Xenosaga : A Fine Enough Introduction

My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.

And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.

But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.

Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.

There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.

While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.

But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.

Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.

The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).

After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.

At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.

Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.

Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.

Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.

As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.

Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.

The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.

The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.

I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.

Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.

Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.

The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).

On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.

That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.

Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.

Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).

Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.

Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.

The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.

You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)

One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.

The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?

And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.

Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.

While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.

Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).

I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.

In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !

Most people will tell you to play this game so you can play Muv-Luv Alternative, but I'm going to tell you that this game is just as worth playing as Alternative is.

I wish more people played this game to enjoy Extra and Unlimited. So many people don't care about the first two parts to this Muv-Luv trilogy and I think that's a damn shame. I really enjoyed both Extra and Unlimited, and just because Alternative is one of the best VNs out there, doesn't mean you should feel like you need to rush through this one to play it.

Extra was dumb enough for me to realise I don't need to take it too seriously and it worked as very nice light reading whenever I felt up to it.

Unlimited was such a great experience. It's a great subversion of expectations if you don't know what you're getting into. Granted, most people will likely know what Muv-Luv is about, but I didn't!!!!! ....until others ruined it for me but whatever.

"This... is the truth of our world. Memories melt in the morning light and then, a new day begins.

Roads stretch out before us. So many paths. Which do you choose? That's up to you.

Sometimes, you might run astray. You'll stop. Maybe cry out in frustration. But you know what? That's alright. For the roads... they go on without end.

So look up, face forwards, towards your chosen horizon... and just...

walk on."

I’m sorry, Spiritfarer. I never really gave you enough of a fighting chance, and you came back right when I needed you again. Consider this review my apology.

After playing through That Dragon, Cancer this summer, I realized that I wasn’t being fair to this genre of “games for impact.” We don’t all play games for the same reason. Sure, plenty of games market themselves as straight entertainment, played for pleasure and excitement. But there are games that aim to not necessarily be fun, but rather be compelling. Games that seek to provoke a wide range of emotions and questions rather than just provide means to an end.

Spiritfarer was one such title that I admit I originally approached with the wrong mindset. It did not do me any favors to rush through in order to complete the game on my limited PC Game Pass, or to try and move onto the next title on my growing backlog, because this is a game both about taking your time while making the most of every moment possible. I also found myself stymied by the supposedly “shallow” gameplay loop while also complaining about its excessive runtime. That’s why upon my second playthrough of Spiritfarer, finally buying my own copy on Steam, I found myself constantly surprised and overwhelmed that all of these preconceptions turned out to be wrong. It all starts by properly contextualizing Spiritfarer’s appeal and purpose.

Just like That Dragon, Cancer, Spiritfarer grapples with the omnipresence of death differently. Death may be a game mechanic, but it is not a punishment; rather, it is the final destination. Heavily inspired by Spirited Away’s hotel for spirits, Spiritfarer tackles one important question; what if we didn’t fear death as much? As part of the Death Positivity movement, the game encourages its players to think of death as more than just a mechanism or taboo subject, and to have healthy and open conversations as to speak more freely regarding all the consequences and feelings surrounding it. To better handle its subject matter, Thunder Lotus focuses the gameplay loop on preparing you to care for souls at the end of their lives as well as the various processes associated with the cycle of grief.

As the newly dubbed Spiritfarer, the player character as Stella must find lone spirits scattered across the vast seas, and handle their final requests. These requests can range from a variety of fetch quests, to constructing little homes and decorations for them, to feeding them their favorite meals and handling their last regrets and affairs with other characters. As a backbone for this request structure, Stella must construct other various facilities and travel to other locales to gather resources and both upgrade the ship and gain new abilities to access new events. Once these last requests have been fulfilled, the spirit will ask to be taken away to the Everdoor, and pass on to the afterlife.

One particular complaint kept popping up in the back of my mind as I fulfilled my duties. A year ago, a close friend and I had a discussion regarding Spiritfarer, when he complained that Spiritfarer didn’t feel cozy at all. If anything, he felt pressured and constantly anxious that there was always something more to do. There were new crops to tend to, or more ore to smelt, or more fish to find and more dishes to cook, and so on so forth. I certainly related to his dilemma; in fact, during quiescent nights where I had the option to go to sleep to start a new day, I often found myself cleaning up my remaining tasks and frantically checking my stockpiles to see if anything else had to be worked on. I simply could not afford to lose time; if daytime was the only acceptable time to travel in order to explore new islands, then even my nighttime had to be optimized to fulfill my obligations and stay “on schedule.”

