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.
Where do we start when it comes to Western-style JRPGs? Perhaps we should get clear about what we are looking for. After all, the wording is ambiguous.
Does a game with JRPG mechanics that was made by a Western company meet the definition? If you believe that a JRPG must, categorically, come from Japan (as the name “Japanese Role Playing Game” indicates), then perhaps not. In that case, a “western-style JRPG” could simply mean one with a Western attitude to gameplay systems, though it was made in the East.
Alternatively, it could mean a Japanese game without traditional Japanese aesthetics (eg. not inspired by manga). Dark Souls (2011) might fit into this category… but that brings up the debate of whether Dark Souls is an RPG in the first place.
We haven’t even started, but we can already see that this is a sticky subject.
Perhaps we should start with the history. Cultural cross-contamination has been at play in the JRPG genre from the very start. Wizardry (1981), the dungeon crawler invented by students of Cornell University in New York, became a tremendous influence on Yuji Horii, the creative force behind Dragon Quest (1986).
And he isn’t the only one. Wizardry reached such heights of popularity in Japan in the 1980s that it might not be an exaggeration to say that all of the early pioneers of RPGs in Japan could trace their influences, game-to-game, to Wizardry in only a step or two.
Today, the Wizardry series is owned by a Japanese corporation, who continue to make entries in the series, though with a slightly more manga-inspired character design. One of the first games to come out of the Japanese “Wizardry Renaissance” was Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls (2009).
This meeting of east and west is a good starting point for the discussion – Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls
A Japanese company gaining control of an American RPG franchise is a little unusual. Just as rare is an American company getting the opportunity to work on a Japanese RPG franchise. But did you know it almost happened with the biggest JRPG franchise of all, Final Fantasy? The cancelled game Fortress, which started production in 2008,was due to be a spin-off of Final Fantasy XII developed by the Swedish studio behind Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Grin. Sadly (I think), it never saw the light of day.
However, it is not so rare for western and Japanese designers to collaborate, as was the case with Secret of Evermore (1995). It is almost an entry into the Mana series, taking its inspiration from Secret of Mana and developed by Square, but it was developed entirely by Square’s North American division. In fact, it was never even released in Japan. This makes it something of a poster child of the western-style JRPG.
Nintendo Life: Was there a lot of emphasis placed on making sure Secret of Evermore had a very “American” feel to it?
Brian Fehdrau: Yes, very much so. That was practically our Prime Directive, so to speak, coming straight down from Starfleet Command over at Square Co. Ltd. in Japan, our mother company. We were, simply put, to make an American-flavored Secret-of-Mana-like game.
Interview with Brain Fehdrau, lead programmer on Secret of Evermore
Another contender for poster child of the Western JRPG – Secret of Evermore
Despite leaning on American cultural references, Evermore was set in a fantasy universe. To contrast, let’s next look at JRPGs with western-inspired settings. Sometimes described as Japanese Americana, and released in the same year as Evermore, Earthbound (1995) is the most well-known example. You might not find the towns of Onett and Fourson on a USA map, but they do a charming imitation of a mid-western suburb and of the Empire State, respectively. Yet Earthbound was created entirely in Japan, in the offices of Nintendo itself.
In the same category (well, for the purposes of this section of the article only), Shadow Hearts (2001), developed by Tokyo-based Sacnoth Inc. by former employees of Square, foregos most of the typical Japanese fantasy tropes. Instead, it gives us a tale of an alternate history largely set in foggy 1913 Britain.
Shadow Heart’s aesthetic, though darker than the average Final Fantasy, is still drawn from anime. For a game with character designs based on an American style of illustration, let’s jump across the ocean and look at our first “American-developed JRPG”. Battle Chasers: Nightwar (2017), might be distinct from most JRPG in terms of artstyle and country of origin, but it’s hard to deny that this turn-based battler captures the spirit of the eastern genre admirably.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar
Where Dragon Quest has Akira Toriyama, Battle Chasers: Nightwar has Joe Madureira, the well known American comic-book artist setting the artistic direction. It is refreshing to see an JRPG with an uncompromising, almost stereotypical American look, straight from a comic book.
