Has anyone ever played the other Xeno games?

[The Geek]

1 hour ago, kingddd said:

What? Most battles are very short most of them lasting mins or even seconds.  The final chapter lasts an hour because of the amount of cutscenes.  The actual final boss only takes about 5-8 mins on average if you don't know some of the exploits.  If you know how to exploit the game, the final boss takes like 10 seconds.

If you're saying most battles takes too long then you're doing something VERY VERY Wrong.

I was watching my friend play and they did most of their combat in Skells, which I know becomes less than optimal once you get near the end of the game and before you get the super Skells.

[kingddd]

4 hours ago, The Geek said:

I was watching my friend play and they did most of their combat in Skells, which I know becomes less than optimal once you get near the end of the game and before you get the super Skells.

The thing is, your friend is using the long way to fight that doesn't mean majority of the combat in X takes forever.  If anything it's only your friend that is using the long drawn method way to fight.  In reality there is a significant amount of tools and Arts available already to fight even in mid game that makes most of the combat last only a few seconds in skells and ground combat.  I know this because I replayed the game almost 9 times and I'm not even an expert in building my characters, or even infinite overdrive early game and even in my first playthrough most of my battles last only a min or less. So if anything your friend's choice of playing is not the best way to assess how fast the game and combat goes for majotiy of the playthrough because he chose to use the slow tools to play his game when reality there are a lot of ways you can utilize your skells to pretty much destroy enemies really fast.

There are already too many misconceptions of the game itself already so I'm a little pet peeved with most of people who don't even play the game assess it from their friends or some guy on youtube who usually is playing the game wrong.  Xenoblade X is a very anti-LP game and no video footage or watching someone play the game is the best way to assess the game.  You gotta actually play the game to actually judge it.

Edited September 5, 2017 by kingddd

[Slumber]

12 hours ago, The Geek said:

Xenogears has aged very poorly in terms of gameplay, with the combat depending entirely on spamming hidden combos that deal massive damage.

This isn't true.

Once you unlock the combo, which is done automatically, the game tells you the combo in the status menu. AND when you press the first button OF a combo in combat, the game will tell you which combos you'll get with the next series of button presses.

You might be confusing Xenogears with Legend of Legaia, where you did actually have to figure out button combos to unlock new techs.

Edited September 5, 2017 by Slumber

[Interdimensional Observer]

2 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Legend of Legaia, where you did actually have to figure out button combos to unlock new techs

People in the towns did tip you off to new combos though if you didn't use a guide/discover them on your own. Plus Hyper Arts were learned as soon as you got the book needed to use one.

I spoiled myself on LoL's plot, and I never have finished the game, nor can I since the PS3 apparently freezes at a certain point, but I have done up to the final dungeon of the second land. The game is good and I wish it got remade. The fighting game flair of it was unique, and I liked the magic system. 

[Omegaprism]

6 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

People in the towns did tip you off to new combos though if you didn't use a guide/discover them on your own. Plus Hyper Arts were learned as soon as you got the book needed to use one.

I spoiled myself on LoL's plot, and I never have finished the game, nor can I since the PS3 apparently freezes at a certain point, but I have done up to the final dungeon of the second land. The game is good and I wish it got remade. The fighting game flair of it was unique, and I liked the magic system. 

I friggin' love Legend of Legaia so much. The whole Seru creature design philosophy as a whole was so cool, and while I will admit that it was never the prettiest girl at school, something about the combat and the world and the music all just fit together in a way that charmed me. The fact that no one has been able to solve the emulation issue that causes a progress-halting bug at almost the end of the game is heartbreaking to me. I've heard that it's a problem exclusive to the US version, but I'm from the US, so that doesn't help me that much. I wish so hard that someone would do a rerelease just so that, when my ps1 finally kicks the bucket, I will still be able to play Legaia.

Since this is not a Legaia remake thread, though, I'll get back on topic.

I played the everloving pants off of Xenogears, and loved every minute of it except for the long, long scenes where other characters are doing a lot of talking, and Fei was just sitting there in silence. The combat was fun, especially once you learned a bunch of special combos with everyone and hopped into your gears. I wish Monolithsoft would stop trying to reinvent the wheel a little bit with mecha combat and take a page out of their old Xenogears playbook in that regard. As for the story, it is a song that will be sung for years to come about how Xenogears was planned to be Final Fantasy VIII, and then halfway through development Squaresoft changed their minds, cut funding, and reassigned a chunk of staff to what would go on to be the Final Fantasy VIII we all know. I know a Xenogears remake will probably not happen in my lifetime, but I dream that they will give it a chance, and not so much expand on the story as actually make the parts of the game that were reduced to characters sitting in chairs narrating what could have been some really engaging and intense events.

Oh, and they could also stand to change Emeralda's in-game voice clips if you do her sidequest. Just sayin'.

I beat Xenosaga 1, and wow was that a disappointment after Xenogears! If you skip all of the non-playable cutscenes, it's actually a very short game (somewhere in the realm of 4 hours if you do most of the sidequests, of which there are few). The story was positively opaque, and the game was just not that fun. It was kind of shallow. I will admit that I was one of the numerous consumers who got fooled by the marketing into thinking that it was a prequel to Gears. Years later, when some PR stooge said, "We only meant to say that it will share the style and themes of Xenogears," I was no less sad. The whole trilogy seemed to touch on these big ideas that then never got explored or even properly explained, and making things even worse was all the imagery and character designs cribbed directly from Xenogears. Someone was saying how watching someone else play Xenoblade doesn't do it justice. In the case of Xenosaga, the opposite is true. You're better off watching it.

I haven't finished Xenoblade yet. I've twice fallen into the trap of trying to do a bunch of sidequests to build affinity with characters I haven't been using, and then burned out a little bit and switched to something else (Metal Gear Rising, maybe). Currently I'm in Sword Valley, I think. The main story is alright and the combat can be tense and exciting, or immensely frustrating as you get ambushed by some level 90-something supermonster while trying to explore a new area, get crushed, and sent all the way back to the last landmark that you found, which could be at the beginning of a pretty big zone. I think the main draw that keeps people invested is probably the charm of the main cast, and that includes the villains. By themselves the heroes are a little vanilla, but when pitted against the over-the-top evil of the antagonists it makes for a nice contrast.

Speaking of not finishing Xeno games, I've been screwing around in Chapter 11 of Xenoblade Chronicles X for like eight months! My excuse this time is that my son started getting properly ambulatory, and I can't really use the TV while he's running around, throwing plastic dinosaurs and toy cars, and trying to take my controller because if daddy's doing it, he has to do it too. My opinion is thus: It has a lot in common with its predecessor, but several refinements of ideas presented in Xenoblade. The sidequest system is, like, a thousand times better, but the main plot barely exists.

My tl;dr recommendation is thus: If you really liked XCX, try Xenoblade out, and give it a few hours to get started. The start is pretty slow. It will take about the entire first half of the game for you to finally get all the characters and unlock all of the different little systems you can use to make your game experience more enjoyable, but once you do, the sky is the limit.

Find a youtube playlist or a Let's Play for Xenosaga. If you're lucky you can get one with some good commentary that'll make it less of a slog, because there is a lot of footage to watch, and most of it is non-playable.

I love Xenogears, but I was 16 years old when it came out, and was taking my first steps into the PS1 era of JRPGs, which to this day I still consider their heyday. I say try it out, because there are a lot of ideas and concepts explored in Monolithsoft's modern games that were explored first in Xenogears. Be prepared for text dumps, though, especially in disc 2.