So many reviews have been written of this game, expressed more effectively than I'm able to, so rather than even try to put my thoughts together in a coherent review I'm just going to put a TL;DR at the top and vomit out random thoughts underneath (much like how this game approaches its storytelling... ooooooooh!)

TL;DR - I'm so conflicted about this game. 2.5 star reviews usually mean I'm lukewarm about the game, but in this case it's anything but. The game is so ambitious and large in its scale, with an inimitable soundtrack and sense of style that I can't bring myself to give it a negative review. But literally every aspect of its gameplay is a chore, the translation is clumsy, and its storytelling is needlessly clunky (more on this below) so I can't bring myself to give it a positive review. So 2.5 it is.

Random thoughts:
- First off. If this were an anime I'd give it 5 stars

- Enough has been written about how the camera angles and platforming make exploring a chore. But this game somehow managed to make talking to NPCs a chore too! The text scrolls uncomfortably slowly if you're a fast reader, and there is no option to change the scrolling speed. Then sometimes, NPCs will seem to finish talking (the text box even closes), but after 2 seconds they start talking again! This is usually just enough time for you to move on, see the dialog box reopen then close immediately because you walked offscreen, forcing you to go back and talk to the same guy again through like 5 windows of slowly-scrolling text.

- I was very enthused on the concept of deathblows and combos when I first started playing; there was a lot of potential to explore in that design space. I'd always felt that menu-based RPGs should give you multiple different 'free' moves (that don't use MP or items) rather than just one regular attack - for instance, one character could have a regular attack, a weaker multitarget attack, or a weak heal spell as 'free' options, which would give the player some strategic choice even if they were trying to conserve resources. The deathblow system could very much have been this! Unfortunately, the deathblows completely lacked depth as they were all single-target attacks of varying strength. The extremely fringe usefulness of combos meant that every deathblow but the most powerful one you currently had was irrelevant. In other words, rather than adding a layer of strategy to the game, the deathblow/combo system simply added tedium, turning "press X to win" into "press TTSX to win".

- I quite like the story - it's great stuff, even today. However, a pretty big caveat: if a story is going to have plenty of symbolism and require me to fill in missing gaps through inference, then two things are required. Firstly, the translation must be immaculate - not the case here. But secondly, I believe convoluted stories need to 'handhold' the viewer to some extent in terms of what is happening in the foreground of the story so that we can then make inferences about the background better. I don't think I described that very well, so here's an example of how the game didn't do it. At the beginning of the game, some giant robots land in the middle of your small village and start throwing down. A cutscene starts, you notice the cockpit of one of the robots is open, and you catch a glimpse of a mysterious figure inside. You then climb up into the mech, and... at this point I was expecting to get into a fight with the mysterious pilot, or have him jump out of the mech to escape, but nothing. I just started piloting the mech without any acknowledgement that there was anyone in the cockpit. Now the game eventually explains who the figure is (like 40 hours later) and then that scene makes sense... but I really wish they had just paid lip service to the fact that I'm not supposed to understand what happened yet. Just a throwaway line like "wasn't there someone in this mech? What happened to him?" Imagine that sort of writing but multiplied by many many times over the course of the game, and I spent 90% of the game in a perpetual state of wondering if I was actually supposed to understand what just happened and was just missing something obvious.

- Speaking of the story, its pacing had an infuriating habit of cutting away from the action that I cared about to focus on people I hadn't met yet spouting exposition I wasn't supposed to be able to understand yet. This was presumably to offer some 'bonus' for players who were going through the game a second time. There were two problems with this, however. Firstly, the scenes make for a very weak 'replay bonus' because they are completely irrelevant on your first playthrough. (Contrast this with say FFVII, where Cloud's narration of the past is relevant and interesting on first playthrough, then comes to take on an added layer when you view it through the lens of the second playthrough). But the other problem with scenes that only makes sense on second viewing is that unlike books by Diana Wynne Jones or movies by Christopher Nolan - both of which keep you confused for 90% of the way before finally offering payoff and incentivizing a second watch/read - Xenogears lasts 60 hours at a conservative estimate and much of its gameplay is a chore. I do like the story and wish I could catch more of the nuance of it, and I'm not averse to replaying games, but I don't think I'm going to come back to this.

- Despite most of my random thoughts above being rather negative, I did also like many aspects of it. It's probably dethroned Phantasy Star III from the top of my list of 'games that deserve a remake'. Its plot and ambition and multitude of interesting (but lacking in execution) gameplay ideas deserve a more polished game.