Xenogears, an early PS1 title from Squaresoft, may not be the strongest RPG in terms of it's combat and party customization system, but does earn it's place among the best RPGs due to a strong story with engaging characters that work well with the rest of the game.

It's hard to state the plot of Xenogears as it's rather all encompassing of numerous threads, but most of the game focuses on a young man named Fei who knows little of his past, but appears to be an expert pilot of Gears, large controllable robots used for fighting. While escaping the carnage of the destruction of the village that he only knows as home, he begins to learn much of the world, two nations at war, an religious group keeping a tight control on historical documents, a floating city filled with extraordinary humans and anthropomorphic beings, and strange beings that seem have to have control over everything on the planet. Joining forces with a rather large number of well developed characters (both playable and non-playable), Fei and his group work to learn the secrets of their world and preventing the entire destruction of their civilization.

Gameplay: B-

For the most part, Xenogears is a typical Squaresoft RGP, released only a year after FF VII and shares some similarities. Exploration on a world map and various towns/areas/dungeons, etc. to locate items, talk to people, buy equipment, are all present, as well as a turn based combat system are all there. However, there are actually two levels of combat, one where you are in melee (character) form, and another which you use Gears against larger and more potent foes. The two combat modes are related but have significant differences in play.

For melee combat, you can select a number of button presses, each with a specific value, up to a maximum amount of ability points. (which will grow as your character levels). This will unleash a series of attacks on the enemy you are battling. As you level, you also learn Deathblows, which are specific button press series (nicely displayed at the bottom of the screen) which are more potent than regular attacks. Any ability points you don't use in a turn are stored, and when you have enough, you can then create combos of these deathblows to release a single big attack in one turn, very useful for foes that can counterattack. Each of the 8 playable characters have distinct styles of fighting; some are true melee attacks, such as Fei, and don't require weapons, while others need a specific weapon geared towards their style (which also carries over to their Gears). Besides melee attacks, characters learn new spells (based on the concept of Ether) which range from offensive elemental attacks, defensive spells, and healing and recovery tools. There's also a range of items to help restore health and ether points. Besides weapons, characters can also wear up to 3 accessories to improve defense, speed, and other attributes.

Gear combat works on the same idea that using a specific button press will launch a different attack, though instead of ability points, each Gear will have a fuel level, with more powerful attacks using up more fuel. As characters level, they will also learn Gear deathblows, usually related to their melee versions, though to use the most powerful, you'd have to attack with that character using weak attacks for up to 3 rounds in a row. Gears can also charge to recover a small amount of fuel as well as boost their output in order to respond faster. Various ether spells also work with Gears, usually with a slightly different function; special functions will also be learned as your characters advance. As with their character melee attacks, the Gears of some characters will use weapons which can be upgraded through the game. And just like the characters, up to three Gear accessories can be added to each Gear to give it recovery abilities, improve defense against specific attacks, or to improve the Gear's statistics in general.

You can only have 3 characters of the 8 playable ones in your party at any time, and to change these characters, you need to find either a "character manager" character, or a special party manager point usually located near save points, which are liberally spread throughout the game. This makes the gameplay a bit more interesting, particularly with Gears since you have to keep track of their fuel levels all the time until you can find a place to refuel them; you can't just switch out to a fresh Gear if one runs out. However, until about 60% of the way through the game, your character party is usually predetermined, or maybe with the option of one of the additional characters, thus not really allowing you to get comfortable with a specific set of fighting styles.

This also leads to one weakness of the gameplay in Xenogears: the lack of character customization. While items found later in the game allow you to improve stats a bit, there's basically nothing you can do to control your characters without doing a lot of extraneous leveling up. While your characters will learn their Deathmoves and other abilities as they fight, when these are learned are at very specific levels and you have no control over when they will be learned or in what order. The gameplay is surprisingly linear for a RPG, particularly from Squaresoft. There's minimal side quests, and even once you get the ability to cross the world map in seconds with an airship, there's little else to explore save for the area that you need to get to next. Thus, if you want to make your characters anything special , you'll need to keep leveling them through random monster encounters. This is also made difficult that you really can't freely select the 3 characters in your party until very late in the game, meaning that to get all 8 characters sufficiently powerful, you need to play a lot of party switching once this ability is available, and then spend time towards that. But this is also hindered by the fact that some characters don't become known until more than 50% of the way through. Fortunately, the game does automatically level characters that you don't take into melee, usually staying a level or two behind Fei, but leveled nevertheless. An aside to this, I found that the randomness of monster encounters was also awfully high, but that may be more a function of how long I was into the game and how much I wanted to get through it.

