is eventually what brought Xenogears to be released in the state that it’s in, it’s not just Square cutting off funds and losing interest in a project that was admittedly too big for themselves, it’s just that Takahashi was a different beast altogether as far as video game creators goes !
Making a video game in the late 90’s and early 2000’s takes roughly 2 or even 3 years, Xenogears was given 2 years and they couldn’t fully finish it on schedule because Takahashi isn’t just an ambitious storyteller but a phenomenally ambitious director as well ! Xenogears decided to forego using pre-rendered backgrounds to tell its story, opting instead for full 3D environments ! Which was unheard of for a game of this ambition especially with how fresh and indiscernible the technology was for most of the staff working on the project and indeed Xenogears is one hell of an impressive game on a technical level.
This visual ambition carried over to Xenosaga and to the furthest extreme to the Xenoblade series was truly something to behold and something Takahashi didn’t lose over the years. Sometimes I am beyond shocked at how good these games look and how well these games run and how insane the level design and environment can be on top of everything else. Xenoblade X alone is a more impressive game than most modern games that came around its release and it was released on hardware that was much less powerful than the competition. Xenosaga was no exception to that rule, as Xenosaga still remains an impressive artistic flex for the console in the heydays of 2002 when it was released and freaking outsold Tekken 4 !
When you think of long saga in video games, you can think of a few examples like Trails or even Yakuza, but even then they had to make compromises to keep the train going like reusing assets every game, keeping the standard of presentation lower, focusing more on text in sacrifice of the gameplay or exploration aspect. Working with a tinier budget can sometimes help to keep a franchise afloat in the long run without risking too much on the line and keeping the release schedule consistent to please fans and investors alike.
But not Takahashi, Takahashi is simply “built different”, the guy always keep pushing the boundaries of what was possible in terms of storytelling in this industry and how to present that story to the world in the absolute best way he can think of or at least that’s what he wants to do…
In the design document for Xenosaga 2, Takahashi stated :
“There are things that even if you try to plan for, you'll never be able to express. With games as a form of media no matter where you set it you have to make towns and all the little accessories you end up doing annoying work with games. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good medium for telling stories. I think it’s better to call it a media for telling narrative things. Without a doubt, there are things you can’t get across in a game.”
Mind you this is certainly coming from a deep place of regret and unease concerning the future of the Xenosaga project, he also stated in that same design document that he didn’t want the current state of the franchise to be static, he wanted the franchise to evolve and branch into other genres. I think what Takahashi really wanted to do was to make the Star Wars of Video Game franchise even Xenogears releasing its fifth Episode first was an homage to the ambition of George Lucas. Takahashi, a man who has worked on games for most of his life up to that point, openly admits that games are imperfect vessels for the art of creating deep impactful narratives because of all of the annoyances that come with making a game well… a game…
Part of me thinks that perhaps, Takahashi wasn’t meant to be a game director, maybe the medium of video game alone was too limiting for his grand vision because being a great artist doesn’t mean you’re good to work with as a manager. When I look back on Xenogears or even Xenosaga 1, the strength and weaknesses of these games couldn’t be more apparent. You’re not coming to these games for deep and interesting gameplay, you came here to experience some of the most brilliant, ambitious and thought provoking stories in the medium on par with novel series. Video games were but a conduit, a means to an end for Takahashi and it would take several years before the Xeno franchise would get a battle system and exploration which people would dare actually give a shit about.
And it’s when realizing that he was perhaps incapable of envisioning Xenosaga II coming on time in a way that satisfies him that he willingly quit the project to take time for himself away from all of the stress that was piling up. His departure would lead to Kaori Tanaka quitting the project too fearing that her writing talent weren’t needed anymore in this context. This wasn’t a forced change, it was something both parties consented to be the best possible outcome for the game. In the end, Xenosaga would go from 6 (maybe more ?) games to only 3 and Xenosaga II would be handled by an entirely different team with the scriptwriters kinda not being sure what to make of Takahashi’s script and the reception was mixed to say the least.
Xenosaga 2 is considered by many long-time fans of the franchise to be the absolute worst game in the Xenosaga series and even more so the Xeno franchise as a whole. It’s a game which is said to be so mediocre or even outright bad on a level of industry failure comparable to “Devil May Cry 2” in terms of a badly made misguided sequel ! Fucking DMC2 ! I’ve heard war stories about people going through this game, some of them outright giving up midway through to watch a let’s play on Youtube. And it’s not even just a gameplay thing either, people have genuine gripes with the story and how it was handled especially when it comes to tone. It’s so bad that I had 2 separate friends sending me 2 separate charts to explain the battle system to me to get it done with it faster (AND ONE OF THEM OUTRIGHT TELLS YOU TO SKIP THE GAME AND WATCH THE CUTSCENES ON YOUTUBE).
