So… am I the only one who facepalmed all the way through Dabrye Mine?
I suppose the “Magus” bit was on purpose.
EDIT: Oh, and I agree with Sin. Shion is a fucking bitch.
haha, she’s more of a cunt the more you progress through the game.
So I just finished, and I gotta agree with Sin here, there wasn’t any visible connection with Xenogears. Abel and U-DO are too big a deviation to actually make a real link. The ending wasn’t too bad though, at least not in comparison with the rest of the game. Comments:
[ul]
[li]The writing style sucks. Seriously, in comparison to what fan translations of Xenogears (Which are generally more accurate than the official) and Episode I had, the overal prose is much less polished and forced.[/li][li]Lia Sargent should never play a leading role again. Very seldom does she get the right pitch and tone for the emotional situations, most of the time her voice is monotonous as if she was just reading off the script.[/li][li]When a game’s most satisfying moment is getting to beat the crap out of the main character, the writing might need a bit of a touchup methinks.[/li][li]It’s not every day that you find out two of your characters are Mary Magdalene and Jesus freakin’ Christ.[/li][li]Kudos to Allen growing balls. They should have made him a fully playable character. Hell, they should have made him the main character, it would have been more enjoyable.[/li][li]The blood removal with Shion’s mother was 4Kids worthy. The scene could have been pretty powerful, and yet it turned into a bad joke. Sheesh.[/li][li]For a game so plagued with Xenogears references, it could have used a bit more Big Joe. And the Captain, you can’t forget the Captain.[/li][li]Hakox is actually fun. Go figure.[/li][/ul]
Overal… well, it was no Xenogears, but it was decent.
I find that the way XSIII plays out, you can actually ignore most of its 2 predecessors now that I’ve thought about it. You could theoretically include only very minor parts from 1 and 2 into 3 and that’d plug any “holes” (not like III doesn’t leave any)
Hmmm I’m having problems with my updated firefox, so I have to double post to add to what I wanted to say.
But anyway, to add to the point, from that perspective, XSIII alone doesn’t play out to be a great game, but its certainly not as disapointint as there is less anticipation for any resolution, character development/fleshing out (like Margulis -_-) or explanation whatsoever.
Just finished the game now (hence the slight necropost) and overall I was very impressed. I agree that, taken as a whole, the 3-game series has some major storytelling problems. They could have pretty much excised number 2 and stuck a few sequences into 1 and 3 and voila. But I felt that XS3 itself was a very strong offering.
I also agree that the prose is worse than the original, but still nowhere near as bad as Xenogears was. X-X I actually know the translator for XG, and it was the worst experience of his life. I think I’m a bit nicer about voice work than some others here, because I thought overall the acting was pretty darn good. Certainly, no one detracted from the scenes, and the voices themselves (as opposed to their acting) were ace-on. MOMO finally got a voice actress that worked well. I also really liked how they expanded people like Allen and Miyuki. Allen in particular is a great character IMO.
Gameplay-wise, I thought XS3 was one of the most fun RPGs I’ve played in a long, long while. Although the character battles are never really hard, they’re consistently challenging; the regular ES battles are easy (and oddly satisfying) but they make up for it with tough boss battles. I like the skill system, I like the Special Attacks, I like the combo boosting, and oddly enough I liked HaKox. The only thing I didn’t like was the inability to return to absolutely everywhere you’ve been, but there wasn’t anything really important there, I guess. 
I also have to say that this is the most packed game I’ve ever played. Seriously, in 40 hours of gameplay there’s an unbelievable amount of things happening. O_o
I’d really like to see an Episode IV, if only because they would absolutely have to take it in a radically different direction. I thought the ending was extremely intriguing, and a huge departure from regular RPG endings.
Yeah, so I’m happy this thread came back to the top. 
No, you aren’t the only one, lol. As long as I don’t see a Chu Chu, I’ll be okay. Maybe. However, XS has thrown some pretty crappy things our way before, and I’ve only just made my forced gate jump after Yuriev, so anything can happen.
