Glad to say that I thought the game was fantastic overall, it was way better than what I'd heard about it beforehand. loved all the characters, the story, the world, the music, and the combat was super fun.

If I had to criticize one thing about the game, it would be how little there was to do outside of fighting, because while I did really enjoy the games combat system for the most part, it got a bit exhausting at times. Having some towns or something to give the player a bit of a break would've been nice. But anyway, I'd still say the game has far more positives than negatives.

I'd probably have to say Lightning, Hope, and Vanille were my favorite characters out of the party, but I loved all six of them. Had some pretty great supporting characters too.

The story itself was fantastic as well, I never had much of a problem understanding the different terms after the first 1 or 2 chapters, and I never had to look at the datalog at all after a few more, so I don't really get that criticism of the game. I loved the character moments in this game, scenes like Lightning and Hope at Palumpolum, her apology to Snow, Sazh and Vanille at Nautilus, Hope and his dad, and the ending was great.

I thought the soundtrack was incredible, not quite the best in the series, but it had one of the best battle themes and my favorite version of the chocobo theme. I loved the "Lightning's theme" leitmotif as well. There were some more songs but I dont remember them all at the moment.


When I was younger I was a bit of a purist when it came to this series, never really had any interest in anything much later than FF7, but eventually I started to realize how stupid of a mindset that was, and started trying more of them, FF9 even became my favorite game of all time. I think beating and enjoying FF13's really opened my eyes to how closeminded it was to completely disregard the newer games simply because of a change in gameplay or artstyle. Not to say that I don't think people had any valid reasons for disliking 13, its far from perfect, but it seems like a lot of people people, like myself, were never even willing to give the game a chance in the first place. I'm glad I decided to try the game out, and I'm looking forward to trying the rest of the series eventually.

I expected the worst when going into this game, because no matter where I looked, it seemed like the general consensus was overwhelmingly negative. However, now that I've finished it, while I can still see where people are coming from, it seems like just about every single complaint they have with this game is actually another reason I prefer it over Episode 1.

The story: I've seen many people complain that the focus of this game shifted from KOS-MOS and Shion and instead focused more on the relationship between Rubedo and Albedo. Personally, I loved it, Albedo's become my favorite character in the entire Xeno series, and Jr. isn't far behind. I loved the ending to this game, but I won't be getting into any spoilers. While they may not have been as central to the plot as they were in Episode 1, I still thought Shion and KOS-MOS had an adequate amount of screen-time as well. I don't see why they can't change focus to another character for a single chapter.

The character designs and artstyle: This is a big one, it seems like everyone absolutely hates the way this game looks. It's a matter of personal taste of course, but I actually preferred the more realistic facial proportions of Episode 2 to the very early-2000s anime style that the first game had, which I'm already not the biggest fan of. This isn't to say that Episode 1 looked bad by any means, but I think it looked a lot better in the 2D artwork than it did in the actual 3D models used in-game, Shion's model in particular has always looked off to me. All that said though, I've seen what Episode 3 looks like and I would definitely say that it strikes a perfect balance between the two.

The music: I don't see this aspect brought up quite as much, but I'll go through it anyway. Overall, while some of the individual songs may not be as good as the first game's, due to Episode 2 replacing the composer, I still found this game's music to be far more enjoyable due to a couple reasons: In Episode 1, aside from two dungeons, there were no area themes, instead all you got were ambient sounds and footsteps. I don't think this was a huge problem, it was actually very fitting at times, but I think some music would have gone a long way in making some of its dungeons feel less monotonous. The second, bigger complaint I had with Episode 1 was its lack of variety in the battle music. Aside from literally the very last fight, you only got one battle theme for the entire game. I don't know about other people, but personally I found this very repetitive. Xenosaga 2 fixes both of these issues, having a unique song for every major area, not one but two regular boss themes, a second regular battle theme for the mech battles, and a unique final boss theme.

