Upon the launch of Xenosaga: Dur Wille zur Macht some time ago, I was part of the crazed fanboy crowd that sprang upon the title in hopes of a revolutionary and engaging RPG experience. See, any console RPG gamer worth his salt knows that Xenogears basically ranks up as one of the best PSX RPGs ever released, and the idea was that Xenosaga would be an equal, if not superior title. Sadly, this proved not to be the case, as the game itself was relatively brief, the gameplay littered with lengthy and convoluted cutscenes, and the combat action somewhat disappointing in nature. The comparatively disappointing music score and somewhat obscure skill system brought down the experience further, and while Xenosaga was still in itself a decent game, I was ultimately left very disappointed. Now the second chapter in the series, Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose (god bless you copy and paste function) has been released, offering the developers the chance to redeem themselves in the wake of what suddenly became very skeptical fanbase. But will they succeed? Let’s dive in and find out.

As the second chapter in the series, Xenosaga II picks up just after the original game, but before the continuance in the storyline actually begins, the game flashes back to an event fourteen years prior, where chaos and a special weapons-grade “Realien” (an artificial person, effectively) by the name of Canaan have been deployed to the planet of Second Miltia on a top-secret mission. Just like the original, XS2’s storyline is rife with flashbacks, long-winded explanations, and obscure technical references, and while this isn’t exactly a bad thing (I’d imagine most anime fans have learned to expect it by now), it does make the game’s plot a little hard to follow at times. That said, after the brief opening segment involving chaos and Canaan (and even Shion’s wacky brother Jin, whom makes an appearance as a usable combatant), the game catches back up with the original cast again, who are onboard the Elsa and are headed for modern-day (relatively speaking) Miltia. But our war-hardy heroes still have their work cut out for them, as they have yet to plunge into the consciousness of their Realien companion MOMO to try and extract the “Y-Data” she carries, which is apparently a significant part to unlocking the mysteries of the universe in some manner. That’s about the best summary I can come up with for the game’s storyline on short notice – fans will really have to play it and watch the lengthy cutscenes themselves (repeatedly, quite possibly) if they wish to get a firmer grasp of what exactly is going on. As a side note, it isn’t absolutely required that everyone who picks up Xenosaga II have beaten the original game beforehand, as the game offers a quick play-by-play rundown of the major events from the first chapter via a terminal found not too far into the beginning.

As I played Xenosaga II, the main thing that struck me is how many changes have been made in contrast to the way the original game did things. Money for example is now totally non-existent, with items and equipment being provided to the player purely through either exploration or destruction of monsters / bosses. Curiously, the whole “U.M.N.” system from the original game (which offered a huge descriptive database of all the obscure terminology thrown around throughout the plot, as well as a neat email system and some other info) has been totally done away with, and the character management system is much more refined and simplified. Basic items, such as health and ether packs still exist, but equipment as a whole has been scaled down significantly. Instead, the new focus is on a character skill system, which allows players to take their characters through four tiers of differing capabilities. Each character starts off having access to only level one skill sets, but by spending “Class Points” to unlock a particular school of skills, and “Skill Points” to purchase those new abilities, characters gradually grow into specialist roles to augment the player’s needs during a fight. These skills are divided up into “Ether” (magic, basically), passive abilities, and active augmentations that have to be “equipped” before they take effect (characters can have up to three of these kinds of items equipped on them at once). And that’s basically the extent that players can customize their characters – the system of totally changing a character’s available attack patterns is gone now, which seemed limiting at first until I began to grasp the nuances of the new battle system works.

Rather than just relying on the use of overpowered characters with incredibly expensive equipment, combat in the game now depends on chaining up a number of different attacks based on an enemy’s weaknesses to do the most damage. The “Boost” system has made a comeback and is now more critical than ever, as boosts are now mandatory in some fights to keep an enemy at bay long enough to kick his ass. The way it works is that each character’s attack (called with the square, triangle, or X buttons) is designed to target the “A”, “B”, or “C” zones on an enemy. Each type of enemy has vulnerabilities to specific zones in sequence (such as “A, B, B”), and pulling off a proper series of attacks on these zones in the right order will cause the enemy to “Break”. If an enemy is broken, a subsequent special attack can be used to knock an enemy into the air or onto his back. Enemies incapacitated in this manner will immediately go back to normal after the turn is over, which is why boosting is necessary to let your other characters all take turns beating the crap out of the enemy while he’s in a weakened position.

This is all critical stuff to know because the majority of a character’s standard attacks will generally no longer do any kind of appreciable damage against a major target, requiring the players to stock up their boost meter and chain up their attacks like crazy to even stand a chance against certain enemies. This also means that boss fights have taken a new twist, because powerleveling simply isn’t enough to guarantee victory – you have to actually go to the effort of learning an enemy’s weaknesses and coordinating your attacks just right to deal massive damage As I said, this adds a novel new approach to what would normally have turned into just another level-grind, because players actually have to think and get creative with their choice of characters and attacks to maximize their damage potential during a fight (the ability to switch between characters in the middle of a battle is handy too). As a side note, the combat in the game is also paced much quicker, so there’s no more concern about having to wait around while lengthy attack sequences play out over and over again (like Shion’s “Spell Ray” attack from the original, which I couldn’t live with almost as much as I couldn’t live without it), which is definitely a huge relief.

