Samuel Vines-Stancill is a digital marketing professional born in the early 1990s and living in northern England, and the founder of Great Adventures Review. He plays JRPGs, CRPGs, action-adventures, and shmups on the side.
AVGP [action video-game players] were observed to have superior cognitive skills, on average, compared with individuals who engage less in video game play.
The data used to reach this conclusion came from 104 studies that have been published over the last 20 years.
The types of cognitive skills tests where action game players had the biggest advantage were:
Perceptual (spot something accurately and quickly)
Top-down attentional (stick with a goal to find a target)
Spatial (such as mentally rotating objects)
Multitasking (switch between goals with less performance sacrifice)
Though it may seem intuitive that a session of playing games might “warm up” a brain, and mean better results in a test taken immediately afterwards, this study avoided looking at only short-term effects:
In line with our focus on long-term training effects (as opposed to acute physiological arousal effects), the training had to be equivalent in both experimental and control groups in terms of duration (minimum 8 hr) and number of sessions (minimum 8 days) and posttest performance measures had to be performed at least 24 hr after training.
As this research looked at many studies, there were many different methods for measuring the traits. To give an example of one, a method for measuring “top-down attention” is an object tracking test, which looks like this (try and follow the dot that starts green):
The authors looked at studies that took different experimental approaches: some observed existing players and non-players (cross-sectional study), others gave subjects action games to play and compared the results to a control group (intervention study). The positive relation between playing action games and performance in the cognitive tests was observed in both types of study
My thoughts
I was impressed with the breadth of this research, and the conscientiousness of the authors, who take pains to keep the data reliable and to avoid publication biases and outlier statistics.
There is more I would like to see studied in this area. Do videogames build resilience to failure? What skills do strategy and puzzle games improve? How does game difficulty (perceived and objective) affect the outcomes?
Naturally, I am also curious about what undesirable traits are increased by playing videogames, and where an ideal balance might lie.
What next
Some will read this, pat themselves on the back for their wise choices in gaming material, mouth “I told you so” to the world, then play another round in Dustbowl. But I don’t highlight this research so that gamers can bask in the glow of group superiority.
Rather, it makes me curious about what roles games might play in benefitting society in the future.
The typical perception today is that games, while an acceptable use of leisure time, are still basically unproductive. This research suggests to me that an hour of videogames is sometimes better than an hour without videogames.
We recognise the importance of reading and physical education in human development, and parents and schools make time for these activities. Is there room for the right games, deployed in the right way, in schools?
If that is taking things too far, instead of treating games purely as unproductive leisure, can we say that, sometimes, videogames are a form of exercise too?
My mind is open to these possibilities, though I think it will be a long time before they are considered seriously.
If you’re interested in the positive outcomes of playing games, here is a recent podcast on the subject:
People fall in love with Oddworld for different reasons. The gorgeous, cinematic vistas and character animations. The non-human characters and the bizarre world they live in. The sense of humour. The messages about environmentalism and corporate greed. The mix of real-time puzzles and tense chase scenes. A unique range of abilities including possessing your enemies and leading other characters with speech commands.
Best picks!
All the 20+ games on this list have a one or more of the above traits and are good games besides. Our top picks have several of the above traits as well as being amazing games. So if you’re an Oddworld fan, any of the following five is likely to be a game you fall in love with.
1. Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Abe’s Oddysee is packed with high-resolution natural environments and tense chase scenes. The Ori games nail these qualities too: the layers of detail in Nibel forest are unique among 2D games today, just as Abe’s Oddysee’s scenes were in 1997, and the escape sequences will have you gripping your controller as if there is a Scrab behind you.
The cat-monkey-spirit-thing Ori, like Abe, is a vulnerable character who scurries through woodlands and ancient temples to save his land. His game doesn’t have much dialogue but it does tell a good story. It can be light hearted and charming and it can be dark, errie and threatening, and that’s a combination that any Oddworld fan will appreciate.
Here’s a one minue clip that shows off some of what Ori and the Blind Forest has to offer:
2. Psychonauts, Psychonauts 2
If a psychedelic colour scheme seems like a hundred miles away from the tones of Oddworld, don’t judge it yet. The strange worlds of Psychonauts exist in the minds of the strange characters, and that level of strangeness can’t fail to tickle the fancy of an Oddworld players.
Other than all that, it’s a creatively designed platformer, has a great sense of humour, and a story that will keep you gripped.
Mind-control is a key tool in Abe’s arsenal, and it is much more deeply explored here, with the main character Raz delving into the psyches of various characters where he is threatened by figments of their anxieties, ambitions and past traumas.
Here’s an quick example from an early cutscene:
3. Another World
Here’s a game that inspired Oddworld! Both Another World and the first two Oddworld games feature challenging puzzles and tense platforming chases that require precision and timing. The games share atmospheric and otherworldly locations, like the eerie alien planet of Another World and the oppressive factory of RuptureFarms in Abe’s Oddysee.
What makes this predecessor to Oddworld even more impressive is that almost ever scene is unique. Challenges and obstacles are very rarely repeated, making the game feel timelessly cinematic. Oddworld takes you to another world, and so does Another World.
Even in this clip from very early in the game, you can see where the level designers of Oddworld were getting some of their ideas from:
4. Inside
What blows me away about Inside, something that few games have managed since Oddworld, is how it makes you feel like you’re in a fully 3D world despite having entirely 2D mechanics. In Oddworld, the camera would seamlessly disconnect from the screen and fly over Mosiac Lines or whichever location you were in, in an FMV sequence that showed off the breadth and detail of the world in which your adventure takes place. Inside also indicates depth, also by clever use of the camera, lighting and background elements. It all looks totally natural.
The gameplay of Insider revolves around puzzle solving and platforming that require creative thinking and precision, similar to Abe’s Oddysee. Both games also have a dark and oppressive atmosphere, with unsettling locations and characters that keep players engaged. Neither game is afraid of a cynical ending, either.
5. Trine series
There are two game franchises that do detailed 2.5 better than any other, and those are Oddworld and Trine. The latter game’s fantastical setting, with its castles, caves, and forests, creates a sense of wonder and immersion similar to Abe’s Oddysee and Exodus. The aesthetic of both games is utterly charming and that draws players in.
Both games feature challenging puzzles and platforming sections that require creativity and problem-solving skills. Trine allows players to switch between three unique characters with different abilities. It’s not quite the same as leading Mudokons to safety in Oddworld, but the party-based puzzle solving has a similar ring to it.
Even more
There are 10+ games below that we think have a good flavour of Oddworld to them. For some, this was based on their mechanics, for other on their visual design, and others on their sense of humour. In all cases, we have linked to somewhere relevant (usually the Mobygames page) where you can get an impression of what that game is like.
Classic cinematic platformers
The first two Oddworld games were part of a genre called the cinematic platformer, which most people consider to have started with Prince of Persia in 1989. The first designers of Oddworld were inspired by these titles, and the ones we have selected here
It’s not like cinematic platformers stopped being made. Here are newer examples that capture the feeling of creeping your way through an oppressive enviroments, leaving you at risk of Rupture Farms flashbacks:
Many of the early cinematic platformers were described as “single screen” meaning that the screen did not move with your character, but was static until the player reached the end of it, causing it to scroll. In other worlds, the world was make up of a sequence of “single screens”. Here are some more extremely well designed puzzling adventures in this style:
Point and click adventure games can rival Oddworld in well developed worlds, empathetic characters and comedic writing. Not all of them are as strange and fantastical as the following, though:
These ones might seem to have only tenuous similarities to Oddworld. Nonetheless, they are great games and they might be the new experience that you are looking for. After all, Oddworld was nothing if not novel!