The new team in charge of developing the game took Takahashi and Tanaka’s baby, put it inside a microwave and distributed the work of art that it was supposed to be inside easily digestible product for the mass market and retooled it into an impersonal messy product which probably caused a lot of mental anguish for the young creative couple... but... against all odds…
It’s peak I’m afraid…
After reading through that long introduction contextualizing the game’s development and knowing of the game’s reputation, you’ve probably looked at the rating already and started raising a few eyebrows. “A 9 ? For Xenosaga fucking 2 ? Really ? Are you out of your damn mind ? Has the Gnome Juice finally gotten to you and now you can’t distinguish the taste of trash from the taste of well aged wine ?”
Well now my dear readers, I’m going to shock you even further. Not only do I think Xenosaga 2 is good, not only do I find the hate surrounding the game is vastly exaggerated, I also think the game is vast improvement on almost all fronts compared to the first Xenosaga and on some level even the untouchable freaking masterpiece that is Xenogears. I fail to see what in the fuck people find so bad about this game outside of maybe not vibing with the battle system.
You know what, let's talk about the battle system for a hot minute because it’s easily the biggest point of contention when it comes to talking about the game. Xenosaga 2 has a battle system which at first might seem familiar to Xenosaga 1, you have to press either square, triangle or circle in order to make combos, you have the turn order displayed on the bottom right side of the screen, additional effect applied per turn like more critical hits or point multiplier or something like that. You can boost ! And this time you can actually see the boost meter of the enemies which is definitely a nice touch given how boost is a major part of the battle system this time around and that’s pretty much it for the similarities. Because Xenosaga decides to revamp pretty much everything about the battle system and this is where things get really controversial with this entry.
In the first game in order to perform different actions you had to use AP which were always conveniently set in a way that you can do at least one action like a single combo or a single ether attack and if you wanted to use something stronger like a deathblow, you had to cancel out the first attack of your combo in order to build more AP to use a deathblow on the next turn, sacrificing a turn to potentially deal more damage the next which was a nice trade-off.
However in this game, in order to perform more actions, make your combo longer and deal more damage you need to use stocks ! Stocks is pretty much the replacement for AP, there are 3 stocks, without any stock the only thing you can do is do a measly pathetic combo attack or use an ether which consumes MP. If you want to perform more attacks you first need to build up your stock meter at the start of each battle so yes, it does mean spending several turns getting wailed by enemies waiting for the stock meter to fill up before actually launching an assault but hold on ! I know it sounds bad but trust me ! I’m getting somewhere with this !
See because what good is to use combos when there are no deathblows in this game this time around which is a shame for certain but let me talk about break ! In the previous game, using the different button was just a way to use different combos and that was pretty much it, but here each enemy has zones on their bodies which need to be hit in order to break them ! These zones are separated in B and C zones, B zones correspond to the Square button and C zones correspond to the Triangle button ! Rarely, enemies will also have A zones which are tied to the Square button but outside of maybe the very first area in the game as well as one of the superbosses it’s usually B or C ! In order to break an enemy, you have to first find their zones, that zone can be BBC or CBB or BB or any combination of these 3 letters and once that’s done and the enemies break, they enter a state of break which makes them more vulnerable to attack.
And this is where the boost meter comes into play, much like Xenosaga 1, you can override the turn order by using a boost which makes the boosted character take priority in the turn order ! The main difference and honestly a welcome one in my opinion is that now the boost meter is shared across all party members and can be built up to three units just like stocks ! Other than that, building your boost meter works just like in XS1 meaning that the meter will be built with each successful attack you land on the enemies !
And I must admit that boosting was one part of the battle system in XS1 that I barely even used or at least used as a clutch to get out of a bad situation. Rarely did boosting in XS1 gave me a real advantage in fights and with how slow the boost meter for each character built up in that game, you rarely ever got to make use of it and when you do use it, it’s usually not that satisfying or even that helpful ! But not in Xenosaga 2, that game took the boosting mechanic from XS1 and made it make sense in the context of Xenosaga’s 2 battle system. Because you see after breaking an enemy, you need to immediately follow it up with a boosted character to follow up on that combo and then you can either launch the enemy in the air or down it on the ground and they stay that way as long as you keep boosting and keep piling combos onto the fool which deals massive amounts of damages.
