Jail Time

Now we have come to the worst part of Disc 1. Dudes from Kislev (the other country at war) have found Fei and thrown him into prison city. No joke. This entire city looks, sounds, smells and feels like one big prison. The worst part is we can't leave until we finish all our vegetables. Bleh.

Mr. Banderas

Right away the character of Rico is introduced and I really don't like him. I mean, sure I like him, but not in a large way. I feel like Rico represents something. Like Bart, this is his one time to shine and for most of it, he just serves as contrast to Fei. He has a huge amount of power and defense but is slow as an ox and we have to get his deathblows up from nothing in the middle of the first big difficulty jump that comes up in game. This is the chapter where we get a whole new area full of new baddies to explore, but the game also introduces status ailments. Which suck. S-U-C-K. 

Never Enough Tools

I hate status ailments. No matter the game I hate them. I never really use status attacks as part of my go-to strategy so I find it annoying when some random encounter hits me with confusion or poison or worst of all "sadness". What is the point of that!? It's not even in XG. It's from Chrono Cross or maybe FF7 but basically it just means you get depressed and can't do quite as much, quite as fast. Sure I get that the dev's have to make combat multi-faceted in order to keep us on our toes but having to carry around 20 different items to "cure" different status ailments is like trying to be prepared in real life. IT NEVER WORKS. You might think "ah, I can be prepared by carrying a first aid kit" but when you need tweezers and there are none in there, you add tweezers to the kit for next time. And this continues until you are travelling with your entire house in your bag. Whatever happened to just rolling with it? If you get poisoned, okay. You could use antidote or you could just wait until it wears off. Am I right? Why don't stat-ails just wear off? A random number of steps and you either fall down dead or your liver has done it's job. NOT "you are poisoned forever until you can find that one item". 

Besides which, stat-ails are mean-spirited. Bad enough you wanna punch me until I die, now you gotta send me to sleep while you do it? And if I try the same thing on you it never succeeds! Most bosses have immunity to stat-ails and about 60% of randoms do too. For the other 40%, the attack can miss and you're left looking like the cheese-head who wasted a turn. BAH!

Needless to say, I do very badly in the "Sewer Horror" chapter. The guys (Citan's here too) muck about in the sewers of the prison city looking for a murder monster and pick up an amazing number of pathogens from the baddies. On top of that, Fei is fighting in this Giant Robot Contest, where all the rules are totally different, and he has to win in order to continue. Tedious! That's what this section is. 

We had a good thing going in Aveh. We were on our way to make Bart the king again. We had goals, and a direction to shoot for. Now all of that has been put on the back burner. All the things we thought we were about to do have been snatched away from us. I feel like the whole Kislev section could have been so much more interesting if we hadn't had the whole build-up of liberating Aveh right in front of it. Working through the dungeons and being locked into to this area feels terrible because we know (well, I know) that there is something left unfinished. If we could just get back and wrap that up real quick... but no. Spoiler alert, we won't do that until Disc 2. The game developers have more of the world to show off before they'll let us go back.

On one hand, I applaud them for this storytelling direction. Being shuttled around based on scripted circumstance leaves me wanting more from each area so I want to keep going. Knowing that I haven't explored every cranny of the game yet makes me want to find every cranny and bust it open. On the other hand, experience has taught me that there is no end to the cranny making the game devs can do. Later on, they will add areas to the world map which were never previously there. A few dungeons are one-play-only with no sign of them on the map after or before. Apparently, this world is being continuously edited by the cosmic forces.

When the sewer is clean (relatively) and the gear fights are won, you might think we can focus on leaving this dump and getting back to what we were doing. But no. Turns out that Elly's boss decided to blow up Prison City with a kamikaze strike on an old nuclear plant so we've gotta stop that from happening. WHAT FUN!

I need a Turbo Controller

MAN, I don't know if it is because I just came off of Earthbound, a callous and cruel battling experience, or if it's because I know XG so very well but I am ON FIRE. Who made this game so easy? I remember leveling for DAYS to get past Calamity coming out of the Sand Caverns. This time he took less effort than a random encounter with a Mayfly. I can't handle it. I'm gaming too fast to keep up blog-wise.

YES! More nudity!