The only downside to the otherwise novel skill tree that is a significant part of the game’s combat system is that a lot of the skills are honestly next-to useless. Because skill and class points are so limited, making correct, useful choices on what kind of abilities a character should have is all the more critical, and as such I found myself shying away from a vast majority of the available skills simply because they seemed a little too specific, such as a spell that shields a single character from a little bit of a particular damage type, or weakening spells that, again, only affect a single enemy’s defense versus a particular type of damage. The concept of the skills system seems solid enough, but it really feels like most of the skills were just put in there for the sake of filler content, and many don’t even have much of a use during boss fights due to resistance factors. The new combat system is really great overall just from all the new hands-on features to give players more control over their victories or defeats (it’s so nice not having to just rely on a pure numbers game for once), but I was a little let down that a lot of other aspects I enjoy from common RPGs were done away with to make room for the changes, and the choice of available skills is really disappointing.

Of course, for the parts involving non-combat, there is still quite a bit for adventurous players to do, although sadly much like the original Xenosaga, a lot of the game just involves running around talking to NPCs or looking for hidden treasure in between combat segments or plot-advancing cutscenes, without really incorporating any of the usual fancy mini-games to enhance the experience (though XS2 seems to make even less of an effort at distracting players with neat little games than the original did). Still, the “G2 Campaign” that picks up a little ways into the game is a neat way for players to take on a number of side-quests for extra items, while at the same time offering a neat interface for keeping track of active objectives and learning a bit more information about the game universe (thanks to the new menu feature unlocked specifically for keeping track of G2 quests). Still, the game world is fairly linear (or at least nowhere near as open-ended as the RPG titles of old) and keeps players moving in a fairly direct manner with no real change for return to significant areas unless they use the little “E.V.S.” icons scattered around to “simulate” environments they’ve visited in the past. Frankly, Xenosaga II’s strongest suits are in its elaborate storytelling and neat combat system, which is great for those who enjoy watching movies almost as much as they enjoy playing games, but not so awesome for RPG fans who want a more fulfilling experience.

This ultimately leaves me with the impression that Xenosaga is a series more about the hardcore fans who tend to just love a good sci-fi story combined into an RPG, without concerning themselves with all the other neat stuff console RPGs used to have (like world exploration maps, or cool little side-gigs like Chocobo-breeding). The game, for all it offers, is a fairly solid experience (if a little brief – I haven’t actually beaten it myself as of this point, but I’m told it ends somewhat prematurely), but I keep feeling as if it’s missing a lot of things that could make it a whole lot better. Summarized, this game is going to be one you either love or absolutely hate, but it doesn’t go particularly above and beyond the call of duty to try and entice new people into its arms, and I find that to be very disappointing.

Xenosaga II’s graphics engine shows a marked improvement in some areas, but sadly is actually inferior to its predecessor in several others – or at least isn’t as polished as it should be. The good news is that the character models have all gotten a spit-n-shine overhaul for both the cutscenes and engine-rendered segments, with some simply looking better, while others (such as Shion and KOS-MOS) looking almost entirely different. The changes in character design actually took some getting used to (especially with KOS-MOS, where a lot of controversy has sparked up), but eventually grew on me. The characters also look a lot more detailed and have a wider, more fluid animation set for use in battles, so there’s quite a bit of nice eyecandy for fans to look forwards to. Unfortunately, this comes at something of a heavy price, as Xenosaga II’s combat segments take an astonishingly long time to load – sometimes upwards of half a minute can pass in the period of time between a battle segment starting and all of the characters physically loading and appearing on-screen, which gets annoying incredibly fast. As a further grievance, it seems common complaints against the original Xenosaga’s FMVs have gone unheeded, as the animation in XS2 is still jittery (if not totally awkward on occasion), and the lip-syncing is totally off-key, making for a strange viewing experience for those who don’t just stare at the subtitles all the time. It’s obvious the team has made an effort to give the game an improved appearance, and it mostly shows, but that just isn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Xenosaga II presents itself far worse than its potential allows.

One thing I was certainly hoping would be improved in Xenosaga II is the audio experience. The original Xenosaga had some fairly good sound effects overall, but the quality of the voices and dialogue was sometimes questionable, and the music, while pretty good overall, became incredibly repetitive after some time due to the same combat theme playing throughout almost every battle in the game (even the boss battles, ack!). Fortunately, the music themes are more varied in XS2 and are ultimately much less grating than they ended up being in the original. Voice acting on the other hand is something of a mixed bag – I feel that the overall quality has been bumped up a little, but some of the talent used just seems downright unwieldy, especially in the case of MOMO (whose battle dialogue in particular has a weird and cheesy “I’m trying too hard” flair to it). Ordinarily I don’t really devote much attention to picking apart a game’s usage of voice actors, but given the game’s heavy reliance on cutscenes, storytelling, and character interaction, flaws I would normally consider insignificant suddenly become much more noticeable (especially given the aforementioned lip-syncing issues, which just make things even more awkward). While Xenosaga II’s dialogue is of an acceptable quality, I really wish a lot more effort had gone into making it better, as games so reliant on long, slow-paced cutscenes really can’t afford to have sub-par voice acting.