Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht

"Excellent gaming . . . in parts"

First off, yes, I realize some fans might be screaming in rage over the rating, but please bear with me as I explain why I felt it was fair.

Gameplay

The map movement and battle scenes in Xenosaga follow the standard 3D RPG format, with nothing particularly new. That's not a problem, though, as both the character polygons and the backgrounds are beautifully drawn, and the action moves smoothly, particularly if you're using the joystick rather than the directional buttons. The combat system is essentially the same point-based one used in Xenogears, although this time around it's possible to customize special attacks and ethers (magic) to suit your own playing style.

In fact, the growth system in this game is all about the customization. In addition to experience points, characters gain TP, SP, and EP after a battle. TP is used to upgrade learned special attacks and character stats, SP allows characters to learn skills inherent in equipment or accessories, and EP is used to learn or pass around ethers. It gets a little confusing at the beginning, but it's not actually that hard to keep track of. The downside to this, however, is that inactive party member get experience but not anything else points, and unless you constantly rotate party members it becomes rather difficult to power up the neglected ones.

The new Boost system used in combats is interesting, but has a bit of a loophole where it seems that there's no gauge limiting how often enemies can use Boost, resulting in battle strategy being thrown out the window as enemies get ridiculous numbers of free turns. While this proves rather frustrating on occasion it's possible to survive it if you're prepared for that kind of thing. Other than that, combat plays out fairly well, and the overall difficulty of the game isn't too high.

Next, the mini-games. Every RPG these days seems to require having mini-games, and Xenosaga is no exception. While it has a Gundam War-like card game, a drill game, a casino game, and the original giant robot fighting game, most of these mini-games aren't all that interesting. The fighting game in particular was nowhere near as fast-paced as the one from Xenogears, and is rather difficult to control.

An excellent idea introduced in Xenosaga is the Environmental Simulator, that allows you to essentially re-visit previous dungeons and claim items you might have left behind. While getting items sooner than later is always a good thing, it stops those occurrences where Super Secret Item of Doom is squirreled away in some corner of the very first dungeon and you aren't familiar enough with the game to understand how to get it. The simulator also provides a great place to level and/or collect items and money.

Speaking of secrets, most of the game's side-quests are fairly obvious, and it's a little unbalancing where one of these provides you with a spell which deals 9999 damage to anything and everything (keep in mind that this is a game where the last boss doesn't have more than 30000 or so HP). Most of the other stuff, though, takes effort but isn't impossible to find, which always a positive thing as many games these days contain lots of secrets that are only findable with either an FAQ or blindingly good luck.

The internet and email concept is also interesting, although it seems more logical for emails to be triggered through event rather than by passing through a particular spot in a location at a certain time. It leads to sudden scrambling around rather obscure places to see if mail will suddenly arrive.

One major gripe, however, is the length of the load time. It takes quite a while to load between maps, and with no ''now loading'' screen it's a bit hard to tell whether the game's crashed or it's just reading the disk. The game is compatible with the PS2 hard drive, so maybe the developers were expecting players to use that and will improve the load times for the English version.

Also, the AGWS (equivalent of Gears) seem almost redundant in the game. I've never really encountered a situation where I absolutely had to use them to get through a fight, as human characters are much faster, can use Boost without special equipment, heal easily, and with upgraded special attacks deal more damage per round. The only time I've found AGWS helpful is to give low-level, fast enemies something to attack while the human characters do damage. However, since these are just robots par the storyline, maybe it's not surprising that they're nothing special.

Story

As can be expected from a Xeno game, Episode I goes into a lot of psychological weirdness and proceeds to rip apart mythology and religion like nobody's business. One complaint people may have with this is that since there's so much story, very long cut scenes turn the game into something resembling an interactive novel. I personally didn't find a problem with this, but it might be frustrating to watch. Fortunately you're given the option to skip any event in a cut scene with the Start button, thus avoiding having to sit through the same scene five times because the boss after it keeps killing you.

