The Xenosaga Series's Failed Potential

Warning: Today’s rant is a bit raw. I mostly just tried to get everything I had to say out and didn’t worry too much about making it feel refined and well-organized. I doubt anyone cares overly much, but I figured I’d let you know ahead of time.



Yes, it is that time once again: Xenosaga Rant Time.

So what should I speak about today? Xenosaga still has so many flaws and nonsense that I could rant about. Maybe I should examine just how necessary it was for KOS-MOS, during the in-the-past-sort-of escape from Kevin, to smack Shion and knock her out--she does it to subdue the obnoxious twit and get her safely away from Kevin, but considering that KOS-MOS is a monstrously strong battle android and Shion is just a (whiny, overbearing) human being, she could have struggled all she liked and not given KOS-MOS the slightest trouble in carrying her off. Or I could point out that it doesn’t make much sense that the shockwave from Abel’s Ark can cause everything it touches to disappear, even planets, yet the Elsa, a small freighter ship, is totally unaffected by it. Or perhaps I could…

...No. You know what? I think I’ve done enough. Since beating Xenosaga 3 and closing out the series, I’ve made 9 rants about the stupidity of Xenosaga, and in nearly all of them I’ve not only examined the flaw(s) that the rant is actually about, but also listed several other ones that I could just as easily have ranted on. I’ve put forward dozens of Xenosaga’s mistakes to you all, and there are plenty more I could add to them. And perhaps I will some day. But with all this criticism at a glance and at length, on all these various flaws, there’s only one conclusion that you, the reader, could draw: that I hate Xenosaga. And, well, that’s just not true. Oh, sure, there are parts of Xenosaga that I sincerely hate, no question. Shion’s pity parade during the finale, MOMO’s last words to Jr., Kevin, the utterly disgusting way Shion’s abusive relationship with Kevin is glossed over as bad ONLY because it hurts other people and NOT because it hurts her...huh, I guess each of the moments of Xenosaga that I truly hate come from the last game. Hadn’t realized that before.

Anyway, my point is that, yes, there are a lot--a LOT--of problems with the series, and yes, there are even some parts of it which are just unforgivably loathsome. But while I don’t like the series as a complete product...well, I don’t hate it. It’s like when your parents tell you that they’re not angry with you, just disappointed. I’m not happy with Xenosaga, especially with the way it all turned out, but I can’t just dismiss it completely, either, because it had potential, and for all its terribleness, it still maintained a few of its good points throughout. This is a series that at least could have been good--even if it wasn’t.

I mean, consider the voice acting. Yeah, as I’ve mentioned, in Xenosaga 3, the voice overs are just a mess of incorrect emphasis and tones that just don’t work within the context of the characters’ intent. But back in Xenosaga 1, the voice acting was pretty consistently decent, enough to make it clear that this cast did know what it was doing when properly directed. And the voice actors themselves fit the characters very well, by and large! Hell, even when they have to change voice actors for some characters between games, the new ones still work very well! The proper matching of actor to character type by itself is enough to lend life to the characters, even if the confusion of lines constantly read in the wrong way later in the series messes that up. This is voice acting that could have been good from start to finish.

Take a look at the graphic style of Xenosaga 1. Now, you know I don’t care about visuals when determining how good or bad an RPG is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the difference between good and bad quality. Xenosaga 1 rolled out with a clean, interestingly simplistic yet distinctive artistic style for its characters and universe. Speak to a player who’s experienced all 3 main titles in the Xenosaga series about which style of KOS-MOS sticks out the most in his or her mind, which grabbed his or her attention the most and is the most interesting, and I’m willing to bet the answer will most of the time be the style from Xenosaga 1. It was different enough to grab and keep your attention: deformed but not chibi, bright but with plenty of darkness to contrast, clean but not undetailed. And then, Xenosaga 2 came around, and...the art style was completely different. For reasons best described as “moronic,” Namco decided to ditch the unique style that otherwise would have become a recognizable signature of the series and adopt, for Xenosaga 2, a much more dark, so-called realistic art style that was far more conventional for anime-styled JRPGs of that age, and in being far more conventional, was also far less interesting and thus did not hold one’s attention as well as before. And then they switched the style up again for Xenosaga 3, but this next change was a smaller departure from its predecessor, and in the end still doesn’t stand out in any particular way from other RPGs. I do know that there are some people (a minority, I believe) who liked the art styles of Xenosaga 2 and/or 3 better than that of the first game, but even still, I think most of them would have to admit that first game’s style was more distinctive--and while visuals have no effect on me, that’s something that can count for a lot with some audiences. Lose the distinctive look, you lose the benefits of novelty. This is a series that started out with a good look, and could have kept that good style to its end.

Listen to the music for the series. Both the composer for Xenosaga 1 and the composer for Xenosaga 2 and 3 are clearly talented and creative. The music of Xenosaga 1 does its job competently nearly all of the time, and there are a few tracks that I consider to be excellent. For an example, there’s only 1 single battle theme throughout the entire game, whether for regular enemies or bosses, and yet even though I heard it hundreds of times during the course of playing through the game, I still love it, and keep it in my personal song collection. It’s fast-paced yet not frenzied, common yet so very epic, promising the intensity of battle while embodying the idea that this is the first tentative step in a grand saga. The composer of Xenosaga 2 and 3 does just as well, providing solid music accompaniment to the entirety of both games, and I have to say that there are some themes of Xenosaga 3 that are just AMAZING to listen to. The theme playing while exploring the forest during the game’s foray to the past, the music that plays during Pellegri’s death scene, the background theme of the Dabrye Mine...absolutely lovely stuff. Not everything with these games’ music is a hit, but there’s certainly no noticeable failing, either, and enough stand-out moments of excellence that the soundtrack gets my endorsement. This is good music to set an epic tale of space, emotion, and drama against, and Xenosaga could have been really good if everything had been as consistently decent and occasionally great as its music is.

Watch the cutscenes of the Xenosaga games. Xenosaga 1 has a good number of FMV sequences that are very engaging, full of gripping action, and compelling suspense and drama. The scene in the first game wherein KOS-MOS saves Shion for the first time from the Gnosis starts off intense as Shion’s fading in its clutches, and becomes cool and impressive as KOS-MOS gets to work, an epic first combat for this iconic character. And what about the hyperspace chase and battle in Xenosaga 1? That whole thing is awesome and thrilling! It’s action-packed, it’s suspenseful at all the right times, it knows exactly when to cut in with comedy with the reactions of Hammer, Allen, and what’s-his-name, the commander guy below decks, it’s a great first meeting of these still-new characters and a chance to really show their personalities as they work together for the first time, it’s inventive and interesting...this is everything a sci-fi space battle should be, combined with a skillful use of the characters involved that’s thrilling from start to finish. Xenosaga 1 knows how to make good use of its exorbitant cinematic budget. Xenosaga 2’s good for a while in the same field, too--the initial battle between Jin and Margulis is very well done, and the car chase early in the game is exciting. But eventually, as the series plot and events becomes too heavy and bloated to support itself, the FMVs start being more long than interesting, more over-the-top than actually exciting. The last cinema sequence of the series that I feel is really particularly good is Jin and Margulis’s confrontation in the second half of Xenosaga 2. From that point on, the FMVs are either just not very interesting, or are advancing a story and/or characters that no longer grip the audience. Even the videos in the latter part of the series that do seem kind of interesting to watch, such as the fights between KOS-MOS and T-elos or the scene in Xenosaga 2 where KOS-MOS awakens to save Shion, are riddled with stupid elements that ruin them (see my rants on Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome, Xenosaga 3’s finale, and space motorcycles). Xenosaga could have had memorable cutscenes throughout its entire course, if it had kept up the same quality as it started out with.

Let’s move on to the more important stuff, though. Xenosaga had great potential where it really counts--the plot, the themes, the characters.

Recall the pacing of Xenosaga 1. It was just as it should have been. We were introduced to important characters at a carefully measured pace, never too many too fast, and for the most part, the characters who had a special allotment of time stayed relevant enough, long enough that the amount of time and importance the narrative afforded them seemed well-spent. The details and lore of the story and universe developed at a brisk pace, but not so rapidly that we couldn’t keep up, and although these factors and ideas kept getting thrown at us steadily right through to the game’s end, it wasn’t a problem, because it was obviously the beginning chapter of a much larger series. It’s okay to keep adding right up till the end of the first part of your saga, it’s expected. It means you’re building extra material in to be dealt with later on.

But after Xenosaga 1...well, the pacing doesn’t slow down at all; it only keeps speeding up! Ideas and details and terms and characters of all kinds keep getting crammed in, too many too fast. You can no longer keep up comfortably with all the complications and plot threads building up, too many huge events are being resolved more quickly than they should while too many small plot arcs are given more focus and time than they’re due, and even as the games try to settle the matters that they were originally building up in the first game, they’re adding more complications. And, of course, it doesn’t help that an entire half a game’s worth of events are summed up in a “this is what happened” speech in the middle of Xenosaga 2, and then another full game’s worth of events are just entirely skipped over between Xenosaga 2 and 3, known only to you if you spend the time reading up on it in Xenosaga 3’s codex. Too slow, too fast, too much stuff thrown in all at once, huge important parts missing or related as a dry, dense monologue that breaks immersion...the only consistent thing about the pacing of Xenosaga 2 and 3 is that it’s just terrible. I’ve mentioned before that the biggest contributor to this was that a 6-part series was suddenly condensed into 3 games, and I’ve gone over the stupidity both of trying to do such a thing AND of expecting to have a guaranteed 6 games to tell your story in the first place, so I won’t go into this any further. Still, Xenosaga 1 shows that the narrative pace of the series could have been fine and easily followed, instead of frenzied and too full of nonsense.

Think about the characters of the series, and how they interacted with each other early on. When you look at the main cast of Xenosaga, you’ve got a genuinely interesting and diverse set of personalities being put together, one that commands enough interest to initially get you invested in them. Initially, MOMO is cute and friendly but not in a way that’s grating, KOS-MOS is cool and robotic but in a way that brings into question the possibility of a humanity hidden below, Jr. is fun and rambunctious, Ziggy is brooding and straightforward but not in a tedious way, Jin balances being a regular guy with some quirks and being a very private and intense person, chaos is secretive yet open and outgoing, and Shion...well, actually, Shion’s never particularly interesting. Still, she doesn’t start out being a psychotic, shrill, repugnant harpy, so you could say that even she was good, early on. I guess. I dunno. The other cast members could at least make up for her, at any rate.