The next example is again western developed, but stars characters from Japan. Though I said that it is rare for an American company to get their hands on a Japanese RPG franchise, this Japanese franchise is not very associated with RPGs at all! Yet this just makes the Bioware-developed, Sonic the Hedgehog-themed JRPG, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (2008), even more surprising!
Sonic Chronicles was released, it was a novelty, but it is not the only JRPGs crafted by reasonably sized Western studio. It is an occurance that repeats after long gaps. Several years before Sonic Chronicles, it was Anachronox (2001). Several years later, it was the Ubisoft-developer Child of Light (2014). Perhaps we are due another.
The trend can in some ways be attributed to nostalgic JRPG players of the 90s becoming game makers in their adulthood. With this in mind, it is far from surprising that the world of indie development has gifted us with its own canon of Japanese-inspired games, which typically recreate the pixel art style of the SNES JRPG golden age.
Let’s start with the big one. Though the influences of Undertale (2015) are numerous and eclectic (who would have thought of combing JRPGs with shmups), the deep homage it pays to classic Nintendo JRPGs cannot be denied. It’s popularity even seems to have outshone it’s main inspiration, the aforementioned Earthbound.
Spurred on by the success of Undertale and others, this trend among indie developers continues to this day. I don’t know if we’re at the pinnacle yet, but if you need evidence that we’ve not yet hit a decline, the recent success of Chained Echoes (2022), made in Germany but borrowing enthusiastically from the likes of Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, should convince you.
Chained Echoes
Along a different line of thinking, we can look at Japanese-developed games that use mechanics more commonly found in western RPGs (they used to be called WRPGs, but that term, unlike JRPG, seems to have fallen out of fashion). Some examples are Star Ocean, that includes many character traits and stats that are only useful outside of battle, including athletics, cooking and divination.
The height of the “Japanese developer, western-RPG inspired” category we can look at Dragon’s Dogma, which goes against the grain by offering players the chance to create their own characters and choose the members of their party, and offering more freedom than the story-driven, semi-linear approach of the Japanese genre classics.
In this way, Dragon’s Dogma is less similar to a typical Final Fantasy game, and more familiar to somebody used to playing, say… Wizardry? Which brings us full circle.
We have seen that a “Western-style JRPG” could mean many different things. Perhaps we have also learned that the definition of “JRPG” itself has blurred lines. If it looks, plays and smells like a JRPG, can we really exclude it from our consideration just because it was developed by Bioware?
Eastern or Western? The lines seem to be blurred – Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
Let’s sum things up with a few examples for each category:
Games made in the East, with a Western setting/aesthetic
Earthbound
Shadow Hearts
Dark Souls
Games made in the West, with an Eastern setting/aesthetic
Jade Empire
Indivisible
Games made in the East with WRPG mechanics
Wizardry: Labyrinth of Souls
The Dark Spire
Dragon’s Dogma
Games make in the West with JRPG mechanics
Anachronox
Child of Light
Cthulhu Saves the World
Sonic Chronicles
Nightchasers
Undertale
South Park: The Stick of Truth
This topic is an interesting one to me, and I well know that the conversation is ongoing and sometimes quite heated. If you have views on what counts as a JRPG, and what Western-style means anyway, be sure to jump into the comments to let us know.
Oddworld started with in 1997 with the 2D cinematic platformer Abe’s Odyssey.
There are five major games in the series, the latest released in 2021.
All titles are set in the eponymous Oddworld, a world of non-human characters and unusual (often deadly) animals and wildlife.
Among other things, the Oddworld series is known for:
1. A world of fantastical and exaggerated landscapes, of natural and industrial varieties:
MobyGames.com
2. A mix of puzzle and action-based platforming, sometimes involving the ability to control your enemies, and often with the goal of saving groups of other characters:
3. A long-term series plan and development history with twists and turns, including several cancelled games that have attracted fan attention
The mainline Oddworld games cover multiple genres. The series went into a long hiatus after the release of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath and returned with a reboot of the series.
