General RPGs' Villains' Screen Time

There are many aspects of story and characters that can go a long way to making an RPG truly great, or truly terrible. It’s important that there be creativity, that the setting be interesting, that the protagonist be compelling, that the story be purposeful, and so on and so forth. Lots of factors contribute or detriment an RPG’s overall quality depending on how well they’re written, and one of those factors is most definitely the major villain of the work. Unfortunately, just like believable and touching love stories, really good villains are unusually uncommon in this genre. Even most of the good games manage to get by without compelling antagonists, by virtue of their other good qualities--Final Fantasy 7 and Disgaea 1 come to mind, as examples, though there are certainly many to choose from.

Nonetheless, RPGs have had their share of really excellent villains, and those villains have always greatly enhanced the game they’re in. Fou-Lu was one of the comparatively few memorable parts of Breath of Fire 4, The Transcendent One provides a thematically perfect climax to the utterly incredible Planescape: Torment, and I dare say that Darth Traya is responsible for 50% of the overwhelming excellence of Knights of the Old Republic 2’s writing.

There’s all kinds of ways to make a villain great, memorable, iconic, a powerfully positive part of the plot. Sometimes it’s as simple as look, attitude, and generally foreboding menace. Darth Vader, for example, did eventually get some backstory in the second and third movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, but even as an entirely unexplained bad guy in the original Star Wars, he was an iconic villain. Sometimes it’s having the villain properly reflect the hero’s nature, the way most of Batman’s foes represent the dark side to aspects of his own personality, or likewise having the villain represent and/or reflect the themes and purpose of the story, like Cato in The Hunger Games. Sometimes it’s having a villain whose fall to evil you fully understand and can even sympathize with, such as Demona from Gargoyles. And so on and so forth--there’s a huge number of ways to really make a villain work well.

One thing that really, really helps, though, is something that not nearly enough RPGs seem to understand: giving the game’s major villain(s) enough screen time. Too often, the villain of an RPG is kept out of the player’s sight for almost the entirety of the game, only showing up to twirl his/her metaphorical mustache menacingly and prove his/her evil by doing naughty things for a few minutes before vanishing again. Sometimes it’s not even that much--the 10 Wise Men of Star Ocean 2 are the masterminds behind all the major problems of the game, yet if you don’t count the actual boss battles against them, I’m not sure all of them put together have even a full 15 minutes of screen time over the course of a 40+ hour game!

Some RPG villains manage to be pretty decent despite this lack of screen time. Saren from Mass Effect 1 is as much an “only shows up to remind you that he’s there and a bad guy” villain as the next guy, but he’s got just enough characterization during those moments and just enough of a tie to the theme of “struggling against impossible odds for freedom instead of giving in to slavery in order to survive” to come out in the end as a decent villain. The Sinistrals of Lufia 2, as another example, manage to pull off the role of epic deities of destruction just well enough that it’s not significantly detrimental that they only actually show up here and there, and we more or less never see anything of note on their end.

Still, as a general rule, a villain with the qualities necessary to be great will only live up to that potential greatness if those qualities have their proper time to shine. I think an excellent example of this is Loghain, from Dragon Age 1. Now, Loghain is a very well-crafted individual, with easily understandable motives and paranoias guiding his villainous actions throughout DA1’s plot, who has many good qualities and good intentions that are interesting to learn of and make him a character with real depth, even if they do not outweigh his evil deeds. But, you’ll never know practically any of this throughout the course of Dragon Age 1 if you let him die during the Landsmeet (as, I would think, most players do, and as I do with my “true” playthroughs). It’s only if you choose to spare Loghain, and sacrifice Alistair’s friendship (and possibly life), that Loghain joins your party and has a chance through his dialogue with the main hero to become known, to explain himself and show his true nature and facets of personality. That’s why he makes such a good example of what I’m talking about. Play the game one way (the more common way, I should think), without knowledge of how it goes otherwise, and to you, Loghain is a fairly basic, unexceptional villain--not bad, has a little characterization by reputation, but ultimately there’s very little to him and he just moves the plot along as needed with his nefarious ways. But, play the game the other way, give Loghain the time on screen to capitalize on the depth of his character by conversing directly with the player repeatedly, and you suddenly have a very, very well-crafted villain who fulfills his role in a particularly human way, and fits interestingly into the setting of the game.

As another example, I have no doubt that Kreia (AKA Darth Traya) of Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a noteworthy villain either way, but compare her to the character of Ravel Puzzlewell of Planescape: Torment. Both are incredibly fascinating characters, both villains in a way that is ultimately for the greater good of the one they care most for (The Nameless One and The Exile) and even the greater good of the universe itself, in some ways. Both are masterfully wise and engrossing to listen to. Both are characters written by Chris Avellone, who is basically a living god of RPG writing. While certainly distinct characters from one another, there are certainly plenty of similarities between them. No one can say that Ravel Puzzlewell isn’t an incredible character and villain. Not without risk of getting punched in the face by me. But to me, Kreia far surpasses her.

