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IT'S SO BAD FF7 IS SO MUCH BETTER

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 24
Date: March 27, 2000
Author: Amazon User

this game is so bad because the story line is to confusing, it has to many thing going on at once! If you what a good RPG Get Final Fantasy 7 know that's a good game.

hmmmmmmm

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 29
Date: January 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

the game is so so kinda boring if you like cool rpg games stick to ff games this game is not for you

Totally overrated...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 13
Date: March 31, 2004
Author: Amazon User

From what people make this game out to be, it was supposed to be the "best game of all time" perhaps, but I saw it completely different. I dunno if it is just me, but I found this games storyline incredibly boring, the battle system was OK in some areas, and the music was absolutely dreadful. Let me break it down for you....

Music: 1/5...
Why? Because it repeats the same tunes over...and over...and OVER AGAIN. The reason I gave it one star, is because when you first hear the music it sounds good, but after hearing it in so many areas throughout the game, its tedious and very annoying. And when it comes down to it I wasn't very satisfied with the music to begin with. Like for example, most of the areas in the game will play the same exact music, so it gets very repetitive.

Storyline: 2/5
I found the storyline pretty horrific as far as being interesting and captivating. Not once in the game did I really care about the characters or what was really going on. And there is so much talking in this game I could probably fall asleep after drinking 10 glasses of cafe mocha...To be blunt...there is way too much talking...and the story isnt explained till the end. So throughout the whole game you are confused about what the heck is going on.

Entertainment- 3/5
Why am i giving it a decent score for entertainment? Well there are a lot of interesting mini games here and playing in the xenogears mixed with humans is also interesting.

Playability- 4/5
This is probably the only good part about this game. You can actually jump around here (unlike most RPGs) and there is plenty to explore in your environment. This sometimes makes traveling through long boring dungeons...not so dull.

Graphics- 3.5/5
The graphics are alright, not good enough to give four stars, but pretty good for when it came out. I am a sucker for 3d playstation one style graphics...kinda the old-school style that playstation RPGs used to have. If you are looking for final fantasy 8 graphics....you wont find them here.

Overall- 2.5/5
If you have a lot of time on your hands...or like playing games for extended periods of time...this is for you.
I however, do not enjoy playing games for 80 hours just to see the ending. Yes thats right...80 + hours just to finish it off, not including finishing everything such as side quests...just the storyline. How someone can sit through 80 hours of jabbering and a boring storyline...and let's not forget annoying music...I have no idea. I hope some day I will understand why this game is considered to be so great...but I don't think it will happen.
Do i recommend this? Nope.

Not as good as it could be.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 14
Date: January 27, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game starts off great with an interesting storyline and a unique fighting style, but as the game continues, you find yourself falling asleep from the long, and I mean long story sections of the game. There is too much dialog and not enough exploring in this game. This game could have been made a lot better.

Over-hyped and too long.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: August 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I enjoy all types of RPGs. Old and new-school, on most any system, and any style or setting, so this is not biased in any way. Xenogears was bad. Well, it wasn't completely bad. The first 50 hours that take up Disk 1 were quite enjoyable. When a a short RPG is good the whole time, it passes by quickly because you're having so much time. However, when you have an 80+ hour-long game like Xenogears and when you're going through the Chinese water torture that is the last 30 hours of the game, it suddenly seems bad. Very bad. Then again, the entire game started out with problems. When you have 1000s upon 1000s of lines of dialog in an RPG and the text goes by about t...h...i...s... s...l...o...w, it can get on your nerves, especially when the programers seemed to think your reward for shelling out [$] on the game was to slow down the text EVEN MORE when important dialog is spoken. There is no option to speed up text. None. All RPGs have this option (or at least are nice enough to make the text all show up at once), but Xenogears lacks this option.

Then there's the FMV. Small tip for next time, Squaresoft: If you don't know how to dub the anime sequences, DON'T. Take Evolution 2's example and subtitle them. The dubbing-over is HORRIBLE. The voices themself aren't bad, but the voice actors seem to be blind since the synchronization of lip movement and speech is completely off. Not by a little, but by a LOT.

Then there's a story, which is quite simply a direct copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion's plot, with a few names changed around, and a few characters added. Even Elly bears an unquestionable resemblence to Asuka. The Gazel Ministry? That would be Seele. Deus? That would be Lilith. (Right down to the 7 eyes), etc.

