Xenogears: Hostage to a homily
A spaceship crashes. A serene woman emerges from the wreckage. Many millennia later, a mountain village is engulfed in flames cause by giant war machines in a skirmish between two neighboring empires. There lives an amnesiac man who first arrived dying in the arms of a masked man. In three years he earns the admiration of all. On the eve of the wedding of his two best friends, he unlocks a power that obliterates the invading enemy, as well as the young lovers, their friends, and families. Cast out into the woods, he and an escaping military officer directly responsible for his tragedy come to rely on each other for survival, while each nurses their own guilt for the atrocity. The power that ruined his life also saves it, and he realizes he is cursed to carry it with him lest someone more unscrupulous were to take it. Crossing the desert, his power is coveted and he is attacked for it, first by the nearby kingdom’s army, then by the leader of a band of pirates, a young man his opposite; brash, optimistic, loved and cared for by those around him. In the struggle, they fall into a subterranean cavern, and he must again rely on an enemy to live. In their escape, a strange old man offers aid, until he wails, recognizing the power in our hero: the power to slay God.
If this were the outline of a TV show, it would be exhilarating. Because it’s a video game, there are certain realities that only really become apparent in the experiencing.
Most of the time, Xenogears is a visual wasteland, often bereft of vitality and sometimes difficult to endure. There is some nostalgia in seeing the mushy 2D sprites drift through the 3D shoebox dioramas, and it’s worth considering the effect technological boundaries can have on lofty ambitions. However, I insist that the shortcomings in presentation largely come from lazy oversights directly resulting from that same overambition.
By ambition, I mean there is a focus on emphasizing unique set pieces to the detriment of moment-to-moment character interactions that make up the overwhelming majority of the game. There are a few non-interactive moments that do inspire awe. The Darth Vader copycat Grahf standing atop a viciously-adorned giant robotic Gear, which in turns stands upon a desert cliff before a giant glowing moon as he portends doom. A similarly threatening devil-red Gear impossibly lifting a submarine over its head, (That was pretty interesting. But dropping a warship on me is cheating… Take it back!) and tossing it at our overwhelmed hero, time dilating to emphasize the weight of the vessel as well as all the lives aboard.
However, similar time and weight is given to many perfunctory mechanical models. The game insists a camera moving around a group of polygons is worth its own time an attention. Most of the time, it’s the player’s primary transportation, the submarine Yggdrasil, coming into dock. After enough times, it starts to feel a lot like the scenes often found in movies on Mystery Science Theater 3000 of cars pulling into driveways – completely superfluous, doing little to establish time and place. There are many similar shots of airships rising into the sky, Gears descending in elevators, which even if useful to establish some change could have their speed increased by as much as double to great improvement.
The lavish attention paid to assets that made Xenogears unique to its contemporaries, it’s fully 3D mechanical models, is frustrating when compared to the much lower-hanging fruit from the Aesthetic Tree that is ignored. In a game that constantly emphasizes the plot, the machinations of shadowy figures, and their effect on the rest of the cast, characters’ emotions are often conveyed flatly and cheaply. Sprites do not emote as they do in other Squaresoft classics such as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Character portraits in dialogue boxes do not change to reflect the tone of the dialogue as in contemporary JRPGs like Lunar or Grandia, a game which also has much more consistent, readable results in displaying 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds. Emotion and urgency is entirely up to the soundtrack, the script, and more damningly, the script’s temperamentally inconsistent localization.
The 3D environments often give the sense that they were designed before it was considered how they would be viewed from the player’s perspective. There are many cases that entering a new room in a dungeon means being greeted with a largely black screen as the ceiling obstructs most of the rooms contents. Sometimes this can offer the feeling of a densely populated world as foreground elements like makeshift scaffolds, railways, and bazaar canopies intrude on the frame, but it never helps it feel immersive as it requires frequent conscious movement of the camera to construct a plan for a navigable path through space, or else dares you to rub your face against a wall first and catch up with the right camera angle later. People seem to live in this world, but not you: you’re just looking at it.
You are also often stuck with it, thanks to the whims of the script, dropped into a small area and forced to push the plot along its rails. Early on this very effectively evokes the sense that you (or our protagonist Fei, at least) are on the run, just barely able to cobble together enough information to figure out the right action to take next, grasping at straws and scrambling for safety at the feet of giant empires, sticking close to the people who know the world better than you do.