As a recap, once we meet Bart we go to Bledavik (which has fantastic music) and enter a fighting tournament so Bart can rescue his cousin/betrothed who is also head of a church. Meanwhile, the bad guys show up and we get lots of teasing about Solaris and Gebler and The Past, all in the form of Kahr and Miang. Kahr is to Vegeta as Fei is to Goku. And that means he's gonna get more and more annoying, and more and more inconsequential as the story goes on. I guess his character would be interesting on his own, but with all the crazy types running around in XG, he just gets lost in the hubbub.

SO we win the tournament and save the girl. Elly shows up for about five seconds. DAN has been following us! You can choose not to fight him when he shows up to get the "armor" of Alice's -Wedding Dress- but why would you pass up an opportunity to maim this dirty little goblin?

Once that's all finished we get a large mass of story to scroll through. UGH. "Fast forward Beemo"

OAKY! okay. So we got our eyes on the prize of making Bart the king of Aveh like he should be. That is a clear goal that we can probably accomplish. We head back to the capital, mix in a couple of feints and distractions. Ooop! Nope. Couldn't quite do it. Looks like Miang kinda screwed us over on this one. There is a bit of hilarity with a land-crab. I'll let that remain enigmatic for anyone who hasn't played.

Elly shows up for a quickie and Fei knocks her outta the park. It takes a real man to beat a lady up and then moralize at her for being in the Army. Sheesh.

Oh, and there he goes again. Fei totally freaks out on the special mission he was carrying out ALL ON HIS OWN. (I mean, they sent like 6 other guys with him. They couldn't help out?) He totally destroys everything and then proceeds to punch Kahr's arm clean off and throw the giant sand-marine on top of Bart.

Long story short, everything goes badly for everybody we care about right now. Right after everything was going so great with that rescue and the tournament too. What a bummer.

It's also a bummer that this marks the end of Golden Time. This is as far as I could get with my borrowed PS2 at the "youth center". I think that Senior year happened here and I didn't get to play the next couple chapters until I got my own PS2 and my own copy of Xenogears a few years later.

Golden Time

Let's have a history lesson.

Shown out-of-order, every other week

When I was in high-school I would go to the local "youth center" after class to wait for my Mom to get off work and drive me home. They had a PS2 there and the game Xenogears was one of the 4 or 5 available to play. I have no idea why it was there. Probably not appropriate for 75% of the kids who went to the youth center. I know this because there is a naked lady in the intro movie. I watched that intro movie quite a few times. It made the game very intriguing, and the anime robot stuff was some of the little anime robot stuff I had access to that wasn't either A: in german or B: DragonballZ or Pokemon. I knew there was a whole community of video-game nerds out there but living in a foreign land around an Army base very much limited my access to it. It's still hard to believe that I know other people who have played XG and love it as much as I do.

DARN YOU TEXT WALLLS!!!!

So, I would play Xenogears, hoping for more naked ladies, while waiting for my ride. The thing is, this "youth center" did not have the memory cards required to save your game on ANY of the systems available (GameCube, PS2, etc.). Therefore, I could only play about four hours into the game before I would have to leave and it would reset back to the beginning. Let me tell you, I got really good at burning through the first part of this game. I formed some major nostalgia-inducing memories there. But while Lahan and the forest are nice, these were the parts I played to death. I could get just about this far, maybe a little further if conditions were good. I learned everything I could. I got bored.

Now imagine the glorious, radiant day when I'd had enough. NO MORE, I said to myself. I went to the "Power Zone" (the Army's answer to electronics shopping) and I bought a PS2 memory card of my very own. I marched right up to that "youth center" and BLAZED through Lahan and Blackmoon Forest and finally, Finally! saw the land beyond the desert. And it was good.

This is Golden Time.

We come into Dazil and it is kind of barren. There isn't the wealth of secrets and activities that Lahan had, and it isn't explorable like the forest. It's a tiny base of operations for the Real Work which needs doing just outside of town. Leveling Up!

Soon you'll all be MINE! BWA HA HA!

You've now got Fei and Citan together. This is your dream team for right now. Citan is fast, he's a tank with 2x Fei's HP, and he is just as strong at 3/4 of Fei's level. Not that Fei is doing too shabby either. At this point you ought to have learned at least one Deathblow. I confess to be patient zero of the Deathblow Fever. A big part of successful speed runs in XG is learning these ASAP, so I developed a Pavlovian response to gaining deathblows and unleashing them upon every enemy who held me back from playing further.

I have no clue (and I don't want to know) how the algorithm for learning them works. It's based on the number and order of basic "normal" attacks you do and that's all I understand. I often get into a random battle, mash buttons, then quickly check Fei's status after to see if what I did got him any closer to the next DB. It's a nasty habit. I can stop whenever I want.

