its the weekend baby you know what that means time to drink precisely one monster energy ultra sunrise and play Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (2006)

apparently "Also sprach Zarathustra" is the actual german title of Thus Spake Zarathustra, which makes a lot more sense than reading "also" as an english word

"okay so Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1885, and then in 2006 the videogame Xenosaga Episode III revealed a bunch of other shit that Zarathustra also spake"

between episodes 2 and 3 they shuffled a bunch of Takahashi and Saga's original plot into a bunch of side content in order to actually finish the story

I did read the script for Pied Piper, the never-localized phone game that was exclusive to a couple specific mobile carriers

Pied Piper actually kicks ass

but I must confess I merely skimmed a summary of Xenosaga: A Missing Year, which was a series of flash animations that are basically powerpoint walls of text interspersed with audio dramas. This was apparently just like... on namco's website lol

Missing Year was also never officially localized and reportedly episode 3 summarizes most of its contents anyway so like.... I'm gonna live with NOT sitting through and hour and a half of scrolling text in an swf file

I dunno what was with JRPG publishers and releasing plot stuff through weird untranslated side media but there was a LOT of this going on in the mid 2000s lol

Kingdom Hearts Coded, FFX-2's intro being only available in a japanese re-release of FFX, Advent Children's actual plot not being in the movie but explained in an untranslated novella released before the movie...

I mean in fairness it could be worse. Tales fans were missing entire games in this period lol

oh hell yeah we've got Fire Emblem style pictures of the person talking on the text box on top of the actual model of the person talking

lmao the story picks up a year after the end of episode 2, and the instant the opening cutscenes finish a character is like "HEY, go into the menu and read this summary of the untranslated flash animations to explain what's going on"

CDC recommends checking the Status screen

Okay I know about the whole "O and X are consistent yes/no symbols in japan" thing, but does triangle have an established cultural meaning? I've seen "triangle means reduced effectiveness" used other games too

well we got boob windows and the tutorial mission ends with an absurd closeup of shion's low-poly ass

it took nearly a decade but monolith software has finally found out about being horny

also this looks Xenoblade As Fuck

most of the environment art in the previous games was fairly unremarkable but it looks like they've now hired the "impossibly gigantic structures tinted an intense blue by atmospheric haze" team, who will define their later games' aesthetic

it's been a year since the end of the previous game and the protagonist quit her job at raytheon and now lives in an incredibly cute sci-fi cabin on a tropical island doing cyberterrorism

SUDDENLY: STEVE BLUM

They actually brought back most of the voice cast from the first episode, which is good I guess but means I have to get used to different voices AGAIN after finishing episode 2

this guy wasn't in the first game but they recast him anyway and now he's Steve Blum lol

new group of villains introduced at the end of episode 2 all have Evil British Accents

Oh man this rules. Probably the best map screen they've done yet

Finally managed to nail the texel density so textures and mesh edges mix together at a consistent detail frequency. Haven't seen them pull this off since xenogears

this is the kind of carefully-authored resolution-dependent scene that would get absolutely desecrated by an HD remaster lol

there's a goofy puzzle minigame and it has an option for swapping O/X confirm/cancel

the actual game does not

yesssss

I dunno if they hired more artists or if the same artists just got way better in the 2 years since episode 2, but they're Really Good at environment art now and it rules

you can see tiny little 1px pedestrians walking around down there

ooo you can go here at night too

relatable

hold up that's just Fei Xenogears

oh it's like actually fei xenogears his name is abel which is also the name of the guy who started the plot of xenogears and got reincarnated as like half the cast of xenogears

rad

in the year since the previous game's events shion and kos-mos have both been upgraded with boob windows

really all of the character designs have gotten much more Videogame Character Design looking lol

also kos-mos has a butt....? window?

robotbutt

I actually like the new designs but it's very funny going through these chronologically because like... xenoblade 2 is Famously Horny but everything prior to xenosaga 3 has been like *zero percent horny*

xenogears has literal sex scenes and it's still a completely non-horny game bc it's depicted entirely as like... normal and meaningful relationships between adult humans

Chronology of human facial morphology:

2050: Toy Story Dad

6050: Christopher Hart's How To Draw Anime 3D

approx. six hours later: Not Actually Anime But Sorta Soul Calibur 2 Lookin Ass

6051: JRPG Protagonist

im still mad they took away shion's glasses after the first game

You've never been able to control the camera and the first two games were generally very constrained to hallways, so all the interesting visuals were mostly in cutscenes

