I think it is trying to do a “you can play the game how you want” which I am sure there was a lot of pressure after something like Live A Live or FF4 which has you passing through party members. The game is trying to balance so many plot points that everything gets lost in this sludge.
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Until the Attack on Serfat World State
Okay so Heaven (it is a spaceship) is manufacturing a war to get combat data and collect slaves to do bioengineering to create an army to do something like defeat god or be evil or fucking whatever.
The hidden UFO community just enlisted my party to take on Heaven so that humans can make their own destiny. Our stupid huge party if I can remember
Rico - bioengineered freak man who is heir apparent to Midgar
Middle East Prince in Exile
His Totally Cool Heaven Spy Bodyguard
Totally Cool not going betray me Doctor Citan Uzuki
Their mutual buddy Auron from FFX
Auron’s Son a gun totting priest that murders the bioengineered freaks to save them from themselves
The 13yo Mother Superior Bride to be of Middle East Prince who is also ruler of a 3rd nation
A 12yo girl who just had to kill her dad who pilots a mech that probably has her mom inside it let’s be real for a second
A hamster bear thing that wants to fuck the main character
Amnesiac main character that again has a robot with a bumper sticker that says “this machine kills god”
His maybe girlfriend that may also be the reincarnation of his old wife who has telekinetic brain exploding powers and is addicted to pilot meth and just recently rebelled against heaven where she was previously a wetworks black ops operative until she gained a conscious and now Heaven (it is a spaceship)'s revolving door of underage girls try to kill her
God I probably forgot 3.
Getting to the UFO which has a 500 year old 13yo Queen and the sole defense mech is piloted by a 12yo girl and looking at Xenosaga and going I Know The Perverts.
Auron has died on screen at least twice now and has mysteriously appeared to save our asses 3 times and been like “You Dumb Fucks I knew what was going on the whole time let me explain it to you while I swig this whiskey.”
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I assume he could be lurking in any hot tub
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There can’t be anything valuable in that 3 hours right?
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Didn’t watch it, but as seemingly the only enjoyer of long video essay stuff on this forum, I would not be a trustworthy opinion
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Look Xenogears I didn’t play you for a week you can’t have me come back and start saying Bledavik and expect me to remember that was the capital of the Middle Eastern Country.
Somewhere on the IC/SB continum I had heard about the dungeon where you find the omnigear. In which you navigate identical tunnels to get to a curved tunnel with 8-9 doors on one side. Each door contains a hallway which leads to a hanger. This is puncuated by loading for each door. One of these hallways has a second door and one of those doors in the main hall turns the shit on. I spent 3 hours in this dungeon. Because after not playing for a week I came back and had to relearn how to navigate while being ambushed by a required battle every 3 minutes. A battle that kept ruining my party because I brought the defected girlfriend along and she died from the mooks in this. I learned my lesson only bringing Blanka along. Not going to bring along Citan Uzuki because he is a great guy and definitely will never betray me.
Also continuing my plot recap for my own gosh darn sake.
Midway through return to Nisan
Okay so the UFO Society is gonna wage war on Heaven. Meanwhile the headquarters of “The Ethos” (aka The Catholic Church I guess) was raided by Heaven and killed everyone except for like one guy look the translation/dialog was really fucking bad there.
The UFO Society also offscreen in a text box removed the inhibitors that were put in all living things so they didn’t get too smart/powerful. This seemed like a huge deal but I guess all the bullshit politicking was more important.
Okay! So we gotta defeat Heaven (It is a spaceship). This means we have to something something 3 Gates that connect the earth with Heaven. We do not know where the gates are. ???
Great! We’ll just go back to the Middle East and overthrow the puppet ruler of there. Also there is apparently a super rare gundam there. Like a fucking sick gundam that fought heaven 500 years ago. We gotta go get it before the puppet ruler does. We do in that horrible dungeon I mentioned. The puppet ruler retreats to The Hidden Gate Number 1! Wow how convinent. Also The Middle East Prince’s Advisor I guess has secret royal blood because he used a Royal Eye Sensor. Or he is using the Prince’s Other Eye because they both wear an eyepatch. No time to explain!
Oh also the stuffed animal that wants to fuck me became a giant kaiju and beat up a guy. It was very strange and I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be impressed or laugh.
I failed against the puppet state Gundam so have to try again tomorrow.
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Fuck the fights in this are miserable as I MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS on my 3rd try at a boss battle. I was about to start save stating before every attack.
