Xenogears is the messiest game I’ve ever played. There’s so much I love about this game and still so much frustrates me playing it.

I wanna start with what I think is the most fascinating thing about xenogears. I want to shoutout @NeonMorris’s review for the idea of xenogears using religious iconography, symbolism, kabbalah, psychoanalysis, etc not to comment on those things but rather to build and demonstrate the oppressive systems and structures governing society and the effects it has on the fracturing of people.

To take it a step further, the actual journey of playing xenogears is like the feeling of discovering that everything you know about your life is just a contained bubble, a cage you’ve been unknowingly trapped in that acts as a facsimile of what’s around it, except that this happens over and over and over in a nightmarish, recursive endless paradox.

The intro of lahan village so effortlessly creates the facade of peaceful idyllic jrpg starting zone with funky characters, cool jokes, romantic tension, well-meaning people, and then shatters it in an instant sending the main character out into a world of political machinations and wars that have no meaning, and into his own fractured identity of a transplant of a transplant of a transplant.

This pattern continues, spiralling further and further into madness. First, a desert kingdom of an abdicated prince turned pirate because of a tyrant. But actually that tyrant is a stooge. He’s playing into the hands of some other force. But actually the real bad guy is not that force but rather this other empire of interlinking cells and prisons stepping on an underclass of demihumans. But actually it’s not the empire that’s bad but rather the ufo’s that visit the empire and give them shit to oppress people with and wage war for power with. But actually it’s the church running all of this shit, they’re the ones in charge to shepard the masses into a false and bloody heaven. Nope, the church is a front. Always been a front, duh. It’s actually these evil creatures that a priest must exterminate by stylishly shooting firearms out of the sleeves of his loose robes. Oh wait, those are just humans too, turned into nightmares by an oppressive force overseeing the church...
The rabithole continues, endlessly, until the discovery that god is an interstellar weapon who invented humans to be spare parts for his reviving body, and it’s like, what then? Was all of this meaningless?

It is in this futile but necessary exercise of breaking shackles of enclosure around the world of the player and the world of xenogears characters, only to discover yet another world of shackles on top of that one, in an endless domino effect, that defines xenogears for me. Even the symbolism, the religious overtones, the political intrigue, the gnostic lexicon, are all systems to rigidly structure the world. Everything is overflowing with keywords, references, and historical implications. Every question answered leads to tens more.

The game succeeds at expressing this aspect through scene structure. Most chapters in this game change the general loop of the game to create a “sub-game” that imitate the stakes of the next fake world of hierarchy the heroes are in. The kislev prison block section comes to mind as almost a mystery game of its own with distinct sections that all feel different, leading to an overseas section that feels completely different in style and tone. The “shape” of this game’s narrative is my favorite part about it.

In keeping with its gnostic message and spirit of the material universe being a cruel, twisted facsimile of the immaterial and spiritual world, the worlds of xenogears are each facsimiles containing each other like an endless matryoshka doll, even god itself. The search for truth can only be brought through a gnosis of human connection, something beyond the material, the bonds of people coming together and breaking through the systems of history, government, psychosis, etc. to find the true god, the god that resides in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man residing in the machine residing in man.. And so on.

A lot of what frustrates me about this game, however, is in the gameplay. While I like the structure of the scenes and narrative pacing, I don’t feel the game’s themes of oppression or shattered character psyche’s are expressed particularly well through the combat.

I think the parallels through on-foot combat and gear combat are cool in the sense that the gears represent a kind of exponential manifestation of the growing physical will of the characters.
On foot combat basically has 3 questions you need to keep in mind each turn.
Do you want to prioritize learning new deathblows (permanent skills that will make on-gear capabilities higher too)? If so, noodle around and press random buttons without causing a learned deathblow, knowing this is suboptimal for damage,
Do you want to use a deathblow to cause some short term bursts of damage? End your combo in a deathblow to do some damage, but you won’t gain much in the long term of this battle and the long term after this battle.
Do you want to stock up points to pull off a combo of learned deathblows? Use one or a few moves to do very little damage, to get little long term reward for after this battle, for the sake of doing a huge combo of all your current potential ability.
Spells and items add only but a little to these three key questions, but I would say on paper these make a generally decently interesting combat system. The problem is by the end of disc 1 most of the enemies act the same way and by disc 2 there are so few on-foot combat sections it barely matters at all. I don’t think the game has enough combat encounters to really push this system to what it can do.

The mech combat system is even simpler. You don’t want to run out of health or fuel, and you want to do attacks that maximize those perimeters. You can’t learn new abilities in gear, so you only need to consider the extent of the current battle and maybe battles after this one if you foresee trouble with fuel/health.
It would be a lot better if you could get off gears mid battle, or if the game had more sections where choosing between being in a gear and being on foot had more of an impact, but more often than not, you have to be in one or the other, and most of the time you’re not even sure which it’s gonna be till you get in the dungeon, making choosing party members difficult.
I had like three party members with near maxed out deathblows with everyone else barely at half their movelists. The game is structured well for narrative, but it isn’t structured well to utilize its own systems, and the combat scenarios are not designed well enough to test the player on its own concepts.

