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chuckroThe Gnosis terrorism is accelerating and Federation planets are being destroyed at an alarming rate. The Zohar is still missing. And for some reason, during all of this we are supposed to care about Shion Uzuki’s feelings.
(Review of Episode I. Review of Episode II.)
They apparently just skipped an entire game’s worth of events, and encourage you to read about it in the Database files before you start playing. Turns out that Vector and their UMN (communications and warp travel network) might be really responsible for the gnosis problem, and Shion’s father is involved in something else shady. Oh, and Shion left Vector and is working with a new terse, uncommunicative badass named Doctus.
It’s also unclear as to when the characters swapped out their AWGS for the super-cool ES machines that are driven by “vessels of anima” that channel power from the Zohar. Did I miss something, somewhere? (I think the ES switch happened before or during Episode 2, while I wasn’t looking, then this game bothered to point out they were different.)
The tutorial for the yet-again-redesigned system is decent. The Setup is closer to jrpg standards, where you gain new abilities as you gain levels and have a full suite of equipment for each character. They kept the boost mechanic and characters still have special attacks, but the two types of standard attacks (short/long or physical/ether) from the previous games are gone in favor of Techs, Ether and boost-using Special Attacks.
ES combat is actually too simple, given how much of it there is (especially in the endgame, against bosses that are giant mountains of HP that can deal unblockable attacks that instantly kill a character—and ES fights don’t allow you to revive fallen characters until the battle is over). You can attack with one of (up to) three weapons which have a very limited selection of equipable choices, you can use special attacks, you can use healing items, or you can defend/heal. That’s pretty much it—no inflicting status ailments, no buffs, no real elemental variety. It makes the aforementioned late-game boss battles both harrowing and tedious. (I had to fight the bleeping ES Dan three times!)
There’s a new skill tree system with some unlockable stuff; it’s nothing special really.
As with the other two games, this keeps the segment file sidequest. It also adds a new sidequest of gathering the “update files” and filling the database, which would be a nicer touch if the database wasn’t so critical to understanding what’s actually going on. Overall, though, it dumps most of the sidequests / fetch quests, and has no big bonus dungeon.
They do put emphasis on HaKoX, the Lemmings-like minigame, even encouraging you to go play it in spots. I found it rather intolerable.
For full disclosure: I couldn’t handle the grinding the game really requires, so I used an Action Replay to, over the course of the game, turn Ziggy and KOS-MOS into maxed out murderbots. It seemed appropriate, really.
Also, I’ve switched TVs recently, so my ability to judge the graphics versus the other games is limited. Best I can tell, they’re about on par with Xenosaga II.
We occasionally hit bits of problematic translation, especially for things like “that person” or “this kind of place”. Mostly, this is an artifact on their desire to always write around a noteworthy item/place/person/macguffin the first six times it’s mentioned, only to offhandedly reveal it later after you don’t care anymore.
Really, this game series should have been an anime, where they could have paced the story better and dropped the padded dungeon bits. Failing that, it needed to have been plotting out as (however many) games in the first place and kept to that schedule—apparently the three games we were supposed to get were supposed to be two games, then six, then four, then they were finally made as three by skipping a game’s worth of events and dropping a bunch of subplots. This desperately needed to be fully plotted and then edited into something obtainable right at the beginning.
As much as I love Ziggy as a character, they should have dropped him from the beginning and given Jin his Episode I stuff to do. Or, heck, give it to chaos and drop Jin too, because neither of them is used to their potential or has much to do in the third game. (Honestly, chaos is the single most under-utilized character in the series, given that apparently he’s the messiah and knew most of what was going on from the start.) Never mind the pointlessness of adding Doctus and Canaan or, even worse, having Allen and Miyuki act as temporary fighting party members. Had they been more ruthless with editing and tightening the story, we could have had a much smaller and easier to control cast who each got much more screen time and development.
The uselessness of the party in cutscenes gets emphasized over and over (though Shion is the worst offender, by far). Lt. Virgil says it best when he’s getting beaten and yells at the party, “Why are you just standing there!?” Despite us having a half-dozen trained and capable fighters in the party at all times, during cutscenes where someone is getting beaten up so we can escape (note the plural, this happens a bunch), nobody a) helps fight or b) escapes. Ever! At all! It’s incredibly stupid!
And yes, Shion being useless? Doesn’t stop. In fact, she starts having fainting spells and although several characters allude to knowing why and knowing secrets about her past, no one pools information or tells her anything until it explodes in all of their faces. Oy. But through the entire thing, we’re supposed to see how wonderful she is and how much she’s suffered. To that, I say “No.” She’s a useless twit who has no business being a main character; she has no useful agency of her own and her story arc mostly consists of following her around while she makes everyone around her worse off.
The overarcing plot—which the final character of the game finally gets into useful detail on—is such full-blown Crystal Dragon Jesus that I can’t even. Xenogears, for all of its meanderings, at least managed to set up the final conflict before the final act and make a lot of the early foreshadowing fit together into the final puzzle. This spends most of the game wandering through mostly unrelated stuff and pointless low-level questing before suddenly deluging you with the whole “remaking the universe” thing. Big setups from early on (such as Shion’s unique immunity to gnosification) are completely untouched on; big reveals (such as Wilhelm’s role as shadow lord of everything) are never sufficiently foreshadowed.
And for that matter, U-DO is apparently God, but it’s fairly clear that the immature and curious U-DO and the architect God who created chaos, Wilhelm, and the Zohar (and the universe) cannot possibly be the same being. This, of course, is never even approached.
Overall: I’m glad I played the entire series. I feel no need to ever play it again. I’m now going to go read every essay I can find about it, which I expect to be a mix of bitching about the systems and bad plotting; and dissection and fanwanking of the plot and the metaphysics. Right up my alley!
