Okay kiddos, I'm going to do a review on one of my favorite games of all time Xenogears.

Now this game was made in 1998 by squaresoft (now known as square-enix), and was released on the Sony Playstation.

Story 9/10

The reason I give this game a nine out of ten on story is because it's one of those games that by the end of the game makes you think about the real world and question our own history (at least that's what happened to me), and perhaps ponder humanity a little bit.  It is a sci-fi/romance game in that the two main characters Fei Fong Wong and Elly Van Houtan have a timeless love that goes back for more than 10,000 years.  It also borrows a lot of things from most of the major religions on Earth and puts them together in an almost seemless harmony that forms much of the basis of the game world's culture.  Plus you are able to do this in giant robots which very much resemble the Gundams from the Gundam series .

The world that the game takes place in isn't really the human homeworld.  Basically, we become very advanced, send a ship to colonize another planet, but tragically the ship (The Eldridge) is destroyed and only two people survive.  Now I'm not going to tell you how only two people propogate the species since the two I'm talking about never actually mate, but it's kinda one of them matrix kinda thingys where the first generation of humantiy was born from one woman without her having "fun".

Plus you go through most of the game as your character has amnesia, and doesn't know anything about his past which is fine because you find out about his past, and his past lives.

To fully get the story, you will have to play the game more than once and pay close attention to the dialogue and everything else.  Plus I advise going to some of the fan sites for the game such as xgam.org (Xenogears God and Mind) and look up some of the various information there or just google xenogears fansites and you can find out more background information to help clear up the mud.

GamePlay: 6/10

The game play in Xenogears on Disk One is very much like the gameplay in almost every RPG released in the last 19 years with you have an overworld where you fight random encounters and travel via foot, gear (giant robots are called gears in the game hence Xenogears), Sandcruiser (Yggdrasil), Ship (Yggdrasil II), or airship (Yggdrasil III).  You also have the generic towns that you go into much like any garden variety RPG so that's all to tell on that note eh.  Lastly you also have your dungeons that you go to so that you can defeat the bad guys .

Now the only problem with the game play is that when you get to disk 2 you get to play the game from a narration point of view so you aren't able to explore like on disk one.  This is due to budget cuts squarsoft did, and since the crew making the game had to live with a smaller budget, they had to do disk two like that instead of typical RPG format

However, the story is good and is worth playing, but you won't get to do much roaming until the end of disk two which is roughly fifteen and twenty five hours of gameplay depending whether or not you gain levels on disk one or were stupid and waited until you are in one of the few dungeons on disk two to level up .

Now the battle system on  this game is fairly nice.  It is turned based which is good for sloths like me.  When you attack you can choose from a weak attack, medium attack, or a fierce attack with the triangle, square, and x buttons, after level five you can begin to learn deathblow attacks which allow you to use a variety of combinations of the buttons.  Your characters also learn magics and stuff which is cool, but I rarely used magic through out the course of the game because there aren't to many enemies that you can't best with physical attacks, and much of the gameplay is done in huge mechs known as Gears.  Now you want to learn your deathblows quickly because how many deathblows you learn directly affects what attack level your gear can reach, and perform combos in it so yeah.

Now gear battle is reminscient of many mech played games.  (That I've played)  With the exception of it being turn based combat, you have hit points and fuel so you have to periodically charge to refuel youselves during battle, but through out the course of the game you can go to various stores and upgrade your gears hp and fuel so it's all good

Graphics 8/10

Now I know by today's standards that Xenogears's graphics royally suck, but for 1998 they were pretty much the norm.  Now they weren't like the pre-rendered high res graphics like ff8 and ff7 with the 32-bit renderings looking fairly realisitic, but the game used real-time 3-D which on the PSX was crappy, but it was good for the day.  So yes I know we have all played RPG's which used real-time graphics on the Playstation so we can't bitch to much about that now can we .

KannibalKaney's overall rating 7/10

It's a really good game if you like story and the battle system, but the gameplay on disk two is the only thing from keeping from a 9/10 so don't let it discourage you from playing.

Also if you like Xenogears, you will like Xenosaga which is made by the same crew, but is published by Namco.  Thank god since Square-Enix sucks 90% of the time .  Xenosaga however, doesn't take place in the same universe as Xenogears even though there are huge simularities between the two.  Xenosaga could be thought to take place during the time period of the Eldridge seen in the Opening movie of Xenogears, but it's actually the creator's way of starting over and redoing the story to what he wants

Overall I like Xenosaga better, but Xenogears is one of those classics like Resident Evil 1,2, and 3, Breath of Fire III and IV, Final Fantasy VII and VIII (IX just was weird but still good).

kannibalkaney