The wisdom and insight of Kreia into the Force, people and their interactions with one another, the power of charisma and setting an example, the way one small act can snowball into a revolutionary action, the importance of striving for balance between the foolish old Jedi Order’s ways and the equally foolhardy ways of the Sith, the connection she forges with the protagonist, the way she manipulates people and destiny itself, the way she sets in motion the future of the galaxy so far that the effects of her actions are seen and felt even thousands of years later, in the actual Star Wars movies...it’s genuinely amazing, it really is. The thing is, you only truly understand all these facets of Kreia as a person and as a force of fate (and in some ways as the fate of the Force) is because you spend 4/5ths of the game in her company, listening to her words and watching her actions, and then that last fifth you spend pursuing her to try to stop her, so you’re sill seeing the effects of her machinations and encountering her as a force to be opposed. Kreia is a character of immense, utterly fascinating depth who has the time in the game to fully show that depth to us in all ways.

Ravel, on the other hand, is clearly a fascinating character as well, and might even be just as incredible a villain and person as Kreia, but in Planescape: Torment, we only ever meet a few of her shadows, hear a little of her actions, and meet her face to face a single time for a single conversation. And don’t get me wrong--the meeting with Ravel Puzzlewell is one of the many parts of Planescape: Torment that goes down in history as one of the RPG genre’s greatest moments. She only has one conversation, but it’s long, and it’s jam-packed full of intriguing character development, plot exposition, and great ideas and perspectives to think upon. As much as the writers do with it, though--and, again, they do a LOT with it--it still is only a single encounter for Ravel to be able to make herself known and understood. We can tell much about Ravel, be properly wowed by what a well-written, compelling character and villain she is, but even if she really does have the potential depth that she could match Kreia, she simply doesn’t have the time to fully explore that potential the way Kreia does, and so Kreia is by far the greater villain.

Giving a villain enough time on screen for the player to really understand them, even bond with them, just makes all the difference sometimes. Sure, we might have found Fou-Lu in Breath of Fire 4 to be an okay villain under normal circumstances, been able to at least take his word for it that the world he awoke to was populated by a pitiful, deceitful, and unworthy society of lower beings...but instead of just expecting us to accept Fou-Lu’s point of view on his word alone, Capcom took the time, had the good idea, to devote a significant amount of the game’s time to playing as Fou-Lu, showing us (instead of just telling us) his own journey and letting us see firsthand how the worst nature of people that he encountered shaped his opinion. It makes Fou-Lu not only a more complex and believable villain with a goal we can understand, but also a better counterpoint to the protagonist Ryu, who has on his journey experienced enough good and strong enough friendship that his point of view can justly be opposite.

And yeah, we would have been able to just go along with fighting an intangible evil force called Odio acting through some random corrupted knight named Orsted in Live-A-Live, but instead of just tossing Orsted at us and telling us “This is a villain, kill it,” Squaresoft gave Orsted a game chapter just as the rest of the cast got, wherein we see how Orsted became the fallen angel that we must oppose, how this innocent hero had everything, everything, cruelly taken from him by the dark side of humanity. By the time Orsted’s chapter concludes, he’s lost every good thing his life had, tangible and intangible, and it’s no wonder to the player that he gives himself over to evil.

And of course, there’s always Wylfred, of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. As the game’s protagonist, the one you’re with from start to finish, it comes as no surprise that he’s also one of the greatest RPG villains ever, since he’s getting the time and devotion to character development that a game’s main character typically does.

Hell, a proper amount of screen time can even work wonders for bad guys who are more like forces of nature than actual characters. You know, big monsters of legendary badness, that sort of thing. I mean, look at Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Yeah, he doesn’t have any real characterization, and there’s no reason to consider him even self-aware. But he’s kept relevant throughout the game’s course--every major arc the story has to do with Lavos, from seeking to stop Magus because of the mistaken belief that Magus created Lavos, to the seemingly unrelated battle for humanity in 65 Billion BC turning out to be the time that Lavos first arrived on the scene, to the story arc involving the magical kingdom of Zeal, which feeds upon Lavos’s power and goes too far with it. In as much capacity that Lavos can exist as a character, he is kept important to the story, on the characters’ and player’s minds, and extremely significant to the game’s world. There are few moments in this game where the threat of Lavos is not being directly shown, reference, or addressed, and that elevates Lavos as a big bad monster villain way above peers of his like, say, Giygas in Earthbound or the evil Genie in Dark Cloud 1.

