Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose

"Unbalanced but compelling."

INTRO
Whereas most sequels try to build upon the original game while tweaking and improving here and there, Xenosaga II attempts to rebuild much of the game system from the ground up. The result of this is that every improved feature of the game is associated with a corresponding decrease in quality somewhere else. We, the first vanguard of nerds who needed to play it immediately, have thus ended up buying a game that, while it emulates much of the greatness of Xenosaga I (and of course only a small fraction of the unmatchable greatness of Xenogears... there, I said it; if you didn't like Xenogears you should probably forget buying Xenosaga outright), fails to deliver everything one could expect from a game from the same team.

STORY: 8/10
(I'm going to treat the story first because let's face it; if you're playing Xenosaga you are almost definitely interested in the story to the exclusion of most other features of the game. ) Here the psychological and religious aspects of the game seem to be improved at the expense of the technological and action-oriented. Seemingly gone are many of the intrusive, unexplained acronyms of the first game, a feature that makes the loss of the UMN database a little less painful. (More on that later.) As people who have watched the original (TGS?) propaganda for the first Xenosaga game will notice, Xenosaga I was originally meant to include a lot of the scenes present in this game, going up to (I believe) the final boss. This means that the story is "of a piece" with the first game: it's excellent and compelling, featuring interesting characters with interesting problems. (Except Allen; he's still a boring guy with boring problems.)

However there are also problems with the game's story. The biggest failure is the game's focus on certain characters to the near-exclusion of others. This wouldn't be so bad if the other characters in the game seemed to remain the same, but they don't. While they get few lines in cutscenes and remain offscreen much of the time, they make important and life-changing decisions. For instance, between Disc 1 and Disc 2 Shion's character totally changes from an insecure engineer to a sassy, take-charge young woman (this might be related to the character redesign and the new voice actress) yet there's little in the story that explains why she changes so much. It's quite disconcerting and true for Ziggy as well.

The second biggest failure of the game's story is its failure to introduce excellent new characters. Canaan, of course, has suppressed emotions (this isn't a spoiler, you find this out in the first five minutes) and isn't too interesting... but Jin! Alluded to in the previous game as a bookworm/badass who was essentially a clone of Xenogears' Citan Uzuki, the developers were practically standing on top of the obvious contender to be THE COOLEST CHARACTER IN THE SECOND GAME. Jin is indeed cool ("It will be a long time before my sword can rest!") but he just isn't developed enough to be interesting because he's not present for long sections of the story. What could Monolith have been thinking?

GAMEPLAY: 5/10
This feature of the game suffers the most in this sequel. Ultra-linear dungeons, block puzzles in secret fortresses (it gets really really old after the third one), and a monotonous battle system makes gameplay more of a chore than one would like it to be... not that these problems didn't exist in the previous game, but they are here again and worse. One can make the game progressively easier by completing "G2" subquests to get new items and so forth, but the core gameplay remains the same. All battles proceed according to essentially the same pattern of "find weak point, stock, stock, stock, stock, attack, boost, attack, heal"... except mech battles, which are even simpler. Also, the lack of the UMN database makes it hard to take a break and relax with some fluffy text explaining arcane elements of the backstory and suggesting topics to research.
To the developers' credit, though, many features of the gameplay (especially the menu system) have been smoothed out and improved. The new skill system is to my taste because you can make the characters as different as you care to, but others may disagree. Also, giant robots are finally useful!

GRAPHICS: 10/10
All-around, excellent. Mechanical design is excellent and the characters are more consistent between each other than last time (no more controlling a character with giant anime eyes who's talking to someone who looks almost like a real human being.) These changes especially benefit Jr, who I can now take seriously as a character; Shion, who now looks, as my friend used to put it, "easy on the eyes" rather than butt-ugly like last time; and MOMO, who no longer looks like she could hurt someone with her chin. The only problems are the fact that in game models, the characters seem to be wearing mittens. The changes to the models and the engine (except the last one) cause many of the game's cutscenes to look GORGEOUS, especially two "certain duels" between two "certain characters".

SOUND is broken up into two categories:

MUSIC: 3/10
The most catastrophic change that happened to this game was Yasunori Mitsuda's decision to leave the project. Without his music the game truly loses that "Xeno" feeling in certain scenes. Not that Yuki Kajiura is that terrible a composer; it's just that I can remember about 3 "story" tunes from this game and about 45 tunes from Xenogears and Xenosaga I. (They even changed the Song of Nephilim theme around.... huh?!) But the real culprit is the composer of the in-game music (maybe Kajiura was asking for too much money because she's now "the" composer for anime series, it seems), Shinji Hosoe. These tunes can be broken down thus:
-one memorable (final boss theme)
-a few unobtrusive (dungeon themes and character battle theme)
- "West Side Story" level annoying, (mech battle theme... I always expect the Jets and Sharks to come sashaying in instead of giant robots: "Meet me at the dance at the ten! And walk cool!" "We always walk cool! We're Jets! The greatest!")
-and AWFUL ("Elsa" music, 2nd Miltia music, all the rest of the music.) Next time I play the game I'm just going to listen to the episode I soundtrack.

VOICE ACTING: 9/10
For the american voice cast, someone actually made great decisions: new VAs for Shion, Momo, and chaos. These were my top three most annoying voice actors for the previous game ("Spell RAY!"), so kudos to Namco. Unfortunately they fired KOS-MOS's actress for some reason.... why? Fortunately the rest of the cast seems pretty similar. Jr's voice actress seems to be a lot better at "acting" this time; I was pretty impressed. All around, one of the better localizations.

TOTAL: 8/10
These days, it seems like higher standards for graphics, voice acting, and texture resolution are actually making new games worse than old ones, because the developers are forced to devote lots of time to surface elements (in order to appeal to the "Does it look as good as the latest Final Fantasy?" demographic) when they could be focusing on story and gameplay. If this is true, Xenosaga II is a true casualty. That said, it's the only game in town when it comes to the "Xeno" story style we all know and love. Recommended for fans of the previous games; if not, forget it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/03/05