This shot, more or less, was the image used in the 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die book in order to entice readers into a deep, deep game that merges science fiction and fantasy and philosophy and ethics and lord knows what else, I was too distracted by the mechs it had as well.
This is the first playable section of Xenogears and a better screenshot should have been used. I don't know what - I'm no editor (have you even read this blog?) - but it could be more descriptive, I think. Something like this.
Yeah. Hard to see Mechs in the dark. That's the one.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go to space and see what's happening.
Fun Times
Xenogears kicks off with some animation depicting the final moments of an absolutely massive spaceship of some kind, as it get's torn apart from what I think is an alien lifeform that was, until about twenty seconds ago, well contained and quite harmless.
I didn't catch all of the setup, because I was not expecting to see anything of this detail from a PlayStation game. I was too busy screenshotting pretty drawings. Anyway, after the Captain tells everyone to abandon ship, he sits back for the fireworks that come from the self-destruct sequence, and we find out that - obviously - a naked woman has made it down to the surface of a planet in some wreckage.
Questions, questions, questions... but first, mechs!
Ooooh, you tease. Not playable yet, but they're making a right mess of a village that they look out of place in, and what sort of sums up Xenogears - things are out of place and unexpected. We've gone from anime spaceships to ye olde costumed sprites painting polygons.
It doesn't take long to learn that Xenogears is an RPG - you run into everything pressing X to see if you can interact with it, and you run up to everybody and see what conversations they'll have with you, all the while spinning the camera around for a better view, because you'll probably need it, even when rooms are floating inside the black void of the rendering engine.
Almost laughably, the first person you meet does the whole 'plot dump' speech to set you up with the most important piece of backstory you need to know, rather than, say, just talking like someone would actually talk.
This guy gets it, though...
The town we've been in for three years - I forget what it's called. Begins with an 'L'. It's in a screenshot somewhere - is small, of course, but full of little details and people to meet. The children are informative, the dogs and cats make noises, as does the bearcow. I'm liking this. Want to play with the Gears though, but first, we've got to go get a camera for tomorrows wedding between the Chief's son (I think) and a girl who quite clearly explains that, had we been in town during her childhood, rather than just a few years ago, this marriage could have involved us. Gee. That marriage will last, won't it?
There aren't any cameras in town because cameras are a magical thing and only the mad scientist doctor that lives on top of the hill has one, so we're going to have to go for a bit of a walk for this fetch quest, and, as expected, it's a perfect opportunity to have a random encounter to see how the combat works.
Fei, our character whom I should have introduced to you a while back, is a bit of a martial artist. He knows how to take care of himself and any threats that come his way, and he does so with an action point system and three strengths of basic attack, each costing different amounts of action points.
You can, I hope, see where this is going. A weak attack will cost you one of your three action points for the turn so you can hit Triangle three times for three weak attacks on one enemy. Or, you could mix and match a weak attack with a normal attack, which costs two points or go all out with a single heavy attack for your turn, which will use up all three points.
While you could use the strong attack over and over again, there is a system where comboing and mixing up your attacks charges a meter or develops new skills, I can't recall, suffice it to say that sticking to one strategy isn't the best strategy.
You'll soon headbutt and karate chop your way through the Hobgobs and the Jackals and will arrive at the top of the hill at the doctor's house.
True to the rest of the game thus far, another unexpected sight, and it's not the spider mech in the background there. This doctor doesn't live like a hermit on top of the hill, but has his wife and child up here too, and seems to be living pretty comfortably. Bit of an arse to live away from the townspeople, but maybe he's not a people doctor.
He does drop somewhat a large bomb on us though, by saying we have someone living inside of us - no brace yourself, no sensing the tone of the conversation, just dollop that factoid in there...
While we're digesting it - and his wife's cooking - mechs tear through the skies and head to town. We've got to hurry back!
The eagle-eyed amongst us will recognise that this is how the game started before we snapped into our room painting what could well have been a vision of the future. I have no idea at this point. I don't know who Fei is or what he is capable of, but I'm going to hop into this Gear and kick the shit out of something.
Much like the 2.5D combat when outside of a giant mech, a mix of strong and weak attacks are available to use, but instead of an action point limit, you have a global fuel limit to watch out for. Ultimately, knowing this was likely to not end with my death, I ignored the health and fuel available to me, and just sat about using all the attacks on all my opponents.
Before I had a chance to really show off what I'm capable of (and at four vs one, with what is pretty obviously a boss waiting behind those four, what I'm capable of is most likely failure), I was anime cutscened out of my mech, as, for whatever reason, it blew up rather violently, taking what was left of the village with it.
There won't be a wedding tomorrow on account of a few things...
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| I can't believe you've done this |
Well, if this isn't a rollercoaster of an introduction, I don't know what is. This is quite possibly the most engaged I've been with an RPG in a while, certainly when it comes to the 1001 list. I am engrossed, and more than an hour in I'm wondering just where the heck it's going.
While it's been noticeable throughout the game, the mix of sprites and polygons isn't as off-putting as it might seem. Final Fantasy VII had a mix of polygonal characters with highly detailed flat backgrounds, and that looked fine, but arguably feels a little dated nowadays. Xenogears sticks sprites on top of polygons, with fully modelled mechs to make the contrast between humans and machines that much more alarming, and it works too. It looks better, I think, than FF7. The characters here may look a little more common, but they hold up.
I've got things to do, though, and leaving town and exploring the world map is the next step on my big adventure. By 'exploring', I clearly mean 'getting lost in'.
I eventually wandered into the forest and called it a day, but not before finding out that I could do some kind of special attack to bust through the tougher, more protected innocent lifeforms in this game...
Final Word
So after close to two hours or just being absorbed into the world of Xenogears, I leave it full of positivity, wondering where it'll go and how it'll get there. Then I find out some more about the development of the game, and why it perhaps isn't so well known.
Turns out that the idea was pitched as a sequel to Final Fantasy VI, meaning that the FF7 that everyone knows and loves could well have never existed, and been replaced by something more akin to Xenogears here. After that fell through, it was a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and with its mix of fantasy and science fiction, you can easily see why, but being more of a serious take on things, it too didn't quite fit and was simply made as a new IP, Xenogears.
It was, however, so ambitious that the developers couldn't cope with the scale, and most of the second disc of the game consists of cutscenes put together to tie up all the loose ends of the plot, with the odd boss battle and interactive segment stuck in between scenes to keep players 'playing'.
Xenogears seems to use every medium to tell its story, with text boxes to animated in-game scenes to animated animation appearing out of nowhere, but the one image that sticks in my head from my research is that the second disc contains a lot of scenes of people sitting in chairs monologing the story.
So, that'll be fun when I get there... if I ever do.
I really like Xenogears so far, and do hope to get back into it at some point. I might be quicker to watch it all, especially considering there's a lot to watch - there's a ten hour cutscene edit on YouTube to give you the important bits - but I can't abandon giant mechs so easily, even if my character appears to have made the decision to never climb inside one again, for as long as he lives.
We'll see about that.
Play Xenogears. It's a mix of all sorts, and you're bound to find something to like.
Fun Facts
To emphasise the point that Xenogears wants players to think and ask questions, influences in the themes include the works of philosophers and thinkers Nietzsche, Freud and Jung.
Xenogears, developed by Square Product Development Division 3, first released in 1998.
Version played: PlayStation, 1998, via emulation.