Monday, March 5, 2012

Nerd musings as I wait

Not much to talk about re: web development.  I'm waiting for one client to get back to me about an e-commerce project, and waiting for another client to pay me.  Mass Effect comes out tomorrow (hell yeah!), and, well, that's about it.

With that said, I figured I might as well blabber about one of my favorite games of all times: Xenogears.

Xenogears was released by Squaresoft (before it became Square-Enix) in 1998.  This was pretty much the Golden Age of Square, with Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics being released in this era, as well as Square's marked Christianity criticism era, as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Xenogears were all pretty scathing in their own way towards the Church (apologies if that sentence made no sense... it's 8:30 AM).

Xenogears (XG from now on, as I'm lazy) is a sci-fi epic, and it's also a gigantic, loveable mess.  It's incredibly ambitious.  It was also so over-budget that the 2nd disc is primarily the two main characters sitting in a chair talking about what happened, as the actual dungeons/events could not be finished in time.  It features robots and a giant pink...thing getting crucified.  It's filled with warts and facepalm worthy moments (I'm looking at you, Soylent System), and yet, in its own bizarre way, it works.

SPOILERS from here on.

XG's main premise is simple enough.  Sometime way in the future, the starship Eldridge was transporting a biological weapon - Deus - to some planet.  En route, Deus gained sentience, woke up, took over the ship, and started killing everyone on board.  The captain (who looked an awful lot like the captain of the SDF-1 in Robotech/Macross), left with no alternative, engaged the self-destruct.  The debris fell to an unknown planet.  See below (sorry for the crappy quality):


From there, the game skips forward several thousand years.  Humanity is the dominant species.  Old technology from the Eldridge - including mechs called Gears - are found, and are in somewhat common use.  Most are utilitarian models, but the various nation militaries have combat models.  What's more, technology has advanced to the point where new ones can be developed.

Gears are maintained by the Ethos, the world's dominant church (dun-dun-DUN).  Of course, the Ethos is actually a covert arm of Solaris, a technologically advanced, secret nation in the sky that uses surface dwellers as a renewable resource.  Yeah, the setting is batshit crazy.

So, there's the setup.  Here's why the game is awesome:

The characters.  There's a large cast, but almost all get their moment to shine.  They all have clear personalities, and are almost all memorable.  Even the NPCs are well done, and very few feel one-dimensional.  The villains are all flavorful, and have various motivations.

The plot.  There are many layers to the story, and XG is probably one of the best at balancing the incredibly epic with the deeply personal.  At its core, XG is a love story, and a very well written one at that.  JRPG fans tend to point to FF VIII or FF X as the best love stories in the genre.  They can't hold a candle to XG.  More spoilers:

The protagonist, Fei Fong Wong (whom I use as my Twitter avatar), and his love interest, Elhaym Van Houten (Elly), are trapped in an Eternal Return.  Through the ages, they're born, meet, and fall in love.  Every time, their relationship ends tragically, usually with one of them dying.  What's worse is that, as time goes on, they start gaining the memories of their past lives.  That tragedy, and the madness it causes, leads to the creation of one of the main villains.  The cycle itself is explained in pseudo-scientific terms (the best kind!), and opens up questions about fate and free will.  It's all well done, with small reveals here and there building to a crescendo.

Of course there's more to the game than that.  It pokes at the ideas of God, faith, death, sacrifice, etc.  It's a very dense story, but mostly orchestrated well.

The music.  Yasunori Mitsuda is a video game music master.  His holy trinity includes Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross.  Some examples:






Again, objectively, the game has plenty of flaws.  Despite them, I love it.  It's the shame the second disc will likely never get fleshed out, as a lot of big things (read: thousands-millions die) happen, but it's all off-screen.  That said, check it out if you have a PS3 and don't mind pixelated sprites.  It's available on the PSN.

2 comments:

  1. It's definitely an acquired taste. It's one of those games people either love or hate.

    ReplyDelete