Anyway, the thing is, the Xenosaga cast is one that...it’s hard to describe, really. My sister, whose insight and feedback contribute immeasurably to these rants and I should really mention and credit her more often, puts it best: they’re characters that you want to like, characters you want to see, know, and learn about. Obviously everyone has their own reactions and prejudices, but I have to say, I’ve interacted with a lot of gamers who have played at least the first Xenosaga title if not the whole series, and it’s funny, but I encounter almost no one who did not have at least a little enthusiastic interest in the cast at first. It may not have lasted--sure as hell didn’t for me--but I think that Xenosaga’s cast is special in that practically all of us start on the same page of an initial interest in KOS-MOS, chaos, Ziggy, MOMO, Jin, Jr., and Shion. And there’s some decent depth to them that could maintain that interest, if was properly developed and worked with.

Additionally, I think the way they interact with one another, the dynamics between the major cast members, are, for a time, pretty neat and enjoyable. I like the connection Ziggy and MOMO share. I like the way that Shion and Jin have trouble with meaningful communication. I like the deep bond between KOS-MOS and Shion, the implicit trust and emotional openness Shion has with KOS-MOS and the way she tries to determine just what sort of humanity KOS-MOS hides within herself, and I like the way that this seems to be, for a time, working its way into a romantic angle for them. I like the puppy dog romance of Jr. and MOMO. I like the way Ziggy and Jr. treat each other as respectable equals. For the first half of the series, possibly even a little longer, the Xenosaga team feels like a genuine collection of individuals brought together, their personalities bonding with and bouncing off one another. It feels a lot like several other games with really good, interesting casts that become close-knit as time goes on, like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, or Tales of Legendia (although not nearly as good as the latter, mind).

Unfortunately, this potentially great aspect of Xenosaga, like so many others, does not last. The character development for some characters becomes too over-dramatic and confusing (not to mention, at times, incredibly stupid--particularly when it comes to Shion), becoming, as with so much else in the game, far too much nonsense stacked up at once. Said character development also becomes too much of a solo act, with the other cast members having little real influence or input while it’s happening. Eventually the relationships and interactions between the cast members are, almost universally, dictated by the plot--by and throughout Xenosaga 3, dialogue is almost entirely restricted to reactions to the plot and forwarding it; gone is that sense of a friendly, interesting team from earlier in the series. Some aspects of relationships are just destroyed completely to make way for more convenient, plot-friendly concepts, like the clear and obvious Shion x KOS-MOS love subplot being utterly supplanted by the terrible Shion x Allen one. And since the plot that’s now dictating their interactions and character development is such a ridiculous pile of nonsense that it actually makes the Star Wars prequels look almost not totally horribly incompetent by comparison, this drags the cast down with everything else. This is a set of characters that could have really been a special, memorable, and iconic cast, if they hadn’t had to stumble along to the breakneck pace of a ridiculously overblown, convoluted plot.

On a similar note, take the villains. Frankly, not a single villain in the whole trilogy is all that good, but a few of them at least had potential to be decent. Margulis, for example, is just this perpetually antagonistic, egotistical asshat that keeps being played up by the cinematics and narrative as someone more important than he actually ends up being. But if we’d gotten some time devoted to giving the guy some honest backstory, or a few scenes that better showed us and emphasized Margulis’s religious fanaticism, he could have been a lot more compelling. We’re told, not shown, that he’s a diehard fanatic, and the only other character traits assigned to him are a rivalry with Jin originating from a history between them that’s never properly delved into, and a propensity for grandiose, frustratingly vague scheming via speeches and monologues. And the latter quality doesn’t count, because pretty much all of the Xenosaga villains, and even plenty of the good guys, do that. With a little care, Margulis could have at least been a little noteworthy, but as is, he’s just a plot mouthpiece who really makes no impact.

Pellegri’s another one. Given her history with Jin and the terms under which they went their separate ways, she could have been a really compelling individual. But the games just never go into any real detail of her old feelings for Jin, never show us what things were like between them, never give enough emphasis to the way her blind adherence to Magulis’s crusade shut out the other things, good things, she had in life. We don’t see her appreciation of the things she had then, we don’t see her regret or conflict at losing them, we just don’t see anything REAL about Pellegri. She’s little more than a rag doll wearing a sign on her head reading, “JIN’S TRAGIC PAST,” existing solely as a foil for him and not even doing very well in that capacity.

Xenosaga could have made Margulis and Pellegri actual, interesting villains. It could have dialed Albedo’s insanity back enough to make him as sympathizable as the games want him to be, and made his brotherly love for Jr. schtick more believable and realistic--as it is, this main point of Albedo’s character depth comes off more as another piece of psychosis than anything legitimate. It could have revealed Wilhelm early enough and well enough that the guy could have better explained his position and the plots he masterminded. It could have given Yuriev the time and effort to develop the idea of his fear of U-DO and better examine how it relates to the human condition, and all sorts of good jazz; there was some real potential in there! It could have given us more recollections (and better ones, for that matter) of Kevin so as to properly show why Shion would have such conflicted feelings late in the last game, so he doesn’t seem like such a one-dimensional dick that we question how Shion can have any attachment to him. So many villains in the Xenosaga series could have been good, or at the very least decent, if they’d been used and developed well.

Let’s also contemplate some of the concepts of Xenosaga’s story. There are a lot of interesting ideas to the games, such as KOS-MOS being a robotic reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. Yeah, that’s bizarre, but I feel like it’s odd enough that they really could have made it interesting and neat if they’d handled it right. They could have used the scenario to explore the character of Mary, and allowed for the contrast between her and the growing personality of KOS-MOS to give them both more depth. But the KOS-MOS-is-Mary stuff is only shoved in at the end, so nothing much can be done with it (despite how overly complicated it winds up being), and Mary’s only used as an odd plot device, not as a character. KOS-MOS could just as easily have been a reincarnation of 1 of the 12 Apostles, or Adam, or Eve, or Lassie the Dog for all the difference it makes--there’s no actual connection to the character of Mary here, so anyone could have been used in her place. Anyone in history and/or theology could have completely and inexplicably been handed God’s keys to the universe, anyone could have been retconned to have Shion’s previous incarnation as their ambiguous BFF-maybe-lover-maybe-not, and absolutely nothing would be changed.

These concepts and scenes that really could have been something good are littered through the second and third Xenosaga titles. Shion’s suffering as the greatest of all the universe, for example. I love the idea overall, that when Shion witnessed her mother and father brutally murdered on the same night that her friend Feb died and all Hell broke loose in a terrifying military battle in her city, her pain was so great and unbearable that it tore the very fabric of reality and called forth the wayward lost souls of the universe’s despondent and rejected. That is compelling and epic stuff! And yet, so much of the plot of Xenosaga 3, particularly regarding Kevin, Shion’s personal conflict, and the themes of starting over or pushing through the seemingly inevitable destruction of the universe with the hope of a better tomorrow, all comes back to the pain of Shion, and the game just doesn’t know how to make use of that all-important plot point. The problem is that while we can believe that child Shion felt that pain, over the course of the games adult Shion, the one we’re familiar with, has never given the slightest inkling of someone still carrying torment that could tear the universe asunder. I mean, she’s not a bubbling mass of happiness or anything, but she never seems to be suffering particularly, either, for the entirety of Xenosaga 1 and 2, and even the first half of Xenosaga 3. She’s just a regular character. Hell, even when the final game’s suddenly realized it has to actually start showing that Shion has some issues since they’re suddenly the most important thing in the world, Shion’s introspections and interactions seem more listless and bratty, respectively, than they do like she’s seriously hurting. Come on, Namco...you want to base the major elements of your series’s plot around the painful baggage Shion’s carrying around, you need to show us that it’s there somehow. Batman carries his parents’ murder with him in everything he does and says, and we see it and we believe it. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment carries the torment of his lost mortality with him in everything he sees and everyone he encounters, and we see it and believe it. But as awesome a concept as Shion’s pain breaking the universe is, it’s never shown until way too late to believe in it, and even that last-minute effort is mostly just a testament to Namco’s lack of understanding when it comes to the emotions and reasoning of human beings.

Another example, while I’m thinking about it--remember 1 of my very earliest rants, about the stupidity of the space motorcycle scene in Xenosaga 2? Of course you don’t; nobody actually read this thing back then (practically nobody does now either, heh). But in a smaller way, it’s another example of this. Like I said back then, the scene SHOULD actually be good--it’s KOS-MOS hearing Shion’s cry for help across the void of countless light years, and despite being turned off, despite not even being in working order, the need to protect Shion is so compelling to her that she awakens and rushes to the rescue. It’d be pretty inspiring...but then, the silliness of a space motorcycle hits you. It’s about as pathetic and obvious an attempt to seem cool as Poochie the Dog, except that Poochie is MEANT to be a ridiculous icon of parody.

The death of Pellegri is a bit similar to that--again, it’s a scene that should be really noteworthy, and it almost is. The music that plays, the concept of her simply having gone too far along a path that ended in failure, the fact that her death is painful for Jin...it’s done well, and provokes some sadness from the player. Yet, as I outlined in the rant about Xenosaga 3’s finale, this scene’s worth is overshadowed by its immense stupidity--Pellegri’s reasoning just doesn’t make sense, and it lessens her character depth considerably by forcing her into a throwaway villain niche. The quality of what’s happening in the death scene is overpowered by the stupidity of why it’s happening. Anyway, I’m digressing a bit too much. Whether because they weren’t utilized and developed properly, or were just poisoned by really dumb elements, a great many of the concepts and scenes of the Xenosaga series could have been quite great, both emotionally charged and thought-provoking, but in the end, very, very few managed to live up to their potential.

Examine the overall themes and intended meanings and messages of the Xenosaga series. There’s actually all sorts of great things that the games are meant to explore through their plot and characters, themes like the significance of the fear of God (represented through Voyager and, more so, Yuriev), like the idea of becoming greater than the sum of one’s parts through devotion to another (KOS-MOS and, in some tiny way, Allen), the idea of whether one can choose to go against the purpose of their existence and the consequences for doing so (shown through KOS-MOS, Canaan, Jr., Gaignun, the failures of Pellegri and Margulis, and many more), and of course, the concept of personal and divine will, how to live with it, how to use it, what it’s capable of and the forms in which it exists. Xenosaga takes many strong ideas for its plot that stem from real-life great works and minds of human culture, such as the Bible, the Torah, and most notably Friedrich Nietzsche (the full titles of the games are even named for his concepts). The seeds for greatness are definitely scattered throughout the series in its many underlying themes and ideas.