This is a collection of 50 high-quality, (hopefully) exciting screenshots from the Playstation 2 game Persona 3 FES.
They were taken in PCSX2.
This is not a comprehensive tour of Persona 3, but it does feature a variety of areas including some from late in the game.
Feel free to use these screenshots on your own website or in your own project. If you do, we would greatly appreciate a link back to Great Adventures Review.
This fondly remembered series started with Jade Cocoon: Story of the Tamamayu on the PS1 in 1991, which has one sequel.
The Japanese box art for the first Jade Cocoon game
This eye-catching box art shows off the first thing that made people fall in love with these games, which is:
The art of Katsuya Kondō, a character designer from Studio Ghibli
Considered a top animator in the Japanese film industry, helping bring classics such as Kiki’s Delivery Service to life, the Jade Cocoon duology are the only games Kondo has lent his talents to.
The cover image of Katsuya Kondo’s Jade Cocoon artbook
In addition to the artwork, the first Jade Cocoon is loved by fans for:
Monster fusion based on dynamic merging of monster polygons and textures
The first monster selected to be merged contributes its shape, and the second monster contributes its texture, and additional modifiers also affect the final monster’s appearance.
The monsters that you fight with are therefore not ones that have been entirely hand-crafted by the developers, but ones that have been generated uniquely according to your choices.
To this day, this system of monster generation is something no popular monster raising game has attempted.
A rich fantasy world and an emotional story
Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei games were set in the real world, but Jade Cocoon combines monster raising with a more traditional JRPG narrative and aesthetic.
This new combination was a stated goal of the development team:
We had two goals. One was to create an immersive story world, and the other was to provide compelling monster-raising gameplay. In this way, the game would be both stylistically and technically unlike anything else on the market.
Gaku Tamura or Shinya Kozaki, director and scriptwriter respectively (Interview)
The characters of Jade Cocoon start the game at the cusp of adulthood, and face life changes including marriage and undertaking dangerous work for their town. The people they meet are grappling with their own situations and pasts.
The story concerns the events of a single town and the surrounding woodlands, the perils they face and the suffering of the characters for the sake of their fellow townspeople.
Clashes between the town and forest occur throughout the story, sometimes with tragic consequences.
If we pursue the theme of people and nature, we have no choice but to be conscious of “Princess Mononoke.” You can’t help but be affected.
Exploring the forests of Jade Cocoon: Story of the Tamamayu
In keeping with the theme of humans coexisting with nature, forests are the dungeons of these games. They are rich with natural variety and detail.
These forests, where the majority of gameplay takes place, are where the player meets the monsters, called “divine beasts”, which can be captured in cocoons after they are weakened.
The monsters grow in size as they level up. They have an elemental attribute, be of the earth, fire, water or air elements (or a combination).
Here are four monsters, one for each element:
The atmosphere the forests is enhanced by the music of Kimitaka Matsumae, who says:
The world of Jade Cocoon is a wonderland like Asia and Africa, so I tried using Asian and African techno.”
Jade Cocoon 2 was released in 2001. In Japan, it had a subtitle that can be translated as “Insect of Destruction” but lacked a subtitle for international release.
Both Jade Cocoon game have their own strenths and weaknesses, though they also have a lot of shared themes.
In general, these are some of the common views on the sequel compared to the first game:
Less focus on story, more lighthearted, questionable voice acting quality
Lacking dynamic monster fusion
Adds a more interesting battle system where three monsters at a time take action, and in total a ring of up to eight monsters are brought into battle in total
Both games have an endless endgame dungeon called the Eternal Corridor where the player can continue to raise and fight their monsters to their heart’s content:
Series at a glance
Fandom
Even 30 years later, Jade Cocoon has remained in in the hearts of fans as a unique experience that other monster raising games have been unable to repeat. You can find those fans online in the following communities:
In Phase 4 of the MCU, for the first time, Marvel Studios made television series (streamed on Disney+) that were tied to the stories of the films as much as the films had been with each other. They set up storylines for the movies and even shared actors.
Most lists of Marvel Cinematic Universe stories are broken into separate lists for the cinematic releases, Disney+ series, and the special short films. I think it is more useful to see the full combined list arranged only in order of release date. This shows us the order that dedicated fans will have watched all of the stories of Phase 4, and potentially the order Marvel Studios intended them to be watched.
This also helps give a different perspective on the phase than seeing only a list of movies. For example, the first movie in the phase, Black Widow, does not reveal anything about the broader storyline of the universe. However, the first Disney+ series of the phase, WandaVision, did.
The last story in the list, Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special, is described by the director James Gunn as “the epilogue of Phase 4”. Maybe you will agree that it does a better job of this than the last film in the phase, Wakanda Forever.
Some have argued that Phase 4 was weaker than the previous three phases, but this argument is always based on the cinema releases. When all the stories are considered, you could come to a different conclusion.
Every film wants to be a cinematic universe, and every game wants to be Dark Souls — according to some.
The cynic inside us already has an answer to why: the games of From Software have a large, paying fanbase, and other studios want a slice of that pie.
A manager who sits at least three floors away from the creative team (if not in a different office entirely) measures the correlation between different Steam tags and estimated sales, and concludes that if they can slap the “soulslike” label on the company’s next game, potential earnings increase by 74%.
A PowerPoint presentation may have been used to convey the message.
If the omnipresence of romantic teenage vampires was the telltale sign that the book market was riding on the popularity of Twilight, there are a few tropes in which we can see a dedication to the From Software formula in the videogame industry:
An intimate, close-up, over-the-shoulder third-person perspective
Weighty combat actions with a long wind-up, long recovery
Bonfires that save progress but reset enemies
A stamina bar that is drained by all actions, including dodges and basic attacks
It’s hard to deny: these things are common in action games where they were not before.
In God of War
God of War III vs God of War (2018)
BeforeAfter
In Darksiders
Darksiders II vs Darksiders III
BeforeAfter
In games by Team Ninja
Ninja Gaiden vs Nioh
BeforeAfter
Some studios seem to have built their entire business model on the trend
Lords of the Fallen by Deck13, also the developer of The Surge, another Soulslike.
New action games love to use Hidetaka Miyazaki’s masterpieces as a blueprint
Upcoming Black Myth: Wukong and Lies of P.
However, to me, this does not represent creative laziness, but creative passion. The altar that Miyazaki built is revered by creators as much as consumers. Developers have played Dark Souls, been inspired by naturalistic level design, eye-catching art direction, high level of tension and rewarding combat encounters.
If you’re not a fan of Souls, this might not sound so great. There are many elements of Souls that are like marmite: you either love them or hate them:
Backtracking
Unexplained mechanics
Save points that work like bonfires
Runbacks before boss encounters
No difficulty settings
Stamina management
But it’s not like every third-person action game is moving in this direction
Astral Chain
My view is that the third-person melee action genre, a genre that I love, has been reinvigorated in recent years, and Dark Souls had a part to play in that.
