Xenogears Full Review

I finally made the time to sit down and play Xenogears as part of finishing my PS3 backlog and after more than 61 hours of playtime, credits were rolling. Since the Xenoblade games especially had meant so much to me that I’ve done extensive write ups on Xenoblade, X, and 3, when I was playing through Xenogears I began kicking around writing a longer blog with all of my thoughts rather than leave it to a short write up in my final planned PS3 backlog blog. The more I played the more I began to feel I had a lot to say about Xenogears due to its connections to some of my favorite games of all time and because it is an uneven experience that proved to be an emotional roller coaster with high highs and low lows that remains interesting throughout. Despite some of the frustrations I have, I’m ultimately very glad I finally played Xenogears and I’m excited to share my thoughts here. I do want to say upfront before I get into it, as a nearly 30 year old game I do plan to talk about significant parts of the full story in detail so feel free to save this blog for later if you are one day planning to play the game yourself and want to avoid story spoilers.

Apparently, it was back in February 2012 I first purchased Xenogears as a PS1 classic on my PS3 since the PS3 marks that (I wish other consoles did incidentally, it’s a cool stat). I ended up saving over my first attempt at a playthrough and forgot to check the date, so I’m not sure if I ended up booting it up back then, but I remember playing up to the entrance of the second town in the game. If I did play it back when I bought it, it would have been just ahead of the English release of Xenoblade which I had been greatly anticipating to the extent I participated in the letter writing campaign asking Nintendo of America to bring the game to America. Aside from reaching that second town, I really did not remember even any of the broad strokes of what I played at this point so walking into Xenogears in May 2026 was a very fresh experience.

I tend to lean towards I actually did try it when I first got it, because I think I would have recognized some of the Xenoblade connections right away which probably would have gotten me excited to play more. Xenogears first came out back in 1998 on the PS1 and doesn’t feature analog controls. You move your main character (drawn as cool 2D sprites) with the D-Pad and spin the camera to look around the lovably quaint and yet still well detailed 3D world with the shoulder buttons. I mention this because one of the first things I noticed playing this game was that the jump in Xenogears is basically identical to the fully 3D jump in Xenoblade which is super amusing to me since it’s such a distinct jump with a lurch to it. I thought I got stuck early on playing when a wandering NPC in the first house pinned me to a wall and mashing the D-Pad and spinning the camera weren’t helping at all, but after a few short minutes I hit the jump button and leaped over them. I wish more classic RPGs had this feature! The connections to Xenoblade do not stop at just the jump button. In the towns especially I immediately spotted architecture, especially with pipes, that would reappear in future Xenoblade games and certain ways the giant robots, the Gears, were depicted would resurface in Xenoblade X (I always love you know a robot means business when it crosses its arms). Even before getting into certain overt elements like the Zohar that would reappear in future Xeno games, there were other elements like salvagers who even had a code of sorts that would be later riffed upon in the future (I love their walrus captain incidentally). I enjoyed spotting these kinds of elements and enjoyed comparing other major elements of Xenogears like the writing to the developer’s future works.

I’ll get to directly discussing the actual game in a little bit, but first while I was also comparing Xenogears to future works, I did enjoy also comparing it to other Square PS1 RPG classics and enjoying the feelings those games offer. The PS1 alongside the N64 were some of the first 3D consoles and in these early 3D games one thing that I think stands out about them is that they do a great job depicting these worlds, but also encourage your imagination to fill in the gaps. Xenogears has compact, dense towns that you can explore in 3D, but it also doesn’t depict the full world it paints like many modern games can. Xenogears relies on both a 3D world map that you can explore to find your next destination (towns, dungeons, etc.) and town maps that suggest these towns are much larger than the areas you get to explore. I loved getting to play a new to me PS1 RPG like a lot of the classics I played growing up like Fina Fantasy 7, 8, and 9, and Chrono Cross as it does a great job capturing those dynamics I described. The world and script together help build out this world and it’s hard not to imagine it stretching beyond what you can see and that’s so cool as modern games don’t really offer quite the same thing with their highly detailed graphics.

