I got about 15 hours into Xenogears on a PSP years ago and stopped when a very plot important anime cutscene happened while I was on a bus with no headphones or subtitles.
My extreme no tolerance for bullshit did not get set off in those few hours.
yes play xenogears, no do not play xenoblade
Xenogears is good
the Xenosaga series takes a really long time to get good. Only attempt if youāre sure youāre ready to Eat Your Vegetables for a LONG time
Xenoblade Chronicles (the first one) is good
Xenoblade Chronicles X (the weird WiiU-only far-future sci-fi mecha-carā¦ thing) is pretty bad
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is alright
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Xenogears is a beautiful aesthetic experience married to an absolute slog of jrpg bullshit, I think it and Chrono Cross are the only ones of these games where Iād say the balance tips to the side of āworth playingā
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There are few games Iāve disliked more than Xenogears.
Nowadays thereās probably an Action Replay code or some shit that lets you speed up the dialogue. Without that Iād consider it unplayable.
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i hate xenogears because it teases you with this mech battle system that seems super robust but you fight like, five times and spend two discs watching cutscenes that are trite unless you saw them for the first time as a young teen. the best thing about xenogears is how the opening cinematic uses a star trek computer sound
the animation is pretty but id rather watch a cartoon
like the slog isnt jrpg slog its doing nothing at all forever slog
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I think there is a dialogue speedup thing but it breaks some cutscenes that are timed to the dialogue speed. I like the walking around town parts of jrpgs and hate the random battle interruption parts but Iāve played xenogears beginning to end many times and I love it.
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Xenogears has some legit neat moments, some of the best jrpg towns ever made and the ability to hop on every NPCs heads when they are talking to you. It also has way too slow text and the few times it actually forces you to make jumps are almost disastrous, but I think it is at worst a fairly interesting mess.
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The best/weirdest/worst part of Chronicles X is that you donāt even get the mechs for like 40 hours, and when you do, you will probably forget to buy insurance on them and have to cash grind to get one back after it gets disabled. Yes, there is an insurance market in this game.
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Re: Races in Role Playing Games
Iāve seen a few places where people criticize āracesā in RPGs, but likeā¦ not enough for a big name game (besides Pathfinder) to really do anything about it. Are there any interesting takes on this in terms of RPGs digital or analog?
I think my two issues that Iād like to see resolved:
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Humans are analogs to white people and their flexibility/ability to thrive anywhere whereas elves, dwarves, etc. are stand-ins for other races. I donāt know how much of that is me projecting existing racist structures onto another thing about race, but, hey, uhā¦
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The term race is fucking weird as hell. People will go through the trouble to incorporate the logic of magic into their fantasy trap mechanisms, but taxonomy? Psh. Building PF2 characters really highlighted this for me, but, yeah.
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Thereās a lot of reasons. For one thing, in D&D, the worst interpretation of race is that in the game work like how real life eugenics fans view RL races.
While I have complicated feelings about that idea, what I have less complicated feelings about is that Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves are all heavily derived from racial stereotyping? Like Orcs are very much coded as a āsavageā tribal culture (and ok to kill), Elves are very much coded as pure of blood and superior to everyone by virtue of being fair skinned, dwarves are pretty heavily based on Jewish stereotypes at their core, etc.
Races in D&D can even trend towards good and evil on a biological level, which is really messed up if weāre not talking about literal angels and demons.
And when you compound this with the basic premise of the game often is about going into the homes of the ātribalā races, murdering them, and taking their things, the colonialism and racism gets pretty stark.
Itās just a plain problematic concept, compounded by a whole lot of subtext that makes it even worse.
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I always thought elves were Asians, but thanks for expanding on my icky feelings. I am fairly certain thereās a book about Tolkien that explains how his experiences w other nationalities during WWI translated directly into the races he wrote into the LotR book.
