Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht
Dec. 15th, 2012 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn the near future, humanity discovers the mysterious Zohar artifact. In the far future, humanity inhabits the far reaches of space but Earth has been lost; the mysterious Gnosis have been attacking human civilization, and an emulator of that Zohar appears to be responsible for destroying a populated planet.
I had played through half this game a couple of years ago, then got frustrated with missing emails and lost forever sidequests when I didn’t slavishly follow a walkthrough. I started it up again, only this time I used my Action Replay so that I didn’t have to care about grinding or missables—the attitude was “I’m just going to casually watch this anime that occasional has me fight battles.” The other two games are on my shelf, and I’ll probably do the same with them.
Starting with the characters: I totally understand why Mithrigil hates Shion. Shion is a pain-in-the-ass strawliberal twit with no survival instinct and no understanding of authority (her own or anyone else’s). I want to throw her into the Zohar and make Ziggy my main character instead. Even Allen is a more competent character: He’s a spineless wimp, but he tries very hard to be sensible and manages to keep Shion alive, which is no small task. The only real skills Shion demonstrates are cooking and giving pep talks to robots. She doesn’t even know how KOS-MOS (ostensibly her invention) works! Oh, and then she realizes she’s the equivalent of a zombie infectee, and in classic style, says nothing. (Though, at least in the first game, nothing ever comes of that particular twist.)
This is how to make a “strong female lead” who really isn’t at all. Despite Shion in theory being this badass genius, she’s constantly shrieking in fear, breaking down in emergency situations, doing stupid things that put herself and others in danger, and only demonstrating skills at traditionally “feminine” abilities.
Ziggy, on the other hand, is a fascinating character: An ex-cop who killed himself but was revived as a cyborg because he’d signed an organ-donor agreement; his failsafes prevent him from ever hurting himself or deliberately abandoning a job, so he always takes the most dangerous jobs with the lowest chances of success. He’s still suicidal, even after a century. This guy, I can deal with.
In general otherwise, I like what they do with the characters and I think they do it effectively. Jr is passionate but on top of things; MOMO is an interesting mix of childlike and robotically brilliant; chaos is enigmatic but empathic. Albedo is a really, really terrifying villain (which is best exemplified in one scene between him and MOMO). He’s like Heath Ledger’s Joker, but he’s got superpowers that include regeneration and mind rape, and he’s really good at Xanatos Gambits. It’s not the slightest bit surprising he survives to the sequel.
So, it’s revealed about halfway through that many (if not all) Gnosis were once humans, and that every human attacked by the Gnosis either turns white and shatters, or eventually becomes one. The Gnosis are made mostly of salt, and may be extradimensional. I can’t help but wonder if this inspired the backstory of NIER, where the extra-dimensional-demon-caused “white chlorination syndrome” either turned people into salt or all-white monsters. (I suspected from the very beginning that the Zohar turned everyone on the planets it “destroyed” into Gnosis, which the remnants found on Cathedral Ship seem to bear out. We’ll see if I’m right.)
The world-building is semi-connected to Xenogears, which was originally intended to be episode 5 of a 6-episode arc. (Xenosaga was intended to be that entire arc, which didn’t really work out.) It’s very clear this team always had gigantic dreams, story-wise, and never really had the budget or the ability to make an interesting-enough game to bear them out. They really should have just made an anime series.
This game feels like the system was developed, then thrown around the anime cutscenes, then padded from there with grinding, minigames and a million Easter eggs. The pacing of the game is really rather awful, with an hour of a dozen different cutscenes briefly broken up by walking down a hallway, then two hours of mindless battling. The dungeon sequences often go a very long time (an hour or more) between save points, and they get longer as the game goes on. For that matter, battles are long and get longer as the game goes on, unless you grind like crazy to get the Tech Points to boost your special attacks to insane levels.
It’s interesting playing this opposite FF7: Crisis Core for the PSP and the different approaches they take to save points. That game presents you with a save point every five minutes or so, and they’ll be right in your path. Saving is no big thing. In this game, they make you work for your save points. Unless you backtrack (which means re-fighting a lot of battles), between the length of dungeons and cutscenes, you won’t see a save point for 30-45 minutes. The longest I went (though admittedly, I missed a fairly easy backtracking opportunity) was an hour and twenty minutes. This game is old school in its “you will keep playing until we let you stop” approach.
The story pacing, on its own, isn’t actually that bad. There are a bunch of competing conspiracies and a lot of names being bandied about, but they give you enough to understand what each one is before they spring the next layer on you. They do actually reveal who most of the Omniscient Councils of Vagueness are as the game goes on, though I’m sure there will be a dozen more layers in the sequels. Also: One of the shorter sidequests makes it seem like you’ll need to go fishing. Of course, this is the future, so instead of a fishing rod, you get a “fish detector” and just grab them out of the water. I was amused.
They’re very efficient in their use of scenery: The town areas are complicated and often a bit mazelike, but that’s because they all double as dungeons sometime after you arrive. So make sure you get a good sense of the layout of all of the safe areas; they’ll be crawling with monsters later. Similarly, they do let you backtrack to virtually all of the areas in the game, either via the “simulator” (recreations of dungeon areas you couldn’t logically return to) or just getting in a ship and flying back.
Overall: I love the overarcing story and the world-building; I’m playing this specifically for that and the pretty cutscenes. The gameplay isn’t great; it’s badly balanced, often repetitive and contains too many ridiculously-hidden important things. Unless you thought playing 70 hours of Xenogears was really worth it for the plot, there’s no need to follow up with this.
