It's hard to describe the varied emotions that ran through me in rediscovering this title; it had been several long years since I last played it. However high my expectations may have been, they were entirely fulfilled by a game with a mature audacity and prescience. To me, the title's flaws – the highly guided nature of the owl or the quest of items exchanges, in particular – are trade-offs that the development team accepted in order to embrace their concept. It is an evocation of childhood through more or less discreet metaphors and allegories: the world of Koholint is a hermetic creation and an assembly of various references, giving rise to a bizarre result. It is an imaginary and absurd quest, where unbearable fears lurk. Of course, the bosses are "nightmares", an explicit expression of their scary side for the child. But the entire cast also follows the same logic. Christine, though an adorable goat, is confronted with otherness and her inability to accept herself as such; the children playing ball represent this fear of responsibility. Perhaps most striking is Ulrira, who can only express himself at length by telephone, a kind of mirror of social anxiety. Link's Awakening appears to be a melting pot of childhood emotions, which evolve to the point where the dream of innocence must end. It is an irreversible quest, which can be stopped temporarily, as if in a desperate attempt to stop the advance of time. The play shows the fears in maturity and plays with the nostalgia of a bygone era. Yet, in an excellent moral, Marine survives and shows that spectre of childhood, tenderly preserved by the adolescent Link. When the Dream Fish awakens, the trance ceases: the graphic style becomes serious and elegant again. We come back to ourselves, after a journey into what was our own past experience. This is, I believe, the strength of Link's Awakening: that of addressing the largest audience and praising candour, with all the charming clumsiness that makes for childhood.

Atlus certainly did not waste the rare opportunity to tell a character focused story where most of the main cast isn’t composed of snot nosed brats. No stupid kids here to spoil the fun of leading a party of nothing but sad, pathetic individuals going through their quarter-life crisis. FUCK you, Persona 5. Adults ROCK!

Joking aside. Within the context of the Persona franchise, Eternal Punishment is definitely among one of the more distinct entries. As opposed to the other games, major character moments don’t consistently act as these scenes of clarity that overtly define a character’s progress as a person. In fact, it’s not uncommon that these moments will raise more questions than they answer, rarely ever making it immediately clear how a scene reflects on someone’s journey in the moment. And it’s through this handling where I think P2EP’s cast shines. At the start of the story, these characters feel genuinely detached from each other. They really struggle to open up, sometimes even lashing out over the simple idea of emotionally connecting. But they don’t strictly develop through opening up about their insecurities and immediately growing past them. It’s more so through their amazing chemistry and challenging each other through their unique perspectives on life that you feel a real bond begin to form. It’s a perfect balance between focusing on the cast members as individuals while also highlighting their importance in how they work as a collective.

I find one of the more under-appreciated aspects of Eternal Punishment are the major, fundamental changes it makes to Persona 2’s core to accommodate for the new, jaded perspective of its characters. The tone is far more subdued. Gone is the goofy, lighthearted bickering between Ginko and Eikichi; replaced now by moral conflicts of ideals between Katsuya and Baofu. The importance of individuality is put into question by the recurring motif of ‘Fate’. Asking what purpose is there to finding one’s self if one’s self can crumble under the power of nihilism, fortune, and higher powers? Its apparent emphasis on challenging gameplay, not only finally forces the player to fully engage with the duology’s battle mechanics, but reinforces the brutality the characters endure throughout the story. The game isn’t some cynical tale that spits in the face of its prequel. Nor is its prequel worse off because of its more outlandish and comedic nature. FAR from all of that. These aspects just allow for Eternal Punishment to act as a wonderful contrast to Innocent Sin, establishing a tone that compliments and builds off the heavy nature of the prequel’s final act.

Where Innocent Sin is remarkable for its effective balancing act of heartfelt character work and the most insane set pieces you could possibly imagine, Eternal Punishment looks to take a bit of a different approach with its priorities. The constantly escalating tension and shocking revelations remain, but the downtime between these moments become just as integral. It’s the short conversations mixed with powerful silence and contemplative penitence that’ll leave just as big of an impact as most of the overarching drama. It’s no surprise one of the lead writer’s favorite scenes is a short, one minute exchange revolving around the nature of adulthood where most of the dialogue boxes are filled with nothing but pauses.

As I further age into early adulthood, it’s easy to get lost in the confusion spurred forth by taxing shit like sin, identity, and especially responsibility. I’m not usually one to see myself reflected somewhere within a story’s world, but I find it’s so easy to attach myself to a cast so… human in their writing and presentation. Whether it be Ulala’s longing for comfort. Katsuya and Baofu’s ever-present battle with their regret. Tatsuya struggling to introspect on his strange, confusing life while dealing with consequence. Or the way everyone is able to find some sort of value in their relationships and provide for each other in their own ways. There’s a resonant aspect to find in every character that hits twice as hard thanks to the narrative’s mature handling of its personal beats.

It’s good, for my sake, that Eternal Punishment is here to affirm that there truly are some good things about being an adult… Just a few.

I genuinely have no words. This game has become my favourite video game of all time, with the exception of a single visual novel. It set a new standard that I think I'll have to readjust quite a few of my ratings now. It's honestly difficult to even begin describing how I feel about this game, but I'll try.

Reverie is both a love letter and epilogue to the first three arcs of Trails, as well as the prologue to what comes next.

From the homely Liberl, to Crossbell's history of oppression and melting pot of a culture, to Erebonia's oppressive yet fascinating existence. From Estelle and Joshua's journey, to Lloyd's unyielding determination, to Rean's saga. All of that was already settled in Cold Steel IV, but unlike the bombastic, massive battles where everyone (well, almost — sorry, Kevin) from every possible side joined to end the conflict once and for all, Reverie decides to focus on a smaller amount of characters and make them go through incredible character development. That's not to say the stakes are low, though — this is still a JRPG. And so, the game, before the finale is split into three routes (actually just POV chapters but whatever), between which you can usually switch at will.

Lloyd's route, despite being the weakest of the three, is something that his character definitely benefits from. We have seen the SSS fight tooth and nail for Crossbell so many times that they, and other people, have forced expectations onto them. The land of Crossbell has been under constant threat of dictatorship and occupation by multiple parties. They just don't want to leave them alone. In spite of that, though, our guy Lloyd, who would face down the sun falling from the sky onto him and would still get back up, is still Lloyd, and it's hard not to love him for it.

Rean's route is a fitting after-story for the completion of his arc in CS4. While that arc may have ended, having doubts after everything is said and done is natural. It feels very organic and fitting as a character study.

C is a newcomer protagonist, and compared to the other two in this game, is more morally questionable. As someone with a dark past, he bonds with other misfits with complicated backgrounds. It's honestly really difficult to talk about this any further without spoilers, so I won't. But I'll just say that he's incredible.

Making a shorter Trails game split into three routes does wonders for this story's pacing, while at the same time having a wealth of side content. This is probably the best paced Trails game since Azure, and possible ever.