Yes, there are more games out there that look like Dark Souls, but also more games in this genre in general. There might even be more diversity in the genre than ever before.
As a closing word, remember that trends come and go. I fully expect more studios to drift away from the Souls style within a few years.
…though, as these cycles go I, expect it will come back again. Love it or hate it, Dark Souls has cast a spell on the industry, and to get rid of it entirely is a challenge that goes far beyond Ornstein or Smough.
This is a collection of 75 high-quality (and hopefully interesting) screenshots from the Playstation game Xenogears.
They were taken in RetroArch with the crt-easymode shader applied.
This is not a comprehensive tour of Xenogears, but it does feature a variety of areas including some from late in the game. To find out what makes this game worth playing, read my Xenogears review.
Feel free to use these screenshots on your own website or in your own project. If you do, we would greatly appreciate a link back to Great Adventures Review.
Magical healers have had a role in mythology, religion and fantasy literature since forever. You’ve heard of Jesus of Nazareth? Total healer.
We will come back to him later. In role playing games, healers were there even before computers. The first edition Dungeons and Dragons (1974) gave rules for three types of characters: fighting men, magic-users, and clerics. It is the latter that concerns us.
The roster of curing classes expanded in the expansions. In Dungeons & Dragons Supplement I: Greyhawk, the paladin made his RPG debut. In Supplement III: Eldrich Wizardry, we meet the druid for the first time. Rangers and bards also had restorative spells or abilities, to a lesser extent.
These classes were the foundations for in early CRPGs. Thus in the Ultima series we find Dupre the paladin and Jaana the druidess, some of the earliest named healers in videogames.
We can draw a line from these healing trailblazers to the world of JRPGs — starting, as many things do, with Dragon Quest.
Moonbrooke: The start of an archetype? (1987)
This female princess cleric establishes norms many other would abide by, yet most people don’t even know her name.
At least, not a consistent one. She is known as the Princess of Moonbrooke, and in later appearances has the name Purin (after “pudding”), or Princessa in the west — usually.
In the game she hails from, Dragon Quest II, her name is randomly generated, a holdover from pen and paper RPGs where parties were rolled, not pre-written.
What the game does tell us about her is that she is a princess of Moonbrooke castle, she is beautiful, and before she joins the party she is stolen away by the game’s main villain. And if that all sounds about right for a JRPG healer, well, we’re off to a flying start.
The JRPG healer stereotype
In Moonbrooke we see a number of traits that make up the stereotypical main healer of a JRPG party. Such characters, which pop up all across the genre, have most or all of the following traits:
a young adult women with striking looks
with a kind and timid personality
with low physical attacking ability but high magical power
has royal lineage or some other destiny by birthright
is often the love interest for the male main character
How did this stereotype come to be? We’ll explore that, but first let’s look at some other examples that show that not all early JRPG healers fit into this box.
Minwu: The first white mage (1988)
The primary healing class in Final Fantasy is the white mage. The white mage has had a place in the series since the very first game, in which they could be promoted into a white wizard, who, though nameless, had a vaguely masculine look to them.
The first named white mange in the series debuted in the sequel, Final Fantasy II. Winwu is a very different looking first healer than Moonbrooke in Dragon Quest II — and why wouldn’t they be? In the context of the the non-prescriptive nature of Dungeons & Dragons character creation, which these games were inspired by, the ranks of clerics would be filled by all types of people with all backgrounds.
Winwu is experienced in battle by the time the party meet him. He is a mentor to the party and willing to lay down his life for the rebel cause. This committed and hardened character feels uncommon for somebody in his role.
A battle medic needs to get their hands dirty; Minwu is one of the few healers in the series that makes us believe that he would.
Expanding casts (1990-91)
As the size of the casts of JRPG expanded — from a measly one in Dragon Quest (1986), to eight in Dragon Quest IV (1990) — games found room for multiple healers. In Dragon Quest IV, we see two very different, but equally traditional, archetypes: that of a paladin and a cleric.
Kiryl: A paladin appears
Games and stories often feature a connection between healing and religion: the skill is the domain of priests. This connection is intuitive, as such professions centre on supporting members of their community. It is somewhat mystifying that fantasy communities do not have dedicated doctors, but only religious men moonlighting — but I digress. Let us introduce our first priest.
Kiryl is steadfast in his devotion to his god, which contributes to the main joke of his character: the tension between his physical attraction to Aylena and his commitment to purity. In battle, he is a paladin through and through, with access to the full suite of healing spells as well as buffs to defence and a firm sword arm.
Kiryl is not the best practical choice of healer, though, because due to a quirk of the game’s AI he prefers to cast instant-death spells. The better healer in the game is one of the twins.
Meena/Porom: Yin and yang
The duality of white magic and black magic sometimes arises in the form of characters, too. In Dragon Quest IV we have Maya and Meena. One, a rambunctious, dancing mage, the other a reserved, fortune-telling healer.
Funnily enough, a very similar dynamic appears in Final Fantasy IV with the twins Porom and Palom. In both games, one twin casts offensive magic and the other heals the party.
Porom and her brother are just five years old, not typically a ideal age to undertake dangerous adventures. Magic is what excuses this questionable choice in companions. We can accept that magical aptitude can outpace physical development in this fantasy world.
And though small in stature, Porom and Palom are both large in heart. Once again, the black mage of the duo is the unruly one, the white mage more calculating, but neither is reserved: Polom is quite willing, eager even, to clip her brother around the ear when he deserves it, and make decisions for the group, who trust her judgement.
Porom is a reassuring early sign that healers can be proactive, full of energy, and take key roles in the story.
Rosa: The purest
The other main healer in Final Fantasy IV is Rosa, the first female white mage to be introduced in the Final Fantasy franchise.
Rosa’s character is simple and pure, denying ornamentation or complexity. She is the centre point on a love triangle involving the main character, Cecil, and his rival, Kain. She is not a princess, though is familiar with court life in her hometown of Baron. Her primary character traits are kindness and devotion to her friends (to Cecil especially). She rarely causes waves in the story except when she is immobilised by desert fever, or kidnapped by the villain — she is generally a passive character.
Rosa does not challenge our stereotypes but sits comfortably within them. Not all love interests are active characters. Rosa plays her part adequately, and can be seen as the foundation for many similar characters for decades to come. She is an important character in the franchise history. though not the most exciting one.
But now let’s try and answer a question: why “white mage” is a commonly chosen class for the female love interest?
Women and healing
Traditional ideas of femininity dovetail into the female healer archetype easily. The female physique doesn’t seem to fit a class that relies on big muscles, but there is no reason to disregard a magical class. On the same line of thinking, stereotypical female nature lends itself to a supportive role.
In 1996, we see these stereotypes in action. Princess Peach had been playable in an RPG before Super Mario RPG (1996). She could have become anything. A mage? A tank? But of course, Princess Peach is the healer. Resembling Moonbrooke and Rosa, she is a shoo-in for the role, ticking all the boxes of the stereotype.
