Xenogears Perfect Works

[Kaylia]

Xenogears has the best RPG storyline ever.

And your criteria are?


[edit]
Not saying Xenogears wasn't great. Both Xenogears and saga rank at the top of my favorite game list. However, making such statement without stating why is meaningless.

[Elvis]

Xenogears has an amazing storyline. If Wild Arms can be remade, so can Xenogears! (prolly not tho, since there is no God)

[Kaylia]

Xenogears is too large to be remade. It wouldnt be a good investment money wise, unless they cut the game in half. A shitty port would be possible, but I'm not sure I want one with all the writter gone.

[Weltall]

Too hard to retype a story that has already been written? lol

This is just stupid.

[greenhills]

Gameplay aside, it's just misplaced nostalgia and expectation. Many people who played Xenosaga first found Xenogears to be boring. If XG's story was that much better, it wouldn't happen like this.


[edit]
And if you read any interview with Takahashi, you will understand where the idea for both games come from. Both stories are a retellling of the Genesis/apocalypse from a kabalist/gnostic perspective. The story are similar on every level, not just the "cameo".

Xenosaga (all of them) was a snooze fest, and i have talked to more than a few other people that agree, some who played gears, some that didn't. Too many/long cutscenes, unlikable characters, lame dungeons, uninteresting story telling, etc, etc.
I really have to agree with the sentiment saga should either have never been made or not associated to gears in any way shape form.

edit: on topic- really neat to see the translations like that, will have to dl. wish i hadn't sold my copy now... kinda.

[Zilong]

Gameplay aside, it's just misplaced nostalgia and expectation. Many people who played Xenosaga first found Xenogears to be boring. If XG's story was that much better, it wouldn't happen like this.

Yes it's fairly subjective, but why do I have to make excuse for their shitty taste?

Also, wouldn't do anything but destroy the game if they have to cut shit for remake, considering the original game's second half is already somewhat butchered due to budget cut and shit.

Then again, they did made that Episode I + II combined game for DS in japan, so who knows.

To be fair though, it's not like as if there was any story worth shit in both of those 2 games combined, so I suppose combining and downgrading it could only improve it.

[Jefe]

Xenosaga = POS. Should never be compared/related to Xenogears.

[Charismatic]

I liked Xenosaga games, but the story of XG and the fucking awesome techs... man.
Xenosaga didn't come close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXJknd_sp0M

[Kaylia]

Too hard to retype a story that has already been written? lol

This is just stupid.

Are you being dense on purpose?

Development cost exploded since the psx era. I said a graphic overhaul won't happen because it cost too much and the game was too big initially.

If you're talking about a direct port with a complete disk 2, I'm sure they can figure out what was suposed to happen in both dungeon that were removed (Soylent system and the missiles facility), and give us a more detailled version of the battle against Solaris v2.0, but those events aren't really interesting in the big picture. They won't add anything we don't know already. Any other additions made by new writters would feel out of place.

Too many/long cutscenes, unlikable characters, lame dungeons, uninteresting story telling, etc, etc. ^

God forbid long cutscenes in a story driven game.

Beside, if Xenogears' cutscenes were voiced, your character would drink tea with Sigurd for 2 hours, and it would take 1 hour to explain you how to destroy Vanderkaum's fleet. They talk a lot more than you think, but you don't notice it because reading text is much faster than watching a cutscene.

I'm not saying that XG suck and XS is perfect, far from it. The presentation for XG was much better in overall, and the medium (text and sprite only) was more appropriate for a huge rpg. However, most story elements you liked in XG can be found in Xenosaga. It's easy to say uninteresting story, but much harder to justify it when you start looking at the details and take the whole series into account. In the end, you would probably be forced to admit it's not the story that is boring, but all the other issue that plague the gameplay that make you unable to enjoy it.

Where Xenosaga failed the most is their attempt to create a world that is enjoyable to explore (I'm including the battle system here). The jump ability and open environment in Xenogears was far more satisfying than being cramped inside a space ship. That alone hurt the pacing a lot. People didn't recognize Xenogears's universe in Saga, and they decided to hate it right away, without paying attention to the story.

The other issue is Shion not being Fei. She had a few good scenes, but because the story couldn't develop as fast as they originally planned, she ended up not doing much in the first 2 games, and sadly, was a total cunt in the last one. Abel was suposed to be introduced as a character in episode 2, and he was going to become the main character in the 2nd arc of the story (according to Soraya Saga, Takahashi's wife).

Because Takahashi poorly planned his money, the game was canned before we get to the interesting part. The first episode was suposed to be Ep1 and Ep2 combined, and the second episode was going to include the "Missing Year" events and Ep3. Everything point out that the 3rd and 4th episode (Episode 4+ for us) was going to be about Abel landing on a new planet with the reborn gnosis, 12 relics, a Zohar, a motherly robot with 2 personality (sound familiar?).


