xene of gears

excuse me but that is Captain Global of the SDF-1 Macross

the like super harsh, chunky shading on the character sprites makes them look surprisingly 3Dish. Aesthetically speaking they blend remarkably well with the environments

I've been playing for like 20 minutes and the text scrolling speed is already killing me lmao

need to like bind fast-forward to a controller button or something just to get through the NPC dialogue lol

CAT!!!!

omg

so the sign gives you a directional arrow, as like, a text glyph... but you can move the camera

so the arrow character in the textbox CHANGES WITH THE CAMERA ANGLE

this is like... indie-developer levels of pointless textbox flexing lmao

oh yeah I love 3D platforming at 20fps on a dpad with random encounters

question for XenoFans™: Is there like bullshit missable stuff in this game that I need to look up beforehand

I don't want to just follow a guide and spoil everything, but this WAS the era of like, basing plot stuff off of one-shot minigames or totally invisible stat systems lol

you can stand on NPCs' heads, which means this is a vastly better game than The Last of Us Part II or whatever

oh hey it's a jrpg

I don't know what aspect of japanese grammar leads to these sorts of sentences in english but it's extremely funny every time

See Also

I feel like I have a decent sense of how the "metal gear, huh?" Cool Guy Repetition thing works, like, stylistically

The "[Word]? You mean [identical synonym]?" pattern is just way more baffling though lol. Feel like I'd need to actually learn japanese to understand its intent

NOMAD FIX BOT

NOMAD FIX BOT

extremely love the idea of like, old-ass giant robot just wandering around in caves for decades, repairing any other robots it randomly happens to come across

I really like how this game mixes realtime 3D and digitized paintings and prerendered 3D and sprite art and cel animation largely at random

basically picks the best tool for whatever visual effect it's aiming at and just goes for it

metal gear, huh

oh fuck yes
absolutely

get in the robot fei

FOR THE GLORY OF MANKIND

given that this is Yasunori Mitsuda I'm kinda surprised that none of the music has been particularly memorable so far

maybe they're saving the bangers for later in the plot or something

I guess to be fair, even if most of it sounds like Generic JRPG Music, Mitsuda is half the reason this style is associated with JRPGs in the first place

man I love how this room is all lit by diffuse sunlight streaming through the door

it's not even using vertex-color effects; the light's all just drawn right in to the texture maps

lmao

a weird side effect of this game's art direction: I don't really know what the characters look like

you only see their bodies as chunky sprites, you only see their faces in closely-cropped static portraits, there are rare anime cutscenes but they're a different art style

You could say this is also true of like, chrono trigger, but that was 2D with a fixed camera. The sprites *were* the canonical forms of those characters

This is 3D and Cinematic, so the camera moves all around but you're somehow NEVER given a clear view of anyone's body/clothing

it's super fascinating that this was developed alongside FFVII, because FFVII is like... incredibly maximalist spectacle that feels like it could collapse at any moment, and Xenogears feels like... Chrono Trigger 2. We put the super pretty sprite work on quads this time. It works

Granted, I haven't hit the second disc yet, where it reportedly kinda does fall apart, but it's neat how much this just feels like a very confident iteration on Square's earlier 2D stuff

which is wild in contrast to FFVII feeling like every scene is trying to blow your face off

it's extremely funny playing Xenogears after playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 because boy was there a shift in tone across the 5 games in between lmao

Xenogears: "A mysterious religion incites a war fought with giant robots known as Gears"

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: "technically there's a mech I guess but tbh it's in space and you're not in space so all it ever really does is, like, shoot a laser sometimes. the catgirl is welsh."

they put Virtual On in a jrpg??

this aesthetic rules and is also COMPLETELY unlike the rest of the game lol

also extremely funny that they've got this rad surprisingly high-res art deco font, but then scaled it slightly wrong so it's all full of wiggly sampling artifacts

game developers: fucking up text rendering since the invention of text

I was enjoying this game but wow this sewer dungeon is excruciating lmao

I'm playing most of it at like 6x speed in an emulator and it's STILL multiple hours long

every citizen of Kislev gets to choose from exactly two clothing styles: cyberpunk bondage gear or Prussian infantry

