you'd never guess it by my online presence, but xenogears is my favorite game! and you'd never guess it by the fact that it's my favorite game, but i think there is a lot wrong with xenogears!
xenogears is probably one of the top 5 most flawed JRPGs of all time. like, if you bought into everything the game was giving you on disc 1, not just the story but the entire structure of the game, disc 2 is utterly tragic
"i don't know xenogears at all. what's the deal with disc 2?"
tl;dr: disc 1 is a normal jrpg, disc 2 is essentially a visual novel in which most of the cutscenes consist of a character sitting on a chair narrating the rest of the story to you with a few static images in the background and a few dungeons and boss battles thrown in there to break it up before finally returning you to the world map at the very end of the gamedisc 1 of xenogears is a very standard ps1 jrpg. you've got your world map you can run around on, towns and dungeons all over the map, you get a boat and an airship, you know the deal
however, the team developing xenogears was fairly inexperienced, and xenogears is an incredibly ambitious game with such a richly detailed narrative and script that... well, just look at this
they weren't going to be able to meet their two-year development deadline, so their solution was to cut out a lot of the story and present what was left through monologue cutscenes where a party member would sit in a chair and narrate. the story still fucking rules and everything but you're not really getting to experience it in a meaningful way. you often don't get environments in these cutscenes, instead it's just some translucent sprites standing around in the background in front of a jpeg
and keep in mind: that nearly 200,000 word script is just what made it into the final game. can you imagine how much more there could have been?
i fucking love disc 2, but it's hard to blame people that feel like it's a massive disappointment! especially when there's so much of the story that was left out, only to be told through xenogears perfect works. and honestly, who even knows how much of the remaining story made it into that?
anyway here's a spicy xenogears opinion
xenogears would be a better game if the entire thing were structured like disc 2 rather than disc 1
everyone always talks about wanting to see what the game ends up looking like as a fully realized game, and of course, i'd love that too, but it's hard to deny that what this game needed, if not more time and money, was a much smaller scope
and here's the thing i don't think a lot of xenogears fans are willing to admit: disc 1 does not justify its structure at all. whether that's the fault of the same time constraints that gave us disc 2 in the first place, who knows. what i do know is that at no point in xenogears does it ever give you a reason for the world map's existence until the very end of disc 2
like, i love JRPG world maps. the fact that so many games lately seem to have decided they're a thing of the past is really depressing to me because i love exploring world maps. and that's the problem with xenogears' map: you don't have a reason to explore. ever. the most you can do is walk up to a place you're going to go in the future, go "huh, guess there's nothing here!" and leave
there aren't really sidequests outside of towns, there aren't any optional areas, there's no sequence breaking or non-linear sections, you are just walking from point to point every time you're on the world map. the most justification you're given for this is that shops change what they sell eventually so maybe you should walk back to nisan for an ether doubler or two before you miss your chance
now, i don't think directly adapting the disc 2 format would be the best choice here, because as much as i adore the narrative of xeno's gear and could easily sit through hours of its cutscenes, that shit fucking drags on A LOT. i think the ideal version of xenogears (where you don't just pretend the deadlines didn't exist) is a visual novel storytelling format with playable town sections with sidequests that take you to optional areas, playable dungeons, and maybe a few extra sections that radically change up the gameplay, like the gear battling in kislev. mostly because i'm a sucker for games doing that even if it ends up being dogshit. battling is not dogshit though let's make that clear. battling owns
in a perfect world, in which not only does disc 2 get the same structure as disc 1 and has more of the dungeons playable, but also disc 1 is further fleshed out and manages to make something interesting out of the format, there's no doubt i'd prefer that over a full VN experience. but that's a complete fantasy. the circumstances surrounding the game made that an impossibility from the very start. a VN xenogears is much more realistic, and allows for the full story to be told. which is good, because the narrative is what carries this game. like sorry i love the combat system but you pretty much end up doing the exact same thing every fight unless the enemies have some kinda gimmick
anyway disc 2 rules put some respect on it also play more visual novels such as highly acclaimed gothic horror tale The House in Fata Morgana
