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Digital Torture: Xenogears (PSX) - Intro
CyclopticInsight - writer/webmaster - posted on Friday, 07/13/07 17:33:13 EDT
I have finally willed my body to do what I swore I would never again do - start a new game of Xenogears. You may say that I'm crazy because Xenogears, in your opinion, is "one of the best RPGs ever". You may think I'm being a bit dramatic about this. Maybe I am; the crazy part certainly crossed my mind a few times, since I consider this one of the games I take most issue with and yet here I am playing it again by my own choice. Thus, before I actually hit that trangular start button, I'd like to explain what I'm doing here.
First a little background: Xenogears was developed by Square and was first released in Japan in February of 1998. The game was said to have deep religious (especially Christian) symbolism, and was thought to be controversial enough prevent a release outside of Japan (which of course piqued many gamers' interest) - but EA published the North American version, which was released in October of 1998. I obtained this information through Wikipedia, and while spoilers are present on the page, I ignored them as much as possible to avoid refreshing my memory of my first playthrough. The article, for anyone interested, can be found here.
I was intrigued due to the "controversy", but I didn't seek the game out immediately at release since I'd played through Final Fantasy VII the year before, and the ending left a bad taste in my mouth. As a matter of fact, I'll put an article up about that one soon, but as this isn't about FF7, I'll just say that my faith in Square's storytelling wasn't at its peak. While I didn't pick up a copy of Xenogears at this point, that didn't stop me from hearing about it from everyone who had, who lauded the game and told me that it was a must-play. "A deep, rewarding story!" they'd tell me, "It starts off slow, but gets amazing!" Only a single person told me otherwise (and damn, should I have listened).
It just happened that on a trip to a local game store, I found a used copy of Xenogears for 40 bucks (coincidentally, I'd also found Fallout 2 there used for $10, but that's beside the point). After all the praise I'd heard, I figured I'd be a fool to pass it up at that price and so I made my purchase and went home. I turned the game on and the graphics looked blurry and pixellated - which I expected, as I'd heard that was one of the game's flaws. It dragged on for awhile, which didn't bother me since a slow beginning isn't the most uncommon way for an RPG to start, thinking only about what my friends said about it starting slow but getting great.
I didn't play it again for two months.
I picked it up again over a winter vacation, and decided that if it was going to be as great as everyone said, I'd steel myself, play through the crappy parts, and be happy when it got good. Unfortunately, that never happened, as the game instead threw me such "plot twists" as the soylent system, which turned out to be making people into food, which I'd never have guessed two hours before the grisly revelation. Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
Xenogears went on and on, and I kept playing through it being bored out of my skull for most and saying "What the hell is with this story?" for the rest. Story resolution came, but was underwhelming. The gameplay got deeper, but not better. Still I trudged onward through cutscene after cutscene on the second disk, still waiting for that amazing part to come. Sixty hours passed in total, and when it was all over, I scratched my head, thinking maybe I'd missed the good part somehow. That was probably the point that I vowed never again to play through this travesty of a game, and wished I'd listened to the one dissenting opinion in the crowd.
Now it's years later. I've played through many more games, great and bad, and somehow people still tell me that Xenogears is a great, deep, engaging, must-play RPG, and I even now don't quite understand this. I think that the hype raised my expectations far above what they should've been, though I'm not entirely sure that I wasn't playing it objectively the first time through. To see if somehow, in waiting for the "good part", I'd indeed missed it, I decided I'd play through it again, despite the aforementioned thought that I might be insane for putting myself through this ordeal. Reviews of Xenogears tend to be skewed one of two ways: Those who hate it, who criticize the method of story exposition through extensive cutscenes and short sections of actual game, and those who love it, feeling that the plot makes up for any shortcomings. My own opinion is that while not terrible, the story brought nothing new or terribly controversial at all to the table, and that those who hold Xenogears up as a great story are wrong. I'm prepared to accept it if I turn out to be incorrect; if not, my writing should show that at least my opinion is supported with actual evidence.
A simple note here: I am writing down most of the plot and events of the game and this will resemble a storyline walkthrough with my own notes interspersed. This is because as a game, Xenogears does not work like a book - one cannot simply flip back a few pages and re-read a passage that wasn't explained thoroughly at the time. As such, since I'm writing it down (and in doing so, reading the same story twice) things that become clear to me earlier on may not be as obvious to most people on their first playthrough. I believe that since what I am criticizing about Xenogears is the assertion of many gamers that the story was written to the point of many calling it an "interactive novel", my methods are bringing it closer to the written novel in order to experience its story in that form. You may believe that defeats the point, since Xenogears is a game and not a work of literature - so my end review of it as a game will address that point, and I will comment on the music, actions of characters, level design, and the like (while factoring in the time that the game was made) whenever these details are particularly important to the story.