It was then that I realized, that there was a method to Spiritfarer’s madness. This constant state of scrambling and juggling tasks to keep everyone happy that had made me feel so uncomfortable… was the same exact state experienced by those in palliative care. Moreover, those were the same feelings that my family went through when taking care of my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side during their last years. They were often fickle with exactly what had to be done; sometimes, I didn’t know if they even knew what they really wanted. We often left my grandma’s apartment with this sense of restlessness that kept us up at night, unsure if there was even anything left we could do to ease their final moments. It was this delicate but never-ending push and pull that we had become so accustomed to, that I had almost forgotten the sensation after my grandma left us in March 2020. I can sincerely say that no other video game I have ever played has forced me to reconfront my feelings and memories from back then… and I can’t help but respect Thunder Lotus for the audacity to not only address it, but also impart those feelings so effectively through gameplay as an compelling example of player perspective.

To Spiritfarer’s credit, I later came to understand that this sense of coziness is not lost at all, because there are plenty of surrounding elements that alleviate this heaviness. The art style, as well as the color palette, are key factors; the graphics are heavily influenced by the Japanese woodblock painter Hiroshi Yoshida, which the lead artist stated as “bringing [her] serenity.” That tranquility and desire to explore the landscape was a key motivation behind the lush and vibrant environments of Spiritfarer, combined with the use of soft pastels and a lack of the color “black;” darkness is instead communicated through softer alternatives such as dark reds, blues, and greys. It’s not without its use of contrast either (see: Bruce and Mickey’s “McMansion” of clashing red and white), which both allows the game to express more clearly express character personalities while providing the opportunity to allow for the player to experience “negative feelings” such as sadness in a softer environment. Finally, Spiritfarer’s fluid hand-drawn animation also breathes life into its many characters while promoting mobility through Spiritfarer’s expressive gameplay.

Spiritfarer also shows further care in establishing mood and ambience as to gently tuck players into an emotional experience outside of the art style. Firstly, Max LL’s accompanying soundtrack appropriately imparts moods without the need for excessive flair and gusto. Simple piano, string, and flute melodies provide ambient backdrops in tunes such as At Sea or At Night. More exotic instruments play important parts in tracks such as Furogawa to convey curiosity, or more upbeat pieces such as Hummingberg excite players into romping around the island to soak in the sights. Then, you’ve got your frenetic tunes such as Freeing the Dragon and Pulsar Pursuit to spur the player into action and snag as many timed collectibles as possible to assuage the spirits’ wants and fears. Finally, epics such as Last Voyage convey emotional upwellings through volume swells while establishing a sensation of finality to bring journeys to a close. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting soundtrack to instill a sense of adventure for Spiritfarer while appropriately illustrating more thoughtful moods along the way.

Secondly, while many post-death games are often filled with hostile and frightening creatures, Spiritfarer instead chooses to surround the player with friendly and welcoming personalities. Of course, there’s the spirits themselves; while some spirits can initially come off as aloof or even acerbic and uncompromising at times, you soon get to learn more about their backstories and interests that allow you to warm up and celebrate with them. Around the vast expanses of Spiritfarer are also many sea creatures and island inhabitants that are sincerely interested in you, with many going out of their way to help you in your role of caring for your friends. There’s also a lot of silly “dumb” jokes and melancholy humor across many of these characters to poke light fun at the world they live in and the situations that Stella finds herself in, all while providing a welcome distraction when juxtaposed with the emotional subject matter of the game itself.

Further adding to this coziness is the lack of a permanent “fail-state” within Spiritfarer. There’s no way to reach a “game-over” screen or enter a state where the player is directly punished for errors. For example, mining requires a specific timing of holding down and releasing the X button, but holding for too long doesn’t lead to negative consequences such as losing resources or health. Rather, you receive a cutely animated sequence where Stella accidentally drops her pickaxe and glances back at what happens, before she picks up the pickaxe again with a smile on her face. It’s like the game is gently encouraging you to try again; sure, you didn’t play optimally and messed up your timing, but it’s okay, for you can always give it another go. Vice versa, you’re also rewarded for playing well due to the ability to save time from optional animations and the potential to gain additional resources (i.e. cutting planks strictly by the lines gets you double the amount of planks you would have gained otherwise), but failure in these cases is not so much a permanent setback, but rather a delayed success.

