Xenosaga II initial impressions
Since I'm stuck at home at this point, I was going to start the New Game+
of Gensou Suikoden IV, but when copy of Xenosaga II arrived sooner than
expected, so I decided to switch games. Admittedly, I'm only about 9 hours
into Xenosaga II, but I'm already getting fairly frustrated.
So, Xenogears is near the top of my list of favourite games -- for awhile
it was the top of the list -- and it holds that spot primarily for
its story and music. I was not as fond of the Xenosaga story line to begin
with: it's a bit too futuristic, a bit too filled with technobabble for my
taste, and its timeline is edited from the original Xenogears history.
Xenosaga doesn't have the same degree of depth that Xenogears had, either
for overall story or for individual character development -- it is telling
that Xenosaga I was neatly summarized in a handful of dialogues near the
beginning of this game. So far, it seems like Xenosaga II is carrying
forward the less interesting elements of Xenosaga I, with a similar level of
technobabble and lack of depth. Hopefully I'm just in the begin-game lull,
and this will improve as I get further into the game.
The bigger frustration is that they still haven't learned how to balance
gameplay and story. They had an excuse in Xenogears, what with running out
of time and resources, but I've been sitting through some rather frequent,
long, and very detailed movies in this game -- suggests to me that
lack of time was not an issue here. At this point I'm getting tired of
sitting through long movie sequences. Xenosaga II has two discs -- we've
seen where that can lead before... *shudder*
In general the graphics are excessive, in more than one sense -- I don't
recall even Xenosaga I being as violent as this game has been so far.
There's constant animation on many of the city screens that is very
distracting. To their credit, they have some very nice high-resolution
models for complex objects (I love what they do with trees), but most of the
graphics are rather distracting. While on the topic of graphics, I'm less
than thrilled with the new character designs. I think KOS-MOS's attire is
getting a bit ridiculous, and I'm miffed that Shion no longer has
glasses.
Minor details: the music is quite good, but Kajiura-san's style is very,
very different from Mitsuda-san's work. I'm having trouble adapting to the
nearly-continual music and the more energetic style; some of the themes are
very catchy, but I still kind of wish it was Mitsuda-san. One other detail:
the font is too small and has inadequate contrast in many areas; I'm getting
significant eye-strain from this game for no obvious reason (there seems to
be plenty of space to put text in).
It occurs to me that I never wrote my Suikoden IV "rant". My impressions
of Suikoden IV were relatively favourable, even though the game's biggest
asset is nostalgia for the prior games. I went through and cleared the
ending again today (partly to make sure I got to play something
before beginning my Xenosaga session) and got happy nostalgic feelings from
listening to the ending theme. I'm looking forward to replaying Suikoden
IV; I really want to pin down some ambiguous impressions I have for several
characters in the game...