Ok, so I just came off of finishing the import of Xenosaga episode II and I feel like writing a bit about my experience with it over the last week. For the most part I'm going to try not to compare it with ep1 and review it as it's own game.
So, every once and a while there comes a game that breaks the boundaries of game budget and shows that with a talented staff you can make a game that is excellent in every regard regardless of how much or how little you are funded. These games showcase talent, they show that the people making these games are true gamers themselves and make games that they would want to play. We were lucky enough to see this early this year with the excellent Shadow Hearts 2 which basically excelled in every category from graphics and gameplay to characters and dungeons. Over this past week, me and Duckroll and probably several other importers got a chance to play a game that is basically the complete opposite of that; A game where everything has gone wrong to form the ultimate mess of a game that makes you wonder just what happened in the stages of game development that caused good staff to make something so torturous and god-awful.
One of the first things you notice is that similar to ep1, Monolith Soft. is lacking in good programmers. When you first go into a battle in ep2, the game pauses and loads an empty area, then chuggingly loads each of your characters in one by one and then does the same for the enemy all while the music kinda pauses to wait for everything to finally load so it can start. Needless to say...this is not a good thing. At least unlike ep1 the loading between areas is always fine and cutscene loading isn't anything too bad.
The next thing you notice is that the gameplay has gone to hell and back. See it seems that someone at Namco most likely asked Monolith to slightly dumb down the game systems as ep1 was filled with pretty in-depth almost western rpg like character stat modeling which may have turned off your average joe. Well sadly Monolith Soft. never learned the idea of 'broadening your market' instead they took the Flintstones way of 'remove anything that would cause you to think'. The Ether branching skill tree of ep1 is gone, and replaced with a skill system where everyone has access to the same exact skills well there goes all your unique characters. Basically the only difference between the characters are their base stats and their tech attacks. Speaking of tech attacks, the menu (which is badly designed and has a clunky interface as did ep1) has a sub-menu of "tech" which allows you to look at your 6 or so moves assigned to buttons combinations of square/square, triangle/triangle, circle, and variations of those. These techs will never change, you will never gain a single new move throughout the entire game. Not only that but you cannot do a single thing in the 'tech' sub-menu such as modifying your tech attacks and making them stronger. Nope for the most part the way you are battling in the first hour is the exact same way you will be battling against the final boss except your base stats will be at a higher level and you'll have some more skills/spell.
The game, similar to Shadow Hearts 2, features a combo system that is centered around you finding the 'break' pattern of each enemy which is basically a mini-game of guessing 2-3 combinations. Once you find the right one you can lift the enemy in the air or beat them into the ground and do 2x damage. While this is fun at first, you soon realize there is not much to the battles. Because enemies have high HP your only choice is to wait, build up your boost meter and 'stock'(the amount of hits you can do in a combo) meter and then do the break pattern (which is always shown on the enemy after the 1st time) and then launch and keep hitting attack/boost. Kill 1 enemy, repeat on the next. Even the bosses are just a matter of saving up for a big combo and then doing it and then saving up and then doing it again. While the game is difficult like the first game, that difficulty comes from bosses and enemies counter-boosting and having high HP's while dealing high damage. Basically besides the final boss or two, you don't really have to think at all in the battle system, just repeat an already setup structure. If you try to create your own freedom and play your own way...you'll probably die every time. If the designers want you to do attack A on the enemy then every other attack will do hardly any damage, but suddenly attack A does 20x damage on that enemy. So the game is basically 'guess what move the director wants you to use now!" which is frankly retarded game design IMO. You also get the additional menu commands of 'move' which doesn't work real well (if I'm standing behind an enemy, why do I get hit with an all-character attack to the guys in front of him @_@), 'escape' (which only 2 characters can use), and 'special' (which is a pretty useless option that only 1 character can use). The game also has a feature of 'switch character' which is basically the same as how FFX did it except the game pauses for 1-2 secs to load the other character into the battle. I would talk about the duel-techs that were feature prominently in the trailers, except that if you only play the main story you get like 2 the entire game. They don't really do anything special damage-wise and are mainly just neat to look at once. To get duel-techs you have to either steal them from bosses, or for the most part they are prizes in the soon to be discussed 'G2 campaign'
As if the human battle system wasn't flawed enough, the designers decided to make a robot battle system that would bore you to tears. Adding in robot dungeons was a good idea as saying the A.G.W.S. robots in ep1 were under-used is a very large understatement. In the robot dungeons, you pilot 3 ES robots and only 2 are allowed in battle. Only 1 of these robots can use spells or in otherwords: heal. Your ES machines in battle have 3 choices: physical attack, gun/beam attack, or special. Special costs energy which you can stock up on each round. There are no breaks or combos while playing as the ES, nor is there much to do other than tap punch/punch/punch which is conviniently the square button. There were many ES battles where I just kept tapping square with one hand while reading forums with the other as the battles were just boring me incredibly. Bosses are basically just a matter of "guess the 1 attack that you have that does 20x damage" which again is just a waste of time. Sadly there is no robot upgrading or buying of new robots like ep1, instead you can just equip 3 items on each ES (same with equiping on the characters) and that's about it.
