Xenogears

I don't think I've ever seen a game go down the toilet as fast as Xenogears does once you hit disc 2. I've played plenty of rushed or 'unfinished' games before and some of them have managed to be incredible despite it, New Vegas comes to mind.
This is the first time I've ever felt that I actually got half of a game. It feels like the video game form of a school kid rushing to complete an essay in the last 10 minutes of an exam. I wouldn't even care if not for how exceptionally good the half of the game we got was. Why was this allowed to happen? Would've it killed them to put the paragraphs in people's mouths rather than in floating text in front of Elly and Fei sitting in chairs? Why not condense some elements of the story so I can at least see it rather than being told it? Why is the most interesting character development and coolest events trapped in the missing half of the game?
TL;DR: jesus christ fuck disc 2.

>This is the first time I've ever felt that I actually got half of a game

We literally did user

I think I'll never not be salty about this

Xenogears shouldve just been a novel.

>the game we got is actually (half of) part 6 of something much longer

You know, it could've worked as an actual visual novel.

And then, when they went back and made an unofficial prequel based on the planned part 1, they end up making at most maybe a third of it. After splitting it into three games.

Lots of games were like this around this time from Square. FF8 has a few good cinematics and then it just teleports you from one set piece to another before shitting the bed at the end with recolored boss fights. Chrono Chross has a huge amount of missing pieces that make it's attempts to do something bigger fall flat early on. FF9 resorts to backtracking skipping content because they couldn't get it all out fast enough, and a final boss that comes out of nowhere.

PS1 era SE got away with this all the time because of their ridiculous game schedule, and people praised them for it. If they were a shadier company, they'd have kept it up, but instead they started releasing magnum opus grandiose bombs once every five years instead, which blows my mind.

You are thinking of Xenosaga which was planed to have like 6 sequels, but after Xenosaga 2 bombed they ended the series at 3.

This is why you outline

No

This is why you secure a budget

Xenogears was intended as something like the 5th or 6th chronologically in an epic of a franchise. After leaving SE, Xenosaga was an attempt to make something based on the chronologically earliest ideas they had for the IP.

And then XCX was yet again another attempt at retelling it

Budget dosent mean shit if all of the money is going to be wasted on trifles and poor design

Just look at MGSV

>but after Xenosaga 2 bombed

Gee I wonder how that could have happened

I couldn't possibly be because they kicked out the original creators, got rid of Yasunori Mitsuda, fucked the battle system inside out, destroyed the character designs, fucked up the characterization, and completely destroyed the story right????

I can accept Xenogears not being finished. What really stung is when Xenosaga came out and it really was being billed as the first episodes and would connect to the original and they STILL didn't finish it.

What's that? You were hoping for some consequences for the revelation of Fei being a psychologist's nightmare? Elaboration on what the destruction of the sky Nazis means for the people below? Fei and Elly to actually fuck or something now that it's clear that time and space is conspiring to make it happen? Gameplay and exploration? Basic character interactions?
No, fuck you. Sit in the corner. Read my paragraphs. Fight through this shitty dungeon with no dialogue other than Fei's because can't guarantee anybody else will be there and writing is hard, and try to ignore how Billy just appears out of nowhere. Now fight with Super Dimensional Fortress Sandpirateship without context. Now fight these bosses we'd clearly finished and/or already paid for the anime cutscenes of. Fuck you.

>Fei and Elly to actually fuck or something now that it's clear that time and space is conspiring to make it happen?

Did you miss the scene where they literally do fuck?

I'm mainly talking first impressions of disc 2. Once the sting goes and the plot points stop being so 'here's 30 hours of dialogue and dungeons in a paragraph' it's actually kind of okay.

I think they're too insanely ambitious and high concept for their own good. The ideas they want to make into games aren't ones that draw the sort of money required to make them into games.

Disc 2 is pretty much a VN 90% of the time anyway.

I can understand the hate for the game because of it, but I didn't mind it that much.

In fact, I felt the gameplay sections were the worst part of Disc 2 they were very unpolished and even pointless sometimes. The main story is still finished within the game and it's still great, so I'm okay with it.

But user, didn't you love having to fight the elementals again, twice, just so they could do a dumb sentai robot transformation? Wasn't that totally the best possible use of their clearly running out time and budget?

But Kajiura was so much better than Mitsuda

crucified chuchu dot jaypeg

I want you to get off my board and never come back.

Well sure, but Xenosaga 1 wasn't really all that good either. Unfortunately, Takahashi & co probably should have just left Xenogears a one-off and moved on - I hear their post-Xenosaga efforts have been well-received, though I haven't played any of them.