I also don’t think I have mentioned in this thread that Garf keeps showing up and asking “Do you want my meth-laden 5 hour energy drink?” Before syringing it into my enemies. Then he flies off. Then I beat the enemy they energy drinked and they explode.
There’s also the Anime Harem that follows Ramus.
And like some other guy who I guess is the head of Heaven but isn’t the TV Conspiracy Cube or Space Emperor.
We beat the puppet state Gundam.
Tomorrow I will maybe have the energy to describe the dumbest plot point yet. See we gotta blow up the gates to heaven. Which form a Triangle. My party is a bunch of fucking geniuses.
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Finished Disc 1.
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The true Xenogears starts here
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I am definitely going to forget things because the last cutscene was an HOUR LONG. Audacious
Until The End of Disc 1 (Part 1)
Fei and company have a fucking brilliant idea. In order to take the fight to heaven they are going to destroy the 3 gates that lock Heaven (It is a spaceship) from the rest of Earth (or whatever.)
The first lock was convinently located just off I-3:16 in the Middle East. The puppet leader was diposed and ran straight to the Gate. I keep forgetting to mention that every bad guy in a mech we meet right before the fight Garf shows up and tells them “You have bullshit beta power. You Alpha Power. Only my meth-laced 5 hour Energy Drink can give you real power.”
Jumping ahead to the end of the disc when it explains fucking everything: see Garf is Lacan, who is the original incarnation of Fei/The Main Character. He tried to blow up the world (and the sleeping corpse of “god” or “mother” (hey I haven’t mentioned in this post yet the translation and the story completely unravel yet)) 500 years ago. He almost succeeded. Anyways Fei is his clone or something so he’s trying to train Fei to be his vessel to Mass of Destruction.
We defeat the puppet leader, he blows up and the gate blows up. The Prince becomes King then tries to renounce the crown for a republic but the people love him too much or something. It turns out his advisor Sigurd who also has an eyepatch is his half-brother.
Okay! So these fucking morons have the dumbest idea of all time. They are gonna use a secret ancient laser in the middle east fire that at a Mirror on the literal Tower of Babel and that is gonna reflect off and destroy the second gate which is buried deep beneath the Vatican. At the Vatican we had picked up a small child made of nano-machines who is a party member and attacks with her beautiful green hair. She thinks Fei is her dad. I think this a 3rd Fei who is not Lacan. In a flashback she? Fei? Saw Not-Fei say “I’ll keep our daughter safe even from you!” To Elly.
The morons fire the stupid laser and destroy the 2nd gate. They then say the 3 gates make a triangle. Which yes. They are 3 points. The 3rd is deep underwater. The walrus salvage captain that is cool as hell because He
Is
A Man
Of The Sea.
Lends us some equipment. We blow up the gate I honestly cannot remember if anything happens down there.
The 3rd gate reveals Heaven (It Is A Spaceship). It is like a giant dildo. Then for some reason revealing it makes it open up into a giant wagon wheel with no outer wheel. I guess it looked really cool to do that. Also it has reverse gravity of Earth. Because okay.
A famous game journalist or someone that posted on a video game forum of absolute assholes once described Xenogears as “The Best Game Of All Time and The Worst Game Of All Time put into opposite ends of the Large Hadron Collider” (El Psy Kangroo). After playing this sucker for 40 hours I cannot agree with this.
The first 5 hours are impressive. When you realize the game was made subquentally is impressive. The budget of the anime scenes are impressive. When it starts to fall apart is impressive. When a name is spelt 3 different ways in one conversation is impressive. When some character abandons everything you know about them for plot reasons is impressive. When you remember the fully function first town was there just so they could destroy and murder everyone in it is impressive. When they remember a character you have forgotten about 15 hours so they could do some plot is impressive.
The game is impressive.
The game is also oppressive. Each random battle is a little puzzle. The problem is you learn the solution to the puzzle then are asked to do it 50 times. As you navigate bland corridor dungeons with lots of doors that have loading Xenogears you hope to something interesting.
I keep thinking about how some nerds taught themselves Japanese in the hopes of understanding “The Holy Text”. The translation starts to fall apart as the game tries to very slowly pull it’s 1000 threads together which points at above spoiler block.
Anyways will start reading Disc 2 soon.
Check the next post after this for the rest of Disc 1 writing it RIGHT NOW.
