Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht

"It's the Light Beer of Religion- Watered down and without substance"

Somewhere in here could have been a decent game. The problem is that it was buried under so much garbage that it choked to death before anyone could play it. Xenosaga, while hardly worthy of ‘game’, has the honor of being the first videogame I’ve bought but did not beat. I was at the very end but every time I started to play I just hated the game more and more.
First off, there is little to no real ‘game’ inside Xenosaga. There are 8 hours of cinemas and the majority of the rest of the game serves to get your character from Point A to Point B to trigger another cinema. There are times where your ‘mission’ is to deliver a plate of food to trigger a cinema and the ‘go here, wait go back to where you just came from, actually go back to where you went first’ method of time wasting. There’s absolutely nothing wrong about having a lot of cinemas as long as the story is good and it has the game play to back it up. XS has neither of these. It features the most amateur, shallow, and laugh out loud horrific religious symbolism I’ve ever seen. It takes the standard anime practise of assigning robots and machines religious names so kids will think it’s deep, but takes it to a whole new level. There comes a point where a group of machines are named after the Apostles and the main one is called The Child of Mary, but there is never any significance assigned to the naming. At that point I realized the game was just going to keep going downhill. If you cut out the mindless techno-babble you could save about two hours of cinemas. You have to listen to people give coordinates number by number, they use many acronyms but almost never explain what they stand for, and you start the game in the middle of a story but are rarely given bits and pieces to bring it together. There’s a simple reason they did all this, they have no story. Once you pull it all together, it’s just garbage.
The characters are weak, boring, and you have no reason to care for them. The main character is just a techno bimbo in a tight, low cut, and short dress and that’s probably the main reason there are those that rave about how wonderful this game is. She serves no purpose other than to whine, give dissertations on her hypocritical belief structure, and doesn’t show a sign of strength at any point in time. The rest of the characters are just as disposable. There are a couple of pathetic romantic side-moments, characters that are supposed to be funny because they punch subordinates, the standard figures running everything from behind the scenes, traitors, and the world’s largest collection of jail bait robots. Most of the robots are modeled after 12-year-old girls and the game takes every opportunity to flash their underwear. You’d have to be blind not to notice it because it happens often and in the middle of the screen. Mainly because there are all of two women that don’t have skirts that put Ally McBeal to shame, but also mainly because the game’s designers are freaks. Running with this theme, XS introduces the absolute worst character to ever arise in videogame land, MOMO. She’s one of said underwear flashing little girls that does nothing but whine, has an extremely annoying voice, is supposed to be funny because she acts like an anime magic girl, and her story intertwines with a rapist’s.
The graphics for the world, some monster and mechs, and the ships are incredibly impressive, but the character models are terrible. The lead character is supposed to be in her 20s but she looks like a 16 year old. The characters bear more of a resemblance to Precious Moments figurines than humans. The music is standard RPG battle fare and the only memorable pieces are the Evangelion music and Spooky Fish tune from South Park.
The battle system is interesting for the first hour but becomes tedious from there. Every round you get 4 points, normal attacks take away 2, and special moves use 6. So to use a special move you have to attack only once one round and then use your move the next round. The problems is that it just isn’t worth it. Up until the end of the game your special attacks barely do anymore damage than a normal attack. They also have a Boost system where every attack fills up a meter, then when it’s maxed out you can go an extra turn. It’s really cheap and pointless at the start and at the end of the game enemies abuse it to go three times before one of your characters. Enemies are easy enough that all you have to do is the single button press you’re used to in standard RPGs, but they do so much damage that you have to heal after every single battle. Battle, heal, refill your magic, lather, rinse, repeat. There are almost no rewards for battling aside from some health and magic refill items, so levelling up takes forever. You won’t have to though until the end of the game, because most bosses are incredibly easy and require no strategy, however the battles are needlessly long and tedious. You have the ability to hop in a mech but there’s no reason to. Against most enemies the mechs do barely more or even less damage than you could normally, mechs can’t use magic or items, you can’t use magic to heal a mech, and the items to repair them are few and far between. Ah yes, one more thing. You can’t skip battle or magic animations. That means you’ll be watching the spell and special attack animations over and over and over and many of them are quite lengthy.