Of course, don’t get me wrong. A lot of screen time is not ALWAYS needed for a great villain. I mean, Luca Blight from Suikoden 2 is one of the most iconic, monstrously evil villains I’ve seen in an RPG to date, and he only got a regular small amount of time on screen in the game. He simply had the attitude and actions to really sell it. I definitely think that Seymour from Final Fantasy 10 and The Master from Fallout 1 are very good villains, and they didn’t get an abnormal amount of time on screen (Seymour gets some, but not a large amount). In their cases, their reason for villainy (for Seymour, the belief that death is kinder than an existence in the perpetually ravaged Spira, and for The Master, the belief that humanity is incapable and unworthy of surviving in the hellish wasteland it has created for itself and should be replaced with a more unity-minded and strong race of super mutants) is given weight by the time the player spends in the environment. We see firsthand just how miserable and regularly lethal life is in Spira, where the greatest hope people have is simply for a couple years’ reprieve from their tormentor (and it’s bad enough that they’re willing to sacrifice human lives for that reprieve), and in Fallout 1 we see just how much the world has been ruined by humanity’s actions, how difficult it is to live in this world, just by traveling across its endless wastelands. And Greyghast in Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle gets essentially no screen time at all, because he's not even alive for the events of the game (sort of), yet he's close to being as monstrously evil and horrifying as Luca Blight, because his evil is seen after the fact in the protagonist Catherine, who has memory-nightmares and clearly bears the mental scars that serve as legacy to Greyghast's evil. In these latter 3 cases, the game’s setting, other characters, and story themselves are aspects of the villain, an indirect way of familiarizing ourselves with the villain’s motivation and goals, and that works more or less as well as actually learning these things through more exposure directly to the villain.

And of course, a poor villain is a poor villain, regardless of how long the camera’s fixated on him or her. If the villain you’ve made just sucks on principle alone, then extra time is not going to help. Mithos in Tales of Symphonia is a whiny, irrational, thumb-sucking little turd. The writers made a shitty villain when they made Mithos, one whose motivations are embarrassingly bad, one whose plans are stupid and silly. Namco obviously wanted him to be a standard kinda-tragic-because-he’s-misguided sort of villain, your usual JRPG bad guy, but they failed big time. Every damn thing this self-important, mewling little jackass says is annoying and idiotic, and his existence even detriments the other characters of the game, like how he makes a major point of Genis’s character development the dilemma of choosing between Mithos, a dude who Genis has known for maybe an hour, and the friends and family he’s known all his goddamn life. Ugh. Anyway, Mithos is a sucky villain no matter how you slice it, so giving him a lot of screen time does not actually improve anything. The time Mithos spends travelling with the heroes is only more time for him to prattle on and annoy us further. A villain has to actually be WORTH the time for it to do anything good for him/her.

However, as a general rule, I’d definitely say that more screen time for a villain is a very good thing. The best, most interesting, most compelling villains of RPGs are very often the ones that the audience has had time to really become familiar with and understand, and really, it just makes sense that a character playing such a crucial role for your story, providing much of, perhaps all, of the obstacles for your heroes to overcome, to get a significant level of characterization. Sadly, most games are so caught up with developing and portraying the heroes of the story (not that there’s anything wrong with that! Heaven forbid I give that impression; if anything, the major characters in RPGs STILL often don’t enough proper development) that they seem to forget the importance of the villain as a character, and use them only as a necessary plot tool. If only more games could follow the examples I’ve mentioned above.

The Shin Megami Tensei Series's Recent Neutral Figureheads

Doubtless I’m making mountains of molehills here, but I cannot help but feel some slight concern over what I’ve seen with a couple of the recent Shin Megami Tensei games’ characters who embody the Neutral path.

In case you’re unfamiliar with this, most Shin Megami Tensei games have multiple story paths and endings, and usually, those follow a formula of Law, Neutral, and Chaos. Law is the path of those who believe in absolute order and submission to rules and regulations (which is usually, in SMT, represented by God and the heavenly host of Christianity), Chaos is the path of those who believe in absolute freedom and that the strong should decide their own destiny (which is usually, in SMT, represented by Lucifer and a wide mythological array of demons), and Neutral is the path of those who believe that too much law or chaos is a bad thing and that a balance between them is important, that humans should decide their fate for themselves without the oversight of God or the temptations of Lucifer, and ultimately hold out hope that there can be a better tomorrow of our own design. That’s a very rough summation, but it will suffice. Not every SMT with multiple paths has a distinct Law or Chaos route, but even the titles that lack either of those routes will usually still have a path of Neutrality (or even more than one) analogous to the one I’ve just described, one which sees the flaws and benefits of both other possibilities and seeks a less extreme middle ground.

Usually, for each path there is a character in the game who is the iconic representation of that path’s philosophies. For example, in SMT Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha 2, it’s Dahn who stands for Chaos and Akane who stands for Order, and in SMT Strange Journey, Chaos, Law, and Neutral are represented by Jimenez, Zelenin, and Gore, respectively. And that’s where my problem today comes from: I find that, as representations of the Neutral path, Daichi and his followers in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, and Isabeau from Shin Megami Tensei 4, are disappointing, and since they’re some of the most recent Neutral Heroes, it troubles me that this could be the direction that the series is going to go in for this role.

