quote:
Originally posted by ladyphoenix:
hey, i loved both legend of mana AND chrono cross....neither of them compare to xenogears (my absolute favorite of all time) but they were both excellent games that i still play today :)
As it stands now, Xenogears is an ex-candidate for best RPG of all time list. This is sort of convoluted, so bear with me.
Right after I played XG, my opinion was that it was the best RPG ever made; that because of the nature of the story it told, it was questionable whether anything could ever actually even get in the same league; and that the game would have been worth $100 (at a time when that was more than a week's pay).
Several years later, I played Planescape: Torment, and it was just incredible. After beating it I judged that it was told much much better than XG and its gameplay was much better. But XG is still XG, and so they tied for The Best RPG of All Time to Date.
Then I played FFX. More or less, repeat. So then it was a three way tie.
Then a friend beat XG and wasn't terribly impressed. So now I'm replaying Xenogears, and all the flaws that were not apparent when XG was released, because of the sheer paucity of the US market at the time...are now readily apparent. And so I have more or less come to the following conclusion:
Xenogears ranks with Valkyrie Profile--it is a game that should have been a candidate for The Best RPG of All Time, but isn't. This category is reserved for games which aimed high, hit the mark for the most part, and screwed something up.
As for Valkyrie Profile, to sum up in a paragraph what I could write an editorial on, it was a FLAWLESS game. And I do mean that--there was NOTHING WRONG with what was there. At all. If I could I would change nothing. It was just that there wasn't enough plot.
As for Xenogears...well, Xenogears is Xenogears and its plot is still unparallelled. But it's got problems. Its graphics are, looking back, simply hideous at times. The battle system is IMO tied with Thousand Arms for the single worst ever conceived and executed. The game text reads like early Sony translations--in other words, like they had the people who did their instruction manuals do the translation. As for the game itself, so much of the early game needed editing.
But Disc 2 is still awesome.