Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose

"Does it live up to the hype?"

After I played Xenogears, I wondered whether square would make a sequel. Surely a hit like Xenogears deserved a sequel. After the split to Namco, I began to have doubts whether Monolith could make an RPG as good as Xenogears. Surely when Xenosaga I hit stores, I was quite skeptical about the game. But after playing it, I realized that its story and lack of focus on gears made this a game unlike Xenogears. Xenosaga II continues where I left off, and let me start by sayin that if you liked the first ep. you will definitely want this one. If you haven't played the first, you should because without it you really can't understand the story. Speaking of which lets start with the story.

STORY: Without revealing any plot at all, Xenosaga II story continues where I left off and deals mostly with each characters background in terms of furthering the story line. It is definitely geared more towards character development and furthers the relationships between characters. Though the overall story progression took a back seat to character development, I thought it worked well to explain a lot of the questions left from the first game. In lieu of this, the story progresses nicely and keeps you drawn to it. Infact I was so drawn that I beat the first CD on my first day.

Score (9/10)

LENGTH: This brings me to the next point. Length of the game. I am not one of those players that wants a ridiculously long RPG game. In fact, I find it to be cumbersome to go back and beat a game over to get access to a "secret" cave or item. I believe these should be accessed from the start. But if you are one of those who like to have replayabilty on games, you will find Ep. II lacking, but if you are one who likes to do other things than just play a game for weeks on in then you will find this game to be of a good length. Though even I found it to be a bit short which is saying a lot. Which is why the length gets a low score. Still the extra bosses and secret cave do make you want to play the game over as I have started over but not really played it the second time through yet.

Score (6/10)

GAMEPLAY: It is the most important aspect to an RPG aside from the storyline. If the gameplay element causes the Story to slow down, it really becomes a nuisance to the player. I found this game to be challenging, but not so challenging that I kept having to level up to beat a boss. The game features a nice breaking system which basically breaks the defense of the bosses (and you) which can lead to them being airborned or dropped on the ground. Dropped/Airborne/Breaked enemies take more damage, and this is the reason why the game can be easy for those that can exploit this aspect of the game. In fact, I found myself breezing through the most of the bosses with ziggy doing insane damage on links. Each enemy has a different break zone, and for most part that becomes the hardest part (finding their weakness). I remember dying on the 3rd boss a few times due to not being able to find its zone which lead him to charge up his attack and basically annihalate me, but after I understood the combo system along w/ breaking, he became so easy that I couldn't understand why I got killed the first time. All this happened without me having to level up one bit which I found refreshing. Usually leveling up creates a false sense of challenge/length to a game and this game eliminates that to a high degree (I still had to level up for skill points but found a way around it through a tip from the "message boards") Boosting also makes a return and is crucial to link up for heavy hitting combos.

This brings me to what I didn't like about the gameplay element. THough easily avoidable, the GS system was tedious and I foudn that helpin people was a big pain in the you know what. Sure you can skip this altogether if you'd like, but the rewards from these events can make a huge difference in your fights. You can miss a lot of you skip the first few GS's of the game. Not really a problem for the hardcore players. Overall I found the system in advancing player dumbed down. Quite disappointing since I couldn't decide if I wanna focus the points to all str like the last game or not. Also all characters get the same skills and you don't learn new techs. I dont' mind the same skills because I still tend to only get some skills for some people based on how I use them and their stats, but the dumbed down character advancement and no techs make the characters feel the same.

Score (7-8/10) depending on what kind of player you are.

Graphics and Sound are hardly important to me, but still are up to par to other games. I still found the fact that the players have "frog" fingers which sorta glared at me and made me irritated that coming so far in graphics they were not able to fix that problem. Sound was good but not great. I found one score to be particularly good which you have to listen to a lot towards the end of disc 1 and thank God it was good. No score for these two, but both were bearable and didnt' deter me from playing the game.

Buy or Rent: I'd rent the game if you are new to the series, but then again you wouldn't understand it much and thus assuming you played the first one, I'd buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/05