The problem I have with Isabeau and Daichi and company is quite simple: they’re figureheads of indecision, not balance. Look at Daichi’s band in SMTDS2. Once you reach the point in SMTDS2 where the factions are starting to distinguish themselves from one another, the point at which we see that the major choice of the game is between a world of equality or meritocracy, Daichi begins to question whether either world is truly a good idea, pointing out the flaws of a society of both utter equality and complete meritocracy.* And that’s fine. I expect someone, particularly the Neutral figure of the game, to see the problems of the game’s major paths, and to seek out and offer a third, middle-of-the-road solution.

But that’s just it--Diachi never offers that solution, never has any idea of what it might be. I give him credit that he seems to be thinking about it and trying to come up with a solution, but when the day in the game comes where all must choose their sides, he’s got nothing. True Armegeddon is approaching fast at this point in the game, and the only way to prevent all existence from being reduced to utter nothingness, a white void of nonexistence, is to approach the entity causing this situation with a plan for recreating and reshaping the world. It’s Yamato’s plan to take this entity’s power and make a world where only those who have strength, intellect, or do something useful to society have any power. Ronaldo opposes Yamato, and intends to instead make a world where all people share all resources equally and harmoniously, where the strong protect the weak and all are valued exactly the same. At this point in the story, with only a day or so left before the last small piece of the world left is erased, everyone must make a decision on which side they will follow.

Except for Daichi. Still insisting that neither side is ideal, and that if a philosophy makes you fight against those important to you then it can’t be a good one,** Daichi, and the friends who then follow him, refuse to follow either Equality or Meritocracy. Okay, fine. So what’s his middle-ground solution?

“I dunno.”

Yes, that’s right. One day from the erasure of all existence, when all the lives that ever were and ever could be are on the line, when everything and everyone will be blanked out forever if a leader does not step forth and provide the blueprints of a new, ideal world, Daichi just wants to sit on his hands. Not only that, but he wants everyone ELSE to do so, too. Daichi insists that there must be some better way than to force friends to fight each other over which flawed world to enact, but when outright asked by Yamato what this alternative is, Daichi can produce no answer. Just...what the hell? It’s 24 hours to the end of existence, dude! If you don’t like either Yamato’s or Ronaldo’s option, fine, that’s your choice, but if you’re going to actively oppose them and encourage others to do the same, you’d sure as hell better have an alternative plan of action beyond “sit tight and hope things work out” in mind! Good God, I’m all for the “finding a better way” approach to things, it’s an RPG story staple, but if you don’t actually find that better way by Go Time, and the universe and all its history and future is on the line, that is not the time to cross your arms over your chest, pout, and whine, “I don’t wanna!”

Yes, if you do support Daichi, a different option besides Equality and Meritocracy does present itself, but that’s beside the point, honestly. The point is that when the chips were down and it was time to nut up or shut up, Daichi, and the characters who choose to follow him, had no plan, no idea, just the dislike of the options presented. The fact that another path does present itself eventually if the player chooses to follow Daichi feels more like a lucky break than some sort of reward for his commitment, a blind gamble with all of existence as the ante, that thankfully just happens to pay out.

Ugh, and Isabeau in SMT4? Pretty much just as bad. It’s not noticeable at first, but when you watch her for the entirety of the game, you come to realize that she is completely, utterly incapable of making a decision or picking a side at any time of significance during the story. The Passage of Ethics? Can’t make a decision on any of the questions; doesn’t even try--Jonathan and Walter are the ones who mull over the philosophical ramifications, and Isabeau just stays silent. When the time comes that Jonathan and Walter split, one to kill Lilith and the other to do her bidding? Isabeau can’t choose either and instead chooses to go fool around with some NPCs she’s met all of twice because she has no convictions about the matter at hand beyond a vague disapproval. Even once the protagonist, Flynn, has set his path at the end of the game to Neutral (assuming he doesn’t go Chaos, Law, or Nihilism), and Isabeau joins him as his only fellow who also sides neither with angels nor demons, she STILL doesn’t know what to do. Seriously, Flynn comes back to his own world, and Isabeau finds him, and says she’s going to hang out with him during this crisis of heaven and earth, and the reason she gives is just a flat-out confirmation that she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know her priorities, doesn’t have any idea of how to do the fence-straddling act she wants to pull, just wants to dump it all on Flynn and have him do her thinking for her.

If Daichi’s bunch and Isabeau are any indication, it seems that Atlus has begun to mistake paralyzing and incredibly irresponsible indecision for the balance and self-determination that Neutrality is supposed to be known for. Yes, the first half of the Neutral path in SMT games is a denial of the extremes of the other paths. But that’s not ALL there is to it; there has to be an actual plan, conviction, even just the faintest wisp of an idea as to what should be done instead! The most proactive action either Daichi or Isabeau takes in the end is to inspire someone else (Flynn and what’s-his-name, SMTDS2 protagonist) to do the figuring-out-a-different-path legwork for them!