Game
Genre
Release Date
Hero
Abe’s Oddysee
2D Cinematic Platormer
Sep 1997
Abe
Abe’s Exoddus
2D Cinematic Platormer
Nov 1998
Abe
Munch’s Oddysee
3D Puzzle Platformer
Nov 2001
Munch & Abe
Stranger’s Wrath
FPS
Jan 2005
Stranger
Abe’s Oddysee: New ‘n’ Tasty
2D Cinematic Platformer
Jul 2014
Abe
Soulstorm
2D Cinematic Platformer
Nov 2022
Abe
A quirk of the Oddworld series is the plan for a five-game “quintology”.
However, which games are canonical entries into the quintology may not be immediately apparent.
Abe’s Exoddus, though the second game in the series, is not considered the second entry into the quintology, but rather a bonus game. Similarly, Stranger’s Wrath is set in Oddworld but is not considered a part of the Quintology. Therefore, prior the series hiatus, there were only two games in the quintology: Abe’s Oddysee and Munch’s Oddysee.
This changed with the New ‘N’ Tasty, which was a reboot of the series. Now the series looks like this:
Game
Notes
Series
Quintology
Abe’s Oddysee
Original
1
Abe’s Exoddus
Add New
Bonus Game
Munch’s Oddysee
Add New
2
Stranger’s Wrath
Add New
Bonus Game
Abe’s Oddysee: New ‘n’ Tasty
A remake of Abe’s Oddysee and a reboot of the series.
Remake
1
Soulstorm
A loose retelling of the story of Abe’s Exoddus
Add New
2
Characters
The hero of the majority of the games is the hapless Abe of the humanoid Mudoken species:
However, in two games different heroes have taken the role of protagonist, as per the above table.
Also, the species that work, roam and rule in Oddworld are almost as important characters as the heroes themselves.
Themes
The themes present in Oddworld games include:
slapstick humour
environmentalist heroes vs industrialist villains
exploitation and resistance of a slave class.
Oddworld also doesn’t shy away from some gruesome and disturbing imagery, as you will see in any of the game’s “bad endings”.
Mechanics
The first game in the series established a few iconic gameplay features, demonstrated by these short game clips:
Possessing enemies
Commanding helpless (ocassionally helpful) allies with “GameSpeak” and leading them to rescue
Most future games in the series (but not all) used both of these features to varying degrees.
With the exception of Stranger’s Wrath, all games in the series have multiple endings. This started in Abe’s Oddessey, where if you failed to rescue at least 50 out of 99 Mudokens then Abe meets a grizzly fate at the of the game.
Starting with Munch’s Oddessey, your success at rescuing the unfortunate captives of each level is called Quarma, and sometimes you will not be able to pay the final levels of the games without passing a Quarma threshold.
The best of Oddworld
The first two games in the series are usually considered the high point in the franchise and the true classics. When it comes to fan-reaction, we would estimate the following (I have not included New ‘N’ Tasty is it is a fairy faithful recreation of Abe’s Oddysee):
Abe’s Oddysee
*****
Abe’s Exoddus
*****
Munch’s Oddysee
***
Stranger’s Wrath
****
Soulstorm
***
Oddworld’ best-known creators are Lorne Lanning and Sherry McKenna, and most of the games are developed by Oddworld Inhabitants.
We have said that atmosphere is key to the appeal of Oddworld, and with that in mind we can not overstate the importance of the music of Ellen Meijers and Josh Gabrie that so effectively sets the tone of the series starting with the first game:
Starting with Stranger’s Wrath, Michael Bross take on the duty of creating the Oddworld soundscape, with tracks that are both familiar and distinct:
Everything else
As well as the five main games already mentioned, there are two more minor games that are rarely spoken of:
Game
Release Date
Initial Platform
Oddworld Adventures
Dec 1998
Game Boy
Oddworld Adventures 2
Jan 2000
Game Boy Color
Oddworld community
The Oddworld series has seen moderate success and has retained a following of dedicated fans that commune in the following online spaces:
At least we know the Bloodstained sequel is in development. It’s not quite Castlevania, but is is very close… which means we can make some guesses about what Bloodstained 2 will be about.
