Whew, boy. Where do I even begin?
I'm someone who absolutely adores the 32-bit era of JRPG's but has finished only a few of them. I've dabbled in dozens by now, but given their sprawling length (and usually plenty of padding) I've rarely seen any of them through to the end. Even so, I want to make clear from the outset that the PS1 era of JRPG's is my favorite of all time due to the sheer breadth, volume, and variety of releases that the genre enjoyed during that prolific time. So given my appreciation for that period of JRPG development, Xenogears was always a pretty big blind spot of mine considering its cult status that has only grown over time.
Now, I'm not stranger to Tetsuya Takahashi's grandiose ambitions. I've played both Xenoblade games and loved them both for their massive scale, even if XC2's fanservice felt like a big step backward from the first game. But Xenogears, man... this is ambition on a level that simply left me awestruck through most of its long runtime. I struggle to comprehend how Takahashi attempted to create this game in a two-year timeframe with a largely new team of rookie Squaresoft employees as his directorial debut on the PS1.
The amazing animated intro by Production I.G. really hooked me in from the start.
As I made my way through the game's opening 20-30 hours I was continually gobsmacked by the story this game seemed to be trying to tell and the scale of its far-flung, sci-fi world. There were plenty of long, sprawling JRPG's on the PS1, but Xenogears without the doubt is the most ambitious of any of them in terms of the scope it was striving to achieve and the depth of its (admittedly convoluted), millennia-spanning storyline. Every time I made my way to a new city or town, encountered new party members and their backstories, or experienced one of many surprisingly well-directed in-game and/or anime cutscenes I felt an increasing sense of disbelief. I just fucking loved it.
The game has more characters than you really end up utilizing, but the majority of them are wonderfully realized.
The characters, the writing, the world, the graphical style, the unfolding mysteries of the in-game universe... everything just checked all of my boxes as I played through it for the first time. And the MUSIC. How can I forget Yasunori Mitsuda's absolutely top-notch compositions for this game? It's up there with the very best in the genre, IMO.
You hear this song many times over the long journey, but I never tired of it.
By the time I reached the end of Disc 1, I was telling my friends that I thought this might actually be my all-time favorite JRPG, surpassing the likes of Chrono Trigger, FF7, and Dragon Quest 8. While it wasn't always perfect, I felt that the overlap of ambition and execution resulted in the most impressive JRPG that I'd played up to now. Then Disc 2 happened.
Me playing through Disc 2
By now it should come as no surprise to hear that Disc 2 was a disappointing and drastic shift for the game. It's legendary for how it gave players back in 1998 the sense that the game simply ran out of time and money and released in an unfinished state, and honestly that wasn't too far off from the reality according to Takahashi when asked many years later. They had a hard two-year timeframe within which to complete the game, and they had to either end the game at Disc 1 (which would've been odd from a story standpoint) or finish out the story they were trying to tell on Disc 2 via text dumps and boss fights that speed you through many large-scale events toward the conclusion.
Disc 2 is infamous for good reason. It completely skims over several massive plot developments and offers little gameplay.
Ultimately I think they made the right decision given those two options, but damn... Disc 2 is, without a doubt, the biggest example of missed opportunity I've ever seen in all my years of gaming. Like, damn. I liken Disc 2 of Xenogears to this: it's like the last season of Game of Thrones and Evangelion had a baby. The comparison to GoT stems from how rushed the game's final story beats all feel in Disc 2 and how characterization is simplified and streamlined to a detrimental degree in the process as well. The Evangelion comparison speaks to many similarities between the game and the landmark anime, and it's a comparison that has been made many times before. The game not only shares plenty of thematic similarities with Evangelion (sci-fi, mechs, a reluctant/mentally tortured protagonist, tons of Christian/religious imagery and allegory, etc.), but it also has a similarly messy and unsatisfying ending. The ways in which Xenogears and Evangelion are similar is actually worthy of any entirely separate discussion, but feel free to have that discourse in this thread if you want.
Xenogears is the closest we've ever gotten to an Evangelion game.
Anyway, I'm torn in trying to evaluate how Disc 2 affected my experience with the game as a whole. On one hand, it actively detracted from my opinion of the game. Disc 1 was borderline perfection in my eyes, but given how Disc 2 played out I no longer feel that I can call it my all-time favorite JRPG. But on the other hand, Disc 1 was friggin' 50+ hours long. It was a massive, amazing, unforgettable JRPG in its own right without even taking the second disc into account. And, hell. If Disc 2 was somehow able to be realized to the same degree of execution as Disc 1, the game would've been a lean 100+ hours long. That's just crazy to think about. I still think it would've been for the better, but that would've just been insanely long no matter how you look at it.
This is all just a stream-of-consciousness thought dump, so please bear with me. Given how much I've already spewed onto the screen I think I'll cut the OP off there and open up the floor for further discussion. Here are some discussion questions to help guide things along:
I'm someone who absolutely adores the 32-bit era of JRPG's but has finished only a few of them. I've dabbled in dozens by now, but given their sprawling length (and usually plenty of padding) I've rarely seen any of them through to the end. Even so, I want to make clear from the outset that the PS1 era of JRPG's is my favorite of all time due to the sheer breadth, volume, and variety of releases that the genre enjoyed during that prolific time. So given my appreciation for that period of JRPG development, Xenogears was always a pretty big blind spot of mine considering its cult status that has only grown over time.
