I do not have anything better to do with my life at this precise moment so might as well just Keep Going

"Jenseits von Gut und Böse" is German for "This Time the Title Screen has Music and Isn't Covered in Jpeg Artifacts"

Apparently there was a pretty significant staff shakeup between this game and the first one. Some of it intentional (reportedly monolith intentionally tries to promote people rapidly instead of letting leadership stagnate, which is kind of cool), and some of it sounds like Drama

Apparently Soraya Saga [co-writer of xenogears/xenosaga 1 & 2, along with her husband/monolith CEO tetsuya takahashi] made a bunch of vagueposts on a blog about this in the 2000s but the posts are both In Japanese and also Gone so all that remains is ancient gamefaqs flamewars

nothing says Reliable Source like a forum thread full of gamers who do not speak japanese projecting meanings onto blog posts they cannot read and then arguing about which of them has imagined the correct translation

It is the year 2004 and Bloom has been invented

whoa the combat system has a version of the Break Topple Launch thing from the xenoblades

I think this is the first, like, *mechanic* thing I've encountered in the older games that appears in the modern ones

they don't have a random british announcer guy yelling
DRIVER COMBO
COMPLETE
AWESOME
though. Took until 2017 to invent that crucial component

dude just said BREAK THE CHAINS THAT BIND US and then blew up a car

when exporting this clip i named it XenosagaNumtot.mp4

also check out how good that car looks before it gets blown up

blurry baked shadows look natural for huge area lights, subtle environment-mapped reflections on the glass (episode 1 didn't have envmaps), the blinking taillight shining on the road is all texture based

super cool

so far this is a HUGE visual upgrade from the first game. Episode 1 had a very "we're still figuring out how the playstation 2 works" look to it, but this one's much more modern (well "modern" by 2000s PS2 standards lol) in terms of engine tech and vfx tricks

wonder if they can keep this up for the whole game, or if they just polished the opening mission a whole lot for demo purposes lol

good sci-fi billboard aesthetic

well it took an entire game's worth of buildup but I am happy to report that the Pope is here and he's evil

This game's plot starts immediately after the end of the previous episode, but in the intervening 30 seconds everybody got DRAMATICALLY less Anime

It's mostly an improvement tbh; a lot of the faces looked pretty bad in the first game, and this style works a lot better with the available lighting tech

IMO nobody really figured out how to do anime faces + dynamic lighting until we could do bent-normal tricks with shaders

so in the ps2 era you could do good-looking anime faces if you painted all the lighting (e.g. kingdom hearts), or you could do more realistically-stylized faces and let the engine shade it (FFX, DoA, etc)

needed future tech-art to shade "anime shaped" face geo acceptably (imo)

one lesson they clearly learned is they have proper LoD models now, so they can actually show more than like two people in a cutscene without prerendering it lol

first game relied ENTIRELY on geometry for shading, which made everyone look like plastic dolls, but now they've realized if you paint SOME shading into the textures then you don't need the vertex density for gouraud to do its work

result is less detailed, but also less uncanny

(first pic is max-detail prerendered mode in episode 1, second is realtime LoD from a scene with a bunch of characters in episode 2

didn't have a good capture of his realtime model from the first game, but imagine basically the same subdivided veggietales look but lower poly)

anyway the most jarring thing is they also replaced most of the VOICE ACTORS??

so like most of the characters have different faces, AND different voices, and the result is incredibly disorienting lol

nice looking water

glad to see some cool graphics/tech-art stuff in this game; the previous one didn't really have anything to talk about there

compared to the first game, the character progression stuff has been made somewhat less Needlessly Byzantine

it still doesn't give XP to characters outside the combat party though, because Not Being An Asshole had not been invented yet in 2004

Wikipedia cites a GameSpot review *complaining* that character progression no longer involves like 70 different interlocking XP currencies that are never explained and will softlock the game if you spend them on the wrong stats

Once Again:

gamespot dot com circa 2005 just identifying things that are good and putting them in the The Bad column

road closed with a big holographic sign that says NO THOROUGHFARE

why is this mans face so Smooth

his face coupled with this choice in voice direction is just incredible

The Galaxy's Most Featureless Man

ooh we get another cool map screen

it's just a big 2D texture this time instead of an actual 3D model, but it's a very neat looking texture

