"KOS-MOS needs to be cleaned. Hooray!"

Xenogears has been one of my favorite RPGs since I defeated the final boss, watched the final cutscene and didn't understand what the hell just happened. The story was engaging, the battle system addicting, and the mech battles like some form of Super Robot crack mixed with a wonderous drug I now call fun.

Cut to some time later, and Xenosaga is being prepped for release. As my anticipation builds, so does my apprehension. I've learned over years of gaming that, no matter what my expectations, they will rarely materialize into reality. And so, lo and behold, when Xenosaga is finally released, my expectations (which, when looking back, were about as inflated as my ego) were not all met. There were flaws in the system that marred an otherwise delightful game. So while it did not surpass Xenogears, it certainly rose to the challenge.

Xenosaga itself started out problematic. The developers of Xenogears were no longer with Square and had instead formed their own development company under Namco. So, while the title is similar, the mechs are similar, and there are just enough references to Xenogears to fall short of a lawsuit, it is (in the developer's words, at least) not part of the Xenogears universe. That fact was lost on many of its fans (including yours truly). So, perhaps we all had unwarranted expectations. Or perhaps there's still room to grow in this franchise.

I feel like starting in a weird place, so let's go with the battle system. There are no random battles. Yay. Instead, all battles are visible on the map ala Chrono Trigger/Cross and various other titles. You can run from battle or face it head-on, your choice. Returning from Xenogears is the concept of combination attacks delivered by pressing certain buttons. Except this time the whole idea of strong, medium and weak attacks have been replaced by physical attacks and Ether attacks. That's the only real distinction between the two. This also prevents the kind of complicated and ultimately satisfying combination attacks leading into deathblows.

Before I get the deathblow lovers sending mailbombs to Namco, there are a kind of deathblows in this game. You're able to set special attacks to certain attack combinations (for instance, setting one to an ether-based attack combo and another to a physical combo). Every battle begins with you having 4AP (action points again) with a maximum of six. At first you can only use your killer techniques when you've gained six AP, but later on you can improve your techniques to high-speed (they all start at low-speed) and use them with only four AP. It's basically something to aspire to.

Xenosaga's big draw is to those gamers who love being able to customize every aspect of their party. The various points you gain (technical, skill and ether) can be used to improve techniques, grant you skills such as protection from various status effects, increase the drop rate of items and money, and others. Ether points, as you may well guess, grant you new spells and actually let you transfer ethers from one character to another. So Shion's healing spells can be copied over to KOS-MOS, who can then use them at her leisure. It makes for an insane amount of customization in the abilities and powers of each character, and since ether spells are much more useful than they were in Xenogears, careful management of your spells can make the difference between life and death.

Probably my favorite aspect is the technical points. These can be used to improve the speed, wait time (the amount of turns needed to wait between uses of a particular tech) and even the power of a technique, but they have one more purpose. You can, and often must, use these points to improve your character's stats directly. This is both an incredible blessing and a great equalizer. Each stat can be fed TP and increased by a point or more (depending on how much TP you want to spend). Now, before you start drooling, there's a limit to how powerful a character can become. The game takes the highest value for a particular stat (say, HP) of all the characters in your party, and that number becomes the upper limit for which you can raise the stat. So, if Shion has the highest strength (hah!) at 40, no other character can raise their strength stat over 40.

This has the added benefit of letting you choose your party based on personal preference rather than statistical ability. Granted, it does take an assload of TP to raise a weaker character to the level of the stronger, and the various characters have additional strengths and weaknesses to certain types of monsters.

In Xenogears, some didn't like how, during disc 2, gear battles were the norm and on-foot battles weren't very prevalent. In Xenosaga, the reverse holds true. The gears (dubbed AGWS, read as Anti Gnosis Weapon System and pronounced 'eggs') are only useful if your characters are severely underpowered and unprepared for the dangers in the current dungeon. Otherwise, you can deal much more damage and survive longer on foot and without the mechs. As a mecha fan, it is a great disappointment that the AGWS don't have a larger role in the game.