Falcom is at its peak with the technical (or at least until Daybreak/Kuro, wow that game is phenomenal), visual and sound aspects here. This is a very stylised game, with probably my favourite Trails soundtrack, which is saying a lot. Every route gets their own battle themes in a fitting style, such as having the spiritual sequel to Zero's Get Over the Barrier! and Azure's Seize the Truth! in Lloyd's route and Crossbell, as well as C's route's tracks, which blew me away. Not to mention the wonderful OP track. The gameplay is pretty much the same as CS4, but no complaints at that front either, especially since I enjoyed the fights in this one more. Trails was already my favourite JRPG turn-based combat of all time, and this just further cemented it.

While playing this series I was wondering what about it works so well for me. Before starting Trails, I was wondering if a 500+ hour series can even be worth it. Seemed like a series that would not be amazing enough to justify such a lengthy commitment over shorter, yet acclaimed JRPGs.

Trails, when it wants to be, is a masterclass on what you can achieve with characters and world building in a JRPG. Well, of course the several hundred hour long series would have good world building, but it is impressive nonetheless, especially if you're a completionist. I'm not one myself, but it would be a perfect fit if I was. The amount of dialogue NPCs have after any given story event is crazy. And then there's the in-story lore and world. The regions in every game feel completely different, and if you go back to a previous region in a future game, it feels like coming home. Different musical styles, viewpoints, vibes, etc. It's not like Falcom made a carbon copy of Tolkien's world or something — to me, Zemuria is one of a kind. This variety extends to the characters, too. The protagonists of the games so far (Estelle, Kevin, Lloyd, Rean, C) couldn't be more different. Despite being a series with plenty of tropes, it has enough diversity to feel fresh every time. That includes thematically. It's impossible for me not to look forward to what they'll show me next, especially with this behemoth of a buildup. Trails is just special to me. This review I'm writing is longer than my usual ones, but it feels like I can always say more.

It's also impressive but kind of funny how this game doubles as damage control for people's issues with CS4. If you liked CS4, there's little doubt you'll like this a lot. And if you hated CS4, you will probably enjoys this a lot more. This game is as much Cold Steel 5 as it is Crossbell 3, and as someone who's greatly enjoyed both sagas, I couldn't be happier. I will probably do some side content in this game for some time, or maybe I'll take a break. Or maybe I'll just boot up Kuro 1 (Daybreak 1) ASAP. Who knows.

This game marks the end of one thing, but the beginning of another. Liberlian Bracers, Kevin, the SSS, Class VII, it's been a pleasure to witness your journeys. This is goodbye for now, but I'm sure I'll see you again... Someday, somewhere.

Xenosaga 3 : A Beautifully Flawed Conclusion

The Xeno franchise, from a creative perspective is probably one of the most fascinating dives into the wonders of the human imagination. If you’ve been reading my reviews so far (and thanks for doing so, I’m putting a bit too much effort for something so insignificant) you probably realized more than anything, I’m deeply fascinated by the creative process behind some of my favorite and least favorite media. This always came from a place of trying to understand why certain things click with me when others don’t. I’m always trying to understand the appeal of even the things I find little value for myself to the point it pisses me off when I simply don’t get why “kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch so much” as that one commercial said.

I’m of the belief that every piece of art has value no matter how good or bad it is, as long as it comes from a sincere place of passion from its creators and not simply out of shameless greedy exploitation. Art is the most powerful tool for humanity to communicate, discussing things through words can be good for a time, but I think if you truly want to understand someone deep inside their souls, you have to look at what they make. Each piece of art collectively forms a puzzle that transcends our mortal bodies and can eventually lead us to understand why humanity in all of its flaws and all of its qualities is actually beautiful and infinitely fascinating. But in the world of media analysis, we tend to celebrate successes and shun upon failures, why is that ? To be fair, it’s pretty self-explanatory, when you succeed at something, you see a direct feedback of progress but a failure and especially a pretty bad one can make you crawl into a fetal position and make you think like you never actually evolve. But you do evolve, constantly, even through failure, you learn, your failure leaves a trace but it doesn’t have to be a wholly negative one and if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that one man’s trash can always be another man’s treasure.

From that perspective, it’s easy to look at the entirety of the Xenosaga Trilogy as well as its subsequent side-material as nothing more than a failure. It’s a project that was too big for itself, it’s a project with a second episode so tonally inconsistent with its two sister entry that it left a mark that was hard to recover from, it’s a franchise when the main vision from its creators was taken, sliced up, diced up, mashed up and broke into pieces to create an incomplete husk of what simply could’ve been. You’ve likely seen projects like these, the most recent exemple I have of it myself being Final Fantasy XV which to this day I still think should’ve not been released due to how much of what was the core of the project got lost in translation in a product that will feel eternally incomplete. FFXV left me with a sense of frustration, a feeling of what could’ve been if it managed to actually pull off everything it set out to do.

In a sense Xenogears was in a similar situation and yet, Xenogears is still celebrated as a monument of the JRPG genre, it’s a cult classic which still remained that way years into the future and which legacy can be felt throughout other projects both from the Xeno franchise but also other games as well. Xenoblade also managed to pull its teeth out and become the first somewhat uncompromised Xeno project and I believe they still go really strong. And then there’s Xenosaga, the awkward middle child stuck on the 6th generation console that no one really talks about. I’ve heard Xenosaga being described as a failed attempt to recapture the feeling of Xenogears but ultimately failed at doing so and didn’t leave much of an impact or some people even call Xenogears the prototype of Saga.
Nonetheless, Xenosaga is in an awkward position as far as the entire franchise goes. Xenogears, although incomplete, was able to tell the whole story of the one episode they could get out to the market and thus naturally had more staying power. Xenoblade games (maybe XB3 aside) are standalone enough in their individual stories for people to latch onto them and were released in an era where the general playerbase for these kinds of games were larger than ever and on some of the most successful gaming consoles of all time. And while both managed to rise into prominence in the gaming sphere, Xenosaga still remains somewhat niche due to its lack of accessibility and the discussion surrounding the game amounts to highlighting its failings rather than celebrating its successes.

Xenosaga is a series that was dealt the worst of hands and everything points out at Xenosaga 3 being a catastrophe, I might be one of the 2 people on Earth to have enjoyed Xenosaga 2 but I can also admit this game fell short in several areas when it came to its plotting mostly because it wasn’t a Takahashi game. And since the series wasn’t going to have its 6 episodes run time (although you might consider that with the addition of Pied Pier, Freaks and Missing Year it does amount to 6 games in the end) to tell the full scope of its story Xenosaga 3 was going to do the seemingly impossible task to conclude an ambitious projects without nearly as much prep time as it actually needed.

And did it succeed ?

I’m not keeping the suspense any longer, Xenosaga is once again a crowning achievement of the JRPG genre and seemingly the most perfect conclusion one could ever hope for the story in spite of its shortcomings (which exists and we’ll discuss them later down the line). Takahashi once again manage to untangle the mess that was left from the development cycle of the franchise and manage to pull it off in the end once again, he already did with Xenogears at the time but I think it’s doubly impressive here considering that what he had to come up with Gears Second Disc was for one game and Xenosaga was for 6.