Also the ES robots are very slow. When navigating the dungeons with them you will feel like you are walking through a dungeon at 5mph, even the character walking speed is at least 5x as fast. This just kills most of the satsifaction you would expect to get out of the "hey I'm piloting giant cool looking robots! Awesome" feeling.
Speaking of slow, because of the high HP nature of the enemies most battles range from 2-3 minutes early on to 8-10 minutes for each enemy in the final dungeon. Luckily there are no random encounters, but unluckily you cannot avoid most of the enemies as they are placed directly between you and the door/path you need to get to.
Which leads to the dungeon design. Which for the most part is the best part of the game. The game's dungeon are quite large. After you get past the intro 2 dungeons, you'll notice each dungeon taking 2-5 hours. These are nice long dungeons with usually great design and some good puzzles. The only bad part about the dungeon design is that the developers love the "go to the west side and grab key A, for the door A on the furthest east side" way of dungeon advancement. So you spend quite a bit of time walking in the game.
Instead of providing various subquests. The game gives you the "G2 Campaign" which is a collection of 50 little mini-games to do to help people out. What you do is you find a person on the street, talk to them and they will give you a mission/mini-game to do and by doing it you get skills and items and other good things. For the most part there is no general dead time in the game for doing these, so it's entirely optional and whether you want to spend hours searching for guy X's lost cat well that's up to you. Sadly when the game comes out in the US the package will probably proclaim "over 50/60 hours of gameplay!" which for the most part is just taking the max if you do all 50 of these mini-games, because it sure as hell ain't the story length.
I finished the game in 23 hours other people on the internet have finished it as fast as 17 hours. My 23 hour mark was not 'rushing it' as I fought every enemy in every dungeon and explored every area to get all the treasures. I didn't mess around with the G2 stuff, so this is the time length of the actual main game: between 18-24 hours. While episode 1 was not the longest game out there, my first time through took me about 40 hours, and the faster people were usually doing about 35 if they took their time. So basically ep2 is half the length of ep1. Also note when I said the dungeons took 2-6 hours each, and you can basically guess how small and how little actually happens in the game. I never thought I would be comparing Xenosaga to the .Hack series, but ep2 is basically the size of on of the middle .Hack parts. You will be shocked and saddened when you reach disc2 after only 8 hours of play in 1 or 2 nights, but luckily disc2 has a lot more content. There are also interesting little pieces during the game that indicate maybe a small chunk of the game was cut for one reason or another and ended up only as a narrative similar to Xenogear's disc2.