Of course, the problem is that those seeds just never have a chance to sprout into something more. Essentially all of the great themes are buried 6 feet deep underneath a tightly-compacted morass of over-complicated details, poorly written characters, bad pacing, grandiose and completely unnatural speeches and exposition, and military-grade insane nonsense, far too deep for the seeds of greatness to ever have a chance to break through to the surface without some serious digging on your part, narrative digging which is effort way beyond what an audience should be expected to put forth. Many of the great themes are simply too unexplored before the crisis point of the character they’re linked to--like Yuriev’s fear of God thing. It’s practically unmentioned until its major moment in the story is upon you, which lessens how much of an impact it can make, how much narrative importance that you can give it. Some discussions earlier in the game on the subject--REAL discussions, not incredibly vague, poorly-written hintings--would have gone a long way to giving the concept its narrative due, and the same is true for so many of the themes of Xenosaga.

And hell, it doesn’t even seem like Namco got a lot of the deeper concepts they borrowed from others like Nietzsche right--though I’ll let smarter people than I explore and explain that here and here.

But make no mistake: Xenosaga may have bitten off way, way more than it could chew and lacked the narrative skill to make proper use of its grand, intelligent messages and themes, but they were there, just nearly inaccessible through the mountains of chaotic foolishness. It’s like a brilliant philosopher with no tongue, no computer, and atrocious, illegible handwriting trying to share the incredible things within his mind. The Xenosaga series could have been fascinating and intellectually meaningful, even on par with the best that the Shin Megami Tensei series can offer, if only its writers had been able to effectively convey their ideas.

And that’s essentially all I have to say on the matter. I could probably keep going, but I think this covers pretty much all the bases. From the small matters to the greatest, Xenosaga had the potential to be a really great series. Great science fiction, great characters, great ideas, great themes, great execution. It could have been something absolutely incredible, it really could have, and that’s why, despite its incalculably numerous flaws, in spite of all the criticism I’ve heaped upon the series (particularly its final installment) in my rants, in spite even of the disgust and animosity that I do feel towards some of its truly vile aspects (Shion’s motivations in its finale still make me shake with loathing)...in spite of everything, the fundamental truth of the matter is, as I said before:

I don’t hate Xenosaga.

It may be less sensible than Final Fantasy 8. It may be more of a disappointment to itself than La Pucelle Tactics, and have just as hasty and ill-thought-out a love story for its protagonist. It may be as idiotically over-complicated as Chrono Cross. It may be almost as much a waste of a good cast as the Kingdom Hearts series’s decision to focus more on its own bland original villains than the Disney rogues available to it. It may be more confused about what it’s doing and how to get to its plot destination than Dragon Age 2, and have a finale almost as stupid and terrible. It may seem as groundlessly self-important as Final Fantasy 12. And it may have been as screwed up by its parent company’s time and budget constraints as Xenogears. But you know what? Xenosaga started out solid and good, and it carried the potential for greatness. If you dig, you at least find and recognize those seeds of quality that never germinated; you can’t say the same for most of the games I just named. And honestly, in spite of the massive incompetence at Monolith Soft and Namco and whoever else was involved in the creation of the series, I have to say, rarely does it feel like the writers weren’t trying, weren’t giving their ideas and desires for the story a sincere effort, and at no point does it feel like the writers didn’t honestly think that these ideas were worth conveying. Which again is not the case of several of the aforementioned titles.

So maybe I’m dissatisfied with the Xenosaga series. Maybe it makes me angry often, and maybe it disappoints me because it started off so well. Maybe it’s made poorly enough that it’s a very easy target for my derision. And maybe...maybe I don’t even actually like it. But I don’t hate Xenosaga, either. And I don’t resent it, and I don’t feel like it was a true waste of my time to play, not like many of the other RPGs I criticize here often. Xenosaga is a failure, but it failed trying to do something worthwhile, and I’ll always respect that too much to ever hate or fully dismiss the series.

Xenosaga 3's Finale

It’s that time again. What time is that? Xenosaga time, that’s what.

What shall I rant about today, I wonder? Despite the dozens and dozens of problems with Xenosaga 3 that I’ve mentioned and criticized in these all-too-regular rants over the past year, there’s still no shortage of flaws both great and minor to choose from. I could analyze the stuff that Virgil says before he fights Shion and company at the church in the past, and point out all the myriad ways that it is poser-intellectual garbled nonsense. I might make critique on how the true explanation for the whole Dicking Around in the Past plot arc of Xenosaga 3 actually makes less sense than completely spontaneous time travel would have. There’s always the fact that for all the hoopla over Betty during that scene in Xenosaga 1, nothing ever actually seems to happen in regards to her. Perhaps I should rant about how no one in the party, not even MOMO of all people, has any sort of reaction whatsoever to the idea of Albedo taking up residence in Jr.’s head?

Nah, you know what? Let’s do something ambitious today. Today, I’m going to look at the finale of Xenosaga 3, and explore every damn thing I can think of that is bad about it. From the moment Shion and company touch down on Michtam, through the final boss fight and the ending, to the moment those credits start to roll, let’s see just how many stupid things Namco managed to cram into the last hours of this trilogy. Things that I haven’t already mentioned in previous rants, at least--I’m not going to go into the many ways that Kevin is revealed to be a complete tool during this time, for example. No sense retreading old ground, and I’ll just work myself into an anger frenzy again.



Facing Off Against Pellegri

Okay, Jin, I know that the Ormus fanatics have done some lousy things for their religion and are bad guys and all that, but really? “History shows that those who speak of the word of God have never represented what is right!”

Uh, way to gloss over a lot of people and history there for an inaccurately over-generalized statement, Jin. That’s the kind of simplistic, black-and-white, close-minded douchebaggery you expect to hear from some raging, poser-intellectual college kid trying to use trendy biases to cover up for his own lack of adequate knowledge and research. Hey, Jin, I’m sure that ordained ministers Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Rogers would love to hear your no doubt rational and deeply considered reasoning for why they “never represented what is right.” Let’s see what you’ve got, Jin, lay some truth on us!

“All they’ve displayed was deception, falsehood, and aggression!”

Yup, that sure sounds like Mr. Rogers and Martin Luther King Jr. to me. Ass.

Putting aside the philosophical musings of Youtube Atheist Jin,* I’d love for someone to explain to me why Pellegri is so gung-ho about fighting Jin and company to the death once she’s learned that her cause is meaningless and her beliefs are a lie. Because I don’t get it. I mean, sure, fine, I know that kind of revelation is gonna devastate nearly any person, but I’m just not sure I see why she’s so adamantly and suicidally going to do the same thing as she would have done had her beliefs not been shattered.

Maybe if she had absolutely nothing else in her life EVER, then I could see why she’d go through the motions even while knowing their lack of meaning. But we know that Pellegri and Jin had a past together, one that existed outside of her life as a member of Ormus, and Jin’s right THERE. She’s known at least partial happiness and fulfillment in the past with him, an aspect of life unassociated with her religious organization, so couldn’t she just, I dunno, release herself into his custody and see about building a new life? I mean, their past is proof that she has, at some time, in some way, had previous exposure to ideals and a lifestyle beyond those of the belief that’s now kaput, so why can’t she fall back on those? Pellegri’s case is not like the case of Margulis, who we can see and believe has never known any other path. His belief shatters and he has absolutely nothing, has known absolutely nothing else, to fall back upon. Pellegri did have something else once, and the representation of that something else, Jin, is right here in front of her right now. Yes, she did give him up long ago so she could focus on the whole fanatical militaristic cult thing, but still, this isn’t a hopeless situation where she gave up something meaningful for something that didn’t work out and she can’t get that meaningful thing back, because the meaningful thing was a life with Jin, and he’s right there and he doesn’t want her to die so it’s clearly not a door permanently closed to her. Why the devil is she stubbornly insisting on dying for her cause as though she never had anything else and/or has permanently lost the chance for something else?

It’s not like she’s backed into a corner here, either! Neither Jin nor any of his teammates want her to die; guy’s even telling her to bail out as her mech is exploding. The bitch talks about irreversible fate, about how pointless it all is, and most importantly, about how each person walks on their own path and how hers and Jin’s didn’t cross, but it fucking DID before, and it COULD again! If you walk down a path that goes nowhere, you don’t just give up and slit your throat, you just go back and try a different route, dammit! Be fucking SENSIBLE, you nitwit! Or just go ahead and die in your cockpit as your mech robot explodes into flames for no reason whatsoever, instead. Sounds like a plan.

Man, this is the first part of the finale I’ve talked about and I’m already spitting in fury. Efreet help me, this is gonna be more annoying than I thought.


Out and About on Michtam

While they’re wandering the surface of Michtam, Jr. twice questions whether Ziggy’s okay, because he’s being silent and broody. Under normal circumstances, that’s fine. But, see, they’re wandering around in huge robot suits--no one on the team could actually SEE his face so as to notice that he’s troubled. And yeah, a pertinent silence can also be a tip-off, but each time Jr. questions him, he hasn’t been noticeably unresponsive (like, not responding if someone was talking to him, or something like that), he just hasn’t happened to be saying anything. How does Jr. know his lack of talking indicates that he’s conflicted, exactly? MOMO, chaos, and KOS-MOS haven’t been saying much, either, but he never questions them. What is this magical indicator that’s letting Jr. know that Ziggy’s got something on his mind? Is it Ziggy’s “...” text box that pops up every now and then? I don’t think Jr’s supposed to be able to see that, but it’s the only cue he could be taking.

On another note...Jr., what exactly about the giant religious-looking building looks “shady?” All I see is a giant temple-ish building. I know that it actually IS shady in that it apparently has a secret research facility below it, but all it actually looks like is a place of worship. Does Jr. just think religious structures generally look disreputable? Maybe Jin’s not the only randomly irrational religion-hater on the team...


