Square's RPG classic features memorable characters and a lengthy epic story that is often argued as the best ever.

User Rating: 9.2 | Xenogears: Elyhaym Van Houten Edition (Square Millennium Collection) PS
GAMEPLAY: The combat system of Xenogears is pretty simple yet effective. Each turn a character can spend between 4 and 7 stamina points (depending on their level/point of the game), and execute a series of normal (1 point), strong (2 points), and fierce (3 points) attacks. The higher attacks do a little more damage proportionately, but have a higher chance of missing. As you repeat certain combinations, you'll learn a deathblow, which is a finishing move with a fancy animation that does extra damage. The simplest combo is normal/fierce, but it's balanced in that sticking with that one won't lead you to learn stronger deathblows since you won't be using other combinations. Also, some enemies have a strong counterattack to deathblows. It's possible to store up your unused stamina points as combo points, then use those combo points in future turns to put together a string of deathblows to overcome this problem as well, but the only time you'd use this is on a handful of boss fights at best.

In the world of Xenogears, there are giant pilotable humanoid robots called Gears which are also featured in the battle system, and are used for about half the game. They are obviously a lot more powerful than character combat, but they have fuel reserves that you can only refill in certain points. Also, you can't restore their HP except at refueling stations (later in the game you may do so in combat at the cost of a great deal of fuel). It's possible to use up a turn to charge up your fuel reserves a little bit, but it's time consuming and you'll be taking damage in the process. It's all about conserving your fuel for the entire level or boss fight, and forces you to think about what move to make. Gears also have a form of deathblow, which are directly tied to a character's learned deathblows (when your character learns a new deathblow, your character's Gear usually does as well).

GRAPHICS: This is one of the earlier RPGs with a fully 3D world. All environments are rendered, with a 360 degree camera control. To compensate, characters and enemies are sprite models, which can look a little odd as you rotate the camera, not to mention on the deathblows when the camera moves around a little for the animations. Still, it's done relatively well. The environments look good, especially the Nisan cathedral, which looks almost impossibly good for the PS1. There's a wide range of environments from deserts to mountains to freight ships to cities in the sky.

SOUND: The game has no voice acting, minus battle grunts as you lay down some kung fu on your enemies. The music, while still synthesized, is still great nonetheless, and I've heard it called one of the best RPG soundtracks by a number of sources. Indeed, a good number of the tracks are very memorable and well done, and the rest still fit with their environments well. There's a number of areas that are just ambient noise, this works well for a few areas but others make it feel needlessly empty.

VALUE: This is a long game, probably clocking in at 60 hours at least. While there's only a few little sidequests available at the very end of the game, the storyline itself gives plenty to do. The story is long and very complex, each time a question is answered two more questions arise. Since there are so many questions and little answers at the start the story gets going a little slowly, but really starts to pick up afterwards. Curiously, while the first disc is lengthy and your standard "watch a cutscene, crawl through dungeon, defeat boss" fare, the second disc must have been affected by a budget or a deadline because a lot of it is just the main characters narrating the story casually mentioning that they travelled through some giant ancient ruins or the like. Still, this has the hidden bonus of keeping this excellent story moving right along.

TILT: This is probably the only RPG where I really felt let down when I got control to explore a dungeon. It's not that the level design is bad or unfun, far from it. It's just that the story was so gripping and kept me wanting to know what happens next that I just wanted it to keep moving along. If you value a good story in an RPG, then this title is one that you need to find. A few of the main characters are very well done as well (admittedly a few of the characters I didn't care for at all, but they were all minor characters that you were rarely forced to use). I should warn, however, that this game contains a lot of long cutscenes to advance the story, some as long as half an hour. While people like me won't mind (or in fact will encourage it since it lets the story be much deeper and detailed), if you do not care for sitting through lengthy stretches of a game then this will severely limit your enjoyment of Xenogears. But when you combine the top notch story, the great soundtrack, the memorable lead cast, and the novelty of the Gear combat, this all adds up to one of the genre's greatest games of the generation.