The character polygons are beautifully painted and carry expression well, allowing for a very expressive cast. The voice acting also helps in this respect: very few of the characters seemed like cardboard cutouts, and all of the major ones had distinctive personalities. However, even thought the character development and storyline progresses at a decent pace, the abrupt ending leaves more questions than it answers, and doesn't allow for much resolution of anything.

The original sense of parody humor's been upped a notch in the game, as the development team seems ready to make fun of everything: giant robots, Eva-esque psychological plots, even magical girl parodies. And most of it's squirrelled away in the corners, letting players laugh at themselves without breaking the seriousness of the story itself.

Graphics and Sound
As mentioned, the character polygons are beautifully done and very expressive. The background rendering is also excellent, giving the scenes in the game a realistic feel. There's also not that much FMV, but the game makes up for it by having the high-quality polys. Battle graphics are impressive, and magic and special attack effects go off without noticeable pause. If you're expecting eye-candy, you won't be disappointed.

Contrary to normal RPG standards, a lot of locations in the game don't have BGM, or have a very understated background score. While this is in keeping with the atmosphere, sometimes it gets a little boring. The battle score is quite good, but there's only one score used throughout the entire game, for both peon and boss fights, and it gets tedious rather quickly.

That said, the score is what you'd expect from Yasunori Mitsuda, as the haunting BGM of some of the game's more esoteric locales is very suited to the atmosphere, and several tunes are reminiscent of Xenogears.

Most of the major event scenes (and there is a lot of scripted action) have full voice acting, and while I can't make any judgment on what the English version will sound like, the Japanese voices are well-cast, and said cast knows what they're doing. In keeping with the recent trend of more voiceovers in recent games, actually hearing the characters spout out the text you see on the subtitles adds to the overall feel of actually being there.

Conclusion

Beautiful polygon graphics, wonderfully mind-bending storyline, attractive characters with personality. So where's the rest of it?

The game and concept, to those people who've enjoyed Xenogears and were waiting for a sequel for about six years, is excellent. With the exception of the rather long cut scenes, the storyline progresses at a very good pace, and the well-animated, attractive cast feels very much alive. The battle system could use some polishing and the save times should be shot, but those are minor details. It's the beginning of what would have been a wonderful game . . . if only they'd finished it. It's like picking up a novel to find that the book is blank after thirty pages.

I understand the concept of sequel, and even of plot-continuous sequel, Final Fantasy versus Chrono Trigger/Cross. But even in series where plot is connected between installments, each installment should be a complete game in and of itself. Episode I can't possibly claim to be anywhere near that, and that's a real shame because the game had so much potential. And when you hit the gorgeously rendered ending, almost nothing is resolved in the overall plot, the last boss is completely irrelevant to the storyline, and half the major characters never see any real development. The mystery of Xenogears and the fun of finding out all the world's secrets is promised but never realized, as none of the important mysteries are solved. The game screen ends with a ''to be continued'' message, and there are several shameless plugs scattered throughout the game proper for the sequel.

So the overall message I'm getting here is that this is not a game: it's a promotional demo that sells for the price of a real game, whose entire purpose is to addict players so they'll shell out for the next one. And unfortunately, it's probably working. You can't look at a world like that and just walk away from it, even if you know that the marketing people are probably laughing at their own ingenuity. To continue the book analogy, it's like chopping a book into thirds and claiming each one was a novel in its own right. And they don't even have the justification of saying that because the storyline was too long they had to divide it up. FFX was one game and it had lots more volume. Xenogears ran to about 70 hours just for completing the game itself, nevermind the side quests. Episode I goes to about 40 hours including finding all the toys and extensive leveling. Am I making a point here?

Because of all of this, while I greatly enjoyed the game, or what there was of it, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else except serious fans of its predecessor. Because finishing a good game shouldn't leave the player feeling ripped off.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/11/02, Updated 05/11/02