Any tips on "breaking" Xenogears and Chrono Trigger?

[Yancakes]

Oh my god... I just got to the gear battle in the Battle Arena in Nortune or whatever it's called, it basically plays like a dumbed down DBZ Budokai game.

WHY ISN'T THIS WHAT GEAR COMBAT IS ALWAYS LIKE IN THIS GAME?! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

EDIT: you can even set the AI to controller 2... hit is brilliant, why on EARTH didn't they use this?!

[MrPopo]

Oh my god... I just got to the gear battle in the Battle Arena in Nortune or whatever it's called, it basically plays like a dumbed down DBZ Budokai game.

WHY ISN'T THIS WHAT GEAR COMBAT IS ALWAYS LIKE IN THIS GAME?! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

EDIT: you can even set the AI to controller 2... hit is brilliant, why on EARTH didn't they use this?!

Because there's no depth to it. It gets old fast. Square already put in a bunch of terrible platforming sequences into the game (and they only get worse). I wouldn't want half of the combat to be based around a terrible fighting engine as well.

[Yancakes]

It would have been better if they'd added depth to this engine instead of focusing on the terrible one that they actually used. If this gets dull after a while, oh well, I hated the regular gear fighting mechanics from the start.

[Godot102]

I really liked the Gear battles in the game, and they get pretty intense as the game goes on. But I will admit, the Gear battles can be a little difficult to get into at first. You just need to learn to use charge and boost properly also try to get into infinity mode( I think that's what its called). I recall Elly's gear having a move that was really broken and dominated certain battles.

[mobiusclimber]

Ugh, Xenogears. So many things that really could have been done better. There's so many different gameplay styles and different things that just seem thrown together, none of them done all that well. The cutscenes don't make any sense (unless you play the game a second time) and seem to just be thrown in from some unrelated anime. The platforming sucks and you can get into random battles in mid-jump (causing you to fall back down to the bottom afterwards). There was some good stuff, but it just made the game frustrating b/c they kept mixing up the good stuff with awful stuff. I liked the walking around without a mech parts, I liked the story when it focused on characters (and not just anime cutscenes filled with gobbledygook). I liked the mech battles, sort of. It's been forever since I've played this game tho, so most of my recollection of it is pretty vague. Not a game I'd want to play over again tho.

Xenosaga I thought could hardly be called a game at all. I remember sitting for half an hour watching a cut scene, saving, watching another cut scene, getting to control my character only to have them walk from one end of the space ship to the other whereupon I got to YET ANOTHER cutscene. JUST MAKE A FUCKIN ANIME ALREADY AND BE DONE WITH IT! XD Really, why wasn't the Xeno series made as an anime? Nothing of value would have been lost. Granted, I didn't like the anime scenes from the first game, but that was b/c by the time I understood what was happening in the first cutscene I was halfway thru the game and had watched twenty other cutscenes. I'm sure if you just strung the anime together it would make way more sense than it did in little pieces like in the game. And yeah, there was some actual gameplay in the first game that I enjoyed. I cannot say the same for Saga tho. I didn't enjoy playing it for the few minutes the game actually allowed me to play it.

People talk about how "deep" these games are. Have you played FFXIII? That game has a very rich world and backstory. All of it is contained in an encyclopedia that you slowly uncover as you play the game. Almost none of the interesting stuff from those entries actually shows up in the game (besides the ramifications of those things, anyway). Xenosaga is similar, tho you do get more story/backstory/etc. It is a rich world, but a lot of it isn't in the actual game or the cutscenes, but as part of data you find or uncover as you go along that is basically just stuff to read. So the game should be an anime, and it should be a book, but it has very little to recommend it as an actual game.

So now you've had the why of "some people say not to bother with Xenosaga" discussion.

[AppleQueso]

Xenosaga I thought could hardly be called a game at all. I remember sitting for half an hour watching a cut scene, saving, watching another cut scene, getting to control my character only to have them walk from one end of the space ship to the other whereupon I got to YET ANOTHER cutscene. JUST MAKE A FUCKIN ANIME ALREADY AND BE DONE WITH IT! XD Really, why wasn't the Xeno series made as an anime? Nothing of value would have been lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenosaga:_The_Animation


Though truth be told, I thought the game cutscenes had better pacing and whatnot than the actual anime did.

[Xeogred]

Yeah the anime sounds pretty bad from what I've heard and seen.

[mobiusclimber]

As I typed that I felt almost certain there WAS an anime. I just feel like the anime cutscenes from the first game would have been better strung together rather than broken up by gameplay. There was a lot of jargon in them that didn't make sense until hours later, characters talked around issues rather than discussing them full on (think "Hills Like White Elephants" talking around issues), so again it didn't make sense until much later. So if you don't just plow through the game, it gets really tough to figure out what's going on in those cutscenes. I could only play an hour a day, sometimes two, but sometimes not at all, so the overarching story meant nothing to me. I'll admit I never got past Babel Tower either, so I likely never saw the "awesome" story everyone talks about. That one section was a total game-breaker for me. I wasn't enjoying half of the game to begin with, so all the platforming and random battles in there pretty much ruined it.

[Xeogred]

The same can easily be said for Xenogears. Creator/director Tetsuya Takahashi definitely probably got into the wrong medium and should have written novels or well, went into anime. But I'm glad he decided to take risks and make crazy games since I've absolutely loved all the Xeno games, and now Xenoblade is blowing me away.

[AppleQueso]

Hey, didn't the european release of Xenosaga 2 contain a disc that was just like, a DVD of all the cutscenes form the first game edited into a movie or something?