Daystorm's Full Review: Xenogears for PlayStation 1
I love stories.
I write them, I read them and I draw them.
I watch them, I listen to them, I live for them.
RPG's are a favorite past time of mine. Too bad they take up so much time. But when I do have the time, I love playing a good one. Too bad they're few and far between.
So when I find a great one, I'm impressed.
For the most part, Xenogears delivers on all fronts to us story junkies. The story is one of the deepest, contorted, confusing, gratifying ones ever found in an RPG. Leave it up to Square to deliver. But it does more. Something rare that even the best stories sometimes lack. The characters capture you and wrap you up in its hand. You care about them and what they mean to each other and the story that enfolds them.
It's great. The story is woven masterfully, interlaced with a magnificent soundtrack. Square has always known how to tweak as much quality music out of that little gray box's midi capabilities as possible.
The graphics of the game are good, but the great sprite-based anime-style characters are highly pixelated when the camera moves in close. The 3D giant robots and environments are very well detailed, however with some lovely special effects to back them up. The pixelation is quickly forgiven when the story grabs you by the nether areas and pulls you in, head to toe.
Gameplay is totally innovative. Instead of the traditional RPG battle system, Square has tossed in a mix of two table spoons of fighting game genre. There's a combo system that is activated by hitting the face keys in certain sequences you learn during the course of the game. The more you learn, the more powerful you are.
The only major problem with this game lies on the second disk. Basically, the problem is...
the second disk.
The game slows down almost to a standstill. The mix of story and action that made the first disk so enjoyable takes a sharp downturn. A good part of the second disk is reading still text and hitting the continue button. It's still evident that the writers did their job. The story is still highly complex and tightly woven, but without the action to back it up, it feels rather stale. There's still a few battles to go through, but not enough to keep the level of excitement found in the first disk.
All in all, Xenogears will keep you sunk deep into its characters and the involved story with a soundtrack that's amongst the best in the Playstation's history. This is a keeper for all you story junkies out there. But... just one small warning...
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