Facing Off Against Voyager

A thought occurs to me as I sit and hear Voyager and Ziggy discuss their century-old grudge. Wilhelm’s bunch of evil henchmen, the Testaments, are comprised of Voyager, Kevin, Virgil (for some reason), and Albedo. Voyager initially offered Ziggy the chance to become a Testament alongside him, as well, back when Ziggy was a human and trying to stop him during the events of the side game of the series, Xenosaga: Pied Piper. Okay, fine, cool. But the events of Xenosaga: Pied Piper took place over 100 years prior to the opening of Xenosaga 1. If Wilhelm was fully capable of making Testament henchmen back then, why did he wait for over 90 years to make his next one (Kevin, after the accident with KOS-MOS’s prototype)? It’s not a serious problem or anything, but it’s nonetheless kind of weird that there’s such a huge gap in time between Wilhelm recruiting his first Testament and his second, especially since once the Xenosaga games are in progress he’s suddenly popping’em out left and right. What, could Wilhelm really not find another human being besides Voyager or Kevin for more than 90 years who wanted to escape the fear of death, or had some stupid grandiose idea of rebooting and reshaping the universe out of a selfish desire of having all of existence be a private honeymoon getaway for he and his girlfriend and the rest of the people who ever did or would exist could just suck it?

...Well, okay, maybe Kevin’s desires are (thankfully) pretty one-of-a-kind, but still, it couldn’t have been that hard to find somebody or other in a hugely populated galactic civilization who wanted to be immortal like Voyager did. Why the weirdly long wait? Surely it couldn’t have been any sort of high standards as to who could become a Testament; Wilhelm let Virgil into the club, and that guy otherwise barely rates higher plot importance than an NPC you pass on the street.

Anyway, enough nitpicking on that. Let’s nitpick something else more to the point during the showdown with Voyager: why the hell does Ziggy get out of his E.S.? The party runs into Voyager, they exchange some sentences with him that make an unusually high amount of logical and emotional sense for Xenosaga, and they battle him in his giant mech suit E.S. Then, after the battle, his mecha is totaled, but Voyager, of course, is fine, because he’s still got Plot God Mode going, and Ziggy...jumps out of his own mech suit to attack Voyager with his personal weapons.

Where’s the logic here, Ziggy? Where exactly is it? Your titanic mobile monolith of pure destructive power’s laser is unable to damage Voyager, so your next move is to try using smaller guns? And you jump out from behind the feet-thick ultra-alloy protection of your mech suit to accomplish this? You give up every advantage you have, leap full-speed into his arms, to attack him with weaponry that you already determined earlier in the game has no effect on him. BRILLIANT! Sun Tzu would be in awe.

Not to mention on top of the whole giving-up-your-armor-in-order-to-use-smaller-weapons-you-already-know-won’t-work thing, Ziggy’s decision to leap as close to Voyager as he can not only has him pretty much delivering himself right into Voyager’s favorite chokin’ hand, but also guarantees that Ziggy’s friends, who were smart enough to stay in the giant robot suits packed to the brim with offensive weaponry, are now helpless to use their own mech suits effectively, since any large weapon discharges will hit both Voyager AND Ziggy now. Not that any of them would bother anyway--if there’s one consistent characteristic of the Xenosaga cast, it’s their unflagging commitment to standing around and doing nothing while they watch a friend get the shit beaten out of him/her. I swear they are actually worse on this point than the characters on Dragon Ball Z.


Post-Voyager

Having wrapped up Ziggy’s side story with Voyager, the party is back to its regular dynamic, and I find myself wondering: Why does Shion get all the sympathy for having to go through a rough time?

Yeah, to be sure, she’s having a crap time of it, finding out she’s dying of plot plague, going through all the traumatic reliving the past stuff, and trying to sort through the emotional pickle Kevin has put her in. But by this point in the finale, Jr. has only recently had to say goodbye to the very last of his brothers. Jin has just been forced to fight his old love and then watch in helpless anguish as she chose to sit and die rather than try to live for any reason he could provide. And Ziggy just had the memories of his wife and son’s murders resurface as he helplessly watched his old friend sacrifice himself for a sin he didn’t consciously commit. Shion may be having a hard time, but she is not the only one, not by a LONG shot, yet her mental pain and turbulence is the only one which is afforded any lasting sympathy whatsoever by herself or the plot--once each of the others’ sad scenes are done, they’re essentially dropped and there’s no further thought of how those other characters might be having trouble getting past their hard times. And unfortunately, this poorly-rationed sympathy just makes Shion’s “Poor ME, Oh Woe is ME, ME ME ME” attitude as things go along all the more alienating as she considers the suffering of no one else but herself even as all the others rally to to support her.


Facing Off Against Margulis

I’m all for cool mech suits doing sword fights, but I feel like the final battle between Jin and Margulis should have been settled face-to-face, by their own hands. “Mecha-to-mecha, by their own joysticks controlling giant robot arms” just lacks the personal touch, and they’re very personal rivals. Further, it would make more sense for them to have their final duel on foot, because their main historical point of contention is centered around the fact that they both learned their sword fighting techniques from Jin’s grandfather. Doesn’t that sort of imply that their final battle should be a sword fight using said techniques?

And no, the fact that their giant robot suits are using swords does not count to that. Battle art or not, that blade-crossing is done through manipulations of electronic controls and levers and whatnot, not through actual employment of sword fighting arts. You could argue that maybe they’re translating those arts into the movements of their mecha, but honestly, are you really going to tell me that the balance, precision, and incredible skill and self-control necessary to master a sword fighting art (let alone one sort of implied to be as special and awesome as Jin’s family technique), which takes years and years to become truly proficient in, can be easily and accurately translated into the controls for a giant robot? Skills don’t work that way. If I hand an Olympic snowboarder a Playstation 1 controller and tell her to impress me with her skills in the snowboarding minigame of Final Fantasy 7, do you think she’s automatically going to be a master at that snowboarding minigame simply because she’s a trained, practiced master at snowboarding in real life? Obviously not! She’d need the same time and practice with the game as anyone else would, because regardless of certain small superficial similarities, it’s an entirely different act. The idea that both Jin AND Margulis would have the time to spend years mastering a fighting discipline and set of sword techniques, and then spend the same amount of years all over again learning how to translate that knowledge and those movements into electronic input well enough to adequately recreate the grace and precision of that fighting style into giant robot form, is ludicrous. Thus, Jin and Margulis’s final battle can’t logically be employing any accurate form of the fighting style that serves as one of the focal points of their personal grudge against one another, and so this duel lacks a simple, crucial level of personal dramatic impact that it could easily have had otherwise.

Also, Margulis? When you say to Jin that his strength means that he’ll “always be alone in this world,” uh, what the hell is that supposed to mean? How? Why? Why do you say that he’s cast away the people who understood him by his own hands? Who were those people? Margulis and Pellegri, maybe? That seems to be what Margulis means, but even if Margulis and Pellegri actually do understand Jin to begin with--and that’s pretty doubtful--Margulis is the one who keeps attacking Jin, and Jin pleaded with Pellegri not to fight him and then not to die; he’s not actively “cast away” either Margulis or Pellegri beyond simply defending himself. Not to mention that Margulis’s defeat may be at Jin’s hands here, but his actual death is quite clearly self-inflicted. Or were these people that understood Jin and were driven away supposed to mean Jin’s family, maybe? Because I’m pretty sure Jin’s parents were killed in an entirely separate matter that Jin had no way of preventing--as we saw for ourselves--and Jin’s difficulty in connecting with Shion is clearly a lack of ability on both their parts to communicate their feelings effectively.

Sigh...I am just so goddamn sick of roundabout, semi-coherent posturing Xenosaga-speak at this point. It’s like an entire game of early 1990s Engrish, only you can tell that this is really, honestly how it’s supposed to be and not just the inept bumbling of a second-rate translator.


Chatting with Nephilim

What the goddamn hell is Shion talking about when she’s ranting at Nephilim in the blue crystal room? She’s denying Nephilim’s statement that everyone knows her pain, and goes on to deny that any of them cares about her, is there for her, and wants to protect her, saying that’s what everyone always says but that they actually stayed away from her and didn’t try to help her.

Which “everyone” is that, I wonder? Because the people she’s surrounded with now have consistently been there for her and endeavored to help her whenever she’s asked for their assistance, and worried for her and sought to help her even when she insists she doesn’t need their concern/help. And that help has usually meant putting their lives on the line for her! In every reasonably possible way, and quite a few ways that weren’t reasonable, these people have cared for, assisted, and reached out to her for the sake of friendship, family, and love.

It has occurred to me that maybe Shion is actually talking about a more generalized “everyone,” referring to non-specific people she’s interacted with and known in her life, but that’s really no better, because A, it’s trying to introduce this faceless, generalized group of people that until now have never been mentioned or indicated in any way, which would be very poor writing, and B, if she’s not talking about the friends she has with her right now then she’s protesting about other people never caring for her and completely ignoring the people in front of her who HAVE been doing all the assisting and caring that she’s saying no one has ever done! I’m going to keep going forward with the assumption that Shion is directly referring to Jr., MOMO, KOS-MOS, Jin, chaos, Allen, and Ziggy, but I wanted to point out that it’s no less rotten and bitchy if she isn’t.

Now I’ll grant you that Shion’s friends don’t often make a huge effort to penetrate her mind and try to understand her, but she makes no effort to make her inner workings known to any of them, either, save KOS-MOS, and she’s always insisting to them that she’s fine and doesn’t need them to worry about her. If your typical behavior is to push people away rather than expose your weaker side to them, then of course they’re not going to know the real you, moron, you didn’t LET them! You can’t have it both ways, you nitwit, you can’t pout and stamp your foot every time someone expresses the slightest concern about your well being, then turn around and pout and stamp your foot about how no one expresses enough concern about you! It’s like if you went around punching people in the nose any time they talked to you, then complained about how no one ever asks you how your day was! Only it’s worse than this example, because despite how much Shion has throughout the game insisted that she’s fine and doesn’t need people showing the slightest human concern for her, they all still do time and time again, so she’s not even now complaining about a situation she has brought about herself--she’s complaining about a situation that just plain isn’t true at all! Ye Christ, what an obnoxious, selfish, loathsome jerk Shion is!

And to top it all off, guys, the real kicker to this: Shion claims that KEVIN is the only one that was there for her and cared for her. Now that would be fine if he had actually stayed dead, can’t blame a guy for that, but she knows by this point that he has, for some time, been gamboling around as the Red Testament, and has only just in the last few days (hours, even?) revealed to her, after an absence of years and years, that he’s still alive. HE’S the one who’s always been there for you, you stupid cow? Are you serious?