There are a lot more that goes into dealing damage than just that however, on top of building up your stocks, you can had elemental attacks to your weapons in order to target their weaknesses, you can use an ether to boost your attack or magic depending on which character you use and eventually all of that combined after all that preparation ends up with you dealing an astronomical amount of damage if you play your cards rights and even more so if you use your attacks on certain turns such as using Momo on the ether boosting turn to make her attacks even more powerful than she usually does (yes Momo went from being completely useless to being your main damage dealer in this game, she’s a glass canon however but she does compensate by having an high evasion stat).
I can understand that this seems like a lot at first glance and a complete headache for those who only want to just mindlessly rush through fights like there’s no tomorrow ! It’s definitely a slower more methodical approach to combat and even regular encounters can last several minutes whereas in any other RPGs they would last mere seconds. I can definitely see the problems people have with it but you’re also talking to someone whose favorite Final Fantasy game is IX, whose favorite Persona game is 2, Pokemon Platinum and I’m an avid SMT player and you know the meme about SMT and buffing that’s a whole ass statement. Xenosaga’s 2 battle system works especially well against bosses which are usually single targets anyway and a bit less when there’s more than 3 enemies, which rarely happens but it does happen ! There’s also a dimension of placement which I didn’t start covering but nonetheless.
I really like this battle system ! And unlike Xenogears or Xenosaga, the battle system never grew dull or uninteresting to me because it’s the type of system which forces you to engage with it constantly and I get it, it’s definitely tiring ! In my Chained Echoes review I talked about how treating every encounter like an event or wasn’t the most optimal way to make a JRPG ! And while it may come from a place of wanting the genre to evolve beyond mindless attack button spam, RPGs tend to be long and I think it’s ok to have enemies which are just fodder and doesn’t require much thinking as you can put the challenge somewhere else like resource management, dealing with status effects or arranging enemies in certain ways which forces the player to think of the most optimal way to deal with them in the long run in the most optimal way possible.
It’s that same feeling that got me to appreciate the battle system from Xenosaga 2 so much, since battles take so much prep time, every fight plays out like a puzzle you have to solve and while in the hands of an uninformed player, the battle system can feel sluggish, once you get into the flow of it, it’s really satisfying. The battle system of Xenosaga 2 is a lot like sex, it needs time, it needs the right tools, the right preliminaries, the right mood and eventually once everything is in place you can climax all over your adversaries in a white beam of glory ! But I guess some folks are more into raw dogging like animals and you know that’s also fair, not everyone can enjoy subtlety in this brute world…
But even with how much I ended up enjoying the battle system of this game, it’s definitely not a perfect system or else it wouldn’t be so divisive to begin with. I think the problem with Xenosaga’s 2 Battle System is that in the end it’s not a very intuitive system and even the game itself struggles to explain how to properly play the game (the tutorial literally tells you to “figure the rest yourself” which is great game design alright). I think it’s better to get into Xenosaga 2 knowing exactly what works with the system and what doesn’t, which party members to pick and which ones to absolutely avoid (lol Shion) as well as choosing the right abilities to learn to make your life easier (Elemental Swords are such an essential part of combat it’s crazy to think it’s even an optional thing to begin with).
There’s also a few other mechanics I forgot to mention because they literally don’t integrate well to the battle system despite their best efforts. Dual Combo can be used when a character boost but you’re not skipping to get to their turn yet, assuming you’ve unlocked the combo in question (more on that later), you can dish out a Chrono Trigger style double tech but I literally never used it. Same for Ether Combo, apparently using certain sequences of Ether lead to Super Ethers but since offensive Ethers are useless you won’t be using them.
Of course during battle you also have to manage health and mana and this is where the one originality of the game shows its face, there is no shop and no money system in the game. Some people might find that strange but in all honesty Xenosaga 1 wasn’t really the best at handling ressources itself and a lot of the late game customization was heavily reliant on grinding barter items to sell, accomplishing cryptic and obscure task to get lots of cash or play the different mini-games that can be accessed at certain points in the story. This gave Xenosaga 1 a bit of a survival aspect to it where you rely mostly on what you find on the ground and Xenosaga 2 embraces that entirely. One thing that Xenosaga 2 surely did streamline however is the ability point system, for better and for worse. Since there are no shops to buy weapons and armor, everything is done through the ability system which is very different from Xenosaga 1.