I mean, compare this to those characters who have previously represented the Neutral path. When the party splits apart in SMT Persona 3’s The Answer continuation on whether they should change the past for the sake of their late friend Minato, Aigis walks the middle road, refusing to make a decision on this matter. That seems like indecision, but we see soon after that Aigis was not refusing because she felt unable to decide--she’s refusing because she won’t make the decision until she knows more about what, exactly, it was that happened the day that Minato banished Nyx and was in turn doomed to be taken from his friends. Aigis is a character whose ethics have been clear by this point for quite some time, and she’s walking the Neutral path on the decision her friends are warring over with an actual plan in her mind, having thought of an important angle to the situation that no one else has. Like Isabeau and Daichi, she doesn’t know enough to comfortably decide the best course of action with their chance to change the past. But unlike Isabeau and Daichi, Aigis is proactive in her lack of understanding, and moves to correct that indecision, to give herself the knowledge she needs to make an educated choice. Isabeau and Daichi are people who don’t know something and sit there stagnating in that ignorance, and Aigis is a person who doesn’t know something and so goes out and finds the answer.

Gore in SMT Strange Journey? Once he’s back in the game and ready to take up the mantle of the Neutral Hero, he has an ideal and a plan for his path. Atsuro and Gin in SMT Devil Survivor 1? Each comes up with a way to put control of the city and world back in the hands of humanity, proactively dealing with the situation of Babel and the war between demons and angels. These are characters who have strong feelings of what is best for humanity, characters who make choices and actively seek ways to do what they think is right and act upon their convictions.

Even the unnamed Heroine of Shin Megami Tensei 1 is better than Daichi and Isabeau. The SMT1 Heroine’s only ethic and plan of action eventually is to stick with the protagonist and support him no matter what course of action he chooses, and yeah, that obviously ain’t a stunning example of a strong, iconic character, but at least she’s showing consistency and loyalty, at least she’s making the choice to follow the SMT1 protagonist. It’s not much better than Isabeau’s joining Flynn because she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but still, it IS a step up. A paid servant and a slave may perform the same tasks, but the fact that a servant has chosen to do so makes for a world of difference between them, and so I say that the decision to follow another and trust his judgment is different from being led because you cannot self-determine. And the SMT1 Heroine’s decision is, at least, thematically appropriate, since the SMT1 protagonist is essentially the avatar of humanity, the one who will decide what path humanity will follow, so you could see her putting her faith in him as putting her faith in humanity itself. And since Neutral is, y’know, about humanity standing on its own to make its own decisions and whatnot...I dunno, it sort of works, right? At any rate, since it’s a case of the Heroine actually choosing to put faith into someone, rather than Isabeau’s desperately turning to someone else to find her path for her, it’s a point in the Heroine’s favor over Isabeau.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to say about this. Being unsatisfied with the obvious paths offered, that’s a natural part of the SMT Neutral figurehead. But the point is for them to go from there to taking action, asserting their views, addressing their lack of knowledge, doing SOMETHING about the situation, taking SOME step toward the future. And that’s a level of proactivity that Isabeau and Daichi never reach; they just stall at the dissatisfaction stage. And that does concern me, because it’s a strike against their games’ storytelling value, and that strike has come both times against some of the series’s newest titles. I’m probably worrying over nothing, but nonetheless, I do hope that characters based entirely upon indecision and choking at the finish line aren’t going to become the norm for future SMT titles’ Neutral figures.






* At least, he tries to point out those flaws. If you’ve read my SMTDS2 rant on the supposed major flaw of the world of equality, you’ll remember that the major criticism of that path doesn’t hold any water whatsoever.

** Which is hypocritical idiocy, of course, since, if you follow Daichi, the protagonist will be leading a campaign against his friends in the other factions anyway.

Star Ocean 3's Map Completion

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Lunar: Dragon Song's Gameplay

I warn you right now: if you’ve read any reviews for Lunar: Dragon Song, then this entire rant is probably not going to tread any new ground. Everyone has the same complaints about this title’s gameplay, and this is just me adding one more indistinguishable log on that fire. But if you don’t have anything better to do--and let’s face it, if you’re actually here, with the intent to read the nonsense that I incessantly chatter on about, then chances must already be good that you’re pretty hard up for entertainment at the moment--then read on.