On a similar note, Shion goes on to say, “None of you saved me. Only Kevin has made a place for me.” Yeah, uh, SEE ABOVE PARAGRAPH. The only place he’s made for you is to be around him while he ends all of existence, you self-centered delusional twat, and the rest of the time, throughout the entirety of the games’ course and long before that, he’s left you high and dry to fend for yourself without even so much as alleviating your grief by letting you know he wasn’t dead! He’s pulled a disappearing act for the majority of your adult life and somehow he’s the only one who’s been there for you and made a place for you? WHAT PART OF THIS MAKES SENSE!? ARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!

I love the next part, though. Shion strides forward, brattily declaring that she’ll open the door to the next part of the plot but that it’s for herself, not for any of the people around her, and when Allen pleads with her, asks her why she takes on all this pain herself, she just pushes him aside and tells him it doesn’t concern him. Well, gee, that almost seems like it’s someone expressing some genuine concern for her and her throwing it back in his face, even as she complained not 15 seconds before about no one caring for her and everyone shunning her! I couldn’t have planned a better validation of my point that Shion is a self-centered, hypocritical bitch; this is the kind of timing that’s usually reserved for parody works!

More of Shion’s amazing ability to be a repulsive selfish contradictory sack of shit in a few minutes. For now, let’s skip ahead to...


Facing Off Against T-elos

The fight with T-elos begins with her demanding that KOS-MOS surrender to her, then immediately rushing in to attack her. Uh...okay...if you’re going to demand that someone surrender to you, shouldn’t you maybe wait for even just one single second to get their answer to that demand before trying to stab them in the face? What’s the point of demanding a surrender if your immediate next act is to attack anyway? I mean, okay, we all know that KOS-MOS wasn’t going to surrender to T-elos, that much is obvious. But if T-elos shares that knowledge and is attacking because she knows KOS-MOS isn’t going to surrender anyway, why did she bother telling KOS-MOS to do so in the first place?

It’s a tiny grievance, true, but it’s still yet one more piece of the puzzle of nonsense that is Xenosaga.

Anyway, T-elos attacks KOS-MOS, KOS-MOS defends herself, and unlike the first time the 2 androids fought, the rest of the party actually attempts to do something useful, with Ziggy, Jin, Jr., and Shion all making their own attacks against T-elos, while chaos and MOMO...uh...sit and watch, I guess. Well, at least most of them actually tried, that’s certainly more than usual. Anyway, there comes a moment in the battle where KOS-MOS and T-elos have one of those running-around-on-walls-shooting-at-each-other contests that animes are fond of, after which T-elos leaps back down onto the ground and grabs Shion in a chokehold from the back, using her as a hostage.

This seems like a sensible thing to do, right? It’s well-established that the safety and well-being of Shion is by far the highest priority for KOS-MOS; we’ve previously seen that the need to protect Shion has given KOS-MOS the power to function even when missing critical components, and when her core operating system had been seemingly irrevocably damaged. With Shion in hand as a bargaining chip, T-elos obviously has gained the upper hand. Logical, right?

Except for one tiny thing: once T-elos has got Shion in her clutches, she shifts all of her attention on Shion and the rest of the party before her, paying no attention whatever to wherever KOS-MOS has gotten to!

Why in the world does she do this? KOS-MOS has been clearly shown to be the biggest threat to T-elos during this fight so far, not Shion or any of the others, and none of them have even had a chance to attack T-elos for the last minute or so while she was running along the walls shooting at KOS-MOS anyway. T-elos only just interrupted her battling against KOS-MOS to grab Shion; by all logic, not only is KOS-MOS the immediate AND greatest threat to T-elos, she’s also the threat that should be most present on T-elos’s mind since KOS-MOS is the one she’s been fighting most recently. Not to mention that this entire fight is all about T-elos trying to beat KOS-MOS specifically; the others are solely collateral participants by her reckoning! T-elos should be using Shion as a shield against KOS-MOS, not the rest of the party, and at the very, very least, T-elos should, while taking her hostage, not have taken her eyes off the enemy who had been actively attacking her!

The idiocy of this fight isn’t done yet, though. I’ve criticized the party for their inaction during KOS-MOS’s first fight against T-elos, at which time each and every one of them just stood there doing absolutely nothing beyond watching their friend get beaten to scrap metal over the course of 8 minutes or so. And I’ve pointed out that this fight is better because half of them start the battle by working together and attacking T-elos as a group effort.

However, once KOS-MOS has knocked T-elos back away from Shion (it is almost as though T-elos taking her focus off of her primary foe for no reason was a bad idea!), T-elos fires an energy blast at Shion, and KOS-MOS shields Shion’s body with her own. T-elos keeps shooting KOS-MOS in the back, knowing that KOS-MOS is unable to move and/or counterattack for fear of leaving Shion exposed. And during this time, again, NO ONE DOES ANYTHING. Jin, Jr., Ziggy, MOMO, chaos, Allen, they all just fucking STAND THERE and watch their enemy shoot their friend in the back OVER AND OVER. They don’t move, they don’t say anything, they just stand and watch in total inaction!

Even if they’ve determined (correctly) that the threat they pose to T-elos is minimal, they could at LEAST occupy her attention to keep her from just shooting over and over again. By forcing her to dodge even one single attack from them, they could give KOS-MOS the time she needed to go on the offensive once more. Or, Ziggy could run forward and grab Shion away, pull her back and protect her with his own body so KOS-MOS could be free to attack again. Or Jr. could even try to shoot the energy gun out of T-elos’s hands, or at least shoot it and damage it. Just do SOMETHING, for Christ’s sake!

Anyway, this scene of everyone just standing around watching their friend get shot in the back over and over again goes on long enough for KOS-MOS and Shion to have a little conversation--which is in itself pretty damn silly, but by this point, my perceptions of normality have been so skewed by Xenosaga logic that it barely even registers to me. Eventually figuring out that she’s really just not doing a lot of damage, T-elos switches tactics and rushes forward to attack KOS-MOS head-on. Well...head-to-back-on. KOS-MOS moves super fast to block the attack in a cool manner, and we see in the next second that she’s holding T-elos’s weapon at bay. But that weapon is the energy pistol from before! Why was T-elos using THAT as a melee weapon? Yeah, pistol-whipping is a thing, but that’s because pistols tend to be harder and heavier and more damaging to swing than just smacking someone with a human fist. But T-elos is not a human, she’s a super powerful android! Her regular fists and feet (well, boots) are a much more dangerous melee weapon than a rinky-dink handgun! Plus, pistol-whipping is only effective because it’s traditionally being used against a human being, whose durability, hardness, and susceptibility to pain make it a very unpleasant experience--but KOS-MOS is, like T-elos, a super powerful android! It’s utterly inconceivable that any energy pistol could possibly have the structural integrity and weight to it that swinging it against her incredibly durable, resistant, pain-impervious frame would have any effect whatever! AND we just saw moments before that T-elos can materialize a laser dagger arm attachment at will, so why wasn’t she trying to use THAT? The hell?

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that. Let’s remove ourselves from the comparably comfortable confines of simple logistic failures and return to Shion the Whiny Fucktard, Part 2.


Facing Off Against Kevin

Ugh, again with this bullshit.

Shion’s emotional constipation and raging stupidity kick off full swing with a repeat of before, with her again claiming that none of her friends saved her and that only Kevin has made a place for her. Already covered how dumb this is, so let’s move along.

At one point, Jin protests by pointing out the obvious--that none of Shion’s comrades want her to suffer, a fact that is and has been throughout the whole game patently obvious. Shion replies by saying that she knows, but, that that’s why she hates it, because she’s had her fill of pity.

Oh, so now, you hate that they don’t want you to suffer and have had your fill of pity, Shion? That’s funny, because less than an hour ago, you were wailing about how everyone stays away from you and doesn’t actually care about you at all! WHICH IS IT, YOU SHIT-BRAINED TWIT? Are they doing too little or are they doing too much? You can’t blame them for both at the same time! Jesus H. Christ playing Parcheesi with Peter Pan, there is just no satisfying this crazy bitch and the only consistent thing about her whiny story of woe is that it unfailingly stays completely false!

Anyway, Shion continues on her utterly deranged little bipolar pity parade, and then says that it’s too late for Jin to try to convince her of anything because he doesn’t understand other people’s feelings, and tells him, “If you had, Pellegri might not have had to die!”

You gotta give the writers of Xenosaga credit--every time you think that Shion has sunk as far as she can into the depths of bitchy stupidity, they find a new way to lower your respect for her.

First of all, real fucking classy on Shion’s part. Not a shockingly heartless and morally repugnant thing to say AT ALL. Secondly, how does Jin’s supposed inability to connect to others even relate to the current situation, anyway? How does this totally-crossing-the-line insult even pertain to Shion’s argument that she should be on Kevin’s side? And lastly, beyond being a seriously dick thing to say and, as far as I can see, largely irrelevant, it’s also so obviously bogus that it makes me want to put my head through the screen. Pellegri’s feelings, as we discussed before, quite obviously WERE wanting to die. She attacked unprovoked when her opponent would rather have settled things peacefully, she refused to save herself, and nothing could be said or done to sway her from that course. The only case of emotional misunderstanding that Jin had during that scene was that in pleading with her in various ways not to let herself die, Jin apparently held out more hope than he should have that she could be convinced to abandon her suicidal course. His only misunderstanding of Pellegri as far as I could see caused him to try all the harder to keep her from dying! It should be obvious to anyone who witnessed Pellegri’s death that she was determined to end her life then and there, and no amount of understanding or misunderstanding of that feeling was going to alter that!

Anyway, the scene continues, with Shion continuing to insist on being a moron and siding with Kevin, and her friends decide that they’re not going to allow it and will just have to rescue her from herself. Frankly, it’s the only sensible thing you could possibly do in their position; she’s pretty clearly proven that she’s out of her mind and a danger to herself at this point. Jr. in particular declares, “I’m bringin’ you with us even if I have to beat you up.”

This could just be my Xenosaga-addled mind at this point, but that line just strikes me as silly. This is a life and death moment of decision between sides of an emotional and ideological rift, and “beat you up” is the best you can throw out there? Who the hell seriously says that any more? It’s the kind of threat a grade schooler throws around because they can’t think of anything more threatening or clever. And just how does Jr. intend to accomplish this, anyway? His weapon of expertise is a handgun--exactly how does one beat someone up with bullets? He can’t be talking about beating her up in the traditional hand-to-hand way; he’s significantly smaller than her, and Shion, while admittedly not a powerhouse, has martial arts training and a specially designed close-quarters defensive arm weapon.