Similarly, this “feeling” of failure translates to the spirits themselves. If the spirits aren’t fed properly, they will complain to Stella and have lowered mood. Again, this isn’t a permanent setback, because this mood can be risen by feeding them their favorite dishes and hugging them. Of course, there are visible consequences here to playing “well;” happy and ecstatic characters will often aid Stella by playing music to make other characters happier as well, or participate in the ship’s tasks by giving you valuable resources (raw ingredients, ingots, dishes, luxury sellables, etc). Most importantly though, these characters feel alive, both because of their written design/stories (often heavily based off the development team’s friends and families, resulting in a lot of personal investment) and because the gameplay loop of performing their last rites and caring for them creates attachment; you get to learn their histories a bit better based off the stories they tell you as they request specific chores that reflect upon their quirks and personalities.

As a result, I found Spiritfarer’s gameplay loop engaging due to its great emotional investment; not only does it give you just enough time to grow attached to spirits before sending them off, it also emulates aspects of grieving extremely well in a video game setting. For example, as characters finally depart for the Everdoor, all other characters on the ship will gather around the departing rowboat to say their farewells, similar to how friends and family surround loved ones on their deathbeds. Another example of this occurs during scripted resource gathering events scattered across the map; you would typically need to speak to a specific spirit to begin the event, but once that character has departed, Stella must instead start the event from the departed spirit’s door. This connection, as well as the inability to remove the deceased spirit’s former house (now analogous to that of a tombstone), constantly reminds the player of the experiences and memories of those who have moved on, and emulates the process of revisiting final resting places or old ramblings of deceased loved ones. Thus, Spiritfarer thoughtfully embeds traces of former spirits to instill both metaphorical meaning and surface meaning that their lives will forever remain with you. By constantly exposing the player to so many different spirits and their transitory stays, Thunder Lotus is able to properly guide players to express these healthy mechanisms that come with loss.

As a related aside, Spiritfarer, similarly to That Dragon, Cancer, utilizes the medium’s ability to capture specific instances to allow players to properly adjust for events in-game. We’ve already talked about the game’s leniency with regards to its fail-states, since every “negative” externality can be quickly superseded with the proper actions; as a result, there are no lasting consequences to playing at your own pace and no real “wrong” choices to be made. However, Spiritfarer also creates opportunities to let the player soak in emotionally-heavy moments without the passage of time interfering, such as the Everdoor scenes. Here, the player can reflect in this frozen moment in ludic space and take all the time they need to absorb the reality of the situation. But as with That Dragon, Cancer, the player must eventually progress and move on, just like real life.

My prior emphasis upon this emotional attachment to characters through the busying gameplay loop might imply that the game itself is mechanically lacking… but I honestly don’t believe that's true. Spiritfarer controls extremely well, especially for a game where the emphasis isn’t necessarily precision platforming. By the end of the game, you’ve got expanded abilities to double jump, mid-air dash, float, and cling to ziplines to quickly zoom up and down and build up momentum. These movement options are further aided by the everchanging landscape of the ship itself, which naturally evolves over time, both from a want to create more aesthetically pleasing or simple to navigate structures, and from a need to construct additional facilities for resource gathering/housing spirits. Furthermore, this structure serves an important purpose, not just as a playground where Stella can bounce and run around, but also as the main stage where resource gather events at sea take place, and Stella must quickly move around the ship to snatch as many collectibles as possible before time runs out. Finally, traversing the expanding ship can be aided by constructing optional devices such as bouncy umbrellas or air-draft machines, should raw jumping on top of houses not suffice enough for clean movement. As such, these movement mechanics and design opportunities provide welcome outlets for creative expression and player agency, which contrasts nicely with the lack of control that often comes attached to games about death.

Finally, there’s a real sense of progression to be found in Spiritfarer, when compared to other “artistic” and emotional indie titles such as Sea of Solitude. As mentioned prior, the ability to unlock new movement options by visiting shrines help keep the player advancing to the next stage, whether it be a signified by an out-of-reach chest or a traversable element such as an air current that you don’t have the movement tech to exploit. Moreover, these upgrades require obols (which are usually given to the player when new spirits come aboard), just as the ship upgrades that allow you to travel to new areas require Spirit Flowers that are left behind from a spirit’s passing. As a result, the personal investment from meeting and saying good-bye to spirits is matched by the extrinsic investment gained from interacting with the spirits, resulting in a powerful marrying of storytelling and gameplay mechanics. By progressing the story, the player is in turn rewarded with new areas, abilities, and accessories to create further opportunities of discovery and novelty.