However, information on the development of Episode 3 are a bit sparse compared to Episode 1 and Episode 2, I’ve tried looking it up online and couldn’t find anything substantial, the only video essay on the subject linked it to a comment made by Bamco’s PR Division which said they were satisfied with the end product and the sales this episode made. One thing is for certain however, unlike Episode 2, Takahashi was back on the project and while he isn’t the actual director of the game, he was pretty much overseeing the entire thing from beginning to end. But it wasn’t going to take simply making Xenosaga 3 and move on to save that sinking ship, that’s why in the wait period between Xenosaga 2 and 3 several project were greenlit by Bandai Namco in order to tie-in some of the loose ends left by the plot of Xenosaga 2.

The most significant of these side projects is Xenosaga 1&2 for Nintendo, a game I unfortunately didn’t play because it’s only in Japanese and no one seems to want to work on an English patch for it. It’s a demake of both Xenosaga 1&2 and from what I heard while it doesn’t actually change much about the plot of 1 it does expand significantly on Xenosaga’s 2 script to make it closer to the initial pitch for the game by Takahashi. Suffice to say, I’m really curious about this one. It's not often you see a JRPG franchise demaking their console releases for a portable system and seemingly make it a more complete version of the original, high budget and ambitious version of said game.
The other two side projects are a bit less ambitious and a bit more questionable when it comes to availability. The first one is “Xenosaga Pied Piper”, an episodic game released for the Vodafone 6, yes it’s a mobile game, yes it’s important and yes you will be regretting skipping on this one once you reach a particular part of Xenosaga 3, I’ve already made a mini-review of it on this website so check it out if you want to catch up on the epic Cani Review lore (or don’t). Same thing for “Xenosaga II to III : A Missing Year”, a frankly forgettable and kinda bad visual novel that’s the equivalent of an hour long infodump meant to tie the previous game to the next by explaining what happened between the events of the two.

If I have one complaint about this way of handling the wider story of the game is that the games in question are not super available in today’s age, these side games were never released outside of Japan and if it wasn’t for the work of several dedicated fans, they will be lost to time and understanding some of the deeper plot of Xenosaga 3 might be almost impossible. I say almost because Xenosaga 3 actually does contextualize a bit of the stuff from those games thanks to the return of the data log.

If this isn’t proof enough that Xenosaga 3 was once again handled by Takahashi, the Database from Episode 1 returns after its surprising absence from Episode 2. In my previous review, I mentioned that I didn’t really check the data base all that often most of it being a combination of laziness on my part, a reluctance to actually voluntarily stop my progression of the story to stop and read wiki articles as well the lack of clear indication of when, why and for what said data base got updated. However, I’d say the database from Xenosaga 3 is much better than the ones from Xenosaga 1 for many reasons, one of which is the fact the game actually notifies you when said database gets updated which is definitely a welcome push towards me actually checking it out and second, the database in question is separated into multiple categories instead of being filed up haphazardly.

Takahashi’s commitment to worldbuilding once again shines through in this game, not only from the database but also the fact the game leans more heavily on talking about the broader setting and all of the moving parts of the deeper lore of the world. Since Xenosaga 3 is meant to provide answers to all the lingering questions left by the first game and try to awkwardly fit in some of the elements of the second to better fit in with the greater whole, this return to form is more than welcome. The database itself is actually much more explicit than the one from Saga 1, not dwelling too deeply on superfluous unimportant detail and just delivering the answer straight to you ! Each entries also comes with a bunch of key-words to link them to one another making navigating the gargantuan story of Xenosaga much easier than it was previously and even if I still had questions near the end of the game, I’d say Xenosaga 3 did a solid enough job at solidifying my understanding of the world it was presenting and gave me much better appreciation for the efforts that were put behind its creation.

But you can also feel this return to form inside of the game itself, NPC dialogues are heavy on contextualization and worldbuilding, there are several areas dedicated to interacting with terminals explaining to you all sorts of esoteric sci-fi stuff and in general there’s a bigger focus on character inter-personal conflict, psychology and drama, something that was present in lesser amount in Xenosaga 2 but here Takahashi just pumped everything he could into every cutscenes and dialogues the game presents.
One thing that’s immediately striking from the start is the presentation of the game, you can feel that this was a late PS2 title and as such, the team at Monolith Software really made the best use of their experience working with console games by now. There are several moments in the game where I was just kinda blown away by how good it looks for a game of this era, especially because of the game's general art direction. Gone are the days of the weird doll-like face of episode 1 or the fugly wannabe realistic character model from Episode 2, here the game has once again a new artstyle which makes a great compromise between the more anime style of the first game and the attempt at realism of the second game. The characters really haven’t looked this good and moved this well in cutscenes. Unfortunately this is where one of my main gripes with the game’s presentation comes into place, there are fewer cutscenes this time around than they were in the previous entries.

While this does help the already excellent pacing of the game as we’re gonna discuss later down the line, a lot of the big story moments are told through a series of in-engine dialogues and text-boxes the kind you see in typical JRPG. I have nothing against this on principle but considering the propension of the series for overindulging in its cinematic flair, it was kind of awkward to transition from one style of storytelling to the other in what clearly feels like budget issues. These sequences are a bit less well directed than usual but they do have the benefit of being all voice acted which wasn’t the case of similar instances of dialogue boxes exchanged in the previous entry. A quick word about the dub of the game, it’s pretty damn excellent, the voice acting in Episode 2 was a bit awkward and there were some unfortunate voice cast changes along the way, for the most part all of the characters got back their voice actor from Episode 1. This includes Shion and Kos-Mos which delivers an outstanding performance on par with what they already delivered in the first entry and since this episode in particular focuses heavily on them as protagonists it’s definitely a welcome change.

I wouldn’t be complaining about that style of dialogue-based cutscenes if it wasn’t for the fact that the game often-times have actual cutscenes and boy oh boy what a bunch of cutscenes these are. The series was already known for having excellent cutscene direction all the way back from even Xenogears and this game is probably the apex of the franchise so far and approaches the kind of cinematic quality one can expect from the later entries in the Xeno franchise. There are a couple of intense moments of action which feels like they’re ripped straight out of some dope ass chinese kung-fu movies with excellent choreography to boot, these are an absolute joy to watch every time and an absolute hype fest. But even the less actioney scenes of the game were given proper care and attention on a similar level, and with Xenosaga you kinda realize that a game mostly composed of cutscenes isn’t really a bad thing as long as the people behind it have a clear love for the craft that is cinema. So many video games these days are trying a bit too hard to not be videogames, proposing heavily cinematic experiences which almost all the time approach just a shallow understanding of what movie-making is.

