There's a whole lot of RPGs for the PS2, and I doubt many have played them all, or even come close. I sure haven't. But I have played a lot. From Kingdom Hearts to Rogue Galaxy, from Dragon Quest VIII to Final Fantasy XII. And I am here to tell that Xenosaga is the best one I've ever played. Not perfect, but definitely the best.
First of all, there is the story, the cornerstone of any RPG. The story is awesome. Not in that classic fairy-tale RPG way, but in an almost totally incomprehensible way that only anime can be. Seriously. Start a game and watch a cinema, play for five minutes and watch another, play ten minutes and watch another. I'm not clocking it but buy hour three I must have watched at least and hour and half of cinemas. Heck, in this game there are cinemas so long that the game asks you if you want to save before it shows you ANOTHER cinema. Yeah, EAT YOUR HEART OUT METAL GEAR SOLID! At any rate, all of the cinemas are rendered in-game, with full voice acting by REAL voice actors who've been in quality anime. Quite frankly, those in-game cinemas are the best I had ever seen in a game until Final Fantasy XII. There is one terrible flaw with them. The lip synching. Is WAY off. To the point of distraction. Get used to it. Sometimes you'll feel like you're watching a really long cool anime rather than playing a game with this one.
Once again, the story is quite good, but quite incomprehensible. While games likeXenosaga attempted to tell you an incredibly long and complex story with massively long explanations, with this game it's like they gave up on that idea and just threw you into the story with no explanation of anything. What exactly are the Gnosis? What is the signifigance of the artifact? Why is there a serial number on one of the character's hands? What happened to Ziggy's family? Will Shion ever love again? Darned if I know. But the story that is there is incredilby absorbing and rich, and that's thanks to the fantastic characters.
You'll start the game and be a little bored with the spartan sci-fi trappings, right until the alien Gnosis-killer android KOS-MOS wakes up. Then, as the aliens blow away a battle fleet and eat all the people, you'll witness one of the coolest entrances in video game history as the android cuts through the aliens like a hot knife through warm butter. Later on you'll meet a cyborg who wants to discard his humanity, and feel your cold heart touched like his when he decides to care about a cute (but artificial) little girl. You'll love to hate the psycho freak Albedo, try to figure out whether the southern belle Mary or the goth Shelly is more your type, and smile smile when junior attacks with action-movie-esque quotes. And of course you'll see some weird wacked-out stuff that you have absolutely no idea what it's getting at, but that's anime for ya.
There's also some really great music to be found, fully orchestral stuff reminiscent of the very best scores in movie history. Unfortunately in the musical department also lies another bad flaw. For most of the game there is only one battle music theme. It's really good so that won't bother you much, but there's also pretty much one frantic dungeon/battle theme that plays in battle areas. And it's really stressful, high-strung music that gets old after about 2 minutes. If you are stuck in a dungeon for hours, you'll have to turn the sound OFF, and play some other music, or risk losing your sanity. And then there's long sections that have no music at all making it kind of creepy and lonely. Considering the awsome music that plays during the cinematics and some of the boss battles, this was just a bad design choice.
It's a good thing that the general gameplay is so darn good. Like most JRPGs, there are a ton of battles, which take you to a seperate battle area for the duration. Fortunately they are not random, you walk into the enemies to start them (or they walk into you). The fight systems is a modified version of the Xegogears system, which is a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because Xenogears had the best battle system in any RPG save perhaps Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VII, and it's a bad thing because some of the changes were not so good. I like have high and low frequency attacks, which allow you to wait and power up devestating attacks or unleash combos. I LOVE hitting the square, circle, and triangle buttons to unleash combos. But I hate the boost system to switch characters, as I've never really gotten the hang of it and it's just kind of awkward. Fortunately, the speed and graphical flare of the fights (cinematic camera angles go a long, long way), and KOS-MOS' AWESOME attacks make battles incredibly fun for the most part.
People hearing about the AGWS robots may have hoped for a Xenogears-type giant robot series of battles. Unforunately most of the time these battles are boring and few and far between. Without the fuel management and devestatingly awesome attacks from Xenogears, they are more a curiosity than anything else. The card game built into Xenosaga however, is not. I think the first time I played this game I must have spent 10 hours playing the card game that's built in. Basically it's a CCG like Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel Vs, Pokemon, ect. But all the irritating management has been totally automated. I've played electronic version of other card games, but strangely, even on the ones which were stand-alone games, I never played one as addictive as this. Weird huh?
And speaking of weird, there are some other game design choices to be found in this game which are questionable to say the least. Besides the incredibly enigmatic cutscenes, there are also crazy weird borderline psychotic ones, which again, are never explained. And while the dungeon-crawling in this game is about as good as it gets (no random battles!) for a game of this type, part way into the game you lose the best, most interesting, most POWERFUL character while you quest INSIDE OF HER MIND (spoiler alert, level everyone up, not just KOS-MOS, or you'll be in for a world of hurt when you can no longer play as her for a long stretch), just takes things to a new level of weirdness, and not in a good way. Then there are a few puzzles later on that you probably will NEVER figure out without a walk-through (I think I would have gotten permanently stuck on the crate elevator puzzle if it weren't for that).
For all of its flaws, Xenosaga still comes out on top. The level of story-telling in this game, the supreme quality of the voice-acting (we're talking voice talents for Ghost in the Shell and The Big O here!), the fantasticly huge cinemas, the addictive battle system (only the very very long time spent leveling up could possibly make it get old), the great characters and fascinating backstory (Ziggy in particular is a character you will never forget, KOS-MOS is so cool she could freeze Africa, and Albedo could give the Joker lessons on psycho evil), excellent graphics, and sweeping orchestral score make this (here it comes...) the best RPG on the Playstation 2. Sure, Final Fantasy has the name, but Xenosaga delivers the goods. The only Final Fantasy game that compares is VII. If you only play one RPG for the system, don't play FF XII, play this game. You'll thank me later.
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Expedited Available
"A Solid Classic Game"
"Kinda like a movie"