Xenogears
“Stand tall and shake the heavens”
Xenogears is certainly one of the most ambitious rpgs the folks at Square have cooked up. The game heavily on its complex and intriguing plot. The story is really well written and interesting, but can be difficult to follow and to understand at some points. The dialogue is good and real funny at some points and the characters get well developed during the game.
The world of Xenogears relies heavily on gears. Gears are huge machines controlled by human pilots. They are leftovers from ancient civilization and the technological information to construct new gears is now out of reach for most countries. The ability to repair old gears is limited too, as barely enough skill and parts exist to fix damaged ones.
Fei is a young man living in the village of Lahan. His life has been peaceful and calm despite of his mysterious past. Fei was brought to the village years ago, badly injured. Although he recovered, memories of his past were completely lost. This doesn’t seem to bother Fei too much anymore and he’s been able to enjoy his life in the village. Fei’s situation changes soon. When unknown military forces are transporting a newly discovered gear by air, they suddenly lose control of the gear. It lands into the village of Lahan.
Once the crash site is discovered, the military forces send out units to retrieve the lost gear. The events lead to tragedy. Military units attack unarmed villagers and Fei enters the abandoned gear and plans to fight back. When huge machines fight in the middle of a small village, the result isn’t going to be pretty and this time is no exception.
Although the attack was stopped, the price was terrible. Village of Lahan is destroyed. Fei feels responsible of the destruction and leaves the remains of Lahan. He takes the gear along, hoping to find out what to do next…
Xenogears is one of first true 3D-rpgs for the PlayStation. Instead of pre-rendered backgrounds (like in Final Fantasy VII for example) Xenogears uses the game engine instead. The result is not as pretty as in FF games, but it allows fully rotating camera, for example. The character models don’t look as out of place as in FF7 either. The graphics are OK, nothing spectacular, but good enough.
The only difference to other RPGs in controls is the ability to jump. This is also used heavily in the game, there are lots of places to exercise your platforming talents. Despite of jumps, Xenogears doesn’t resemble a platform game. There aren’t any endless ancient chasms of doom for you to fall into, and it isn’t possible to jump to instant death.
World map can be traveled either by foot or by gears. The biggest difference is that with gears you can avoid battles on map screen and are able to move faster.
The best parts of Xenogears are the story (as mentioned above) and music. Yasunori Mitsuda, the man who composed majority of Chrono Trigger’s songs is responsible for Xenogears’ soundtrack. He certainly doesn’t disappoint and delivers one of the most impressive videogame soundtracks ever created. The songs very from calm and soothing to powerful and energetic. Tracks like Shevat: the Wind is Calling, The One who is Torn Apart, Omen, and Awakening make the soundtrack worth of purchasing by itself.
Combat complexity
Xenogears has two battle modes. The regular one where the characters fight like in any RPG games and the second one where the characters fight inside their gears (Gears are those huge robots which you see in a couple of the screen shots here). These modes are different since when using gears you also have to worry about fuel. Gears use fuel and each attack consumes a certain amount of it.
The only way to gain fuel during battles is by charging it, but it only restores a little amount per turn and you can’t attack while charging fuel. Once the fuel is gone, gears can only charge (or use magic) which kinda makes them sitting ducks. Therefore the gear battles require a bit more strategy than regular ones.
Gears can’t do their strongest attacks at the beginning of a fight. They have attack levels and each gear starts the battle in attack level 0. Attack level 0 attacks are basically just kicks and punches. Once a gear damages an opponent with level 0 attack it’s attack level goes up. When attack level rises, gears can do combo attacks which are way powerful than the normal ones.
After a gear has reached attack level 3 it has a chance to enter hyper mode (attack level infinite). Gears in infinite level do insane amounts of damage, but unfortunately the hyper mode only lasts for three turns. If this sounds difficult to understand, it really isn’t. It’s a simple system, but difficult to describe.
As I said before, there are both hand-to-hand battles and gear battles. Interesting thing about regular battles is that if things are looking grim, you can call your gear for help. That’ll change the odds a bit, since fighting regular enemies with gears offers the challenge equal to stomping an ant. That works both ways, trying to battle a gear-sized foe by hands is asking for trouble. To maintain the challenge in hand-to-hand battles, the use of gears is limited in some areas, you usually won’t be able use your gear in small dungeons for example (for obvious reasons).
Xenogears is a great game and definitely worth buying. Completing Xenogears takes well over 40 hours of your time, so prepare to lose your free time for quite a while, since it’s difficult to stop playing this game once you’ve started it. The first prequel game to Xenogears, Xenosaga – Episode One was released in 2004 and the sequel to it, Xenosaga Episode II was released in 2005 . Although the connections to Xenogears are slim, those who liked Xenogears should check Xenosaga out too.