The driving force behind Xenogears is it's strong story and anime-like feel, which made the game unique.
Xenogears' story centres around the protagonist Fei Fong Wong, an adopted young male from the small village of Lahan. He was brought to the village three years prior to the games events by a mysterious masked man and he has no recollection of his life before coming to Lahan. Not long after the events of the game open giant combat robots called 'Gears' (from the warring rival nations of Kislev and Aveh) land in Lahan and start fighting each other. Fei, in an attempt to rescue villagers, jumps in to an empty Gear named Weltall to protect the village. But after witnessing one of his friends maliciously murdered by a Gear Fei loses control of himself and allows a hidden personality deep within him to awaken. Once awakened Fei's hidden personality causes him to lose control, destroying the Gears and most of Lahan in the process. After the battle dies down Fei awakens outside Weltall totally unaware of his actions. But because of the destructive behaviour the surviving villagers banish Fei from what remains of Lahan. So Fei, and his friend 'Doc' Citan, set out on a journey to take the destructive Weltall as far away from Lahan as possible.
Xenogears has a fantastic story, and one of the best aspects of the story was that if offered deep personalities for each of the games playable characters. There's a total of nine playable characters in Xenogears, and while some of them clearly serve less of a purpose than others they all have their own complex personalities and all serve a purpose to the story at least once. Because each character has a strong back story and personality this goes a log way to immersing the player in the experience. Fei is the most complex character, but seen as though he's the main lead this comes to no surprise what so ever. But three of the other main characters, Citan, Bartholomew and Elly, can all be considered just as complex in their own right. In the games back story Citan has knew Fei the longest, and because he knows more about him than others do the two interact very well throughout the course of the story. Bartholomew meets Fei later on in the game, and while they don't hit it off at first a strong and reliable friendship soon blossoms. Elly, on the other hand, hardly knows Fei, but for some reason she has this strong emotional connection to him.
Masato Kato, Xenogears' script writer deserves a lot of credit for his achievement with Xenogears' story. He already had a strong pedigree with his work on Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger, but he yet again proved with Xenogears that he is an exceptional game designer and script writer.
Battling is something present in all of Square's RPG. Battling monsters to gain your character the strength to progress further into their quest is a must, but a lot of would-be RPG gamers get put off by this. Now Xenogears doesn't re-write the rule book on RPG combat, but it certainly added enough features to make its battle system unique and less tiresome that that of Final Fantasy.
The battles are still turn-based, but the few tweaks made to the formula really pay off. Your characters are still commanded in battle by an active time battle system (ala Final Fantasy) but Xenogears brought in a new concept of attack combinations. Each character has a certain amount of Battle Points (BP) in battle, and these BP determine how many times a character can attack in a single turn. Each character starts out with three BP each, but as the game goes on they'll eventually reach seven BP. You've got three levels of attack power in Xenogears - weak, strong and fierce – and each attack consumes a different amount of BP. Weak consumes one BP, Strong consumers two and Fierce consumes three, so if you've only got three BP you can either opt to use one Fierce attack (which is most powerful but with the highest risk of missing the target) or you can choose to do three Weak attacks instead (which have the highest probability of hitting the target). Getting used to this system is a must. But the best aspect of the system is that as you battle you learn special 'Death Blow' attacks. These attacks require specific button combinations to execute. For example one Death Blow requires you to use three Weak attack followed by one Fierce attack. These Death Blows deal a greater amount of damage, but can only be use once a character has learned them.
The biggest aspect of Xenogears' battle system is that it's split up in to sections. You either fight on foot as the characters, or you can fight inside Gears. Each of your characters has their own individual Gear that they can battle with, and to keep them strong you'll be required to customize them whenever you can. The Gear battles are played out in a similar manner to those on foot (even down to using Death Blows), but instead of having BP present inside a Gear you have fuel instead. You can only use attacks or special attacks as long as your Gear has fuel. If you run out you can recharge the fuel by selecting the 'Charge' icon in battle, but keeping your fuel up sufficiently enough to battle is something you'll be required to do. Most of the games biggest boss battles are fought when your inside your Gears, so you'll have to get used to fighting in them as quickly as you can.
Xenogears' soundtrack was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, the guy behind the masterpiece video game soundtrack for Chrono Trigger. Like he did with Chrono Trigger he again composed strong music with Xenogears, but I felt the music was limited. Xenogears is a long game, even for a Square RPG. Clocking in at about seventy hours you'd expect Xenogears to have a huge soundtrack… but you'd be incorrect. Despite its length Xenogears soundtrack only consists of just over forty songs. The music quality is high, but a lot of the music gets repeated countless times. To put this in to context I'll compare to Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a lot shorter than Xenogears (only about 30 hours) but the soundtrack has nearly seventy songs. It has an individual song for just about every occasion, and this is something Xenogears lacks. Quality-wise the soundtrack is great, but the music's repetitiveness makes you forget this.
As good a game as Xenogears is (believe me, it is good) the game does suffer from a certain amount of problems. Some of the problems are ones that should have been resolved, some of them didn't personally affect me, but in the overall picture there's certainly a lot Xenogears' left. As much as I enjoyed the story and the length of the game, a lot of people will clearly be put off by them both. It is hard playing a game that lasts for seventy hours, but if you've got no understanding of the game that seventy hours will drag and feel longer than it actually is. Personally this didn't affect me in the slightest, but a more casual RPG fan should certainly approach Xenogears with a little optimism.
Xenogears also suffers from horrid pacing issues. On the first disc the game plods along fine, but the second disc is so jam-packed full of talking and anime movie sequences that there's little to do in terms of actual playing of the game. Also despite been advertised as having a strong anime-style feel I feel this was over judged. The anime moves in Xenogears are awesome, but they are too few and far between. The game opens with this fantastic movie, but then they simply die out and don't make a return until the very end of disc one. You go so long without been treated to one that you forget the movies are even a part of the game. Lastly another problem with Xenogears is its camera work. Unlike Final Fantasy VII which came before it Xenogears doesn't revolve around 3D character models roaming against 2D pre-rendered back grounds. All the games environments are full 3D, and you can swing your camera around the player to get better views. But the camera does get caught up a lot behind walls, or just plain doesn't help you at all. In the whole I feel the pacing problems affect the game more, but I was disappointed with the camera controls.
But despite the few criticisms I have with the game, Xenogears remains one of the best RPG's I've ever played. Sure the story is hard to follow, and the game last so long that it feels it'll never come to an end, but this doesn't matter because the structure is so strong that it carries the game through all its flaws. Simply put Xenogears is a role-playing masterpiece, and no other words can describe it better.
Review by: James Widdowson
Score: 9.6/10