While comparing Xenogears to future Xenoblade games and its contemporaries was something I expected walking in, there was one more dimension Xenogears was operating on for me that I didn’t expect. As I started playing, I started noticing connections to one of my all time favorite games growing up, Chrono Trigger. At first it was just the odd one off element like both games having a fair you can explore and play minigames in that had some fun attention to detail (I loved here you could be handed a balloon and when you left on the full town map you’d see it float away). Other smaller things started piling up too like how certain sound design was handled and how text boxes were handled. For the latter, there aren’t too many games that let you talk to someone and walk away in particular while a text box is up. When I entered Shevat for the first time, a floating country in the sky, I immediately drew comparisons to the Kingdom of Zeal in Chrono Trigger and I couldn’t believe when I discovered like Zeal three sages came from Shevat who shared the exact same names as the ones in Chrono Trigger: Melchior, Balthasar, and Gaspar. At this point I felt like I was playing a secret Chrono Trigger game and I’d soon learn from others I talked to that apparently Xenogears actually began production as a sequel to Chrono Trigger! I was excited to start seeing what other connections I could find and start comparing Xenogears to Chrono Trigger and see what they had learned and applied from that prior experience. Playing a game like this where you can see where it comes from and how it fits in its then present and its future beyond is just a really cool thing.

Alright, I’ve talked enough about Xenogears in a more zoomed out perspective and where it fits for me and why I was interested in it, so I want to spend the rest of this blog talking about the game itself in detail. I’m going to talk about the combat and other gameplay first and then I’ll move into discussing the story. Since I don’t have a better place for it, before I do that, I do want to give a quick shout to the excellent music in this game. Xenogears’ composer is Yasunori Mitsuda, who created the Chrono Trigger soundtrack beforehand and would later work on the Xenoblade games and become the lead composer for Xenoblade 2 and 3. Mitsuda did an awesome job here as his soundtrack adds so much flavor to the game. The town music is inviting, the battle music, including the boss battle theme with the unusual vocal sample from a real life court case, is exciting, and I dig some of the tracks that make certain areas feel appropriately larger than life. Some of my favorite tracks include: Blazing Knights, Fuse, Soaring, and Foreboding.

If I had to pin a general weak point to Xenogears, I’d sadly say overall it’s the combat which in general trends to be too easy if you stay on top of gear upgrades that are largely straightforward rather than lending yourself to unique builds (the very expensive and extremely powerful Ether Doubler is one of the exceptions). Buying the newest weapons and armor in town for your characters and Gears is simple and usually not much of a question as the prices are cheap. This helps keep the game moving forward, but again is sort of an issue for combat. Too many enemies can go down in a round or two which sometimes oddly includes some of the bosses. Other times the issue is that enemies can barely even hurt you. One of my least favorite stretches of combat for example was found in the Solaris dungeons as they regularly featured drones that offered no threat at all, but just proved to be roadblocks. When battle with these drones commenced, you couldn’t deal too much damage until they decided to announce whether they’d be weak to physical or magic attacks at which point you’d just pick what they were weak to and watch them immediately melt. There was no pressure to eliminate these enemies efficiently because even if they managed to sneak a hit in they only did 1 damage when you had hundreds. The Solaris dungeons took a few hours to clear and combat was just completely whatever for too many encounters in this stretch because the drones were the most common encounter by far. This dynamic was hardly a one off either, if your characters were in their Gears and you fought regular enemies like the Croaker Tribes in the second Anima Relic dungeon for example there was never remotely any threat there as your robots would have 20,000+ HP and a group of six frog soldiers doing 1 HP at a time meant absolutely nothing to you.