Sometimes I torture myself into thinking how much more of the game could've been finished if they hadn't done that stupid fighting minigame.

I'm still surprised the producer didn't commit seppuku or some shit.

>First disc is glacially paced, with hours and hours of filler arcs and bland dungeons that amount to nothing.
>Second disc they just rush past everything because they were out of cash and it turns into a barely coherent wreck.

A happy medium would be nice. I wonder how much money they burnt on that awful fighting minigame in the prison arc (thats filler)

The first time I ran into this it pushed my shit in

>Super hard fight with Ramsus
>immediately have to fight this thing without a chance to repair
>mfw

What were they thinking?

Thats what happens when you write your game like a fucking anime

Just tell the damn story, stop trying to artificially extend shit into some stupid epic

I don't want to live on this planet anymore

This is kind of a misunderstanding that goes around about Xenogears. While coming up with the story, they toyed with the idea of making multiple games of completely different genres to cover the 6 episodes. When they got down to actually making a game, they ended up lumping together episodes 2-5 into Xenogears itself. In large part because those episodes are all related to Fei's planet which is almost a meaningless side-story in comparison who how much part 1 or part 6 could theoretically deal with. Which was a smart decision because it allowed Xenogears to be more character-focused and avoid all the shenanigans that would be involved in a galactic setting. On the flip-side, it meant that parts 1 and 6 don't really matter anymore because Fei & co have no reason to give a shit.

So while the history and scope of the lore is so large that there are plenty of places for other games, it's not true that they had serious plans to make any after actually starting work on Xenogears itself.

With Xenosaga they started from scratch and tried to begin the story more towards a theoretical part 1, but the games also end up more of a mess as a result (beyond the additional mess of budget and development problems related to planning a franchise before the first game is made).

Reminder that Fei and Elly banged 100% confirmed.

He was chasing that pussy since the forest so it was bound to happen

I thought it was a nice moment.

Reminder that Shion was not a virgin at the start of the series

You really prefer Mitsuda's bland samey shit from the first one? His only good soundtrack is Chrono Cross

>they then give up and decide to just make a standalone story with a definitive ending
>it becomes a cult classic and Nintendo wants them to make a follow-up

I was speechless when I got to disc 2.

I heard about horror stories, but I thought people blew it out of proportion, as usual. Boy, was I wrong. This time, the horror stories were spot on. I couldn't believe it. I kept "playing" for 20-30 minutes, and then it slowly sank in that this is really this bad. Then I dropped the game, and never bothered to finish it, my disappointment reached such magnitude I couldn't believe it was possible. Maybe sometimes I will find the time to play it again and finish it ( I can't just continue from disc 2 because I don't remember shit, this happend like 10 years ago).

>that feel when the only LPer with enough determination to finish the game was The Dark Id
How does he do it? Is it the nanomachines his PMC gave him?

I remember playing xenogears when it first came out and absolutely loving disc 1. I was hanging on every fucking word.

Then, about 5 hours into disc 2, I set a book down on the text advance button and went to take a shit.

you guys are a bunch of faggot who dont respect anything.

xenogears one of the best rpg for the ps1 and realy a great games even with this many time passed.

TLDR : bunch of faggot who call wow and cod masterpiece but hate a great games named xenogears.

And no love interests in Final Fantasy have sex.

I hope you are not implying that XCX is connected to XC

Everything would have been fine if FF8 didn't eat Xenogears lunch!

And to make what? The worst Final Fantasy ever.

Way to fucking go.

I think they did intend a Xenogears 2, but it didn't go anywhere. It probably existed only in some basic documents.

I'm saying that they decided to do a one-off, and it was their one project to warrent a sequel, and they had no way of making it a sequel. It's a grand irony.

>Implying disc 2 is the part where Xenogears falls to pieces.

Kislev, my friend.

Almost everything from Kislev to the very end of disc 1 is absolute garbage. After the slog for most of Disc 1, the rate at which disc 2 progresses and the lack of garbage dungeons is a godsend. The real curse of disc 2 is that all the interesting shit is there while all the boring shit is told at a ball crushingly slow pace in disc 1.

The "Xenosaga Episode 1 is good" meme will never fail to confuse me. It is literally a series of roadblocks before the start of a story. It's like if The Hobbit spent an entire book on the party at Bilbo's house and put a bunch of shitty minigames in the back to make it look full-featured and worth the purchase.

>half of it is coloring book pages and pop-ups

>Instead of writing an actual story, they put a giant glossary of terms and lore in the back.

Blame Squaresoft...