I'm not going to blame you for not liking the game, but did you give it a sincere try? Did you read any of the additional content from both database to understand the plot? Did you read Ziggy's game's script (this one was particularly good and link a ton of stuff together? Did you give a look to the Missing Year's story? Did you even bother looking up at the symbolism mentioned throughout the game (Marienkind, zohar, gnosticism, jung's bullcrap, the apocalypse..etc). Did you read Xenosaga's "perfect work"?

If the answer is no, there is a good chance you missed half of the plot. I'm certain you get the essential, but XS is great in the details, and if you refuse to pay attention to them, you will obviously hate the game, because the gameplay does blows compared to Xenogears.

To be fair though, it's not like as if there was any story worth shit in both of those 2 games combined

How am I suposed to take this comment seriously?

[Cydewinder]

I liked Xenosaga games, but the story of XG and the fucking awesome techs... man.
Xenosaga didn't come close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXJknd_sp0M

That also reminds me of another thing I loved about the game, the music, damn I need to play this game again.

[Kaylia]

Mitsuda was great. I can't wait to listen the soundtrack he composed for that wii rpgé..I forgot the title, but I'm sure the music will be great.

My favorite track he composed for Xeno universe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJCf_-BgzLc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3sErgVX25w

[Elcura]

June/October Mermaid (Emeralda's bossfight/theme) was always my favourite track, Flight was also good. It's a shame Xenogears OST was so short, some of the tracks were really really good, but you get sick of hearing the same music constantly.

[Kaelan?]

Yeah, I also agree Xenosaga wasn't the worst game ever, but it was definetely a step down from Xenogears. It's not that the story wasn't there, it was, but not only was it poorly presented, almost every other part of the game wasn't there and were just poorly executed in general. To me, every time I look at saga it looks like they focused so much on trying to make this huge epic multi-episode story that they forgot they had a game to make.

Gears had the most amazing storyline of any RPG I've ever played but it had more than just that. It was also fun. There were enjoyable minigames, the combat system for both characters and gears were fun and the visual design of the game was really well done given what they had to work with. The characters looked good, the anime cutscenes were great, the city & environments had plenty of diversity and were in general well done. And there's not just the contents of the game but how they present it - another reason I think it's one of the best RPGs I've ever played on any system is because it's executed in a much more mature way than almost every other RPG is (i.e. compare Fei and Elly's relationship with like....Shion and Allen; or say, the way Primera, Midori and Maria are portrayed vs. MOMO, Nephilim, the other 100-series realians and their gratuitous abuse of loli and panty-shots; or criticisms of ceirtain parts of society [in solaris] and religion [in the ethos] versus...actually I don't think there even is any equivalent in Saga; I could keep going, you get the point).

Saga had the foundation of a solid story, but way too many other things were wrong with it. The characters were almost all unlikeable or forgettable. Albedo was pretty much the only awesome character. Ziggy was alright, Jin was usually worthless but had a really good scene at the very end of EP3 and KOS-MOS was good until they started putting Mary into the story (I still think this is one of her best scenes)...everyone else was meh at best. The character design in general was horrible (especially for MOMO, Nephilim, Wilhelm, Chaos, the 100series in general and Rubedo). The gameplay wasn't even close to being fun for the vast majority of the entire 3 episodes. A lot of the presentation came off as either shallow, off the mark or just trying too hard (the chaos jesus scene really just made me cringe) - they should have stuck to using christian mythology for metaphors or drawing parallels/similarities between the characters the way gears did rather than trying to directly stick a bunch of it in and attempting to make it fit with everything else (although the scenes with Mizrahi yelling bible verses on top of a skyscraper were at least funny in a lulz kind of way).

It's still a solid RPG (well, 3) in the end, but gears was just so much more than that that in so many ways; it's not hard to see where people are coming from when then mention saga in the way most people in this thread have (or why that's such a common opinion of people that have played both gears and saga)

[greenhills]

whole bunch of stuff

You ask if we gave saga a sincere try, and yes i did. When the first one came out i was extremely excited, and played it almost twice through. The second came out and i was a little less excited but played it anyways. When the third came out and i finished it, i was very depressed that it in no way shape or form lived up to gears.
Why should i have to read other things to get anything out of the game? And yes, i do know the refernces, etc. I have read some of that side stuff for saga, i have read the perfect works, etc. My thing is, when i played gears, i didn't need to read anything else outside of playing the game to give two shits about it. It not only had thorough story telling, despite the rocky development, it was also fun to play. This is not something you can say about saga. Plus, why couldn't they just do short, awesome anime scenes when they had something purposefull to say, instead of boring ass 30 mins of pointless dialog. I wanted to play a game damnit.

