2.5/5 ★ – mandatrous10's review of Xenogears.

Oh Xenogears, what a game with so much influence and so much baggage. It lives and dies by its ambition, and even then it could do with a bit less lore. Spoilers from here on out: It starts off with a bang with a guy getting in the robot and everything going terribly wrong, very strong opening to have the MC's destroyed hometown be their fault. And while it takes a while for the greater plot to get going it really is fun to get sucked into the world and all the side quests What drags this game down before we even get into the disc 2 issues is the fact the gameplay is just not fun. Deathblows never really have much strategy besides using the strongest one, but the random encounter rate is atrocious so fighting just always ends up being a slog, and in a 70 hour JRPG, that is a major flaw, not to mention navigating every dungeon is a pain before we even get into the platforming Of course JRPGs are also a story intensive genre and I tend to weigh that heavily as well. And when the writing in Xenogears is on, it's on, aside from the opening, Billy's story and Elly's return home are some incredibly engaging elements, but in general the game struggles to tie it all together. There are so many mysteries that are strung out between its dull gameplay that when they are yapping about more Christianity-inspired lore nonsense, it is hard to really remember what they're foreshadowing. They do straighten everything out in the end, but after our protags being ping-ponged everywhere without much wants or desires of their own, it is hard to care about the million back stories and cool things that happened off screen thousands of years ago. Honestly the lack of developed content for disc 2 improves the pacing bc we don't have to suffer through another dungeon for the next exposition dump Still I can't help but admire the ambition. As someone who has played the Xenoblade trilogy and seen Evangelion, I do want to give it props for doing a lot of stuff those series do first. This is not a mediocre game. But it isn't a fun one and as someone familiar with both the JRPG and mech genres, it doesn't blow me away the way it might have if I was younger or had been around for its release.