"okay what logo should we use for our galaxy-spanning FTL internet that is somehow also a sort of government unto itself"

"how about an ouroboros, but like, the cutest ouroboros ever"

BURGER CUBE

for those keeping track, I think Astral Chain still holds the title for best fictional fast food brand with LARGER BURGER but I have to admit BURGER CUBE is a close contender

at least momo looks like an actual child now instead of.... whatever uguu nightmare was going on in the first game

I guess the first game being from 2002 means it coincided with Peak Wideface Uguu era

really glad that turned out to be a relatively short-lived aesthetic trend lol

I don't usually use walkthroughs for jrpgs but these games have enough Fuck You Buy The Officially Licensed Strategy Guide bullshit that you kind of have to

tfw

The main city area in the first game got attacked by aliens and you spent a bunch of time like rescuing people trapped in burning rubble and stuff

you go there again in this game and it's all fixed and everyone's talking about how they've built new lives

this is fun and cool except...... canonically speaking the events of the previous game took place like 16 hours ago

like the protagonist hasn't even slept yet

oh hell yeah shion gets a Dramatic Costume Change and now looks like she's from final fantasy X-2

the replicant girl has an existential crisis after learning her emotions can be disabled remotely, and then one of her human friends comes up with the hardest possible response

fuck this outfit is so good

I haven't fought anything in like 8+ hours this rules

"Virginian Bright" is a very good made-up name for a shitty american beer

ALL HAIL THE EMOTION ENGINE, UNDEFEATED GOD OF OVERDRAW

none of this foliage is writing Z; it's all just straight up back-to-front alpha blending

f u c k

so the primary mcguffin of xenosaga has thus far been "the Y-Data" which is some secret knowledge that the villains are trying to capture so they can do [ambiguous evil stuff]

so the whole plot has been about preventing them from obtaining it

except like.... this is a videogame right

if the villains want a thing, you KNOW that the villains are GOING TO OBTAIN THE THING. This is an absolutely ironclad rule of videogame writing

you CANNOT foil the villains' plans until the very last second of the very last step

"we need to stop them from doing Thing"

you will not. you CANNOT. they are GOING to do Thing. this literally always happens

no one has ever written a videogame where Thing is successfully stopped. no one ever will

this is just how shit works when you live in a dramatic arc

We're all used to this. Except xenosaga was planned to be six entire videogames. So THE ENTIRE FIRST GAME was about stopping the villains from Doing the Thing, which you, the player, knew was impossible from like minute five

anyway, after the 70 hours of the first game, and now like 20 hours of the second game, I am happy to report that the villains FINALLY obtained the fucking Y Data, which means the protagonist's mission is no longer "stop the plot from happening" and maybe the plot will happen

See Also

anyway for the record: I am enjoying Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse (2005)

I was trying to think of counterexamples; jrpgs where the main characters are the primary force in advancing the plot, instead of the villains doing all the work

immediately thought of Persona 5 and the Niers, which like, yeah those are The Ones With Good Writing lol, i know

oh wow that was quick

maybe the gamers weren't lying when they said this game was short

I like how these metal railings look

the camera angle is more or less fixed, so they could just paint the reflections right into the texture

also lol disc 2 starts with a very xenogearsy "we planned a shitton of content here but we had to cut it all in order to ship so here's a voiceover just telling you everything that happened" timeskip

halfway through they're like ALSO SOME NEW CHARACTERS JOINED THE PARTY lol

I have already gone on record stating that Xenogears Disc 2 Is Good Actually so I'm not complaining here. Given Saga/Takahashi's love of utterly glacial pacing it's usually a good thing when somebody steps in like "yo sorry we gotta keep this moving lets skip ahead"

ohh im a videogame protagonist oooh i sleep fully clothed with my shoes on and no blankets oooohh

the reflections in this window look so good

it's just the hallway geo mirrored with a very low alpha. no fancy technical tricks but it's all you need to look basically perfect

it looks so natural I didn't even notice it immediately

honestly surprised we don't still see this trick in modern games. Like sure it's not Physically Based but there's no reason you couldn't use it for occasional hero assets