I think the white bit towards the bottom of this portrait is supposed to be his chin, above an elaborate collar, but honestly it mostly looks like teeth and Grahf is just perpetually making the pogchamp face

Like half the dialogue in this game is mysterious villains going like "ah... so it is 'he' who has arrived" "the time for 'it' will soon be upon us" for like hours at a time with no actual exposition

the first xenoblade was structured like this too lol

you can't just drag "mysterious portent" out for 40+ hours man; by the time you start actually explaining all the bullshit Proper Nouns the villains keep nodding sagely about I won't even remember those scenes

this is the actual script of an actual cutscene I just watched lmao

this is like 30 hours into the game and almost nothing they're talking about is referring to, like, things that have been explained

A very neat consequence of this game's "SNES tiles, but on quads" approach is that there's TONS of bespoke sprite art in every room. Far less tiling and texture reuse than you'd usually expect from a 3D game. Lots of directional lighting and shadows just drawn right in

like I'm used to later eras, where devs were pushing texture resolutions and you couldn't fit too many huge images on disc + in VRAM

but if you build the whole game out of 16x16 pixel-art tiles, and only load one room at a time, you can fit like INFINITY textures on a CD-ROM

like at that point it becomes entirely feasible to just construct the whole world out of totally bespoke one-off chunky pixel dioramas

healthcare

oh yeah those two goals are definitely aligned certainly nothing sinister going on

AS ALWAYS:

ma'am your church's logo is a cross with goat horns

This game's translation is really odd... it's REALLY high effort in comparison to stuff like FFVII, like the phrasing generally feels pretty natural and they like translated jokes and puns in ways that make sense... but also it's full of typos lol

Priest: *discovers that his entire religion is a front, invented to sell slaves to aliens*

JRPG Guy: Hey man just get over it

this game does not have nearly enough cute girls in it

there's a bit with an ancient underground lab, with a science-project girl in a tube, and the villains use the heroes to access/capture her

Unsure if Xenoblade 2 intentionally references this or if it's basically JRPG Trope Salad and could just as easily appear in any game lol

interestingly, the Salvagers (sailors who haul up ancient technology from ocean floor) are currently the ONLY thing in this game that's directly referenced in either of the Xenoblades. Apart from some vague thematic similarities they don't seem at all related

I do know the Giant Cross-Shaped Monolith That Creates Universes is present in all of them, but it hasn't even been mentioned in this game yet

what

AWAKE
JUDGEMENT GUNMORPHING

we regret to inform you that this game is bad now

also why am I doing the world's worst platforming dungeon when the robots can fly it's a whole thing thE ROBOTS CAN FLY IT'S LIKE CENTRAL TO THE PLOT THAT THE ROBOTS C A N F L Y

okay well getting here was a colossal pain but I must admit the sky city vibes are unimpeachable

me and the boys when we have Gaspar remove a part of the Limiter inserted our genes

so there's like a god-killing super robot that everyone is after

the heroes obtain the key to access it

after they unlock it, the villain is like "ha ha! you fell into my trap! you've unlocked the robot for me!"

then the heroes just beat him up with the new robot they just got

this isn't even played as a joke it's just the heroes heroically getting out of a scrape

all of a sudden this game gets REALLY into forcing characters into your party and then going straight into boss battles without letting you change equipment

hope uhhhhh all of your characters are optimally geared at all times because if not you can pretty much softlock

there needs to be like an ESRB for jrpgs that mandates a giant label on the box that says whether the game ever forces you to use specific characters or not

remember when tales of vesperia had a shitty whiny shrieking child in the party and nobody ever willingly used him and then at like hour 60 it made you solo a boss using only this character, who by that point was probably 20 levels below the rest of the party

that's definitely a poster of tifa right

lmao this rules

it's spent like 60 hours hyping up the evil sky-city technopolis full of military and scientific geniuses ruling the world from the shadows

and then you get there and the whole city's a tacky shopping mall built on top of an amazon warehouse

like there's all this death and chaos that they're inflicting all over the planet and then you actually get to their homeland and it's just tasteless suburbanites who literally live in a mall

extremely unsubtle lmao

rip to anyone with hearing impairments i guess

I guess even talking about accessibility for 90s jrpgs is sort of fundamentally absurd because these games demonstrably hate even their able-bodied players and refuse to accommodate them either lmao

