Xenogears 10-year anniversary playthrough go go!

Originally posted 2009-09-14.

(I stayed up until 4:00 last Monday and finished Persona 3. The last boss wasn’t as bad as I’d expected!)

I have wanted to play through Xenogears again since… well, since I first finished it in Christmas break of 1999. The 10-year anniversary of that first playthrough seemed like a fine opportunity to do so. In those intervening years, I have learned enough to be perfectly comfortable with the Japanese version of the game. So, I downloaded it to my PSP for ¥600 and jumped in.

I’ve seen the beginning of the game several times, in showing the game to others and in my own dropped attempts to play through again. So the main interesting thing so far has been the differences between the original and localized versions. For some reason, the main difference that stands out to me so far is that Hob-Jerky, one of my favorite items, was originally “Tsuchinoko Meat”. The enemy Tsuchinoko is a probably-mythical creature of Japan; localizing it to “Hobgob” was pretty shrewd. (Especially since, based on information revealed later in the game, the enemies are clearly not supposed to actually be creatures from Japanese legend; their names are just names.)

I’m also surprised at how early some of the mysterious characters show up. Less than 4 hours in, I’ve already seen Grahf, Wiseman, the Emperor, and Id. Well, and Miang, of course, in the intro. I’m also surprised by how quickly it’s hinted that Citan is more than he seems; for some reason I remembered thinking for a longer time that he was just an ordinary guy.

The other thing that has struck me is how beautiful everything is. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s a PSX game. Maybe the crisp screen of the PSP is helping.

Xenoyears

Originally posted 2009-09-20.

I’ve gotten past the beginning bits of Xenogears; what I’m playing now is what I haven’t seen since first playing it 10 years ago. Being back in these places that I only vaguely remember (like Nisan), but that were very meaningful to me back then, is eerie.

Also, I’m driving the Yggdrasil all around Aveh! Wheeeee!!

Xenoyears: Nortune

Originally posted 2009-10-12.

I’m getting into parts of Xenogears that I don’t remember at all. Everything past beating Redrum and winning the gear battling tournament in D Block seems new to me. I didn’t even remember the existence of Sigmund, for instance. The game is really moving along, though. It being on PSP, I can play a bit here and there whenever I have a few minutes, so I’m already 25 hours in, on the 24th of 61 chapters.

When it’s done, Mother 2. Then Persona 1, or I’ll just switch to Demon’s Souls full-time.

Xenoyears: Solaris

Originally posted 2009-11-28.

Some scenes I have no recollection of at all: the Emperor’s appearance before the crowd, for instance. I have vague memories of Elly’s house. Others, like the memory cube room in Krelian’s (Kareruren’s!) creepy lab, have stuck with me for the whole ten years. That the save points themselves represent a sinister conspiracy is a symbol of the sort of wholly epic game Xenogears is.

I’m close to Disc 2, and the story has already switched pretty abruptly from the lavish, certainly very expensive, highly detailed environments into the hands-off, dialogue- and narration-based storytelling. I remember not minding it that much the first time, but I certainly had a less critical gaming mind back then. We’ll see how it goes, especially now that I have to read through the screens and screens of text in a foreign language. I nodded off a few times during the TV room sequence between Fei and the Gazel Ministry, even though this crazy background story stuff is my favorite part of the game…

What has struck me most during this replay is how spoiled I feel while playing. For the past ten years, I’ve consciously or unconsciously compared every story-oriented game to Xenogears. Is its story as epic? Are its characters as authentic? Is its world as captivating and momentous? Of course, the answers are almost always no. Sure, there is a nice love story, but it’s no Fei and Elly. These robots are neat, but they’re no Gears. I got so used to accepting that games don’t stack up, that I’d forgotten that there was a game that did stack up: Xenogears itself!

Ah, and Disc 2 has begun. I’m going to be looking at this chair and pendant a lot:

Xenoyears: First and Last

Originally posted 2009-12-04.

Last night I finished Xenogears, with 75 hours on the clock. I think this run (on PSP, largely played while sick in bed, fueled by donuts) will be as memorable as the first one a decade ago (on my Lime iMac, on Christmas break in Chicago, fueled by Chex Mix with Cheez-It in it).

I was definitely more conscious of some meta-game stuff this time, after having a lot of time to learn about games.

It’s tragic how clearly the second disc reveals the rush to finish the game. Right when the story gets truly fascinating, you’re whisked through a series of scenarios that were meant to be carefully, lavishly developed like in the first disc. Instead, they’re represented by several screens of narration, a screenshot of what the dungeon would have looked like, and a boss battle. Much of the world-building, grindy stuff on the first disc seems embarrassingly frivolous when you see what they had to give up implementing at the end.

And it’s clear why Xenogears has the most compelling, epic storyline of any single game I know. The history is not just a sketched-out setup for the current story. This time through I knew that Xenogears was meant to be episode five in a series of six. Roni Fatima, Lacan, Zephyr, Krelian, and other characters from generations past seem more real than historical characters ever do, because they were always meant to be stars of their own episode. As much as I would love to have played Abel, Kim, and the others, this compression of five games worth of story into one seems almost as good as the whole series would have been.

Also! I figured out why the text in the English version is so infuriatingly slow, especially in the screenfuls of text on the second disc. Compared to English, Japanese conveys the same amount of information in fewer characters. The game had a character draw rate roughly matching normal Japanese reading speeds; they must have never changed it when switching to the much longer strings of the English version.