So, you do stuff in the desert and you meet this guy Grahf, who is totally mysterious, and get captured by the Aveh Army, and then some pirates attack and you fall down a hole with BART. Ugh, Bart.

I can't decide about Bart. He is an essential part of my Golden Time but after that he just kinda becomes... extraneous. A lot of characters in this game become extraneous. Just like in Final Fantasy 9, characters are introduced, they have their individual part and then they just kinda get lumped into "the team". The SAVING THE WORLD team.  Freya was my most favorite in FF9, but after you leave Cleyra... *bloop*. Nobody cares. That's all the story you get. Thing is, these characters are actually well defined and have clear desires, personalities and quirks, but they have to be available to be used interchangeably story-wise, based on the which ones the Player wants in the active party. As a result, their actions are meaningless and their dialog becomes oatmeal. Spiced with their own flair, sure. But in content, just flavorless mush.

It is particularly bad in Bart's case because he stands out so well right now. I am overjoyed to have a new guy to play as. He uses whips instead of fists, he has new deathblows to learn, he has fancy red styles, and drives a sand-marine. He's even got a stronger ATK stat than Fei right now. But unfortunately it doesn't last. Everybody else continues to advance and make huge jumps in fighting power but Bart stays kinda the same. Even his mega-ultra-super-robot power up from Disc 2 is only used in one fight and isn't all that impressive damage-wise compared to everybody else at the time. I never use Bart in my late-game party unless I have to. Which is sad. It's sad for Bart who gets left behind.

 Right now though, it is Golden Time. We have to help Bart infiltrate the capital and rescue his cousin (who is also his fiancee!)

Keep the Home-fires Burning

Okay, okay. So it doesn't happen exactly like that but it's close enough to still be relevant. Fei comes back to Lahan to find it in FLAMES. So he does what any rational young man would do, he jumps into the convenient giant robot and blows everything up. I mean everything. Everybody in Lahan dies because of Fei. Timothy, Alice, Dan... 

Oh god-dammit Citan! Don't save Dan! Alice is standing right there and you rescue her horrible Troll of a brother!?

Anyway, you get your first taste of fighting in a gear here. It's pretty easy. In fact, the gear recognizes that you are a total noob and turns on "Easy Mode" so your stupid, dumb, surface-dwelling brain can handle it.

"Why did you save Dan?"

But it's all in vain I'm afraid. Because Fei freaks out and blows everything up. This is also the first time we see the suggestion that all is not well in the mind of our hero. Be prepared for more of this because the game is going to explain the shit out of this particular facet of Fei's character. There are several text walls later on which drill their Freudian psychology in like a sadistic dentist.

Long story short, (and spoiler alert) Fei has multiple personalities, one of which is extremely powerful and violent. They even named this fucker "Id". There are even more "personalities" in Fei's mind but we only know about the violent one right now, we'll see just how many times this dude can fragment later on. But don't go thinking Fei's the only character in XG with the old "multiple personality", there is no end to the messed up brains in this game.

Speaking of messed up brains, Dan gets real mad at Fei for exploding the village and everybody decides to kick him out forever. Great. Not like there was anything left here to do now anyway. So Fei heads out onto the World Map for the first time.

Ms. Plot Device

In the forest dungeon which comes next we meet Elly.

And after about 5 random encounters she's gone again.

This really could have been written better. Elly is a fantastic member of the team and can be really helpful in a fight but the times we get her in the active party are not profuse by any means. It seems like every time Elly comes into the party, one story chapter passes and she's taken right back out again. 

The thing is, Elly is massively important to the plot of Xenogears, but she is really never much more than a Macguffin. She drives the action forward without ever seeming to be herself of great consequence. She has to be rescued multiple times. She struggles with her dual nature just like Fei, but isn't allowed to come to terms with it. She is brainwashed a few times, sacrifices herself way too much, and is rather generally "The Woman".  I'm certain that if you've seen any Xenogears merchandise or promotional material you've seen young miss Van Houten's likeness sprawled on it with the "I'm a sexy member of the Armed Special Forces of my country" pose.