The next question: without the Castlevania name, does Bloodstained even need a castle?
The recurring setting
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night castle
In Bloodstained, Dracula’s castle becomes Gebel’s castle. Or, that’s what we think at the start of the game. The true owner is probably Gremory. Gebel was the steward of the castle because he was possessed by Gremory. At the end of the game Johannes talks about returning the castle and demons to where they came: hell. In Curse of the Moon we also see Gremory as the master of the castle, not Gebel.
Will we return to the castle in the next game? One game in the Bloodstained series has already bucked the trend. The major structure in Curse of the Moon 2 a demonic tower, not a castle.
Yet… I can’t yet imagine this series without any castle at all, even if we take detours away from them for some (or most) of the game. I already said I expect Gremory to be a recurring villain, so I expect to see her castle make an appearance regularly in future games, probably as a late game area that precedes the summoning of the final boss.
The Castlevania castle had some recurring areas and we definitely see analogalous areas in Bloodstained. The clocktower, a late-game Castlevania area filled with moving platforms and other devious machinery, becomes the library, the Livra Ex Machina. (There is also the Twin Dragon Tower, which features rotating gear platforms like the clocktower, but I think the library fits the spirit of the clocktower better)
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night castle
What about the castle’s supposed owner? Gebel’s role in Bloodstained is supposedly that of the new Dracula, but we find this to be as a red-herring. By the end of the game, Gebel heroic core shines through. Not a very good trait for a series villain, but there is another character Gebel is similar to.
The recurring protagonist
Gebel also stars in the Curse of the Moon games. In this game, he is no dracula analogue, but an analogue for another Castlevania character: Alucard (his moveset is almost identical to that in Alucard’s debut game, Castlevania: Dracula’s Curse).
Alucard and Gebel. Can you tell the difference?
Things get more confusing when we jump back to Ritual of the Night and realise that game has it’s own, entirely separate analogue for Alucard!
Of course, I’m talking about OD, or Orlok Dracule, who not only looks the part but even sounds it: he is voiced by Alucard’s PS1 voice actor — both the Japanese one (Ryōtarō Okiayu) and the English (Robert Belgrade). I’m not sure how much more of a homage OD could possibly be!
It’s not surprise that an analogue of Alucard was desirable. The son of Dracula is one of the most well loved characters in the Castlevania franchise, and played major roles in some of the most loved game in that franchise, including Dracula’s Curse, Aria of Sorrow, and of course Symphony of the Night.
I say that with some trepidation, because there seems to be plenty of call from the fans for more OD. He is highly requested in discussions about the next playable character. It’s not that I am an OD hater, it just seems to me that OD was supposed to be a reference rather than a substantial character. A librarian, like in Symphony of the Night, with the appearance of the protagonist of that game, with a fun name (OD being the reverse of Dio, a JoJo reference, like Alucard is the reverse of Dracula). It’s witty… yet OD has a miniscule role in the game.
My guess would be that OD will return, but probably in a similarly minor capacity, as a recurring side-character, perhaps always found in the library.
If not OD, our new Alucard must be Gebel then? Well, perhaps, but… I think there is a better candidate: Miriam.
Our hero
First, let’s explain why I think Miriam will return: she is the most iconic, popular character in the franchise to date, and she has had cameos in other games, which would make it the most wasteful of wasted opportunities to bring back Bloodstained and not bring back Miriam.
As the star of the first game, she will always have a special place in this universe. I expect Bloodstained to play into that fact big time.