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The End of Disc 1Part 2
So the only way to get into Heaven (It Is A Spaceship) is to have a 13 year old super pilot push her Super Gundam into the Trans-Burrito-Calyco Field surrounding Heaven while the whole party just like hangs out on it’s shoulders miles above the surface.
This somehow just works, whatever. I am mentioning again that on Heaven the gravity is reversed and you are facing the ground, I guess, when Heaven is open, whatever. Anyways you act like murder victims and seperate into teams then get further lost.
Fei sees how the different strata of people on heaven live. The 3rd class citizens are conscript slaves from Earth that can maybe work their way up to 2nd class which has a mall and television. They are docile like SHEEP MAN!!! Above that are the ultra wealthy like Elly and her family and military geniuses and pureblood heaven people.
So yeah Fei finds out Elly’s Dad is a highup in the military and later that her Dad was a nazi eugenist who made Solyent Green. He like tried to help people including Elly and her Real Mom. Hiding them in his mansion and raising Elly as his daughter. Elly and Fei watch each other take a bath and there is a lot of bad clumsy JRPG shorthand for romance that infested the brains of amateur game designers for 20 years.
Elly and Fei cannot find Dr. Citan Uzuki (who is a cool dude and will absolutely not betray us). They do witness a speech from The Emperor and Krealian (who is described as the real head of Heaven.)
I am going to try and describe the next 5 to 50 plot beats in one sentence each without jokes or commentary to accurately describe how derailed it becomes.
The Emperor announces they have kidnapped All your other party members.
You break into Elly’s Dad’s Computer to find the best way to rescue them.
Fei goes by himself after proving he would protect E’s D’s Daughter.
The cops show up and E’s Dad holds then off allowing Elly to chase her dreams and love.
Fei meets up with Citan Uzuki.
Elly meets up and gives them a keycard-
Okay this is getting boring, and not arriving at my point. Ugh. Forget it.
After escaping a trash compactor they find some cans of food on the ground. In a startingly turn of becoming video game characters Fei and Elly decide they must absolutely eat this unmarked canned food. They eat till they are stuffed. Citan Uzuki says nothing. In the next room they find a Soylent Green factory. It is made of discarded bio-experiments and punished by Heaven citizens. Uzuki says “Look you had to see for yourself, that’s why I didn’t say anything when you ate people.”
Fei finally calls Uzuki on his bullshit and goes “why do you know everything and have a magic keycard that opens all doors?” So Uzuki knocks Fei out. Meanwhile Krelian takes Elly and calls her “The Mother” and “The Antitype (Oh That’s Why That Poster Had That Name #insertcredit )”.
Citan Uzuki was working for The Ministry the whole time. He was there to observe and collect The Animus. See The Ministry is a floating TV Cube that says cryptic shit and wants to resurrect “god” and the take over the universe. They don’t seem to be able to anything by themselves right now. They are humans who abandoned their physical bodies a long time ago.
But see The Animus which happens to be everyone in your party are the perfect vessels to regain their physical forms. See everything on Earth is like this elaborate breeding/chaos/control program to create the conditions by which The Ministry can get their bodies back and then somehow also use “The Key” and resurrect god. After humans crash landed here 10,000 years ago God was lost.
Okay back in the present. Citan Uzuki turns off the security camera and talks to Id, who is Fei’s split personality because this game was made in 1997. Id wants to destroy the world because he is the 2nd incarnation of Lacan/Garf. But Id’s Dad buried Id and created Fei. There is also a secret 3rd personality called The Coward. If Fei believes in love and elly and having chill times he’ll be fine. But if the gets too upset Id will come out and try to bring about the Apocalypse.
Keeping up?
But Id takes a lot of energy so he gets tired and goes to sleep and Fei wakes up. Citan keeps the security cameras off. See Citan wasn’t working for The Ministry at all. He was working for The Emperor to observe Fei and decide if Fei was a threat to the world. Citan and the Emperor decided that Fei can probably like wake up god or cause the singularity or something despite all the evidence he will kill everyone (more on that in a second.)
Look Citan needed everyone to get captured so that he could do surgery on their brains and remove the limiter there that prevented them from fighting The Emperor and The Ministry. Look everyone is fine. Time to get off Heaven.
