Is this the single greatest story ever put on a video game ?

Is this the single greatest story ever put on a video game ?

Name ONE game with a plot better than this

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It's great. One of the best rpg.

>mfw not even Sup Forums can deny Xenogears' greatness

Not the best execution, but definitely the most ambitious game I've played.

Too bad the rest of the game's kind of shit. One aspect of a game can't carry it alone - no matter how novel.

A
A v I d e o g a m e s t o r y i s o n l y a s g o o d a s I t s l u d o n a r r a t I v e

The combat system may not be perfect, but it's far from shit. Literally the only thing needed would be a rework of the Gear combat and adding a few features to the regular combat system. The graphics are amazing thanks to gorgeous environments and cutscenes and a wide range of animation despite the sprites being so basic and SNES-ey, the soundtrack is literally above anything FF has ever dropped and on par with Chrono Trigger.

So I ask you, user, what exactly is so "shit" about the rest of the game ?

Almost half of the story is filler, then it runs out of budget

At least EVA avoided the filler

Bloodborne

Which was perfect until the budget issues arose in CD2. CD2 itself would have been perfect if three or four more dungeons were added at certain key moments, despite the story being on steroids for the entire disc.

And if you cant keep up with the storyline, play it again when you re over 16 or go back to Dragon Quest

Not him but:

The combat is spamming deathblows over and over, and it takes forever. So does everything else in the game. Text scroll is incredibly slow. The music is also very overrated. It's grating and repetitive.

This, it's for that reason Majora's Mask is the greatest vidya story ever told. Majora's Mask has elements, key concepts, and execution that can't be done well in any medium except vieeogames. Xenogears has been told before and in every medium, except better.

Name literally one filler that's not the sewers in Nortune. Shit, even the sewers in Nortune have a semi importance for the story as it's later revealed that Id did the killings as opposed to the red beast

I can't say, since I'm sure that I probably only understand half of it, although I'd like to think I got most of it.

Super Metroid put out a better only and was a better video game at that.

>the budget issues arose in CD2

Never happened. Takahashi quit trying partway through production.

We're talking about a JRPG, it's kinda hard to tell a story through gameplay when it comes to that.

As opposed to spamming Attack in other RPGs ? Although I agree that learning new deathblows is tedious, and the combo system as well as 98% of ethers are ludicrous, accusing the game of being bad because "you have to keep attacking till the enemy dies" is a really bad argument

>mfw I never heard of the word Ludonarrative

>budget issues arose in CD2
I'm pretty sure it was rushed development to meet deadline, not budget issues.

The combat is bad because it is simultaneously simple and overlong. Tedious, in other words.

The question was "is this the greatest story ever put on a videogame?" and the answer is no, because a good vidya story has ludonarrative consistency up the butthole, in addition to having complimenting art and sound. Now, the story independent from the game? Maybe, but that kinda defeats the point of a story in vidya, dontcha think? If I could write an equivalent to the games story and you got the same out of it than if you played the game, why not just write a book? A good videogame story is something that can only be done in vidya, that's what pushes the medium forward.

Still my favorite villain in an RPG, scene very much related.

You can argue that for most JRPG games.

>JRPG games

Fuck off.

>the main writer stopped trying halfway through
>which is exactly the point where the story rises up from being a stereotypical JRPG narrative into becoming the greatest storyline ever produced in video games
I know that was supposed to be your argument, but I really don't see how it hurts the game.
Also, source ?