I’m also going to jump on the “Shion bugs the crap out of me” bandwagon. Currently I can’t even articulate exactly why she bugs me, but she does. Maybe I’ll edit after dinner to get some thoughts out. Another thing - am I tripping, or has chaos become more and more useless as a party member throughout the series? I’ve been able to heal just as well with Shion (argh, I hate to say it), and his special attacks just aren’t that good compared to the others. Am I missing something in my (mis)use of him?
HaKox is fun but so frustrating. I really want to finish Level 5, but I don’t know if I’m that patient.
Oh, you ain’t seen NOTHING yet. Don’t worry, no Chu-Chu, but the XG references will get pretty stupid really soon. Fortunately, they pretty much end after that.
I’ve found Level 5 of Hakox to be easier than Level 4. Once you figure out what to do, you don’t really need that much skill.
Yes, chaos really got nerfed. In the first game his Deathblows eventually did more damage than KOS-MOS’ in the long run and the Best Ally Ether was godly. Ep. II and III screwed him over. However I still liked him as a party member, I’ll be damned if I use Shion and he is balanced well enough. By the end of the game you can purchase a buttload of Upgrades (Stat-increasing items) relatively cheaply, so you can just customise the characters however you want. I bought enough to pump his STR even higher than KOS-MOS’ in one go.
chaos was actually pretty good in Ep. III if only due to his level 3 special attack. He also has pretty decent break attacks and can be a good spellcaster.
I did notice that they make a pretty big deal out of the “crystallization” status, even giving a whole vaccine for it, but I was only actually killed by it once in the whole game, and was only even affected a handful of times. Weird.
The thing is, there weren’t that many gnosis in the first place, so the crystalization didn’t come up a lot.
That’s another thing that’s bugged me - I want more Gnosis! I was all psyched to see them from Episode 1, so these other games have let me down a lot in that respect. Why can’t there be more Gnosis? (I’ve tried not to spoil myself too badly for this game, but is there a decent plot reason as to why there aren’t more?)
There are plenty of them; most of the character fights in the last half of the game are with Gnosis. There aren’t any on Old Miltia since that’s before they actually show up, if you recall, but after that most of the fights are with them.
Let’s put it this way: the only time you don’t fight them is when the plot does not demand it.
I find fighting Gnosis retarded and unstimulating personally. There wasn’t the same sense of urgency or meaning to the Gnosis in XSIII and I fond that disapointing.
Shion’s annoying because she’s a whiny, impulsive, illogical, selfish, emotional cunt.
I managed to finish the game easily without having to bother with the stat boosts. I do believe the game is probably a whole lot easier and the final fights are a lot less tedious to do if you do do so. Chaos kinda sucks but I used him for healing and for his level 3 ether thing, for which he was amazingly useful. He wasn’t a damage dealer. Ziggy, KOS-MOS and Jin were. I hear MOMO could be tweaked to be pretty nasty.
Sin’s point about the Gnosis is exactly what’s bothering me: They aren’t scary anymore. Even as countless planetary systems are taken over, nobody seems to panic. In the beginning, when Shion and chaos are in the restaurant and the news announce that yet another ENTIRE STAR SYSTEM was wiped out, his response is just “that seems to be happening a lot lately”. Not that chaos ever displays much excitement, but nobody else does either. That reallys sucks, especially when you compare it to the mayhem that was the Woglinde.
I honestly have no idea how the last few bosses are supposed to be handled, since I had the Heaven’s Door and Erde Σ, so the last boss went down in two hits. Speaking of which, they should never let you get things like those items/spells so easily, especially when there isn’t any super strong boss to use them against like in Episode II.
Yeah… the extra stuff in Ep. II was so ridiculously hard that I never bothered finishing most it. This time it was surprisingly easy to get. Although I didn’t bother until I actually finished the game, so I actually had some challenges with the final boss.
