Xenogears

aka: Project Noah, Xenosaga Episode V: Xenogears
Moby ID: 4154
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Description official descriptions

A war has been raging on the continent of Ignas between the Kislev Empire to the north and the kingdom of Aveh in the south. It has gone for so long that people have forgotten the cause. As a mysterious organization known as "Ethos" introduces an ancient technology in the form of huge mega-robots, the tides are turning. Gebler, a military organization with an unknown agenda, is pulling the strings and supports Aveh to regain its authority over Kislev.

A failed attempt to steal one of Kislev's new Gears, a giant robot named "Weltall", leads to a fight between a group of Gebler and Kislev guards in the remote town of Lahan in the outskirts of Aveh. One of the villagers, Fei Fong Wong, impulsively takes possession of "Weltall" and steers it to fight. As Fei's best friend Timothy is killed during the battle, he releases a massive wave of energy and destroys the whole village together with one of his close friends, Alice.

After this tragedy, Fei is blamed for the destruction of the village and the death of his friends. Pursued by military governments and mysterious forces, Fei sets out on an epic quest for answers and his own forgotten past.

Xenogears is a Japanese-style RPG with a few distinguishing features. The characters have the ability to jump, which must be used on several occasions to access specific locations. There are two types of combat in the game: standard and gear. In standard combat, the characters fight with equipped weapons, learning and performing different combos that can be executed in one turn. But often the heroes will have to explore dungeons while piloting giant robots called "gears". Gear combat follows different rules: they are able to perform actions until they run out of fuel, therefore the player must concentrate on finishing the enemy quickly. It is possible to equip various accessories on the gears, including those that will let them partially restore fuel. Gears cannot level up, but can be upgraded in workshops.

Spellings

  • ゼノギアス - Japanese spelling

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Credits (PlayStation version)

292 People (282 developers, 10 thanks) · View all

Producer
Director / Scenario Writer
Script
Main Programming
Music Compostion-Arrangement
Character Design
Mechanical Design
Co-Character Design
Co-Mechanical Design
Art Director
Chief Artistic Design
Localization Coordinator / Project Leader
Localization Assistant Coordinator
Executive Producers
Localization Management
Localization Staff
QA Manager
Lead QA Technician
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 91% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 96 ratings with 5 reviews)

Mechs, mutants, machinations, and lots of half-assed gameplay in between...

The Good
Xenogears is another one of those RPGs that's coveted by a dedicated fanbase and/or hardcore RPG players but is met with either disdain or dislike by everyone else. Coming out in an era when Squaresoft tried to sort of recreate its image through the kinds of themes present in their games, Xenogears is another sci-fi fantasy RPG, combining elements of advanced technology, religious and psychoanalytical philosophy, and to some extent, magic. And as with many Squaresoft RPGs, the game's strong point is its plot. Xenogears tells the story of Fei, who after "accidentally" laying waste to what he thinks is his home village, goes off on a journey to find his place in life. But what starts off as a cliche quest for soul searching turns into an epic tale of several millennia of human progress on a distant Earth, and a battle for the ultimate fate of those humans. And if that's not for you, you also get to duke it out in giant mechs called Gears. And who doesn't like giants robots, eh?

The Bad
Well, I hope you enjoyed reading the previous section of this review because frankly, that's all the good stuff I could say about this game. While the concept of this game's story seems brilliant, it is executed in a dull and slow-paced fashion. I honestly have no idea how Squaresoft thought they could stuff this much plot into a two disc RPG without it gobbling up hours of gameplay time, but they certainly didn't do a very good job of it. The amount of text-based cutscenes in this game is just ridiculous. And with the dialogue already being quite poorly written, I found it irritating having to sit through them. And the amount of these scenes just increased as the game went on, with disc two being almost completely comprised of them.

But forget plot and presentation for a minute and digress to a much more important aspect of a video game: the gameplay. This is probably the biggest source of boredom and frustration in this game. The battle system seems fun and different initially, but becomes extremely boring and repetitive as the game goes on. Rarely do you do anything more in a battle than heal your party and use characters' best Death Blows. Oh sure, there are Ether spells in this game, but most of them are just there for show and are borderline useless in most situations. In-Gear battles are a bit better since you actually have to take fuel consumption into account and have Special Options and the Booster feature to use, but don't feel as fun as they should. What also bothers me is how ridiculously easy all the battles in this game are, but I guess that's there to counter the relentless encounter rate in this game.

That leads me to the topic of dungeons and cities. Most of the locales in this game are pretty boring. The NPCs don't say anything interesting, and there's little more to do than to shop and find some way to progress the plot. Okay, maybe one or two towns DO offer a mini-game for you mess around with, but they're hardly worth your time. The dungeons in this game are quite tedious and poorly designed. In a lot of them, all the rooms look the same, and while I could forgive this in an 8-bit or 16-bit RPGs which have a static overhead view, in Xenogears you're often forced to rotate your camera within dungeons to know where to go, which quickly makes you lose your sense of direction since only two dungeons in the game actually have maps, and you're forced to figure out where to go by yourself. Combine that with sloppy platforming elements, annoying puzzles, and a high random battle encounter rate and you the perfect recipe for gamer rage.