On last thing I want to touch upon in the gameplay front is money. So they've cut out any unique skills, any tech attack modifications, any new move learning or sense of progression; well what's left to simplify even more. Oh yes, there is NO MONEY in the game. But instead of designing a world around not needing money, the game basically plays like ep1 if you imagine yourself never having any cash. This means you can't buy items. Suddenly every item you get after a battle becomes rare. This might've been good if the only the high-end items were rare, but by the time I was at the final boss the total amount of low-level-revive type items numbered at five. Anything above the smallest potion/ether type item was numbering around one or two. So basically by eliminating money from the game, they've also eliminated items too since you'll be wanting to save your precious few items for the end bosses. I really have to wonder who made all these brilliant game design choices ^^;;
Now on to the most important part of a Xeno~ game, the story. One of the aspects that made Xenosaga episode 1 quite good IMO was the character development. There were many scenes of people just standing or sitting and talking naturally. It's through these scenes that we learn to like and care about the characters and even identify or feel sorry for people not in the main cast. Remember the scene on the white beach with Andrews, or the scene with the fireflies on the Durandal? These were the scenes that made ep1 great, that brought the characters to life. If ep1 was an epic space drama, then epII is a b-movie action popcorn flick directed by Michael Bay. For the most part there is no character development in ep2 besides Jr./Albedo/Nigredo. Everyone else just does things, or is just there. Need a reason for why antagonist A is standing before you? Nah, doesn't matter we don't need to know anything about them, let's just fight. Wonder how you got to or what you are even doing in Dungeon B? Nah, were here lets go solve puzzles and fight a boss at the end. Things just happen. It's like the director said "I want an explosion" and the writer said "what next", "well...hmm let's have a car drive out on fire while a whale is in the backseat and the main character has to shoot it and eat popcorn while doing it!", so replies the director. That's what a good amount of ep2 is...you could almost call it "nonsense" basically bad writing at it's finest. That's not to say the story of ep2 is not good. No, if you pull back and look at the overall major plot points it's still quite an interesting story and there are a handful of great scenes and some of them even have very nice dialogue sequences indeed. But overall it seems that the writer took Takahashi's main plot summary and then wrote in a ton of events that serve no real purpose other than to extend game length. Also one thing many will be wondering is "does ep2 answer many of ep1's questions?" The answer quite frankly is a disappointing 'no'. Ep2 answers a few minor things, but all the original major points that you hoped to get more info on are for the most part not touched upon or maybe get a 10 sec scene in riddles. Then Ep2 adds a bunch of new questions of it's own. Takahashi said recently that Ep3 will wrap up the Shion/KOS-MOS story which we would assume means wrap up the current arc. Well if that's true, then ep3 better be 80 hours long and be nothing but non-stop answers because really there's just too many questions at this point and you gotta wonder if they have all the answers to back them up. By the time you finish ep2 you will feel like you've basically played ep1_the_cut_for_budget_last_third and will be hoping that more stuff actually happens regarding the main story in ep3.
Also if there's one thing that shows the decline from ep1->ep2 in storytelling it's the new characters of ep2. Every one of the new characters created for ep2 is lacking in nearly any development (except one of the bigger antagonists who gets a few scenes) and are barely in the story. They show up and leave making you wonder who created these characters and why? Because ep2 sure doesn't give the answer to why you should care about any of these new people.
Graphically the game is pretty good. The realistic look is very subjective, but one thing that shows, is that Monolith Soft. really couldn't handle realistic character models on the PS2. The characters have blocky PS1 hands and boxy rectangular arms and legs. The faces look good (one of the new characters looks excellent in particular) but they usually only have 1 or 2 expressions that are switched between for every cutscene. The dungeon graphics are great though, and the battle graphics work perfect.
The last thing I'll want to touch on is sadly the worst part of the game. "How could it get any worse?" you may ask. But it does: The music
While it's one thing to not use Yasunori Mitsuda (one of the best game composers out there IMO), it's another thing to get 2 people who have done quality stuff before...and have them turn out some of their worst work yet. Kajiura's music is completely non-memorable and even non-present as quiet little bumps in the background or generic action music. There are maybe 3 tracks that are excellent, but those are used probably 3 times. The lack of impact and actually noticability of the music really hurts the game cutscenes. Whereas a talk between two people could have had menacing music, or sad piano, instead you get just some quiet beats or random tappings of a piano. The cutscenes lose an incredible amount of emphasis and just overall quality from this problem.
Then you have Shinji Hosoe. Dear Shinji Hosoe, you are making music for an rpg not an 80's techno dating game. Hosei's music is just so bad it's embarrising. I mean Kajiura's stuff is non-memorable but I wouldn't say it's bad, whereas I will say straight out that in my opinion Hosoe's music is absolutely terrible and some of the worst music I've heard outside of bad doujin dating simulators. The main theme for the first city you come to sounds straight out of Tokimeki Memorial...and I know because I've played it
If an Ep3 is made, and judging by the short length of this one and early sales, it will be made. Somebody really needs to learn to get their act together. They need to get back to good writing, good battle system, good stat developing, and finally for the love of god they need to get on their knees and beg Mitsuda to do the score. But then again if ep2 has taught me anything about Monolith Soft. it's that their favorite choice in game development...is a bad one >_<
Here I will add a disclaimer: I am a huge Xeno~ nut and despite all the problems and all the times I was yelling about how unbelievably stupid the current part of the game is; despite all that, I still enjoyed every minute of the story as in the end it was more Xenosaga.
