1.0
abysmal

Not as deep as it pretends to be. Unintentionally cheesy, and padded full of clunky, unnecessary dialog.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Spent: 40 to 100 Hours
The Bottom Line: "Pretentious"

A story heavy RPG that is packed full of redundant dialog, most of it meaningless to the story itself. Anything that does relate to the story is bogged down with self important foreshadowing, and slow text speed. The story itself is mostly a watered down ripoff of much better American science fiction, from Star Wars to Soylent Green. For no real reason, there are lots of random psychoanalytical and religious references thrown in to the story which are unintentionally funny to see, but not so much that it makes the game entertaining (seeing a giant pink furry creature tied to a cross for no logical reason is funny to laugh at but not worth playing the game for). The story itself tries its hand at being very deep and heady, but instead is full of bland exposition that goes on for hours at a time, and really is not nearly good enough to justify its length.

Instead of measuring up to a lot of great science fiction classics, the only science fiction I can really compare this to would be Battlefield Earth. Except this is 80 hours long, so if you want a cheesy and silly science fiction story, you're better off watching Battlefield Earth, preferably with the Rifftrax treatment. A good MST3K treatment might make Xenogears more tolerable, but that won't be happening. The ending is especially painful, since most of it goes on and on and throws in some of the oldest and most worn out movie cliches in the history of cinema.

The combat system is alright, although mostly simple. The two modes involve a small on foot party, and then occasionally in the story you can fight by controlling a mech. There is almost no difference in these two versions of the combat system, and in fact the mech portions of the game are mostly unnecessary, but seem to exist just so the game will have mechs in order to attract people who like that sort of thing, all while padding the game out further, in a game that is already choked on filler. If the mech sections were cut out of the game completely, the story itself would lose nothing, and perhaps even become more tolerable due to the cut in the game's length.

Overall, the game is mostly one rambling dialog cutscene after another, with a basic combat system in, and of course random encounters, which the best RPGs have phased out since the late 90s. The story needed an editor, the characters are one dimensional stereotypes, and they talk on and on, speaking entire paragraphs of dialog to make a one-sentence point; this is a pretty intermediate mistake in storytelling, so while it may technically have better storytelling than perhaps a Mario game, it is not mature at all by any level of creativity or art. It is in fact pretty juvenile. If you really want a good story, there are hundreds of movies or books that are more engaging and even insightful. Xenogears cannot compare in any way to any of them. It is nothing next to them.