If Miriam is coming back, will the game be set in the same era as Ritual of the Night (Castlevania often made generational leaps decades and centuries across the timeline). Maybe, maybe not.
Consider this. Miriam is not a vampire, but she is a shardbinder. So was Gebel, who was initially this game’s version of Dracula. Shardbinder might well be Bloodstained’s version of vampire, or dhampir. Rather than sucking blood, they absorb crystalised souls.
Now, could Miriam’s powers as a shardbinder have made her ageless? If so, even if Bloodstained 2 leaps into the future, Miriam may still return.
As all this would make Miriam the perfect replacement for Alucard: she would a recurring hero, touched by darkness, closely connected to a villain, that defends the mortal plane across the ages, as an iconic franchise hero…
Talking about “across the ages”, in the next post we will discuss a potential timeline for the Bloodstained franchise. See you then!
Despite being a videogame franchise twice as big as Dance Dance Revolution and a Netflix franchise so popular they didn’t cancel it even after four seasons — they gave it a second show instead! — Konami isn’t making more Castlevania games. So it is a good thing Koji Igarashi is.
Bloodstained might not have Belmonts or magic whips (we talked about that last time), but it isn’t trying to hide its intentions: it wants to succeed that franchise, and it’s got a pretty good claim.
For over a year now, we’ve known that “Ritual of the Night 2” is in development. We don’t know anything else. But with 25+ years of Castlevania inspiration to draw on, we can make some educated guesses.
As I said before: I don’t think Bloodstained should slavishly follow the Castlevania blueprint, and they’ve even got good reason not too. The theme of Castlevania NES was monster mash. It was never designed to support a lore than spanned fictional generations. Bloodstained doesn’t have to build on those quirky foundations.
However, I want to explore the clues for the future of the Bloodstained universe that might be lying in its connections to the previous franchise. This time, new interpretations of classic villains.
The Future of Gremory
Gremory
You don’t have to squint to see that Gremory is an analogue to Castlevania’s recurring boss, Death. I love how they have taken the visuals of some of Death’s traits, such as the sythe attacks, and managed to reinterpret them into a wholly original lore: the spinning half circles that Death was known for are no longer the grim reaper’s sickles, but are representations of a waning moon, the moon being the source of Gremory’s powers.
Gone is that odd quality of the Grim Reaper being a servant of Dracula. You would really expect it to be the other way around, wouldn’t you? Gremory is a powerful demon, but not something metaphysical and metaphorical like Death.
There’s no question in my mind that Gremory is going to be a recurring villain in this franchise. She already is, having appeared in all three games released so far, and that is bound to continue.
But if Gremory is Death, who is Dracula?
Death
The Big Bad Question
If there is one single thing that Castlevania is known for, it is that Dracula is the last boss of every game. So it’s natural for us to wonder, who is Bloodstained’s equivalent? You might say it must be Gebel, because he kind of looks like Dracula. But Gebel is not the final boss in Ritual of the Night. Other than that, he is also disqualified from the role as he is no longer a villain.
(He’s also no longer alive, though how often has that stopped somebody trying to become a Lord of Darkness?)
At the end of a Castlevania game, you almost always have a fight with Dracula starting as a man, then with Dracula as a demon. The final boss of Ritual of the Night is Bael, a demon, but before Bael it is Dominique, a human.
Therefore, the roles of Dracula are taken in combination in Bloodstained by Dominique and Bael. Is our new Dracula one of them?
Well, Dominique certainly has the name for it.
Dominique Baldwin Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
The Future of Dominque
Despite being the antagonist of the first game, I don’t think Dominique is going to be the recurring series villain. In her debut, she didn’t appear to have the charisma to carry a whole franchise, but that could change. She doesn’t have the long history of Dracula, but that could change, too. However, most of all she seems to better fit the achetype demonstrated by Shaft in Symphony of the Night. There are similar character throughout the Castlevania franchise: Brauner in Portrait of Ruin, or Albert in Order of Ecclesia. These are the humans that align themselves with the forces of darkness. Though Dominque surpasses them by featuring a final boss in her game — other corrupted human villians never do — this is the role she plays.
