Xenogears

[Brian Moy]

After Vanguard Bandits, I still feel in the mood for a game with robot mechanized vehicles, so I'm continuing with Xenogears.  I had just over 12 hours on my save since I played it last.  Xenogears is the kind of game that is hard for me to play for too many consecutive times because the story is so complicated and being so in depth.  After playing where I left off, I put about another hour of play time in the game, which was just adventuring to get to where I needed to go, story advancing stuff without any actual battles or anything like that.  Lots of talking and reading to pay attention to.

[Jared Patton]

I never finished Xenogears either. But if a mech RPG is what you're looking for I can't think of a game that gets more praise than Xenogears. Theres also the Front Mission series but I've never played any of them.

[dante]

You've gone mech-crazy Brian!

Xenogears is a game I always wanted to play but never actually saw for sale. I'm pretty sure I'll get around to playing it though.

[Brian Moy]

I never finished Xenogears either. But if a mech RPG is what you're looking for I can't think of a game that gets more praise than Xenogears. Theres also the Front Mission series but I've never played any of them.

I'd been playing the first Front Mission last year.  The game is turn based strategy on a grid.  Your wanzers have a short range and long range attack.  Short range tends to do more damage, long range tends to do less damage.  Hit rates vary.  Each hit applies to a part of the wanzer - left arm, right arm, legs, body, etc.  You shoot down each part of the other wanzer piece by piece, so as a wanzer loses an arm with a gun, they can't use that weapon, when they lose their legs, they can't move as far, etc...  The setting if I recall is post-apocalypse cyberpunk. 

The ONE thing that made it painful to play consecutively is the micromanagement.  As you go thru the game, you get more and more characters - I'm at around 10 or so, maybe more, if I recall.  And then after each battle, each between battle city has a shop that seems to have more powerful armor and weapons available than the last city.  So you go and upgrade each wanzer .  Only thing is that as you play, each vehicle will be specialised for a particular tactic.  And each wanzer has a item to change for body, CPU, right arm, right shoulder, left arm, left shoulder, legs, backpack.  And in later stages I swear you have like 30+ options to choose from for each type.  BUT... you can't just purchase the items with the highest stats for each character.  No no no... if it were that simple, management would be not as intense as it is.  You have to consider the WEIGHT of each item to equip as if it can't go over a certain weight.  Going thru the shops to upgrade my characters one by one took me over 1 hour of actual time last time I played.  (I happened to notice the clock and seeing I was still upgrading my characters' equipments an hour later thought - this is ridiculous...)  Taking close to an hour in the shop upgrading my character's equipment between battles got annoying - realising I would have to do it after almost every battle.  The AI is smart enough, that yes you DO need to have the strongest available equipment for each battle.

I'm usually a big fan of the slow-paced repetition that puts me to sleep genre, but this game takes too much thinking tinkering with the wanzer customization.  You can even name your wanzers and paint them custom colors, etc if you like.  Very cool, but the equipment management overwhelms me...  The battles are very fun though.

[Jared Patton]

Micromanagment also turns me off. And that seems to be a general aspect in all mech-type games. It's too bad cause I love anything post-apocalypse cyberpunk.

[Brian Moy]

Micromanagment also turns me off. And that seems to be a general aspect in all mech-type games. It's too bad cause I love anything post-apocalypse cyberpunk.

Yes, I feel exactly the same way.  If you're someone who likes to tinker, you'd probably call it customization.  I like the idea of having so many options, you can basically make all your robots to be very individual and look as unique as you want them to be. 

I forgot to mention in my previous post.  For selecting the different body parts - its more than JUST the best stats for each, and there is not really a clear best body part for each type usually.  The different criterias are attack points, HP points, weight points, defense points... so various ones will be better at one criteria than the other.  So you could choose to be even overall at everything, or be strong at one particular thing, but weak at other things.

Front Mission is hardcore, which is good and bad.  Since I have regular stresses in my life, I generally don't like to play too many games that I have to think too intensely about regularly. 

[Brian Moy]

I completed Xenogears last week.  About 83 hours on the save, so its a medium length RPG.  I like to find everything I can and do a lot of level grinding (Fei gets the last ability at level 80 - I just wanted to see it) so the game could probably be finished in 60 to 70 hours without a guide if a person was playing just to finish the game.

Xenogears is a game that FELT longer than it actually was.  The story is pretty deep and intense, lots of reading - especially on the second disc.  Disc 2 is more of an storybook where you read and watch what happens, do some battles at key points, compared to the first disc where there is more open exploration.

Xenogears is VERY much a Japanese/Anime culture styled RPG with the dark emotional settings, the mechs, the artwork style, Chu Chu....  As deep as Xenogears is, it feels too Japanese/Anime for me which personally I don't really connect with.