​I could forgive combat being easy too often if it was snappy, but Xenogears combat regularly was far from snappy thanks to the Deathblow System. I’ll say it upfront, my feelings on the Deathblow System is that it feels like homework with no good payoff. The whole gimmick here is that when you attack you have a limited amount of AP to input button combos. A weak triangle attack costs 1 AP, a medium strength square attack costs 2 AP, and a strong X attack costs 3 AP. By entering certain combos like triangle, square, X, or X, X, over and over again your character will eventually learn a special move called a deathblow that will deal more damage than usual attached to that specific combo. Each character has eleven deathblows to learn while Fei, the main character, has two extra to learn. When you learn a deathblow on foot, your Gear also learns a deathblow (though input combos are far less exciting being only two buttons in Gears) that you can trigger if your combo level is high enough. While this may sound interesting on paper, sadly this never comes together to amount to anything exciting. Individual characters learn their deathblow combos individually which makes sense and with the difficulty so low that learning new combos doesn’t meaningfully drag out fights further, you’ll probably assume like me you should learn as many as possible because you might need specific ones one day and no not really. The level one combos for deathblows in your Gears are what you’ll want to use in basically every situation and if you are just constantly learning your moves on foot you’ll rarely ever use deathblows outside of boss fights where it makes sense to just use your newest and thus most powerful one. The last four to six deathblows have elemental affinity and regularly do the most damage, but so few enemies are weak to or strong to elements it makes little sense to care if you even get to unlock more than one for your characters before the game ends. Only one of my characters, Citan, managed to learn all of his deathblows (about fifteen hours before the game ended even) and I can think of only one boss fight where knowing the four elemental deathblows proved useful (a fight against elite soldiers called The Elements where the bosses all went down quick anyway). I want to mention too, there’s a system where you can choose to forgo spending AP to build up points to unleash a combo of deathblows and similarly outside of two early fights, it goes basically unused because you’ll never need it. Perhaps what they should have done is let the meter carry over between fights even if it meant you could further stomp on bosses so it would actually see some use. As you might imagine, these elaborate combo attacks and elaborate animations take up a lot of time across every fight so it begins to feel bad rather than cool you are doing these attacks when it drags out fights you know you’ll stomp through. I wish the magic system offered some needed variety, but sadly outside of very select spells, you’ll learn a lot of skills you’ll barely use. I dug Citan, the combat MVP really, had a cool idea where one of his skills would let you set up a group cast, which I did use a few times for group healing and applying a speed buff, but again I found little use for group casting in general which was a shame.

Despite combat being a weaker element overall (it’s not always boring thankfully, sometimes it’s pleasant / inoffensive enough and story weight can paper over flaws for bosses) I don’t think that tells the full story of the gameplay here as in addition to solid enough dungeon and town exploration there were many notable gameplay highlights here though I do have two negative lowlights to share as well. I’ll start with the positive ones. I didn’t really know exactly what to expect with Xenogears because the most infamous element of this game is Disc 2 where it notably becomes unfinished for whatever reason, similar to something like Evangelion. I’ll discuss that in depth later, but I mention this now because I wasn’t expecting to encounter something like my first gameplay highlight, a fairly elaborate sequence where you alternate between two of your characters, Fei and Bart, doing very different tasks in this game famously known for being unfinished. Fei is serving as a distraction by fighting in a martial arts tournament while Bart must infiltrate a sewer system and swim against the flow of water to ultimately break into a castle where you have to sneak past or fight guards to plunder treasure and more importantly rescue Bart’s cousin held hostage. The amount of time you have to explore and how many guards you have to contend with directly corresponds to how long your fights in the fighting tournament take and which round you are in the fighting tournament determines how many guards are present as there are less guards as you approach the finals. This is a very cool segment that could easily have been a pain in practice, but it’s designed very well to move at an interesting and steady pace. Swimming against the current when water rushes out is demanding as you have to rapidly press a button to swim, but you have more than enough time to make some good progress and explore the sewers and castle for treasure. Similarly, while the stealth is very cool as I especially dug you could even peek out doors before you opened them, there isn’t much of a punishment for failure as the fights against guards aren’t tough so yes this segment is mainly focused on being fun above all else which is great. The martial arts tournament has some of the best fights in the game too. After a few classic battles, there’s an interesting one that is one of the two fights where using the deathblow combo system where you hoard AP to chain together deathblows makes sense and there is a big highlight one against Dan (a kid from Fei’s village that gets destroyed at the start of the adventure) where you should just sit there and take damage until he retreats. I was especially amused Dan knew a Kamehameha big energy beam attack as it feels like that would have been very useful when soldiers invaded Fei and Dan’s hometown.

