Yesterday I fired up the old PS1 (via PS3 emulator) to catch up on some unfinished business. Once upon a time I rented a game called Xenogears, played it for a couple of hours, then had to go do some stupid baseball crap and never got to finish. Now that I have the mandatory 40-60 hour chunk of dead time required by the Japanese role-playing gods to see Xenogears to completion, I intend to do just that. Plus, since I’m older, I can drink while playing it, Huzzah.
The game starts off in traditional fashion: you’re a good looking teenage dude who wakes up in a random village only to find out you’ve got amnesia. The folks there have been raising you since the day you got dropped off by a mysterious man. Luckily, the elders like you, the kids like you, and the girls think you’re cute. Then, just when you think the game is going to be the next Farmville, someone needs your help running an errand and boom—you’re thrust into a world ending calamity. Note to self: never run errands for people in rural villages while suffering from amnesia.
There you have it: a plot at its Japanese role-playing finest. I swear the amnesia thing is taught in classes over there. You’re all set up to spend the rest of the game uncovering your dark, murky past in hopes that it will help you fix a dark, murky future
The only real question is, what bad-ass power are you going to discover about yourself along the way? Could it be magical properties, like a Final Fantasy series? Could it be monster summoning, like a Pokemon game? Could it be samurai sword skills, ninja skills, I used-to-kill-people-with-a-gun-before-I-got-whacked-in-the-head-skills? None of the above, actually.
As it turns out, your special inner gift is the ability to go bat shit crazy in a giant mechanized battle suit and kill everyone in your home town. Yeah, uh, so, some robots crash land in your town, start wiping the place out, and in the middle of the murder and chaos you have this flash back to a time when your dad used to beat you for not getting A’s on your science paper or something, commandeer a robot (called Gears), black out, and slaughter everyone and everything.
Afterwards you wake up clueless, the surviving villagers have the red-ass about what you did, words, words, words, you’re sent to wander the world over in belief that your life is worthless, along again. Hurray adventure!
It will be a while before you get back into your murder-bot. In the meantime you’ll walk the desert, do a little soul searching, run into some really moody, preachy girl with a gun, then, finally, have an encounter with the game’s antagonist (named Grahf) who sports a mask likened to a Shogun warlord. He’s a bad mama-jama, you can tell by the way the writers make him laugh after he says stuff like, “the villagers deserved to die, their lives were empty anyway, ha, ha, ha!” That’s some scary $^&#, huh? Thank god I was pumped full of liquid courage at the time or I probably would have had to stop playing
Anyhoo, this dude knows about your past, but he’s not going to tell you, of course. He reveals that the murder-bot Gear you’re piloting is pretty powerful. So powerful it could kill God. Yeah, you heard that right; you’re future —part of this great prophecy thing, says Grahf—involves killing God. Of course, Grahf let’s you know that he could kill you right now, because he’s also bad-ass and stuff, but it wouldn’t be worth his time. Also, it wouldn’t be much of a game if you died 2 hours in. And finally, Grahf wants you to kill God because he’s pro abortion or something—I can’t remember, I was on my third mixed drink by then.
Here is where you the games starts to get all moody. See, if this were an American game, you’d go fight because you like to fight, like this was a UFC reality television show. In JRPGs, you have to have a reason to fight—because you’ve got a giant robot, a prophecy to fulfill, and two armies that want your new technology at the expense of your life isn’t good enough. No, you need some kids to be oppressed, or high taxes, or crying girls, or hijacked tea leaves to get the fighting spirit raging again.
Unfortunately, this means there will be a lot of mindless button mashing on your part to get through all the preachy text windows you’re forced to read to make sense of why you’re doing what you’re doing. This brings up one of my major complaints with the game: the walk around time to get advance to text driven dialogue.
At one point you find yourself in this sprawling secret pirate base (of course there are pirates in this game, stupid question) and I swear the programmers put all the people you need to talk with on opposites sides of the damn place just to make sure your game character gets his cardio in. If the purpose is to set the scene of the conversations by putting you in the proper location, like the Gears hanger, or the galley, or the sauna, just warp me there because all this hoofing is tiring on the player, especially since there are load times. That’s right, as you move through this virtual journey there are load times even though this is a 15 year old game running off your PS3’s hard drive.
Load times suck. If you’ve been a gamer for any stretch you know this to be true. And there are a lot of little delays in Xenogears that don’t have to be there. Sure, they make you feel like you’re back in time, playing to original version. But they weren’t fun back then either! Every port of an old game with loading times that comes to a super computer system like the PS3 should have the loading times removed, period.
There are two other things that bother me about this game. First, there is no zoom-out so I can take in more of the map. You are zoomed in so close to your character while he explores enemy turf it’s difficult to take in the surroundings and figure out where you are going. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it wasn’t for my second complaint: random encounters.
Nothing says classic Japanese role player like wandering around only to be ambushed by a flashing screen and battle music. Whether it’s slimes, or knights, or giant robots, when they materialize out of nowhere—over and over again because you can’t figure out where the &%$# you are in a dungeon—they piss you off. I’m in a giant robot battle suit that can kill God for Christ sake, you’re telling me I can’t detect a battle before it happens?
I digress. There are some seriously fun features here as well. We haven’t talked at all about the games well written characters, the sprites and animation, the music, or the sci-fi concepts (like a flying space battleship and the sand submarine). I specifically like how Xenogears gives me the impression that the sky is the limit with what my future as a robot killing machine will blossom into as I further the atheist voting agenda. But I’ll talk to you more about those in my next Xenogears update.
Last save: Play time 5:24. Aveh Capital City.