The opening hour of Xenogears extends a myriad of hands to grab newcomers into its world. It doesn't make this clear at first impression, however. The opening sequence is a breakneck montage of space opera, science fiction, spirituality, fictional history, small town drama and giant mecha combat that offers very little room to breathe. To me, this intimidatingly vast range of concepts serves two important purposes. It first serves as a concise vertical slice of the narrative elements present in Xenogears. The journey of protagonist Fei Fong Wong et al. traverses some ten-thousand-plus years of history both real and fabricated, deep inside the boundaries of themselves and far outside the bounds of their universe. This opening hour serves as the ten thousand foot view of Xenogears will delve into over its seventy five hour runtime.
The second purpose runs ancillary to the first, though that's not immediately clear. Xenogears makes it immediately clear that it requires an appreciable amount of dedicated headspace to keep its game This issue is heightened by the scope of the game: it is easy It is clear that Xenogears requires attunement to a very specific wavelength. The main narrative of the game requires consistent engagement and extensive dedicated headspace. This is not an easy ask. Put lightly, it is not for everyone, and more severely it is a sign of a needlessly complex and esoteric plot. The extensive variety in the game's opening sequence, while certainly exhibiting this very problem, nevertheless attempts to assuage it: with so many elements thrown at the player, it's likely they will grab onto something. It could be the comfortable atmosphere of Lahan Village draped in the warm blanket of Yasunori Mitsuda's Celtic music; perhaps it's the initial character intrigue regarding an upcoming village wedding, where an otherwise cheerful day gets undercut by requited but purposefully unmentioned emotions.
All of this is a lot. A player could feel overwhelmed and understandably bounce off such a broad scope of ideas. My first impressions almost fell along these lines, too: the transition from hard sci-fi to a slow text crawl about medieval politics into small town drama did feel like being dragged around from place to place rather aggressively at times. However, now that I'm on the other side of it all, I retrospect on those opening moments more charitably. The opening moments are certainly chaotic and busy, but not to confound a newcomer. I didn't feel like a thousand hands were throwing a thousand concepts at my face for intimidation, but rather presenting these ideas as offerings.
And for others who do manage to take the plunge as well, who accept the offers of those hands, I believe that what they'll find there is a narrative unrivalled in depth and unparalleled in grandeur.
The mechanical body of Xenogears is largely familiar. It features most of the usual trappings of a turn-based RPG: cities, towns, villages and dungeons dotted up and down and all around a wide open world. It also has the expected combat system with physical attacks, magic attacks with an associated currency, armor to equip and items to use. In addition to the familiar face, though, the combat system is also outfitted with the first of Xenogears's interesting innovations. In place of a single attack option, each character is alloted points per turn to spend on light, medium and heavy attacks.
The game actively encourages experimentation and exploration of this combo system by layering on deathblow techniques, specific attack routes that culminate in a strong finisher. Deathblows aren't merely level up rewards; they require characters to learn and discover them on their own by practicing combo strings. I found that this created a wonderful harmony between the player's mindset and the character: a player is naturally driven to find the most optimal attack combinations to succeed in battles; the characters' mindset in universe would naturally mimic this mindset as their journey faces them against many a foe. Thus, these deathblows are both rewards inside the universe of the game as well as on a meta level for the player.
The other innovation layers even further on top of the combat system, and indeed every other aspect of the game: at any point in battles or on the world map, you can enter Gears, giant robots that can do kung-fu. While this prospect on its own
Before digging into fan communities and finely aged
The way the small stuff shines so brightly, i.e. the sign changing direction based on camera, the way plot threads are brought up recurrently like Dan and the wedding dress, the different gameplay styles like chasing after the ship in a gear or the palace stealth mission (both the sewer segment and exploring the actual palace)
Finished 1/23/2023