In XS1, you got a shit load of different types of point that can be spend to upgrade certain parts of your character, Xenosaga 2 streamlined the process a little bit by fusing all of those different currencies into a single one called “Skill Points” which need to be spend on this board where abilities are classed by level and sublevels to what I could only compare to the RPG equivalent of a windows file explorer. In order to unlock these classes however, your character needs “class points”, these are not obtained in battle however you do obtain them for purchasing new skills in the shop (more specifically by purchasing every skill in a single class). Every character in the game can virtually learn any ability and if you happen to have a clear data file of XS1 on your memory card, you can transfer those to get a few extra points to get started when playing the game for the first time.
It’s kind of a daunting but ultimately kinda boring system, some skills are new ethers the character can use in battles, some are passives which apply directly to the characters when learned and others are equipable passives which replace regular equipment. It’s a boring system because it means that every character evolves in the same way, you could make an argument that you can’t possibly teach everything on the board without grinding so you need to specialize your characters through the system but really most of the class board abilities are pretty goddamn useless because they don’t work in harmony with the break and boost system.
You’re mainly going to focus your attention on abilities which can up your damage multiplier, or regenerate mana while stocking, or allowing you to boost even when the turn order is in your favor or starting the fights with stock and all of that jazz and that’s the most optimal way to play the game ! I think a lot of ideas when it comes to Xenosaga’s 2 gameplay should be expanded upon in a sequel so that a lot of the “fluff” gets better contextualized or cut entirely to make for a more well-rounded and less divisive system. Unfortunately the reception of this battle system by the community pretty much dooms it to being entirely replaced by the next game which is a shame however saying Xenosaga 2 had no influence on the rest of the franchise would be a straight up lie. The entire idea of Xenosaga 2’s gameplay system probably heavily inspired Monolith Software during the development of Xenoblade 2 which also had quite a slow methodical system about building up all sorts of weird effects before launching a big fuck you attack on the ennemies in battles which can take quite a while to get through even with regular encounters. Maybe a new playthrough of Xenoblade 2 will make me appreciate the system of that game more now that I kinda have the knowledge of which games probably inspired it (goat meets goat, what can you say o/).
“Ok fine Cani, so you enjoy getting fucked in the ass now that’s great, but surely you’ll have a lot of things to say against the story of the game huh ? Surely with that whole 3 pages long introduction praising the artistic integrity of the author's original vision was to tell us that the game is bordering on fanfiction territory and should therefore be shunned by the public… right ?”
Well actually, man I hate to say it but despite the respect I have for Takahashi and his work on the first game, I must also admit that I enjoyed the story of Xenosaga 2 way more than the first despite most of it not being written or directed by Takahashi. Ok I think it’s time to talk a bit about my taste when it comes to stories. I think I said in one of my Cold Steel reviews that the single aspect I find the most important in a story above all else are the characters and only second to that is theming or message ! What can I get out of this game, what was the intention behind it and did it succeed at delivering on said intention ?
Xenosaga 1 is a game with many praiseworthy aspects to its presentation and at times its story, but remember I did say I had trouble calling the story “good” because in the end Xenosaga 1 was too busy introducing us to the universe rather than making me entice to it ! It’s full of cryptic bullshit that one could only ever hope to understand after thoroughly pondering about the meaning of life and whether I’m already Half-Xehanort or something like that. It’s not a bad approach to storytelling, it’s slow, it’s methodical, it’s very academic but personally speaking I’m a man of action not words ! I think the worst offense a piece of art could do is making me feel nothing ! And even worse than that is making me feel frustrated (you’ve probably understood by now while I was talking about the series we should not mention the name of).
Xenosaga didn’t make me feel “nothing", but it wasn’t a particularly memorable experience either, I 100% acknowledge the artistry behind it but ultimately, I got nothing out of that experience but a thirst to know more which is already enough but it doesn’t help that game stand out on its own ! Xenosaga 2 decides perhaps because of the change in writer to re-focus the story on a more character driven one as well as trying to make sense of wtv the fuck Takahashi was trying to cook in the first game. And yes, am I frustrated that those answers didn’t come from the man himself who made me cry like a bitch watching a dude on a chair for 10h ? Of course I am ! But I also don’t think the job that was done with Xenosaga 2 was a botched job either ! It’s definitely a flawed story but one that I think I ultimately connected with more.