I like how Citan has spent the entire game casually explaining incredibly top-secret details about the villains' evil plans and how all their machinations work and it took 60 hours for one character to finally go "hey uhh how the fuck do you know all this and who are you exactly"

if you take your dedicated caster character and minmax absolutely everything to buff her magic damage she does ALMOST as much damage as just hitting the enemy with her sword. also magic attacks consume a limited MP resource

honestly MP and magic attacks in general have been a total shitshow in RPGs for basically forever. The 90s ones are all either "magic is totally useless" or "magic completely breaks the game", and then we spent like 10+ years trying to balance magic somehow, and then we gave up

Final Fantasy XII (2006): "Magic hits harder than swords, but burns MP super fast. MP can be recovered mid-combat via a complex system of dice rolls"

Final Fantasy XIII (2009): "Stronger attacks take longer. Some attacks are magic"

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017): "whats magic"

also not to derail the xenogears thread but shoutouts to FFXIII for STILL being the only game to make debuffs both powerful and also fun/interesting to use

I have now reached the part of the 90s PlayStation game where the characters read you the wikipedia articles for various philosophy topics

in this case they're doing the id/ego/super-ego thing but couched in a layer of anime nonsense. I'm now IRL reading the actual wikipedia article on id/ego/super-ego to remember how it's supposed to work

at least kojima has the decency to forgo metaphor and just has a guy call you on the phone like HEY SNAKE HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS GUY FREUD

notably kojima is *still* doing this as of 2019


meanwhile takahashi has advanced the xeno series to "what if there were two anime girls at the same time"

so I've started the second disc, which marks the point where the developers ran out of money

this rules lol

"we went to a dungeon. it had a theme. we advanced the plot at the end" thanks you just saved me having to play like five hours of irrelevant random encounters

"The existence of the secret battleship remained hidden" my dude the city is literally a bright red spaceship surrounded by shacks

*watching the city-size spaceship transform into a bipedal robot*

oh it's a macross

*title appears*
oh it's LITERALLY a macross lol

lol this is really the perfect polished core of JRPG Writing

the heroes wreck the villains plans, over and over and over again, on larger and larger scales, for like 60 hours

and the villains just go WE ARE STILL IN CONTROL; OUR PLAN FAILING DOES NOT IMPACT OUR PLAN

dungeon filled with incredibly terrible puzzles

pulled up a guide because screw that

guide says "oh by the way, unequip all the gear from one of your characters because you're about to lose them FOR THE REST OF THE GAME"

glad I uhhhhh happened to see that

interesting that the whole Ran Out Of Budget thing didn't just affect cutscenes/story content, but it also introduced "buy the strategy guide OR ELSE" jank at a design level

really makes me curious what Square's playtesting was like in the 90s

lmaoooo at like hour 70 it turns out that the "Anima Relics", i.e. ancient magical macguffins that turn robots into super robots, are just straight up named the twelve tribes of israel

approaching critical levels of 90s anime

wait the stuffed animal crucifixion screenshot is from xenogears???

you know what this rules actually

im The Xenogears Disc 2 Defender now

JRPGs are too long and have too much pointless combat and dungeon crawling. VNs are good. Just tell me the plot in a giant wall of text and make cutscenes for the big moments. maybe fight a boss sometimes

Context if you're reading this thread and haven't played it: The devs ran out of money. To finish the game, disc 2 is mostly just the characters narrating what was supposed to be the rest of the plot. "We went to a dungeon and discovered [plot thing]. Then we fought a boss" etc

what's really wild is since they went with "just describe the rest of the plot via text" they don't seem to have edited it down at ALL

the narration has just blown past like six entire arcs with their own cities and dungeons and enemies and stuff, and I'm still *early* in disc 2

given that disc 1 alone is 60+ hours, and every town+dungeon arc is like 5-10 hours, if they had somehow obtained enough money to actually make the whole game as originally written, it would've been like.... 200 hours??

