Xenogears / Xenosaga

Xenogears was once described to me as "the best book I've ever played." I understood and agreed immediately: it has more text than any other game I'm familiar with, of any era or genre. (Including any work of interactive fiction.) Its fan-transcribed script on GameFAQs weighs in at a total of 826K. (For comparison, Odin Sphere's is only 300K; Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, 454K; Final Fantasy XII, 303K script + 341K bestiary.)

(I did like it, but it's been seven or eight years since I played it, so I'm afraid I can't give a reasonable review.)

Immediately following the above comment, Xenosaga (I, as II and III hadn't yet been produced) was recommended to me by someone else as "the best movie I've ever played." Which, again, I agreed with, although I had to first borrow the game from the recommender and play it through.

Unfortunately, unlike Xenogears, the RPG elements suffered for it. I recall getting through the entire game without using the A.G.W.S. after their introduction; they seemed pointless. (Perhaps I was overleveled?) It also suffers from repetitive and too-large environments — explained almost plausibly via appeal to nanotech, but that didn't stop me from getting lost, or bored walking from one side of a huge room to the other for the kth time. Alas, while XsII and XsIII fixed the mecha battles, the environments stayed annoyingly sterile through XsII and in many parts of XsIII.

While the story began interestingly enough — even the vaguely Evangelical Gnosticism-based technology and rambling (Jungian-flavored, for a change) — and the main characters stayed actual characters (unlike NGE), in the end it still succumbed to the common failing of overly-allusive videogames that many of the events depicted made no sense whatsoever unless interpreted solely as metaphor, growing increasingly rarefied and symbolic as time went on. It feels surreal saying this, but I have to credit the "Erde Kaiser" sidequests — gleeful, tongue-in-cheek homages to pre-Evangelion mecha anime — with giving the game some much-needed grounding in (at least a literary excuse for) reality.

I have no conclusion. But then, neither did the series, really, so I'm fine with that.