Xenogears is my favourite game of all time. This game is the creative basis for all of the Xenosaga and Xenoblade games, although none of them did the job so thoroughly as Xenogears. The world of Xenogears is one that would work great in 3D, if the task of translating it wasn’t so monumental - as all of the cities and towns alone in that game would probably exceed the size of Witcher 3 - or all of the Xenoblade games combined when considering towns. Bledavik, Kislev, Shevat, and Solaris would be Novigrad, Beauclair, New LA scale cities in 3D, perhaps larger - Witcher 3 certainly has more smaller scale towns, and when considering Xenogears to 3D, it would feel in line with the game to have a lot of smaller towns along with the large cities - but even then, Xenogears still had a number of small towns that were fairly large (like Dazil and Nisan) that would probably translate to something along the lines of Oxenfurt. And Solaris’s factory zones would probably be equal to Mechonis in scale. As a result, none of the Xenosaga or Xenoblade games are as ambitious in scale as Xenogears, but if they ever did get there it would be glorious!
Another thing I love about Xenogears is the cast. The villains are all very interesting and have their own motivations and relationships - there are multiple people who feel like they could be the main villain. Xenogears itself is heavily inspired by the Arthur C Clarke novel Childhood’s End, with 2001 being a big part as well (the Zohar is the Monolith, and the Zohar is related to the evolutionary goals of Childhood’s End - except with a different final product), some Bladerunner stuff, and some 70s anime like Starblazers - a ton of other stuff as well: Asimovian themes and Soylent Green are in there. The merger of mech and human, a concept revisited as the Mechons in Xenoblade, is also a part of this.
In terms of video game inspiration - the two biggest inspirations are clearly Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6, both games Tetsuya Takahashi worked on. Masato Kato was also one of the three head writers of Chrono Trigger, and Soraya Saga/Kaori Tanaka was a writer on FF6 creating the Figaro dynasty (Rene and Roni are brothers in the ancestral royal line of Bart, King of Aveh, also the middle names of Edgar and Sabin). The main elements are the Gears are the successors of Magitek Armour and Deus is the successor of Lavos.
There’s too much to say about this game and too little time tofor me at the moment :D
It won’t beat Ocarina of Time in this poll, but I love this game, it is part of the “sacred trinity” I call it, FF6, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears.
The game is fairly compact for everything that occurs in it. But that’s the thing about overhead RPGs from the 16 and 32-but era, they tend to move a lot faster than modern RPGs despite having bigger stories.
Suikoden 2 is one of my favourite RPGs of all time, but it happened to come out the same year as Xenogears. Hopefully the remaster hasn’t been canned by Konami. They announced a remaster series and there was some disconnect between development and publishing, because it’s certainly been an epic drama with all the cluelessness of the marketing team about its development status - they basically marketed the game for imminent release about a year ago with trailers, info, advertisements, then suddenly went dark leaving fans in a “WTF?” type state for around 8 months before announcing the game delayed indefinitely. What probably happened is poor communication, and jumping the gun announcing and marketing without even confirming the schedule. It sucks, but what you gonna do? I hope all RPG fans get a chance with this gem on the Switch sooner rather than later.
While I liked a lot of the leaps that Ocarina of Time made, I didn’t enjoy the game as much as Link to the Past. I was expecting something much bigger and more open world in its approach (a game with a lot of options and things to do), a game where I could stand atop mount doom (or near the top) and look out over Hyrule. We did eventually get that game, but it was nearly 20 years later on the launch day of the Nintendo Switch in March 2017. Ocarina of Time, while it did add a lot that I liked (such as 3D combat and epic feeling cinematics), it also added a lot I disliked about the 3D Zelda series: dungeons that took forever to get through, too much looking for keys/switches that took 20-45 seconds in 2D but sometimes 20-45 minutes in 3D because of how much more obscured and longer to navigate everything is; there also wasn’t much of an overworld focus - and I love the overworlds in the 2D Zelda games. Many love this game, but it’s not my preference. Still, Ocarina of Time was important for its place in history - the Breath of the Wild style game envisioned wasn’t technically possible yet.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