Really happy they're finally confident enough to put the cool stuff in the actual environments now

that's the ship from this cutscene

it's a central part of the story but this is the first time it's EVER appeared in a realtime environment. It's supposed to be 4km long and they finally let us just walk past it and be like "whoa that thing's fuckin BIG"

it took 8 years but xp and skill points are finally shared with all characters regardless of which ones are in combat

(non-combat characters still get LESS but euhhhhhhhhhFine)

it still blows my mind how long it took for devs to realize that not sharing XP *actively prevents* players from using all of the characters you spent years designing

FFXII came out a few months before this and it STILL didn't share xp

(which is doubly wild because FFX came out five years earlier and had a combat system designed to actually USE all the characters in most fights, which is a much better solution than XP sharing and most games STILL haven't learned that lesson lol)

eternally funny jrpg trope:

sneaking into an office building to steal information or something and just murdering like 60 uninvolved security guards along the way

at least FFVII had the excuse of "you are literally terrorists" lol

at the end of episode 2, an Evil Guy who was dead for 14 years reincarnated by stealing another character's body

I think they uhhhhh had to edit some stuff because in 3 he's inexplicably the president of the galaxy?

Like zero explanation, he wasn't president BEFORE he died and now he's been dead for 14 years and then just randomly shows up again, and the entire political apparatus of like 10,000 planets just... put him in charge? I guess?

presumably this is all part of his evil plot somehow

kos-mos having gigantic arcing 90s bangs had to have felt pretty dated by 2006?

odd that they chose to keep this one aspect of her design constant across the games, when most of the other character have gotten dramatically redesigned multiple times

man it's been really cool playing these games right after each other because it's an incredible example of just HOW FAR devs were able to push the PS2 as they learned how to work within its constraints

hanger full of big robots, 2002 vs 2006:

momo has just looked like a completely different person in every game lol

in fairness she's supposed to be like 12 and there's a one-year time skip between 2 and 3, so they did make her look slightly older

(also she's like barely appeared in this game so far, which is a bummer because she's by far the most interesting character)

an interesting thing about the xenosagas is you have the same set of party members through all three games, but most of them aren't really close friends?

there's none of the usual jrpg "group of social misfits finds family in each other" thing

a few of them form individual friendships, but for the most part they've all got their own lives going on, and they just end up fighting together because external forces keep pushing them together

most characters' closest relationships are with other people outside the party

while it's interesting, tbh I kinda feel like it weakens the writing? I'm on the third game and I still don't feel any real emotional investment in any of these characters, because THEY don't either

I dunno this is probably mostly a symptom of the story getting edited down from a gigantic sprawling six-game draft written by a husband/wife duo who were getting mad at each other while trying to power their way through dev-hell crunch stress

one hundred and fifty hours into this fucking plot

nobody ever actually DOES anything in this story, every character is just a Mysterious Clouded Past so every plot beat is just revealing some dramatic backstory detail that could have been explained at any time, and deliberately unintelligible proclamations of Dark Portent

Before every boss fight a dude in a robe shows up and goes "ahh, you are powerless, you know not the meaning of this boss" and then every time you kill a boss a different robe guy goes "ahh, it begins, the wheels are set in motion, exactly as foretold, soon 'that' will awaken"

Again this was also like 85% of xenogears, but then they had to pack the actual cool plot stuff into a 90-minute VN at the end of disc 2 and that part accidentally totally kicked ass

this time it's getting dragged out across three entire games lol

like: two games and four years later this same guy is still showing up before bosses and doing this lmao

pretty though

Ironclad law of videogame writing:
Any information referred to as a "rumor" is absolutely 100% guaranteed fact

Rumors are THE single most reliable source of information. Characters or even narrators can lie or be misinformed, but rumors? Truth straight from the Tree of Knowledge

oh wow this is ridiculously cool

so you get teleported to a mysterious forest next to a big locked door. Spend a bunch of time walking through woods going past cliffs and waterfalls and stuff. Occasionally you can see a big tower sticking up above the trees in the distance

At the end of this section you break out to a map screen, which reveals: You've just been wandering around a park in a huge city?? there was just some hills blocking the view?