Anyway, Allen steps forward and gives a little speech about how they shouldn’t be fighting, and brings up a good point about how even though Allen may be weak and powerless, he’s better than Kevin and his associates, who are actually cowardly and pathetic, which you may remember my mentioning before in my rant about Kevin. Not particularly liking Allen’s posturing, Kevin proceeds to start beating the every-loving crap out of him. And you’ll never guess what the rest of the party does! Surprise, surprise, they stand there and watch! As fucking ALWAYS. Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome at its finest. No, that’s cool, guys, you all just fucking stand there while Kevin blasts the crap out of Allen, who has just himself admitted that he’s powerless. Don’t make the slightest move to help the completely defenseless guy out in any way.

Jesus, and I thought it was bad when they were just watching KOS-MOS get punked. At least she could fight back.

How does Allen get the black eye from this ordeal, incidentally? I mean, I know he’s having a lot of punishment heaped on him, but it’s all magical energy pain attacks. He gets up and lands heavily against the ground, I guess, but it’d still be hard to fall on the flat ground in such a way as to specifically bruise his right eye. For that matter, how does this bruise appear this fast? He’s got it fully developed within the first minute of Kevin attacking him.

Anyway, eventually Allen gives another little speech about how much he loves her, during which several lines from both him and Kevin are weird and don’t make much sense, and Kevin acts to finish Allen off, only it seems that KOS-MOS has finally gotten the genius idea that maybe she should actually DO something instead of just watching like a jackass, and blocks the attack. KOS-MOS then makes her own appeal to Shion to get a fucking grip, and this time Shion actually listens (once again, we see that Shion is far more emotionally connected to KOS-MOS than anyone else, including Allen--but don’t worry, Namco, I totally believe your incompetent flailing in this game promoting Shion x Allen, instead of the Shion x KOS-MOS pairing that every damn part of your trilogy’s narrative has reinforced until this goddamn second). So how does Shion break the news to Kevin that she’s gonna pass on his resetting-the-universe insanity?

“Kevin, all I ever...wanted was to be with you, even if that meant I was being used, even if that meant I was being deceived, as long as I could be by your side, I thought it didn’t matter.”

YOUR HEROINE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! Great self-esteem there, Shion, really great. Truly you are an icon of self-empowerment and feminism to inspire us all.

But okay, fine, this is the beginning of her speech about how she was wrong and why she’s now standing up to him, so the next part’s going to be where her speech becomes inspiring about how she now knows better, that she understands now that she deserves more, and that’s why she’s standing up to him, right? Right, because the next line is, “But, now I know, that’s not true.” You tell’im, Shion, stand up for yourself and tell that rotten bastard that you’re important and deserve better than someone like him who manipulates and emotionally abuses you, tell him that--

”It’s wrong for me to sacrifice others for it.”

What. What. What.

Oh, RIGHT! Sure! Of course! So, it’s okay to stay in an emotionally abusive relationship where you’re used and lied to and you know it, just as long as it’s only hurting you, and not people around you! That is what she’s saying, is it not? She’s saying that all she ever wanted was to be with him no matter how she was being used and deceived, which obviously means she understands that she WAS being used and deceived, and the reason she’s giving, the only reason, for changing her mind on that, is that it would be wrong to sacrifice others in order to achieve that--”that” being the situation of being with Kevin regardless of his manipulating and lying to her.

THERE’S a healthy message! Being with someone who lies to and uses you for his own ends is bad ONLY if doing so hurts anyone other than you! This is an “ends can’t justify the means” moral, except that the supposedly desirable “ends” are to be in an emotionally abusive relationship!

Not a thing, not a single solitary thing, is said by Shion about her refusal to join Kevin having ANYTHING to do with his having done wrong by her. In fact, she reiterates at this point that she does love him, and that she is sure they’d find happiness together, but she just can’t stand the idea of her being the only one that finds happiness, just to really hit home the point that in her mind, it would be 100% fine for her to be with a guy who used and lied to her if it wasn’t at anyone else’s expense.

She can’t stand the idea of her being the only one that finds happiness? What you just described isn’t happiness, Namco you fucktards, it’s an abusive relationship!

Also, this is barely important at all compared to the whole thing of Shion being fine with being in an abusive relationship, but it’s worth mentioning that also missing from Shion’s speech is any displeasure whatsoever for the fact that Kevin just beat the shit out of a helpless dude Shion knows and is friends with. I guess that maybe Allen’s an example in a roundabout way of the sacrifices that Shion’s saying she’s not willing to have for her own “happiness,” but you’d still think she’d have a bit more than a vague disapproval of harming others in general as a response to seeing Allen get knocked around like that.

One more point of stupidity about this scene. Again, this is barely important at all compared to everything else, but Shion has got to be the shittiest scientist ever. I mean, think about the core concept of what it is to be a scientist--it’s a desire for knowledge, a curiosity about the workings of the universe, whether general or specialized, and the ways in which one can manipulate those workings. It is a pursuit of information, knowledge, truth. And here Shion is, actively stating that she would under not-sacrificing-others circumstances have been completely okay with being used and deceived by Kevin. Key word there is “deceived.” Yup, living a lie, never having the slightest interest in the truth of things, that’s all just dandy to Shion, the scientist.

Blurrrrgh. Let’s move along to the final confrontation, and hope I can keep from choking to death on my own bile.


Facing Off Against Wilhelm

Question: is 5 minutes before the end of a 3-game series really the best time to reveal the truth of the Gnosis, the identity of chaos, the plans of the main villain, AND both the nature and just plain existence of the Zarathustra artifact and why it needs the little Anima things? I know that it’s a common writing technique to save a twist or explanation or two for the last battle in RPGs, but I feel like somewhere in the great many hours of playtime over the Xenosaga trilogy, they could have cut out a little bit of the nonstop bullshit double-talk running rampant throughout Xenosaga 2 and 3 and taken a moment to explain a couple of these major plot points.

I mean for fuck’s sake, the heroes have been traveling for 3 games with chaos and haven’t once questioned who the hell he is and why he’s caught up in all this with them since that single initial meeting with him in Xenosaga 1 where he gave some non-answer in place of explanation for his powers and Shion just nodded and said “Durrr uh-yup, that’s good enough for me!” One more example of what a great scientist Shion is--presented with an unexplained and highly intriguing phenomenon, she’s completely satisfied to unquestioningly take someone else’s word for it that it’s nothing worth thinking about.

The writers really couldn’t have found a moment in all this time before the last second to address the what-is-up-with-chaos plot elephant in the room? Couldn’t have found a better time before now to properly explain that the Gnosis are the wills of people who reject others and the world? Hell, the Gnosis haven’t even had any real, strong plot relevance by this point for quite some time; the team’s been caught up with U-DO and Yuriev’s ambitions and Mary’s resurrection and Kevin’s antics and getting trippy with the past in Shion’s head for pretty much the whole game, with the Gnosis only really holding any relevance for a few moments. Strikes me that the reveal for them would’ve been better to take place at some point during the trilogy while they still seemed like the major thing. I can’t see how knowing their true nature in advance would have negatively affected the narrative or significantly altered the characters’ actions; on the contrary, having known about the nature of the Gnosis in advance would probably have made the reveal here at the end of the game about Zarathustra’s purpose and the danger to the universe seem much better, like the Gnosis nature angle was a puzzle piece finally fitting into its slot. But nope, Xenosaga writers aren’t capable of that level of foresight--just dump the half-dozen major plot points left all into the same scene over the course of a dozen text boxes, and call it a day!

This is as bad a last-second plot-dump as that vile load of rat shit that Bioware tried to foist on us at the end of Mass Effect 3. Well, almost as bad. Well...not even close, really. But closer than it should be, all the same.

I’d also like to say that a ton of this last-second exposition is still high-and-mighty Xenosaga double-talk gibberish to me. I fancy myself a relatively intelligent person--no genius by any regard, despite my monicker, but a fair ways away from stupid. But I’ll be damned if I understand any more than about 75% of the sentences being thrown around during this conversation with Wilhelm, and that’s after having watched this damn scene like 5 times, once for my initial playthrough and then the rest for this and other rants. In the end, I STILL am not satisfied with my knowledge of what it is that makes the universe’s situation so precarious as Wilhelm says, exactly how or why Zarathustra does what it does, the specifics of chaos’s role, and what the deal is with the Zohar. And arrogant though it may be, I’m going to operate on the assumption here that the fact that my knowledge of these important plot points is more limited than I like is not my fault, but the fault of the game’s inability to make itself clear--if its understanding of itself is any better than what I know of it to begin with. So much of this dialogue during the final showdown with Wilhelm, right to the moment he’s finally dead, is vague references, half-thoughts, and ambiguous platitudes whose relevance is shaky, that I’m actually surprised I can follow any of it as well as I do, even after my multiple viewings.

Hey, quick question that has just occurred to me this second as I write this rant: Why DID God give Mary Magdalene that choice of changing the form of the universe, anyway? Why her? Hell, why anyone? What was the reason she in particular was given that choice, and why is it a thing being given to a human at all? I’m not saying she was necessarily less qualified than anyone else for the job, but some quick little explanation of how that came to be would have been nice. But it’s never explained, and a quick (actually, quite protracted) visit to the Xenosaga Wiki on Mary Magdalene provides no explanation.**

Anyway, back on target. After a momentary flashback in which Kevin remembers a moment in his life when he sort of almost wasn’t a douchebag, Kevin decides he’s tired of watching Wilhelm hurting Shion and goes up to the guy and karate-chops his arm off. He sure took his time coming to the conclusion that he didn’t want the woman he supposedly loves to suffer, but I’ll give Kevin his due on this point--A, no matter how over the top it is, it’s still kind of badass to karate-chop a dude’s arm clean off, and B, regardless of his tardiness in doing so, Kevin IS actually stepping forward to do something, instead of just standing around for minutes on end watching loved ones suffer, which is sure more than you can usually expect from our so-called heroes.

Wilhelm plays it cool, saying this betrayal was also anticipated, and honestly, I gotta say, this sort of thing kind of annoys me. It’s by no means a signature of Xenosaga, though. You want your villain to be a super-cool customer and be a big mastermind manipulator who foresees even the betrayals that (supposedly) the audience is surprised by, fine. But stop having the villains brag about their foresight about said betrayals after the act of betrayal has seriously messed them up. Wilhelm, your arm is lying on the damn floor. You are dangerously close to making me crack a Monty Python joke here. I’m not impressed by your damn foresight if you still lost a limb over it; I don’t care how much you want me to think you didn’t need it. You want to successfully have your villain seem cool for foreseeing his subordinate’s betrayal, then have him acknowledge and stop said betrayal BEFORE someone tears his arm off!

