Xenosaga for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

Having just recently finished this first installment of the three part series, I recommend playing this game. Although, you should only play if you plan on getting the next two installments. Why? The battle system is rather easy and the game's storyline is rather short. If anybody is looking for complex and balance battles, they should stay away from this game. For the most part, the characters can deal more damage than anything else in the game. Only boss battles require some thought, but only slightly more than regular fights. As for as the story goes, its rather short and leaves alot of confusing plot elements. What I mean about short is that much of the story is explaining the background of the Xenosaga universe. Also, there are a large number of characters introduce thoughout the game. All the characters and the background information tends to slide the story to confusing. Overall, the game is enjoyable if you can overlook the shortness of the story and weak battles.

This is one of the best RPGs I have played since Final Fantasy 7 and Star Wars Kotor.

Story: The story is so massive, complex and intriguing. Its set like 4 thousand years ahead of our time. An ancient artifact called "The Zohar" was discovered on earth, which also caused the disappearance of it and brought forth beings from another dimension called gnosis who want the zohar for themselves and want to bring forth the extinction of the human race.

Gameplay: The game is 30+ hours, 3 hours of it is cutscenes explaining the story believe it or not. If you love a good story like me you will enjoy it, if not you can skip it or it will prob annoy you. It has a turn based combat system with a bunch of spells, different attacks and attack combinations you can do. You earn different special attacks called tech attacks that you can power up to make stronger and faster. You can buy gear and weapons at shops. Certain characters can get into giant robots called A.G.W.S. which increase their HP, armor, and attack strength. There are a ton of ways you customize your characters from gear, weapons, accessories to stats, ether spells, skills and more.

Graphics: The graphics look amazing for a PS2 game.

Flaws: The boost system in combat is rather complicated and confusing to understand, they don't explain the concept of it that well in the tutorial. I didn't figure out how to use it well until half way through the game. The tutorial is so boring I almost turned off the game. If you can get past the tutorial and first 30 mins after that, it only gets better from there. The skills leveling is a little confusing at first. The frequent loading and having to revisit levels to get "Special Items" is annoying. Leveling up grind can get repetitive depending how good of a player you are.

One final note: They are 3 games in this series the 1st one is the only one worth playing. The other 2 are horrible. If you want to find out how bad read my review on xenosaga 3, FYI there are spoilers