Vital Stats

Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Monolith Soft
Publisher: Namco
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 2/15/2005

Platforms

• Playstation 2

Xenosaga 2 is an unadulterated Japanese role playing game wrapped in an excessive quantity of cut scenes. The gameplay is uninspired when it isn’t frustrating, but the cut scenes are fairly entertaining and fans of the series can enjoy some story revelations. If you do play it: don’t play for the game, play it for the parts that aren’t interactive.

Like A $20 Movie Ticket
Ever since Final Fantasy VII brought, “the cinematic RPG experience,” to American gamers, developers have been crafting imitators in hopes of somehow recapturing that game’s extraordinary success. Perhaps understanding that it is impossible to be FFVII nine years after the fact, Monolith Soft debuted the first sequel in the Xenosaga series–a series that departs from the typical cinematic RPG formula by emphasizing the cinematic over the RPG.

To have some concept of how this plays out, consider the opening segment of the game. After emerging from a ten-minute cut scene, the game proceeds to a three-minute tutorial on navigating through the world map, and then enters another long cut scene. Some of these cut scenes are surprisingly hefty, and can make the time between save points prohibitively long for the gamer on a time budget. It’s an unusual choice that feels like the game is the result of some misplaced desire to direct for the silver screen.

Thus Spake Albedo
Fortunately, the cut scenes, the primary vehicle for the game’s narrative, aren’t as bad as typical gaming fare. While some of the quiet and reflective characters come off as breathily reading a script, the majority of the voice acting is emotive and passably immersive.

Albedo, white-haired immortal driven insane by loneliness, contributes a particularly excellent performance as he screeches madly from malevolent act to lunatic justification. It’s worth noting, however, that sometimes there’s a noticable disconnect between the game’s art direction and Albedo’s performance–his face, in particular, doesn’t quite capture the contortions to be expected of such a raving maniac. Perhaps it reflects the limitations of using an in-game engine to do cut scenes instead of pre-rendering them as custom-built movies, but it may also be a failure of the movie director to rein in the voice actor at appropriate times. Either way, the disconnect breaks immersion during some of the best voice work in the game.

Of course, good performances would be wasted on a lousy story, and this is probably the richest feature Xenosaga II has to offer. This installment in the series mostly focuses on the messed up relationships among the major characters. Veterans of the first game can look forward to finding out why leading lady Shion doesn’t really get along with her brother, and play through the conflict between Albedo and his brother. Most of the action in the story happens through sufficiently-advanced-technology-style deus ex machina, but it can be fun to puzzle over the cryptic mutterings that happen along the way.

Speaking of cryptic, the series trademark Judeo-Christian symbolism and extensive jargon is back in action. While it has been something of an internet sport to lampoon the series for peppering seemingly random religious words, at least the game uses them with internal consistency. Sadly, the database, a glossary present in previous and subsequent Xenosaga titles, is absent, so much of the vocabulary becomes impenetrable gibberish.

When The Controller ISN’T Idle
The gameplay in Xenosaga II draws from traditional Japanese RPG conventions. For the most part, this means that you’ll spend time killing enemies to gain experience that will allow you to make small numbers into bigger numbers. There’s also a player-interactive skill acquisition system that could ostensibly be used to customize characters and make them unique, but since every character has access to every skill, party members become largely homogenous. There’s a category system that organizes the skills somewhat, but it mostly contributes to character growth by forcing you to buy skills you don’t want. When all this comes together, it doesn’t feel like the player makes a meaningful contribution to the growth of the characters.

The combats from which these experience points are acquired are largely turn-based fare. Mixing things up is the accumulation of a “boost meter” which allows you to insert a character into the turn order to act next. This is particularly important in Xenosaga II, because attacks will hit an enemy in a certain zone (zone A, B, or C), and after hitting these zones in the proper order, some characters can beat them to the ground or launch them into the air. Boosting and taking an extra turn while the enemy is in this compromised position yields bonus damage, presumably offering a bit of tactical flexibility when dealing with larger foes.

The problem, however, is that Xenosaga II is riddled with “larger foes.” Characters deal modest damage values by default and ridiculously high damage when using the beat down mechanic, and all the enemy hit point totals are geared to favor the latter. This means that most combat consists of waiting for the boost meter to fill, and then utterly dominating an enemy, or nickeling and dimeing the enemy to death over five minutes. Even this wouldn’t be so bad, but enemies can also accumulate boost, and do so at a similar rate to the characters. In fact, there’s only one small difference between the two: enemy boosts trump player boosts. So, midway through beating down a boss on a timer, don’t be surprised if he boosts and ruins the last 10 turns of preparation. The needlessly extended battles and occasional cheap game over resulting from these mandatory mechanics are frustrating and mostly just pad out the game’s 20-25 hour length.

Also padding the game is the exploration. Characters (and their corresponding giant robots) move at a creep when traveling from place to place. Unfortunately, the environments through which you’ll crawl are dull; futuristic apparently means flat and monochromatic. In the game’s favor, however, enemy encounters are actually visible on this map, which genre fans should recognize as meaning no random encounters. Unfortunately, the majority of them are positioned in an unavoidable location, and the game’s difficulty curve assumes that you kill everything you see (and grind a bit as well).

A Brief Note On Music
The game’s music is a mix of synthy environmental sounds and quality recorded performances. This mix can be quite jarring when you’ve just seen a dark revelation about Albedo’s past accompanied by a swelling orchestra, and suddenly you’re listening to grating town music from a 1980 synth keyboard. However, when the music is good, it’s excellent, and overall the experience is a positive one.

Closing Thoughts
Xenosaga II is an ambitious game–it has a vision to which it uncompromisingly sticks. While this results in a rich story and interesting characters, it often feels like some of those resources could have been spent making the game fun to play. This game is mostly recommended to series fans; it’ll offer all the story you crave, even if you have to suffer a bit to get it. Anyone else who happens to be intrigued by the mythos surrounding the series would be well advised to rent this one before buying.

What It Costs: $19.99

What It’s Worth:

• To The Hardcore: $10 (Rent)
• To The Genre Fan: $10 (Rent)
• To The Casual: $0 (Just . . . don’t)