Thankfully, from the start we see examples like Minwu, or Myau from Phantasy Star (1987) — in which game the only female character had a more physical role in battle. The stereotypes were not widespread or rigidly adhered to, but they did appear to have some staying power.
Cecil and Rosa: The cure couple
We’ve already seen how Final Fantasy IV contributed to JRPG healer lore, but there something important we haven’t even touched on yet: the main character is also a paladin, making a very rare example of both the main character and the love interest of the game being part of a healing clas.
It’s not too uncommon for a main character to have some healing potential. It’s a good way to balance the early portions of the game, when you might not have access to all characters. Alice from Phantasy Star was another capable healer. But usually the balanced main character can delegate to a dedicated (and more capable) healer later on, allowing the game’s poster character to show off more of their offensive abilities (and take more of the glory).
However, it’s unusual that the main character to be the party’s main healer. This trait is part of what gives Ness of Earthbound a unique flavour.
Aggressive healers (1994-2001)
With Cecil and Ness, we saw healers taking more mixed, offensive roles.
In Marle in Chrono Trigger (1995), we have a typical ranger, sporting a bow, a suite of healing spells, and complete with a feistier personality than any healer before her.
But why bring a crossbow when you can bring a gun? One of my favourite healers, Billy from Xenogears (1998), perfectly demonstrates how a character can be a “healer with a nasty bite”.
Make no mistake, he is kind, he is rational, and he is even a man of the cloth — a cleric in the most literal sense. On the other hand, he wields a pair of pistols like a cowboy, has a rather impressive damage output, and is certainly not afraid to take charge of a situation.
These are examples of healers becoming more active and less one-dimensional. The final examples in this article follow the same trend but take it in a different direction, resulting in one of the most popular healer subtypes.
A new archetype: the summoner
Once upon a time in the series, Final Fantasy summoners were an alternative black mage. Your summons were elemental bombs in a monster-themed wrapper. In Final Fantasy IV your strongest black mage, Rydia, was also your summoner, because why not: it’s roughly the same role.
However, Rydia’s descendants in spirit, Garnet and Eiko of Final Fantasy IX (2000), took a totally different approach. They were a healer/summoner hybrid, allowing them to do massive damage as well as massive healing. That made them a bit of a safe, more alike with Tellah than Rydia.
This new archetype proved popular, and was repeated in the very next game, for Yuna in Final Fantasy X (2001).
Up to this point, we have expected healers to have limited damage output, so giving them access to the most destructive abilities in the game is a pretty radical twist in itself.
But it goes a bit further than that: it gives the archetypical main female character something more to do in the story. Both Garnet and Yuna are similar in this respect, summoners in games where eidolons/aeons have more significance than in any game before. A very welcome change.
Yuna: The healer-saviour
You don’t have to look hard to see that Yuna could be an analogue to Jesus. She heals wounds, she is a preacher of sorts, and she is instructed to die for our sins — literally, sacrifice herself to defeat a monster called “Sin”. Yuna also walks on water and guides people’s souls to the afterlife.
She entirely fits the healer conventions, too. She is a princess (the daughter of high summoner Braska), she is quiet, kind, devoted and beautiful. She is Rosa in all these respects.
What makes her interesting is what she adds on top of those conventions. She does fight against a potentially tragic destiny, and she does wield unimaginable destructive power. It’s the combination that makes Yuna such a compelling character, and one of our favourite healers of all time.
Conclusions
So we haven’t come very far in 2000 years, but we came quite far in 20. The role of healer in 1991 was one-dimensional, but over time hybrid classes were allowed to flourish and the characters become more complex and had a greater role in the story.
Healers are as popular today as ever. One of the most popular characters in Final Fantasy XIV is Y’Shtola. One of the most popular characters in Overwatch is Mercy.
As long as there are games with combat, there will be a need for specialists to patch up our heroes. And sometimes, they are the heroes themselves.
List of Healers
These are the healers that appeared in this article. All are candidates for the best healers in JRPGs:
Princess of Moonbrooke/Purin/Princessa (Dragon Quest II, 1987)
Myau (Phantasy Star, 1987)
Minwu (Final Fantasy II, 1988)
Kiryl (Dragon Quest IV, 1990)
Meena Mahabala (Dragon Quest IV, 1990)
Porom (Final Fantasy IV, 1991)
Rosa Joanna Farrell (Final Fantasy IV, 1991)
Princess Peach (Super Mario RPG, 1996)
Ness (Earthbound/Mother 2, 1994)
Garnet Til Alexandros XVII (Final Fantasy IX, 2000)
Avatar 2 recaptures the magic of the first film without feeling like a retread — mostly.
With the world of Pandora and the way of the Navi explained in the first movie, the sequel seems like the time to build on those foundations and tell a new, more complex story.
I wanted Avatar: The Way of Water to do Star Wars: expand in a far flung, arms sweeping sort of way. Flamboyantly. Big space politics, new sentient species, strange ideas that are more than a step away from what we’ve already seen.
Instead, Cameron meanders pleasantly to a nearby island cluster, where the locals still have blue skin, but a slightly different shade of blue.
If this sounds like criticism, wait until you see it in motion. The world of the water tribe is worth a film to itself. It is not with dramatic, superficial variety that Cameron is expanding his world, but in the aggregate of many meaningful details.
The lands of the Metkayina clan are sometimes less fantastical than locations from the first film, but as these suspended wicker abodes show, they are still exotic and beautiful. Image from Pandorapedia.
In a way, it is the opposite of Star Wars, where you can cross a billion miles in a second to meet a thousand interchangeable aliens. On Pandora, you leave your forest and the other blue people laugh at you for having a different shaped tail. Honestly, much more realistic.
Deeper fidelity, deeper sentimentality: those seem to be the goals of Avatar 2. Sully’s new children (some biological, some adopted, each with a personality of their own) make up the emotional core of the film.
The multiple times I got choked up, the children were to blame.
When the film took a few seconds to slow down and lovingly explore the details of the new environment, it was Kiri’s unique connection with this nature that elevated these affecting moments above similar scenes in other movies.
When the danger ratcheted up, it was the heightened adrenaline of the children and the parents that totally encompassed me in the action.
I’m a sucker for a family dynamic in films, and The Way of Water does it well.
Kiri, one of the new generation of Navi. The fidelity of the hair, the subtlty of the expressions and body language — truely the most lifelike computer generated characters in a film yet. Image from Pandorapedia.
In some regards, Cameron doesn’t move far enough away from the first Avatar. In particular, the villain, Colonel Quaritch, who is no more interesting that he was in the first film.
He learns the way of the Na’vi, which seems like a great excuse for a redemption arc. This would have left a vacancy for a new antagonist at the end of the film… but alas. This film, as did the previous one, resolves itself with a showdown between Sully and Colonel Quaritch. A good fight scene, but a tedious narrative repetition.
Another disappointment is the scale of the conflict. The sequel starts well in this regard, jumping immediately into a new planetary war. But at the height of the third act, the stakes are no greater than Sully’s family, a few tens of water tribe warriors, and a school of large fish.
I’m happy for a sequel getting more personal, but when the conflict is already similar to the first movie it is hard not to make comparisons. In Avatar, the fate of the whole forest was palpable. In this film, does the fate of the ocean hang in the balance? It doesn’t seem so.
