Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht

"I never thought Xenosaga would turn out to be mediocre..."

Before this game was released, I popped my Xenogears CD into my Playstation 2, wanting to play the first game right before the second (technically, Xenogears happens AFTER Xenosaga). Ah, words cannot describe exciting game I went through for the second time, although I didn't get very far before Xenosaga came out. That's when I rushed over to the electronics store to buy it. I was expecting something better than Xenogears. Something with a great environment, cool-looking Gears similar to Xenogears (they're called AGWS in Xenosaga and are somewhat different), a spectacular story, and an overall better play than Xenogears.

I should've just rented the game.

Xenosaga was not what I expected. While I expected many terrific things about Xenosaga, sometimes I thought of what can turn out to be horrible with the game. Well, I called those bad things ''nightmares'' and Xenosaga is literally packed with them. Why, oh why did this have to happen? If you played Xenogears, know one thing - Xenosaga is barely related to Xenogears. There may be some names you recognize from Xenogears but they probably have nothing to do with what you've seen in the older game.

Okay, sure... the game takes place entirely in space (pointless fact: that rhymes). That means plenty of space battles, right? Nope... There were 10-20 second glimpses of one or two later in the game. Expecting to pilot large mechs that have superior statistics and generally look cool? Nope. What good does this game have to offer? Okay, so there are a few well-done things, but all the bad things practically override the good things. It's mostly a disgrace to its older (or, in game terms, younger) brother.

The story... well... the story. Remember the ultra-mega-confusing story line in Xenogears? Yeah, well I didn't understand it either after playing through twice. If you read about Xenosaga in game magazines, fan sites, or game sites, you'd probably think that this game has a story line that messes with your brain over and under. The game's storyline is actually nowhere near as confusing as Xenogears' storyline, but at some points it may come close, especially in parts where the game doesn't reveal something that's mentioned in the game at all. Instead, it makes you wait for future episodes to find out what exactly happened. Can anyone say 'Miltian Conflict'?

The story starts out over in good ol' Kenya, Africa, where some big monolith-like object called 'Zohar' is excavated from a lake. It creates some sort of platform on the lake, and that's it. From there, you hear ''Whoa'' and ''Ahh'' and ''What the'', but that's all that will be revealed to you during that time. Fast forward to 4000 years later. We see an armada flying through space, after it gates out (exiting hyperspace). The lead ship is the Woglinde, and that's where the game begins. Apparently, the crew of the ship found the 'Zohar' object in the area and stored it inside the ship. While that is going on, we see our heroine, Shion, going inside an android's mind. KOS-MOS, the android, is created by Shion to fight the Gnosis, or the space scourge of Xenosaga. However, Shion must keep her under control so she doesn't break out into a rage.

That's basically how the storyline goes through the game... Throughout the first half you only have one objective, but there are plenty of stops on the way, most of which range from pointless to ''oh we must save the ship!'' blah blah, all that...

The storyline does, in fact, drag on throughout the first half. It only gets interesting once you actually meet the main villain of the game, and even then, you want more cutscenes and less boring dungeon crawling and battling.

Oh, cutscenes! This is what people may hate the game for, or like, or whatever. This game has plenty of them. Some may last 5 minutes, others last 45, you can never tell. To be honest with you, this is the best part of the game. It's also what saves the story and the game itself. If you hate 'em, just pause (push the start button, you newbies) and push triangle to skip them. Once you get to the Boredom Gameplay Area, a.k.a the second half of the game, you'll be begging for more and more cutscenes just to show up and play for you.

What is Boredom Gameplay Area? Well, the second half of the game. The game completely changes then. You'll explore dungeons that are 3-4 hours long and fight countless ANNOYING 5-10 minute battles over and over again. And you know what? You HAVE to fight these battles so you can acquire exp/tech points/ether points/etc. and be able to last fighting those frustrating bosses.