But from time to time, you get to see a game director with a clear passion and love for filmmaking and it shows, I can name the Metal Gear Solid series from the top of my head for kickstarting a similar philosophy but Takahashi clearly belong to the same school of thought as Kojima does. I already mentioned the clear inspiration from Kung-Fu movies but the entirety of Takahashi’s body of work with the Xeno Franchise oozes from inspiration from the most obvious ones like Star Wars or 2001 A Space Odyssey to more obscure ones like author films that I wish I could tell you about if I was more of a film buff.
Outside of the action segments, I can think of a couple of really evocative shot that would come straight of an arthouse film, that part where Shion reflects upon herself while completely nude (a sight to behold I know), cleaning the foam off of the mirror to show her face full of doubts and interrogation for the situation she finds herself in. That one horrific scene in the hospital where the monstrous updated combat Realians enter the room and mercilessly slaughter Shion’s mom as she’s hiding under the bed followed by a cutscene of a young Shion desperately trying to put her organs back (sadly censored in the English Dubbed version). The evocative first cutscenes of the game’s intro showcasing the downfall of Michtam, an intro that much like the first cutscenes of Xenogears will only make sense in several hours from now.

I could name a couple more of theses instances but I think the cinematography of the game is truly on point, which is a shame when out of the 10h of cutscenes present in the game only 5 of them are in this cinematographic style while the rest is presented in a rather dry format of dialogue exchange. But what little we do get in terms of raw actual cutscenes are simply fantastic and a massive upgrade from the previous 2 entries which were no less impressive in that regard. This level of cinematic flair however isn’t only found in the cutscenes but also in the actual exploration segment as well, the environment design clearly had a lot of thoughts put into them this time around, and the relative dryness of the areas from the first two games are not to be found here.

The game reminded me of the works of Kitase on the Final Fantasy series, more specifically the PS1 entries. While Xenosaga 3 doesn’t use pre-rendered backgrounds like them, it keeps the locked camera angles of the original 2 games but this time uses it to really enhance the presentation of all the areas you’ll traverse. The Tutorial Dungeon alone shows how much of a technical jump we made, with lots of moving parts and lots of sprawling camera angles and cinematographic shots telling a story of its own. One scene in particular struck me as particularly hype and it’s when you enter the Merkabah on the second disc, your mechs just diving inside the enormous space fortress in something that looks like something straight out of freaking Star Wars, or the distorted yet imposing vistas of Abel’s Ark ! At several moments during my playthrough I was simply in awe at how good the game looks and holds up for a game released in 2006, thanks to this commitment to spectacle, cinematography and an absolutely killer art direction.

On average the dungeon design of the game retains most of the qualities of the dungeon design from Xenosaga 2, the same team who worked on that game also worked in Xenosaga 3 and you can clearly see the progress between the two games in terms of game design. You still get a few puzzles, some of them much more fun and less obtuse than the ones from the previous game, there’s a lot of moving parts to each areas, lots of space to avoid the enemies this time around (and the enemies themselves aren’t raging bulls rushing to you with the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog) and most important of all very little in the ways of unnecessary backtracking.

These are easily the best areas and dungeons in the series so far if we’re not counting the Xenoblade games I’ve already played which operate on a completely different design philosophy. The younger team of Monolith did an excellent job with the areas this time around and I’d say than more than just serving as set dressing for the plot to shine through, Xenosaga 3 actually feels like a properly well designed and fun videogames.
But of course, all of this would matter very little if it wasn’t for the game's impeccable sound direction, unlike the previous game, Yuki Kajiura composed the entirety of the OST for Xenosaga 3 making for a much more tonally cohesive soundtrack than that of the previous entry. And my god, she did more than an excellent job at this, no shade to Yasunori Mitsuda, the historic composer of the franchise but I think this has easily become my favorite soundtrack in any Xeno games aside from maybe X. Right from the get go, the dungeon music sounds like actual music from an RPG and not some rejected arcade shmup blurb, we go from jazz, to rock, to orchestral, to epic choir music that goes “HAHA HAHA HAHA OOH AAAH OOOH AAA LALA SALI YADIDADI DADIDI”. The soundtrack is so freaking excellent this time around and actually stuck in my mind for being used even outside of cutscenes and while there is still some moments of silence during gameplay to enhance the atmosphere of the game, these are easily more welcomed than they were previously, much like how Xenogears managed its own soundtrack.

A couple of standout track I can name from the top of my head, like Hepatica, Godsibb, Fatal Fight, Febronia, Promised Pain, Abel’s Ark and of course how the fuck can I not mention the ending song “Maybe Tomorrow” which makes me emotional every time I listen to it like I’m some 15 year old emo girl stuck to her ipod nano in 2006. I’m not a music expert of course so I can’t really go into much detail on why I think the soundtrack is fantastic but sometimes, it’s just something that you feel rather than something you can explain with words. Anyway Kajiura is a goddess and I need more of her compositions in my vein.

The only real issue I have with the sound direction however is that several areas of the game have these “alarm” sounds, which is a repeated line by some robot lady going like “Activation of the Song of Nephilim, all personnel must evacuate immediately” and while it does had an effect in the most urgent and intense moment of the story, the fact that this is a repeated occurrence in a lot of the dungeons in the game quickly start to get a bit grating. Especially when the frequency of the “alarm” is repeated probably every 5 seconds on loop, I don’t get why they couldn’t just stick that one to a cutscene and just let us enjoy the soundtrack in peace.

Which leaves me to talk about the new battle system of the game. Once again, the gameplay of Xenosaga has seen a massive overhaul but this time I must admit that I’m a bit more divided on the change. In this game, there are no combos to do with the Square and Triangle buttons, no AP’s, no Deathblows, No Event Slots and even less so Stocks and Break Zones from Episode 2. The only remnants of the old battle system is the turn order and the boost mechanic, the entire battle system has been streamlined to a frankly quite absurd degree. Now the game has a more standard type of menu based battle system, tech attacks are now just stronger attacks you can use out of a menu which costs EP like the Ether attacks which are still present in the game. The game features now a more classic “break system” you’ve likely seen from a lot of JRPG past the release of FF XIII which I was actually quite surprised to see since Xenosaga 3 was released a whole 3 years before that game (and makes me wonder which game actually did that dreaded mechanic first).

Some attacks deal “break damage” at the cost of reduced regular damage which fills a red gauge below the enemies health bar, once that bar is filled, you can initiate a “break” which leaves the enemies vulnerable and unable to act for 1 or 2 turns depending on how when you break said enemies. You also have a break gauge yourself, so you need to check that.
Boosting is back and serves the same purpose as the old games but with some differences. Just like Xenosaga 2, you and the enemies can both hold 3 units of Boost but now on top of using boost to override the turn order, you can instead use your boost units to launch “Special Attacks” which are this game’s version of Deathblow from the older titles. Using a Special Attack allows you to conserve EP but also if you happen to finish off an enemy with one of those, you get an extra amount of experience, skill points and gold at the end of a fight, so it’s always good to use them to make your characters stronger.

