(I wrote this a few days ago when the site was offline so it’s going up now.)
Having just watched what was probably the conclusion of A Raving Loon’s stream series of Xenogears—which ended very badly—I’ve been reflecting on how a game that was genuinely my favorite Playstation 1 game at the time is now just so…bad. What ultimately killed the stream series was the infamous train wreck that was disc 2, where the game essentially retires from being a game and becomes hours of characters sitting in a chair in front of a still image in otherwise empty space, talking about all the amazing things that would have happened if there had actually been a game here. The longstanding problem of the game’s verbosity stretches beyond a breaking point and the person formerly known as the player drowns in information dumps of trivia and references to a garbled understanding Kabbalistic and Gnostic mysticism, punctuated with the (in retrospect totally busted) pop science of multiple personalities that was popular in 1997. There are a few dungeons and other spots of gameplay thrown in, but they only highlight how awful the rest of the time is. After 10 or 12 (or more) hours of this, you’re eventually dumped back into a world map that has probably five interesting locations on it, one of which is the final dungeon.
What’s strange is that none of this bothered me at the time. The awfulness of disc 2 was generally regarded as being a tragic result of insufficient time and/or money, rather than being an unmitigated title destroying disaster. In an era where AAA games are routinely released in an incomplete state with the rest of the content (and most QA work) being developed after the fact, possibly as DLC, the way Xenogears handled its second half would render the game unsellable today and probably damage the reputation of its publisher. The game’s director apparently went on the record recently to say that it was the result of mostly leaving the game to new, inexperienced employees and interns. If that’s true, it only happened because of major negligence on the part of the people who should have been building the game. More to the point, I have trouble believing it. The fact that most of the team eventually left Square to form their own company in order to make Xenosaga, the game they apparently wish they could have made, suggests a passion for the project that would make it extremely unlikely that they’d have left it in the hands of others.
Xenosaga was itself a production disaster: It was intended to be six games, each representing one of the six episodes Xenogears promised in its ending, but the first game was itself so incomplete that it represented only the first third of the story they wanted to tell. It ultimately took them three whole games to accomplish what they’d planned to do in one, and the series was then terminated due to poor sales, in no small part due to the fact that, yes, in this case you actually do have to play the first two games to understand the third. What all of this tells me is that the team behind Xenogears and Xenosaga have terrible project management skills. If they’d had the time and money that its fans in 1997 wished they’d had, they’d have made a game that was twice as big and still only 50% complete. The explanation that they’d left the game to interns either speaks to that managerial incompetence, or is just a petty attempt to shift blame to others.
That said, the game itself has much to recommend it (even though I wouldn’t): it has an amazing if too short soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda, excellent sprite work, a few extremely good mech designs, and a number of enthralling subplots that could have easily carried their own games. Despite everything I’ve said, it really is tragic that the game ended up in its sorry state. What the game desperately needed wasn’t time and money, it was an editor that had the authority to cut out the unnecessary exposition, plot arcs that don’t go anywhere and all the mythology that just doesn’t need to be communicated. Call it Donnie Darko syndrome.
Oh my god, Xenogears is Donnie Darko. Oh my god.