So what's good about Xenogears? There are about 50 hours of enjoyable game play. That could easily be the length of an entire RPG. (Or 2 in Suikoden's case), so it's not completely bad. And, well, the song that is your reward for beating the game is quite nice. ;)

So much potential...how did it all go wrong?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 13
Date: April 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I wanted to like this game...
I really wanted to like this game...

This game had all the things that would hook me in. It had some neat visuals, a tight combo-based battle system, some cool mechs, and some anime cut scenes.

When I first started to play this game, I was enjoying it. Sure, the dialogue was corny, but because it was fun and challenging to play, I didn't mind it one bit...

UNTIL...IT HAPPENED...

You know, this game has led me to believe that former legendary comic writer Chris Claremont must be in charge of Squaresoft. (For the uninformed, he was the writer who gave us many classic X-Men stories...like "Days of Future Past" and "The Pheonix Saga". These were the kind of stories that all comics would be judged.) If you check out any of the comics he's writen over the past 10 years, you'll face many problems...like OVERWORDY MONOTONOUS AND CHEEZY DIALOGUE, TOO MANY LEFT-FIELD PLOT TWISTS THAT CONFUSE PEOPLE, AND TOO MANY CHARACTERS. This game suffers some of the same ailments. The moment you find out about Fei's multiple personality problem, you will find yourself using the attack button a lot. Not because you're going to be in a lot of fights, but because YOU ARE TRYING TO GET RID OF ALL THE MONOTONOUS TEXT THAT FILLS YOUR SCREEN! In fact, it gets even worse the moment you get to disk 2! The moment you get to disk 2, you better started taking some NO-DOZ pills because you will be treated to a 10 minute cutscene with even more monotonous text to skip through! It has gotten so tedious that even the things I liked about the game are no longer enough to get me to complete it.

I hope that someday, Squaresoft realizes that confusing plot twists and overwordy, monotonous text do not a compelling story make. It is their refusal to learn that very lesson that keeps them from having a RPG with the charm of the SNES RPGs. It also kept me from enjoying this game.

Back to CHRONO TRIGGER for me.

Disappointment...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 11
Date: June 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have played most of Square's games, and I definately thought this game was disappointing, despite the fact that my friends recommended it highly. I thought it was SO boring, and the characters were, for a traditional type RPG, really lacking in any discernable personality. The graphics are REALLY dated, and the music was subpar even for Mitsuda Yasunori. If you want something without depth of character, go for Legend of Mana. At least a: it never pretends to have deep characters, b: the music is good and c: it's REALLY pretty and fun!

I Have to be Honest

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 28 / 54
Date: August 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Truthfully, I really want to be able to recommend this game. It's not as though there's not a lot here to recommend--the story is well written, and though it doesn't stray TOO far from the well-beaten RPG path, it does break some new ground. The battle system, while not revolutionary, is at least workable. More than anything, I got around forty hours of solid enjoyment out of this title.

The only problem is that it took me sixty hours to finish the game, and it's those other twenty that get in the way of my giving an unconditional recommendation. There are a lot of ways to screw up a game. You can poorly design the levels, you can write a broken combat progression, you can blow the ending--the list is pretty well endless. One way that I never thought I'd witness, however, is simply not finishing the thing. This game is not done. There is no other way to put it.

All the way up through the end of the first CD, things cruised along nicely. Then, all of a sudden, the world map disappeared. That's the only way I can think to put it. Whereas before I had been able to control where my characters went and explore the environments, now I was forced to sit through rather uninteresting sequences featuring one of the lead characters sitting in a wicker chair and telling me what I supposedly just did. The ONLY interaction between the game and the player through that second CD consists of fighting the boss battles that it unceremoniously thrusts you into.

That is a terrible, criminal sin of game design. You are allowed to put the plot on a rail if you want, but you DO NOT get to take away any ability the player may have had to control the game or interact with the world. At that point, your "game" ceases to be a game and becomes an experiment in button pushing. I don't mind exposition, but I do expect to have some control over my own fate when the speech gets done. If you take that away from me, I get angry, and this game made me VERY angry.

There are other problems here as well. By Square standards, the localization is dismal. While it's not as incomprehensible as, say, Okage, there are still some pretty serious mistakes in the English script. Is it just me, or is it reasonable to expect that the people localizing my game for me know that the word is "should've"--not "should of." Mistakes like that are strewn throughout the game text, and I must admit that it detracted a little bit from my ability to enjoy the experience. Of course, as the game progressed, those errors got worse. Around halfway through the second CD, the script writers were dropping words by the twos and threes. Now, that didn't throw me SO much, since I normally read like that anyway, but for people who, you know, like to have all the words, this could be a problem, particularly coming from Square--a house made famous in part by its great localization efforts.