Now the reason I’m a bit divided towards this battle system can’t be really evident at first so I’m going to address the one positive of such a system, everything goes a lot faster than in the previous two games. Entering in contact with an enemy instantly transitions into the battle screen without any transition whatsoever and fights are usually done in a matter of seconds whereas they could be taking a couple of minutes in the previous two games. Add to that the fact that the series added a back attack where you can deal more damage to enemies for one turn if you approach them from the back and battles are generally over faster than it takes to say “Xenosaga II”. A mechanic I think I didn’t explain in the previous two reviews also get a big change that’s kinda welcome, traps, in the previous game there were some weird tanks you could shoot which sprayed an area of effect on the field which not only stopped the enemies on their track but also gave you an advantage in battle if engaged them in that state. Well in Xenosaga III, instead of these traps being installed at certain strategic points of the levels, you actually carry those traps and can place them on the field yourself and upon shooting them, they’ll act exactly the same. I guess it would be a neat tool to use for speed runners and you can carry up to 10 of them before having to restock them at a shop. I personally saw very little use for them during my playthrough as I found getting behind the enemy to be surprisingly easy to do in this one.

But anyway, it does make fights faster but I also think this streamlining kinda removes a lot of the depth and uniqueness of the series core battle design philosophy since Xenogears. Xenosaga 1 was an improvement over the original system and Xenosaga 2 was a re-evaluation of it to try and see how to make it more engaging. I will say though, that as a staunch defender of Xenosaga’s 2 battle system, I was kinda disappointed by this admittedly expected turn-over. I think that ultimately what I dislike about the new battle system is that there’s so much more that could’ve been done with at least the battle system from Xenosaga 1 for exemple and that just make the system more basic didn’t necessarily created a better or more interesting battle system, just one you can be kinda over and done with faster.

I also have a bit of a confidence to make, I’m getting a “break” fatigue as of late and even though this game predates the “break” fads we see in many modern JRPG, I couldn’t help but sigh at the new battle system for having something like this. I’m not blaming the game here, I’m blaming myself for not being able to enjoy that mechanic after so many games using it. I never found a break/stagger system to actually add anything of value to battle for the most part, it’s just a waste of time, it’s just annoying to do piss poor damage all the time until you fill up a gauge that lets you finally have fun… It’s just kind of tiring…

It’s also not helped by the fact the game is pretty damn easy all across the board. Very early on in the game, you get several options to trivialize encounters and bosses, like spamming Erde Kaiser summons which you get one very early in the game and can be casted by all party members this time and not just Shion.
Another thing I’m not too big on is the progression system, it’s a much more linear system where characters fit into tightly defined roles, but whereas the original game allowed you to switch things around and mix and match your party’s abilities this game is sadly very straightforward. Skill points can be spent on a skill tree that looks more like a skill fork than a tree, very early on you are tasked with choosing between two branches, one branch makes the character go through the path of the role they were given in the previous game and the other a sort of alternate job. If you feel especially crazy, you can pick the alternate path but usually speaking it’s better to stick to the main one and stick to it until the end to unlock the Master Skill which is a powerful ability with a variety of effects. Throughout the game, you can obtain a bunch of books allowing you to add a couple more branches to the skill tree, but this is sadly quite a superfluous addition.

Most battles in the game are going to be heavily reliant on you using Tech and Ether to make higher damage and deal with the enemies faster, so a lot of the difficulty comes from managing your EP’s, this rarely becomes an issue since you have 7 party members at pretty much all time ! However I do enjoy the fact that residual EXP and Skill points are a thing now and that the game incentivizes you to use the entirety of your party instead of a select few, much like Xenosaga 2, you can switch out party members during battle which is always a nice plus.

I won’t say the battle system is bad whatsoever, but it is flawed and rather dull at points, most boss fights play out exactly the same and it’s very easy to cheese them. Boosting is such a non-component of the battle system that I even wonder why it was still implemented anyway and they must’ve felt the same way as I did while making the game because they had to give another purpose to boosting in order to not make it almost irrelevant outside of keeping up combos and finish enemies faster. Even the main superboss designed for the battle system doesn’t manage to actually do anything interesting with it, which is kind of a shame. I think with the experience Monolith gained on the first two games, they could’ve managed to make a fast paced version of the older system too instead of making it this way.

It’s hardly a complaint since I still find the battle system effective and fun to break, but not one that particularly impressed me in the long schemes of things. Of course this isn’t the only side to the coin of the game battle system as we now have to discuss the mech fight and for once, I am much more enthusiastic about those ! Not only is there a decent degree of customization this time again but I also think this is the best mech combat in the entire series this far.

The game uses a fuel system much like Xenogears but instead of being a consumable like in that game, it just determines the number of times you can attack in a single turn which is determined by the type of weapon you’ve equipped and their cost in terms of fuel consumption. You also have the possibility to activate “Anima Mode” filling an Anima gauge by landing successful attacks on enemies, you can stock up to 3 Anime gauge depending on where you are in the story and during this mode which last for 2 turns, you can either use a powerful special move, or attack the enemies while only consuming half of the fuel necessary to use your attacks. Attacking during Anime mode can sometimes activate a random ambush which is an all-out attack of your entire party against a single target, there’s also co-op attacks outside of Anime mode where only 2 characters wail on the enemy. You can also heal in battle by charging which also serves as a guard which can come handy.
While a bit more gimmicky than the on-foot battle, I did find them to be thoroughly more engaging than them which is surprising since usually it’s the other way around. Some of the best bosses in the game like the 2nd Margulis Fight which is the apex of fiction, happen during the mech combat and I’m really glad there are a lot more of them this time around and a lot more dungeons designed around E.S exploration. I had a lot of fun with this system which is surprisingly deeper than one might expect at first glance, sadly it does suffer from the same issue as the rest of the game for being quite easy outside of a few encounters using unique mechanics you have to figure out midway through the fight (like the aforementioned Margulis encounters). Much like the on-foot battle, a lot of them are done and over pretty quickly which is actually a plus.

Overall, I’d say the battle system being fast definitely does help the excellent pacing of the game, the previous two Xenosaga games were kind of a slow burn both in terms of story and in their gameplay but Xenosaga 3 goes at a brisk pace at all time, it’s always engaging, there’s always something going on and there’s rarely anything to stop your progress. One thing that’s a bit regrettable however is the lack of side-content to engage with compared to Xenosaga 2. While the side-content in Xenosaga 2 leave a lot to be desired, the sheer quantity of them made the game quite generous especially when it comes to its post-game. Here the side-stuff has been severely downsized, there’s still a couple of mostly puzzle based optional dungeons and 2 superbosses but the bulk of the side content is in the red door/red key quest present in all previous games.

In a surprise twist on the formula however, the Erde Kaiser Quest has been nerfed a little bit in favor of integrating that silly plotline within the actual main story. It’s a surprising choice for sure to make the two comedic side-quest characters actually important characters in the plot but their contributions mostly amount to justifying narrative shortcuts when it comes to technological stuff. But I do find it hilarious that the whole Erde Kaiser thing is actually important to the plot now with Kos-Mos herself being implemented with some of Erde Kaiser’s features after being beaten to a pulp and not being able to keep her new design for long. You can still summon Erde Kaiser in battle, in fact they’re now just regular summons a la final fantasy that you can acquire through the red door/red key thing, you get access to all versions of Erde Kaiser from throughout the franchise, sadly they all share the same battle animation but they compensate with raw fire power, and they made the already trivial regular encounters even more trivial.