[Elcura]

It's weird, RPGs are the one genre you expect a story, cut scenes and lot of dialogue and is probably one of the few genres where game play doesn't need to be good to be enjoyable (not my personal view on it).

It seems like the average attention span dropped a few points.

[Zilong]

I don't mind long cutscenes and dialogue if I could give a damn about what they were talking about/who were talking.

Saga doesn't have interesting characters, and kinda relies on me actually going through the fucking glossary of terms in the game to actually know what they were talking about.

I don't mind that so much, but shouldn't good storytelling incorporate those complicated concept/events into the storyline rather than having people talk about it briefly and expect the players to actually give a damn and go through the list of definitions/explanation on the glossary part of the status screen. It's like they were trying to be pretentious and assume the players give enough damn about their game to actually do the extraneous readings to understand and enjoy the fucking game, without actually giving them a good reason to.

I mean, I get where you're standing Kaylia, you're probably understand enough of the concept that the XG parallel is defined and clear to you. But to me, by the time I finished the first game, I felt so fucking ripped off. I thought the story was horrible, the character wasn't interesting, the combat/levelling system was tedious and felt more like a chore than a game and I really couldn't be bothered to explore the depth of the symbolism/concept/etc at that point because I JUST WASTED 50 FUCKING DOLLARS ON A PIECE OF SHIT THAT USED THE NAME OF MY FAVORITE RPG OF ALL TIME.

Really, had they gone with some other fucking name, I wouldn't have bought it on release date for full price, and if I did buy it later, I'd enjoy it more because obviously I won't have the goddamn Xenogears to expect from this RPG.

And really, if we were suppose to rate something by what they could have been than what they actually are, we wouldn't have any fucking argument of anything sucking, ever. Living in that kind of world would rip me off my raison d'etre to say the least.

PS: The one who bares fang against god is nice, though my favorite tracks on XG is Omen and June mermaid. Also June Mermaid really reminds me of just how fucking bad the translators are from that era of gaming was. The japanese name is "Kannazuki no Ningyou" which translates to October's Doll.

[Elcura]

The japanese name is "Kannazuki no Ningyou" which translates to October's Doll.

That makes sense considering who you fight when it plays. But translators sucked back when Xenogears came out. I bet a whole lot of the PS1 RPGs we played would make a lot more sense today because the translators and localization team actually give a damn. Or not, I'm no expert.

[greenhills]

It seems like the average attention span dropped a few points.

This is probly true, but after the great games the snes and ps1 had, as far as rpgs go, who really wants to waste time on something that isn't sucking you into an interesting world/story?

I don't mind that so much, but shouldn't good storytelling incorporate those complicated concept/events into the storyline rather than having people talk about it briefly and expect the players to actually give a damn and go through the list of definitions/explanation on the glossary part of the status screen. It's like they were trying to be pretentious and assume the players give enough damn about their game to actually do the extraneous readings to understand and enjoy the fucking game, without actually giving them a good reason to.

^ that, i read philosophy when i want to listen to people just talk about stuff. i play video games based on philosophy in the hopes that they will incorporate things into an interesting story of events.

That makes sense considering who you fight when it plays. But translators sucked back when Xenogears came out. I bet a whole lot of the PS1 RPGs we played would make a lot more sense today because the translators and localization team actually give a damn. Or not, I'm no expert.

after playing the ff remakes on the ds i keep hoping they will redo xenogears for the ds so that they retranslate it.

[Kaylia]

Why should i have to read other things to get anything out of the game?

Why not? The content was made to complement a game that was butchered due to time and money issue. It's a choice to limit yourself to the content you find on the disk. Of course, you can pretend the rest doesn't exist and tell yourself the story is terrible, incomplete and not worthy of being told, or you could actually read what Takahashi and his wife wrote, and try to understand the point behind the game.

By not looking in the details, you're the one missing out of a story that complement Xenogear's universe pretty well (and the opposite is also true).

[Sol-Blackguy]

Xenosaga was actually pretty awesome, but what really pissed me off was how they kept trying to change the battle system and the story pacing. You get so much from episode 1 with the data logs, mini games, (card game fucking owned) and character development. But episode 2 was so short and didn't give up that much in terms of story. The combat was so fucking bad that I just used cheat codes on my first run through because I wanted to play Xenosaga, not: "Stock energy for 9 turns, cast an elemental on all my guys, find the mobs G-Spot so I can uppercut them into the air and combo....oh fuck! they boosted ahead of me, I gotta do it all over again."