Also featured are several options, games, and side quests that further destroy any flow of game. Near the beginning you receive transmissions that, if you cut through the babbling, amount to e-mails. You’ll be running through an area when you receive mail and you have to come to a dead stop to read it, download any attachments, and to respond and in some points you get two or three e-mails in one area. Like many things in the game, it just isn’t worth the time it took to program. In the end you get some money if you do some exact steps and you can get some weapon upgrades for KOS-MOS. They could just as easily made these few items available through talking to people or leave the e-mail but have it serve a greater purpose and not be as detrimental to gameplay.
After battles you’re given tech points, magic points, and skill points. Skill points can be used to extract skills from items and you can set three to a character at a time. Considering how many status affects there are and the number of skills available, three skills aren’t even worth the trouble. Unless you feel like changing skills every time you meet new enemies that cause different status changes or use different elements you’re just going to stick with three you extracted at the start. If it comes in handy great, if not oh well. Ether points can be used to learn new spells because for some reason the designers felt that learning new spells as you level up just made too much sense. Spells branch into new spells so all the good ones are at the end of a path of useless ones. This means that if you worked on developing one path but find out you need a spell from another path, it’s going to be mindless battling until you have enough points to learn what you need. Spells are also weighted against 12 points total. Decent spells cost four points and junk costs one or two. This gives you even less incentive to branch out the spells you’re evolving. If you want that powerful new magic you’re going to have to abandon three or four ones you learned earlier and might actually need all of a sudden. I got rid of the Boost spell to make room for better healing magic and was severely punished for it in a boss battle. Tech points can be used to upgrade your special moves (but since they are useless why waste the points) or to up your stats. It’s slightly handy near the beginning, but at the end of the game it costs several hundred points just to get ten extra HP.
The mini games are neither entertaining nor interesting. There’s a casino, but if you’re that desperate to play poker just get some friends together and get a deck of cards. They’re not even two bucks at a 7-11. The cards that is, buying friends would probably set you back some more. The AGWS fighting game is just a hastily thrown together Virtua On Light. You can whip through it by just dashing towards the enemy and hacking away with a sword. There’s no reward for playing it so once you beat the game once you have no incentive to go back. The drilling game offers little to no reward and is, again, just incredibly boring. You play a version of a crane game but the only object is to put the drill over objects to destroy them rather than pick them up. Finally there’s Xenocard, which surprise surprise is boring and offers nothing interesting. If you wanted to play a card game than pick up some Magic, Pokemon, or Yu Gi Oh cards or games. They’re infinitely more in depth and rewarding. The sum of Xenosaga’s mini games are nothing more than time wasters because they have no great impact on the main quest and aren’t fun enough to play on their own.
There’s really only one side quest present and it’s not really much of a quest. Scattered throughout the game are red doors that can’t be opened unless you find them and their respective keys that are also scattered around. Once you find a key, either by beating a certain enemy or opening a chest, it’s time to trudge back through the needlessly large areas you’ve already been through and find that door again. Of course this means you’re going to have to do battle with the same old enemies that weren’t worth fighting the first time around. Couple that with the fact that party members sporadically become unavailable so you’re stuck with just Shion and you’re either going to watch her same moves plenty of times or you’re going to watch the escape spell and item animations plenty of times. Choose your poison; or just don’t bother with these side missions because most of the items behind the doors are worthless.
I can’t stress this enough, do NOT buy, rent, borrow, or look at this excuse for a game. It’s a bloated, boring, and shallow cinema that isn’t worth the time of day. If you’re that desperate for religious themes there are countless movies and TV shows that handle the material with class and substance. And of course it’s just Episode 1 so there’s absolutely no closure or end to the story. You’re going to have to wait for several more parts to finish this ‘saga’. Or of course you can use logic and just pay it no mind.
Final Score- 1.5, rounded up for GameFAQs submission

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/07/03