Lunar: Dragon Song. It is nothing short of legendary for how horrible it is to play. This game does so many things wrong with its design, making itself utterly unplayable at every turn in so many ways, that I actually think it was designed by a super villain. Really, there cannot be any way for this many completely unique gameplay problems to have come about without malicious intent; this game is a work of an evil, twisted creative genius. You almost have to admire it, as a work of art made to commemorate frustration and human suffering. I’m 30 years old now, so I don’t actually have the time left to me on Earth to really go into every part of why this game is virtually unplayable, but here’s a quick Who’s Who list of the more horrible design flaws:


Experience OR Items After Battle: Yeah, you don’t get both. Items are the only reliable source of income in this game, and the badly designed challenge curve guarantees that you’re eventually going to really, really need every edge you can get, which means that after a certain point in the game you HAVE to be buying every new piece of armor you come across. That means twice as much time wasted grinding against enemies, once for EXP, once for the items you’ll need to make money. Since enemies level with you, you might be thinking that you COULD try for the money alone and do a low-level run of the game, but…


Frustrating Challenge Curve: The game gets too hard, too fast, and never lets up; every dungeon is a war of attrition with the player. This makes it more or less impossible to do a low-level run of the game. Yes, enemies do level with you, so if your levels are lower then they’ll be likewise less powerful, but that isn’t enough--even low-leveled, the enemies’ power will eventually outpace updated armor and weapons’ effectiveness, and you’ll be unable to defeat bosses without gaining levels. So what you have here is a game where gaining levels is almost meaningless because your enemies are gaining them with you so each level only provides you with marginal superiority, but also a game where you also can’t take advantage of low enemy levels past a certain point, either.


Enemies Can Break Your Equipment: There are a fair number of enemies in this game that can break your equipment with their regular attacks. Yeah. That’s annoying in any game, but consider what I’ve mentioned so far. First of all, that you have to spend time battling enemies over and over just for money alone. So if a random enemy attack means that you’re forced to replace that piece of armor you just bought for tens of thousands, you’d best grab yourself a Snickers, because you’re not going anywhere for a while. And then consider what I’ve mentioned about the difficulty curve. After a while, you’re not going to be able to do diddly-squat damage to enemies if you don’t have the best possible weaponry, so if an enemy happens by chance to break your main character’s weapon, that’s really just too fucking bad for you. You’re not going forward until you replace that weapon, unless you want your already tediously long and overabundant battles to take 5x longer. Oh, and if the piece of equipment that breaks happens to be one you got from a chest that’s better than any other equipment you can currently buy? Tough shit.


Painfully Slow Walking Speed, But Running Costs HP: The pace of your characters when walking is best described as “plodding,” but your characters lose HP when they run. Want to get anywhere in a timely fashion in this game? You’d better stock up on those healing items. But oh wait, you have to waste twice as much time fighting enemies for the money you’ll need for those healing items, won’t you? So either way you’re going to be wasting that much more time. Awesome.


Jian’s the Only Useful Attacker: Jian the protagonist does more damage in one of his attacks than any other character does in one of theirs. This wouldn’t be a big deal (pretty standard for RPGs, really), except that Jian also does 3 attacks for every round, while everyone else just does your standard 1 attack. This means early on that Jian is overpowered and the rest of the party are just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Later on, when the game figures out what’s going on, this means that Jian is just 1 competent fighter against groups of enemies designed to challenge a full party of competent fighters, and the rest of the party are still just some fumbling, nearly useless support. Not helping this problem is my number 1 complaint, which is:


Oh My God Are You Serious, You Can’t Target Specific Enemies!?: Self-explanatory, really. When you tell your party to attack, they randomly select their target from the enemy party. Did Jian spend his turn attacking one enemy, whittling its HP down to nearly nothing? You can’t tell your weak supporting characters to finish it off, so more than likely they’ll just ineffectively attack something else (probably a weak enemy that Jian could 1-shot-kill a minute from now anyway), and Jian will waste his next turn finishing off the weakened enemy instead of being free to go to the next. Remember when I said that every dungeon is a war of attrition in this game? That’s because in every single battle, enemies get several more turns to attack you than they should due to the game’s random AI having no concept of attack strategy. You simply watch, powerless to do anything, each battle dragging on that much longer and costing that much more HP. Unbelievable. What is even the point of having a battle system at all if you only half control it? You have about as much say in what happens in battle as you would if you were watching someone play it on Youtube.


There’s plenty of other terrible things that make playing this game agonizing, like very low starting MP values, MP restoration items not being able to be purchased, weird map object-collision detection, the fact that money-making delivery sidequests often have the name of the supposed receiver and the name of the actual receiver not match up due to translation errors, the fact that a lot of your money comes from stupid delivery quests to begin with, and so much more, but the ones above are, I think, most of the really big ones.

Now you look at those, and you tell me that a game this perfectly designed to suck, where its gameplay flaws all coordinate with one another to strengthen each one’s dysfunction, was not MEANT to be as painful a playing experience as possible. Sorry to get all Intelligent Design on you, but there is no way something this horrible happened accidentally.

