Episode 17: Xenogears Part 1—Total S in the Gas Chamber
Terra's Review:
A very long game means a very long episode! To avoid
subjecting our listeners to a four hour episode, Xenogears has been broken up
into two parts. Part two and a full review will be online in a few weeks. For
now, here’s some advice for other people planning to marathon Xenogears:
- Everything will take at least twice as long as you planned. If you want to get through this game in one four day weekend, you may need to give up on sleeping, bathing, and going to the bathroom.
- Enjoy the first 15 hours of the game while you can—Hammer is coming and it’s all downhill from there. Bro.
- Mistrust any stuffed animal that the characters describe as “lukewarm.”
- Soylent Green is people! Wells were people! Your Gear is made of out of people! Assume that EVERYTHING in this game is people. Your console is people. Your controller is people. YOU’RE PEOPLE.
- You can’t go wrong with Shotgunnova’s Walkthrough. Come for the dungeon maps, stay for observations such as Hammer being ”a pince-nez-wearin' crossbreed between Splinter from TMNT and Joe Camel.”
- Know that Xenogears will never pass up an opportunity to traumatize the party members. Or the player.
- Take a moment to appreciate the times when all the party members are together and you can choose which of them you want in a fight. These are rarer than you think.
- Take advantage of these when you can: They get rarer the farther into the game you get.
- Remember that Citan is an asshole.
- Have fun! And a lot of booze.
Shotgunnova’s description is accurate. Bro.
Msuic Credits:
RPG Roundup Theme Song: "Video Game Theme," J. Arthur Keenes Band. Creative Commons Attribution License.
Xenogears OST
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ReplyDeleteFlame flame flame!
ReplyDelete...nah, most of your criticisms are spot on. I like Xenogears, but it has a ton of problems. Even if the second disc hadn't been cut short, the first disc is a good demonstration of how the second disc seems more exciting because the short text descriptions hint at a greater narrative, but if we had actually gotten to play through the original vision it'd be a lot of random side quests, running through long corridors, sudden but inevitable betrayals, and swinging pendant visions while Fei cries. Also, the game would be like 150 hours long.
It's pretty telling that the Google autocomplete for "Xenogears disc 2" is "Xenogears disc 2 wtf."
Xenogears is a lot like Black and White or Neverwinter Nights, where it's really ambitious and you can see what the designers were trying to do, especially if you go look up what the actual translations of the names were supposed to be, but the execution has enough problems that playing it is often just painful.
It does have that bitchin' soundtrack, though, so I think that justifies its existence.