TNL Game Club Month #1 - Xenogears

[Opaque]

I agree with the need for quick text.

This game is would be 30 hours with it.

[Andrew]

Work has been busy this past week, so I'm just now getting time to really play. Hopefully I can get a lot of it knocked out over the next few days.

9. A lot of the music reminds me of Star Ocean II. This makes me happy.

10. The graphics do not. I know I said it before, but this is one ugly baby.

11. Battle menu is awkward but workable.

12. Agreed with others on the text speed. It's especially annoying when you want to talk to someone again to see if they say something different, but they don't, but you can't just speed through it, so you end up running away to get the dialog box to close quicker because that's faster than waiting forever for the text to load... yeah.

[Andrew]

13. Combos are more fun than they should be.

14. Regarding the part when you return from the doc's place and all hell breaks loose in town... the cutscene where you see the eyeless kid with the creepy smile... I trust this will be explained to me later, because I have no fucking clue what that was all about. I'm still in the first hour, and the story intrigues me. This bodes well.

15. Up to the forest now, and the most difficult enemy I've faced is my super-limited field of view.

[Tain]

I'm only a few hours in myself (desert town), and yeah, that camera is pretty tight up in there.

Graphics are pretty solid, though, if you ask me. Nice sprites, nice environments. Nice music, too.

Most of my other complaints are typical to the genre, though. Lots of meaningless combat. Some awful dialogue here and there, too.

[Opaque]

So I'm at the point where You go to Alteh or wherever to save Barts cousin and I thought it was a neat touch that after you get a balloon from the fair, if you go to the world map you can watch your balloon float off into the sky.

I think we too easily forget that this game is 12 years old when we judge it's graphic and controls, but little touches like that aren't even done in modern RPGs.

[MechDeus]

I've found I love the combat all over again. I think part of it is that I can often start building up meter to unlock future moves before I can use them, so my enjoyment of getting stronger has a vicious cycle going on (build meter to 100, level up to use those moves, leveling up means more combo points so new meters can be built up, etc.).

I had also forgotten that they handled war and power struggles really well for JRPGs at the time; simplistic dialogue aside this was a fairly mature game. I would commit murder if it meant a remake of this game with a good writer (and Yasumi Matsuno as director).

p.s. I made Yui cook that fat bird egg for me. No regrets.

[BonusKun]

Dumb Question: I did a little bit of searching but is there a Ps1 emulator I can download onto my PC to play this?

[Opaque]

Skull and Bones has the answer.

Also, I might get a wired 360 controller and play future PSX games on an emulator, I popped this in for a quick giggle and it looked much better on the PC, but I'm not replaying the first ten hours of this game.

[FirstBlood]

I remember playing through Suikoden 2 on epsxe back in like 2003 and even then it still looked better than on my TV. I would have defaulted to emulation immediately if I were to play Xenogears again, which is damned tempting but I'm knee deep in Steam sale games and FFXII Zodiac. Maybe it will run on my Netbook... hmmmmm

[Opaque]

I would have but without a controller it's not the same.

I just never had a reason to really care about emulation too much until this club.