Right from the intro, you can see how much the game has evolved from just a presentation standpoint, the action set pieces from the prologue are absolutely nuts ! Giving us a flash back to the conflict on Old Miltia and explaining Chaos deal in that conflict, this intro is so freaking cool and actually re-introduce mech dungeons into the series something that was missing from Xenosaga 1. Quick word on the mech sections tho, they’re easily the low point of the game for me gameplay wise, I actually enjoyed being able to summon your mech in battle like a Final Fantasy X summon and the customization was nuts even if it was a bit grindy to make good use of it in the long run. But here mechs got their own sections again, separated from the rest but usually speaking the level design of these sections are a bit uninspired and the combat is a more straightforward and limited version of the on-foot battle that I didn’t especially fuck with all that much. No combos, no everything, just charging a bar to unleash 1 (one) single big attack isn’t that great but at least the mechs designs are sick.
You can definitely feel this game was released in 2004 and Matrix was the craziest most hyped movie franchise of that period of time and it shows ! Very early on, you get introduced to Jin, Shion’s brother who is literally just a Citan clone ! He’s not as unhinged as Citan was in Xenogears but he does share enough similarities in terms of raw personality alone that I was still thoroughly entertained by his wacky antics. In this intro, we also get to see Jin’s rivalry with Margulis the chief leader of U-TIC the evil terrorist organization from the first game and every time these two meets, you just get the sickest most badass under the rain super well choreographed sword fight imaginable and you get two of those in the game it’s fucking crazy I love that shit !
In fact, I will that I got a lot of enjoyment out of all the action scenes this time around, I’m a simple guy, show me Kos-Mos waking up, turning her bed into a motorbike, launching to space and perform a freaking Gatai with Shion’s ship like it’s fucking Gunbuster and I’m all over that shit ! It’s in these moments you really can’t be fooled that this wasn’t made by Takahashi however, the team at Monolith Software already got a taste for over the top anime bullshit which is essentially how Xenoblade even came to be and was even allowed to go full shonen mode (Xenoblade is to the Xeno franchise what TTGL was to Gainax in response to Evangelion). The first game went for a colder, more creepy, atmospheric almost stifling vibe which reminded me of Dead Space or 2000’s a Space Odyssey. It’s full of perspective switches to these random politicians discussing important stuff outside of the main frame ! That’s because Takahashi is thorough with his world and wants to make you understand all of it and yes at times, some other aspect gets dwarfed in the process.
But here, the plot is definitely more focused on moment to moment action set pieces as well as character moments which isn’t something that displeases me at all. One thing that people complain a lot about the plot of Xenosaga 2 is its tone, compared to the first game, the team allowed themselves to just have a bit more lighthearted fun with the characters. For some reason, people hated the entirety of Second Miltia and the scenes that happen here. There’s a pretty infamous scene of Shion having to meet back with her brother which seems to have a falling out with before starting working at Vector and the whole scene is a bit silly. Some people found that scene monstrously cringey but I personally found it rather cute myself, we didn’t get to see much of Shion's actual personality in the first game since she was always so aloof and kinda distant so I dunno, I kinda like it here. In fact, I think these moments of levity were kind of necessary coming off of the first game which in contrast was harrowingly stifling in its atmosphere.
Getting the characters to breathe a little bit after the intense event of the first game by just interacting with one another in a relatively stake-free environment definitely helped me getting more attached to the cast and I think these were a great way to show how all of these unlikely allies ended becoming closer following the events of the first game. It sure is a brutal change of tone, but it’s not something that bothered and in fact it’s something that I welcomed, especially since much like the first game, shit starts hitting the shitting fan rather quickly.
While trying to recover the Y-Data, the key to unlocking the seal of Old Miltia and its secret, Albedo pretty much trapped everyone and managed to get away with it, helping U-TIC in the process which lead to a full scale war as U-TIC can now have their greedy palm on the Zohar and unleash whatever evil shit they want to do with it.
During the hacking process, we get to explore Momo’s subconscious world and that’s where we learn a lot more about who she is or rather who the person she’s a clone of was and her relationship with Jr, Albedo and Nigredo. Xenosaga 2 puts a lot more emphasis on Jr. this time around, a lot of the events of the game puts him on the forefront of the story for various reasons. I absolutely loved Jr. in the first game and I think the team at Xenosaga 2 understood that and just straight up made him the main character this time around. The decision to make Jr. the central character of the plot was apparently kind of a shady marketing one, they thought that focusing the plot on a male character would go better with the western audience. As such Shion and Kos-Mos which very much were the central figure of the plot in the first game were kinda shafted in favor giving Jr. and by extension MOMO who he has a romantic subplot with more scenes to shine.