Battles may remind you a bit of Xenogears. Basically, you have up to three members of your party out in the field. You can perform attacks on the enemy using special buttons. For example, Triangle makes the character unleash an Ether attack and Square makes the characters attack with a less-powerful physical attack. After inputting the first button, you can input a second Triangle or Square attack. Each attack costs 2 AP. All of your characters can have a maximum of 6 AP, but they start out with 4 at the beginning of every battle. You can also set different attack for different battles. Once you acquire enough Tech Points, you can upgrade your learned Tech Attacks (learned through levelling) and be able to perform them every turn, instead of having to build up your AP to 6. This will be a requirement, since battles will take forever otherwise. It's too bad that you have to watch the Tech Attack being performed every time you use it. This will get on your nerves very quickly.

You can perform other various commands while in battle. There's the ability to use items, which, of course, every RPG should have, the ability to use magic (Ether), and the ability to move to the back row, from where you cannot attack but cannot be attacked physically.

An interesting feature is Boost. On the bottom right lies the turn order menu. If you press and hold R1, you will see who is able to 'Boost'. Boost means being able to have an active turn after the current turn. When your Boost Gauge is filled up, your Boost Level goes up 1 and the gauge starts filling up again to Boost Level 2, and so forth. When a character's face is shown when holding R1, you can make them perform a Normal Boost. This way, they'll act next. You can use this towards your advantage. The problem here lies in the enemy's ability to use this. See, enemies use Boost often, but bosses use Boost like they've just drank ten cups of coffee, then went out and tried out some random drug that speeds up their systems like hell. They also use Counter Boosts. See, Counter Boosts override Normal Boosts, meaning the enemy will always go next turn no matter if you Normal Boost-ed or not. You cannot Counter Boost without two items equipped on a character. These two items are extremely hard to find. Pretty cheap, huh?

The final option when battling is AGWS. AGWS, or Anti-Gnosis Weapons System, are basically mini-Gears. You won't find any Gears in the game, but these AGWS can replace them, can't they? Nope. AGWS are small and ****ty. You can only board them during battle, and when you do, your HP rises... a little (unlike Gears from Xenogears). In fact, I can guarantee you won't be using these wannabe mechs many times. They're okay for the first part of the game, but once you're halfway through, your own Tech Attacks will do twice or thrice the damage these mechs will ever do. If one of your AGWS reaches 0 HP, they die... for the rest of the battle. There are no AGWS healing items that you can use in battles, you can't revive them either. The only way to heal AGWS is to equip a specific item that recovers as much as 150 measly hit points when the AGWS guards. What does that mean? That means they're pretty much useless during boss battles.

Characters... This is one of the positive factors of the game. Characters are developed pretty well. There's Shion, KOS-MOS, Ziggy, chaos, etc. I believe all six of the permanent party members in the game are developed pretty well. Much like Xenogears, even the supporting characters have great development. My favorite was the main villain of the game, who ended being a messed-up freak high on some drug. However, there's one part here that I hated... much like Final Fantasy X. See, once you get far in Final Fantasy X, some of the characters in your party lose their touch. They barely have any more lines to speak and you may forget about them. That's the case here, as there are two playable characters in Xebosaga who barely have anything to do with the storyline in the second half of the game.

Now we go to graphics. They're pretty average, actually. Final Fantasy X had better graphics, but I can't compare the two because FFX took place on land and Xenosaga takes place in space. The space background here looks pretty nice, with many, many starts and galaxies in the background. The character models look neat, and some of the city ruins you visit look pretty cool. Now, the game I played before starting Xenosaga was Skies of Arcadia. That's a LOT of ships I saw in the game, and they looked pretty damn cool. When I started up Xenosaga and saw the Woglinde, I swear I could have vomited. Everyone inside the ship says that the Woglinde is one incredible ship, but on the outside, I thought it looked like a pile of Gnosis crap floating in space. The ship designs are horrid. Hell, the only ship I thought was fascinating was a ship you see for 10 or 20 seconds later in the game.

The interior graphics are too plain. The interior spaceships and space stations are sometimes too bland and look all the same throughout the entire ship/space station. There was barely any detail inside the spaceships, just metal hallways running to and fro. YAWN.

