LogFAQs > #925053696

I have beaten the game. Thoughts:
1. What was with the ending saying "Xenogears Episode V?" Was this going to be some Star Wars thing with prequels?
2. Does Xenogears have any connection to Xenosaga or Xenoblade? I ask this as someone who's played Xenosaga 1 and Xenoblade 1, but none of the sequels to either game.
3. I learned the light-elemental deathblow for Fei, but never actually got to use it, because all of the last section of the game was just in gears. It would have been nice if we got to use the characters on foot at all during the last portion of the game.
4. I can't believe the audacity to finish exactly half of a game, then have the second half be characters sitting in an endless void describing what they would have done had the game been finished. That's something I wouldn't even invent as a joke. And it felt like there were multiple subplots that just didn't get resolved in any way, things like Rico and his father, the fate of Elly's parents, Jessie just randomly disappearing during disc 2, and especially Ramses. I really expected Ramses to show up and do something heroic at the end, but his last scene is getting slapped by Citan. I appreciate that they must have run out of money and time, but it's like... the first disc took me around 42 hours. The second disc describes events that would have been another 30-40 hours had it been finished. Clearly, Square planned two games' worth of content and then just didn't consider that they had the resources to make one game, and instead of just ending at a satisfying point and making Xenogears 2 later, they chose the weirdest possible way to finish the second half of the story.
5. This feels like the ultimate post-Neon Genesis Evangelion work of fiction. I looked it up and Xenogears came out two years later, so yeah.
6. This game has the same problem a lot of JRPGs have, which is that it has a bunch of main characters, but only like four matter. Fei, Citan, Elly, and Bart are the only ones who matter. You could cut basically all of the other heroic characters, including the NPCs like Sigurd, and it would barely affect the story at all, which is a problem in this gigantic epic that expects you to care about a million characters.
7. Really didn't like the ending with Krelian where Elly is like "he's a good guy, you should forgive him." The guy turned 99% of the human race into zombie mutants and then used their flesh to build a body for God, and in the end he's treated like a fallen hero. Get bent.
8. The translation isn't as bad as FF7's and FFT's, but it's still really awkward and silly.
9. Overall, I appreciate the game's ambition, I appreciate the weird out-of-battle gameplay system of being able to shift your camera and see all of the sprites in another direction (it must have taken a lot of resources to make four camera angles for every sprite, including walls, props, and so on), I appreciate how the game tries to tell this convoluted and too-epic story, and I like certain elements of the game, like the idea of human skeletons only appearing in the fossil record 10000 years ago and everyone wondering what's up with that, only for us to learn the answer, and weird stuff like the Gazel ministry giving up their bodies and becoming a giant floating computer... but I can't honestly say I like the game. Maybe I'd like it more if it was finished, but I feel like it's a 5/10 for me.

I am glad to have finished this game, though. It's been on my backlog since like 2004, when B8 told me to buy it and I actually did.
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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig.
Started: July 6, 2005