In a nutshell it's
>thousands of years ago, humans lived in a world like ours
>discover limitless source of energy called Zohar
>Zohar entraps a divine being from a higher dimension
>divine being starts seeking way to escape
>thousands of years later, Zohar is used as a battery for the greatest weapon ever created
>weapon rebels and destroys the ship carrying it while it's being disposed of for being too powerful
>crashes above the Xenogears planet at 10,000 yrs before the events of the game
>before the crash, Zohar made contact with the last surviving crashed vessel passenger whose soul became endowed with the duty to release it. Zohar fulfilled the wish for a mother that the passenger had by creating the Elly personality; the antitype
>the biological weapon in the vessel, Deus, creates humans on the planet to populate the planet so that one day they may be used as replacement parts for the damage it has taken during the crash
>humans are set to be driven by Miang, the guardian of time whose consciousness exists in the DNA of every female in the planet
>thousands of years later, basically the Contact and the Antitype personalities were fated to meet hundreds of time over and over until the divine being inside Zohar was released and 10,000 years after the crash, they fulfilled their duty to release the divine creature
There's a whole lot of stuff inbetween, but that's the gist of it

Most JRPGs don't encourage you to use a lengthy cinematic combo for every single attack.

>The combat system may not be perfect, but it's far from shit
It is pretty shit. It's literally 90% Deathblow spamming and healing thanks to the Ether mechanics being underwhelming as hell.

>inb4 w-well it's better than pressing X/A to attack!
Nobody above the age to 12 plays JRPGs like that. Don't even bring up that retarded argument.

> The graphics are amazing thanks to gorgeous environments and cutscenes and a wide range of animation despite the sprites being so basic and SNES-ey
Grandia and FFT pulled the 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds look way better. Gorgeous environments? More than half of that game's dungeons are boring, blocky hi-tech facilities. And the sprites are pretty ugly thanks to the game constantly zooming the camera in and out without proper 2D filtering. The battle sprites are nice, I guess, but the field sprites are used more often and have way more limited animation. It's really dinky and off-putting at times.

> the soundtrack is literally above anything FF has ever dropped and on par with Chrono Trigger
No? Not to mention there's not nearly enough variety in the soundtrack for a 60+ hour game. Tracks like Flight and Omen get reused to hell and back.

In addition to all that, the dungeon crawling sucks, the towns are boring, the platforming is a worthless gimmick, and the story becomes way too focused on character drama for its own good.

is the purpose of a story to push its medium forward? don't you think that enslaves human creativity to a false idol of artistic "progress?" we're the ones in charge of making what we want, we don't need to be told by the medium what we ought to do

it's as likely as anything else that "ludonarrative consistency" is an invention of the current wave of videogame criticism that will vaporize in the light of the next cultural zeitgeist

I have one question about the story that has always bothered me, because to me it came out of absolutely nowhere and was one of the most random things I'd ever seen in a JRPG.

Why did Hammer turn traitor out of the blue?

I can name a few that does.

Legend of Legaia
Baten Kaitos
Baten Kaitos Origins
Arc Rise Fantasia
Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier

What he said
>villain
>is literally the consciousness meant to guide humans
>humans rebel against her and their creator
If anything, we're playing as the villains in the story

Are you arguing that Xenogears does ? Because the combo system is anything but encouraged in Xenogears. There is literally no reason to use it whatsoever as regular deathblows will do. Also, the average deathblow takes 3 seconds. Are you really that ADHD ?

>It is pretty shit. It's literally 90% Deathblow spamming and healing thanks to the Ether mechanics being underwhelming as hell.
That's what it is, yes. And once again, it's just like any other RPG out there, with a slightly more cinematic Attack

>Nobody above the age to 12 plays JRPGs like that. Don't even bring up that retarded argument.
That is LITERALLY how 99% of JRPGs are played. Name 5 JRPGs with a dramatic gameplay difference that came out in the same generation as Xenogears.

>Grandia and FFT blah blah blah
The variety of the environments hardly matters when that's what the game becomes eventually. That's like complaining that FF9 is too fantasy and doesnt have cars. It's merely the game respecting its own rules. Also, as far as the sprite thing goes, I'm just gonna have to disagree

No? Not to mention there's not nearly enough variety in the soundtrack for a 60+ hour game. Tracks like Flight and Omen get reused to hell and back.