On one hand, it’s kind of a shame because I actually like Shion and Kos-Mos and I find the idea of a genius engineer and her trusty sexy killer bot being the main protagonist infinitely more bold and original and there were still a lot of unanswered mysteries surrounding the past of these twos that I wish we could’ve explored further. On the other, Jr. clearly is the character who had the more stakes in the story of even the first game in my opinion and thus while the decision to make him the main character in this second entry might be a bit misguided, ultimately I think they still did a great job with him and especially Albedo ! Xenosaga is kinda meant to conclude the rivalry arc between these two and without spoiling too much everything about JrMomo, Albedo and Yuriev foundations are easily the best part about the entire game.
There is an attempt to still make Shion relevant into the story but I think it’s done kinda poorly. Not only because Shion seems to had a weird shift in her personality following the events of the first game which somehow made her more bitchy and at times mean compared to how she was portrayed in the first game for seemingly no reasons at all but also because most of the emotional crux of her story are tied to things we have yet to be briefed upon like who the fuck Febronia is and why is Shion so attached to her. There’s a pretty horrific scene near the endgame with Febronia’s sister which the closest the game gets from the horror vibe of the first game and the scene should be genuinely heart wrenching if I had been given more context to Shion’s relationship with Feb and why was she chosen to do all of these crazy traumatic adventure to seek the Zohar all the time. As for Kos-Mos, she gets a grand total of 2 (two) cool scenes and… yeah that’s kind of it… so much for being the mascot character amirite ?
But tonal inconsistency with Shion’s story aside, I found the general plot to be more easy to digest than the first one, maybe because it was more focus on giving us answer as well as developing the relationships each characters have to one another than simply throwing cryptic stuff in your face hoping you make sense of it. It’s definitely a more raw approach to storytelling but it’s one that works on me a bit more, a story focusing on character moments big and small and delivering full sales on them. The game still has a lot of mystery that the third game will have to answer but what I got here still was hella satisfying. The Subconscious Domain and the very end of the game definitely stand up to me as some of the highlights of the Xeno franchise so far. Albedo is a fantastic villain and this game only cements him further as one of the best antagonists in the genre for various reasons. The guy is a legit great representation of a truly psychotic mind with no filters whatsoever, wish he had more creepy scenes like the first game but his antics in this one are still a joy to watch.
The final confrontation of the game between Jr. and him will probably live rent free in my head for the rest of how long this new hyper-obsession will last and I will admit that the game managed to make me emotional during several places in the narrative. However, do not be fooled, this clearly is a different style than Takahashi, this isn’t a Takahashi story. You still get a small amount of what the original script might’ve looked like but even then you can see that whenever they try to imitate the first game pacing and approach to worldbuilding that the cracks start to show. A lot of revelations are done through boring expository dialogues with very little good direction to them, some twists are handled really poorly especially because of the way they padded the game in weird ways in order to just add an additional dungeon and the final boss is a complete joke both as a villain and as a boss fight in spite of a neat meta effect midway through the fight.
Well speaking of dungeons and exploration, let’s talk about that, the game is still as linear as the original and still suffers from a lot of pointless backtracking to progress the story but in terms of dungeon design, it’s a vast improvement over the original game. The original game dungeons really only served as set dressing for the story to take place in and at times felt like they were built out of convention for the genre rather than to be interesting, there were a few puzzles in them but it was really rare. One thing which definitely helps however is that now the game has actual music during gameplay ! It’s another point of contention actually, Yasunori Mitsuda the historic composer of the series left the boat on this one and was replaced by two composers. One is Yuki Kajiura which you’re certainly more familiar with for her work on anime such as SAO, Demon Slayers or Fate/Stay Night but if you’re a chad like me you first heard her work in the classic anime Mai-Hime, she was responsible for the cutscene track and she did an excellent job with those like she usually does for her work on anime. The other composer however is Shinji Hosoei, a guy who you may recognize as the dude who made the soundtrack of Ridge Racer and here the dude is responsible for the regular gameplay track and let’s just say the result is… well… interesting ?
There’s definitely a clear dichotomy between Kajiura and Hosoei’s track which doesn’t make the entire sound direction all too cohesive. Hosoei makes very “arcadey” sounding music which I personally don’t think is necessarily that great of a fit for Xenosaga as it should be, it’s a lot of weird Techno-Electro future sci-fi mambo jumbo can’t really describe it very well. Second Miltia and Kukai Foundation sound like happy mall music. That's really the best way I could describe it and the rest of the soundtrack sounds a bit stiff and odd. Personally speaking, I don’t mind how weirdly “beepy” Hosoei’s track sounds, I like the sound of mid-2000’s eroge and rpg maker tunes and these are pretty reminiscent of that in a sense. Also having actual background music during exploration definitely makes it less boring to go through them, it sacrifices atmosphere but oh well. Some Hosoei tracks work really well and some don't, and while I get the type of sci-fi vibe it was trying to convey, ultimately a lot of them felt a bit too artificial (but not unpleasant to my ear).