You would think it would be hard to care as much about the character on the right as the character on the left. You may be surpised. Image from Pandorapedia.
At the end, we are left with open conflicts for the next film to deal with. The sacred words of the water tribe state that “the way of water has no beginning and no end”. As a middle film in this franchise, that is unfortunately what this feels like.
In the one-day complete Avatar five-film epic cycle, if The Way of Water hadn’t introduced new characters then it would have risked being skipped in marathons. That’s how little has changed in the broader conflict by the end.
But’s it’s not the franchise building that matters. It isn’t the climax that makes this film a worthy sequel and blockbuster. It isn’t the wit of the writing or even the plot, which frankly requires Sully to make some very questionable decisions. It is the slower second act, which once again transports us to a fantasy world that no other film has the ambition to attempt. Love it or hate it, Avatar did it, and The Way of Water did it again.
Xenogears released in 1997: after Final Fantasy VII, before Final Fantasy VIII. At a time when the Square Enix development cycle could stretch to a year and a half (Final Fantasy games included), Xenogears took over two. Even that wasn’t enough, not even close: Xenogears is, at best, 75% complete.
That’s nothing, though. Xenogears is only one part of the saga. I almost didn’t want to start my review with this fact, because it seems like a spoiler… except when you think about it, it can’t be. The “spoiler” is this: after the credits role, Xenogears is revealed to be subtitled “Episode V”. But if another game had been released in the saga as intended, Xenogears existence as the fifth part would now be common knowledge. It’s only because the series was cut short that the placement of this game remains a hidden easter egg.
Xenogears, the complete saga, is only 12.5% complete. And yet, you can feel the weight of those four prequels in the content of Xenogears: Episode V. When people describe this game with grand approbation, that is the truth at the heart of their praise. Xenogears: the most intricate story in videogames; the most ambitious JRPG ever made.
I imagine what Xenogears: Episode V (from here, just Xenogears) might have been it had been fully fleshed out from start to end. The word that comes to mind is “breathtaking”.
Xenogears was conceived by Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga, husband and wife storytelling superteam. They were inspired by Gundum, Star Wars, and perhaps most obviously, Neon Genesis Evangelion. They were inspired by Freud, Jung, and Neitzche.
Takahashi went on to write the scenario for every Xeno game since, from Xenosaga Episode 1 to Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and Saga is credited for the Xenosaga games. These subsequent games were not the missing Xenogears episodes, though some fans consider the Xenosaga trilogy as an adequate replacement for Xenogears episodes I and II.
Xenogears is a orphan gem, lonely and unique, but it is also something more simple: an incredible game. With the resources of Square in their golden age, who turned out masterpiece after masterpiece in the JRPG genre, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Xenogears is one too.
In fact, this game started life as a pitch for the seventh Final Fantasy game. The gears, so essential to the game that they made their way into the title, started life as summon monsters.
It is extremely interesting to look at Xenogears as an alternative branch of the Final Fantasy series. It builds on the foundations of Final Fantasy VI but develops them in a different way to VII. And when you see the similarities in story between Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII, you have to wonder how much of an influence Takahashi’s story had on the most loved JRPG in history.
I played Xenogears for the first time in 2022. Here are the reasons it blew my mind (and a few reasons it didn’t).
An aesthetic to die for
Xenogears has my favourite character spites of any game.
The hair flows, the clothes have volume. Each character has a unique gait and posture that matches their personality. The power in their legs as they run is palpable. This was so unlike the restained movements of SNES-era JRPG, and equally unlike Final Fantasy VII’s stiff limbed 3D characters that had arrived on the scene one year previously.
This is a theme: where Final Fantasy VII zigged, Xenogears zagged. It is stark in their visual presentation. Final Fantasy games on the PS1 have 3D characters against detailed, pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. In Xenogears, it is the environments that are 3D while the characters remain 2D spites.
It was not the only game to do this: Breath of Fire III was another RPG to take this route, and the whimsical Klonoa used the effect with excellent results in the platformer genre, but games with 3D characters were fast becoming the fashion. Therefore, Xenogears represents the heights of its 2.5D style (though HD-2D games like Octopath Traveller have now arrived to challenge that claim).
Mitsuda: Maps used to be one piece of art that characters would stand and move around on, but Xenogears was innovative in that it implemented the ability to move the camera around. The characters are 2D, but the background is all 3D. Because of this, we could try out new gimmicks and new camerawork that was previously not possible. That was what we started with.
Xenogears demonstrates the strengths of it’s presentation choice early. By default, it is we see the world at an isometric angle. You spin can spin the camera left and right. But when the moment calls for it, the game will seize the camera from you. In the first village, climb on the roof of your next-door neighbours house: the camera sweeps up to face the horizon, and the birds, sun and mountains come gloriously into sight.
When a game with prerendered graphics, like Final Fantasy, wants to show the sun, a new background has to be drawn from scratch. There is no sweep of the camera, either. This fact also affects cutscenes. Final Fantasy could rely on FMVs when they wanted to deliver an action scene with greater impact, but Xenogears could pulled it all off in-engine.
“Xenogears was innovative in that it implemented the ability to move the camera around. The characters are 2D, but the background is all 3D. Because of this, we could try out new gimmicks and new camerawork that was previously not possible. That was what we started with.”
As a result, Xenogears regularly has cutscenes with the dynamism and drama of an anime. They are complex, with multiple moving parts, changes in camera angle, dramatic pacing. There is never a cut from gameplay to FMV to break your immersion.
Unlike the characters, the mechs (called “gears” in the game — I’ll stick with mechs so this article is easier to read for those who have not played it yet) are 3D models, but as they are blocky machines to begin with, this doesn’t detract from their design in the slightest. These are mechanical warriors that could take the stage shamelessly in any Gundam show room — and I wrote that line before I realised that Junya Ishigaki, the primary mechanical designer for the game, is also prolific in the Gundam franchise.
The mechs, the character sprites, their portraits, the lived-in details of the environments: they all come together to delight the player. Every location is a perfectly constructed diorama, a sculpture that is fit to be enjoyed from every angle. Every character portrait drawn with a skilled and seductive stroke. Xenogears is visually captivating.
I’ve heard some people describe the visuals of Xenogears and a pixelated mess, and that pains me so much. If you are emulating this game, turn on a CRT filter. It makes more of a difference here than any game I have ever played. It smooths out the textures, smooths out the jaggies, brings the image together and let’s you appreciate the extreme artistry on display.
I can’t exaggerate the number of times I wanted, needed to take a screenshot while playing Xenogears. So many rooms of this game are gorgeous. So many cutscenes are eye catching. There are so many evocative environments, so many unique unique visual effects. You want to experience it at its best.
An anime epic
How many mysteries does Xenogears present in the first hour? We have a anime FMV about spaceship disaster with no context; a text crawl that introduces two mysterious organisations (the Ethos and the Gebler); an amnesiac protagonist and hints about his significant past; that protagonist’s unexplained and dangerous powers that he tragically can’t control; a mysterious figure called Grahf…
Xenogears is slow to doll out answers to any mystery is introduces. It is known, quintessentially, as a “slow burn” JRPG. Instead of answers, Fei is whisked away to new location after new location, meeting new characters, getting embroiled in new conflicts. The war for Aveh’s capital, the prison block struggle in Nortune, the defence of the floating city, Thames, against the Wels — the list goes on and on. There are unique characters, animations, scenes, plot developments around almost every corner.