I had played through half this game a couple of years ago, then got frustrated with missing emails and lost forever sidequests when I didn’t slavishly follow a walkthrough. I started it up again, only this time I used my Action Replay so that I didn’t have to care about grinding or missables—the attitude was “I’m just going to casually watch this anime that occasional has me fight battles.” The other two games are on my shelf, and I’ll probably do the same with them.
Starting with the characters: I totally understand why Mithrigil hates Shion. Shion is a pain-in-the-ass strawliberal twit with no survival instinct and no understanding of authority (her own or anyone else’s). I want to throw her into the Zohar and make Ziggy my main character instead. Even Allen is a more competent character: He’s a spineless wimp, but he tries very hard to be sensible and manages to keep Shion alive, which is no small task. The only real skills Shion demonstrates are cooking and giving pep talks to robots. She doesn’t even know how KOS-MOS (ostensibly her invention) works! Oh, and then she realizes she’s the equivalent of a zombie infectee, and in classic style, says nothing. (Though, at least in the first game, nothing ever comes of that particular twist.)
This is how to make a “strong female lead” who really isn’t at all. Despite Shion in theory being this badass genius, she’s constantly shrieking in fear, breaking down in emergency situations, doing stupid things that put herself and others in danger, and only demonstrating skills at traditionally “feminine” abilities.
Ziggy, on the other hand, is a fascinating character: An ex-cop who killed himself but was revived as a cyborg because he’d signed an organ-donor agreement; his failsafes prevent him from ever hurting himself or deliberately abandoning a job, so he always takes the most dangerous jobs with the lowest chances of success. He’s still suicidal, even after a century. This guy, I can deal with.
In general otherwise, I like what they do with the characters and I think they do it effectively. Jr is passionate but on top of things; MOMO is an interesting mix of childlike and robotically brilliant; chaos is enigmatic but empathic. Albedo is a really, really terrifying villain (which is best exemplified in one scene between him and MOMO). He’s like Heath Ledger’s Joker, but he’s got superpowers that include regeneration and mind rape, and he’s really good at Xanatos Gambits. It’s not the slightest bit surprising he survives to the sequel.
So, it’s revealed about halfway through that many (if not all) Gnosis were once humans, and that every human attacked by the Gnosis either turns white and shatters, or eventually becomes one. The Gnosis are made mostly of salt, and may be extradimensional. I can’t help but wonder if this inspired the backstory of NIER, where the extra-dimensional-demon-caused “white chlorination syndrome” either turned people into salt or all-white monsters. (I suspected from the very beginning that the Zohar turned everyone on the planets it “destroyed” into Gnosis, which the remnants found on Cathedral Ship seem to bear out. We’ll see if I’m right.)
The world-building is semi-connected to Xenogears, which was originally intended to be episode 5 of a 6-episode arc. (Xenosaga was intended to be that entire arc, which didn’t really work out.) It’s very clear this team always had gigantic dreams, story-wise, and never really had the budget or the ability to make an interesting-enough game to bear them out. They really should have just made an anime series.
This game feels like the system was developed, then thrown around the anime cutscenes, then padded from there with grinding, minigames and a million Easter eggs. The pacing of the game is really rather awful, with an hour of a dozen different cutscenes briefly broken up by walking down a hallway, then two hours of mindless battling. The dungeon sequences often go a very long time (an hour or more) between save points, and they get longer as the game goes on. For that matter, battles are long and get longer as the game goes on, unless you grind like crazy to get the Tech Points to boost your special attacks to insane levels.
It’s interesting playing this opposite FF7: Crisis Core for the PSP and the different approaches they take to save points. That game presents you with a save point every five minutes or so, and they’ll be right in your path. Saving is no big thing. In this game, they make you work for your save points. Unless you backtrack (which means re-fighting a lot of battles), between the length of dungeons and cutscenes, you won’t see a save point for 30-45 minutes. The longest I went (though admittedly, I missed a fairly easy backtracking opportunity) was an hour and twenty minutes. This game is old school in its “you will keep playing until we let you stop” approach.
The story pacing, on its own, isn’t actually that bad. There are a bunch of competing conspiracies and a lot of names being bandied about, but they give you enough to understand what each one is before they spring the next layer on you. They do actually reveal who most of the Omniscient Councils of Vagueness are as the game goes on, though I’m sure there will be a dozen more layers in the sequels. Also: One of the shorter sidequests makes it seem like you’ll need to go fishing. Of course, this is the future, so instead of a fishing rod, you get a “fish detector” and just grab them out of the water. I was amused.
They’re very efficient in their use of scenery: The town areas are complicated and often a bit mazelike, but that’s because they all double as dungeons sometime after you arrive. So make sure you get a good sense of the layout of all of the safe areas; they’ll be crawling with monsters later. Similarly, they do let you backtrack to virtually all of the areas in the game, either via the “simulator” (recreations of dungeon areas you couldn’t logically return to) or just getting in a ship and flying back.
Overall: I love the overarcing story and the world-building; I’m playing this specifically for that and the pretty cutscenes. The gameplay isn’t great; it’s badly balanced, often repetitive and contains too many ridiculously-hidden important things. Unless you thought playing 70 hours of Xenogears was really worth it for the plot, there’s no need to follow up with this.