Another gameplay highlight is the extended section in the Kislev Prison with the Gear “Battling” tournament. While it doesn’t mean too much, when you enter you have to immediately battle a few bosses to figure out what rank you are in prison which sets the stage well that this is an unpleasant place to be. Afterwards you’ll soon find yourself enrolling in a robot battling competition that actually has real time 3D fights similar to something like Tekken. While this is going on, mysterious murders are happening in the sewers so you’ll have to put the tournament on pause to discover and eliminate the “red monster” that’s taking out people who wander in. All told, it’s a fun sequence as you are thrown into it unexpectedly and have to deal with the tedium and frustration of being trapped in there, you get cool character moments with Fei, Citan, and Rico, and there’s a fairly fun minigame to engage with. Incidentally, I’d consider minigames in general to be another highlight of Xenogears. There aren’t too too many, but it’s the kind of thing that generally goes missing in a lot of modern RPGs. In addition to robot battling, which is probably the most involved, I dug Xenogear’s version of the card game Speed where you actually have to walk over the cards in order to place them in one of two piles. The CPU is very aggressive and when you first get introduced to it, there’s a cool goal to aim for as the champion on the Thames won’t let you challenge her until you defeat a few other players on board.

​I mentioned at the start Xenogears is an uneven experience, but it does prove interesting throughout and there’s two lowlights I want to highlight here that I think sort of get at that best. The first I want to talk about is the infamous Disc 2. In contrast to Disc 1 that functions like a normal RPG throughout where you explore the world map, visit towns and dungeons, engage with combat regularly, and have cutscenes as your party moves through the world, Disc 2 except for the very last stretch of final dungeon prep, optional stuff, and the final dungeon (which I did have a good time with incidentally) primarily features a visual novel like presentation to delivering the story and your characters will return just immediately for boss fights and two dungeons. In these visual novel sections, you’ll see a character sitting on a chair, narration will happen, and basically a slide show happens behind them. At first, I was a bit excited expecting a proper visual novel as the first two sections seemed introspective, but it’s not quite like that in practice. Too often it’s like the story is put on fast forward instead as “hey we went here, we found a giant robot or whatever, and then blew up the boss” which is just not exciting. Sometimes you will get proper in the world cutscenes mixed in here too, and there’s two flashback sequences I think are both well done and needed, but in general events that are bookended or covered entirely by the chair segments just don’t feel right. I’ve played some games where it goes “and that’s another story for another time” as some kind of DLC or audio drama hook, but Xenogears is the first time where I’ve seen a game with multiple story and potential gameplay sections so nakedly unfinished. (Closest I can think of is Sports Story which was an indie game) It’s fascinating to experience this however. As I mentioned there are some parts here that land like those two flashback sequences into Fei’s and the villains’ past that I think work well with control already largely stolen from you. While I was bored and frustrated at times and could only take so much of it each day, I was still entertained if that makes sense as it was a surreal experience.