The combat system: This is the big one. From what I've read online, I've gathered that people's two biggest complaints regarding Episode 2's combat are that A: the random battles take too long, and B: the strategy of “stock, build up boost, break the enemy, unleash stocks, repeat”, gets repetitive. I'll do my best to explain the game’s combat and why I enjoyed it, even preferring it over the first game.
So first, regarding the battle speed, I'll just say that the majority of my battles went faster than most people claim they do online, so I can't help but think that maybe this one has just simply been exaggerated by everyone over time. But, that's not to say that some battles didn't last around five, six, maybe even eight minutes at times, especially toward the end of the game. There were a few times where they started to drag, but for the most part I hardly noticed their length, because I was actually having a lot of fun with the combat system itself. Another thing I hardly see brought up is that the battles in the first game often took just as long, however instead of that time being taken up by actual engagement from the player, it was instead filled with overly-long attack animations from both the player-characters and the enemies. Personally I thought Episode 1's battles got far more tedious than 2's ever did.
I mentioned this briefly earlier, but I'll try to explain the combat system itself now. The focus this time around is on setting up and executing powerful combo attacks on enemies. Each enemy has a "Break" pattern consisting of B, C and A zones. These zones correspond to attacks that your party members can perform during battle: the Square button is for B attacks, Triangle is for C, and Circle is for A (Circle will actually default to the B zone if the enemy's pattern doesn't contain A). Not all characters can hit all zones though; most characters can only hit B and C, while the characters with ranged weapons can usually only hit A, the exception being Jr. who can hit all three but lacks the ability to Down or Air enemies, which is a mechanic I'll explain later.
Before you can break an enemy, you will usually want to build up your "stock" first, the three bars next to each character portrait at the top of the screen. Essentially what these stocks are, are extra circle attacks that you can use during your combos. To build up stocks, you use the "Stock" command from the battle menu, or alternatively, there's a chance you could get a free one if you break an enemy, which is usually easy to do since all non-boss enemy's patterns consist of only two zones, and only ever use B and C. Interestingly, I never really see anybody bring up the fact that you can gain stocks by attacking enemies.
While you don't always need stocks to break enemies, you will usually need them in order to "Down" or "Air" an enemy, knocking them down or launching them into the air respectively. This is one of the most important parts of this game's battle system, and is done by hitting the broken enemy with a circle attack, hence the need for stocks. There is an alternative way to Down or Air enemies however; if you break an enemy, then "Boost" another character (a mechanic that essentially lets a character cut in line and get a free turn immediately) you can have that character perform the Down or Air attack instead, without the use of stocks. This boost method isn't optimal, but it is important during boss battles.
Right now I'm just going to briefly explain Boost, a mechanic that also appears in Episodes 1 and 3. Basically, every time you attack an enemy, a meter at the bottom right corner fills up a little, and each time it fills up to the top, the number next to it increases by one and the meter resets. That number can reach a maximum of 3, and represents how many times you can "boost" a character, giving them an immediate free turn.
So, let's say you're fighting a boss, and its pattern is ACCB. Stocks only allow for extra Circle attacks (A-zone) so naturally you will need to boost another character in order to continue the sequence of attacks past the first two zones. After some preparation, building up Stocks and Boosts, we can start the combo with Jr, the only character who can hit both A and C zones. He'll fire off those two attacks, and then before the next turn begins, you boost the character who will finish the combo and knock down the enemy, let's say that character is Jin. So now Jin is attacking; he will finish off the combo by hitting the enemy with C and B, and then his circle attack which will knock the enemy down, leaving it vulnerable to massive amounts of damage. Assuming Jin still has stocks left, he can now continue attacking the enemy while its down, doing much more damage than he did before, and then if you have more Boosts, which you will have probably gained at least one of after how many times you just hit the enemy, you can now Boost another character and continue attacking the Downed enemy. This process is the key to winning most fights in the game, and that seems to be where many people's issue with the combat system lies.
From what people have said about this game online, it would seem that at the start of every single battle in the game, you're forced to waste several turns just using the Boost command over and over, and THEN you can start the battle. However, I got through the game just fine while only using this strategy during boss battles, where buffing at the start of the fight is to be expected in most JRPGs. Of course, that's not to say I never used the Break mechanic at all during normal encounters, far from it, but I very rarely found myself needing to build up several stocks at the start of a battle with regular enemies. For the majority of the game, I could get by, have fun even, just relying on the boosts and stocks that I’d naturally gain by attacking enemies. Even when battles did start taking longer and I began to rely more on Stock, I was still having a fun time simply because I found it so satisfying to pull off a long combo of attacks. I think this quality shines through even more during the boss battles, where you might take out an entire half of the enemy's health in a single well executed combo. I'm honestly not entirely sure why more people don't find this satisfying, but to each their own.