That said, there are a few other nitpicks regarding certain aspects of Spiritfarer’s design, such as moments of less focused dialogue writing. Spirits will often run out of things to say, and that might limit interaction on the ships outside of jobs to scant bumps where they tell you they’re hungry, especially when you’re super busy micromanaging other tasks. This honestly doesn’t bother me as much as before (since we as humans will inevitably run out of interesting things to say); however, it is a bit more annoying speaking with non-spirit NPCs and either getting “trapped” in several lines where I had to mash X to move on, or being confronted with terse and meaningless scripts where the NPC would continually parrot some variation of “Hello. Leave me alone now.” This wouldn’t be as problematic if I didn’t feel the need to speak with every generic NPC to try and fulfill the requirement, since the “correct” NPC is not marked.

While I did find the gameplay loop much more palatable upon my second playthrough, I do agree that it’s easy to feel as if there’s a bit of padding near the end of the game as well. By this time, most of the spirits have departed your ship, and it’ll probably be down to Stella and a few remaining hardy spirits to pick up the pieces. It can definitely feel a bit lonely and out of place having to finish the remainder of Stella’s backstory with little spirit interaction in the last few hours. To its credit, Spiritfarer remedies this somewhat by finally allowing you to travel at night to quickly sweep up the story if you so desire, and with most bus stations unlocked and most speed upgrades having been fulfilled at this point, it’s not too arduous of a task. I do wish that there was a way to speed up time in Spiritfarer’s endgame though, since the backstory can only really be accomplished at night. As mentioned prior, you can fall asleep to skip nighttime and proceed with daytime events, so it is a little ironic that Spiritfarer’s endgame suffers from the exact opposite problem of running out of things to do in the day and lacking an analogous mechanism to get right back to the story at night.

I’m willing to look past these minor issues and more though, because ultimately those shortcomings end up making the game feel more human somehow. I tend to be a completionist at heart, wanting to 100% every experience and see everything there is to see. But I had to throw away that mentality and go against all my previous instincts, because Spiritfarer is a game about brevity.

While in the video game space, the developers have provided enough opportunities to artificially extent deadlines when so desired, it is Spiritfarer’s impermanence that makes its experiences so fruitful. I didn’t have enough time to learn every single detail about all the spirits, nor am I sure that the spirits were necessarily prepared to spill their entire life story in a single sitting to someone whom they had just met. Similarly, this experience’s meaning would be greatly diminished if you just let it stretch on to infinity and beyond. You most likely won’t have the time to finish every single task or close every loop… and that’s okay too.

Ultimately, while it can feel off-putting to some that characters can seem inscrutable to some degree (which may urge players to seek additional details on a wiki or in the Spiritfarer Artbook), I found myself content with what I knew. The condensed experiences that I had with these characters more than moved me upon my journey, and in fact put me in a headspace where I constantly found myself translating these experiences to my real life. Atul made me wonder if I really got to know my deceased relatives and friends well enough. Gustav left me contemplative regarding humanity’s eternal struggle with meaning. Stanley left my heart broken that innocence, while powerful, was just as fleeting as life itself. And Alice’s story left me speechless and frightened, because I saw signs of my grandmother within her.

That was, until Christmas night, when my dad received the call that my grandma on my father’s side had suffered a stroke. How bitterly ironic that the exact moment as I finished my second playthrough, my grandmother was left in a coma and I’d be forced to recontextualize my experiences once again. I knew that playing Spiritfarer would prepare me for this… but I wasn’t prepared for it to be this soon.

Had these lessons imparted upon me not meant anything? Sure, Spiritfarer is a game about dying… but it is also a game about living with death. Honor those who have moved on, so that you make the most of every moment with those who are still here. I hadn’t gotten the chance to see my grandma since a family vacation right before the 2020 outbreak, and I was hoping that someday, I’d get the chance to make it up to her. Now, I might not even get that chance. What could I even do at this point? Was my best not good enough anymore? Was my time spent all for naught?

I don’t really know. I spent a couple of days agonizing over my inability, my words feeling empty and my actions feeling directionless. I’m still waiting, because at this point, that’s all I have left.