So I give two scores:
As a huge fan of Takahashi and all things Xenogears/Saga I'd give ep2 - 7.5/10
As trying to be objective and weighing the faults of the game vs. the pros - 6/10
Oh and to be fair I should say that the night I finished XS ep1 import I wrote up a similar long winded review and gave it a 9.4/10
So, every once and a while there comes a game that breaks the boundaries of game budget and shows that with a talented staff you can make a game that is excellent in every regard regardless of how much or how little you are funded. These games showcase talent, they show that the people making these games are true gamers themselves and make games that they would want to play. We were lucky enough to see this early this year with the excellent Shadow Hearts 2 which basically excelled in every category from graphics and gameplay to characters and dungeons. Over this past week, me and Duckroll and probably several other importers got a chance to play a game that is basically the complete opposite of that; A game where everything has gone wrong to form the ultimate mess of a game that makes you wonder just what happened in the stages of game development that caused good staff to make something so torturous and god-awful.
One of the first things you notice is that similar to ep1, Monolith Soft. is lacking in good programmers. When you first go into a battle in ep2, the game pauses and loads an empty area, then chuggingly loads each of your characters in one by one and then does the same for the enemy all while the music kinda pauses to wait for everything to finally load so it can start. Needless to say...this is not a good thing. At least unlike ep1 the loading between areas is always fine and cutscene loading isn't anything too bad.
The next thing you notice is that the gameplay has gone to hell and back. See it seems that someone at Namco most likely asked Monolith to slightly dumb down the game systems as ep1 was filled with pretty in-depth almost western rpg like character stat modeling which may have turned off your average joe. Well sadly Monolith Soft. never learned the idea of 'broadening your market' instead they took the Flintstones way of 'remove anything that would cause you to think'. The Ether branching skill tree of ep1 is gone, and replaced with a skill system where everyone has access to the same exact skills well there goes all your unique characters. Basically the only difference between the characters are their base stats and their tech attacks. Speaking of tech attacks, the menu (which is badly designed and has a clunky interface as did ep1) has a sub-menu of "tech" which allows you to look at your 6 or so moves assigned to buttons combinations of square/square, triangle/triangle, circle, and variations of those. These techs will never change, you will never gain a single new move throughout the entire game. Not only that but you cannot do a single thing in the 'tech' sub-menu such as modifying your tech attacks and making them stronger. Nope for the most part the way you are battling in the first hour is the exact same way you will be battling against the final boss except your base stats will be at a higher level and you'll have some more skills/spell.
The game, similar to Shadow Hearts 2, features a combo system that is centered around you finding the 'break' pattern of each enemy which is basically a mini-game of guessing 2-3 combinations. Once you find the right one you can lift the enemy in the air or beat them into the ground and do 2x damage. While this is fun at first, you soon realize there is not much to the battles. Because enemies have high HP your only choice is to wait, build up your boost meter and 'stock'(the amount of hits you can do in a combo) meter and then do the break pattern (which is always shown on the enemy after the 1st time) and then launch and keep hitting attack/boost. Kill 1 enemy, repeat on the next. Even the bosses are just a matter of saving up for a big combo and then doing it and then saving up and then doing it again. While the game is difficult like the first game, that difficulty comes from bosses and enemies counter-boosting and having high HP's while dealing high damage. Basically besides the final boss or two, you don't really have to think at all in the battle system, just repeat an already setup structure. If you try to create your own freedom and play your own way...you'll probably die every time. If the designers want you to do attack A on the enemy then every other attack will do hardly any damage, but suddenly attack A does 20x damage on that enemy. So the game is basically 'guess what move the director wants you to use now!" which is frankly retarded game design IMO. You also get the additional menu commands of 'move' which doesn't work real well (if I'm standing behind an enemy, why do I get hit with an all-character attack to the guys in front of him @_@), 'escape' (which only 2 characters can use), and 'special' (which is a pretty useless option that only 1 character can use). The game also has a feature of 'switch character' which is basically the same as how FFX did it except the game pauses for 1-2 secs to load the other character into the battle. I would talk about the duel-techs that were feature prominently in the trailers, except that if you only play the main story you get like 2 the entire game. They don't really do anything special damage-wise and are mainly just neat to look at once. To get duel-techs you have to either steal them from bosses, or for the most part they are prizes in the soon to be discussed 'G2 campaign'
As if the human battle system wasn't flawed enough, the designers decided to make a robot battle system that would bore you to tears. Adding in robot dungeons was a good idea as saying the A.G.W.S. robots in ep1 were under-used is a very large understatement. In the robot dungeons, you pilot 3 ES robots and only 2 are allowed in battle. Only 1 of these robots can use spells or in otherwords: heal. Your ES machines in battle have 3 choices: physical attack, gun/beam attack, or special. Special costs energy which you can stock up on each round. There are no breaks or combos while playing as the ES, nor is there much to do other than tap punch/punch/punch which is conviniently the square button. There were many ES battles where I just kept tapping square with one hand while reading forums with the other as the battles were just boring me incredibly. Bosses are basically just a matter of "guess the 1 attack that you have that does 20x damage" which again is just a waste of time. Sadly there is no robot upgrading or buying of new robots like ep1, instead you can just equip 3 items on each ES (same with equiping on the characters) and that's about it.