The plot is a little bit more adult than you're likely to find with other games in the genre. Indeed--any parents out there who might be concerned with their children reading thinly veiled discussions of pedophile priests and cartoon buttocks would be well advised to avoid this title. It's really pretty standard anime/manga fare on the whole, but, strangely enough, you don't see much of that in the video game industry, so the game manages to be unique and interesting. Of course, the religious references could use some work. I know from Dogma that Metatron is the recording angel (and that's pretty obscure), but I find it difficult to believe that somebody who hasn't been through seminary is going to be able to appreciate all of the parallels that this plot has with the Christian faith.

On the whole, this game is ALMOST incredible. Had it stayed in production for another year, it might have made it all the way there. Unfortunately, the product that we're left with is unfinished, with some incredibly serious problems near the end (for example, what is the point of letting me run around all over the world map and collect all these great pieces of character gear if the last dungeon is a GEAR dungeon?). As it stands, RPG faithful and anybody willing to overlook the game's faults should find an interesting experience, but I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who's not a member of one of those niche groups. We can only hope that Xenosaga (NOT a prequel, as most would have you believe), due out early next year in the U.S., avoids the mistakes that hold this title back.

Almost Great

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 14
Date: April 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I could have fell in love with this game, that is could have. This game has so many great features in it and as you read reviews you can read why. i'm sure I'm one of the few people who gave this game such a low rating and I might be the first one you have come across. Well like I said this game had potential to be great, the plot was awesome and there weren't any loop holes. The battle system was great and the charaters were pretty good. The love story behind it wasn't so great, two people on two sides of a war meet, fight together and one day say "oh... I'm going to sleep with you now lay down byotch!" Anyways that isn't the reason why I didn't like this game. The thing is it involved too much reading. I wasn't reading a book! I was playing a game and I found myself waking up with a sore thumb from pressing the X button for hours and still not through all the dialog from one part. Of course I'm exaggerating; It didn't take hours but sometimes it was close to an hour. There are times when the game gets you prepared for battle. Someone in the game stands up and says "Enough with us talking let's go kick some...!" But instead of you the so-called player of this game, going and causing havoc, you get to watch someone sit in a chair and descibe how the battle went... Disappointing and doesn't appeal to my A.D.D.

A mixed bag.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: November 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Out of all the RPG fansites and magazines and such, you'll find many RPG fans adoring this particular game. Xenogears is a decent game and it's a shame that it wasn't released under a Greatest Hits collection like the horrible Chrono Cross has. Still, I find myself finding this game to be far from great. Being somewhat of an RPG fan (I use "somewhat" very loosely), I find myself disappointed but also intrigued. Read on or face the fires of Hell:

THE GOOD
This game has a REALLY good storyline, and we get a main character that's unique in the sense that he doesn't want to fight, but he knows that he must. The storyline has often been touted as the best plot an RPG ever had, and while that can be debated (I always thought Chrono Trigger had the best storyline...), it's still awesome. A futuristic tale of social class warfare with various different symbolisms... very complex. I was a bit disturbed at the game's athiest point of view, but oh well. I'll let that slide. The battle system is also quite good, featuring several different combos your characters and gears can perform. The music is top notch, and since it's the same composer of Chrono Trigger (Yasunori Mitsuda), you can expect a gold musical score here. The multiplayer feature is quite good, too, and I shun all those people who have beaten me by using Xenogears (the ultim---er, CHEATING gear *Cough Cough* Someone I know.... *Cough Cough*).

THE BAD
The unfortunate downside of this game happens to be in the presentation. This game is virtually 70% dialogue and story and 30% gameplay. I'm not kidding. I came here to play a GAME, not WATCH it! I guess the RPG fans just want to sit there in awe, but when a battle is going on, I EXPECT TO PARTICIPATE IN IT. I was vastly disappointed when it cut to one of the characters in a chair talking about the battle with the pendant in the background swaying back and forth. This happened a lot on the second disc and it's a shame. I also felt the love story, albeit far from bad, didn't quite get the boost that it needed; it just seemed to "happen." Oh well.

OVERALL
Die hard RPG fans no doubt love this game and while it's far from terrible, I do think it's overrated. A great story with interesting characters, but not nearly enough gameplay involvement. If I wanted to watch something, I'll watch a DVD. Nevertheless, I do recommend this game to any RPG fan, BUT ONLY TO THOSE WITH A LOT OF PATIENCE. I might get negatives for this, but that's just because the people that give negative votes are usually very shallow.

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