One last complaint I have about this game is a lack of any interesting side quests or dungeons. I know a few bonus areas open up near the end of the game, but only one of them is actually somewhat pertinent to the plot and offers something useful inside it. The rest are just plain stupid and pointless.

The Bottom Line
Xenogears is one of those games that you either love, hate, or don't care about whatsoever. It is an unconventional RPG that tried to set itself apart which a complex plot and unique gameplay elements which honestly didn't impress me. The dungeons and towns are boring, the battle system is underdeveloped, and there are just way too many cutscenes. If you like to play games just for the plot, then you will probably thoroughly enjoy this game, but if you like RPGs with lots of fun side quests, interesting dungeons, and a good battle system, then look elsewhere.

PlayStation · by Idkbutlike2 (18) · 2011

Ye shan't be as gods if ye have more cutscenes than gameplay

The Good
Xenogears became famous for its enormously complex story that tried to deal with deep psychological and religious issues.

The game's main hero is Fei, an orphan who was found abandoned in a village. Most of the time you control Fei or his party (whose members change all the time). Fei will start his journey once he is chased away from the village, but soon he will find himself involved in a war between two kingdoms. This is, however, just the beginning of an incredibly complicated plot that outdoes pretty much everything I've seen before in Japanese RPGs or any other kind of video games.

The amount of psychological, social, ethical, and religious problems raised by Xenogears has few, if any, parallels within the medium. The gradual, relentless development of the story is singularly impressive, and the amount of plot twists mind-boggling. The story starts as a more or less conventional tale about war, but what grows out of this is a remarkable (though not necessarily successful) attempt to analyze the nature of faith and religion, trace back the origin of mankind, and face unanswered questions.

The game has an overwhelming amount of characters, each with a well-developed background and importance to the plot. The smaller quests - personal stories of the characters - are organically woven into the main plot, and every character brings with him a piece to the puzzle that will be solved only at the end of the game. Fei is easily one of the most complex video game characters ever, and most of the supporting characters are interesting, colorful, and varied.

The one interesting aspect of the gameplay is gear combat, where your characters fight while piloting large mechs. Nearly a half (or perhaps more) of the game's dungeons can be accessed only with gears. Gear combat doesn't work the same way as hand-to-hand battles and requires different tactics. Your gigantic armored suits can't level up, and you upgrade them only in shops or at certain points of the game. They also lose fuel each time they attack. Gear combat can therefore get quite tricky, especially during the last portion of the game and the final battles, where fuel is precious and you have to think about preserving it all the time.

The Bad
Unfortunately, Xenogears is just not that good of a game. It is a classic example of a late-nineties Japanese RPG where plot matters more than gameplay. The creators of the game crammed huge amounts of cartoony plot twists and uninspired dialogue into the game, but forgot about what matters most.

For starters, the game's system is nowhere as flexible as in Final Fantasy games. Characters have neither pronounced class traits nor allow any kind of free-form customization; they automatically learn some fairly meaningless spells when they level up, and that's it. They can execute and store combo moves, but this never surpasses the level of a harmless gimmick because no tactical thinking is required: the game is too easy. On-foot combat is generally utterly forgettable, not in the least due to its disproportionally low difficulty; gear battles are a bit better, especially in the later stages. But overall, there is almost no challenge in the game.

In fact, it seems that combat system and much of the gameplay were added to the game as an afterthought, to accompany its monstrous story rather than the other way around. The game masks its linearity fairly well during the first half of the game, where you explore large areas and where setpieces are varied and progression is dynamic. It all, however, goes downhill in the second half - which is where Final Fantasies usually open up and provide optional areas and access to secrets. Sadly, there is way too little of that in Xenogears, and it comes too late, just before the final confrontation. The rest of the second disc consists of long text blocks unabashedly summarizing events that should have been shown through gameplay, interspersed with streamlined dungeon romps in a most weirdly artificial, disjointed fashion. The game is generally fond of lengthy cutscenes done with the engine, with little cinematic handling and plenty of averagely translated, overly verbose exchanges between characters. Only very few cutscenes are presented as anime-style movies, and they are very short.

Finally, the ambitious story of Xenogears is not all good. First of all, like with most anime-influenced narratives, one should take it cum grano salis. An example is the determination of the Japanese to include "cute" characters in every story. Personally, I didn't "hate" Chu-Chu as much as many other people seem to have; but I can understand how annoying such characters and similar instances can be for someone who expects serious treatment of very risky material. Unfortunately, said material is often handled with irksome nonchalance. Biblical topics are being thrown around with next to no coherence, and the developers' comprehension of religions is revealed as roughly matching the ravings of a confused adolescent who has just discovered the romance of mythologized philosophy from a book written by a nineteen-century amateur. Basically, it's all a giant mess, albeit one the writers clearly tried to infuse with creativity.

