Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose

"What should have been a wonderful sequel is a failure."

Xenosaga I: Der Wille zur Macht introduced the players to a stunning universe, told through the eyes of a few people, most of whom are rather odd, such as Shion, KOS-MOS, and chaos. A fascinating sci-fi story with just enough fantasy to be truly compelling, it spawned dozens of theories. The battle system, while not perfect, worked. The games biggest problem was that you spent lots, and I do mean LOTS of time sitting there watching cutscenes.

In Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose, they tried to keep what was good and fix what they thought didn't work out well. A new combat system who's roots can be seen in the XS I system, fewer cutscenes, and a continuation of XS I's story awaited those who picked up this game.

Visual: 9/10
Xenosaga I was a beautiful game, visually, and II follows in I's footsteps perfectly. Each of the character models looks quite good, and moves wonderfully, both in and out of battle. Everything is rendered nicely, and I didn't see any major screwups.. or, heck, even very minor ones. My biggest problem was area reusage - they didn't change any of the old areas at all, such as the Kukai Foundation city or the Durandal. These areas still look exactly the same. Also, the overhead city 'maps' still do not look very good.

Audio: 5/10
For the most part, the audio does what it should: sound effects are properly placed and fit what's going on, and music is present. The problem is that the audio, for the most part, is -completely- forgettable. I can't remember one track I really liked, not one. That's pretty bad, right there.

The character voices were all right, although some of the voice actors changed from the first game, notably chaos and MOMO. For the most part, I thought the voices were all right, though not the greatest. I still don't like MOMO's voice.

Story: 3/10
Normally, I would do the story section of a review last for an RPG, as it is the single most important element, but as the story is a continuation of a previous game's story, I felt it was perhaps slightly less important than usual.

XS II starts off with Canaan and chaos flying down to Old Miltia, 14 years ago, apparently to protect the URTVs. Along the way, they meet Jin Uzuki, Shion's older brother, and things just go haywire from there. After that part is done, the game switches to following Shion and co, beginning with a recap of XS I, and then moving on from their landing at Second Miltia.

The entire rest of the first disc focuses on ONE quest, involving MOMO's brain. The story doesn't exactly get any faster-paced, either, but continues to plod on through the rest of this game's story, moving at a turtle-pace. A shame, really - especially considering how XS I covered more ground, in my opinion, than this game did.. And this game goes off of the assumption that you at least know -something- about the previous story.

The sidequests to this game exist in the GS quests (or 'Good Samaritan' quests.) While reasonably plentiful, these side quests require you to go ridiculously far out of your way, and consume unreasonably massive amounts of time comparatively to the main game. To make matters worse, a large number of them are a variation of the good ol' Fedex quest or fetch quest schemes (the first being 'take this to so and so and bring back whatever he gives you, the second being 'find me this and bring it to me!') Both kinds are simply boring. The Segment Addresses from the first game make a reappearance, but make about as little sense as they did in the original.

Overall, the story and it's side elements are extremely slow and boring, and the side elements seem to only exist as a way to extend the length of time playing this game past twenty-five hours. Not a good thing, and thus my low score here.

Gameplay: 3/10
The gameplay in the first game was not perfect, but it was manageable, and gave you a real sense of how your characters were growing. In this game, that simply isn't the case.

The battle system consists of attacking 'zones' on an enemy (A, B, or C) in an attempt to find the combination of zones that will break an enemy's guard and allow you to beat the HP out of him. This is, in theory, a great system, unfortunately, since most enemies will recover their guard immediately after you break it, you're forced to overuse other aspects of the battle system - specifically, the Stock and Boost commands.

Stock allows you to 'save' attacks for later use, up to three. These can be unleashed during the character's turn, which, on an enemy who's guard is broken, can be quite devastating. You can only 'Stock' one attack per turn, however.

Boost is a recurring command, from the first game. A few changes have been made, such as good guys use one boost guard, bad guys use another (instead of one per person in the battle.) Boosting during an ally's turn allows you to follow up his attacks as if no time at all had passed, preventing an enemy from recovering it's guard, or getting up from a 'Down' state, and so on. Very nice, and you can use Boost a LOT.

Unfortunately, the -vast- majority of battles end up going like this: Stock each character on their turn for the first three turns, use one character to break an enemy's guard, then Boost all the characters one right after another until that enemy dies. Lather, rinse, repeat. Even bosses are effectively the same thing. And since you never learn new attacks, this gets.. BORING. Especially when you consider that even normal enemy battles take several minutes to finish this way.

Now, characters do get Skills, a unified system of Skills and Ethers from the first game. Unfortunately, every character has the ability to learn every Skill in the game, with NO variation as to cost or requirements to get said skill. And, for the most part, the vast majority of these skills are pretty well useless. I certainly don't recommend having MOMO cast Aura Blast when you can use chaos to smack an enemy around for four times the damage with no EP cost, for example. For the most part, the only Skills you'll use are the passive ones, the healing ones, Psycho Pocket (steal), and the skills that grant a character's attacks a certain element.

The 'mech' combat also returns from the original game, with changes. For one thing, you're either playing with mechs or characters, not both at the same time, and there is certainly no calling of your mech (now called an ES, instead of an AGWS) in the middle of a fight. For the most part, commands are the same, but the ES uses a variant of the Stock system from the character-scale combat, as well. You can use 'Stock' to build up a charge, then use that charge to unleash a special attack (each ES, and there are only three in the game, has a couple of basic specials - all the others are designated by who the copilot is.) While sort of neat, it quickly gets repetitive and boring. Thankfully, ES battles seem to be much shorter than character-scale battles.

You still gain levels (as both characters and ES, oddly enough.) All a level gives, though, is more HP and EP, and some stat boosts. No special skills or attacks are unlocked via levelling. In fact, outside of the Skills system, there's no real way to 'grow' your character at all in attacks or abilities. This is quite unfortunate, as, since the battles pretty much demand you play a certain way, you're pretty much guaranteed to see a repetition of the same attacks again.. and again.. and AGAIN.. throughout the entire game. Yuck.

There is one more thing that I nearly forgot to mention - Double Attacks. Basically, a Double Attack is two characters combining their abilities to do one nifty-cool thing, such as.. an attack. These require Stocked attacks, and also require one character to Boost in order to achieve the Double Attack. While they -are- spiffy, they're unfortunately pretty darn useless.

Outside of battle, the game controls in pretty much the same way as the first, even down to the ability to blow up some objects. It does it's job nicely. Although I should also mention that money is gone from the game - you don't get money and can neither buy nor sell items. You want that Med Kit? Find it. You also can't upgrade your weapons or armor, which is even more unfortunate. At least the animations when blowing things up are more varied now...

Final Score: 4/10
This is NOT an average. Story and Gameplay are worth worlds more than both audio and visual.

Xenosaga II had so much potential, and in the end, was a complete letdown. If you really want to play this for the story, just so you know what happens, I advise renting it, playing it straight through, then moving on with your life.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/13/06