However, I don’t think her influence on the franchise is over.
The story of the Belmonts is one that spans generations, and allies are often cropped from familiar families. One of the key families in the Castlevania franchise was that of the Belnades, known for their powerful magic. The progenitor of this bloodline was Sypha Belnades, who now has a starring role in the Netflix series. Charlotte Aulin (Portrait of Ruin) and Yoko Belnades (Aria of Sorrow) are some of her descendants.
Yoko Belnades Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
There’s not a lot of evidence for this but one hint is something Dominique Baldwin says about exorcists, especially just before Ritual‘sfinal battle. She says that she and Gebel have the power of exorcists in their blood. Earlier she says that her parents are exorcists. So if this power is hereditary, I feel like if we take a leap to another generation we might see the Baldwin’s take a similar role as the magical family.
Though Dominique was a foe in Ritual, in Curse of the Moon she was an ally. Therefore it is not even much of a twist for her descendants to join the fight as true heroes, like the Belnades clan. In the canon of Ritual, they might be motivated by the evil committed by their mother/grandmother/ancestor.
Or it could be a bit more uncertain, where like Dominique (or like a Targaryen of Westeros), the Baldwin clan have a tendancy to turn to evil, summon demons, and cause trouble through the ages.
Either way, bloodlines were an integral theme to Castlevania and I think taking the villain of the first game and doing something with their descendants is an interesting way to start a new family tree for this new franchise.
The Future of Demons
If not Dominique, who replaces Dracula?
So far, there may be more more evidence to suggest there will be no recurring final boss. For the games released so far, we have various final bosses:
In Ritual of the Night, it is Dominque followed by Beal.
In Curse of the Moon, it is Gremory, and the secret boss is corrupted Zangetsu, who acts a little like Dracula.
In Curse of the Moon 2, the boss of the last stage is at first Beelzebub, but even nastier demons replace him at the climax of subsequent episodes, leading to a final confrontation with a beast called Sariel.
The theme seems to be a different demon will take the role of the ultimate antagonist in each game.
If that is the case, I’m okay with it. Dracula’s narrative impact always felt lessened by the fact that he was beaten back to sleep every century without fail. By having a new, previously undefeated, demon in each story, the threat can feel fresh and urgent every time.
Unlike Castlevania, Bloodstained does not enlist a smorgasbord of movie monsters that Castlevania used as its bosses. Instead, many of Bloodstained real-world influences are found in demonology lore, such as the 17th century grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon.
Now I don’t know anything about demonology, but according to Wikipedia The Lesser Key of Solomon lists eight other demons with the rank of king, the same as Bael.
By the way, the Gremory of real-world demonology is listed as a duke. Here is an interpretation of her:
I feel it would be pointless of me to try and guess which of the demon kings might appear in the next game. There are other demons with names that have pentrated popular culture in the same way Bael and Beelzebub have. For the sake of recognisability, perhaps we will see an Astoroth, Mammon, Asmodeus, Samael or Azazel.
If I had to choose, it would be Paimon, described as a man riding a dromedary camel followed by a procession of trumpet players. I very much look forward how such a thing might be turned in a fearsome last boss.
I see a franchise in which each game, a new demon king is summoned by the power of the Liber Logaeth. Perhaps, as we work our way through the princes and kings of the demons, a greater threat stirs in the shadows. At the top of the demonic chain lies lucifer himself, which would make quite a climax for Bloodstained VII or so.
I’ve used the Curse of the Moon games as examples here, so I’ll also point out that they are considered alternate realities and are made by a different studio and therefore I don’t think they are precisely indicative of what Iga wants to do with the franchise. I’m confident Inti had plenty of creative freedom with the Curse games. An interview with the game’s director indicates as much:
The path to the ending was going to be pretty wild, and we were afraid that we might make IGA upset when we sent our ideas over to him. It was all for nothing though, because we got the OK for the main story with hardly any changes requested.