​The other lowlight I want to mention took place in the middle of Disc 2. Xenogears has I feel a far above average number of boss fights and event fights and this even carries over into Disc 2 as there are a good deal of bosses even with normal gameplay vanishing. Many bosses in Xenogears take place back to back which is where the fuel mechanic for your robots can threaten to become a factor. Outside of the six final bosses and the situation I’m about to describe lack of fuel never was an issue, but yes, I found out in Disc 2 how horribly wrong a boss fight can go which ensured I’d be buying Z Chargers for the final dungeon to restore 500 fuel at a time. The final fight against Ramsus, a recurring rival character of sorts, and the battle against the Opiomorph are two fights that are back to back so you have no chance to refuel or recover health in between them. The problem here is in the first fight, Ramsus has a new ability that brings the party down to 1 HP which means you’ll need to heal quickly and burn through a ton of fuel to do so. I was unable to take him out unfortunately before he used the ability again so my party’s fuel was largely depleted and Fei in particular, my main damage dealer at the time, walked into the Opiomorph fight with 1 HP. The gimmick of the Opiomorph fight thankfully is that it had exactly one attack that at the start of the fight that would deal exactly zero damage to your party as long as you didn’t hit it (which would gradually raise its damage). This gave me a chance to refuel safely, but the issue is by default you can only recover 30 fuel for one robot at a time every turn and the cost to heal 30% of your HP was roughly 1,500 fuel at the time. You need fuel to act and deal damage so you also needed to refill your fuel beyond just healing yourself if you actually wanted to win the fight. If you do the math, you can see exactly why this was set to be a miserable time and because you’d have to rewatch a ton of cutscenes and gamble you could potentially be in a better spot if you decided to redo the prior fight, sunk cost hit quick. It ended up taking me hundreds of rounds of selecting charge over 80 minutes to repair my team’s robots and recharge the fuel I needed to feel confident I could take out the boss. I ended up recharging close to 9,000 fuel for Fei alone as I only felt good to tackle the boss when I had roughly 5,000 fuel in my tank after healing. I ended up burning 3,000 so I think I made the right call to feel safe that I would for sure win and never have to do that again. My Mom came by in the middle of the fight and I described why I was doing what I was doing in the fight and she commented as she left it was “as exciting as watching a faucet drip water” and yeah I think my Mom nailed that review of the boss fight lol. The Opiomorph fight may have been a disaster and the absolute low point of the game, but it’s one of my favorite moments playing Xenogears because the whole thing was so ridiculous to experience and look back on. Early on, to make it more tolerable I muted the game and threw on music to power through which was fun.

​Those are my thoughts on the gameplay of Xenogears, so for the rest of this blog I’m going to discuss how I felt about the story and characters. To kick this off I’ll start with how the game opens and the main premise for the adventure. Xenogears opens with a huge space ship flying through space and something is going wrong on board as things are breaking and exploding. The captain orders an evacuation and people escape in escape pods, but unfortunately the guns get commandeered and they get shot down. At this point all hope is lost and the captain awaits the end. You then see the ship crash on a planet and a woman emerge from the wreckage. At this point the story hard cuts to Fei who has been happily living in a remote peaceful village for a few years with amnesia. His best friends are about to get married and he is asked to visit the local doctor, Citan, who lives up in the mountainside to attend with things they’ll need for the wedding. On his way back home, Fei discovers the village has been caught in the middle of a battle between soldiers in giant robots. While evacuating others, Fei notices an unmanned robot and feels compelled to board it. While he successfully defends the town for a while, one of his best friends is gunned down in the crossfire and Fei loses it which for some reason causes a huge explosion that wipes out the enemy, town, and some of the townspeople who hadn’t evacuated far enough away. The next day, Fei wakes up with no memory after he lost control and is essentially banished from the village which together with what he did fills him with crushing sadness and regret. A little later on, Fei ends up meeting Bart who turns out to be the rightful heir to the Kingdom of Aveh who was believed to be killed by a traitor to the kingdom named Shakhan who is backed by the Empire of Solaris. As they work together and help each other, they end up forming a friendship that sets them on an adventure and path to ultimately challenge Solaris who has a complex and firm grip on the surface world.

​I ended up liking the story of Xenogears the most when it focused on the main party and their more human and relatable drama. Fei and Bart in particular have the most compelling motivations and roles in the greater story. Fei wants to atone for what happened to his village and ensure no one else will get caught in the crossfire of war even as he struggles with his personal fears, his uncertain place in the world, and the secrets his memory and body hides. Bart meanwhile is responsible for the entire crew of the Yggdrasil who supports him and the expectations his assassinated father had set for him as the prior King of Aveh. I enjoyed seeing the relationships he had with his crew, including Sigurd and Maison, as well as his cousin Margie and the bonds of friendship he forms with the party. The party as a whole is excellent incidentally and I pretty much like everyone in it. In addition to Fei and Bart, I was a big fan of Citan who is Fei’s greatest friend and ally even when he at times has to also work against him due to his position of directly and covertly serving the Emperor of Solaris that the game reveals early on. I liked Elly, the main heroine, a good deal as her defection from Solaris and the struggles she goes through are interesting (not to mention it is cool she’s the black mage of the group), though she is eventually dragged into multiple elements of the story I do not care for and is insultingly kicked out of the party (Fei needs to know she is safe :/ ) and later on is removed for most of the remaining story when Miang possesses her. The rest of the members, Rico, Billy, Maria, Chu-Chu, and Emeralda sadly don’t get as much attention as those first four, but most of them have decent chunks of the story focusing around them. I have to mention in particular I got a big kick out of the scene where Billy’s Gear is introduced as the orphanage kids somehow use their playground equipment to launch it. I also have to mention my favorite scene in the game was when Chu-Chu stepped up to save the day when everyone else’s Gears were disabled so she went off alone to take on the villain as triumphant music played. It was incredible. Disc 1 then as the party journeyed around the world was thus my favorite part of Xenogears overall. I enjoyed exploring Aveh, Nisan, Kislev, the Thames, Shevat, and Solaris as the party experienced their share of setbacks, but also had clear wins like Bart returning home to Bledavik, Billy reconciling with his father, and Maria stepping up to save the day when Shevat was invaded following Chu-Chu’s lead.