Shin Megami Tensei 4-1's Downloadable Content

3DS RPG DLC! Besides being way too many abbreviations all at once, it’s a subject I haven’t touched on yet. This is partially because most add-on content I’ve seen so far has been for PC games, which traditionally are more used to DLC and expansions and so on than Japanese RPGs are. This is also partially because there was not one single bit of Dragon Quest 9’s DLC that was even worth ranting about, so I didn’t bother. Fucking Dragon Quest.

Anyway. This will be the first time I’ve seen an add-on for a Shin Megami Tensei title (unless you count The Answer for SMT Persona 3, which does sort of count, but also sort of doesn’t since it was less an add-on than it was an expansion that you’d have to re-purchase the entire game for). Let’s see how Atlus does. I can only hope they’ll outperform some of the games I’ve seen in the past.

As usual, I’m not paying any attention to anything that doesn’t have any particular story content. You can just assume that the DLC packages for different armors and Experience/Money/App Point grinding are wastes of money.



Clipped Wings 1 and 2: There’s no point in separating these 2 DLCs, they’re each half of a whole. Uh...nope. Nope. Don’t like’em. They’re each about $2.50, which is not very much these days, but even then, you are not getting your money’s worth. All they are is a tiny bit of plot dialogue, and a series of fights against the Archangels (Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael). They’ll take you 10 minutes each at the very most to complete, assuming you’re victorious--and I don’t think it’s fair to count it if you have a longer experience just because you lose a few times. As fights go, they’re fine, but it’s not like the game isn’t already filled with plenty of decently challenging fights already.

The storyline for the DLC is mildly interesting, but too light and too lacking explanation. Oh, to be sure, I appreciate that this DLC provides us with some information on how 3 of the 4 Archangels were captured prior to SMT4’s opening, and that it provides us with some background for Mastema’s role in the game. But that information is rushed, and frankly, I’m not sure that randomly throwing time travel causality loops in was really the best way to handle this scenario. While the passage of time in SMT4’s a little difficult to get a firm grasp of at times due to inadequately explained differences in time flow between Tokyo and the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, the game hadn’t had any time travel until this moment, so it feels forced and out of place.

Plus, this DLC introduces a plot hole (besides the standard logical paradoxes of time travel to the past): if protagonist Flynn did indeed go back in time to defeat the Archangels and allow Mastema to capture them, why in the world does Gabby not recognize him during the game proper’s course of events? Once the other 3 are freed, why don’t they recognize Flynn, for that matter? Yeah, you can argue that they realize that the past events are set in stone and they shouldn’t attack him in the present before he’s traveled back to set the past events in motion, but even accepting that answer, it makes no sense for Gabby, or any of them, to trust Flynn as much as she does and they do. She charges him and his companions specifically with rescuing the other 3 Archangels in the middle of the game, and if Flynn follows the Law path, all of them will completely trust him to fight Lucifer alongside them. Do they somehow think he isn’t the same guy as from back in the past? Even if they’re not sure, wouldn’t they say something, ask something, do some sort of investigation or take some kind of precautionary measures?

There is 1 criticism I’ve heard for this DLC that I don’t share in, though. Some people have complained that since the Archangels are significant parts of the main storyline, they should have been fought in the game proper, not as optional add-on bosses. I actually don’t agree with this criticism. I mean, taken at face value, it’s logical, but the plot of the game kind of makes it hard to make that happen. By the time you reach the point of the plot where you may actually be opposing the forces of God, the Archangels have already fused with Jonathan to form Merkabah. Until then, there’s no reason they would attack Flynn, and at that point, they’re no longer individually in the picture. Still, that’s just one small thing that isn’t a problem with this DLC. The facts remain that it has too little story and play time, the story isn’t done well, and it is WAY overpriced for what it is. Considering how little you get from this DLC, I’d say paying even a single dollar would have been an unfair price.


Ancient One of the Sun: This one is a little better. It actually relates to the main plot of the game without mucking about with time travel (granted, it uses dimension travel, which isn’t much better, but at least that’s an established part of the game already), and furthers one of the main plot’s story arcs. In this DLC, you’re brought back to Blasted Tokyo to defend its citizens from God’s wrath once more, this time by defeating an actual piece of God, the Ancient of Days. Essentially, it’s pretty similar to Clipped Wings in that it’s short, doesn’t have an actual gameplay area, and is just a battle with some dialogue before and after it, but at least it seems somewhat relevant to the game. It develops a little further the fate of the Blasted Tokyo survivors, and ends with a little better closure for them, with uncertainty but hope that they’ll be able to greet the new culture of Genesis and live with them peacefully. I kind of wish poor Kiyoharu didn’t have to be disillusioned during the battle, since he would probably have been able to quite happily embrace these new people of God and easily maintain his fanatical faith, but ah well. So is this DLC worth it? Well...more than Clipped Wings was, but overall, no. Again, even if $2.50 isn’t much to spend, we’re talking about 15 to 30 minutes of game time total. To me, a dollar should equal at least 1 hour of play time in a DLC. If Atlus lowers the price of this one to 50 cents, I’ll buy it, but I’m sure as hell not paying any more for it.


