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REVIEW: XenoSaga Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht

Square’s Xenogears on PSone was legendary.

It was the game Square was afraid to localize to the US because of its religious content. It was the game Square felt was “too Japanese” (in this case, they meant too mech-oriented) to succeed in the US market. It was the game many feared would be demonized by the religious community, but never really was.

Xenogears was also the game that consisted of a wonderful first disc (despite bogging down a bit in the prison-camp segment) and a disc two that was basically nothing but hours and hours of text leading up to a final boss battle and cinema. As wonderful as disc one was, disc two was a gamer’s Dante’s Inferno.

Despite this, Xenogears was one of the best-selling non-Final Fantasy titles Square ever released in the US, at least until later when the Parasite Eve and ChronoCross titles broke Xenosaga’s records.

The title’s complex storyline, which suggested it was Episode Six, also caused people to anticipate a sequel with as much fervor as any Square one-off title since ChronoTrigger.

Well, it took a new generation of hardware and a new publisher to make it happen … and technically Namco and the development team, which has survived mostly intact from the first title, won’t completely admit it’s a true prequel … but that’s exactly what it is.

XenoSaga Episode 1 takes us back to the beginning and the results, thanks in part to the increased power behind the PS2, are impressive.

How impressive? Read on, McGruff!

Unlike some traditional RPGs of late, XenoSaga isn’t hopping on the cel-shaded/cel-stroked bandwagon headed up by Wild Arms 3 and Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Instead, XenoSaga sticks with a more traditional, anime-influenced look and the results are gorgeous.

Dramatic scenes are handled largely within the game engine, even though the dustjacket boasts over an hour of FMV. Honestly, like all the best RPGs, the switch over to FMV won’t make that big a difference as the quality of the in-game graphics engine is as good as anything Square’s offereded up since the dawn of the PS2 era.

While the gameplay and story of XenoSaga mostly rocked, the graphics were about on standard with other games of its time and not much more. By contrast, XenoSaga sets a new standard for PS2 RPGs, graphically speaking, and is the best-looking PS2 RPG since Square released Final Fantasy X.

XenoSaga will be remembered kindly for years to come, graphically speaking.

The orchestral music on display makes for an appealing audio experience and fortunately is mixed in well with the voice acting and sound effect so that whatever you’re supposed to be hearing at any given moment isn’t obscured by other sounds. That’s a trick not every PS2 RPG game … *cough*Galarians: ASH*cough* … can pull off well.

There are not many recognizable name-actors in the XenoSaga cast, but those who do appear were real troopers, recording hours of dialog to make the game have that FFX-inspired “not a ton of reading” feel.

And that is the genius of XenoSaga that saves it from falling into the same traps that bogged down Xenogears; while XenoSaga is at least as story-heavy as Xenogears, at least all the important story-bits are voice-acted rather than appearing in text and causing gamers to read and read and read with nothing to hack and slash.

Fortunately, it’s a fascinating story. It had better be since significant chunks of time are taken up with storytelling in between the exploration and battle portions of the game.

How significant? I guess it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that in my first 10 hours of XenoSaga, perhaps two were spent exploring or battling. Maybe three.

Of course, this style is no surprise to anyone who played through Disc Two of Xenogears. Much like Metal Gear Solid 2, hardcore gamers are bound to complain about all the “story” in XenoSaga. They want battles and lots of ‘em.

Hey, if that’s you’re gig, pick up some other RPG with generic characters, little story and lots of pointless battles. Grandia Xtreme is a solid example of that. (And that’s not a rip… it really IS solid.)

But XenoSaga is a different breed of RPG cat, cha-cha! (Okay, that concludes my Dennis Miller impersonation, before it gets stale!)

XenoSaga is an RPG that really focuses on strongly realized characters, an involving storyline of epic proportions (at least six episodes long, after all), and a compelling motivation for each action part of the game.

The main stars of XenoSaga are Shion Uzuki and her creation, a humanoid weapon known as KOS-MOS. Shion lives with the guilt that an early version of KOS-MOS went on a rampage that cost a lot of lives. Though she’s corrected the cause of the malfunction, she hasn’t quite forgiven herself and even as the story opens, KOS-MOS seems to be guided less by Shion’s programming than by an agenda only KOS-MOS knows.

The cast is rounded out by the secondary storyline of Ziggy and Momo, while Chaos and Jr. play important supporting roles. And in time, the two storylines do merge; but before we start spoiling the game, I’ll pull back here and just say it’s a long game with a long, but ultimately satisfying story.

If the game were all text, it’d be annoying to have this much story play out between interactive segments. It’s a very linear experience, but then so is watching a great movie … but I don’t hear anyone complaining because they can’t make Humphrey Bogart join the circus in Casablanca, rather than court and then ultimately push Lauren Bacall into the arms of another man.

I mean, sure, seeing Bogart trying to master lion taming might be fun, but ultimately the great story is the love story between Bogart and Bacall and without it, CASABLANCA wouldn’t be CASABLANCA.

It’s the same thing with XenoSaga; while the gamer has control over a goodly portion of things, there’s a story to be told here and Namco is going to tell us the story they want to tell.

That’s not a bad thing; that’s a good thing. Because it’s an engaging story.

Now, don’t get confused. The style and pace of XenoSaga does settle in some portions and there’s a goodly portion of exploring, fighting and minigames. There’s plenty of gaming to be had and you could easily log 100 hours or more on the game (unless you’re the kind of narrow-minded gamer who skips over story segments, in which case there’s no hope for you and you may as well buy Grandia Xtreme instead).

But if you like your storytelling rich and you enjoyed Final Fantasy X, then XenoSaga is the game you’re looking for while waiting around for Final Fantasy X-2 to reach US shores.

In all, the significant chunks of story may turn off hack-n-slash games but the other 90 percent of us will find a story and game world rich and deep enough to make getting lost in it for 70 to 100 hours a worthwhile investment of time.

And it’ll leave you waiting for the next Xeno-title. Anxiously. Here’s hoping it won’t take till PS3 for it to appear!

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Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Aug 3rd, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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