it's wild that having a girl protagonist STILL feels unusual for this genre even decades later

also very funny that rather than being depicted as particularly sensitive, her default mode of thought is just Videogame Protagonist lol

amusing mechanical detail: XP is split between active party members. There's a short section of this game where you only have one character, and all the enemies are weak to account for that. except this also means you gain XP three times faster than anywhere else in the game lol

according to ancient gamefaqs posts, when the rest of the party is added back they get boosted to match the protagonist's level (presumably so that this short plot section doesn't unbalance your party)

sooo effectively this area functions a 300% XP boost for the whole party lmao

so yeah I just listened to a couple podcasts and gained like 15 levels and now hopefully I shouldn't have to deal with any bullshit for the rest of the game lol

thank you Ancient Gamefaqs Forum Posters

tbh I've been seeing WILDLY conflicting opinions about this game's balance. Half the Forum Posters claim it's insanely brutal and requires days of grinding, and the other half are like "nah you just need to understand how the combat system works"

the combat is ABSURDLY complicated, but with the benefit of being able to look stuff up on the internet I've had zero problems with bosses

which means either
- the "git gud" nerds are correct and people just didn't understand the mechanics, or
- there's a difficulty cliff later

since I have now powerleveled myself beyond the intended curve, I guess I will never learn the answer to this

FWIW the combat system is actually really neat. It's just WAY overdesigned, to a degree that it probably detracts from the overall experience

basically none of your attacks do meaningful damage unless the enemy is weak to that attack type AND you go through a special attack pattern to break their guard

so combat is about stocking up unused turns, cracking an opening, and then unloading everything at once

this is cool and rad, except it takes a LONG ASS TIME to pull off, and requires juggling a shitton of state re: turn order and character attack types, so basically every crappy mook encounter is like boss-fight level complexity

fun for a few fights, exhausting in the long run

oh shit the robot girl has a robot motorcycle that is also a spaceship that is also the cockpit of a mecha

KOS-MOS the robot girl is the only xenosaga character I'd ever heard about prior to playing them

This is odd bc she's not the focus of the first game and she's barely even been PRESENT in this one

but I guess suddenly showing up with a motorcyclespacehipmech is worthy of fame

everybody loves a transforming mecha attack

okay I'm not a genetically engineered child supergenius but I'm pretty sure that is not how gravity works

incredible sequence of decisionmaking

we're like two puzzles deep in this dungeon and the writers have already given up trying to invent an in-universe justification for whatever bullshit the designers came up with so there's just a sign on the wall that says FUCK YOU PUS HTHE BLOCKS

no game designer has inflicted more suffering on the world than the guy who made sokoban

I do not want to push blocks

I have NEVER wanted to push blocks

if I never push another fucking block for the rest of my life it will still be too soon

ah

okay so this definitely isn't at the xenogears level of "ran out of money" but they definitely seem to be running out of money lol

just had two consecutive boss battles with cool intro cutscenes and mid-battle dialogue and then you kill them and and just... get XP and proceed

like no cutscene after the boss battle

they just die in combat and then you get dropped straight from the results screen back into the dungeon

weirdly jarring lol

are ya winning son

(context which makes this line even funnier: the zohar is a 200-foot-tall golden cross that occasionally eats planets and creates entire universes seemingly at random, and which also might be God. It's the monolith from 2001 retconned into gnosticism)

game design

this game has a lot of side quests and they're all extremely tedious and boring but many of them provide extremely important combat abilities