I mentioned in my prior paragraph I often loved the game the most when it was focused on the main party and their struggles. Conversely, I often liked the game the least when it focused on the villains. While the more minor villains like Shakhan often worked well, he was straightforwardly petty and heavily tied to Bart’s human drama, it was the main four villains I increasingly took issue with: Ramsus, Miang, Grahf, and Krellian. I’m going to weave in and out talking about the villains here in the next few paragraphs, but I’ll start with talking about Ramsus who is first introduced as a calm and collected officer in Solaris who slowly begins to lose his mind as he keeps losing fights against Fei. Ramsus I think was the best of the weak four main villains as at the end of the day you can sort of put aside his absolutely ridiculous backstory and just focus on his role in the story as a rival slowly losing his mind since he does have people who care about him, especially The Elements, which grounds him more than the others. But it absolutely must be said his backstory sucks lol. I genuinely was stunned when it was revealed that the reason Ramsus hates Fei is because he somehow overheard a conversation about Fei being born and how the villains were going to prioritize on using Fei to best achieve their ends over Ramsus when he was a still forming fetus in a science tube. It makes absolutely no sense and just makes me think less of the game as a whole because it’s so absurd.

This reveal happens in Disc 2 and I think is emblematic of how the story shifts in Disc 2 for the worse. Instead of the more grounded human struggles that defined Disc 1 even as it explored increasingly fantastical places like Shevat and Solaris, it increasingly features wild reveals and reversals that seem more concerned with being shocking than being satisfying and it increasingly features threads I was less interested in especially ones that are described as being predetermined. While the story eventually wraps around into a cool high concept pitch that works for me with what exactly happened and there are some great moments in there, the game still muddies many of them for no good reason which is frustrating and disappointing. In order to get into that then, let me talk about what actually happened in the backstory especially then for those who haven’t played Xenogears. Essentially the big reveal is that the space ship from the start of the game was holding a dangerous interplanetary weapon called Deus. The crew had shut it down / disabled it because it was too dangerous, but Deus reactivates itself and manages to destroy the crew housing it. When it crash lands on the planet, it creates Miang who gives birth to the humans that are then tasked with restoring Deus. 10,000 years pass where humans have had civilizations rise and fall a few times to get to the present day’s current state and that knowledge has largely been lost. Aside from the Miang factor where she has the ability to awaken and possess any woman at random to guide civilization towards resurrecting Deus which rubbed me the wrong way, I think Xenogears has a generally exciting backstory and of course the party being in opposition to Deus as it will wipe out humanity in its resurrection is a cool threat to fight against. The other major backstory reveals regard Fei and I think these too were exciting. Fei’s most distant ancestor was the only survivor of the crash of the space ship at the start of the game and he made contact with the Zohar engine that helped power Deus. From here, that survivor would reincarnate through history and hold onto the memories of his past lives even if they were all individual people. When it comes to Fei specifically, he also had his personality split following his mother sacrificing herself to protect him when he was still a child.