The Bottom Line
In the end, Xenogears is an overblown, messy game that treats its own gameplay with unjustified negligence, and collapses under the enormous dead weight of its freakish narrative. The storytelling megalomania of the game's creators cannot compensate for its lackluster and chunky gameplay.

PlayStation · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2016

Potential ruined at every corner. A huge let-down, a frustratingly stupid game.

The Good
There is a lot I wanted to like about Xenogears, and while I thought it was a hugely idiotic game, there was still quite a bit lying around that at least made some of the game worth putting sixty hours into.

Around the time the game came out, console RPGs were going under a graphics trend involving 3D characters on prerendered two-dimensional backdrops. I appreciate that this game does the exact opposite: 2D characters on 3D terrain. It not only makes this game stand out, graphics-wise from the rest, but it also works very well and looks fantastic. Especially with a Playstation 2's "smooth textures" option, which blurs the sprites so that they don't appear quite as pixelated during close-ups.

Like a long, complex, deep story? Xenogears has probably the deepest story I've seen in a console RPG. Throughout this two-disc adventure it seems that every fifteen minutes you uncover a new layer, a new plot twist, a new side of Fei. The story dives so far under these layers you might want to keep a notepad handy to keep track of everything going on.

There are two modes of combat: with a Gear and without. Outside of a gear you fight using weapons and martial arts and can string together combos and such, and inside a gear you have to manage your status and fuel consumption. While I thought both modes were very lacking, I still enjoyed having to adapt to two distinct fighting environments to survive.

The Bad
Unfortunately, it seemed that for every great idea this game had, there was something there just made to counter it. As I said, this game's storyline is long and complex and very, very deep. But rather than immersive and exciting, I found it to be convoluted and annoying. The storyline itself is very good, but the execution and presentation of it make it far too annoying to enjoy.

This game has hands-down the most stupid and annoying dialogue I've ever seen in any game. It almost seems as though it's just a really, really poor translation. Awkward grammar, misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and more "..." per conversation than any game I've ever played. Here's a pretty good example of what 99% of the dialogue in the game looks like:

Fei: "..."

Elly: "...?! ...What's wrong, Fei?!"

Fei: "...What? ...Nothing?!"

Elly: "..."

Fei: "...?!"

Elly: "Okay?!"

Fei: "...I'll be okay?! ..."

Now, I just made that up...I'm pretty sure. But that exact conversation is not unlikely to have been found in the game somewhere. Having to sit through that kind of crap made whatever story this game had to give almost unbearable. I wanted to like the characters, but I just hated them instead. Or rather, I hated the people who wrote the damn dialogue.

If you can get past the bullshit dialogue, sometimes the characters are almost worth their presence, but then you realize that this game consists entirely of cliched characters. Characters such as the nerd, the rebellious royal youth, the annoying kid, the shy, deep main character, the large, detached mean introvert who has a soft side to him although he'd never admit it, the mad angry villain who wants to rule the world for no real reason...and the list goes on. As I said, sometimes the characters have...something in them that really shines through. But those instances are a rare occurrence.

Having to play through the game utilizing two different methods of combat was a neat thing, but I really wish they'd have just left Gear combat out of the game altogether, or just changed it to something better. Unlike normal combat, which is flawed but still fun to do, Gear combat consists mostly of making sure you don't run out of fuel. The fights in Gears are never hard, unless you run out of gas, in which they're still not very hard but they're more annoying. Combat on the ground is fun, and the sprites are great to see kick each other around, but about a half hour into the game you get pretty much the most powerful combos you're going to get and there's no reason NOT to use these combos. You can stack up some points by not using these combos and then executing a really long combo, but do the math and you'll see that you'd be doing just as much damage by doing the combos as you would by saving up combo points, and you'll probably get hurt less too.

The game has a pretty deep story for you to experience, but be prepared to grab a walkthru or something before you play this game. There's almost never a clear indication of where you're supposed to go next. Sometimes, the only clue you're given is "make yourself at home" and the plot WILL NOT advance any further until you've spoken to one specific character in some specific area, and there may be a hundred different characters in twenty different areas for you to talk to, and there is no clue for whom you're supposed to meet! If I put sixty hours into the game, I'd say at least twenty were spent wandering around talking to every single person and sitting through line after line after line of increasingly stupid dialogue until I finally found that one guy - who, by the way, may not have had any importance at all as far as the story goes! - that allowed the plot to go a little further until the next vague "why don't you make yourself at home" mission. In one particular part of the game, the plot doesn't advance until you've spoken to EVERYBODY in a certain area. That's like thirty people. AND it does not indicate that this is what you're supposed to do! As a rule, I only use a walkthru as a very last resort, but having spent two hours in the same fucking area I finally looked it up and found, hey, you have to talk to EVERYBODY and I missed one or two people during my frustrating need to advance the story.