Also the ES robots are very slow. When navigating the dungeons with them you will feel like you are walking through a dungeon at 5mph, even the character walking speed is at least 5x as fast. This just kills most of the satsifaction you would expect to get out of the "hey I'm piloting giant cool looking robots! Awesome" feeling.
Speaking of slow, because of the high HP nature of the enemies most battles range from 2-3 minutes early on to 8-10 minutes for each enemy in the final dungeon. Luckily there are no random encounters, but unluckily you cannot avoid most of the enemies as they are placed directly between you and the door/path you need to get to.
Which leads to the dungeon design. Which for the most part is the best part of the game. The game's dungeon are quite large. After you get past the intro 2 dungeons, you'll notice each dungeon taking 2-5 hours. These are nice long dungeons with usually great design and some good puzzles. The only bad part about the dungeon design is that the developers love the "go to the west side and grab key A, for the door A on the furthest east side" way of dungeon advancement. So you spend quite a bit of time walking in the game.
Instead of providing various subquests. The game gives you the "G2 Campaign" which is a collection of 50 little mini-games to do to help people out. What you do is you find a person on the street, talk to them and they will give you a mission/mini-game to do and by doing it you get skills and items and other good things. For the most part there is no general dead time in the game for doing these, so it's entirely optional and whether you want to spend hours searching for guy X's lost cat well that's up to you. Sadly when the game comes out in the US the package will probably proclaim "over 50/60 hours of gameplay!" which for the most part is just taking the max if you do all 50 of these mini-games, because it sure as hell ain't the story length.
I finished the game in 23 hours other people on the internet have finished it as fast as 17 hours. My 23 hour mark was not 'rushing it' as I fought every enemy in every dungeon and explored every area to get all the treasures. I didn't mess around with the G2 stuff, so this is the time length of the actual main game: between 18-24 hours. While episode 1 was not the longest game out there, my first time through took me about 40 hours, and the faster people were usually doing about 35 if they took their time. So basically ep2 is half the length of ep1. Also note when I said the dungeons took 2-6 hours each, and you can basically guess how small and how little actually happens in the game. I never thought I would be comparing Xenosaga to the .Hack series, but ep2 is basically the size of on of the middle .Hack parts. You will be shocked and saddened when you reach disc2 after only 8 hours of play in 1 or 2 nights, but luckily disc2 has a lot more content. There are also interesting little pieces during the game that indicate maybe a small chunk of the game was cut for one reason or another and ended up only as a narrative similar to Xenogear's disc2.
On last thing I want to touch upon in the gameplay front is money. So they've cut out any unique skills, any tech attack modifications, any new move learning or sense of progression; well what's left to simplify even more. Oh yes, there is NO MONEY in the game. But instead of designing a world around not needing money, the game basically plays like ep1 if you imagine yourself never having any cash. This means you can't buy items. Suddenly every item you get after a battle becomes rare. This might've been good if the only the high-end items were rare, but by the time I was at the final boss the total amount of low-level-revive type items numbered at five. Anything above the smallest potion/ether type item was numbering around one or two. So basically by eliminating money from the game, they've also eliminated items too since you'll be wanting to save your precious few items for the end bosses. I really have to wonder who made all these brilliant game design choices ^^;;
Now on to the most important part of a Xeno~ game, the story. One of the aspects that made Xenosaga episode 1 quite good IMO was the character development. There were many scenes of people just standing or sitting and talking naturally. It's through these scenes that we learn to like and care about the characters and even identify or feel sorry for people not in the main cast. Remember the scene on the white beach with Andrews, or the scene with the fireflies on the Durandal? These were the scenes that made ep1 great, that brought the characters to life. If ep1 was an epic space drama, then epII is a b-movie action popcorn flick directed by Michael Bay. For the most part there is no character development in ep2 besides Jr./Albedo/Nigredo. Everyone else just does things, or is just there. Need a reason for why antagonist A is standing before you? Nah, doesn't matter we don't need to know anything about them, let's just fight. Wonder how you got to or what you are even doing in Dungeon B? Nah, were here lets go solve puzzles and fight a boss at the