Anyway, some more stuff happens, and eventually Kevin gets another chance at taking Wilhelm down. In an attempt to kill him, Kevin shoves his arm straight through his gut. Seriously, dude punches Wilhelm so hard in the back that his entire arm goes straight through the guy. AND makes a colorful little sustained energy explosion thing.

Wilhelm, of course, being so super powerful and whatnot, doesn’t die immediately, and instead just keeps doing his thing, making more grandiose speeches. All the while that he’s talking and carrying on, Kevin just sort of holds his pose, standing there with his arm sticking out of Wilhelm’s torso for several minutes. In fact, it’s after some of these lengthy speeches that the final boss battle begins, and apparently, Wilhelm and Kevin just stand and chill like this, one’s arm bisecting the other’s intestines, for the entire length of this final boss battle, because once that battle, which takes, I dunno, half an hour or so, is over, we see that they are STILL standing in that position. It’s...kind of strange.


Hallelujah, We’re Finally at the Actual Ending Sequence, I Really Wasn’t Sure I’d Make It

Just once, it might be nice to NOT have to have all the good guys rush out of the final area because it’s magically going to explode once the final boss dies.

Well, the heaviest of the insane nonsense of Xenosaga is, believe it or not, actually, finally, over with,*** but there’s still a few dumb things to make note of. One of those things is when Shion tells KOS-MOS that what she just said is “unusually vague, coming from you, KOS-MOS.” The reason this is dumb is 1, what KOS-MOS just said (that their time apart won’t be too long, and that she knows they’ll see each other again) isn’t actually vague at all, and 2, NO, it’s NOT unusually vague coming from KOS-MOS, because NOTHING coming from ANYONE in Xenosaga is ever UNUSUALLY vague. There is no such thing as UNUSUALLY vague for a Xenosaga character, because EVERYTHING coming from EVERYONE in Xenosaga is ALWAYS JUST vague.

Another part of the ending that doesn’t add up: Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really get why Jr. is scolding the Gnosis in the ending about how they’re supposed to accept people’s kindness, while repeatedly emptying his handgun into them. Don’t know about you folks, but if someone was shooting me repeatedly with a handgun, I doubt very much that I would consider it an act of kindness on the part of the shooter. Is it something else that he is referring to which is the act of kindness that he is annoyed is not being accepted by the Gnosis? If so, what? Is Jr. not referring to anything, just spouting random words that enter his head that he thinks might sound cool when strung together? I just don’t know. Hell, if I could figure out what this sentence is supposed to mean, I feel like maybe I would have unlocked one of the great mysteries of true enlightenment. I suppose it’s only fitting that Xenosaga 3 should thoroughly confuse me one last time before it’s done with.

Also, why does Allen look considerably less beaten-up during the ending escape scene than he did a mere half hour or so earlier?

And one last thing about this ending. I know I made a rant about how utterly unbelievable it was that the writers would actually have MOMO’s final line of dialogue be to tell Jr. to say hi to Albedo for her, but an anonymous reader actually pointed out a way in which this line is horrible that I hadn’t thought of, but definitely deserves mention. Besides just being disturbing and infuriating as I mentioned in the rant on it, this being the last line that MOMO says to Jr. is also incredibly lame considering all the work that was put into sort of hooking them up. The connection between Jr. and MOMO was shown right from the start of the series and had more screentime for showing and developing their interest in one another than Allen and Shion got, and yet here they are, about to be separated for who knows how many years as Jr. leaves with Shion to find Lost Jerusalem and MOMO stays behind to try to get civilization back on its feet...and all we get is “say hi to Albedo for me?” And a hilarious joke about how Jr. will do that, but who knows when Albedo will be awake for it because he’s lazy? No “I love you,” no “I’ll miss you,” not even a “take care of yourself.” The writers spent so much time establishing that these characters care for each other deeply, and THIS is how they choose to handle MOMO and Jr.’s goodbye. Fantastic work as usual, Namco.



And that’s it. I guess. I mean, that’s probably it. Maybe. Honestly, I don’t know. There could be all kinds of additional logical inconsistencies and poor narrative choices and lousy characterization and who knows what else in the finale that I’ve missed here, that just haven’t occurred to me as I watched it as being off. This rant has given me such an overdose of Xenosaga that by this point I feel like someone has replaced my brain with a lumpy pile of mashed potatoes. And while you might think this would give me extra insight into Xenosaga 3, since it’s clear that this is the exact condition all of its creators were in when they wrote it out, no such enlightenment into idiocy has come to me. So this will be it for today. Xenosaga 3’s finale is silly, stupid, infuriating, confusing, poorly communicated, and flimsy, has a very poor understanding of basic human nature and interaction, explains itself poorly and too little, has a completely inept narrative plan and flow, and is generally just a nonstop circus of repulsive stupidity and staggeringly bad writing. But you have to give it credit for 1 thing: at least it’s going out true to itself all the way.

But I hope you’re not too tired of Xenosaga just yet...I think I’ve got one more Xenosaga rant in me to go. Stay tuned...













* All credit for the the term “Youtube Atheist” goes to reader Ecclesiastes. He originally used it to describe Dragon Age 1’s Morrigan--and a more appropriate title for her there has never been--but I’m pretty sure it applies quite well to Jin’s little bit of bonehead pretend-wisdom here, too.

** It DOES provide all kinds of plot history and details regarding Mary and WIlhelm and chaos/Yeshua, though, heaps of information that just outright isn’t in the game at all. Some of it even sort of makes sense at times! I’d be annoyed that all this information isn’t actually available in game, but it doesn’t actually answer or clarify anything from the game at all, anyway. It’s new information, just not about the holes in the plot that you’re actually wondering about.

*** Besides the part where MOMO tells Jr. to say hi to Albedo for her.

Xenosaga 3 Mini Rants 2

My goodness, can it really be that it's been 3 months since I last did a rant on the most numerously flawed RPG series ever? Well, let's fix that!

Hey, remember that time I did a series of little rants about Xenosaga 3’s problems instead of a regular-sized rant about only 1 of those issues? I do. It was fun! Well, not exactly, but it wasn’t tortuously awful, either, so what the hell, let’s do it again!


Dying of Plot Plague: So, according to Kevin, Shion’s connection to U-DO (which just seems to be her being able to talk to him/her/it any time she passes out) makes her sick, for some inadequately-explored reason, as it did with her mother. KOS-MOS apparently runs by drawing power from U-DO, a convenient fact which I don’t think has ever been mentioned up until this moment in the series. Thus, because of Shion’s connection to U-DO, her close relationship with KOS-MOS is slowly killing her.

Wait, what? How the hell does that work? Shion just communicates with and gets passing-out headaches from U-DO (which happen whether or not KOS-MOS is nearby, using any unusual amount of energy, or even switched on, so that negative effect has to just be from U-DO in general). She’s not otherwise said or shown to have any particular connection to U-DO. If she did, she should presumably have some sort of negative reaction to Jr.’s abilities, since Jr. is a being specifically designed to combat U-DO (and he’s the strongest of such beings, to boot), but she doesn’t. So why does KOS-MOS running on U-DO juice have any sort of negative effect on Shion? If I’m chatting with my friend Varanus on Skype when an overzealous Red Cross worker bursts into his home, ties him down, jams a needle in his arm, and extracts a gallon of blood, leaving Varanus a withered husk of a human being, I don’t magically start losing MY blood too just because I happened to have a line of communication open with him when it happened. So why is this the case with Shion? Additionally, how does this relate to KOS-MOS and Shion becoming closer and having their wills align? If KOS-MOS uses U-DO as a source of fuel either way, then how will Shion’s condition worsen by deepening her relationship to KOS-MOS? What about that exacerbates the condition? I’m not unwilling to believe that it COULD make the situation worse, but I’m gonna need SOME reason, even if it’s magical sci-fi bullshit, for that to happen. But I won’t get one. Because the game stops directly acknowledging this situation of Shion slowly dying fairly shortly after the scene where it’s introduced. And why is that?

Because Xenosaga, that’s why.

Oh yeah, I love the part after Kevin tells Shion and company about this U-DO-Shion-KOS-MOS death connection stuff, and Jin warns Shion against taking it at face value, even though it “may seem plausible enough.” Does it seem plausible, Jin? Does it really?

What’s He Even Doing, Again?: Kevin wants to save the universe. Kevin wants to destroy the universe. Kevin wants to save the universe BY destroying the universe. Kevin wants to save the universe by destroying the universe, but only for himself and Shion, so for everyone else, he’ll be destroying the universe by destroying the universe. Even by Xenosaga terms, his purpose is about as rational and coherent as the intro for Team Rocket.

Blood Censorship: Censorship is rarely a good thing, but most of the time, I don’t really care if some blood and gore are removed when a game’s transitioning from the too-lax lands of Japan to the too-uptight lands of the USA. The overbearing creative deadzone that is United States Entertainment Culture has not yet managed to kill my imagination off, so if you show a guy getting stabbed with a sword, I don’t necessarily HAVE to see the blood from the wound to know he’s probably not feeling all that great about it. There are, however, some scenes that really HAVE to be free of censorship or else they’re significantly damaged, and the scene in Xenosaga 3 in which Little Shion is futilely, uncomprehendingly trying to catch her murdered mother’s blood in her hands in the hopes of putting it back into her...damn is this ever an example of why censorship is a bad thing. If you watch the scene from an original Japanese copy of the game, it’s very impressive, very emotionally painful and powerfully dark to watch. I’ll give this game credit where it’s due, and here, it’s very due.

Buuuuuuut, try playing an American copy of Xenosaga 3 through to this scene, and...well, the game was censored to have all blood removed from it.* So you sit there and you watch it, and you frown in mild confusion as you see this stricken child making inexplicable hand motions and muttering about putting something back in that doesn’t seem to exist. The entire mood of the scene is destroyed. I’d even go so far as to say that it actually looks silly. Man, even when Xenosaga 3 gets something right, it can’t get it right all across the board.

