Xenosaga First Impressions

I bought Xenosaga on Friday, played it throughout the weekend, and after 25+ hours, I\'m not sure what I think of the game so far.

First off, the story is confusing as heck.  The basic storyline I understand, but as soon as I think I understand it, I sat there going through stuff where I didn\'t know what was going on.  (Hard to explain...)

Anyways, gameplay.. Gameplay is nice and simple.  Gives you a lot of freedom with how you want to build your characters and stuff like that.

Characters are real nice, and the storyline keeps me interested in the least, but as for Xenosaga being a "Game", I start to wonder.

Its weird.  I like it, but I kinda don\'t.

Basically, out of the 25+hours that I\'ve spent in front of the TV playing this game, 15 or so I sat there watching cut scenes, 5 or so I sat there watching a black screen while the PS2 read the dual layered disc, and the rest, I actually played.  So in a sense its kinda like watching one long movie with a little bit of interaction involved.

But really, I kinda like that at the same time.  It gives me breathers when I need them, and allows me to run around the room makin dinner or something while I still have entertainment.

I dunno, I just remember a lot of people flaming recent FF games because its become more of a movie than a game, and along those lines, Xenosaga progresses more towards a movie than a game.

Things that really irritate me about the game:  I watched one long movie sequence, and it ended in me having to go to some room.  So I move the character into the room (basically across the hall) and boom, another long movie sequence....  Dood, why didnt they just include the part where the character goes across the hall in the movie sequences too?  Well okay, it didnt really irritate me, but I sat there thinking, "huh?"

Sidenote:
Anyways, I really wonder why Square dropped this series.  I think Namco just made a good investment.

Thanks for the on-hand impression!

I read that if you have HDD the load times are a lot faster, and seeing how I\'ll probably have HDD by the time Xenosaga hits the States, it\'s not much of a concern with me.  About it being more a movie, that\'s what I got from the reviews as well.  I remember reading that they wanted the ability to have the game part removed, and still have an impressive story.

I can\'t wait for it to come to our shores!

damn i heard it got real good reception when it was released!!! hmmmm, ill need to hear more, how long is loading???

Before I had bought the game, I read somewhere that loading time was something like 20 secs between maps and scenes, and I was really doubtful that it actually takes that long.  But after having played it, I found out that it was actually true.  Hopefully the HDD does fix this.

However, I\'m not completely sure how much of the HDD they\'ve incorporated in the game itself.  I still have yet to read the manual about it, it might just be that the game saves the save data on the HDD, because there\'s an option to save to the hdd or the memory cards.  However on the game config screen, there\'s also the option to enable HDD, so I dunno.  Hopefully they do load a lot of the data onto the HDD so that the load times are less.  But 10gigs is a lot of data.

Yes, they said the HDD improves loading,
I was also very glad to hear you could save on the HDD