4.5/5 ★ – TheRealness408's review of Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht.

My main complaints with 1998's Xenogears were the combat while innovative felt jank, and the story was far too dense for one game. Xenosaga adresses both of those issues, while introducing it's own issue that keeps it from being a 5/5. First of all. Combat is fucking awesome. It's turn based, but you mainly attack via combos. The way you equip your characters and perform your combos determines if you're doing a magic attack, elemental attack, aoe's etc. You can guard or do a smaller combo to build AP and perform larger combos. That combines with a boost system that allows character's to take early turns. There's also a wheel that spins (in the same order) every turn and grants your party bonuses (you want the exp). All of this combines to make combat a balancing act of surviving and winning the battle at the right time to maximize results. The main part of this game... The story. Ima be real. I don't entirely know what's going on. Part of that may be because it's part 1 of 3. Part of it is how many important seeming characters and concepts are introduced and only discussed once. The real reason is this game has a looooot of cutscenes and I was zoning the fuck out at points. With that said, the story and the cutscenes are really good. It's just the gameplay to story ratio is way too heavy in favor of the story when the gameplay is actually really fun! I'm not even going to try to explain the story. Despite my bitching about the pacing. It is very well written, directed, and engaging throughout. All you need to know is, at the start of the story, your ship gets attacked by space ghosts, you get picked up by some Space bros, then you hitch a ride back home and a whole bunch of cool shit happens. The highlight of the story was the characters. You play as Shion, the chief developer of a weapon (sexy robot lady) named KOS-MOS. I thought Shion was a total badass. While she can use weapons, that isn't really her forte. Her intelligence, determination, and strong willed personality is her greatest strength. She's kind of a Karen, but a very likable one who gets shit done when other people can't, and it comes across as believable. KOS-MOS is pretty much an emotionless sexy robot lady who operates purely on logic. Does all of the coolest shit in the game. Will remind you she's not a human when you start acting emotional over her actions. And most importantly, leads to quite a few well written humourous moments. You got a dude named Chaos. I dont really know whats up with him. I think he's a robot or something? He's alright though. Jr. I feel like I need to learn more about him in part 2. He's cool though. Insanely OP when he joins too. Ziggy This guy has a cool backstory that I halfway forgot. He died back in the day then got revived. I think he's a robot now? Idk. He doesn't consider himself fully human tho. MINOR SPOILERS MOMO is probably the most interesting character. She's a special realian (a race of robot people who were generally created to be a workforce. they seem cool with it. think house elves) who seems to have more humanlike attributes, and was designed for a specific task. Homegirl has all kinds of spoilery ties. SPOILERS OVER Allen, poor Allen. He spends the entire game crushing on Shion and not knowing what to do about it. Homie gets friend zoned so hard, he's not even a playable character, but hes around for the entire game. Honestly. I feel like I just said a whole bunch of nothing. I like this game a lot. I just wish there was more game in the game. Ima go play part 2 now.