I think a 2005 Gamer would call this an improvement over the previous game's lack of quests, but tbh I preferred the cutscene hallway lol

xenosaga adheres to the final fantasy XII-2 philosophy of "you can put everyone in ostensibly-sexy outfits but Butts Do Not Exist"

honestly this makes sense; I feel like anime artists in general didn't really find out about asses until like 2008

the CLAMP noodle anatomy regime was remarkably long-lived

crediting hyung-tae kim with the invention of anime glutes

notably the swimsuits actually have excellent stats; a design innovation which reached its apex in Xenoblade Chronicles (2010)

revisiting this, I think it's sort of both

the later portions of the game ARE massive difficulty cliff, but it's all via weird combat-system minutiae that CAN, TECHNICALLY be countered if you know enough about how the systems work

basically every attack has a Zone and an Affinity and a Type and an Element and an Effect

each character has access to a unique set of zones/affinities/types/elements/effects

so there's like.... thousands of possible combinations that enemies can be strong or weak against

what happens later in the game is the enemies start having increasingly narrow weaknesses, to the extent that only certain characters or only certain attacks ON certain characters, can actually hurt them

and none of this is really communicated in any reasonable way

then enemies start getting HEALED by whole categories of attacks, and then it introduces mechs, so then it's like "only this attack, on this one character, while riding in the sPECIFIC CHAIR INSIDE THE SPECIFIC MECH, can hurt this enemy, and also most other attacks heal it"

in 2022, you can just read Ancient Gamefaqs Walkthroughs that are like "okay put this set of characters in these positions, and you should be able to handle the combination of enemies in this zone" and then combat is straightforward

but playing this in 2005 must've been Hell lol

hate clocking into my job at the Evil Science Office Tower and having to solve 【Water Level Adjustment Room】 in order to proceed to my desk every morning

extremely good line delivery lmao

"I mean wasn't planning on doing a villainous monologue but since you ASKED"

also hell yeah we're finally getting into the overt christianity fanfic part

I was trying to think how to describe the soundtrack of Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse (2004) and the best description I can come up with is "Sound Blaster Ass"

It's not bad (composer is Shinji Hosoe, who's been around since the 80s and written a ton of well-known stuff), but it's very funny hearing FM synthesis DONG noises everywhere

and like, not the Genesis FM sound everyone's nostalgic for; much more like the PC shareware aesthetic

I was gonna comment on how the title screen music is real instruments and mournful vocals and then the in-game music is all upbeat synthesizer boinks, but apparently it's two separate composers who had basically no contact with each other

found this on the wik of pedia and like.... damn dude. does not sound like a good time :(

this puzzle is made so much funnier by the fact that you have to do it from inside a mech

get in the robot and play candy crush shinji

anime girls in swimsuits beating the shit out of the pope

so I finished xenosaga 2 last night

the ending briefly features the most fucked up CGI dog I have ever seen

On the whole I would say xenosaga 2 is... fine?

After the first game monolith learned how to make PS2 games, so it's largely technically competent and feels like a "normal" jrpg. But missing the batshit fever-dream chaos of the first game sadly makes it... much less interesting

It's much more coherently put together. Despite apparent strife, I think reducing Takahashi and Saga's direct involvement in the script was probably a good idea? There are some noticeable bits where it feels like an editor DRAMATICALLY cut down the script, for the better imo

I think Takahashi in particular just LOVES doing mysterious shadowy figures talking in vague terms about Proper Nouns of Mysterious Portent for like 80 hours

as much as I like the xenoblades they're def dragged down by this, and xenogears is just The Most

with xenosaga planned as six episodes the ENTIRE FIRST GAME was just Mysterious Portent, but then for 2 someone was clearly like "okay actual events need to happen at some point in this story"

I dunno if the story is GOOD but I'm at least interested in where it's headed now

ALSO NOTABLE:
This is the first of these games where it's like, recognizably the studio that made xenoblade?

xenogears felt like a Square game/Chrono Trigger spinoff, xenosaga 1 was all over the place, but this one is recognizably A Monolith Game, for whatever that means

Given that my take is "this one is better polished but less interesting than ep 1" I'm kinda curious why 2 was generally considered the low point of the series? It's got all of the Gamer Signifiers that Gamers think make games good (better graphics! more quests! two discs!)

I suspect it's because I had 18 years' worth of gamefaqs posts to reduce the combat difficulty?

Without Posts you'd prob have to just grind enough to brute-force the more byzantine late-game fights

I dunno how long that would take but I suspect it would be absolutely brutal

ANYWAY

what I said about xenosaga episode 1 continues to be true: if you're interested in this game you could PROBABLY just watch it on youtube without missing much of anything. The gameplay portion is... ehhhhh

no Xeno Card this time either

ah fuck