Finally, as a counterpoint to this theory, let me say that I believe there is power in developing an iconic series boss over the course of several games. One of the greatest pleasures of a Castlevania fan is seeing a new interpretation of Dracula at the end of each game. It is something that is novel but familiar. It will be a shame if that is lost entirely.
If Bloodstained does opt for a recurring demon antagonist, Bael seems the most likely choice. In Ritual of the Night, his name is first evoked by Johannes in some optional dialogue at the hero’s base. He tells Miriam to fear the demon Bael, because he is the most powerful of the 72 demons. If, in Igarashi’s demon heirarchy, Bael is already at the top, any other demon will be a step down. This would seem guarantee a starring role for Bael in subsequent games.
At this point, I think it could go either way.
In the next part, I will consider how Miriam’s role in the Bloodstained story might proceed.
Stranger’s Wrath was too unusual for its own good. That’s probably why EA never advertised it. 2005 was the year of Call of Duty 2 and Indigo Prophecy. Stranger’s Wrath began in an Old West town of chicken-men called New Yolk City.
Stranger himself was weird, a mixture of man and ram and wildcat. Take some hits and he will amass a hide full of arrows — you recover his health by shaking them off like a cat shaking off water. He shoots as you might expect, in first person, but if you want to cover more ground you switch the perspective, Stranger drops onto all fours, and you prance around the lush wildlands at speed. I loved it. If you’re going to have a fantastical videogame, why not control someone that acts and animates like something not of this world.
There was one thing in the game that let me down: “live ammo”. From Stranger’s crossbow he shoots rodents and bugs instead of bullets. The shooting itself is fine, but the instructions describing collecting these as “hunting”. That sounded enticing. I imagined setting traps to catch boombats, and flinging the bats like bombs at the enemies, and the booms would disturb a habitat of stunkz (which are used as smelly smokebombs), which would escape into the level for you to catch. In practice, there’s really no difference between Stranger’s “live ammo” and ammo in any generic FPS — it’s just lying around.
After Stranger’s Wrath, Oddworld went on hiatas. A mere 16 years later, in April 2021, they released another original game (Soulstorm is ostensibly a remake, but there can be doubt it is a new entry into the series, unlike New N’ Tasty). With Oddworld alive again, can there be hope for a Stranger 2 that does it even better? I would certainly love to step back into Stranger’s boots.
Predictions for Bloodstained 2 (Part 1): The Belmonts & Zangetsu
Castlevania is in my top three videogame franchises of all time, easily. Right now, Komani is doing nothing with it. Regular Castlevania director Koji Igarashi was unsatisfied with this state of affairs, which is why so he crowdfunded the Bloodstained franchise — his avenue to make new Castlevania games in all but name.
So far, there are three games under the Bloodstained banner, but only one in Igarashi’s characteristic metroidvania style. That game was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and at the time was the most successful videogame Kickstarter ever. A sequel, if not a whole franchise, seems likely.
I’m going to make some predictions. I think it will be interesting (for me at least) to see, if and when Bloodstained 2 is revealed, how close I am to correct. Perhaps you will find these speculations interesting, too.
Before I start, know that I will make lots of comparisons to Castlevania, but I don’t want to imply that I think Iga and Artplay should simply follow the historical Castlevania blueprint. I don’t think they should, I don’t think they will, and I would even say they’ve done a pretty good job of building an original lore already, even if it is obviously done with the intention of having a Castlevania equivalent.
However, I think we can definitely get some clues about what the plan for the future Bloodstained universe might be, by understanding it’s connections to the previous franchise. And I think the best place to start is with Zangetsu.
The Future of Zangetsu/Zangetsuto in Bloodstained
Zangetsu
The signature weapon of the Castlevania series is the Vampire Killer whip, the only weapon that can kill Dracula. The equivalent in Bloodstained is the Zangetsuto katana, the only weapon that can kill Gremory. The Vampire Killer is only wielded by members of the Belmont family, and the Zangetsuto has a similar rule. It’s not a bloodline thing, but a title: if you are the warrior that wields the Zangetsuto, you are known as Zangetsu.