The plot of this game revolves around the ethereal and unusual Gnosis (pronounced no-sys). They're seemingly mindless and violent creatures that can appear out of nowhere and cause havoc, death, destruction and terror on a whim. It doesn't help that they apparently exist somewhere outside what everyone else knows as reality, making them insubstantial. Cue the government's experimentations to create an android (KOS-MOS) with the ability to neutralize and fight the Gnosis. You begin the game as Shion, a lady scientist working to debug KOS-MOS somewhere in outer space. Naturally, the Gnosis make their presence known rather quickly, and it just snowballs from there.

A word on the story and its length. There have been many complaints telling tales of hour-long cutscenes, cutscenes with intermissions, cutscenes that do nothing for bladder control. While the intermission one is true, the rest are exaggerations, and there's only one cutscene requiring a game-inspired intermission. What kills me, though, is many of these complaints are from the same people who read through pages of text in Xenogears, with no qualms about doing it, either.

I suppose the problem is passive versus active participation. Xenogears had lengthy cutscenes, true, but during that time you were reading information, acknowledging new events, and trying to sort out all that had happened thus far with all the new stuff being thrown at you. Xenosaga, with the power of the PS2's large DVD disc space, instead gives you fully-animated and fully-voiced cutscenes. It's a treat for technophiles who have waited for a fully cinematic game, but many of the complaints that address the length of these cutscense are actually well-founded. Many are long. They only require you watch and listen, and it's too easy to become distracted or bored, and only half-listen or stop paying attention entirely. This is more of a psychological flaw than one of the game itself. Many of the cutscenes are chock-full of action, intrigue, character development and events even more confusing than Xenogears. Fortunately you are given the power to pause any cutscene at any time, and even skip them entirely should you have seen them previously.

One of my highest grievances with this game is the decided lack of a musical score. Many times dungeons will be played out without an accompanying song, making them seem dreary, lifeless and ultimately boring. The battle music, while nice, also plays through boss battles as well, so the only indication that what you're fighting is a boss is its large stature and powerful attacks. The battle music only changes with the final battle, which is a damn shame considering that particular track is one of the best in the game.

Another complaint goes almost hand-in-hand with the last. While Xenogears was more of a traditional RPG with a world map, airships, and whatnot, Xenosaga is more of a pure dungeon-crawler. There are neutral areas where you can stop, rest and shop, but the game proceeds from one dungeon area to the next without much of a break in between. And, since the game takes place out in space, there's no world map to explore outside of the above-mentioned neutral areas, and once you've fully mapped those, you're out of luck. There is some incentive for exploration in the form of a particular sidequest, but it's not terribly difficult to complete, and outside of that, there's no opportunities for new discoveries.

Pessimism and criticism aside, Xenosaga does bring to the table a cast of characters made more real by their extensive and well-done voice acting. Emotion is projected, inflection is made, and the characters more quickly find a place in your heart (or your hate list) than ones in other titles of the same genre. I can't help but chuckle at the sight of the captain of the Elsa and his hat which states, and I quote, "I am boozer." Fantastic, just fantastic.

While the number of sidequests in this title are relatively few, you're given a good number of mini-games to enjoy, ones that have actual rewards worth fighting for. The number excels Xenogears' games and range, and includes a similar mech-on-mech battle for supremacy. While I prefer the mech battle system in the Xenogears arena, this system is more of a game in and of itself. Likewise, the driller, poker, slots and especially the Xenocard game are fully fleshed out and developed. Xenocard especially is impressive, as it's a good sight more complicated than the various card games tossed into certain Final Fantasy titles. You can literally waste hours playing video poker in the casinos, or attempting to win prizes from the driller games, and your rewards are definitely worth the time and effort.

One more word on the story. Like Xenogears, it's a series of complicated techno-babble and half-sane ramblings that result in a climax that nearly explains everything. Nearly. Xenogears was a game unto itself, needing no backstory from other games and (mostly) leaving no question unanswered. However, Xenosaga is episode 1 of a multi-episode franchise, so there are questions left hanging in the air. There are answers left just out of reach. And there is a definite lack of explanation for certain events, which are hopefully put to rest in episode 2.

Hell, as long as KOS-MOS and Shion aren't warped too much by the new character design, there won't be much stopping me from getting, playing and enjoying episode 2. Besides, I have to figure out what the hell happened at the end of episode 1.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/04