And yeah, the soundtrack has reused tracks, just like, once again, every other JRPG in existence.
The towns are some of the bigger and more lively towns of that generation. You're just spouting unfounded bullshit at this point.
The platforming, I'll agree on. It was simplistic and unnecessary. Thank god only ONE (1) dungeon which can be traversed in 20 minutes ever made use of it.

He might have been hypnotized by Miang although that's unlikely as he behaves like himself during his betrayal. My take on it is (and what the game conveys also) is that he always felt undermined and surpassed by everyone on the team because everyone was strong and willing to fight whereas he was always seen as the annoying sidekick. When offered a chance to achieve power through being fused with a Gear, he jumped on the opportunity, regardless of what it would take

Shin Megami Tensei 1 for snes/Sega cd/ps/gba/ios/android

That would be the fuckery that is the Drakengard and NieR stuff.
Simply because it is based on how retarded vidya stories are, like when Nathan Drake somehow can still sleep at night after having just killed thousands of people.

Xenogears could have been told way better in every other form of media.

Takahashi was the director.

Iwata Asks interview with Xenoblade.

Xenosaga 3

>the storyline that was literally crammed into a 60 hour game could have been better told in a 2 hour movie
>or a 120 page book
>or a 5 season TV show

no, because they took this youtube.com/watch?v=PqOWhstrffw
and a mech that would shoot its pilot as ammunition seriously.

Considering that the grand majority of that time is spent on shit that has nothing to do with the narrative, he's right.

>That is LITERALLY how 99% of JRPGs are played.
You're mixing up interface with mechanics. Yes, you press X/A to do shit in menus, but at least in other, better JRPGs that can involve anything from casting offensive spells, casting buffs, debuffs, and status effects, using summons and limit break-esque moves, etc. Some JRPGs even have minor positioning mechanics and such. Xenogears barely incentives any of that. Difficulty is also completely trivialized thanks to Omegasols being dirt cheap. Now, I know most Squaresoft games weren't known for having a high difficulty, but at least there was some kind of thought process involved in battles.

>The variety of the environments hardly matters when that's what the game becomes eventually.
Well, what it eventually becomes is a boring, post-apocalyptic setting with barely anything to do outside of exploring Zeboim (which is boring and dumb - oh and fuck's Joe's overprized crap) and pulling some random katana out of a fossil.

>That's like complaining that FF9 is too fantasy and doesnt have cars. It's merely the game respecting its own rules.
There's a difference between being thematically consistent and reusing the same 3D assets in different arrangements to comprise a good chunk of your dungeons.

>The towns are some of the bigger and more lively towns of that generation.
Bullshit. Hardly any of these towns have anything in the way of good side quests or reasons to ever revisit them in between major plot arcs. Hell, the whole world feels like a network of isolated environments rather than a cohesive setting. Then by the later parts of disc 2, everyone dies and none of what you did in like 90% of those towns even matters.

Best RPG hands down

>Name ONE game with a plot better than this
Suikoden II. It doesn't fall apart in the second half and has better characters.

>names FF games as an example for a great JRPG
>when every single FF game released since 5 is breakable within 2 hours of starting

Becoming overpowered in FF is like sequence breaking in Metroid. It's actually a part of what makes those games fun.

Yenogears has a lot of problems but the one thing it did right are the villains.
Probably the best villains in video games. They all have their own reasons that all make sense in that world, are more developed than most of the party members and actually plot against each other in a way that makes sense for them.
To the point where most of them end up killing each other.
The villains in this game are so fucking good.

>Suikoden II. It doesn't fall apart in the second half and has better characters.

Because it fall apart in the last third.

>Demon doggos take over Highland because reasons

>Because it fall apart in the last third.
No it didn't. The team killed Luca and Jowy took over the Highland army. Then they invaded Highland to stop the war. Killed the puppet master and stopped the Beast rune. With multiple possible endings related to Jowy.

>Demon doggos take over Highland because reasons
What the hell are you even referencing?