Kajiura’s soundtrack on the other hand goes super duper mega hard, of course she’s mostly responsible for the cutscenes but I think Kajiura was a great pick to follow up on Mitsuda’s more grandiose and orchestral score of the original game. I’m more of an in-game track myself because a lot of cutscenes track tend to come and go for me but re-listening to some tunes on the side really solidified how good of a pick Kajiura was for the cutscenes in the game with a very electronic yet epic style she’s known for in her other works. She really captured the vibe and essence of Xenosaga and it’s great.
But back to dungeon, I’d say that the dungeons in this game are a vast improvement not only on Xenosaga 1 which had “wtv” dungeons in my opinion and Xenogears, whose selection of good dungeons and environment can be counted on 3 fingers. Dungeons now have proper dungeon design, with tons of paths to explore, some nice amount of verticality and even the occasional puzzle to solve to spice things up. The game also has a lot more variety in its environment than Xenosaga 1, while it still retains the sci-fi core of the setting, the game isn’t afraid to spice things up with not just making up just from space station to space station. The environment from a visual standpoint is much more striking, from a lush mysterious otherworldly artificial forest to bustling futuristic cities as well as ruins under the sunset, the game kinda makes the most of the setting it presents and I’m all the more happy for it.
However, while I do find them better, do I find them good ? Well it really depends in my opinion, some design decisions in those dungeons can be quite questionable. The Subconscious Domain for exemple is a pretty cool place the first time around but did we really need to go through it a second time but with a winter aesthetic instead and the same enemies but swapped colors ? Especially back to back with no breaks like that ? That’s gotta be the weirdest way to pad game time I’ve ever seen but alas there’s also the Ormus Stronghold. The Ormus Stronghold is way too long and demands so much useless backtracking that it kinda makes me lose my mind a little bit. It’s also not helped that this dungeon is complete filler, it appears in the middle of nowhere halting the natural progression of the plot so we can have a few boss fights with the U-TIC organization which they somehow couldn’t fit somewhere else in the game.
But by far the biggest offender when it comes to the dungeons are the way enemies are placed on the field. I think I said it in another review but I don’t think field encounter are the end-all be-all solution to random encounters and could be easily as fucked up as random encounter are in raw annoyance level and this game is no exception. There are way too many enemies per screen, forget about avoiding them because you will not be able to as they run way too fast, that is if you could avoid them in the first place. There are way too many mandatory encounters which makes the whole field encounter implementation feel pretty useless. One thing I also don’t get is why the monsters in the mech sections disappear for good and never respawn until you leave the dungeon but regular monsters respawn every time you change rooms and come back. Battles are already long enough like that and this only serves as making the fatigue of them even stronger.
It’s especially bad since much like the first game, the red door and red key sidequest is back and requires backtracking which was made significantly more annoying because of these inconsistencies in the level design department. In fact, this game has a lot more side-content than any previous games in the series, it’s a part of the game I’m definitely more mixed on however because while I do enjoy having so much content to chew on, let’s just say that it’s really hit or miss. So on top of the red door and red key sidequest from the first game, you get introduced to the Global Samaritan (or GS) path which is a system that allows you to talk to NPC and help them do different things. That sounds fair, there’s not that much side-quest either and these are completely optional so you can feel free to skip on them if you want, there are over 36 quests like that which ranges from : Fun little vignette, Puzzle Solving and minigames, tedious fetch questing and “Oh god did anybody playtested this shit ???”.
I’d say that all the minigames requiring you to play a small minigame, solve a puzzle or go through a mini-dungeon to fight a mini-boss were honestly fine and a nice distraction from the regular loop of the plot but as it is sadly tradition with games in the mid-2000’s that also mean that there’s a lot of side-quest which are simply about going places and either gather or distributing items and they’re pretty fucking terrible. There’s only 2 real cities in the game, Second Miltia and the Kukai foundation so any quest requiring you to fetch stuff is just about making back and forth between these two places and with how slow the movement of these games can be, they can be very very tedious. Fortunately, I’ve played this game on an emulator and thus I’ve allowed myself to cut on the tedium by activating turbo mode (ah the joy of modern day conveniences…). Some of these quests can also have success and fail conditions which can be very obtuse without a solid guide at hand and I really don’t understand why it’s even a thing given that the reward is given to you regardless of clear status.