Takahashi: I liked mechs and pop culture characters, and I wanted to make a game combining the two. And if I was going to do it, I wanted it to be better than FF, too. I wanted to try my hand at the popular fad at the time of littering the plot with foreshadowing and having all of those storylines coming together for the central story, too.
Describing Xenogears as just a slow burn does not do it justice. It is a long lasing campfire to warms your story-loving cockles for many hours. It is a story that could easily be repurposed into episodes and mini-arcs of a long-running anime series.
There is always a crisis and a plan. This is fundamental story telling, but it works. The crisis shunts the heroes to somewhere new — a deadly foe is chasing you across the desert, a dictator has taken control of your friend’s home city, a battle goes wrong and somebody is dreadfully injured, warring factions coalesce on your location. Rarely a dull moment.
More than the crisis, the stories of Xenogears are elevated by its smart and active characters. They come to the table with different goals and attitudes. Bart is brash, passionate, and funny. Citan is calm and calculating. They talk over the latest crisis, asking questions about possible issues with their course of action. They unfurl a map.
This is the intersection of a plot driven story and a character driven story. Unfortunately, not all characters are as fleshed out as others, but every one of the playable roster is worthy of your consideration (except Chu-Chu?).
Takahashi and Saga’s reading of psychological literature helped them write characters with issues that were uncommon in other JRPG protagonists. One main character has split personality disorder, which becomes very relevant to the plot. One of the best scenes in the game takes place inside that character’s mind, and the full reasons and implications of the split are revealed. It is one of the most emotional scenes in the game.
Oh yes, the story gets dark. You don’t have to wait long for that, in fact. The Evangelion inspiration is makes itself known within the first few hours.
After an emotional deathblow or or two, the story eases off somewhat. But it’s always ready to give you a painful jab to make you wince, or make you question what you know about the world up to this point. If you want a story with a cynical view of religion, where god exists but not in the mystical sense we usually think of him, Xenogears has that. If you want a story where humanity faces an nuanced existential struggle, Xenogears has that too. There are points where we wonder if the people of this world have lives worth living, or if they are indeed just “sheep”?
However, let’s not pretend Xenogears story isn’t fun! The search for the animus relics to transform the gears to the next level reminds of, believe or not, Digimon Adventure. It is very similar to the search for the crests to evolve the Digimon to ultimate level. Most of the game is like that. A journey that is bright and full of character. It is only at key moments, especially towards the end, that the game takes off its gloves. The balance is masterful.
Fans may use words like “love story” describe Xenogears. It is, but only a little bit. It is more of a “father issues story”, and it will hit you hard if you are weak to tales of troubled father-son and father-daughter relationships. Almost every character has a variation of it.
A natural product of the game’s exceptional scope, there are numerous other themes present too. Which the main one? Each player you ask might might have a different answer. Some that stood out to me include:
Common people exploited by elite castes. Solaris vs. “the lambs”. Nocturne and the prison population.
Technology used to gain supremacy, even transcending the human condition. The gears. Krelian’s nanomachines. Deus.
How previous generations form the ties of our destiny, but also how those ties are not unbreakable. Fei and Lacan. The Fatima heritage. The age of the Gazel ministry and their eventual fate.
What else? Revenge. Loss. Reconciliation. Trauma. Xenogears is those sorts of stories. And, yes a little bit of a love story as well.
Unfortunately, the weightiest plot points only emerge in the games truncated second disk, where only a little attention can be given to each issue. Even so, I found the attempt a lot more convincing than in other JRPGs.
It is of comparable quality to the “World of Ruin” half of the Final Fantasy VI story: a plot that delivers on the big ideas it presents, instead of tiptoeing around them. It is a story committed to itself.
Another word I would use to describe it is intricate. It has many subplots that feed into one another. You don’t realise it until the game starts revealing it’s secrets towards the end, but this story really is extremely complex. Do I understand Id’s story even now? Or Grahf’s? Or Elly’s? Miang’s?
I have only played the game once, but I am already certain that if I play it again I will be shocked by the subtle references and foreshadowing I missed.
For something as long, complex and high quality as Xenogears, you would the script must have bee written in detail ahead of time. But it seems this was not the case:
Interviewer: There was a deadline, but the plot wasn’t done yet, it seems.
Tanaka: Takahashi-kun seemed to come up with parts of the world as he went along making the game, so there were times when we didn’t know when we’d see the exit. It might have been better to write up something first, clean and tidy, and go from there, but I think Takahashi-kun had a vision of seeing everything in action, and further expand the world from there.
If I could sum up the game in a word, as cliche as it sounds, it has to be “epic”. Even in a genre full of epics, Xenogears takes it to another level. So much happens in an average 10 or 15 hours stretch in this game that where the characters were at the start of the game feels like a different life time. By the end of the game the political status of the world is very different. The nature of the conflict is different. I think back to when Fei and Citan were first looking for a way out of the desert after the events in Lahan. There was a small desert town that we never returned to. It seemed consequential at the time, but it was a drop in an ocean.
Speaking of Citan, he is my second favourite character, but it would be too much of a spoiler spoiler to tell you why.
My favourite character is Bart. This cast is full of characters with a dark side. Bart is boisterous and takes action before he thinks, but he is fundamentally good in an uncompromised way.
He isn’t the main character, but he is the most traditionally heroic. That contrasts with the anti-hero characters in a way that makes him shine brighter.
A world of fun
Around halfway into the first disk, Xenogears takes a detour. Fei is captured and finds himself confined to prison town with a unique culture. The pecking order in this town is based on “battling”, a formal sport of mech-on-mech combat.
There are many times that Xenogears shocked me, but none more so when I realised that “battling” is a fully-featured, 3D fighting game!
Hiromichi: Yes, we put a lot of stuff in it to make it look like a standalone game. I think that took us about six months.
JRPGs are a balance of repetition and variety. The core gameplay of grindable regular battles is inherently repetitive, but they soften the blow with variety — minigames, dungeon puzzles, gimmick bosses, and so on. But no game achieves the balance quite like Xenogears does.
In other words: this is a long-ass game, but it doesn’t like to repeat itself.
The setpieces are exquisite. Take Bledavik. The goal is in infiltrate the castle, but a distraction is needed. Therefore, the game alternatives control of Bart, who does the breaking in, and Fei, who is part of a tournament, where he puts on a good show to distract the guards. It’s double the excitement, half the chance for the player to get bored.
Later in the game, its you inside a castle, defending an assault on Shevat. A lesser game might have turned this defence scenario into a dungeon: run through the city, fighting random encounters, until you reach the leader, whom you defeat to fend off the assault. Xenogears knows this wouldn’t make sense. Instead, it requires that you split up your characters, choosing which character to defend which side. You fight battles with each of them in turn until the boss arrives.
It seems like a small change, but it is vastly more evocative and memorable. Xenogears understands that not every conflict scenario in a JRPG needs to take the form of a dungeon.
