Extremely repetitive combat that somehow translated the worst aspects of the original TWEWY's combat to a controller and included with it are cardboard cutouts for characters that have the same lack of depth the persona 5 cast had, boring fan service that adds nothing to the game and a monotonous, drawn out story that is easily the worst interpretation of time traveling ive ever seen in media. Why the fuck does this game get the praise it gets?

Also apparently there’s this idea that says you don’t need to play the original TWEWY to play this game. That is absolutely fucking wrong go play the original and you understand this game a lot more

I’ve been replaying this recently and I’m starting to realize that a lot of the levels in this game feel as though they’re either poorly made or just throw away fodder with little thought put into their design and are nowhere near what I would describe as memorable. I like Mario's movement and it's some of the best I've felt, but you never get to appreciate it because the level design feels like a group of 12 year old assholes who just got mario maker for christmas made this game in a few weeks. The most fun i've had with this game is with the hacks the community has made for it over the years.

It’s not my main gripe about the game because I understand that Xenosaga was going to be a six(?) part series at one point and that it’s hard to judge the characters and story based off of the first entry, but this was actually pushing me to my limits. These are some of the most one dimensional characters and while some of them, such as Ziggy, had their interesting and honestly really engaging startups, right when his section of the game ended, so any hope of furthering his character development did as well. Mere hours after rolling credits, I’m having trouble remembering their names and importance to the story.

The lack of story was hardly an issue but when paired with a nonexistent soundtrack, thats what really did me over. It’s not that the songs that are there are bad by any means and if anything I’m a fan of Yasunori Mitsuda’s work as I’ve even gone as far as playing games solely because his work was in it… but there’s no soundtrack here. Who thought it would be a good idea to have the normal battle theme remain the only constant battle theme throughout the entire game? There’s not even a boss theme, it just plays the regular battle theme. The game wasn’t ever extraordinarily hard but I would have preferred feeling a sense of differentiation when battling special enemies or bosses, but instead I was forced to hear this song the entire game. Tragically, when I wasn’t fighting slow and mundane battles that lasted an eternity (and then some thanks to the music), I was enduring silence. Like actual silence because there’s no overworld music unless there’s a crisis or something. Atmosphere matters and all and you want to show how empty outer space is or whatever underlying value there is to that strange decision, but man I’m seriously not begging to go from silence to that battle theme every 10 seconds. At one point I even preferred the silence because I got so sick of the battle theme and decided to make the silence permanent by lowering my volume to 0. Honestly that made the game just a little more bearable.

Outside of that, while the menus are a fucking monster and I couldn’t ever figure out where which option might lead to, I actually enjoyed the systems. You can extract skills from accessories and then equip 3 skills to characters, there’s a skill tree that while grindy at times, allowed you to “transfer” (the realistic term is copy) skills to other party members which was great since I could put a strong multi-heal skill on multiple characters at once. On top of those, you can also use points to raise your stats manually, which is great for customizing characters, and if you couldn’t tell already customizing is what this game does best without a doubt. I don’t want to make it sound groundbreaking or anything but it was always fun finding ways to break the game. Except when I had to grind. I love grinding but this game made me dread the thought of it.

Exploration in this game consists of either

1. Labyrinth hallways that you constantly get lost in if you have a short attention span and don’t know the exact place your goal resides (the ships)

2. Straight hallways with occasional detours to treasure (the ground levels)

The takeaway? They both fucking suck.

I should add that there are these decoders (keys) to secret doors that you can find and get some pretty good accessories from, and when you’re able to extract the skill from them, combat becomes much more fun because the battles are usually over in a turn or two. You’re able to revisit levels as you progress into the game, so that means you might find decoder 6 in a later level, and you kind of remember seeing door 6 in one of those earlier levels but don’t quite remember where, so you scour the entire level fighting the level 2 galactic hemoglobins to find it. Yes, it’s about as fun as it sounds (it’s not).

I’m sunk cost into this franchise so I’ll play the other two, but man… This fucking blows. Now I’m being told that Xenosaga 2 is even worse… fuck.

I went into this expecting it to either be a pile of garbage or mid at best but came out thinking that Wild Arms is a standout title on the system that holds up to this day

Of course, it is lackluster in some areas. The puzzles can either be move object A to point A or be incomprehensible due to the horrible translation to the point where unless you trial and error it, you’re not getting through that locked door. Thankfully however, that only happened to me twice. Beyond that the game likes to give you no sense of direction on where to go next, and while I like that aspect a lot, it’s not for everyone. That’s ok though because im the only person that matters and none of you are real i dont think so this game is a 9/10 can’t wait to play the rest of the series very soon

When i was a kid i went to my friends birthday party and some dumbass i never met before was playing this on my friends wii and i thought it looked cool so i asked

"What is that game"
Then he was like "i dunno"
Then i said "Well youre playing the game what the cr*p is it"
He responds "i dont know"
I beg "Do you know the name of the game atleast"
He grimaces and says "no"
...."Can i p-
"no"

So i leave the room and come back and the game is paused so i sit down and continue playing and according to my mom because at this point in the story for whatever reason shes sitting down near the couch that im playing the game on. The kid from before comes back and says "thats my game give it back" and im like "What" "dude give me my game back youre mean" For some reason according to my mom i just stare at him for 1 minute straight emotionless and he just leaves i have no recollection of this

Anyway, the game fucking sucks but it takes an hour to beat so if you want to digest some slop bone apple tit

I want to preface this by saying that I play my games without using Google or any emulator cheats (fast forward / save states / actual cheats) because I feel that by using them, I’m disregarding the game’s design. From my understanding, people use them either because they have limited time to play games or they’re simply impatient and don’t want to deal with archaic design. To both ends, if you truly care about a game and are enjoying your time with it, why rush through it and ignore the pacing of the game? That’s not to say you can’t enjoy a game while fast forwarding and the like, for some it might help them enjoy it more… for me however, it ruins my enjoyment of the product.