The ending of the Erde Kaiser plotline however, is actually peak fiction, acquiring the final Erde Kaiser demands you go through a few steps which includes a boss fight against Wel… I mean Omega Id from NOT Xenogears and another boss fight against the strongest Erde Kaiser which frankly exists to break the late game in half if you’re too tired of the combat system by the end (or if like me you’re crazy enough to finish that game at 4am and you just want to fucking sleep). The conclusion to the quest made me a bit emotional and filled me with the burning passion for giant robots (the thing chicks dig).

Last but not least, there’s Haqox which… is a lemmings clone… it’s the main mini-game available and it’s surprisingly difficult and ramps up in difficulty quite a bit, I was not big on said mini-game but after a while I got used to how it works even if some stages broke my goddamn finger. Completing the game allows you to see the cutscenes with Swimsuits which is a fun bonus for all of your effort and I mean who doesn’t wanna see Shion in a bikini heh ?
Alright enough bubbling around, if you’re playing a Xeno game especially a pre-Xenoblade era game at that it’s clearly not to talk about extraneous detail such as how the gameplay hold up or if the dungeons don’t want to make you kill yourself. First and foremost, you’re playing a Xeno game to experience the amazing stories told by Takahashi and his wife Kaori Tanaka (which I doubt actually worked on the game, like I said, I found very little info on the development of that one). And so how did Takahashi manage to save Christmas once again when everything seemed to be against this game succeeding in doing so ?

The story takes place roughly a year after the event of Xenosaga 2, after a couple of shenanigans involving Gnosis Terrorism and the uncovering of a conspiracy involving Vector Industries, Shion lost her trust for the company and decided to leave it in order to join Scientia, an anti-UMN terrorist group which also wants to know what the deal with Vector is. Meanwhile in the void of space, a floating landmass by the name of “Rennes-le-Château” (an actual city in France btw) has appeared in the middle of space, it’s said to be a part of Lost Jerusalem the home of origin of humanity. Dmitri Yuriev is also up to some shenanigans, after coming back from the dead which seems to bother absolutely no one, he took his place back in the government to start working on a new super weapon by the name of “Omega Res Novae” piloted by a mysteriously familiar looking “Abel” which will not be the only time Takahashi is bordering on copyright infringement. But wait that’s not all, a new scientist is in town and has created a robot very similar to Kos-Mos by the name of T-Elos and they’re about to scrap Kos-Mos which is unacceptable !!! Especially since we need Kos-Mos to save the crew on the Elsa after these dimwits got stuck into a pocket dimension after orbiting a bit too close to the big French rock.

From the get go, we can see one thing about the story which is pretty cool, the story is back to focusing on Shion and Kos-Mos, I had nothing against Jr. taking the lead in the previous game (especially when it was so damn raw) but the story of Shion and Kos-Mos has been the central hook of the original premise for the trilogy and it was about time we get some closure on that front. Like I said earlier, the pacing of the story is honestly quite excellent, the entire premise that I’ve talked about pretty much summarizes the first few hours or so of the story ! It’s intense, there’s tons of moving parts, an extensive attention to detail when it comes to developing the lore and the setting of the game, we’re definitely inside a story that was written by Takahashi and I love it ! The story is really thoroughly engaging from start to finish, aside from one fillerish dungeon which exists solely to make yet another Xenogears reference, every event that takes place advances the plot in some way or another !

This frantic pacing made me play the game for hours on end. We go from revelations after revelations from one powerfully emotional and philosophical moment to the next, it’s like experiencing the highs of Disc 2 of Xenogears but as if it was an actual game. Speaking of Xenogears, Takahashi really didn’t give a fuck this time around, knowing full well this might be the last chance he’ll get to direct a Xeno game, he just bombards the story with all these parallels which will certainly please older fans or people who checked out Xenogears.

I’m a bit mixed on these references and parallels because I fail to see how they contribute to the plot, aside from tying Xenosaga to the grand project of Takahashi aka “Parralel Works” but it’s nonetheless really fun to witness how much he got away with. I mean there’s a certain part in the end where I can hear the team at Monolith Software being like “We cannot pass this opportunity to get a 3D Model of Elly ! WE ARE GETTING ELLY IN 3D DAMNIT !”.
There’s also a part of the game I was a bit skeptical about at first until it turned out to be absolute kino, there’s a “kinda” time travel plot line in the middle which is the game excuses to do the traditional tour of Old Miltia this time around however, we will be witnessing the events that lead to the tragedy that unfolded on this cursed land ! It’s a really long part of the game which takes probably half of the game runtime but I think it was worth every second of it and the implications of time-travel in the series opened a few interesting things for Shion as a character.

Speaking of Shion, I’ve heard that many people hate Shion in this game and on average she’s easily the most unpopular Xeno protagonist by a large margin but honestly… I really don’t get why, I have tons of complaints about the story especially in its later half but none of these issues are Shion related in the slightest. In fact, I wish more female leads in games, manga and anime were written with the same level of pertinence as Shion is. Shion goes through a lot in this game and arguably she has been going through a lot for a lot of time, but she never actually worked on herself, she was always distant and aloof as well as brash and borderline suicidal in the first game. What she goes through in Episode III isn’t a sudden shift in behavior that was brought about for the convenience of the plot or to serve the theme of the story, it was something that was already established in the first game albeit in a more subtle manner.

Shion does a lot of shitty, awful and at times unreasonable things in this game, she acts very rashly to what’s happening around her. Shion isn’t a happy person, nobody seem to understand her and she has been carrying traumas of the past and she now sees the possibility of finally reaching happiness for the very first time in her life and she’s about to take the chance, even if that means turning her back against the people she hold dear and even turning her back against the universe. In this game, we also learn a lot about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Kevin and let’s just say not everything was as lovey-dovey as they seemed at first. Their relationship is clearly manipulative, even if Kevin claims she is doing all of this to make Shion happy. Shion, giving in to his lies, is torn apart by the avalanche of information rushing through her mind right now. Shion is a broken character, a broken human being and it’s not just something that’s shown and serves just as a cheap way to evoke a feeling of forced relatability to the player, in fact only few people will probably relate to Shion since her situation is very specific to only a couple of people. But what the game asks of you is empathy. Even though I wanted to punch Shion at one point in the story, I also think Takahashi did a more than excellent job at humanizing the character !

She is profoundly human and written so realistically that I’m sure that it could throw some people off, she’s a perfect representation of somebody falling for a toxic relationship once again, of someone willing to go back to her abuser because in the sea of her own traumas, it seems like the only beacon of hope in a hopeless world ! She is stuck, trapped, in the clutch of the man she loves so dearly despite him being the absolute worst fucking dickhead imaginable, but I also think every decision Shion takes are believable ! It’s hard to work the fine line between a caricature of a broken person and someone who is realistically and believably broken. It’s not enough to have a character display self doubts and go “boo hoo my life sucks”, for a character like this to work, you have to make a good character first and then make a good broken character second ! Making them humans instead of just a function inside of a wider narrative ! And Shion is ultimately an excellent representation of that and it makes her path to healing even more powerful and poignant (also ALLEN IS THE GOAT !!!).
Xenosaga III manages to create a powerful narrative about breaking from the cycle of pain, about how a small wave can reach to the far end of the cosmos as long as you scream loud enough for people to hear it ! Shion isn’t the only one to get an amazing treatment in this game however, I’d say that all the characters which had yet to have some level of conclusion to their arc managed to shine through and brilliantly so ! I can’t believe Takahashi managed not only to nail the Febronia plotline that was teased since the first game as well as making me care about fucking Virgil, a random guy who dies near the beginning of the 1st game only to come back as one of the Testament which are the main antagonistic group of the game. All the scenes involving Virgil and Feb managed to make me so fucking emo it’s kind of unbelievable.