The Eternal Youth: Meh. Since Sanat kind of comes out of nowhere with no background to precede him, this DLC, which is again just some dialogue, a fight, and final dialogue, feels contrived and doesn’t particularly draw one in. It’s nice to help Infernal Tokyo’s Akira again, I guess, but it doesn’t feel like any particular step has been taken by the end of it. I guess the idea is that now that Akira has supposedly beaten Sanat, all the demons think he’s hot shit and awesome and all that, but why the hell didn’t they already think that? The events of the main game have Akira taking the credit for beating Kenji, the guy who was previously the strongest individual in Infernal Tokyo, so this is one of those annoying cases of characters forgetting what they’ve learned solely so they can re-learn it. Sanat’s story and powers and role and motives and whatnot are too vague and mysterious, Akira’s side of things is too much a repetition of before, and nothing seems to have really been accomplished by the DLC’s end. Even if this one were long enough that the cost ($2.50, again) were tolerable, it wouldn’t be worth it. Pass.


For the Past...For the Future: Now see, this is the kind of DLC I hate the very, very most. In this DLC, you’re transported once again back in time, this time to the day that the land above Tokyo was created that would later be the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. You get a bit of dialogue beforehand, which explains a fair bit about several important parts of SMT4’s past history, including the disaster whose results separated the 3 dimensions we see during SMT4 (the home dimension, Blasted Tokyo, and Infernal Tokyo), a little background for the Yamato Reactor, how things went down with Masakado, of course part of the origin story of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, and we even see that the whole day of fate relates very strongly to similar cataclysms in other SMT games (the missile strike is just like the one from SMT1, and the conflict of angels and demons and humans in the streets of Tokyo is similar to the events of SMT Devil Survivor 1), which is a nice touch. Admittedly, Masakado is stupidly overpowered during your fight with him which doesn’t really fit the SMT lore,* and this DLC once again brings in time travel where it’s not wanted and REALLY opens a can of worms as far as cyclical event time paradoxes, but overall, this DLC has a lot of really good, really critical backstory for the setting and history of SMT4.

And that’s the damn problem. Why the HELL is such a critical part of understanding how events led to the current situation of SMT4 a Downloadable Content package!? There is just absolutely no denying that this is important, story-relevant narrative that absolutely without a shadow of a doubt should have been in the main game! This is important backstory that is just outright missing from the game, and whose absence is most definitely felt! At most the main game gives you vague hints and impressions of the things this DLC shows us, things that are incredibly relevant to understanding and appreciating the major plot events of Shin Megami Tensei 4! Holy hyper hell in a hamper, I hate it when a game has content in its add-on that obviously belonged in the main game. You wanna sell me Downloadable Content, then give me additional, unrelated aventures, give me character side stories, give me special epilogues and ending adjustments, give me expanded stories on minor things I’ve heard about in the game...but you sure as hell better not give me significant parts of the main plot that you just messily ripped from the game so you could charge me more money! If I want to understand the primary plot, the core story, of a game to the fullest possible extent, I should NOT have to pay extra! I paid for a full, complete story when I purchased the game, Goddammit!

I do not take kindly to being swindled, and that’s what this DLC is. At $3 for 20 to 35 minutes of play time, it’s not worth it anyways, but since its content is relevant enough to the game proper that keeping it separate is obviously a ploy to take advantage of you to make a quick buck, I wouldn’t pay for this thing if it only cost a single cent. Definitely go find a Let’s Play video of this add-on, because it’s certainly content that you should experience if you’re playing SMT4, but don’t waste your money supporting this kind of disingenuous scam. Shame on you, Atlus. I thought you were better human beings than Bioware. Perhaps I misjudged you.



So what’s the verdict for my first true foray into JRPG add-ons? Not good. Only a couple of SMT4’s DLCs have any plot content worth your time, they’re all way overpriced for the piddly amount of game time they add, and the last one is a classic example of how disgustingly dishonest the add-on business can be. If Atlus does another set of DLCs with its next SMT game, I sure hope they’re better than this.












* He’s supposed to be the ultimate demon of Neutrality in the SMT series, but as such he is, power-wise, way below the high iconic demons of Chaos and Law. That’s how it should be, because Neutrality is supposed to be all about humans finding their own way through their own strength, so it makes sense thematically for Masakado to be less powerful than Lucifer, Merkabah, Ancient of Days, even perhaps the Archangels, because that way the hero who chooses the path of Neutrality must compensate for the lesser power he receives by using his own abilities to see himself through--a human being’s abilities. Making Masakado into clearly the most powerful boss in the entire game just tosses all that thematic consistency out the window.

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.