XENE OF SAGA

LETS GO

i love that the logo is just jpegged to hell and the menu text is stretched wrong

it's 2002; nobody except square had actually figured out how to make ps2 games yet

OH SHIT IT'S PYRA

four thousand years later, humanity has evolved into Anime

man this opening goes HARD

fully in the FFX vein of like "it's a new millennium, it's a new console, videogames are here to BLOW YOUR FUCKIN MIND" ridiculously self-confident CGI bombast

they got a real orchestra

youtube link bc too long for twitter:

I love that this team is fresh off of making Xenogears, completely running out of time/budget and cutting like 100 hours of planned content down to like 8 hours of scrolling text

and then immediately after they're like "alright we're trying this again, and we're GOING BIGGER"

yasunori mitsuda bringing the incredible tutorial music vibes

you know it's gonna be a good videogame when it uses O for select and X for back

I love that the tutorial specifically calls this out, like "oh hey if you've played a bunch of JRPGs you might be wondering where to find the Flee menu"

if you're making a videogame in 2022 and your UI doesn't sound like this you are a coward

fuck I miss the y2k-era optimism where everyone's vision of a sci-fi future internet basically looked like Summer Wars

I mean in retrospect it turned out to be unfounded optimism, but it was nice when the future of technology looked like something playful and exciting, instead of mark zuckerberg's pallid silicone eyebrowless mask telling you strap a zoom meeting to your eyes and look at a wendys

doing the sickos YES HA HA YES thing as I recognize transparency sorting errors in a prerendered video

this is the earliest game I've ever seen using in-engine-but-prerendered cutscenes? Some cutscenes are fancy CGI but some are clearly the actual PS2 models and renderer but with video compression

Not sure why either; they don't seem to do things the realtime cutscenes can't

by like 2006ish this was a fairly common technique for hiding loading transitions, but I'm not sure that's what they're doing here

(although generally the loading times between scenes have been super short, so maybe)

this game rules

man I've played enough xeno games to know you REALLY shouldn't just leave that thing sitting around in a cargo hold

I played xenoblade 2 and then xenoblade 1 and then xenogears, which is a very weird way to go about this

but my chief takeaway is: if you find a giant gold cross in space, do NOT build a bigass NERV gantry around it unless you're prepared for things to get real fuckin Gnostic

i see

holy shit you get spam emails advertising other namco games from 2002

GUNCON™ 2 COMPATIBLE

can an hdr tv get bright enough for light guns to work

it is four thousand years in the future and workplace safety consists of a guy who stands next to the Kill Everyone In This Room Button and tells people not to press it

lmao

ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩 ROBOT 🤖 GIRL 👩

this game rules it's like barely even a videogame you just watch a kickass weird 90s-CGI anime and occasionally walk down some corridors

UI design is my passion

bandai namco please sell this hat irl

in addition to the incredible trucker hat this guy ALSO has a necklace that's just a binder clip on a chain

describing a cyborg as "anachronistic" is a very cool choice of words

honestly for being a game consisting almost entirely of cutscenes, the writing has some surprisingly strong bits?

It's very good at throwing out lines like that cyborg thing, that don't waste time but immediately suggest a whole lot of interesting concepts about the setting

One concept that comes up a lot is they have replicants, i.e. manufactured humans, with natural bodies but deliberately-engineered neural patterns

the scientists/engineers in charge of their upkeep are called "counselors" bc most of what they do is psychological therapy

so like the therapists genuinely care about the replicants and want to keep them healthy, BUT ALSO there's this weird conflict of interest because they're employed BY the replicants' manufacturer and their job is to do counseling to make sure the product keeps turning a profit

WOW IT'S ALMOST LIKE A METAPHOR FOR HOW "MENTAL HEALTH" IS PATHOLOGIZED AND MANAGED THROUGH A LENS OF WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY UNDER CAPITALI

it remains to be seen whether the writers are actually going anywhere with this, or if it's just gonna turn into gnostic fanfic about robots slaying the demiurge

I mean okay it's almost certainly the second one

but it's a very neat bit of writing that establishes a cool setting

damn dude

CYBER KICK

CYBER KICK

CYBER CRAB

mandatory stealth mission where you play as a cyborg whose metal cyber feet make echoing clanging noises wherever he walks is a very good joke

lore

between the replicants and "all animals are extinct but we made robot copies of them to keep as pets" being a plot point, I'm kinda wondering if this game is deliberately referencing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

holy shit lmao GET NOKIA'D

the in-game glossary is incredible

lots of games have a "codex" system like this but this is the only one I've ever seen that's written fully *out of character*?

the tone is like a wiki or something. It directly distinguishes between the IRL and in-fiction meanings of words. Some of them have translation notes

oh okay one of the robot pet models is named Nexus 6 this is definitely an intentional reference lol

incredible power move

I haven't really mentioned the gameplay of this game because there mostly isn't any

you watch like an hour-long episode of an anime rendered on a ps2, and then you walk around some scifi corridors and talk to NPCs for a while, and then you watch more anime

on rare occasions it will drop you into a Combat Zone and then you get a very standard/unremarkable 90s turn-based jrpg

these sections are usually pretty short, although enemies tend to hit VERY hard, probably to force the jrpg resource attrition thing in a shorter timespan

so with that as context:

I just encountered a boss that one-hit-kills my entire party on the first turn, then uses the same attack on every subsequent turn if anyone managed to dodge it the first time

lol, lmao

once again:

(also dang it's been almost 2 years since the persona 3 thread

wow time flies when you're uhhhhhhh imprisoned by plague)

apparently the Intended Stat for this boss is literally "go grind in a hallway for an hour or two until you have enough HP to survive the first turn, and also unlock the only skills that will allow you to exploit its gimmick weakness"

this sucks even by 2002 standards lol

FUCK this is also from the "characters who are not in the combat party do not get XP" school of Gigantic Asshole JRPG Design

I'm like 14 hours into this game and this is the first time there has been enough actual Gameplay that I've had to even THINK about the combat system at all and only now do I discover: it sucks ass

okay I listened to a podcast and ground out the necessary stats and beat the boss but the podcast happened to be about The Ongoing Distintigration of The Fabric of American Society so now I'm just depressed whoops

two very funny bits of writing:

- instead of being waifu bait, the robot girl is a huge jerk. like not even tsundere, just genuinely an asshole

- the girl who built her is simultaneously mad at the robot for being a jerk, and mad at herself for failing to make a *cute* robot

it's funny how the prerendered promo art from this era usually ended up looking WORSE than the actual game graphics

they didn't really have any knobs to turn up the realism other than "make it Even More Smooth"

there's also these scenes where there's just a character in a void so they don't need to render backgrounds/npcs and the face model is just ABSURDLY high poly

really get the sense that 3D artists in 2002 just kinda figured "more subdivision levels == better graphics"

I'm sad that the mechs are like truck size now instead of like building size

in xenogears if normal guys attacked your mech you could step on them lol

convention center hallway lookin ass spaceship

all the environment art in this game is... not bad, but a pretty significant downgrade from xenogears

wonder how much of the original art team stayed with square instead of leaving to form monolith

now that's a sales pitch

Jank

I must emphasize that this is the entire extent of Jank's dialogue

ahh, if only someone could bring me some Ｇｌｏｗｉｎｇ Ｔｅｘｔ... but alas, Ｇｌｏｗｉｎｇ Ｔｅｘｔ is impossible to find

Image description:
A large billboard that has been consumed by some sort of flesh spaceship.
The billboard depicts a photograph of some fish, and the word "Why?"

normal names for shops to have

environmental storytelling is when you find a ruined building embedded in a giant spaceship made of flesh and the sign on the door says SPACE-TIME ANOMALY RESEARCH LABORATORY

oh fuck yes

welcome drill game

why is it the U R MR GAY font

so I keep getting these items that tell me I can play minigames and then not finding the minigames

I just discovered you have to go into the Key Items inventory and then press the O button on the "you can play a minigame" item WHILE standing on a specific type of save point??

aaaaaaaaa

XENOCARD??

what the actual fuck

i have been reading the rules of Xeno Card for six hours

not a shitpost: the tutorial for how to play Xeno Card is 47 screens of text

in addition to the tutorial, there is also a manual, which is 59 pages long and features a searchable topic index

WHY DID THEY MAKE THIS INSTEAD OF MAKING THE ACTUAL GAME GOOD??

they 3D modeled little foil booster packs that you have to buy and open

I need money to buy new equipment and apparently the easiest way to gain money in this game is to play the poker minigame because the odds are heavily skewed in the player's favor except it requires KNOWING HOW TO PLAY POKER

this game feels like a playable sleep paralysis dream

every guide about the poker minigame is filled with great advice

ah,, the mark of the Nice

initiate unnecessarily kickass docking procedure

lol of course there's a Beach Episode

also it's 2022 why don't phones look like this IRL. I want a PS2Phone

that thing would be so much easier to type on than our stupid 3 inch wide touchscreens

yooooo it's the xenogears map screen!

I am 30 hours into this game and this is literally the first time I have been given to choose any sort of destination lol

railroaded game design isn't bad and any nerd who criticizes games for being "too linear" probably just has shit taste lol

but also it's VERY funny to build an entire game out of cutscenes connected by corridors and then suddenly introduce an overworld map at hour *thirty*

this also supports my hypothesis that all the xenogears artists stayed at square instead of joining monolith, because the xenogears maps were WAY better executed

the detail density is so consistent you can barely tell where texels end and triangles start:

lol'd irl

Xenosaga fishing sets a new bar for the industry

I'm pretty sure this is 100% implemented via the regular dialogue scripting system. Zero custom code. The fish are NPCs (as indicated by the minimap) and they don't despawn

you walk into the sea and talk to a fish, and the fish says "Caught a small fish!"