end. Things just happen. It's like the director said "I want an explosion" and the writer said "what next", "well...hmm let's have a car drive out on fire while a whale is in the backseat and the main character has to shoot it and eat popcorn while doing it!", so replies the director. That's what a good amount of ep2 is...you could almost call it "nonsense" basically bad writing at it's finest. That's not to say the story of ep2 is not good. No, if you pull back and look at the overall major plot points it's still quite an interesting story and there are a handful of great scenes and some of them even have very nice dialogue sequences indeed. But overall it seems that the writer took Takahashi's main plot summary and then wrote in a ton of events that serve no real purpose other than to extend game length. Also one thing many will be wondering is "does ep2 answer many of ep1's questions?" The answer quite frankly is a disappointing 'no'. Ep2 answers a few minor things, but all the original major points that you hoped to get more info on are for the most part not touched upon or maybe get a 10 sec scene in riddles. Then Ep2 adds a bunch of new questions of it's own. Takahashi said recently that Ep3 will wrap up the Shion/KOS-MOS story which we would assume means wrap up the current arc. Well if that's true, then ep3 better be 80 hours long and be nothing but non-stop answers because really there's just too many questions at this point and you gotta wonder if they have all the answers to back them up. By the time you finish ep2 you will feel like you've basically played ep1_the_cut_for_budget_last_third and will be hoping that more stuff actually happens regarding the main story in ep3.
Also if there's one thing that shows the decline from ep1->ep2 in storytelling it's the new characters of ep2. Every one of the new characters created for ep2 is lacking in nearly any development (except one of the bigger antagonists who gets a few scenes) and are barely in the story. They show up and leave making you wonder who created these characters and why? Because ep2 sure doesn't give the answer to why you should care about any of these new people.
Graphically the game is pretty good. The realistic look is very subjective, but one thing that shows, is that Monolith Soft. really couldn't handle realistic character models on the PS2. The characters have blocky PS1 hands and boxy rectangular arms and legs. The faces look good (one of the new characters looks excellent in particular) but they usually only have 1 or 2 expressions that are switched between for every cutscene. The dungeon graphics are great though, and the battle graphics work perfect.
The last thing I'll want to touch on is sadly the worst part of the game. "How could it get any worse?" you may ask. But it does: The music
While it's one thing to not use Yasunori Mitsuda (one of the best game composers out there IMO), it's another thing to get 2 people who have done quality stuff before...and have them turn out some of their worst work yet. Kajiura's music is completely non-memorable and even non-present as quiet little bumps in the background or generic action music. There are maybe 3 tracks that are excellent, but those are used probably 3 times. The lack of impact and actually noticability of the music really hurts the game cutscenes. Whereas a talk between two people could have had menacing music, or sad piano, instead you get just some quiet beats or random tappings of a piano. The cutscenes lose an incredible amount of emphasis and just overall quality from this problem.
Then you have Shinji Hosoe. Dear Shinji Hosoe, you are making music for an rpg not an 80's techno dating game. Hosei's music is just so bad it's embarrising. I mean Kajiura's stuff is non-memorable but I wouldn't say it's bad, whereas I will say straight out that in my opinion Hosoe's music is absolutely terrible and some of the worst music I've heard outside of bad doujin dating simulators. The main theme for the first city you come to sounds straight out of Tokimeki Memorial...and I know because I've played it
If an Ep3 is made, and judging by the short length of this one and early sales, it will be made. Somebody really needs to learn to get their act together. They need to get back to good writing, good battle system, good stat developing, and finally for the love of god they need to get on their knees and beg Mitsuda to do the score. But then again if ep2 has taught me anything about Monolith Soft. it's that their favorite choice in game development...is a bad one >_<
Here I will add a disclaimer: I am a huge Xeno~ nut and despite all the problems and all the times I was yelling about how unbelievably stupid the current part of the game is; despite all that, I still enjoyed every minute of the story as in the end it was more Xenosaga.
So I give two scores:
As a huge fan of Takahashi and all things Xenogears/Saga I'd give ep2 - 7.5/10
As trying to be objective and weighing the faults of the game vs. the pros - 6/10
Oh and to be fair I should say that the night I finished XS ep1 import I wrote up a similar long winded review and gave it a 9.4/10