And then, there are “these” types of quests, the type of side-content that just makes you question the sanity of the developers who put it into the game. One quest is a fishing minigame but it’s completely RNG dependent, there’s no strategy to be had here, you just cast your line and you wait for the fish to come, you get a 1 min timer for each attempt which I’m not even sure myself why it was even necessary. Another quest requires you to get a battery on Second Miltia, come back on the Elsa to use it on a machine that goes beep beep color to analyze a picture and whether this succeed or fail is completely RNG dependant and you have only 5 charges of said battery before having to go recharge it on the place you got it in the first place ! REALLY FUN !
Oh but the peak of the fun factor is Quest 32 ! Quest 32 requires you to sell items to a robot in order to settle a debt made by the Captain of the Elsa… There is no way to get money in this game so the only way to do so is to sell barter items and accessories which doesn’t even come close to covering 0,0001% of the cost. What you need to do (and this isn’t a joke btw) is backtracking all the way down the final dungeon, fighting the final boss, steal a specific on him, then go through all of the endgame, watch the credits (which is the only cutscene in the game that’s unskippable for some reasons) and repeat the process…
TWENTY
FUCKING
TIMES
YOU HAVE TO DO ALL OF THAT 20 TIMES IN ORDER TO GET SHAVE ENOUGH OF THE DEBT ! THIS IS RIDICULOUS ! AND THE REWARD ISN’T EVEN THAT USEFUL BECAUSE YOU’LL MOST LIKELY BE DONE WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME BY THE TIME YOU GET TO IT !
And that’s also something that kinda suck about these side-quest, it’s their shoddy implementation, there are no side-quest marker so it’s up to you to know when and who needs help and some of the quest can only be triggered by having specific party members set as leader and it’s never clear why. A lot of important and useful skills as well as the entirety of the double-tech system are locked behind those side quests which you know sucks if you want to make the most use out of the battle system and make your life easier but also some quests can only be accessed after beating the game for some reasons ???
Going back to red door and red key quests borrowed from the first game, they’re used primordially to obtain more skills but also get Erde Kaiser like in the first game but because they were a bit weird about it they hid some keys inside other red doors or inside specific sidequest so in the end if you wanna participate in the game lengthy post-game content, you will have to engage with them whether you want it or not.
Because yes the game has quite a bit of content after you beat the final boss, mostly tied to the now expanded Erde Kaiser sidequest. It’s pretty much just a silly plotline giving you a silly reason to explore kind of off-topic environment like a desert, a random factory or a Final Fantasy style flying castle until you reach a climactic showdown against the Dark Professor and his Dark Erde Kaiser and it’s pretty damn funny, there’s also several superbosses added specifically to the english version of the game to please the western market who just like content I suppose. If you’re not tired by the Battle System like me by the end of the game, I’d say these are worth a shot as it’s a pretty fun post-game in my opinion but not essential.
Xenosaga 2 is a game that makes me feel awkward about myself, I’m the kind of person who has a lot of respect for the artistic integrity and the artistic vision of certain authors and seeing as this game is considered almost like fanfiction in the community and single-handedly ruined the Xenosaga plan for them is kinda comical. Because if anything it’s really good fanfiction and a really good improvement on some gameplay and presentation of Xenosaga (and yes that also includes the character design but mostly for the boys, the girls kinda look mid in that more realistic artstyle…). The finale, although a bit rushed is kind of phenomenal, the cliffhanger at the end truly hooks me up to learn more about it in the sequel and even if the game has some awkward design decisions much like any Xeno-games really, I’d say that it is better than the sum of its parts. I fail to see how this game isn’t a straight up improvement over the first one aside from some tonal inconsistencies which didn’t phase me that much and a battle system which is an acquired taste but that I found infinitely more engaging and fun than the first game or even gears. The dungeon design is better but still leaves a lot to be desired however.
In the end, it’s the story which got me, a story of brotherhood, the pain of immortality, what it means to be human when you’re born in a different set of circumstances and how to overcome all of this to become truly whole. It’s some Xeno stuff right here that I love, Jr. is a fantastic character and so is Albedo which has easily ascended in my list of favorite JRPG villain but everything else from the action to the emotional stuff was pretty damn great and I also want to see what Dmitri Yuriev is cooking…
Also damn I can’t believe Kondo stole everything once again, Takahashi (not director here) is the goat ! Xenosaga 2 is the goat ! You guys are just mean and this game is peak !
See you next time for when I cover the epic conclusion to this… broken but still grand Xenosaga !
2 Comments
One of my favorite reviews so far
MBgov1133
3 months ago