you can backtrack along a mini diorama version of the path you followed to get here

aaa this is so rad

this approach of like playing with scale to introduce novel perspectives was one of the coolest aspects of xenogears

xenoblade chronicles is kind of the ultimate realization of this concept; it's like that game's Whole Deal

really cool to see this game sorta bridging the two

🞑tomboy

The level designers and environment art teams put SO much love into this game, and it's both extremely cool and extremely *unexpected* given the previous two

1 was just made of unremarkable hallways
2 was generally nice-looking hallways
but 3 has like Good Art

The area between the red markers on this map screen is a tiny diorama version of the actual levels you walk through

note the three arches above the street on the lower right, and the crosswalk+pedestrian overpass for the highway on the left

this city is fairly central to the plot, and you visited it a few times in flashbacks in the first two games. They were mostly just corridors with a very constrained camera

now in 3 they've sneaked in alternate views of those areas so you suddenly have a sense of PLACE

The tutorial mission from the start of episode 2 is just here on the map. Nothing to interact with but they PUT it there bc it's part of the city

planting it on a map next to other landmarks suddenly connects it to the rest of the world in a way the original game never attempted

This walkway overlooks an unremarkable bit of street, which is actually part of a dungeon in the first game

if I hadn't played these back-to-back I probably wouldn't have even noticed it

the evil science faction in this story is named U-TIC, which is short for UNKNOWN TERRITORY INTERVENTING AND CREATION

footstep noises match bpm of music, all forward progress halted

the primary job of a game designer is to ensure that the physically smallest anime girl is also the most powerful damage dealer

this is how you make a good videogame

sometimes some VFX use this weird darkening effect that's done at half res and then blended back, resulting in an odd ringing artifact around edges

every time it happens there's a split second where my brain goes "oh cool TAA fucked up" before remembering this is a PlayStation 2

paused the game mid-cutscene to go make this

shion finally developing the correct response to the dozen or so characters who keep teleporting into the plot to solemnly pronounce a bunch of mysterious organization xiii bullshit

i am several hours into disc 2 of 2 of game 3 of 3 of the xene of saga, and uhhh they're gonna have to kick this plot into fuckin overdrive if they intend to resolve literally *any* story thread before they run out of money again

I can kinda see why the third game was a commercial failure. There's like zero payoff for any narrative arcs in the entire first two games, because they exist solely to set the stage for Mysterious Future Events, so I can def imagine people just lost any interest in keeping up

like I'm def enjoying 3; it's by far the most technically competent game in the series, a lot of the art is great, and it's MUCH better at keeping a sense of narrative momentum going

not sure there's any way it could have been commercially successful though, given its context

your path is blocked by a conveyor belt

you are piLOTING A ROBOT THAT FLIES IT LITERALLY DOESN'T EVEN HAVE FEET BECAUSE IT F L I E S

shoutouts to Xenogears (1998) I..... guess lmao

one very fun thing about this game is I'm constantly walking into giant machine caverns and being like "oh yeah, this sure is The Team That Made Xenoblade Chronicles"

extremely funny explanation of events

it's a great bit of writing because at face value it's very silly ("don't worry we moved all our illegal activities to the Illegal Activities Company") but also its 100% how giant orgs work IRL lol

"Learning from the failures of Enron, Meta assigned all of their illegal activities to Facebook and concentrated on legal activities (manipulating congress), centered around Zuckerberg"

absolutely wild decision:

more than halfway through the third game, an optional hidden chest unlocks this GIGANTIC wall of text, which, for the first time, actually explains the fucking backstory in chronological order, including a bunch of details that were never mentioned

almost nothing actually HAPPENED in the first two games; the vast majority of the story is actually just piecemeal revelations of all this military/political shit that happened before the games started lol

it's all told through, like, flashbacks to characters' Repressed Trauma

and like, I dunno, it's *possible* to make a good story about slowly piecing together past events (PLEASE PLAY 13 SENTINELS), but being able to read the entire thing in one colossal loredump like this is just straight up demoralizing lol. why did u take 120 hours to give me this

helping

(needs sound on)

I think this is one of those "neither the actors nor the voice directors know the context of the line being recorded" things lol. If the vocal emphasis was on "help" it would sound like she was referring to her friends, but emphasizing "everyone" just makes her jokerfied lmao

all three of these games have a major mechanic where it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to kill every boss in a really hyper specific way or you miss, like, Most Of The XP In The Game