Environments were okay. The interior of the Woglinde was nice and large. It took me two hours to talk to everyone and explore the entire ship before fulfilling the first objective there. Most of the other environments were pretty damn bad. Plus, when you're walking around areas not populated by enemies, you'd get annoying e-mails that Shion automatically has to check every time. Most of these are pointless to read through. They're usually junk/spam that would be 8-9 pages in length, something you don't want to read all the way. When you're walking around areas WITH enemies, you'll see them. That means no random encounters at all. This may seem pleasing, but the fact that the enemy respawns (you can't avoid most battles) every time you leave the room they're in and force you to fight another 5 minute battle with them will annoy the hell out of you.

Another area where the game struggled was the music area. Yasunori Mitsuda brought us great music with Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears, and he shines with Xenosaga again. However, if you want to hear his music, you'd better off buying the OST. See, his music is rarely used here. Most of it is heard during cinema scenes. No, maybe all of it. I think there were only THREE tunes that were heard when walking around. THREE. Two in the final dungeons, and one when areas are under attack. None of the other areas had music at all. Another factor here was that there was NO boss music at all. The same exact battle theme was used throughout the entire game, with only a change in the last battle. This is a major disappointment. Sure, the battle theme was quite good, but listening to that same tune will get boring so quick that you'll need your trusty CD player with you in the later parts of the game.

However, Yasunori Mitsuda's works here are great. I especially liked the tracks Green Sleeves, U-TIC System, Battling KOS-MOS, Gnosis, and Relief. By the way, I believe U-TIC System and Gnosis was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. They did a fine job with some of the music here, as they composed the much darker tunes of the games. All of the music sounds pretty fit in when it plays. There are the slower, moodier themes such as Pain and Kokoro, the ominous themes such as U-TIC System and Albedo, and the fast-spaced, ''run'' type themes such as Breaking Space Ship Pursuit and Panic. Durandal is an excellent tune perfect for a game set in space (and the two locations it plays in). If you like these tunes, you'll probably enjoy the rest of the game's music. Try out the OST if you can.

The voice acting was pretty nice. Shion's voice was cute, KOS-MOS' sounded robotic, which is the way it should be. Momo's was annoying, and chaos's was genius-like. The developers picked out a good cast, but there was a problem: voices in battle. Seriously, not only would they quickly get annoying (hearing the same exact lines over and over) but they sounded different, as in much worse. Plus, when you win a battle, don't expect something like ''We won!'' Instead, you get some really dumb line like ''Who'd ever thought Miyuki's inventions would come in handy?'' or KOS-MOS practically asking Shion something in TWO sentences. Thankfully, you can skip this and go right to the victory results screen.

I never mind the controls in games, but I have a minor control problem in Xenosaga. See, the CIRCLE button is the action button and the X button is the cancel button. I have no clue why some games (like Metal Gear Solid and FF7)continue to do this control method. Why not stick to the regular X button -> action button control scheme?

Xenosaga also had four big mini-games to play. There was a AGWS battle game similar to Xenogears' Gear Battlers, a Card Game, a Drilling Game, and a Casino game with slot machines and Poker. However, I don't think very many of you will spend too much time with the Xenosaga Card Game. The directions are too confusing and it's not worth achieving. The other mini-games are a little fun, but I've seen much better.

In a nutshell, we have a mediocre game with above average character development, a deep story, average graphics, boring gameplay, a tiny arsenal of music, and a tiresome battle system. Overall, the game is a major disappointment to me. I wanted to play something resembling Xenogears, but I got something much different. Something not as good. And I'm not marking the game down just because it isn't like Xenogears, I'm just lowering the score because, overall, the game wasn't that good at all.

GOOD POINTS
-large areas to explore
-good music
-good voice-acting
-cinema-scenes
-some good graphics

BAD POINTS
-bad usage of music
-boring battle system
-boring dungeons
-AGWS were disappointments
-some bland graphics
-boring exploration inside areas without enemies

Graphics: 6
Music: 7
Story: 7
Character Development: 6
Gameplay (Battle System): 3
Gameplay (Walking Around): 3
Control: 6
Replay: 4
Challenge: Medium/Hard
Length: 40-45 hours (good)

Rent this game if you want to play it. If I were you, I wouldn't spend $50 on it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/20/03, Updated 04/21/03