drboot on 14 February 2009
| Millennium said: Xenogears had the potential to be the greatest RPG of all time, but it falls short in a few areas. 1) Difficulty curve. Challenging games are a good thing, but there is a difference between challenge and tedium, and its name is Calamity. 2) Budget. I'm not talking about "production values," the actual value of which I have always been skeptical about. What I'm talking about is the dev team's complete lack of pacing itself with respect to its budget. When you run out of money two-thirds of the way through the game, requiring you to reduce the second disc to an 8+-hour sequence of cutscenes with maybe two hours of gameplay in between, this is a Bad Thing. 3) Interactivity/cutscene balance. There is a reason that this was one of the last major games to not feature some kind of cutscene-skip functionality. A remake which fixed these three problems, even if no other changes were made to the game at all, would have the potential to stand with anything put out since then. But as it stands these deep, deep flaws keep the game from deserving the 'greatest RPG of all time' title. They are simply that damaging. |
Again, I don't think people here understand that RPG's are played for their storylines and cutscenes...So a lot of each of those is a good thing, not a bad thing. Hence why I loved disc 2, but disliked disc 1.
