I was curious what people’s thoughts were of this 3 game series for the Playstation 2. I liked all three games, but preferred the last game over all the rest since I felt it solved many of the problems of the first 2 games. Xenogears will eventually be mentioned in this discussion, and that is fine, but its not really a part of this series even though they all would’ve been connected if it wasn’t for Square and Namco bickering. I look forward to reading your opinions. Log in to see images!

The Unknown Comic Posted:

It’s like watching a movie where sometimes you have to push bumons. But there’s no reason to push the bumons because the characters aren’t compelling.

Yes, the long cut-scenes were a problem that plagued the game, most notably with the first installment. With the second game, I swear, if I skipped all the cut-scenes, game would’ve been over in 20 hours. As far as compelling characters go, I’d halfway agree and halfway disagree. The series was intended to last longer, so, hopefully, more development would’ve happened over time, but our characters for the most part stayed the way they were. Momo was one dimensionally cute, ziggy was an android, albedo was a psycho with really no motivation, and shion got all wet at the sight of her dead fiance. That shion bit in ep3 was annoying. This was in contrast with Xenogears where all our characters are given depth. Perhaps this is what happens when there is only one game and everything has to be tied up as opposed to a series with recurring characters where the writer(s) go “well, we’ll get around to motivation later.” That being said, I still liked Xenosaga III the most. Probably because its problems didn’t cause a drag in the game play as the other 2 games. Any thoughts on battle system for instance?

I haven’t played XSIII yet, so I can’t comment on that.

Overall, it’s definitely a series that contains a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones. I’ll admit that I also got bored during some of the over-long cutscenes.

And I know that XSII’s battle system does get a lot of flak for being “overly complicated”, but I actually liked it. I liked having to plan several turns ahead of time to be able to pull off a huge elemental chain. Though the Global Samaritan sidequests ****ed me off tremendously with their glorified fetch quest approach.

I guess I’ll need to play XSIII to eventually get the full picture.