We meet up with everyone and Elly’s Parents and The Ratman character who literally hasn’t had a line for 20 hours so he’s-yep he just betrayed us and killed Elly’s Mom and ran away. Oh look Garf is here. Time to fight him. Garf kills Elly’s Dad. We beat him but all of this is super stressful for Fei so Id comes out and calls his Gundam to him. (the amount of G Gundam in this game is something else.)
Id starts to completely wreck shop on Heaven. Luckily the 13 year old girl shows up and takes everyone away. We all get on our big battleship and start to fly away when Heaven Colony Drops on Earth.
This is immediately forgotten as Elly tries to calm Id down. She succeeds but everyone agrees Fei is super fucking dangerous and should probably die. Fei and Elly run away.
Elsewhere, somehow, Ramus, who has gone insane from pilot meth (normal) and being a sore loser gets a Super Gundam (an Omnigear) and attacks Fei’s Normal Gundam. The Gundam crashes and Elly dies in Fei’s arms while Lacan/Garf as a ghost watches on. End of Disc 1
Except I also need to explain all this side shit. After the battle with Garf, Gard dissappears offscreen and his fighting partner in the battle The Executioner transforms into Miang who has also said cryptic shit and talks to Krellian. Krellian is totally obsessed with Elly (oops!)
Despite all being on Heaven when it got Colony Dropped Krellian, The TV Cube, Miang, and The Emperor are fine. Apparently The Emperor is cursed and literally cannot die. Plot armor whatever. How anyone survived it is me throwing up my hands and going whatever man!
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Another (almost) long-lost thought about Xenogears is that it was the first post-coital scene I had ever seen in a videogame (and probably the only one I can actually recall)
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Just got to this. Huh that was nice. I am about halfway through Disc 2.
I had to transfer my save from the mister to my laptop/retroarch because it kept freezing at a boss battle.
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Look I’ve been trying to figure out how I would summarize Disc 2 of Xenogears. How I could possibly emotionally explain the plot. I’ve tried to explain one scene to friends multiple times now. One Quarter into the 15 minute explanation and they go “okay.” Then they start going “Oh that is a weird interpretation of Pulp SciFi/Freud/Gnosticism.” Then they go “This game (Disc 2) poisoned a generation of nerds.”
It felt important to play. I have also heard friends say “I heard it is a the best JRPG” I start laughing. I just laugh and laugh. It is not. It’s a boring JRPG. It is filled with characters and abilities you instantly forget. Your second most important party member is removed from Disc 2.
I am glad I sat there and finish it. I had done roughly an hour of grinding before the final dungeon on the characters I expected to use. The final dungeon has a bad puzzle about wasting your time. Every random battle I gave an audible sigh. The final dungeon takes place entirely in mechs. Preparing a full cast list for the final dungeon would easily take 5 hours. You don’t need to do this, but would in 1998. I was surprised to arrive at the final boss and it saying “You should use the whole cast, and save Fei’s energy for the boss.” Suddenly confronted with 4 mini-last bosses that if defeated weakened the final boss. I immediately pulled out a party of my most unused members and my 4th prepared character. The 4th prepared character gets rocked instantly.
See there is no easy way to heal in a mech. You have Health and Fuel. The only way to Heal is to spend a significant section of your Fuel. You need to fuel to take all actions. The best action you can take is Boost, which doubles your Take Action Speed. It also very quickly drains your fuel. It’s a necessary and important tactical decision that assumes if you beat the boss there is nothing afterwards and you can go rest at an inn or pay to repair your mech because sometimes resting doesn’t count sometimes.
I ended up switching in one of my main party members for the last two battles and failing the second battle 3 times (thank you save states.) I barely survived. It felt great. And then I turned on booster at the actual final boss and beat them immediately.
I cannot begin to bring focus to recap Disc 2 because it is 11 different simultaneous stories layered on each other. I had mentioned they made this game subquestionaly . Disc 2 was clearly laid out and decided what was important what they could and could not afford to show and how they had to cut the rest of the story together. It is definitely better than Disc 1 because it doesn’t have as many miserable dungeons of blank corridors. It still has a few.
Things make more sense now, because Xenogears was a lense through which people saw the world and entertainment and media. It doesn’t matter that it is incoherent. That it piled these college sounding concepts together In A Video Game is enough. It even has anime cutscenes. The last scene is all anime and the most spoken dialog is by some guy who wasn’t in the game. I am going to think about that forever.
That it makes great pains to say that every enemy you kill in the back-half you are actually relieving their suffering sure is something.
Xenogears remains impressive.
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