3/5 ★ – TheRealness408's review of Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra.

This is a hard game to rate on it's own merits. It improves a lot of the issues with Xenosaga 1 and 2, the main one being the gameplay to cutscene ratio. This actually feels like a game, and not an interactive anime. The battle system is simplified this time around too, opting for a more traditional turn based system over the convoluted combo system of the previous games. This game is hard to rate because the previous games set it up for failure. You have what was intended to be a 6 game series condensed into 3 games with 4 of those games condensed into 1 game. Honestly, this could have just been one epic masterpiece instead of a 3 part mess. The first two games have almost nothing happening, but in the third game EVERYTHING is happening, but the pacing is still far too slow. It has this weird effect where things just flat out arent introduced or explained, while other things are overly explained to the point where I found myself losing interest. When things did get interesting, I often found I had no idea who the majority of non party members were, what their alliances were, or their motives. Part of this was me not paying attentention, part was because its a character who showed up once in the first game and wasnt reintroduced, and some things just never got mentioned until the last 2 hours. Overall, this series is a mess, and it frustrates me because there was clearly something good underneath, but they butchered it.