I fucking love this

intensely normal shop name

hold on this is just persona

this game routinely goes HOURS between save points

I can't imagine how bad this must have been to play as a kid if your parents limited your game time

g o d r a y s

videogames are good because guns perform Physical attacks and therefore their damage is determined by the wielder's Strength

oh yeah I love Vagrant Story

(that's not actually true; I attempted to play Vagrant Story a while back and the opening + tutorial mission went harder than almost anything I've ever played but then it made me solve block-pushing puzzles in a series of identical brown corridors for eight hours and I gave up)

A VISION

lmao a point of Lore in this game's world:
At one point a tech company invented a superintelligent AI. Everyone immediately went "wait that's bad right" and then the military obliterated every building the company owned and then the government made AI illegal

i do not like that the robot girl has a Womb Cannon

this game took an abrupt turn into some campy but surprisingly well executed horror

Xenosaga Episode I: Rated T for a guy doing a comically exaggerated Insane Villain Monologue while uhhhhh tearing his own limbs off in front of a terrified child

I do kinda love how pre Hot Coffee and Oblivion the ESRB was just like "yeah sure just pick whatever letter you want"

See Also ocarina of time getting rated E with ganondorf vomiting blood and the Dead Hand fight in there lol

apparently episode 3 has a bunch of gore that got toned down in the US version. I know this because I found gamefaqs posts from 13 years ago where Gamers were writing aggrieved sermons about the evils of Censorship

wild how gamers have just been permanently Like That for decades

there's a non-obvious trick for minmaxing stats that 20-year-old gamefaqs posts assured me would basically break the game

I have been doing it for like 40 hours

I just got a bad arrangement of turns and got party-wiped at like 70% health

this game's combat is miserable lmao

meaning like, WITH the supposedly game-breaking exploits I'm still barely keeping up with the intended power curve

this game must have been an absolutely crushing grind for anyone playing it at launch

Thus far my review of Xenosaga is that it is the bad kind of bad videogame but it's also the good kind of bad anime so it sort of evens out

forum signature banner ass special attack

irl cracked up laughing halfway through this

some of the most Videogames Writing ever conceived

more extremely good Lore:

there are apparently two superintelligent AIs in the universe: the one that started xenosaga's version of the butlerian jihad, and this rabbit mascot, which the protagonist made in her spare time to answer emails for her. it lives in her phone

in case anyone was worried, yes, of COURSE xenosaga features the Official Videogame Footstep On Metal Grate Sound Effect

if ur game got grates and they dont sound Like That what are u even doing

endgame keyboard

*gesturing towards computer*

subtlety is for cowards

tbh the idea of some science nerds building a *prototype* of The Literal Throne of God is extremely funny but also extremely rad

this game has been steadily getting more Gameplay as it goes on, which is unfortunate because the gameplay is bad

I liked the beginning when it was just Xenogears Disc 2 But Expensive and it was like an hour and a half of cutscenes for every ten minutes of walking down a hallway

there is no save point before the final boss

the previous save point was about 1.5 hours ago

uuhhhhhHHHHHH

okay I managed to make it through without dying but holy shit

do not play Xenosaga Episode I: Dur Wille zur Macht (2002) on an actual PS2

use an emulator so you get save states lmao fuck

Anyway I have now finished playing Xenosaga Episode I: Dur Wille zur Macht (2002)

it is Batshit

the plot explains nothing and resolves nothing and it's totally unclear what the point of anything was and it ends abruptly with a giant TO BE CONTINUED

no real dramatic arc just like Stuff Happens for 70 hours and then stops

this was originally planned as part one of SIX lmao

I very rarely say this about games but: if you want to check out xenosaga 1 you could probably just watch it on youtube without diminishing the experience

the gameplay is tedious, unremarkable, and largely unnecessary, and all the good shit is in the NPC convos and cutscenes

well okay you would miss out on XENO CARD

one of the weirdest things about the game is there's like.... almost no music, ever

there's exactly one battle track (no separate boss track), the email/tutorial music, and a generic "monsters are attacking" piece, and the rest of the game is just complete silence

some of the cutscenes are *scored*, as in like, bespoke music timed to the events on screen, but that would be way too expensive so mostly they just.... didn't

gives the whole game an incredibly strange tone

Anyway it's hard to form a real opinion about this game bc it's so wildly unfocused. Just a million cool ideas in a big pile of weird creepy rad CGI and dated (even by 2002 standards) game design. The last few dungeons are just absolutely miserable to play, which is a bummer

I think what makes it interesting is it's an incredibly *singular* game

it feels incredibly disjointed, but where xenogears was disjointed because of dev hell, this game is like... overwrought? It's trying SO hard to impress you from every direction and the result is chaos

Like I can't imagine this weird plastic doll aesthetic looked GOOD even in 2002. Final Fantasy X was already out, and the 3D Appleseed film was on the horizon (prob the first work to really nail CGI anime aesthetic imo)

it def looks EXPENSIVE AS HELL tho

ultimately I think this is the real take

excited for Episode II, where apparently they started running out of time/money again