In fact, I’d say that characters coming back to fulfill one last wish as Testaments is actually a pretty damn cool idea in concept, usually I’m not a huge fan of returning characters for the sake of fanservice but here it’s not for that sake and they actually do serve a purpose in the story at large. In fact, they even manage to nail the whole “true mastermind” plot line by giving it some interesting ramifications and devastating effects to some characters ! Shoutouts in particular to Margulis which boss fight is easily the best one not just in this game, not just in the Xenosaga series but in the entire Xeno franchise ! I keep listening to Fatal Fight every single goddamn day since that fight happened, the sight of this man being betrayed and left like a dog, losing everything he believed in but finding purpose in the one thing that hasn’t abandoned him yet, the one thing that won’t disappoint him, a fight to the death against his rival ! AAAAAH IT’S SO PEAAAAAAAAAAAK !!

However for how gripping and engaging the story is, that fast pacing does have some consequences especially at the tail end of the game. You can feel that the game was meant to finish around the time of your confrontation with Dmitri Yuriev but the game still had a bit more things to tell and the final dungeon kinda rushes through what little hanging plot thread was left in the story ! It’s a bit of a shame because I would’ve loved to see the conclusion to these arcs presented in a more thorough and developed way ! This doesn’t take away too much from how I enjoyed those but I can’t help but think several things about the game weren’t properly closed off. For example, I do love the final scene of Albedo in this game, but I wonder if there was even a point in bringing him back to just serve second fiddle to the main antagonist of the game and have maybe 3 lines of dialog at best (you don’t even get a boss fight against him whereas you fight every testament in the game at least once !). Deep down, I feel like the Albedo plotline should’ve been dropped or at least developed a bit better. I think Albedo already had a decent conclusion by the end of Xenosaga II so I felt the additional screen time to be kinda pointless.

The story also delves a bit more heavily on direct references to Christianity and I was a bit scared at first but it’s handled with a surprising level of tactfulness, it managed to completely avoid blasphemy and not being too chuuni which I’m always a bit afraid of when you go deeper in that territory.

Despite all of these rushes however, the ending of Xenosaga 3 is absolutely insane. From the moment Shion betrays the party all the way to the end credits I was crying not just out of sadness but out of sheer admiration for the craft ! It’s one of the most beautiful endings I’ve ever seen from this medium and even if it’s clear the story Takahashi wanted to tell wasn’t yet complete, in the end, I think the story we got was good enough !
Xenosaga 3 is a freaking generational game, it’s a game which leaves an impenetrable mark in the mind of those who play it and solidify Takahashi as a master of his craft. So many conclusive pieces of media tend to drop the ball hard with empty fanservices, awkward plot delivery with artificial stakes sometimes in favor of said fanservice, too busy with paying-off the storyline than actually saying something with the work. But not Xenosaga 3, it’s a game which does suffer a bit of growing pain that’s something we can’t ignore unfortunately, but I can excuse a lot of the game shortcomings because of how well it wrapped up everything that matters and delivered a powerful story which spoke to me as a person, with characters and a universe I had a tough time saying goodbye too by the end of the credits.

At times, I even wonder if I don’t prefer it to Xenogears, the gap is really close, but both games, as broken as they are, do deliver on their promises. Takahashi might see the Xenosaga series as a failure, heck maybe you’re seeing the series as a failure after completing it ! But as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t regret going through the series and experiencing Takahashi’s wild ride. And maybe who knows, Xenosaga isn’t over, there’s tons of stuff left to uncover, the Xeno series is not over yet, Xenoblade proves that the Perfect Works plan has still delivered all of its secrets. Maybe someday, Xenosaga will once again be brought up in the light, I really wish it does, I wish the game would receive at least an HD port if not a straight up sequel…

But this is a far off dream for now, but who knows a wave can travel the universe and change the course of history… so yes it’s a dream for now but maybe not for long, maybe one day Xenosaga will shine and ve celebrated for the cult classic series that it is…

Maybe this day…

Maybe tomorrow...

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 !

"Listen up, Phones! The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go."

To truly understand another person is a fundamentally impossible task. No matter how much we can claim to know about other people, we will never be able to truly know everything about a person. And yet, despite the apparent Sisyphean nature of reaching out to people, to remain alone is to deny yourself the true scope of the human experience. To give up on others is to give up on yourself, and consequently, the world as a whole. Despite how much it can hurt to lay your heart bare to other people, we're in this shit together, ain't we? It's only through taking the risk to open up that we can expand our world beyond the boundaries of ourselves, and what better way to represent the difficulty of learning to open up to and understand people than with the most action-per-minute ADHD-ass battle system to grace RPGs?

The World Ends With You is a master-class of the mostly now-extinct maximalist game design philosophy that pervaded the 7th generation of gaming, being a game that makes full use of every single aspect of the DS' unique hardware. Control two characters at once in combat, one with the d-pad/face buttons, another with the touch screen. Match cards, do arithmetic & deal poker hands on the top screen while you tap, touch, swipe, scratch, even scream to attack and cast spells on the bottom screen. It's so gripping and unique that it's virtually impossible to emulate the sheer frenetic energy of the gameplay (which is why, to my knowledge, future ports don't even try to replicate it); a true dedication to hardware & design that makes the unfortunate stranding of this game on the DS almost impressive in it's sheer audacity & commitment to putting every single bit of hardware to use. In picking up TWEWY to idly pass the time during my 40 minute bus commutes to my college campus, I had unknowingly gotten myself sucked into one of the most innovative action RPGs to grace the system.

This frenetic & captivating gameplay is complimented perfectly by TWEWY's period-perfect commitment to the late 2000's urban youth's sense of charm & style. Fighting to a playlist of dozens of unique J-Pop/J-Rock/J-Rap battle themes; hitting the town to buy high-rise skinny jeans, browsing goth fashion boutiques for Scene Kid arm-warmers and knee-high boots to craft a fashion-disaster of a character build; keeping a pulse on the modern trends of the youth culture epicenter that is the Shibuya scramble crossing to maximize your damage output. The under & over-current of youth culture, fashion trends & artistry runs strong through TWEWY's veins, in every aspect of its UI & gameplay systems.