But I’d like to think that my time wasn’t wasted. I don’t wish to make the same mistakes again… even if it might be too late this time. I think a game that’s willing to be as boldly emotionally vulnerable as Spiritfarer, despite all its potential pacing and mechanical issues, is something that has to be shared and treasured regardless of consequences. We can’t let trivial issues stop us from discussing that which is feared to be discussed, because we don’t have all the time in the world to pretend that everything’s okay. We wouldn’t improve if we never erred, and even if some missteps can’t be taken back… at least we can try to stop others from following our paths by connecting and sharing stories, right?

I can’t deny that Spiritfarer might not have hit me as hard the second time had these unfortunate events not occurred almost immediately after finishing. But I also can’t deny that Spiritfarer’s narrative power is the reason why I will always associate this game with everything that’s happened, nor can I think of any game that would have better prepared me for this moment and left such an impact upon me than Spiritfarer. Regardless of any gripes I may have had, this game is now a part of me, and I’m honestly not sure if I would change anything that I had experienced, lest I somehow forget about everything I strove to become moving forward.

So, let me leave you with these final thoughts of what I learned from Spiritfarer.

Grief is not a wave; it is an ocean. Every time you glance at it from a distance, you think you’ll be ready, but then it hits you, and you’re still swept away. As it washes over you, you start to wonder what it’s like to drown. Just to linger in that space a little longer, to try and lose yourself again in that gap in time where there was, before there wasn’t.

But there is nothing deep about drowning. Ultimately, we must carry on, for just as life has no meaning without death, those who pass on have no meaning without those who remain. Your ship will keep getting rocked by tide after tide, storm after storm, and you still might not be ready by the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or however many waves hit you over and over. Nevertheless, you learn to navigate the waters a little better each time. There’s nothing wrong with getting seasick, but that doesn’t mean you have to drown.

Love is watching someone die. But love is so much more than that too. Love is a balancing act between letting others in and watching them leave. Love is living every day like it’s your last, but realizing it’s okay to forget about life too. Love is learning to accept everything about us: the pleasures, the turmoil, the fallacies, all of it. Love is preparing for the inevitable while savoring the ephemeral.

Love… is letting go.






Sources referenced:

Representation of Death in Independent Videogames: Providing a Space for Meaningful Death Reflection
Spiritfarer And Death Positivity
Corporate Intervention In Video Games
(also please see Fudj's separate review of Spiritfarer on this site, as I find that it effectively communicates many of its strengths and provided motivation to write this up)
Spiritfarer Explained: Letting Go Is Everything
Mindful Games: Spiritfarer
Spiritfarer Documentary: A Game About Dying
Healing Together on Discord: The Spiritfarer Community
Zero Punctuation: Spiritfarer
Spiritfarer's Art Book: Can be found here or purchased as part of Farewell Editions or separately on GOG/Steam.

I think Spiritfarer's greatest strength is being able to wield the specificity of its characters' lives and the real life stories of grief that they take inspiration from whilst also remaining quite universal. Though, in a rather morbid way, I think one's mileage with Spiritfarer will vary mostly by one's life experiences with the subject matter. That's not to say that the storylines are hollow without being able to relate to them, some of my favourite characters in Spiritfarer are meant to serve as catharsis for a particular type of grief I'm simply not familiar with on that level.

This is all to say, one story in particular has had a more profound impact on me in a way that I think would simply not work quite as well if I hadn't lost a loved one in the way that I did.

I am going to put a spoiler warning here, though first of all, I obviously recommend the game if that wasn't clear; and second of all, go and read Drax's Excellent piece on the game, which is genuinely my favourite write-up about spiritfarer on the site, and maybe even the entire web.

I want to talk about Atul. A few days ago a friend of mine @MrCanilla finished his playthrough and wrote a thoughtful piece on it which I enjoyed (and the shoutout was nice too, lol). I then reflected on my original piece on the game and I wasn't very happy with it. So I replayed Spiritfarer and quickly dispelled the idea in my head that there was no way the emotional impact would be as effective on a second go. But the main reason Im writing this is because I never talked about Atul, and that surprises me, because it sat on my mind for a while when I originally played Spiritfarer in 2021.

Atul is a jolly Frog spirit you pick up as one of the first spirits you can ferry to the afterlife. He's the world's least picky eater, he's a handyman who runs the sawmill and breaks out into song, one of my favourites : thunder harvest. He asks you to go on a pretty long and arduous quest to feed him various foods which remind him of memories of his family, which he misses. As you get to know him you realize that behind his jolly facade is a real void, a void that he may be filling with food, judging by his appetite.