(Review of Episode I. Review of Episode II.)
They apparently just skipped an entire game’s worth of events, and encourage you to read about it in the Database files before you start playing. Turns out that Vector and their UMN (communications and warp travel network) might be really responsible for the gnosis problem, and Shion’s father is involved in something else shady. Oh, and Shion left Vector and is working with a new terse, uncommunicative badass named Doctus.
It’s also unclear as to when the characters swapped out their AWGS for the super-cool ES machines that are driven by “vessels of anima” that channel power from the Zohar. Did I miss something, somewhere? (I think the ES switch happened before or during Episode 2, while I wasn’t looking, then this game bothered to point out they were different.)
The tutorial for the yet-again-redesigned system is decent. The Setup is closer to jrpg standards, where you gain new abilities as you gain levels and have a full suite of equipment for each character. They kept the boost mechanic and characters still have special attacks, but the two types of standard attacks (short/long or physical/ether) from the previous games are gone in favor of Techs, Ether and boost-using Special Attacks.
ES combat is actually too simple, given how much of it there is (especially in the endgame, against bosses that are giant mountains of HP that can deal unblockable attacks that instantly kill a character—and ES fights don’t allow you to revive fallen characters until the battle is over). You can attack with one of (up to) three weapons which have a very limited selection of equipable choices, you can use special attacks, you can use healing items, or you can defend/heal. That’s pretty much it—no inflicting status ailments, no buffs, no real elemental variety. It makes the aforementioned late-game boss battles both harrowing and tedious. (I had to fight the bleeping ES Dan three times!)
There’s a new skill tree system with some unlockable stuff; it’s nothing special really.
As with the other two games, this keeps the segment file sidequest. It also adds a new sidequest of gathering the “update files” and filling the database, which would be a nicer touch if the database wasn’t so critical to understanding what’s actually going on. Overall, though, it dumps most of the sidequests / fetch quests, and has no big bonus dungeon.
They do put emphasis on HaKoX, the Lemmings-like minigame, even encouraging you to go play it in spots. I found it rather intolerable.
For full disclosure: I couldn’t handle the grinding the game really requires, so I used an Action Replay to, over the course of the game, turn Ziggy and KOS-MOS into maxed out murderbots. It seemed appropriate, really.
Also, I’ve switched TVs recently, so my ability to judge the graphics versus the other games is limited. Best I can tell, they’re about on par with Xenosaga II.
We occasionally hit bits of problematic translation, especially for things like “that person” or “this kind of place”. Mostly, this is an artifact on their desire to always write around a noteworthy item/place/person/macguffin the first six times it’s mentioned, only to offhandedly reveal it later after you don’t care anymore.
Really, this game series should have been an anime, where they could have paced the story better and dropped the padded dungeon bits. Failing that, it needed to have been plotting out as (however many) games in the first place and kept to that schedule—apparently the three games we were supposed to get were supposed to be two games, then six, then four, then they were finally made as three by skipping a game’s worth of events and dropping a bunch of subplots. This desperately needed to be fully plotted and then edited into something obtainable right at the beginning.
As much as I love Ziggy as a character, they should have dropped him from the beginning and given Jin his Episode I stuff to do. Or, heck, give it to chaos and drop Jin too, because neither of them is used to their potential or has much to do in the third game. (Honestly, chaos is the single most under-utilized character in the series, given that apparently he’s the messiah and knew most of what was going on from the start.) Never mind the pointlessness of adding Doctus and Canaan or, even worse, having Allen and Miyuki act as temporary fighting party members. Had they been more ruthless with editing and tightening the story, we could have had a much smaller and easier to control cast who each got much more screen time and development.
The uselessness of the party in cutscenes gets emphasized over and over (though Shion is the worst offender, by far). Lt. Virgil says it best when he’s getting beaten and yells at the party, “Why are you just standing there!?” Despite us having a half-dozen trained and capable fighters in the party at all times, during cutscenes where someone is getting beaten up so we can escape (note the plural, this happens a bunch), nobody a) helps fight or b) escapes. Ever! At all! It’s incredibly stupid!
And yes, Shion being useless? Doesn’t stop. In fact, she starts having fainting spells and although several characters allude to knowing why and knowing secrets about her past, no one pools information or tells her anything until it explodes in all of their faces. Oy. But through the entire thing, we’re supposed to see how wonderful she is and how much she’s suffered. To that, I say “No.” She’s a useless twit who has no business being a main character; she has no useful agency of her own and her story arc mostly consists of following her around while she makes everyone around her worse off.
The overarcing plot—which the final character of the game finally gets into useful detail on—is such full-blown Crystal Dragon Jesus that I can’t even. Xenogears, for all of its meanderings, at least managed to set up the final conflict before the final act and make a lot of the early foreshadowing fit together into the final puzzle. This spends most of the game wandering through mostly unrelated stuff and pointless low-level questing before suddenly deluging you with the whole “remaking the universe” thing. Big setups from early on (such as Shion’s unique immunity to gnosification) are completely untouched on; big reveals (such as Wilhelm’s role as shadow lord of everything) are never sufficiently foreshadowed.
And for that matter, U-DO is apparently God, but it’s fairly clear that the immature and curious U-DO and the architect God who created chaos, Wilhelm, and the Zohar (and the universe) cannot possibly be the same being. This, of course, is never even approached.
Overall: I’m glad I played the entire series. I feel no need to ever play it again. I’m now going to go read every essay I can find about it, which I expect to be a mix of bitching about the systems and bad plotting; and dissection and fanwanking of the plot and the metaphysics. Right up my alley!