So, I think I've covered just about all the controversial aspects that I liked about the game. There are several smaller mechanics and details I could get into, such as the ability to switch out characters mid-battle, and the simplified skill system, both of which I’d consider to be improvements over the first game, but this review is already very long, and I think I've covered the parts that are most relevant. But, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't also talk about some things that I didn't like about the game, so I’d like to go over some of those too before ending the review.

The dungeons: or more specifically, their puzzles. I’m no stranger to puzzles in video games, my favorite series of all time is The Legend of Zelda, but frankly some of the puzzles in this game just sucked. They had slow animations, you had to slowly walk back to the computer monitor to reset them if you got stuck, they were just so slow, and in my opinion needlessly difficult at times. They weren’t all bad though, I remember the block puzzle in the Dammerung where you made a bridge for yourself being enjoyable enough. For the most part though, they could’ve been better.

The E.S. battles: For those who don’t know, E.S. is the name of the mechs in this game. I didn’t like these parts. The mech battles went on much longer than the character battles, and gave the player far less options strategically, attacking or using special moves from the menu were about the only options available.

Escaping the Ormus Stronghold: This one’s a bit more specific, but I really hated this part. Long story short, you’re in a space station that’s going to self-destruct in 30 minutes, and you have to get out while fighting enemies along the way. As much as I did like the combat in this game, it is absolutely not something I would ever want to play while on a time limit, I get way too stressed out. To make matters worse, there's a mech boss battle at the end of the time limit. Thankfully the time limit does stop during the fight, but the constant threat of dying and being sent back to the last save point made it so much more stressful than it needed to be. This one’s more of a personal complaint, because I’ve always felt like I get way more stressed out by time limits than a lot of other people, but I felt I should go ahead and mention it anyway.

So that’s the end of my Xenosaga Episode II review. I can definitely understand a lot of the criticisms of this game, it’s far from flawless, but in my opinion the good far outweighs the bad, and I had a fantastic time playing through it. I liked the gameplay, I loved the characters, the soundtrack balances out to be about on the same level as Episode 1 in spite of them switching composers, and I wish more people liked this game as well as I did. I can’t help but feel a bit sad, and almost guilty in a way, seeing the game nearly universally bashed online. At times it feels like I must’ve been doing something wrong if I was able to enjoy this game as much as I did, but I digress.
If nothing else, the game is easily the shortest game in the Xeno series at only about 22-23 hours long, so even if you’re not a fan of the gameplay, I think it’s worth powering through it for the story alone, which in my opinion is the best part of the game.





Okay, here’s a couple more things that I felt were worth noting, but couldn’t find any good places to fit them in with the rest of the review:

I did grind for a few hours during the segment of the game where Shion is in the off-limits areas of the Dammerung. This wasn’t because I hit a roadblock and was FORCED to grind, I just noticed that the battles in this area were quick and gave a good amount of XP, so I decided to gain a few levels of my own volition, until I got bored and moved on. This may or may not have reduced frustration or tedium later in the game, due to one of my characters being overleveled, but I can’t say for sure since this was my only playthrough.

Before I started the game, I found a couple guides online for the combat mechanics and read through them. I think this helped a lot, and I can’t say for sure how much I would have enjoyed the game without having had a decent understanding of it’s basic mechanics from the start.