learning facts about women

Question for anyone who was older than 10 years old in 1998 (i.e. not me lol):

was the whole "split personalities from childhood trauma + Freud Stuff + repressed memories" trope combo considered tacky by the late 90s?

like it's def tacky NOW but I dunno when that shift occurred

imagining if all the christian-conservative moral-majority parents terrified of D&D and Videogame Violence had known about this game in 1998 lmao

like I literally knew families who earnestly believed pokemon was a stealth op by satan and/or The Japanese to convert christian children to, quote, "eastern mysticism"

honestly I super love the 90s anime thing of, like, stripmining catholicism for its (admittedly kickass) aesthetics but then immediately blowing RIGHT PAST the parts most people actually practice and latching onto gnosticism lmao

narrative designer at Square in 1995:
"yall know about judaism right well cHECK THIS SHIT OUT *pastes the entire text of wikipedia's Kabbalah article into the office slack*

Final Fantasy VII (Square, 1997): This guy with a 20-foot sword is named sephirot

Xenogears (Square, 1998): The sephirot are a gun

there are some super late-game items that claim to increase crit rates

according to the internet, they do nothing, because the combat system does not have crits

one of the most "we ran out of money" dungeon maps imaginable lmao

bart does not care about orbs, only cores

holy shit takahashi

"what if we did the star wars in-medias-res thing but instead of putting it at the beginning we wait till they've played an entire 80+ hour videogame and then just drop END OF PART V on them"

magnificent

Will prob dump more thoughts later but: Xenogears is good!

Bizarrely I think it actually gets BETTER once it stops trying to be a videogame and turns into a VN with occasional boss fights lol. The actual videogame part is generally unpleasant to play but the story is very cool

Additional Xenothoughts

having now completed the game and seen the plot twists revealed, the dialogue in this cutscene is still.... pretty much totally unintelligible lmao

huge swaths of dialogue in the first half the game are like this, where the subject of the sentence is totally unclear. Like they're either talking TO or ABOUT some other character, but the implied subject changes with every line

the second disc being mostly a narrated infodump, punctuated by properly "scripted" cutscenes for the more emotional bits, is honestly a vast improvement

Speaking of things from the first disc that don't make sense: man what the hell was Citan's whole deal???

He's initially this sort of Gandalf-like figure, in that he knows way too much about the world and is clearly sort of guiding everyone without ever really explaining the true reasons

also he has a wife and daughter who he just like leaves and basically never mentions again?

he's like manipulating everything from behind the scenes and then betrays everyone and then is like "Oh actually the guy who ordered me to betray you all is actually maybe not evil sort of so actually I'm still a good guy" and everyone's like oh okay we're cool then

???

like you EVENTUALLY get an explanation of, like, what his goals are and why he takes certain actions, but you never get ANY sense of his own personal motivations or what he thinks of the other party members or why he leaves his family to go help them kill god

just an utterly baffling character; deeply central to the story but never illuminated by it

xenogears is a firm adherent to the More Spikes Means More Power school of mechanical design

one very funny aspect of the plot is they use the "ancient lost civilization with incredibly advanced technology" plot device no less than four consecutive times

they just keep revealing older and even more advanced dead civilizations one after the other lmao

also... this lmao

(xenogears spoilers for like... the biggest revelation in the game lol)

(if you've somehow read this thread and still care about that)

game has kind of an Uncomfortable obsession with the concept of Motherhood, but tbh I mostly give that a pass because the entire premise is "what if freud was gnostic", so... kinda comes with the territory lol

Sigmund Freud, famous for his incredibly normal opinions about mothers,

Also! Characters have sex! And not in a remotely voyeuristic sense, just like, yeah these are adults with complex and meaningful relationships! It's not Weird about it!

how come we had this in 1998 but we just stopped putting actual romances in plot-centric games after like FFX