Parts of it remind me of dragon quest 8, with the idea of sacrificing damage to build up future damage, and protecting yourself in that build-up. When it works, it feels great, but it stops working eventually. The gear combat on the other hand, mainly feels fun for delivering flashy animations and seeing the theatrics of these large things perform martial arts moves, but not much more than that. Spend more fuel for faster turns, and use my attack levels now or keep building up more for a larger one are about the only questions you need to ask with them.

The spell system works, but it feels very minimal and mainly included because they felt it was “necessary”. While eventually the magic system of the game is explained with intriguing lore, I found that it didn’t add that much to the combat system, mostly being very situational.
Character customization was similarly minimal. There are some choices to be made, but it’s neither particularly demanding, interesting, nor streamlined or user-friendly.

The game is being pulled in lots of different directions, certain parts of the game have things that are only ever used in that one part, and never mentioned again. Things like the weight mechanic, card game, gear battler, etc. While they are cool, I think it’s a bit too much and too messy, and as a result, nothing but cutscenes and narrative structure feels particularly concentrated on as the lead voice of the ensemble of these elements.

The narrative, although the best part of the game, isn’t without flaws either. I think many scenes are in need of editing and trimming. Some lines just go on for way too long, some parts of conversations are just absurd to me in delivery (billy telling bart he almost went into prostitution to be able to afford care for his sister, in front of all the characters he just met) feel hamfisted and overbearing. There are needless repetitions in the script, like: the player being explained the ignas/kislev war at the start, only for parts of it to be reexplained to fei later; fei being incapacitated multiple times in the game, sometimes for the same reasons; fei being nearly put in carbonite once to introduce carbonite as a concept, then the same scene happens again but this time they actually put him in the carbonite; nanomachines turning people into mutants several times in disc 2, etc. Stuff just seems to be happening multiple times when it didn’t need to and served little purpose.

Furthermore I was rather disappointed with disc 2’s storytelling style. When I saw screenshots and videos of people sitting in chairs, I got really excited to see what that was all about. But it didn’t really work for me. I think the visual of people in chairs suspended in space with giant objects floating around them gave me the impression that disc 2 was gonna be the moment where the game stops paying as much attention to the world and its properties and more on the characters and their issues, their minds, what makes them tick. But instead of that, the characters were simply almost recalling things that happened or they had done as if they were dreams of distant memories, with little focus on character writing aside from the first few dreams. While thematically making sense given the end-game revelations, I’m not sure of the tone they were going for with it. When the seated characters are spouting paragraphs of text, I still don’t know how to read those parts in terms of tone. Are they wistful? Regretful? Melancholic? Sometimes I feel like they should be, but it reads more neutrally in some scenes. While I think it looks great, it comes off clumsy. And it’s clear when playing the game that the game systems would not have been able to last long enough or be able to retain interest even if those sections were fleshed out, the combat, exploration, and customization would’ve gotten even staler faster had that been the case. And I wish there were some kind of explanation as to why they were dreaming all those scenes. Maybe something like they were all swallowed by the zohar modifier or being restructured into deus while fei was speaking to the wave existence, just SOMETHING to contextualize it.

I wanna say lastly, as cool as the idea of fei and elly as characters and entities are, I found a lot of the scenes between them, especially on disc 2, kind of bad. Elly is damselled way too often in this game needing the player to rescue her or help her in general, but by disc 2, Fei kind of speaks very chauvinistically toward her and it’s not clear if it’s meant to be read that way. I found it jarring and distracting from what should be an eternal romance echoed through time. Elly’s character in general felt very weak-willed for a lot of the game except for when she needed to not be and she suddenly became a mother Theresa figure to all the downtrodden(??), which felt rather sudden a development for me personally.

There were still some great scenes between them earlier on, I especially liked the ones where Fei tells her to stop doing those dang drugs and holds her gear down with his own, and the one where he shows her Kislev being destroyed on the ground level to show her the true effects of her staying in the army.

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Sorry if this review is all over the place, but this is a game that goes in so many directions it can be hard to keep track. I feel I really need to replay this game at least one to two more times to really even keep a handle on it, and probably read more perfect works, listen to more podcasts, play xenosaga, etc etc.

If it were my choice, however, I do not think xenogears works best as a game. I think if they were to remake it, it would be great to see it as an anime series rather than a game (although I would be interested in hearing opposing opinions on why the game aspects of this game help it). Since I am incapable of refraining, I’ve already spent many afternoons daydreaming how this story would look as an anime. I would personally keep the mixed media style of the game, and have the characters be animated in 2D (or 3D that looks identical to 2D thanks to shaders) similar to the art style they have in the game, but with slightly more realism and more shading on skin tone. The backgrounds would be either photographs or models, or at least realistically textured rendered metallic corridors when applicable, and the gears could be physically photographed models as well. I think it would make for a cool and experimental aesthetic beyond the typical 3d/2d type stuff seen in evangelion rebuilds.