Now that you mention it… it’s true that the Gnosis didn’t seem as scary this time round. That’s probably because by the time you fight them, the game’s already explained how they came to be. Ep. I portrayed them as this huge nasty alien species dedicated to human destruction, but the Ep. III’s depiction actually is closer to the “truth”. As for the nonchalance, don’t forget that the Gnosis attacks had been going on for six months at the time Ep. III started. Six months of these sorts of news reports are bound to dull the senses to them. In Ep. I these attacks were still pretty sporadic and limited, not to mention the player was actually in it at the time.
Shion was a bit annoying, but people don’t realize that she was that way right from the beginning. People didn’t notice it in Ep. I because her appearance was much more cutesey, and in Ep. II her voice was a lot less sharp. But behavior-wise she was always pretty nasty. Don’t forget, though, that she’s gone through a lot of crap in her life, so being harsh and cutting off the world is probably her way of dealing with it. By the end of Ep. III she finally starts getting tired of dealing with it that way, which is probably why she latches onto Kevin so fiercely, since he represents the only time in her life she was truly happy.
Thanks for reminding me that the game is out. Somehow XS III went off my radar screen, and I completely forgot its release date.
So I got XS III last week and I love this game. It has everything that I want/need from my video games – cool FMVs and …
And…
Oh well, I want to watch my games as much as I want to play them, and XS III fits the bill. The database à la Wikipedia is a nice touch – it clears up most of the Ws (who, where, when, why and hoW) of two previous installments. As for not being able to go back to previous locales, that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise, it took me a while to adapt and become more thorough at each stage of the game, getting most of the items available before advancing to the next episode.
Yes, sequences like Jin vs. Margulis encounters. I always had a certain penchant for VG bad guys with scars 
The problem is that we didn’t go through those six months of Gnosis attacks. There is a difference between asking you to suspend your belief and integrate with the characters, and asking you to fill holes in the narrative. It’s badly written, and as for your point of the nature of the Gnosis being explained, that happens in the last five minutes of the game, the rest of the time they are still the unknown extra planar space critters that eat up entire planets for breakfast.
Speaking of which, It’s kinda funny that by that logic, a battleship getting torn to pieces is supposed to scare you while, once again, ENTIRE STAR SYSTEMS BEING DESTROYED AND BILLIONS OF BILLIONS OF PEOPLE SLAUGHTERED are supposed to be taken calmly. C’mon, Helmer, the Sub committee, the Feds, SOMEONE JUST PANIC A BIT.
Also, here’s a fun little somewhat unrelated detail: Shion called the Gnosis right? The how come U-TIC was researching the Gnosis phenomenon even before that happened? Even if U-TIC’s real goal for the Zohar was… I forgot what it was really, but the point is they were using the Gnosis research as the front cover for the project. And as long as I’m on it, if Shion and young Shion were needed to awaken the Ark, what was the Ark doing six months before that when it took the Zohar? What was that, sleepwalking?
Episode I Shion was more oblivious than headstrong. Her recklessness during the experiments weren’t accompanied by “shut up and do it” comments, she just did stuff without asking. She was also nicer to pretty much everyone, even strangers like Cherenkov* and considerably naïve (Once again, remember chaos’ introduction in which she swallows his explanation without complaints while Allen, god bless him, has the “are you kidding?” expression on his face). Her appearance wasn’t the only cutesey thing, her character was as well. I never liked her in the first place mind you, but she at least wasn’t as annoying.
The first thing that bothered me about her in EP III was her behaviour towards Miyuki. She’s a civilian scientist who’s risking her butt to help her out of kindness and respect to a superior, you’d think she would cut her some slack, especially considering all the stuff she does get right. Where they going for a clumsy-girl exhasperated-leader duo end ended up with whipped-slave and bitch-boss by mistake?
*anyone else bothered by how he was addressed as Andrew in the database? Until I get the reference on mental manipulation, I had no idea they were talking about him.
I agree; the whole “six months later” thing really threw me for a curve, especially since it made it sound like there was a whole adventure there.