I mean he only fought in Europe so Iām guessing relatively little. His description of Orcs as being similar dark skinned Mongolians stereotypes (his words, he uses the word stereotype when describing orcs) is pretty horrendous, but I donāt think it was based on personal experience.
He also was pretty staunchly anti-nazi and specifically decried them and their anti-semitism?
But he loved nobility and thought a good king was the best form of governance.
Personally I blame Tolkien a lot, but I think the roots of the specific conception of race in fantasy owes just as much to actual outspoken white supremacist Robert E Howard, who classified races pretty hardcore in his works, and the real life human ethnicities they were a part of. D&D as Gary Gygax shaped it owes a lot to Howard, and I think the racial undercurrents of Howard come through a lot in it to a degree thatās less remarked on than Tolkien.
Which isnāt to give Tolkien a pass, but itās hard not to notice everything bad about Tolkien got filtered through D&D and just kept getting even worse in later fantasy writing.
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5e in its popularity uses the term āancestryā to describe literally the exact same thing āraceā always described in dnd just because the word āraceā is loaded and itās utterly cowardly
I actually noticed PF2 used the term āancestryā, and when I looked into 5e rules I just assumed theyād be forward thinking, too, butā¦
Eh, half the reason this discourse about āRaceā in D&D happened was because 5e got huge. Like it wasnāt even in the mainline RPG conversation before a bunch of new folks less stuck in old assumptions flooded into tabletop.
Thatās not to say there was never any criticism, far from it, it just wasnāt a recognizably vocal and visible part of the marketing demographics for a corporation to care until recently.
Criticism of D&Dās handling of race and gender is pretty much as old as D&D.
That said, Pathfinder isnāt really any more progressive, IMO. Ancestry is in theory a less loaded term, but the implication of certain genetic groups being as divergent as they are being a purely genetic one is still implied by itās usage.
I also fully expect whenever 5e revised or 6e or whatever comes out to change the term. Dunno to what exactly yet, but I think the designers have already said they were going to look into it?
Edit: I want to make it crystal clear that itās not that I donāt think the criticism mattered before, just the folks running the companies involved didnāt think it would make them money for listening to the criticism until recently. Like Disney and having one queer character cameo in each movie they make.
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This is a lot more positive than I had imagined. Are there existing examples of systems that solve the problems wrt sex and race representation in games?
I mean a lot of RPGs straight up donāt need to because there arenāt any āracesā. Some games try to do it by having multifaceted, complex depictions of fantasy groups, like The Burning wheel (although there are still some pretty big issues with that game, like how all Dwarves are inherently greedy and thereās still a lot of biological determinism).
But like, Apocalypse World is set in the post apocalyptic future so youāre not really going to have anyone but humans. It also dodged the question of gender by making it more a question of pronuouns and aesthetics.
My inclination these days is to give players tools to make an otherworldly and fantastical being if they want, but try to divorce it as much from real world eugenics ideas as possible. Maybe the only real reason elves are different from humans is because if you live long enough in a magic Forrest, you get elfy. Maybe you got bit by a spider so you have eight eyes now. Maybe youāre a demon who got dumped on your parents doorstep as a child. That kind of thing.
But I admit these thoughts are incomplete, and probably imperfect. Itās something Iāve grappled with a lot in my worldbuilding and game design of my own.
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absolutely
Iām actually fond of the term ākinā as used in the swedish RPG Forbidden Lands but I can accept that its imperfect in the way ancestry in PF2e is
But yeah Runequest and Talislanta are both classic rpgs that had nuanced views on ethnicity in fantasy games: They centered culture and didnāt have deterministic views of how a culture impacted your ability to do things.
Basically, Iām fine with dwarfs and elfs having darkvision but I canāt abide by racial stat bonuses and maluses. Half-orcs getting -2 charisma back in dnd 3e and pathfinder 1e is straight up racist horseshit.
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Yeah like, breathing underwater, claws, wings, being a sentient plant, that stuff all feels different to me than āIām a pointy eared person who will live forever and is better than you at everythingā.
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