In fitting with this focus on youth culture, the story tackles the most pressing personal issue of every generation before, during and after ours: opening up to others. TWEWY's protagonist Neku is a thorny individual who is initially down-right unlikable, uncooperative & borderline malicious in his actions towards his partner & those just trying to help him survive. Put as on-the-nose as possible, his world starts & ends with him, and no one else. But by being forced into the Reaper's life-or-death game, attached by the hip to a wide variety of party members & crazy characters, he's forced to rehabilitate his misanthropic worldview & opinions of other people, and by the end of his adventure, he's dedicated himself to his friends & mankind as a whole. Understanding other people is a difficult & terrifying prospect, but it's only by clashing with others and their values & beliefs, and by making an attempt to help & know those around us that we truly live. The world doesn't just end with you, it begins with you, and it's horizons stretch as far as you are willing to push them. TWEWY is a game that leaves you with a single thought after it's all over:

It's a wonderful world, isn't it?

Within the game's gorgeous open zones, windows of interaction with different manners of moving through the maps (using a stream of wind to get up a platform, using a fire skill to burn down vines, etc.) are often gatekept by a varied set of abilities acquired by leveling up certain attributes in favour of specific openings in the game's Affinity trees (which are unique for each Blade) --- the so called field skills are only but one of the many variables that rule how Blades you bond with will interact with traversal, combat and overall progression through the game. There is a notable contrast between the sprawling, natural and detailed zones of the setting and the slippery, awkward character movimentation through these same panoramas filled with markers and cluttering UI identifiers; an incongruity between the maximalist, megalomaniac numerical obsession of the matters in which players connect and interact with that virtual world, and the often terrain-based combat/navigation that constantly demands that you look around and look for gaps between the pixelated topography, to check if there's an unrelated enemy around who could aggro you and interrupt your chain of orbs, to topple a flying enemy and make it fall down after you make it to higher ground, to use rails, rocks or other common environment assets to cheese your way through battles by gaining distance from the enemy's aggroing and auto-attacking with a bitball or a cannon while their path is blocked by said asset, to make use of the game's many position-based Arts: these strategies are not exceptions, but constant thoughts and visualizations I had through the game's many, many encounters.

This friction between the 'artificial' and the 'pulsing', the 'constant' and the 'drifting', is what builds this game's main dialectics: in this made-up world of flamboyant designs destined to be made fun of or utilized for their visual and questionable appeal, of series of integers and technical rigidness bounding the player to a progression based on variables and array-based requirements, how do we achieve genuine connection between constructs that seem to attract inherent unseriousness and confusion? How do we break down the walls of 'artifices' between the player and the game? The answer could only be one: Rex, and his Salvager Code.

The panache and naivete of juvenile optimism, the shonen-esque confidence in all that exists and the resolve to make people smile. Within the bounds of its own artificiality and the signifiers used to construct its experience, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 somehow manages to weave a convincing force of sincerity through a world that is conducted by the forces of constants, arrays, dipping frames and uncertain dynamic resolution --- all of that which cannot be organically touched or interacted with, ends up crossing the walls of mechanicality unexplainably by the end of it all, finding expression and meaning in the most unexpected places. A boy and a girl make a promise to reach Paradise; the boy complies without knowing why, not even because of the fact she saved his life right beforehand --- for giving his life for a stranger is simply his spirit. A girl who fears her own power, shutting herself off for unspecified milennia; a boy who finds treasures in junk for a living, salvaging meaning and memories out of seamless clouds. In the friendship between Rex and Pneuma lies the game's final and most important dichotomy, the impossibility between eternity and remembrance, the way in which our selves are tied to our egos which are formed by the promises we make to each other, how one would rather die than be forgotten by the one they love and keep on going for infinity. Theirs is a relationship of light: uncertainness about oneself's purpose breed spontaneity and trust in that which shines the way forward. Shin had Metsu, Hana had Hikari; within the endless streams of lights we project when we break down the walls of artifices between us, we find identity and purpose.

In each of the game's varied landscapes, one sight tends to repeat itself: the view of Alrest's enormous World Tree, the promised spot that gives access to Paradise and God, peering at his creations above the sea of white. To find that these organic leaves sprouting from its head and that the wooden exterior of its large shell house a high-tech facility full of elevators and robot guards only intensifies the images that Alrest creates through gameplay: an ocean hiding before humanity's ruins in Morytha, the vistas of the clouds forming different shapes and patterns within the perspectives of each character, numerical catharsis and exploitation of the artifices as a means of visualizing the act of bonding and the struggle of moving forward by your own means. Connecting Arts and auto-attacks indefinitely, building up elemental spheres and breaking them with the collective power of strategized synchrony; the endless QTEs building up in the screen demanding timing and linking in this fascinating real-time turn-based system.

"I love this world because you're in it."

Truly my favorite entry in the Science Adventure series, and one of my favorite VNs of all time.

A shining example of SciAdv playing to its strengths of character writing, slice-of-life, detailed sci-fi aspects, and larger narrative worldbuilding. The characters are steeped in analysis of personalities and relationships. The slice-of-life is mellow and serves to explore the characters well. As someone with a degree in electrical engineering, I can speak to how realistic, yet wondrous, the sci-fi behind electromagnetism and robotics truly is in this entry. And not to mention how well the story of R;N fits neatly and expounds greatly upon the already established lore of Science Adventure.

It's truly one of the coziest, loveliest, most heartwarming stories I have ever read.

I love it dearly. Please read R;N if you haven't already.

Considering the shmup genre has effortlessly sustained its status over the decades as the ultimate statement on the purity of videogame difficulty, it's no wonder that it has so adamantly rejected interference on its beautiful juxtaposition of being an all destroying one man army and the cruel fragility of getting annihilated by one measly small orange bullet. After all, why would you even consider perfecting something that was already perfectly conceived?

ZeroRanger's success rests not only on its reverance for the giants upon whose shoulders it stands on with rose-tinted glasses, in a similar fashion to Shovel Knight, but also in its ability to shorten the gap between newcomer and veteran of the monolithic genre, while sticking to its brutally familiar and established winning formula. Through the use of clever motivational incentives and an intriguing narrative, ZeroRanger manages to keep players from shutting off the game after getting a game over in less than 5 minutes, and with a simple set of satisfying mechanics that allow for the opportunity to strategically express yourself, the feeling of improvement and progress is an ever compelling sentiment that will surely lead you to its demanding yet soul cleansing finale.

The gorgeous two colored aesthetic and vibrant genre fused soundtrack are not just external flourishes of the gameplay that give it its striking and unique presentation, but are instead core components of it that dictate the flow, tone and pace of the action, allowing for some of the greatest interactive setpieces of escalating tension and catharsis I have had the pleasure of experiencing on this planet. ZeroRanger consistently display an astounding level of craft and showmanship on par and beyond the library of greatest shmups, that it isn't until you reach the modest list of credits filled with endearing homages when you are reminded that this was a passion project conceived by just two very talented Finland dudes commited to one-up the their heroes.

Ultimately, the greatest achievement of ZeroRanger is its enthusiasm in kick opening the doors to a genre that many would think would be closed off to them. Difficulty is an art. And like all great art, there needs to be an engaging communication between both parties. And I think ZeroRanger accomplished it flawlessly.

Also, the fucking drill. It has that too.