Sil: That was some of the most pedantic nonsense I’ve ever heard. The millions of people who bought Xenosaga for the most part know nothing about Nietzche, gnosticism, or in fact almost any of the deeper meanings of what’s there. So what? We can still enjoy the storyline. Heck, most of the references in Xenogears were lost on a lot of people; folk enjoy it on different levels. I honestly have absolutely no clue what you’re getting at with the Moby Dick restaurant.
And the creators of XS have gone on record stating that XS is not canonically connected to Xenogears. They simply have a lot of similar-looking and -sounding elements.
Cid is right on all accounts. Xenosaga is not, either legally or spiritually, a prequel to Xenogears. If you really were still expecting someone to close that gap after Episode III, after the designers explicitly told us all “No, they are not related” and then felt disappointed… well, that’s just your fault. By the end of the last game, Abel successfully creates a breach so big that no amount of reading-between-the-lines can close. And yes, what’s with the Moby Dick?
The Zohar never tells Fei anything like that. Actually, the Zohar doesn’t even have a consciousness, it’s the Wave Existence within, but nevermind that. The only beings in the planet that ever got altered by the W.E. were the “Guide” segment of the Mother Persona (Elly, who was given the form of Abel’s mother, which was only possible because of the link between the Zohar and Kadamony), Abel and his reincarnations (Who were given the big-whoop ether load, and Lacan who got the transmigration skill), since those are really the only ones it ever had contact with. That’s the entire point of using the Contact as an errand boy, because it couldn’t interact directly with the outer world by itself.
Let me save you the trouble: Abel is absolutely not Xenogears’ Abel, Nephilim has nothing to do with Sophia/Elly, Jin has nothing to do with Citan, the X-in-the-face guy has nothing to do with Vanderkaum, and so on and so forth.
And I’d like to know what you still don’t get about Xenogears. With knowledge of Perfect Works, everything but two or three details should have become perfectly clear.
The millions of people who bought Xenosaga for the most part know nothing about Nietzche, gnosticism, or in fact almost any of the deeper meanings of what’s there. So what? We can still enjoy the storyline. Heck, most of the references in Xenogears were lost on a lot of people; folk enjoy it on different levels. I honestly have absolutely no clue what you’re getting at with the Moby Dick restaurant.
This was exactly my point. Xenosaga doesn’t succeed on the surface level that Xenogears did, by most accounts, and is not a masterpiece.
Herman Melville was a gnostic and Moby Dick is largely an allegory for gnostic mysteries. It’s like if the game were an allegory for the Beatles and the cast walks across Abbey Road in a prominent scene.
That makes no sense. Just because people don’t get the underlying philosophical concepts doesn’t mean the game doesn’t succeed. Frankly, I didn’t understand half of what I saw in Xenogears (I still don’t) and by and large, I enjoyed playing Xenosaga far more than I did Xenogears (with the possible exception of Episode II). I thought the characters were more interesting, for one thing. How are we measuring “success”, exactly?
First: Thanks for the Moby Dick info, I didn’t know that.
Second: While it’s fun to pick Xenogears apart and see where each concept came from, it’s definitely not necessary to enjoy the game. A player who is presented with the Wave Dimension doesn’t need to know that it’s a reference to the Pleroma to understand that it’s “a higher plane of existence composed by waves of energy” since that is stated clearly in the story. Even fewer people get the retconned Azilut of Sephirot/Plato’s Epistemology concepts that the Zohar uses to function, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that they know the Zohar is an energy source. You certainly don’t need to know who Cain and Abel were in the Bible to understand the first steps of the planet’s history. At most, knowing these things helps reinforce what is already presented in the story, but just having blatant and obscure references to every last religious group ever conceived isn’t a measure of quality.
I did enjoy Xenogears much more than Xenosaga, but that was merely due to the commonplace elements of writing: the characters, the villains and the world were much more interesting in XG than XS from my point of view, but I like Fei much more than Shion because he was a lot more fun as a character, responded better to his environments, had a really sweet love story going and had a father that looked like Master Asia, not because he had a giant Freudian metaphor living in his subconscious.
Also, half the names and references in Xenogears are either made for fun, like Billy (the Kid) and Jessie (James), are arbitrary (The Elements) or down-right silly like the Super Dimensional (Fortress Macross) and the sentai-style G-Element.
MOMO is a pinkhaired cute tactical nuclear warhead.
You take her in A path, you buy every EATK+ everywhere else, you give her the ‘Spells cost 1MP’ accessory and the necklace of +boost +healing.
Turn Blood Dancer on. Nuke people for several thousand damage if they have one of four weaknesses. Be sure to have a dude with a scan-item equipped so you see weaknesses at all times.
She’d outdamage KOS-MOS for me if she wasn’t healing/buffing/debuffing/similar stuff 1 round out of 2.
As for Gnosis, I never saw crystalisation. I was immune before Old Miltia ended.
Oh yeah. Attack ethers are often more useful than physical attacks in Ep. III; they just use up more EP and require you to be able to see enemy weaknesses.