I think this little bit of lore gives us a massive clue as to how things will progress in the Bloodstained universe.
The Zangetsu we meet in Ritual of the Night will not be the only Zangetsu, but will be just the first that we have met, a member of a line of Zangetsu warriors that may extend into the past and future and whom we may continue to meet more of the longer the Bloodstained series continues.
The Zangetsus will be the Belmonts of the Bloodstained franchise. I think the use of red in Zangetsu’s design is a reference to this, as Simon Belmont was also commonly portrayed with red armor or a red coat in laster interpretations.
The Zangestuto will be the Vampire Killer of the Bloodstained franchise. It is the weapon needed to put the demon threats to rest, and will be passed from hero to hero through the ages.
Simon Belmont
In future Bloodstained instalments, I can Zangetsus from various backgrounds, with both female and male versions of this warrior. Some will be side-characters, as Zangetsu was in Ritual of the Night, and protagonists, as in Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon.
They may be family members (as Trevor and Simon Belmost were), or the mantle may be picked up by characters who have no familial relation. It may play into mysteries in the story, where a character who did not seem have any connection to the Zangestsus is later revealed to be one (Julius from Aria of Sorrow would be a good comparison).
And, of course, every time a Zangetsu shows up the Zangetsuto, and Gremory, will be close by.
In the next part, I will be talking more about the villains of each franchise, starting with the similarities between Gremory and Death.
Many of the MCU movies and shows can be enjoyed without having seen any of the other MCU movies or shows. However, most of them are improved with some context gleamed from the other stories. Therefore, I would like to suggest which shows I think you should try and watch before going to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, if you have time.
Doctor Strange 2 is out on May 2. I am writing this in April. These are only predictions for what films and shows will be relevant to best enjoy the new Doctor Strange movie, based on having seen pretty much everything in the MCU myself.
This list is in release order:
Doctor Strange: It is very likely Multiverse of Madness will assume you have watched the movie that introduces Doctor Strange. If you watch the sequel first I’m confident you’ll be able to pick up the key points, but it’s still a good idea to have an introduction to the characters. Likelihood of being important: 4/5
Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame: Characters from Doctor Strange had major roles in the two Thanos movies, but more than this, a large number of the stories released after Endgame have referred to the events of these movies in some way. Putting this on the list opens a can of worms, because if you want to watch Infinity War you really should really watch some of the other films first, but that’s just how the MCU is now. It’s only a guess that this will be relevant, though. Likelihood of being important: 2/5
WandaVision: This seems to be the story that directly precedes Multiverse of Madness. Wanda is featured heavily in all the marketing materials for the new film, and WandaVision tells you how she got there. Likelihood of being important: 5/5
Loki: This films dives heavily into the multiverse aspect of the MCU. I don’t think there were any direct indications that Doctor Strange 2 will pick up threads from Loki, but it’s very easy to guess that it will, just based onthe fact that both stories centre around the multiverse, and Loki did leave some big ol’ threads lying around. It’s totally possible they won’t be touched until Loki Season 2, though, so this one is just a guess. Likelihood of being important: 2/5
Spider-Man: No Way Home: It was the last movie released inthe MCU and Doctor Strange had a starring role. The plot revolved around the multiverse. I would be surprised if this wasn’t referenced in some way. As with the Avengers movies mentioned above, you probably don’t want to watch this without seeing some of the other Spider-Man movies. Likelihood of being important: 3/5
Summary
What films do you need to watch before Doctor Strange 2?
The films most likely to have significance to the plot of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are the original Doctor Strange movie (for introducing the characters and rules of magic in the MCU) and WandaVision (as the direct prequel from Wanda’s perspective, and for introducing ideas that will likely make a return in this movie). Endgame and Loki could be significant as well.