There are many examples of Xenogears choosing to go beyond the obvious JRPG gameplay loops. Even the sewer, that ubiquitous level type that is a joke among gamers, is elevated here: facing off against the sewage-dwelling monster of Nocturne is not unlike a level you might find in an early Resident Evil game.
I could keep going. The anima dungeons have very welcome puzzles. That isn’t a big surprise, as lots of JRPGs has puzzles in these days, but it adds to the variety.
Speaking of puzzles, there are a few decent puzzle battle. Deus is one. So is the following Ramsus fight. Unique battle encounters can set a JRPG apart. Not all JRPGs have them, but Xenogears does okay in this department. Nothing special, but similar to Final Fantasy.
Between the battles and dungeons, you find towns areas worthy of a travelogue. There is never a lazy town, only fleshed out, lived-in locations with carefully considered geography and idiosyncratic visual design.
One town is actually a giant salvage rig floating on the open ocean. You enter from the deck and come across a lift. Facing the controls, you see there are six floors you can visit! But once you start moving through them, you realise they are all connected in a corkscrew pattern.
Another town floats above the map, and when you enter the residential area you are wrapped you in relaxing music that makes exploration feel easy. Stone bridges crisscross above and below you, and there are many nooks and crannies to pry into.
Then, you enter the palace where you find a library library packed with a history of the world that you won’t find anywhere else. All the people you meet all have their own perspectives on wars long past and tribulations yet to occur.
Even how you explore each town feels distinct. In one late-game city, it involves taking floating platforms to reach people’s tiny, oppressive cell-like abodes.
At times, Xenogears seem to have the fidelity and charm of a point and click adventure game. Towns with lots of detail to add realism. Nooks, crannies and secrets to find. Distinct areas with unique atmosphere. Minor characters everywhere, ready to tell you a piece of the story.
There are two towns that stand out to me. Kislev’s prison block; and Solaris, the main enemy city. In both urban areas, you come into contact with people you don’t understand, following rules that you haven’t been introduced to. It takes time to acclimatise, which is the sign of a well designed fictional culture.
Bledavik market
Every location was truly designed for you to enjoy being there. It makes believe strongly that there are variety of types of people that exist in this world, and that makes the world feel vast.
A sense of scale
In the Stalactite cave, where you get lost early in the game, you are piloting your mech and find a switch you need to pull. It is not a mech sized switch, but a human sized one. You jump out of cockpit. From this perspective, which is calibrated to the size of a giant robot, your character is tiny!
It’s almost like I’m playing Blaster Master.
Scope and scale and keywords for the JRPG genre, adventures in which you circumnavigate the globe and sometimes go into space. Since the NES era, they have had a reliable bag of tricks to create the illusion of scale. From smaller to larger, different screens showed the world from different perspectives: a battle screen, a town and dungeon screen, and a world map.
By 1998, those techniques were long in the tooth, and PS1 JRPGs were innovating for the 3D era. Just as Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears branched away from one another when it came to visual presentation, each games also had their own new methods of conveying scale.
In Final Fantasy VII, scale is increased at the small level, though detail. You see the grime in the slums of Midgar, you see the ramshackle state of their streets, all careful conveyed in hand-crafted, pre-rendered backgrounds. The world feels big because you can see it in greater resolution than ever before.
Xenogears does something different. It adds new, intermediate levels of scale. The “mech” perspective, in which your character is ant-sized, is one example. Zoom out further, and you find that the transition from town map to world map is blurred with the addition of a city screen that helps you better appreciate the size of these large settlements.
As a result, Nisan feels like a much bigger and more realistic location than, say, Kalm, even though the playable space of each is a similar size (a few shops, a few houses).
Another Xenogears city is Bledavik, the capital city of Aveh:
When you arrive there, a festival is taking place. It’s not as packed with side-activities as the festival in Chrono Trigger, but it was enough to remind me of it. There are loads of nice details here. One stuck in my mind. A man outside a tent gives you a balloon, then you exit this area to a city map. Then, on the city screen, you see your little balloon float away into the sky! Brilliant.
Let’s zoom out again. Back on the world map, there are structures that look enormous! We have developed an intuitive sense of what the city-sized world map object really represents. So when we see something many times bigger, like the Babel Tower, we are awed! When we enter the tower, the sense of enormity is maintained, as this is by far the largest interior location on Disc 1 — and that’s from the perspective of a mech!
World maps would eventually fade from JRPGs, making Xenogears one of the last games in the genre to develop new ideas for it. In this way, Xenogears feels both classic and innovative, the height of a defunct artistic style. It truly would have made an excellent FF7 in another dimension.
There’s one more perspective to look at: the battles. You learn early on that there are two types of battle in Xenogears: battles on foot, with your 2D spite characters, and battles in your 3D mechs. They have slightly different mechanics, presentation, and seem to be entirely unrelated to one another.
The two battles types seem to be entirely separate entities. The level of damage is different by an order of magnitude. The user HUD is different. And of course, the mechs are so much larger than the humans, it would only make sense for them to fight mech sized enemies.
Then there was another Xenogears moment that blew my mind. As escaping the Kislev prison, and regaining your mechs, a new option becomes available in battles: summon mech. You can do this in any outdoor battle. You can do it for one character at a time, so that your party consists of a mix of mechs and humans. You can summon three mechs against an enemy party of rabbits. Yes, you do comically overwhelming damage to them, 1000+ per hit against enemies that have 50 health. The point is, these two battle systems were never separate, just two halves of the coin. That means you can really feel the gigantic size and power of your machines, and conversely the powerlessness of your human characters even they happen to stumble into an encounter with an enemy far too big for them (there is at least one area of the game that makes this likely).
Your first thought might be that this sounds terribly imbalanced, but it’s not. Most story scenarios are built to be played in a mech (wide open spaces) or as a human (narrow interior spaces where the mech cannot be summon). The majority of the game is story scenarios, so it’s never an issue.
But the fact that mixed mech/human battles are possible, occuring at two vastly different scales at once, is awesome.
A battle system
It was over 30 hours into the game that I first had to make a tactical choice regarding battle. I equipped items to my mechs to reduce fire damage to stop Shakam incinerating me.
The Xenogears is a traditional system with physical attacks, elemental magic, buffs and debuffs — all the building blocks of a strong battle system,
Yet it never quite coalesces into a tactical experience because the only effective damage dealing option is to use back-to-back “deathblows”.
Deathblows are made up of a combination of light, medium and strong physical attacks. Light attacks are more likely to hit the enemy, but do less damage, and the opposite is true of strong attacks, and you can do a sequence of these attacks in one turn.
It’s an original idea for a JRPG, borrowed from fighting games, and a nice one at that. In a genre sometimes ridiculed for the ability to spam the first attack in the menu to win, making your physical fighting options more complex is a truly appreciated innovation.
At the end of your sequence of attacks, you perform the deathblow, if you’ve learned that technique and if you’ve followed the prompts at the bottom of the screen (or memorised the sequence).
These attacks are some of the most visually interesting moments in a game jam-packed with visually interesting moments. A personal favourite deathblow is Citan’s “Myogetsu”, in which he appears to pogo stick off the enemy’s head using his sword, Zelda II style. The later deathblows get even more flashy and intricate, such as Billy’s “Holy Gate” or Citan’s “Haze of Fire”.