I'm sure the combat designer thought this was a kickass idea but as you might imagine it Very Sucks lol

getting very tired of playing through 20-minute boss fights and then having to reset the ps2 because an errant crit killed them one move too early, costing me like 2+ levels' worth of xp

I linked this tweet a while back but having gotten a lot further it's even funnier

xenosaga doesn't even do THIS much. Like it doesn't even try to PRETEND the heroes are inconveniencing the villains or affecting their plans in any way whatsoever

the entire three games' worth of plot is just the villains enacting their villainous plans. The only times their plans are disrupted are when the various villain factions backstab each other

sometimes after a boss the villain tells you more of his villainous plan, then does it

the final boss of the second game isn't even killed by the protagonists; you just fight him for a while and then the TRUE villains just teleport in and vaporize him in a cutscene

INDEED

final dungeon is full of fiddly mechanic bosses that all require you to die to them once in order to figure out how to completely re-gear your party to handle their specific strain of bullshit

I would prob have more patience for this if I hadn't played 3 games consecutively lol

to be fair this is actually the first time episode 3 has done this. I haven't even needed to follow a guide for this game, because it's mostly like....... normal

the first two games are basically unplayable without either a walkthrough or like 8+ hours of grinding (or both)

the only voice actor who truly understands Xenosaga has finally returned, retroactively destroying the preceding 50 hours of videogame

that dude enunciating the word "dimension" during recording is the most fun anyone has ever had with xenosaga

everyone else is trying to do self-serious anime space opera, but this sole voice actor has the clarity to recognize "no, this game's level of aesthetic sophistication is basically Spy Kids, and I am its Floop"

me after watching 40 years' worth of macross animes

I've been doing side stuff instead of finishing the actual game

I beat the optional superbosses

now I'm finishing the game and one of the regular story bosses is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than the supposed end-game optional stuff lmao

even one of the walkthroughs is like "yeah this boss is just bullshit, sorry" lol

due to Mechanics you can't even grind your way out of it; it's literally just a "pray he doesn't attack the same character twice or you just lose" rng fight

it's very odd because this is OTHERWISE balanced like a Normal Videogame

like it took four entire games but they did eventually figure out how to balance an rpg

I dunno why this one fight is like haha sike it's 1995 again

btw I forgot to take a screenshot earlier but rest assured: The Orbs That Bart Does Not Respect return in Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (2006)

one fun aspect of the Lore is that most of the references to Xenogears are connected to the supernatural/gnosticism stuff, rather than the plot/world

the stuff from Gears that appears in Saga is mostly things that transcended realities to begin with, like the zohar, abel, anima relics, etc

so instead of explicitly connecting the plots they're just like "oh yeah the weird dimension-bending god stuff exists in this world too"

if you're gonna make 8 games in the same universe over a span of like 24 years, this seems like a sensible approach to avoid writing yourself into a corner

Really neat blurry refraction effect going on here

I will never tire of PS2 texture feedback tricks

we're finally just making up new christian doctrine out of whole cloth this absolutely rules

Unfortunately I did actually know the big plot spoiler about the robot girl. because it's like the only piece of xenosaga lore that regularly gets mentioned in internet discussions

finally got to the actual reveal, and even knowing beforehand it's still VERY fun in context lol

ULTIMATE ATTACK

CLEAVAGE CANNON

they put so much thought into this lmao they animated like a little knife piece that slices the cloth and everything

I have finished the xene of saga

need to go to bed and then think more but wow that was kind of a mess

but like the *interesting* kind of mess at least

so Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (2006) is pretty good

Combat is still pretty dull/unremarkable, but the art got a huge upgrade from the previous games and there's a lot of really fantastic environment work

Plus it's got real level design for the first time. They finally started using the structure of the spaces to tell you things about the story, instead of just connecting cutscenes via hallways or dungeons

VERY straight line from here to Xenoblade Chronicles, which is cool

the previous 2 games I kinda landed on "you could probably just watch these on youtube without missing much" which is pretty rare for me to say lol

this one actually has ｌｕｄｏｎａｒｒａｔｉｖｅ stuff going on though. Not a lot, but enough

kind of unfortunate, but I think removing the original writers and trying to mash the rest of the story into a single game.... actually improved the writing a lot lol

you can feel the strain in the end result, but it's got a MUCH clearer sense of direction than the prev games

my constant "the heroes literally never DO anything and the whole plot is just the villains successfully enacting their plans" complaint remains true until the very last moment, BUT the final hours of the plot start to address this fairly directly

the last chapter is basically the protagonist losing her shit over three games' worth of being manipulated, and lashing out at everyone for being useless

which actually lands at an emotional level because like... she's right lol

she's like "I am very literally going insane and none of you are fucking helping so fuck you" which is honestly... fair?

