First time I beat it, it changed the way I look at stories in games and understand symbolism and deeper elements. Second time I played, I was older and picked up on a lot more things I never noticed. Third time, I played it while watching Resonant Arc's Analysis videos which was one of the best experiences ever. Now I fully understand every single thing there is in the game and my mind has been blown a third time. There is a scary amount of deeper details in this game you'd never know without looking into the Gnostic themes, alchemy, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, etc. By the time you fully understand the game, you have a college level understanding of the theme spresent.

Xenogears is a life changing game and something that really has never been replicated. Xenosaga has those deeper elements too but, we'll probably never see something like Xenogears ever again sadly. It's a game that is made with so much passion and so much heart. It shows that video games can be so so SO much more. Something that can change your outlook on life itself.

So, unfortunately, this is below Orochi 3 for me, and maybe even Orochi 1-2, though not for character gameplay and smoothness. Let's start with the good. All the characters have their most up to date iterations of themselves being DW8 and SW4-II. So they have a lot of options available to them along with the magic system in the game which really allows for insane combo cancelling potential. This is in some ways, the Marvel vs Capcom version of Orochi in that the possibilities for combos are through the roof and is the best part of the game. You get a crap ton of unique variety in combat and with the ultimate version, the ability to use whatever divine artifact you want allowing for even more combo potential on any character. Though, let's talk about the other part now.

The story is very whatever and while Ultimate has a better story addition, it really can't make up for how dull and lacking it all is. Even the presentation is a far cry from Orochi 3 and it makes sense since Orochi 3 WAS supposed to be the final game with all the many cutscenes it had, character interactions, and good story. But 4 really misses the mark and instead seems to go for fanservice especially with two of the most obnoxious characters to exist in the warriors series being at the forefront...(which thankfully Ultimate gives no attention to in its part of the story, hence why it's an improvement).

Though, story aside, where it suffers also is gameplay on the balancing side. While you can do some of the most craziest combos ever, unless you have your weapons fused with a specific set of elements (buffs you can add to make your character more lethal), every officer and even enemies are damage sponges and considering some story objectives being timed, it makes this a huge flaw. Naturally with a lot of warriors games, you are actually encouraged to start on easy mode because the difficulty of games is not an A.I. thing, but instead an enemy level scaling affair. So on hard mode, you're basically expected to be level 50-100 with strong weapons for instance. However, you can just jump straight to nomal difficulty (increasing your rewards) by using elements like Slay, Might, Wind, Bolt/Ice/Flame, etc at +10 which will make killing enemies a bit faster. Though, the problem is, getting that high of a level (before they unlock the fusing levels to reach +20), takes a TON of grinding, far more than necessary due to the fact that when you dismantle rewarded weapons after battle for their fusion elements, you only get half the amount, and you need almost 10 times the starting amount to add it what you would start with to get it to +10 in the first place. It doesn't help that leveling up characters takes a lot more to see a big leap of a difference to be effective in combat by a certain point in the game, thus leading you to have to stick to favorites if you want to make any progression at all...which is fine but then makes the experience more repetitive by limiting how soon you can play certain characters. The amount of growth points earned to quickly level up characters doesn't match the amount of characters in the game with the effort placed in, along with the enemy balance of the game. I don't understand why they couldn't have used the weapon fusion system from the prior games and instead using a separate resource all together to do what was so simple before. The skill tree is not really handled well either in terms of that same balance I was mentioning prior. The amount of time you have to put in really makes upgrading overall a slog.

I did enjoy my time with it but there were a lot of omissions from Orochi 3 that made engaging with the game not as fun, and certain aspects were made even more complicated which added too much padding to a game that doesn't need it. The slow grind of the game feels equivalent to how slow it is in progress in a game that wants you to buy microtransactions to speed it up...but without the microtransactiosn...so it's just slow as heck.

It also is a shame that unlike MANY prior warriors games that they never included past outfits which has been a staple thing to do in the history of the Warriors franchise. So there's literally only the one or two dlc outfits for the characters and no free unlockable ones.