I\'ve finished playing the game, and thought I\'d like to share some thoughts about the game after having played it through once.
First off, since giving my first impression on this board a couple weeks back, my thoughts about the game have changed somewhat. I earlier stated that the long cut scenes might actually take away from the game at times. Now I would like to change that thought to: the cut scenes take away from the game somewhat, but really keeps you centralized on the story and helps to keep your interest level peaked. Time flies when you\'re playing this game, and I\'ve come to work many times these past few weeks on two or three hours of sleep simply because I lost track of time while I played. So good or bad, I dunno, but the game itself was beautiful and interesting, so that\'s all there is to it, I suppose.
As for trying to compare it to a classic RPG, its basically not your typical classic RPG. In the classics such as the Dragon Quest series, its definitely almost necessary to talk to a lot of people in towns and stuff like that, but in Xenosaga, you really don\'t have to talk to anyone, and you rarely find yourself lost as to where to go or what to do. So in a sense, its not much of an "RPG" but kinda more like an action game.
Anyhow, after having finished the game, it left me wanting for more, so that\'s a good aspect. Basically they made this first episode with the definite idea of creating a second. Kind of like the Phantom Menace in that it leaves a lot of threads of the story open.
Also another really interesting thing was that you can save the game once you finish, but you can\'t do anything with the new save file which is created. This I believe is probably going to somehow be incorporated in episode 2, like being able to load off of this same gave and continue onto episode 2 with the character settings and levels from the first episode. However this feature also is a negative, cuz I almost saved over my other save, which would have rendered that save slot useless, thus me having to start back quite a ways, simply to see the ending again, or to build up my characters for fun.
The story is weird at times, but its good. The graphics are superb. Real superb. I wasn\'t sure if I was looking at FMV sequences or realtime processed sequences, but there\'s a lot of them, and they all look good. My personal thoughts however, is that Namco might have cut down a lot of the costs of creating FMV sequences by using the more powerful Playstation 2 dev kit to create much of the movie sequences and then loading those sequences into the DVD as FMV sequences. This way, the sequences look beautiful, and as if they were created realtime. This would also greatly cut down on the costs of making the computer graphics sequences, something Square spent a lot of resources on in the FF series.
As for how challenging the game was.... it wasn\'t. There was one boss who basically cheated, and other than that, there really wasn\'t anything much to it. I didnt really have to sit in one area and fight a bunch of enemies to power up my characters at all. It kept the game flowing, but it really wan\'t too much of a challenge.
The music score is real good.
And last but not least, I ended up killing the last boss on the game without realizing that it was the last boss of the game.. I sat there afterwards watching another ingame sequence, and all of a sudden credits started to roll. Which basically explains why I sat there thirsting for more... I hadn\'t even realized that I was at the end.
Total time to finish, around 30+ hours first time around, around 15+ hours the second time around (skipping all the movies will cut out a bulk).
Any questions and comments are welcome to this post.
Topic: Xenosaga After Thoughts *no spoilers* (Read 767 times)