Xenogears (PS1) Playthrough [1 of 4]
251A playthrough of Square Electronic Arts' 1998 role-playing game for the Sony PlayStation, Xenogears.
This is the first part of a four-part playthrough, showing from the beginning through the scenes following the fight with the enemy battleship Kefeinzel.
Part 2: https://youtu.be/h9KNYTD-9-0
Part 3: https://youtu.be/32krX2Ef71Q
Part 4: https://youtu.be/nO927HN4i14
In 1998, Squaresoft was on fire. Final Fantasy VII had seemingly overnight turned everyone in die-hard RPG fans and the game had become a bottomless pot of cash for the company. This success had given them the resources to be able to branch out with some more experimental fare. Some, like Brave Fencer Musashi, Vagrant Story, and Parasite Eve, were warmly welcomed, while others like Racing Lagoon and Soukaigi failed to make money and left critics thoroughly unimpressed.
Xenogears sits among the best of Square's 32-bit era gambits. Mechanically speaking, it's a traditional role-playing game, but nobody would mistake this for a Final Fantasy game. In fact, Tetsuya Takahashi and Kaori Tanaka had originally drafted and pitched this story for Final Fantasy VII, but they were turned down because the dark tone and the story's complexities were deemed too out-of-character for the series.
The game stars Fei Fong Wong, a young painter living in the remote, pastoral village of Lahan. He arrived in critical condition three years earlier with no memories of his past, but he was taken in by the villagers and came to be thought of as one of their own.
Then, on the night before the wedding of his friends Alice and Timothy, a foreign military unit turns the village into a battleground. In a desperate bid to save the everyone, Fei climbs into an enemy "gear" and inadvertently triggers an explosion that levels Lahan and kills most of its inhabitants.
Blaming himself, a suicidal Fei disappears into a nearby forest where his crossing of paths with a woman sets in motion an incredible series of events that will ultimately decide the fate of humanity.
The storytelling was not just Xenogears' greatest achievement - it established a new narrative standard for video games on the whole. It feels far more like a piece of classic literature than it does a video game about fighting robots. The dialog (however awkward in translation), evocative setpieces, and the visual and musical motifs are all slathered in layers of symbolism that unify and enrich its component parts. It uses analtic psychological theory to juxtapose elements of gnosticism, metaphysics, and modern scientific sensibilities, and it's on this stage that the game plunges headfirst into its examination of the human condition.
It's a masterpiece that completely upends any notion that video games aren't worthy of being considered legitimate art. The gorgeous graphics and Yasunori Mitsuda's triumph of a soundtrack don't hurt, either.
That being said, it would be disingenuous to judge the game without acknowledging its considerable flaws. It lacked the limitless budget and resources that the Final Fantasy games benefitted from - the second disc is essentially a cutscene with a few battles and dungeons interspersed throughout that resulted from the team's running out of money and time. The English translation is clunky, the battle system is needlessly obtuse and not very well balanced, and the platforming elements feel tacked on and are hindered by the game's tendency to freeze your controls when it begins loading a battle.
Those sorts of issues have derailed lesser games, but the setting, the characters, the plot, and the philosophical questions that drive it are all so well constructed that the problems with the gameplay never threaten the core Xenogears experience.
I could go on and on here, but one could fill a book with everything that could be said about Xenogears. A work like this cannot be neatly summed up within the confines of a YouTube description box, and it would be foolish to try.
If you haven't played Xenogears, you don't know what you're missing. If you want a game that can challenge your perceptions of the world and your place in it - a game that makes you think and that doesn’t reduce morality to a limited set of binary choices - you'll love this.
And if you happen to be a fan of the Xenosaga or Xenoblade games, well... the connection should be pretty obvious.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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