Xenogears

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.... With these words, the RPG Xenogears begins. An RPG with religion, battles between countries and huge man-sized robots. Truly a masterpiece of Squaresoft.

Story

The story is great! It's just soooo big, with countless stuff going on in the world, so you'll have a lot to do. The different countries and groups will fill the story with plenty of action, plot twists and other cool stuff. Although the story is big, it's not very confusing. I could easily follow the story, at least until Disc 2. Then I started to lose track of what was happening. Maybe it was just me, or maybe more people had problems with this as well.

Gameplay

In the game you can do lots of neat things. You can use the Yggdrasil craft to travel across the world in three different ways. Only when you get to Disc 2, you lose a lot of freedom. You regain the ability to travel the world map at the end of Disc 2. You can access the world map almost always on Disc 1.

The "dungeons" are not that hard, but challenging enough when you just start with Xenogears. Later in the game, you'd better be good at math or have a calculator with you, because you'll need to solve some things with math in order to continue. I myself am not very good at math, so it took me a while to figure it out.

As for side quests, there are a few. But I haven't done most of them. The only one I remember I did was the one in the lighthouse.

The battles come in two types. The first is the regular character battle we know from most RPG's. In those battles you have an ATB Gauge (active-time gauge) like the one in FFVII. When it's a character's turn, they may use skills, use items, escape, defend. You know the routine. When you attack, you can do it multiple times as long as you have stamina. The weak attack costs 1 stamina, the medium attack 2 stamina and the strong costs 3 stamina. Stamina is restored after you end your turn, so you don't have to do anything special to refill the stamina. By using combinations of the weak, medium and strong attacks, you can learn Deathblows. Learned Deathblows can be used by pressing the right combination. If you have stamina left when you end your turn, it is gathered in the special AP gauge under your ATB gauge. Stamina can be stored there until the AP is 28. With the AP, you can use multiple Deathblows by selecting them in the Combo menu in battle. After you've selected them and pressed the OK button, you unleash all the selected Deathblows in 1 turn with double animation speed. That causes a lot of damage and is cool to see. AP is set to 0 once a battle is over.

The second battle is with Gears, giant humanoid fighting robots. Characters ride the Gears as their pilot. In Gear battles, you have different options. You can select Boost, which speeds up the ATB at the cost of some fuel each turn. You can defend, escape and use some skills of the pilot. You can also increase the combo level of your Gear. Attack once, and it is raised by 1. So after 3 attacks, it's at 3, the highest level. You can use the combo levels to perform Gear combos, depending on how many Deathblows the pilot has learned. Example :

Gear Combo Level 1 - Character Deathblow 1 and 2
Gear Combo Level 2 - Character Deathblow 3 and 4
Gear Combo Level 3 - Character Deathblow 5 and 6

As you can see, 1 combo level has 2 Deathblows. You can't use the combos if your character hasn't learned the Deathblow needed. It's not needed for a character to learn both Deathblows to use a combo level. 1 Deathblow is enough, though 2 are recommended. If you have Deathblow 7 or higher, nothing will happen to your combo level unless you have special items equipped on your Gear.

You can equip Gears with Engines for power and fuel, armor for defense, frames for HP and some Gears can even equip weapons. It's a handy function, and upgrading your Gears is very important, so make sure you have a lot of money ready.

Graphics

The graphics of Xenogears are..........well, let's just say you can see the pixels. You can rotate the screen to look from different angles, but everywhere you look, you see pixels. The Gear graphics are done quite nicely, but the characters are showing the most pixels. This doesn't really bother me, but if you like nice graphics like FFVII, or maybe FFX, Xenogears' graphics might disturb you. The FMV's are very beautiful, and done in anime style.

Sound

The music of Xenogears is a masterpiece of Yasunori Mitsuda, who can create music just as good as his competition of the Final Fantasy series, Nobuo Uematsu. Really, the music is of very good quality. It's really enjoyable when you're playing, and it doesn't get annoying. I've yet to hear a Xenogears track that really gets on my nerves.

The sound effects are not really special, just the basic sounds you hear in most RPG's. Opening a chest, pulling a lever. There are some cool sounds in Gear battles, that really sounds like heavy damage. I think that's well done, and I haven't heard anything like it yet.

The characters have voices, but only in battle. And they don't really speak, they're just battle sounds like "HA!" or "OOF!". But this gives a little extra to the battles. In the anime FMV's the characters speak, and good voice acting also. It's just a shame the English voices don't fit in with the mouth movements of the characters, as the mouth movements are meant for Japanese voices. In most anime series, the mouths movements get along great with the English voices, but not in Xenogears. I'm telling you, it's even worse than Bruce Lee or FFX.

Characters

The characters are all well made. They each have their own personalities and problems. They also have unique skills and weapons, although some characters don't use weapons. It's even possible to change the little girl in your party into a teenager through a side quest. I don't know if this is useful, but if you like Xenogears, it's worth it.