Alright, I've put 15 hours into Xenogears, I'm at Kislev about to steal my gear back and stop Rico's execution. Here are the pros and cons of Xenogears thus far:
Pros:
Visuals have aged well and there's a lot of color and vibrance.
There's some incredibly solid sections of gameplay combined with narrative. Breaking into a castle while a martial arts tournament happens at the same time. Fighting mechs in a desert while your buddy is trying to accomplish his espionage mission.
Really neat bits of interactivity. Running over someone's shit on a blanket results in them complaining, people to ask you to move out of their way. A lot of small touches that aren't in other JRPGs.
Minigames or gameplay diversions have been neat and executed well.
Cons:
The combat is fucking boring. You'd think a turn based game where you can do combos as your main attacks would be interesting. What ends up happening is doing a bunch of weak combos to unlock deathblows, and eventually deathblows start outclassing earlier deathblows, making those combos not even matter. Combos take too long to watch.
Encounter rate is fucked in dungeon areas. You often run for a few seconds and then a battle happens. Random encounters in other JRPGs of all eras weren't this bad.
Encounters happening IN THE MIDDLE OF PLATFORMING. WHY. THIS IS A FUCKED OVERSIGHT. Missing a jump and having to more random battles is beyond fucked.
Combat difficulty is non existent, combining that with boring combat means you get a good battle every couple or few hours.
Accessory and weapons are basic as fuck. Shit, Fei and Citan haven't had weapons for the entire game. I get their martial artists, but god damn, looking for weapons in any all shops results in disappointment.
The localization/writing is not nearly good enough for how much shit you have to read. A simple conversation can go on for three minutes. I don't know how to express how longwinded dialog can be, and how simple it is at the same time. Xenogears makes Metal Gear Solid 2 cutscenes look breakneck and fast paced in comparison.
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After 15 hours, there have probably been around five hours of brilliance, and then ten hours of amateur hour horseshit. I'm fine with this format, of storylines picking up at a certain point. Deadly Premonition is nothing but weird bullshit until the final third. The difference there is the moment to moment storytelling was hilarious, goofy, charming, endearing in Deadly Premonition.
I've heard how disc 2 is dreaded for changing the game's format completely, but as long as shit starts to get answered and explained, I'm fine with the shitty dungeons being thrown out.