​So let me get back to talking about the villains again. I just mentioned Miang’s role in the story and I wasn’t a big fan of the concept I think in part because the story was already very concerned with what a woman’s role should be in a relationship which completely stunk when it saw Elly being kicked out of the party. Later suggestions that Miang would eventually come to remember her past lives and be conflicted by them came a little too late and I’d have to sort of imagine where that could have possibly come into play and would have to square that against the actions of the main Miang you fight against multiple times in the story. It just didn’t really work for me which is a shame because she is an important villain as the one closest to Deus. Incidentally, her role sort of aligned with the “predetermined” elements of the story I was less a fan of. Part of Deus’ resurrection was that it would need all kinds of materials to revive itself including organic materials so it used a lot of humans as materials essentially after triggering mutations in them with the help of Krelian. But where it got weird is this idea that humans were sort of programmed to appear at these mysterious facilities and sort of accept their fate which I just didn’t care for. Xenoblade Chronicles had a similar storyline with what happened to the Entia when the big villain wants to revive itself and I think that worked for me a little more since they did have a plan to fight back and they didn’t just accept it when the horrible monster transformations occurred.

​The reveals with Grahf are what I’d point to most for Xenogears muddying good reveals and moments for no good reason. After some cool flashbacks that reveal Grahf was Lacan, one of Fei’s past lives, and that he was an entity that had survived by possessing others you get to the reveal that at some point Grahf had possessed Fei’s father Khan as his latest victim. This culminates in a series of odd back and forth reveals of who is actually in control between Grahf and Khan and flip flops just enough that it becomes hard to know what the takeaway should be. Like at one point it looks like Khan had won out and so Fei gets an emotional reunion with his father that feels satisfying. But then you get actually no it was Grahf all along and the scene switches to one of horror and Fei knew all along somehow, before immediately swapping over to him protecting Fei from the Zohar suggesting maybe it was Khan in control? It’s like why do this except to have dramatic reversals for drama’s sake. It starts to feel alienating and I started clinging to moments that felt like proper human drama where human motivations won like the scene where Fei’s Mom fights back against Miang and is able to save her son in the last minute. 

​I don’t have too much to say about the biggest villain in Xenogears, Krelian, which is kind of a problem. For the longest time he just doesn’t have a lot of screen time even though he is the guy ultimately responsible for the current world state more than most as he’s the more active leader of Solaris and he’s the one behind various inhumane experimental research, the virus that ends up killing so many, and then again the resurrection of Deus that kills nearly everyone else. Fei has a good rebuttal speech to him talking about the value of being human in their final battle as Krelian is set to leave the universe with the Zohar, but it gets very weirdly undermined in the very next scene where Fei forgives him for everything after Elly told him “well he was thinking about humans more than anyone.” The complete reversal in Fei’s thought process and in light of everything makes absolutely no sense and is just such a whatever note to end the adventure on. So it goes I guess.

The last story elements I want to quickly discuss were the two story beats I knew before I started. First, I knew there was a scene with all of the characters on crosses which included Chu-Chu which was funny out of context, but it was even funnier in context as it’s actually all of the characters in their robots and then again a giant Chu-Chu on one of the crosses which just looks even more goofy than I imagined. The other which is the main thing I want to talk about, is that the very last thing the game ends on after credits roll is text that says: Xenogears Episode V THE END.” This is first kind of funny knowing they never made any of the other five episodes they had planned, but it is kind of a bummer to end on as well because it definitely sparks the imagination one last time of just what the prior story could have been about and where the story could potentially go from there. Before I heard some details from talking to others, I imagined perhaps other episodes could have focused on the civilization that built Deus and maybe what became of them when the ship exploded. I’ve since learned one episode would focus on that society and three of the episodes would have dealt with elements of Fei’s past lives. I definitely appreciated Xenogears offered one last major thing to contemplate and imagine about as the game ends because it otherwise swiftly ends after the battle is won and the party reunites.

​That concludes my review of Xenogears! Overall as I mentioned I’m glad I played it because it certainly was an interesting game from start to finish even if it isn’t going to go down as one of my favorite games. I’m hoping one day Namco Bandai will rerelease the Xenosaga games, because I’d love to play the three Xeno games I haven’t played. Thank you for reading my latest blog and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any thoughts or have played Xenogears I’d be curious to hear what you think! Publicly, I’m most easily found on BlueSky @justinmikos.bsky.social. See you next time!