the other chars try to be all "we'll save you with the Power of Friendship" but it rings hollow bc they really aren't all that close

it's by far the most interesting bit of character writing in the whole series, and I wish they'd done ANY of this earlier instead of saving it for literally the last two hours of the third 60-hour videogame lol

xenosaga is basically 180 hours of loredumps and Mysterious Backstories documenting about 15 years of military/political maneuvering, some of which is interesting but none of which is very important, and then the entire plot happens in a 2.5-hour cutscene blast, and then credits

I think the strongest aspect of the writing is that it doesn't really stick to any jrpg genre tropes? Whether consciously or not it's very much doing its own thing, which gives the games a very unique vibe

there's no Power of Friendship ending because the friends aren't that close, there's no Kill God and Seize Destiny ending because God is less "gnosticism demiurge" and more "old-testament terrifying and incomprehensible"

like there's even a guy who's TRYING to Kill God and Seize Destiny but he's a villain who needs to be stopped

(of course the protagonists don't stop him, some other villain does, because as you recall the protagonists never get to do anything at any point in the story, but lol)

okay so having played the entirety of xenosaga and given it a few days, I think the one piece of writing I'll actually remember is the stuff about the like..... Biblically Accurate Internet

it rules bc it's both an incredibly cool idea, and also mostly left up to the player to figure out. The PLOT is pretty forgettable, and most of the Lore is more interesting but it's very directly told through, like, encyclopedia entries

but the internet stuff is mostly subtext

[xenosaga spoilers, if you somehow care about that in 2022]

so they have FTL internet right. At the start of the story you just assume it works like the internet, but it's somehow ALSO the system used for FTL space travel. Same idea as Mass Effect actually

the internet is a series of nodes in space that can transmit stuff instantaneously between them. But the way people TALK about it is.... very weird. There's "VR" on the internet but actually VR is just physically running your own mind inside someone else's? Using the internet??

tl;dr: you eventually work out that "the internet" is in fact the literal Collective Unconscious, like the Jung thing, and you're sending emails using, like, every human being's mind as a substrate

and also it's God.

like, capital G God from the Bible

it's stated really early on that you can teleport objects through the internet, but not humans. Official explanation is that teleportation is fatal

EVENTUALLY you find out: Teleporting humans means *they meet God*, and are effectively annihilated by the experience

Anyway the reason this is sticking with me is because I grew up mega christian and the writers honed in on weirder aspects of the bible: the whole "fear of god" thing

if you didn't grow up reading the old testament: "fear of god" comes up CONSTANTLY as sort of both a warning and a virtue

the usual interpretation is the CS Lewis/Narnia of God as a metaphorical lion, being "not safe, but good". So like, fear as a sense of respect/awe

...but this incredibly dorky anime videogame somehow read enough christian doctrine to hone in on this as a particularly weird concept. And then went "okay but what if it's not respect/awe, and in fact it's literally FEAR"

so, in the videogame Xenosaga, if a human tries to teleport, they come face to face with God, and are obliterated by horrific, primal, all-encompassing FEAR

it's presented as basically the defining characteristic of God. To humans he's like, ontologically Fear

anyway this is ridiculously compelling to me, because it's like... a pretty novel and arguably even *defensible* bit of christian theology?

in a not-terribly-great videogame about space swords?

i mean it requires disregarding the new testament, where God is ontologically Love and the Love and Fear exist alongside one another in a sort of hnnhggDialectic

resisting the urge to start calvinposting on main here

I got out of the religion but it took an INCREDIBLY long time and hoo boy does this stuff leave an imprint

if u love getting nerdsniped by infinitely deep rabbit holes of Lore check out uhhhhh calvinism lmao. truly a theological framework for the wiki editor mind

anyway in the videogame Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (2006) a guy invents the replicants from bladerunner, in an attempt to bioengineer a human that cannot experience fear and could therefore behold the face of God and survive

ex catholic: really into performative blasphemy sexy nuns baphomet imagery

ex presbyterian: excited about novel heresies