Voice Acting: The English voice acting in Xenosaga 3 utterly confounds me. I mean, in theory, it should be great. Pretty much every voice is a perfect match for its character. KOS-MOS is appropriately feminine yet robotic. Jr. is appropriately young but gruff. Captain Matthews is appropriately rough. Shion is appropriately normal yet somehow annoying over time. And so on. And a lot of these voice actors have got a lot of talent and experience under their belt, too. The woman who voices Jr., Brianne Siddall, has voiced a ton of lads and done a fine job each time. The guy who voices Margulis, Michael McConnohie, has, I think, voiced roughly one third of all RPG villains to date. Kirk Thornton, who plays Captain Matthews, has been in so many shows and games and such that it might actually be faster to make a list of things he has not done vocal work for. And yet, the voice acting for Xenosaga 3 just plain stinks!

It doesn’t stink in the usual way. I mean, like I said, these people are right for their roles, and they’re pretty much all quite good at what they do. But...I don’t know how to describe this. It’s like they’re doing a good job, but in the wrong way. Let me pose an example to you. Take this sentence: “What are you doing?” Now, there are a LOT of ways you can read that, a lot of scenarios that it can belong to. That could be a question of simple curiosity by someone passing by. Someone could be screaming that in horrified disbelief as they witness a terrible event. You could particularly emphasize any one of the words in it to get a different implication--”What are you doing?” implies extreme puzzlement and likely some dismay or disgust over what the speaker is witnessing, “What are you doing?” has a sort of snobby air to it, “What are you doing?” can imply some disdain for the doer being addressed, as though it’s laughable or unusual for the person to even be present, let alone doing something, and “What are you doing?” implies extra incredulity of some sort of the act itself. You could speak the sentence quickly and with little interest, and it becomes an apathetic moment of slightly sarcastic disregard for the other’s actions.

My point here is that practically any given sentence a voice actor reads can be used in many different situations in many different ways, and thus it needs to be spoken in the right way for the situation’s context. And that consistently does not happen in Xenosaga 3! These well-chosen, competent voice actors are delivering their lines well, but those deliveries are very often inconsistent with the situation in which the characters are speaking them. The inflections and parts emphasized are all over the place, and only seem to hit the mark for the characters’ situation and emotional state half the time, 60% at the most. It’s distracting. I can only assume that the voice actors weren’t properly directed while they were recording, weren’t given the proper context of the lines they were recording and weren’t told to re-record lines that weren’t going to fit in correctly. I can’t really think of any other reason for why this should be such a problem all across the board.

Jr.’s Guns: You know, the last time I did a series of mini-rants for this game, I talked about how useless MOMO seems in the cutscenes, but when I think about it, Jr.’s not a whole lot better. Like MOMO, Jr. is a fine fighter in the game’s actual battles; his abilities and his skills with his handguns are adequately effective, and you can quite easily use him efficiently as a party member. But like MOMO, if you go by all the instances of storytelling--actions taken outside the battle screen, and the content of the cutscenes--Jr. doesn’t seem to be able to do jack squat, at least not with his handguns, which are all he really uses outside of special situations with his fellow URTVs. He fires at giant mech suits, and, predictably enough, does no damage. He fires at T-elos, and does no damage. He fires at Voyager, and does no damage. Any time we see Jr. shooting at anything more than a faceless grunt enemy, there’s no damn effect. Being an effective fighter in the battle screen really doesn’t cut it with Xenosaga, as I mentioned before with MOMO--this is a game series with hours and hours and hours of cutscenes. They are the games’ primary vehicle of storytelling. And as Jr. cannot inflict damage on any significant foe throughout the Xenosaga series’s cutscenes, he comes off as useless to the team’s combat dynamic. It’s not as bad as with MOMO, since at least Jr. gets a chance to TRY to attack enemies here and there, but going by the storytelling sequences of the games, you would think him just as useless as you would think MOMO. They really should’ve given him a more appropriately dangerous armament--antique handguns just don’t cut it in a setting of giant mech suits, super robots, and lasers freakin’ everywhere.

Do You Know What Being Alone Actually Is, Shion?: Uh...okay, if Shion’s greatest fear is, indeed, of being alone, as is indicated by one of her little fireside chats with U-DO, then why does she later want to leave her friends and family to help Kevin? Yes, she’ll have him (and what a fucking prize he is), but in the process she’ll give up everyone else who cares about her and has been there for her. Not only that, but if Kevin were to successfully work his universe reset voodoo, she’d REALLY be alone with him, as they would be the only 2 people in the entire universe! That’s a pretty lonely scenario even with your precious boy-toy by your side, and what if something happens to him again? Seems like a hell of a counter-productive gamble for her to take if her loneliness is her greatest fear.

And Why Did All Of This Happen, Again?: The millennia-spanning ludicrously complex plan of Wilhelm that involves all the hogwash of collecting relics of God and souls of dead Bible women and giving abusive boyfriends superpowers and making little boys who are also sort of God into robot pilots and so on...it all stems from the one, single problem that the universe is, over time, dying. But the game never, to my understanding, has the courtesy to specifically explain to us exactly HOW the universe is dissipating, what’s causing it and why. First it’s blamed on the wills of people who don’t feel like they fit in (the Gnosis), and then it’s blamed on chaos’s existence, but not once do we get any idea of how either of these things, or anything else, actually translates into the end of the universe. What is it about the mere existence of the Gnosis and/or chaos that makes this happen? The Gnosis are fairly destructive in general, but that’s just on the normal human scale, like the way an all-out nuclear war in real life would devastate the society of man and its creations, and wreak havoc on the Earth’s surface, but would not actually, so far as I know, really damage the Earth itself, only the stuff on it. We never see the Gnosis doing anything that could even faintly connect to destroying the universe itself. And chaos is just bumming around, not bothering anyone. So how do either the existence of chaos or the existence of the Gnosis hasten this universal collapse that Wilhelm’s trying to circumvent?

And here’s the other thing about that situation I don’t get. Once Shion and company have defeated Wilhelm’s plans, chaos and Nephilim begin to summon all the Gnosis to them, with the intent of sealing the Gnosis and themselves on Lost Jerusalem (Earth) so that the destruction of the universe can be slowed, to buy humanity enough time to hopefully come up with a true solution to the problem. Well that’s all fine and good, very noble and all that, but, uh, why should that make any difference? I mean, all we can glean from the game’s information about how the universe is dying is that it’s the existence of chaos and/or the Gnosis that causes it--and since chaos is a good guy who would never actively destroy the universe, and as I said we don’t see the Gnosis really do much besides destruction on a human scale or just sit around in space, it seems like the only logical conclusion really is that just chaos and/or the Gnosis existing is all it takes to be detrimental to the life of the universe, even if, as I said, we have no idea why that is or how it is done. But if just existing is enough to bring about the universe’s end eventually, then why does sealing chaos and the Gnosis on Lost Jerusalem make a difference to how fast that happens? Lost though it is, Earth is still IN the universe, so, sealed there or not, the Gnosis and chaos will still be existing in the universe. If their mere existence is enough to hasten destruction, how can it matter which planet that existence happens to be taking place on?

The Ambitions Of Sellers: During the heroes’ final meeting with Sellers, before he just vanishes inexplicably from the plot altogether, the guy makes a bunch of grandiose statements about how he has no loyalties to Ormus or the Federation, and that he’ll happily use any powerful organization as a vehicle to advance his goals. He also talks about how sacrifices are acceptable and trivial in order to accomplish great things. Okay, right, amoral mad scientist schtick. Yet do we ever get any clear idea, anything but the very vaguest of notions, of what those goals and great things are meant to be? I mean, I’m willing to allow for some non-specific mad science-y ambitions, a la Hojo from Final Fantasy 7, but we should be privy to at least a general idea of what it is that Sellers is trying to do. I think we kinda get an idea that he’s trying to surpass his old boss Mizrahi, but in what way? Why? How? What is it that Sellers finds interesting about his work? What are the results he wants to see? What are the results he’s even observing? Again, a case where Show, Don’t Tell would’ve been the right move--Sellers can go on and on all he likes about his goals and ambitions and science crap, but we’re given nothing specific to qualify his statements.

This Guy Are Sick: Most of the time, when a character in Xenosaga says something that doesn’t make any sense, it’s not because it’s badly translated, it’s just because they’re spouting the usual over-complicated nonsense that is the signature of Xenosaga. There are, however, some occasions in the game that are just silly gibberish that doesn’t seem like it could make sense even by that standard.

For example, when Helmer talks about how his planet, Miltia, is evacuating its population as quickly as possible in light of the danger of Abel’s Ark, Canaan says “You humans are hopeless. It’s times like this when you should be working together.” Where the hell did THAT come from? Wouldn’t expedient planetary evacuation imply at least some form of cooperation? Does Canaan mean that they should instead be working together toward some different solution? What the hell does he think Helmer and the regular military and citizenry are going to be able to do? All the bullshit magical hooplah that has to do with Abel’s Ark is way beyond conventional resistance. I have no idea what prompted this statement by Canaan, what the intent of the statement is, or why everyone around him just seems to accept it as valid.

Or as another example, Albedo’s line when he shows up during the confrontation with Yuriev: “I’m so happy to be able to see you again. It’s rather amazing. I feel like thanking the laws of this universe.” What the fuck does that even MEAN? It’s like something some weirdo would say in Earthbound! Granted the laws of the universe are sort of behind anything and everything that happens, so you COULD thank them for virtually anything, but to my knowledge, no one ever goes around doing that. And for that matter, Albedo is only able to see Jr. again here because Wilhelm BROKE the laws of the universe to make it happen--Albedo DIED, and Wilhelm brought him back. If there’s any time where the normal laws of the universe actually weren’t responsible, it’d be this one! But that’s beside the point. The point is, what the fuck are you talking about man.

Well That Was Convenient: After the heroes defeat Citrine and try to stop Yuriev, Yuriev shoots the panel controlling the door he’s exiting from. Now, I understand why he does this--it’s to stop anyone from being able to open the door to follow him. What I don’t understand is why, after he has shot it, the door opens one last time for him? He shoots it while the door’s closed, then it opens for him after the damage has been done to it, and only THEN, after he’s made his getaway, does it seem to realize its control panel has been destroyed and refuse to open. Look, Namco, either shooting the damn thing breaks it or it doesn’t. You can’t change your mind halfway through the scene.


Ehhh, I think that’s enough for today. Hope you’re not getting tired of Xenosaga, though, because there’s more to come.










* I can’t even understand why that is. This is a game made for adults, it features a nonstop barrage of adult themes. There is enough mature-themed shit going down in this series that a little blood should not be the breaking point.