Re: Xenosaga II

In message <4p79lPAa6OiEFwek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mike Williams <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Wasn't it FatHippy who wrote:

Picked this up a couple of days ago for the princely sum of 20 quid and
was surprised that it came on two DVD's for the game itself, plus an
extra DVD that contains a movie.

I've never played a Xenosaga game before and did not really know what to
expect. As it turns out, I have never played a turn based RPG quite like
it.

It has more spoken word, cutscene animations and narrative than any
other game I have ever played. It is quite possible that this would
annoy the tits off some people, because it seems so be quite linear in
storyline, with 15 minute cutscenes between every 15 minutes of gameplay
(a slight exaggeration, but it feels like that).

Complex storyline, with the plot revealed as you go, nice graphics,
reasonable voice actors, slightly convoluted turn based battle system.
The battle system is probably no more complicated than Final Fantasy
battle systems, but it is explained very poorly and it takes you a while
to work out what is going on.

I shall get many hours of joy out of this, but the lengthy cutscenes
would not suit everyone.

Anyone else played it ? Your views ?

It starts off very linear and gradually opens out into being open and
free roaming. If you want to do well at the side quests then you'll need
to do a lot of roaming with very little guidance.

OK. That will actually suit me well. I am perfectly happy wandering around for hours, doing nothing but little sub-quests.


I normally don't mind long cut scenes, but there are a few situations in
this game where you go into an extremely long inescapable series of cut
scenes and dialogue after having defeated a rather difficult boss and
before being allowed to save the game.

Already encountered that and I'm only a few hours in.

[snip]

I found the balance between the mech mode combat and the character mode
combat to be rather odd. The mech battles become easier as the game
progresses and the character battles become much harder.

Haven't had a mech battle yet, but I have found the combat system quite confusing for the character battles. Still haven't worked out quite what is going on with the 'Boosting' yet, and I think I have probably been spending my points too indiscriminately on skills too, without having thought things through and focussed the spending on providing the equivalent of fighter/healer/wizard type character classes. Hopefully there are enough points available in the game that I will be able to redress this somewhat as things progress.

I have found that you need to be careful to remember to swap characters in/out of battle too, so that you can ensure your 'reserve' characters are getting levelled up properly. It's all too easy in the heat of battle to forget who your active party is and to forget to swap one out.


I never really understood much about what was going on in the story
line. I don't know if it was just too Japanese for me, or if the story
just doesn't make much sense if you don't have any knowledge of the
Xenosaga I story.

A combination of all those things I suspect. :-)
--
FatHippy
'Poking death in the face with a big stick and then running away'
(To reply by e-mail, please replace {$spamtrap$} with fathippy)
Name: Fats Town: Bauhaus
.

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