Closing in on the 20th hour of gameplay, I am astonished at how little the game wants to let some slack into the leash it has on me. The game has ping-ponged me around the map, but also teamed me up with new characters unpredictably. Upon reaching the floating city-barge Thames and uniting the entire cast, I was itching to find out how to combine all five characters, rearrange their shared equipment, and see how they worked together in battle. Instead, it’s cutscenes full of dialogue between non-playable characters, randomly interspersed with interactive segments where my objective is to find the next cutscenes. Amidst this, the makeup of my party is rearranged seemingly at random. First I have Elly, then Citan, then Bart, then myself, (Rico disappears, the script almost certainly forgets he exists) then finally Bart and Elly again before, suddenly, I’m thrust into a boss fight. Bart’s Gear has a third the HP of Fei’s Gear. I’ve used Elly in combat for all of 10 minutes since the game started, and she has learned exactly zero skills.
I could have upgraded Billy’s gear, but I simply can’t afford to upgrade everyone, which is why I haven’t really upgraded anyone. I could have learned more of Elly’s skills, but ONLY if I set aside time to get into random encounters with that specific objective hours earlier – at this moment, I am stuck on Thames and cannot go anywhere to do that. I haven’t been encouraged to prepare for a struggle, I’ve been hit on the head with a ruler for falling asleep in class.
At the start of the game I felt I had at least a little effect on the events. It felt good to be pit against an arrogant tank battalion commander, outmaneuver his heavy equipment, and totally kick his ass. But immediately afterward, in a cutscene, the cataclysmic explosion that started the game repeats itself and wipes out the entire battalion. Now instead of the main world change being my defeat of a military commander, something I did by making choices as I engaged with the game’s systems, the thing all the important characters talk about afterward is the big explosion. The results of my choices are just a brief sideshow; it’s the script that’s the star. I’m just some schmuck.
Eventually there are so many forces at play in the narrative and so many mysteries setup, and all of them so lofty, that my accomplishments can’t hope to impact them. I meant to tread water until some cryptic plot points, ANY of them are finally resolved by more powerful, more well-informed NPCs. It’s like trying to solve a complex equation where I keep finding open parentheses and no closed parentheses. Id, Miang, Grahf, Citan, the Emperor, the Ministry, Shevat, Solaris, Ethos; these are all entities I have to continue to track without even a lick of their motivations.
I rarely know what the game wants of me. Should I pay close attention to this cutscene where I don’t understand what people are talking about, or is it just a setup for another cutscene later where the same thing happens? Should I buy equipment for all of my characters now, or will half of it be obsolete when a cutscene removes some characters from my party until I get to the next area with even better equipment? When I’m back on the Yggdrasil, can I actually drive it around, or it just another set of rooms to see cutscenes, including a room with a spiral staircase to another floor obstructed by the floor above, on which navigating from one side to the other requires no fewer than three different camera angles to see where I am going.
The upshot is I don’t feel like I’m making any choices. When I do, the effects are short-lived (refusing to attack the furious Dan in the fighting tournament gets me unique armor that is outclassed instantly), obtuse (if I give Big Joe 5000 bucks and I return to that spot later, I will get an item that let’s me listen to 6 songs from the soundtrack, but only from a single room that I can’t access most of the time), or sisyphean (if I play rock-paper-scissors with an NPC for the first hour of the game, I get the chance to play two more annoying mini games for a shot at a marginally useful item many hours later).
It’s funny. I had identified Xenosaga, Xenogears’ sequel, as being a cryptic on-rails snoozefest rather quickly. I remembered Xenogears being more active and engaging. If it is, it’s just barely; a slight difference of degree, a slight difference of kind. Being stuck on a floating city-barge ruled by laughing walrus man is, in fact, slightly less boring than being stuck on the third of seven dead-silent spaceships. In both cases, I spend most of my time watching a half-baked, self-serious anime while itching to get back to playing with the game’s systems, only to be reminded again and again how overthought and repetitive they obviously are.
It’s much more apparent now that most time and attention was given to the elements meant to dazzle and distract such as a few eye-catching animations and occasional “did that just happen?” cut scenes, and less to those with which you actually interact with, like character development or literally just walking around. It gives the feeling of being invited to stay in someone’s beautiful house with expensive and tasteful decor, but the guest room has no bed in it. Xenogears might be worth visiting, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Maybe I’ll keep playing and unlock the cosmic truth of life itself. Or maybe I’ll pick up a farming sim and actually feel encouraged to interact with a game’s systems at all.
Also the main menu is so fucking ugly. Plain and bland, truncated text crammed into featureless boxes, item descriptions that are either scant (Why would I buy Lite Armor if it has less Defense than regular Armor?Oh silly me, if I DID buy it I would discover it increases Speed!) or complete lies (How much extra Defense does Rico’s Iron Body provide? Surprise! Zero, it’s bugged). It looks like what they used debugging the game and never came around again to finishing it.