Unfortunately, deathblows are more exciting visually than they are engaging tactically. They deal a lot of damage with no downside, so will be your primary method of attack from the start of the game until the end.
It is, however, quite addictive to train for new deathblows.
Almost all JRPGs give you money and experience after a battle, but the good ones give you something else to work towards. For Xenogears, this something is deathblow experience, obtained by performing different physical attacks in battle. Each character has four light attacks, two medium attacks, and just one heavy attack. Each attack type gives a type of experience towards new deathblows attacks.
As deathblows are the primary way of becoming more effective in battle, it became enjoyable to get into random encounters to figure out what sequence of attacks will train my next deathblow, and spam it in as many subsequent battles as possible.
It even made Xenogears irritatingly high random encounter rate quite sufferable.
I have one more thing to mention about the battle system. Towards the end of the first disk, Citan starts using a sword instead of his fists. After that, Citan has a whole different set of deathblows! What exceptional attention to detail.
An imperfect game
I’m not going to say that Xenogears is for everyone. I want to warn you about a few things before you get overhyped and then blame me for playing something that didn’t transcend reality.
If you get confused by the story, I can’t blame you or act surprised. I felt lost at multiple points. There are multiple antagonists and it won’t be clear for a long time how they are related or what each of their motivations are. There are many factions, something I usually love in a story, but only if I know a bit about them. We go from getting involved from one faction to another and it’s not clear how some of those scenarios relate to one another.
It’s a jam packed story and there is always something interesting driving events forward, but you don’t always get any view on the bigger picture, and that can make it hard to get engaged with.
Minor storytelling irritations aside, the main thing I don’t like about this game is the speed. Many actions in this game execute with a delay:
Opening the menu
Scrolling text
Walking through a door
Entering battle
Completing attack animations
It’s a drag. In a remaster the first thing needed is to cut out these dead seconds. Faster loading, shorter gaps between attacks, faster text, and maybe a speed up button.
Remember, this is a 60+ hour game. There’s no question about it: if you are prone to impatience, Xenogears is going to challenge you.
On the other hand, if you’re into JRPGs for the music, let assure you that the work of Yasunori Mitsuda, of Chrono Trigger fame, does not disappoint… except in one way: there just isn’t enough of it. There are 44 tracks (compared to Chrono Trigger’s 64) and there are about four in particular that you will hear very regularly. It’s a testament to the exceptional quality of those tracks that I never tired of hearing them, but more variety would have been better.
Some other things that could have been refined:
The random encounter rate in a few areas is way too high. The last dungeon was the most frustrating example, but it’s not the only one.
The camera can be an annoyance, or rather the scenery isn’t always designed in a way that works best with the isometric camera, so you vision might be blocked from some , or it is hard to get a clear sight with an angle that makes it easy to make a jump.
Just a little jump.
Speaking of jumping, many players people hate the platforming. However, frankly, there’s hardly any of it, nowhere near enough for me to hold it in contempt in my memory. It’s only significant in one dungeon (Babel), and I can’t even say I dislike that dungeon overall. It is supposed to be a ruin, the platforming just helps emphasise that this is not a place that exists for your convenience.
Being able to jump just makes the expiration more varied, usually, and more JRPGs could learn from this.
Okay, rounding out the negatives, let’s talk about Disk 2.
Xenogears is a two disk game. The first disk is a 40 or 50 hour typical JRPG journey, with it’s own minor climax. The big mysteries of the game are still unanswered at this point. In fact, you could say that Disk 1 is a massive, multifaceted set-up arc, and all the events with the biggest consequences (those on a global and cosmic scale, as you might put it in comic-book terms) are set to occur in Disk 2.
However, Xenogears vast scope did not fit into Square’s development cycle, which was supposed to take something like 1.5 years in the late 90s. Xenogears had an extension to 2 years, but finishing the whole story in this time was impossible.
Takahashi could choose to finish the game at the end of Disk 1, but he took a different path: rush through the remaining story in a JRPG-storybook hybrid.
It’s not just a change in how the story is presented. If the game’s story became a novel, similar amounts of dialogue, a similar level of detail and pacing, but without the gameplay sections, I wouldn’t have minded so much.
Instead, events that would have taken a great deal of dialogue to build up if they had occurred in Disk 1 — spreading the nanomachines to remove the seal limiter from the population, or finding and activating the Norturne mega-mech, events of global consequence — are just thrown at you in a few lines of text!
It’s pretty comical and bad.
It starts to come together again at the end, for a hour or two before the final fight, when you get access to a world map again. For that reason, I thankfully don’t have to say that the game ends on a low.
It’s a decent ending, we just don’t get there in the best way. The rest of Disk 2 is just the silhouette of an incredible story. Therefore, you have to go into Disk 2 with low expectations.
Conclusions
Xenogears is exceptional and unique. At it’s core, it was born of the minds of exceptionally well-read and ambitious writers, and for two years they were given the resources and talent of the Final Fantasy series in it’s golden age, and the freedom to make the game they wanted despite it’s complexity and weirdness and an unrealistic scope. That is a combination that is rare in videogames.
Xenogears is a game you can go in-depth on, if you are so included. Take the Xenogears and Xenosaga Study Guide, for example. The writer sometimes shows disdain for the “immature consumers of popular media” who see Xenogears as “just” another JRPG classic like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII, instead of the Russian literature of our generation — an attitude that I find off putting. But I have to admire his or her dedication to the series, and consider it a point of merit for the work that that it can inspire such dedication.
I’ve only played Xenogears once. I am confident that if I play it again, I will be struck my how much of I missed or misunderstood.
I do not believe there will ever be a finished version of Xenogears. Therefore, the game leaves us us sad, something full of wasted potential. A marred magnum opus. Elation and sadness: these are essential to the Xenogears experience. It could have been the best story ever told in a videogame (some people say it still is). It being unfinished is part of the rich metastory of the work… but I would prefer to have the tales of Fei, Elly and Bart told in full.
Xenogears was also inspired by Star Wars. Grahf is Xenogears version of Darth Vader, Cain the Emperor, the chasing Gebler forces in their battleships equivalent to the Empire’s Star Destroyers. Star Wars, too, had a unique and compelling metastory, one of a convoluted untold history (before the prequels were released), and eventually disappointment (after the prequels were released). That is essential to the Star Wars experience.
The same again: Evangelion, that ran out of money and had a finale composed of mainly still images. It was eventually corrected by a movie, but the episode 25/26 disappointment is part of the metastory of the franchise. A quirk that makes it more fascinating to us.
Inspired by Star Wars, Takahashi intended Xenogears to be the middle part of his story. Multiple prequels (not necessarily games) should have filled in events that are only hinted at in Xenogears: Episode V, such as the previous incarnations of Fei going back 1000 years or more. A sequel, Episode IV, would have wrapped up the story and the universe.
That never happened, and never will. But the ideas for the first of those prequels was spun off into a new franchise, Xenosaga. Thought it might be some time before I get to playing it, what I hope to get from it when I do it is reassurance: that the ideas of Xenogears lived on, in some form, and that it become something close to the multi-game, space-spanning epic that it always deserved to be.