I’m sure people did panic, but by the time the party got to talk to them they’d already realized that they had absolutely no options. Probably more depression than panic. They could have put a bit more verisimilitude by having news flashes of crazed mobs, I suppose.
As for the Gnosis phenomenon, remember that U-TIC was experimenting on people who can communicate with U-DO. That communication was what caused the Gnosis to appear. Now, Shion had a particularly strong connection to U-DO, coupled with the Song of Nephilim, which “opened the door” for the Gnosis to appear on a wide scale; but obviously minor sightings must have happened during U-TIC’s experiments.
If you look at the database, it says that the Ark was mainly an observer; it was only Wilhelm who wanted to co-opt it for his own purposes by “awakening it”.
There are a few explanations for her nicer personality in Ep. I. Firstly, she had things going good; she had a good job, was part of a project she enjoyed, and had respect among her peers, even in other work fields; she also was in a very different setting than her past, as opposed to Ep. II where she had to constantly contend with Jin and other upsetting reminders. Also, her “journey” was just starting, so she spent a lot of time being reactionary; once she got used to the fact that it was pretty much her against the universe, she got a lot more aggressive. But even back then she was pretty callous at times, especially to Allen (although so was Miyuki, come to think of it).
There will be Xenogears spoilers in this post. If you’ve come this far for some reason and haven’t played it.
I’ve been pondering this a while recently, having just finished episode I and mid-way through II, and Xenogears being one of my favorite games. I enjoy the Saga, but it doesn’t reach the level of its predecessor.
It seems that Xenosaga story fails most in one particular regard, in that it tries to answer the kinds of questions that Xenogears only asked. Having played through XG numerous times, I still don’t know what everything is about. XG’s story works on multiple levels, it’s fun and moving in the way that good RPGs should be, and beneath that, it has a philosophical and psychological depth unmatched so far in video games. Xenosaga, on the other hand, seems to strip away much of the surface action in favor of allegory. I have a hard time understanding how anyone could like it without a fairly good knowledge of philosophy and/or literature, and gnostic philosophy in particular. Was the cast’s wandering into the Moby Dick restaurant lost on anyone? It’s sort of like in the Star Wars Episode II where they show the villains talking about some secret plans then point with a wink and mouth the words “Death Star”. Except XS’s Death Star is a lot more obscure. And still, with a pretty good previous grasp of its abstracts concepts, the story isn’t that fun, unlike say, Moby Dick or Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which deal with many of the same things.
Further, in happening upon details of plot which I haven’t reached yet myself, it seems the writers are trying to present a tangible reality like the “Zarathustra” machine(?) for what in Xenogears were psychological ideas like the redemption of Krellian and the entire Freudian jumble.
Also, despite the nomenclature, I see almost nothing that relates it to Nietzsche.
Since beginning Episode II, however, it seems they’ve gotten over some of rough patches of narrative that hindered Episode I, where a lot of the dialogue and histrionics fell flat (I’m looking at you, Albedo). Ep. II seems more professional, and if you’ll allow me to say, more like Hollywood in it’s execution. It’s almost an over-reaction, as that first deadpan act with chaos and Canaan began to sound like a Morrissey competition.
Also, I think it should be quite clear from the Perfect Works layout of the intended series, the current three “episodes” should really be seen as just one arc or one greater episode in the six-part continuity, as I recall the rest of the five occur all on the planet of Xenogears. Though I don’t suspect Deus suddenly crashes on the planet at the end of Ep. III of Xenosaga, after the first the episodes were supposed to be at the times of the various Fei incarnations through the important time periods. I don’t ever read about it, so I’m not sure if it’s the general opinion of the fanbase, but I’ve always thought that XS fit into the scheme, just that they couldn’t say so. And I think you can see this in that somewhere in XG, I remember, the Zohar tells Fei that it created the people of the planet from the memories of people he had seen or known at one time, like Vanderkam, Elly/Sofia/Nephilim, Jin/Citan, so forth. Of course maybe this is all addressed in Ep. III, in which case I am doubly wasting my time.
Oh I always fucking hated Shion, in all episodes.