I emphasize the above because the contacting system is abhorrent and easily the worst part of this game. I think it worked fine enough in the first game even if it was easily abusable and barebones, but this is just needlessly grindy for absolutely no reason. How it works is each character has 4 unique contact options that you can use to talk to a demon, given that you have 5 characters throughout the game, it easily becomes overwhelming. Depending on the personality of the demon and contact you chose, you will elicit an angry, happy, eager, or scared reaction. The goal is to make them eager so that you can get their arcana’s spell cards, though if you make them happy before doing so, you will get free cards that can be converted into any arcana card type in the velvet room. You can only have 3 happy demons at any given time as the would-be “buff” stays constant throughout the game, unless you make them angry, which is very easy to do. On random occasions, including at the very start of a battle, a demon will start talking to you, except during these sequences you pretty much have to guess what the correct answer is because they ask you questions like “if you were an animal what would you be human dog demon” and on my life I picked every single possible option for multiple demons, and they were all fucking wrong so i think it’s bugged or something. While that’s annoying, I found the fusing system to be fun, assuming I had enough cards to make what I wanted to make. I like the emphasis on spell cards, but I would be lying if I said I preferred this over the modern fusion systems, even though the game is hardly balanced around them.

On the topic of balancing, it’s all over the place. I played the PS1 version which is harder than the PSP remaster according to everyone, and for a good portion of the game all I was doing was getting into random encounters, even boss fights, and just auto battling. To extend on that, the combat system is centered around auto battling. You set your characters moves and press start battle. You can stop the auto battle whenever you want and check the turn order of your party members so you can plan your attacks accordingly, but outside of the final boss I pretty much turned my brain off the entire time, save for a select few instances. I don’t like this system because more than any RPG I’ve ever played, I get little to no reward or satisfaction mainly because I’m not pressing buttons as often. While some might see that fact as a good thing, I see it as mundane and boring. I make it sound bad, but in reality it barely affected me and it’s not like the difficulty is completely nonexistent, it’s there I just found it incredibly easy and manipulable is all. That final boss is some bullshit though. Game goes from being easy for about 15 hours to being extremely tedious and hard for no reason? Boring as hell

THE RUMORS SUCK. The system is there to remind you that the story involves rumors, and it fucking sucks. I don’t like talking to rumor mongerors with the clunky ass text boxes that plague the entire game and just don’t skip properly just to hear that Bimble Fuck Joe is selling his Sweaty Ass Shirt for 3 yen cheaper. Same people who defend this shit are the people who say Drakengard is a masterpiece because the gameplay sucks on purpose or whatever. I’m heavily overblowing it and this was hardly an issue because i did it twice throughout the entire game but it just made me realize how much i hated the textboxes in this game. Going back to that demon happiness shit for a second, if you have 3 contracts (3 happy demons) then the demon you’re currently trying to contact will ask you to replace one of the contracts so that they can be added, and for some god awful reason the developers thought it would be funny to have the dialogue option to appear at the least opportune time so that almost every single time I press the A button to progress the dialogue, the options appear and I annul the wrong contract. Every. Fucking. Time. Even when i'm careful I still somehow fuck it up. Yes, I know, skill issues and many such cases. Shit was made to make me fall asleep im not even going to lie spread a rumor to make my bed more comfortable. Booking the luxury suite at the Innocent Inn™ if it doesn't become a reality (joke donated by @Zotol)

Now that I aired my grievances, I liked the characters! I think they’re easily some of the best and most realistic ones in the series. I loathe how the modern persona games have these uninteresting and almost repetitive characters that for the life of me I just can’t give a single fuck about half the time, and for the first time I actually found myself caring about the issues and problems these characters are facing. They may not be as realized or fleshed out in this game as I would have liked them to be, but they were nonetheless impactful, more so than half of the slop the modern games shoved down my throat and I’m sure they will be even more amazing in the sequel. There's more I could go into and I made the game sound a lot worse than it actually is but the reality is that I'm mincing my words in fear of spoiling people, so it might sound like I'm not complimenting the game enough. The reality is that it does have good qualities but I also don't feel like I'm at a position where I can collect my thoughts and judge the game's story based without having played the sequel, so I won't. It's pretty good though, if not paced strangely at times. It's also incredibly hard to take this game seriously when iykyk is the villain. I'm serious if you don't know shit about this game go play it right now and prepare to have the craziest whiplash ever

I'm not going to lie though that PSP version is probably better because the god awful fan translation for this game gave characters different during different points in the story and I could never tell who was who.. Aside from that, the music was alright. Just alright. Few stand out tracks but I’m not foaming out of the mouth for anything. The PSP soundtrack sounded better from what I heard, and I’m probably going to play the PSP version of Eternal Punishment after my exams.

If you played the PSP versions of Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, WITHOUT SPOILING, what does the save transfer do? Is it important or can I just play EP on PSP without it

Love the use of Amano’s art style and I wish final fantasy treated it with as much respect as this game and on a completely unrelated note did they just not teach Wanzer pilots how to aim in the military? More than half of my attacks missed throughout the course of the game… it’s really not even that serious but everytime it happened every ounce of dopamine disintegrated because the game relies on hitting random body parts with no way to guide shots unless your pilot learns a skill that allows them to do so, but that comes in play half way through the game and even then you get more XP if you destroy every body part, so I ended up not using it half the time. Front mission also has stats that increase depending on what weapon you’re attacking with. You know what other game did this? Final Fantasy 2. But you all let Projared brainwash you into thinking the level up system sucked. Shame on you.