Now, I'm not stranger to Tetsuya Takahashi's grandiose ambitions. I've played both Xenoblade games and loved them both for their massive scale, even if XC2's fanservice felt like a big step backward from the first game. But Xenogears, man... this is ambition on a level that simply left me awestruck through most of its long runtime. I struggle to comprehend how Takahashi attempted to create this game in a two-year timeframe with a largely new team of rookie Squaresoft employees as his directorial debut on the PS1.
The amazing animated intro by Production I.G. really hooked me in from the start.
As I made my way through the game's opening 20-30 hours I was continually gobsmacked by the story this game seemed to be trying to tell and the scale of its far-flung, sci-fi world. There were plenty of long, sprawling JRPG's on the PS1, but Xenogears without the doubt is the most ambitious of any of them in terms of the scope it was striving to achieve and the depth of its (admittedly convoluted), millennia-spanning storyline. Every time I made my way to a new city or town, encountered new party members and their backstories, or experienced one of many surprisingly well-directed in-game and/or anime cutscenes I felt an increasing sense of disbelief. I just fucking loved it.
The game has more characters than you really end up utilizing, but the majority of them are wonderfully realized.
The characters, the writing, the world, the graphical style, the unfolding mysteries of the in-game universe... everything just checked all of my boxes as I played through it for the first time. And the MUSIC. How can I forget Yasunori Mitsuda's absolutely top-notch compositions for this game? It's up there with the very best in the genre, IMO.
You hear this song many times over the long journey, but I never tired of it.
By the time I reached the end of Disc 1, I was telling my friends that I thought this might actually be my all-time favorite JRPG, surpassing the likes of Chrono Trigger, FF7, and Dragon Quest 8. While it wasn't always perfect, I felt that the overlap of ambition and execution resulted in the most impressive JRPG that I'd played up to now. Then Disc 2 happened.
Me playing through Disc 2
By now it should come as no surprise to hear that Disc 2 was a disappointing and drastic shift for the game. It's legendary for how it gave players back in 1998 the sense that the game simply ran out of time and money and released in an unfinished state, and honestly that wasn't too far off from the reality according to Takahashi when asked many years later. They had a hard two-year timeframe within which to complete the game, and they had to either end the game at Disc 1 (which would've been odd from a story standpoint) or finish out the story they were trying to tell on Disc 2 via text dumps and boss fights that speed you through many large-scale events toward the conclusion.
Disc 2 is infamous for good reason. It completely skims over several massive plot developments and offers little gameplay.
Ultimately I think they made the right decision given those two options, but damn... Disc 2 is, without a doubt, the biggest example of missed opportunity I've ever seen in all my years of gaming. Like, damn. I liken Disc 2 of Xenogears to this: it's like the last season of Game of Thrones and Evangelion had a baby. The comparison to GoT stems from how rushed the game's final story beats all feel in Disc 2 and how characterization is simplified and streamlined to a detrimental degree in the process as well. The Evangelion comparison speaks to many similarities between the game and the landmark anime, and it's a comparison that has been made many times before. The game not only shares plenty of thematic similarities with Evangelion (sci-fi, mechs, a reluctant/mentally tortured protagonist, tons of Christian/religious imagery and allegory, etc.), but it also has a similarly messy and unsatisfying ending. The ways in which Xenogears and Evangelion are similar is actually worthy of any entirely separate discussion, but feel free to have that discourse in this thread if you want.
Xenogears is the closest we've ever gotten to an Evangelion game.
Anyway, I'm torn in trying to evaluate how Disc 2 affected my experience with the game as a whole. On one hand, it actively detracted from my opinion of the game. Disc 1 was borderline perfection in my eyes, but given how Disc 2 played out I no longer feel that I can call it my all-time favorite JRPG. But on the other hand, Disc 1 was friggin' 50+ hours long. It was a massive, amazing, unforgettable JRPG in its own right without even taking the second disc into account. And, hell. If Disc 2 was somehow able to be realized to the same degree of execution as Disc 1, the game would've been a lean 100+ hours long. That's just crazy to think about. I still think it would've been for the better, but that would've just been insanely long no matter how you look at it.
This is all just a stream-of-consciousness thought dump, so please bear with me. Given how much I've already spewed onto the screen I think I'll cut the OP off there and open up the floor for further discussion. Here are some discussion questions to help guide things along:
- Where you do you rank Xenogears among the best JRPG's of all time?
- How did Disc 2 affect your overall impression of the game? How do you think it has affected its legacy?
- What do you imagine would've happened if the game did well enough to allow Takashi to expand Xenogears into a multi-part series as he originally envisioned?
- Have you read the fan-translated Perfect Works book? If so, what are some of the more interesting details illuminated by the book that were either unclear or completely absent from the game?
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