The real turn comes when his quest advances to organizing a big dinner for everyone on board, another set of food quests to make a big feast. Then as you go back to the ship and go to sleep, you realize the next morning that Atul is simply not there anymore. And I may be misremembering, because originally I played a much earlier version of the game, but I think originally that was it, you went to his room and found the spiritflower, the symbol left behind by the spirits in their quarters after they are ferried to the everdoor. On replay though, it seems there is a bit more clarification, with characters confirming quite plainly that Atul simply left. I am rather conflicted on this "QOL?" decision for reasons I will explain at the end.

You see, up until that point in the game (and they made damn sure that Atul's quest cannot be finished before sending at least 3 or 4 spirits I think to the everdoor) the game had established a sort of routine. Relating to the main thrust of the game being essentially the experiences of a palliative care nurse who would take care of patients in what little time they had left, all of the spirits follow the pattern of seeing off a dying relative, the spirits gathering around when taking their fellow to the everdoor analogous to gathering around a deathbed, as Drax pointed out. It doesn't get easier but it does follow a pattern; you take the spirit to the everdoor, they have some parting words somewhat concluding their storyline and then you cry and they leave forever.

Atul, however, simply leaves, utterly subverting the established pattern brilliantly. My reaction and many others was that of utter confusion : "What? What the hell? Where did he go? I didn't even get to say goodbye! That's not how it was supposed to go?" to anger "how could he leave without saying goodbye! How could he do this to me?". I simply couldn't believe it. In the case of Atul, there is some implication given his character arc that he simply didnt want to make Stella sad and went to the Everdoor himself, characteristic of his personality, but there is also an implication in my mind that this may well be Stella and by extension the audience trying to make sense of that which has none. And sometimes our loved ones will leave us without the chance to make peace or say one final goodbye, and we kind of just have to live with it and make what time with them count.

The reason this was all so devastating is that with a simple upending of established mechanics, spiritfarer pulled me back to 2018 and the exact emotional reaction I felt when my father unexpectedly past away. Without getting into needless details, it was simply an accident, one of tragically countless which happen every day. I was studying abroad at the time and got a call from my mother on an evening that was until then utterly mundane, I think I was planning on playing skyrim and procrastinating on work as I always did back then. Unbeknownst to me my Father had already passed when I received the call, but I was just told he was in the ICU and to get home ASAP. I hurried to the airport as fast as I could to take a late night flight back home. Looking back I am almost thankful for the eventful trip which took my mind off it all, getting lost and without battery in central london until some helpful people pointed me in the right direction, talking to a tourist on the plane, etc.

But of course when I landed I got the news. It was quite surreal, in a way. Now, I don't think anyone is fully prepared to lose a loved one ever, but when someone young and healthy leaves in such a fashion it makes you question a lot of things. And my Dad was not all that similar to Atul, personality wise, but much like the sawmill he used reminds you of Atul even when he's gone and you miss his supply of planks and all the other helpful activities he would do like most spirits in the game, I realized a few weeks later when I started to cycle again, that I was going to finally have to learn how to change tyres by myself. A sad reminder of who I lost but also an important lesson to move on and to let life's hardships as well as its good times serve as lessons. Its been 5 years now, and though this replay may have resurfaced a few bits, I am doing well, And I can confidently say that Spiritfarer is still a great game which accomplishes with its mechanics what couldnt be accomplished in a different medium. Its personally inspiring to me genuinely.

I must say, playing Spiritfarer in 2023 makes me think we should mandate Minecraft's version history system into every single game, because I think Spiritfarer 2020 was a great game which was a little padded and could have ended a bit earlier than it did, and lo and behold that's even more so the case now. In principle, I understand why they clarified a bit more on Atul, even if it robs it of the full impact of the utter confusion and shock it was originally intended to convey. However, if you are one of the people who complained enough about it that they added the option to turn off the Bus stop music, we cannot be friends; and I will see you in hell. And I have the sneaking suspicion that the new spirits were always supposed to be there in the original version but were cut due to time constraints and later added in, in which case I can see why they were chosen to be cut out of all of them, I'm sorry. They're not awful, but y'know.

Anyways, I don't know If I have much of conclusion beyond the obvious plea to love those closest to you and live a life you won't regret, so let's idk share our favourite spiritfarer tracks in the comments. Have a good one