This also brings up another problem in the overall learning curve, in that the game difficulty through about 80% of the game is reasonably fair if you just follow the plot, spend an average amount of time in the dungeons, and continue on. The last few boss fights I found to be insanely difficult at the level I reached them without going back out and earning more experience and collecting more money to buy better Gear equipment. In fact, I didn't have many of the most powerful attacks learned by my characters, and while I never needed them on any bosses previously, these were almost required to have in order to just survive to the end. This does tend to be a problem with some RPG games which don't either help you get to the right 'fighting' level prior to the end game, or that don't suggest that you need to get move powerful before moving into these boss fights. This late difficulty also seems to come from boss fights that, while never having any special required tactics to defeat bosses in the first part of the game, suddenly because nearly invincible save through one specific attack in the last chapters.

There's also a very large obvious problem when you've played the whole game through, particularly related to the story. The game is spread across 2 disks, and I've got through it in a bit more than 55hrs of gameplay. That's a LOT of gameplay, though it's not equally spread across both disks. The first disk is about 40hrs total, and the game stays pretty consistent throughout. However, save for the last few places in the game on the second disk, much of the 'gameplay' is very reminiscent of the last parts of Metal Gear Solid 2 - tons and tons of cutscenes and little to no gameplay. When the gameplay is there, it varies drastically from the regular RPG-ness of the first disk; you're told a lot of the reason why you are suddenly going to fight a boss, but all the adventure in getting to that point is lost. I've read speculation that by the point, the game was being pushed out the door, and that all the extra RPG elements were nixed in favor of the "highlights" version, but it's definitely a drastic change and just feels wrong. The game recovers near the end back to what it was like on the first disk, but for myself, I was at that point already disappointed with the presentation of the second disk.

Graphics: B+
Sound: B

I realize that I'm reviewing a 6 year old game here, effectively 2 generations behind more modern RPG games, and thus I have to consider what the tech was like back then. However, there's several issues with graphics and sound that nowadays would be a horrendous mistakes. However, some stuff still stands out. The game is rendered using a 3D world with 2D sprites for the characters on it. The 3D environs are reasonably good for the hardware it was meant to run on, though highly pixilated. The 2D character style, however, can be weird with certain angles or when the game rotates around. The graphic animations are just a bit too long at times during battle. When a simple 'easy picking' random battle takes about a minute to complete of playtime mostly due to watching the characters jump forward, pummel, then jump back, it gets very old very fast. Sound is generally limited to high quality background music (though there are some scenes that run with almost no sound for a long time) and fighting sounds during battles. Probably the most annoying sound part was the heavily reused combat music, or the same bg music over a half-hour long cutscene (in a short loop) which gets easily annoying after a while.

Story: A-

Despite many of it's gameplay faults, Xenogears supports one of the most engrossing stories I've come across in a game. There's a full motion video anime cutscene that plays from the opening screen, which seemingly has nothing to do with the game itself, and several other small elements set up that don't seem to have rhyme or reason during the first half of the game. But suddenly, things start just dropping into place, and all the plot elements set up back in the first few hours become critical in the last half of the game, including that opening movie. All the playable characters and most of the secondary named characters are well written with personalities that don't change (for the most part) through the game. But even more so is how encompassing the plot becomes, getting significantly deeper and more convoluted before it is resolved rather cleanly.

The story is told through a combination of in-game cutscenes and full motion anime cartoons. A large annoyance in this approach is that the speed of the cutscene dialog is slow and nearly all of the time, you need to button-press ahead to keep the text conversation going, though you can't button-press to speed it up or omit it all together. As mentioned, the story suddenly becomes much more significant in the second disk, such that in one case, between one battle and when I had the option to save, there was close to an hour of cutscenes alone. Additionally, as mentioned above, the story takes a odd perspective on the 2nd disk, with you only participating in the required boss fights, but leaving details of massive worldwide cataclysm and other shattering evens as a simple still for you to look at. It feels very much like a cop-out than well developed. I strongly appreciate the amount of story the game had, but the way it was presented could have been much better. Of course, the technical abilities of the PS1 limit what could have been done; having even spoken dialog over some of the text such that one did not need to button-press through it to keep a cutscene going would have been great but would have probably made the game cover 4 or 5 disks instead of 2.

Value: A
Replayability: C

As with more RPGs, there's not much in terms of replay value here. You can't 'take things with you' between games, so the only benefit in playing a second time is knowing when characters will be introduced, where to find certain items, and boss tactics and the like. But an RPG with a minimum game time of 50hrs definitely has something to be said for gameplay value, particularly now when you can find copies on the cheap.

Overall: B

Xenogears has been raved as being one of the greatest RPGs for a console. It's hard to support this claim nowadays when you consider the gameplay that Square has put out before and since (again, FFVII was put out before this title), and with an end game that features only a few hours of gameplay out of several more hours of cutscenes. But all that aside, the game itself has a unique approach to combat (hinted a bit in Xenosaga) as well as an awesome engaging story and characters that deserved to be a full fledged anime production above and beyond the ingame shots (and as with the combat, is hinted to be related to the newer Xenosaga games). It's definitely not a good game for a person not into RPGs in the first place, but will likely be a great title to fill out any RPG-fanatic's shelf.