There are areas in the game where encounters come at an insane rate. I can't remember many battles, save for boss battles, being very hard, but it's just throw-your-controller-against-the-wall annoying when you can get from Point A to Point B because you get an encounter every two seconds.

The Bottom Line
Looking back at this game, I think I could have enjoyed it if they had just made a few changes. Rewrite the entire damn dialogue (or shorten it by about sixty thousand lines by getting rid of all instances of "..."), and make a clear indication of who you have to speak to next, and I think I could have really enjoyed the game. Sure, it would have been flawed, but at least it would have been bearable.

Xenogears has a deep story, a lot of interesting characters, a unique graphics style and two unique modes of combat. Unfortunately, the dialogue is horrible, the quests are frustrating, the characters taken from the Big Book of Cliches...

Oh, there's something there. But it's buried under a mountain of frustration.

PlayStation · by kbmb (415) · 2004

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
2D Sprites? SharkD (425) Aug 17, 2009
Preparations for the final boss Donatello (466) Sep 28, 2008
Question regarding gear deathblow skills Donatello (466) Sep 4, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PS1 version of Xenogears appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Artbook

A companion artbook called Xenogears: Perfect Works exists. In addition to containing tons of original art from the game, it also contains details on events, character names, places and references to the backstory including all the other Xenosaga games (published years after Xenogears)

Controversy

There was some controversy surrounding the US release of Xenogears regarding the religious context of the title. Apparently the game was originally going to be heavily edited during the translation process. The reason? the game makes use of lots of catholic references (the Babel tower even appears as a location in the game) and makes some...controversial allegories on the game (ie. -SPOILER- the major religion on the planet turns out to be an entire fraud and a front to exploit people, etc). Fortunately save some item/monsters renaming the entire translation ended up being faithfull to the original.

German Language Usage

The creators of Xenogears made much use of the German language, in particular when naming the gears. A large amount of gears' names are actually German words. For example, "Weltall" means "universe", and "Stier" is "bull". Two gears are named Achtzehn and Seibzehn: the first word means "18", and the second would have meant "17", if it were not incorrectly spelled: the German word for 17 is "Siebzehn". Another gear is named "Vierge"; this is not German, but French, and means... "virgin". Hmm. If you say so... ;D

Kislev

Kislev, the name of one of the two rival empires of the game's universe, is actually just a month of the traditional Hebrew calendar!

References

  • There's a ton of sci-fi references in this game, both to the obvious japanese "giant robot" series, as well as some western sci-fi. For instance, the elements final form of attacking you is by joining their gears in an exact replica of all the Super Sentai (Power Rangers, etc.) sequences; When the Yggdrasil joins the Norturne city to form the super-gear you see it's called the "Super Dimensional Gear Yggdrasil" this is a reference to the old Robotech show were the big city-ship SDF-1 transformed itself in a giant robot (on the original japanese version (Macross) the ship was called Super Dimensional Fortress Macross).

  • References to western sci-fi include the name of the ship in the opening, the USS Eldridge (remember the Philadelphia Experiment?) and the Soylent System, which is, of course, made of peopleeeeeee!!

  • Heavy references to the Bible are found in abundance in "Xenogears". The old legend about the first humans who ate a forbidden fruit and thus "became like gods", which is the core of the game's story, is taken from the beginning of the Old Testament. The Babel Tower also appears in the first book of Moses. There are some subtler references. For example, the three wise men Gaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior are the exact names of the three mages who visited Jesus in Bethlehem.

  • Lucca from Chrono Trigger makes an appearance in Xenogears. She can be found right in the beginning of the game, in Lahan's Information House, teaching you about save points.

  • The name of one of the key characters in the game, Citan Uzuki, is a reference to Dr. Gitanes, the hero of Square's very first game, The Death Trap. Also note that both characters are doctors.

Special edition

There is a special edition of the game available in Japan as part of Squaresoft's Millenium Collection. The game is the same but can be found on two different packages with brand new cd art, one featuring Fei and the other Elly. Also the Fei package comes with a Fei and Bart plastic figure and the Elly package comes with Elly and Chu-chu.

Information also contributed by Ash Ligast II, Unicorn Lynx and WildKard.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by msl.

PS Vita added by Fred VT. PSP, PlayStation 3 added by Charly2.0.

Additional contributors: Zovni, Unicorn Lynx, Shoddyan, DreinIX, —-, Patrick Bregger, Thomas Thompson, FatherJack.

Game added May 25, 2001. Last modified January 16, 2024.