This is too bad because I can see the potential for a really great character in Elly. Her fighting is brutal and effective (except when it isn't), she's compassionate but tough (except when she isn't), and she's sexy (all the time, but not as much as Alice). Elly is a character who is great at the core but has gone slightly off in the storytelling. Like a cheese with a bit of green fuzz on the sides. You could scrape it off and eat the cheese anyway; it's probably still fine. But do you really want to? Do you really need that cheese? There's only a little bit left and there are other, much nicer, cheeses out there. You could cook it into a casserole or make a sauce, and that could be nice. But you really only wanted some cheese to go with the rest of your plate. And it's late so the shops are probably closed anyway.

Maybe I'll clarify that later. For now, Elly has gone back home and Citan is back in the party. We're headed for Dazil and the desert and that means we're entering Golden Time.

Doctor of what?

Citan: #1 Wise Guy

Fei heads up the mountain to get a camera from Dr. Uzuki.

Citan Uzuki is my favorite character of all time. From anything. I aspire to become just like him in most aspects of my life and I think that everybody else should too. He is the fastest, most powerful character in the game (not always, but usually). He's a total badass at times and also an achingly earnest dweeb. Most of all though, he is the one character who knows what's going on. In a game with the complicated and undulating backstory Xenogears has, this puts him close to god-like omniscience. For about 90% of the playtime of Xenogears, Citan knows exactly what's going on and why. But rather than be all explain-y about it, he lets you (Fei) discover things for yourself because he knows (unlike the writers) that experience outweighs explanation almost every time.

Plus he has really neat-o glasses!

We meet Citan in the middle of fixing up a bunch of old garbage priceless relics from the past. He has some very poignant comments to make about music and some really cryptic things to say about Fei.

"Music is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it makes people remember things they do not expect. Many thoughts, feelings, memories... things almost forgotten... Regardless of whether the listener desires to remember or not."        - Citan

And that music he's talking about was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. If you haven't heard of Mitsuda-san you must not like video games much. He's responsible for the music in both Chrono Trigger and Cross, as well as Mario Party but let's not talk about that one.

Don't forget to grab -Midori's Ring- from behind the flower boxes. It'll come in handy much later.

When you leave, some craaaaa-zy stuff comes flying overhead! Better go see what that's all about.

Hometown Hero

After a short pre-recorded fight (don't worry, we'll get back to that) we are introduced to OUR HERO!

This hair needs less of itself...

What a dreamy guy! His name is Fei Fong Wong and he is (apparently) a sensitive artist. This is the only time we ever see Fei painting and, if I may be so bold as to give my opinion, he isn't that good at it. What Fei excels at though is kickin' butts! And jumping! Wheeee! A bit of a stand-out for an RPG is your ability to jump around on the town maps. I don't know why it's so rare. Jumping is fun! Press the triangle button to try it! Also, jumping in one of the corners in this first area will gain you a -spider web-! That'll come in handy later (much later). 

Anyway, run upstairs and you'll learn all about how Fei was a foundling, and how his friends Timothy and Alice are getting married, and how Alice's little brother, Dan, is some kind of horrendously deformed, giant foreheaded, bratty, mouthy, red-haired, shitty-little-kid. That's enough exposition. Now get outside! 

... no, you can't just walk through the door... 

...you have to push X... 

...yes, you have to do that with every door in the game... 

...you are turning the doorknob... 

...because that's how doors work.

You think you can just smash right through every door you come across? You think every door in the world operates on Star Trek logic?  NO! You walk up. To the fucking door. And turn the handle! And for goodness sake CLOSE IT BEHIND YOU.

Good! Now we're in Lahan proper; which has to be my absolute favorite RPG hometown of all time.

Dan: Angry Gnome Thing

Not only is the music cheery and fun (pro-tip: ALL the music in this game is great), but there is so much to do! This is the quintessential small starting town so nothing you do here really matters unless you want 100% completion but it's all very fun. There's a kid who'll play Rock-Paper-Scissors with you and give you a badge if you win enough times, the cows moo back at you, an old man yells at you if you step on his vegetables, you can fall down the well and find something gross, there are -aquasol- (the basic healing item of XG) littered around everywhere, there's a mystery guest from another game to teach you about saving, and a troll-child who wants to talk to you.

Oh, wait. That's Dan again. He wants to stop his sister's wedding or some shit and maybe you wanna help him with that, or not, whatever. He's terrible. Go talk to Alice anyway because she is a HOTTIE. Seriously, something strange was going on with Alice & Dan's parents because there is no way those two are the fruit of the same tree. Alice is also totally crushing on Fei, which is kinky 'cause she's getting married tomorrow. OR IS SHE!?

   

Alice:  The Hottest Hottie

Again, this is all very small-town stuff. The mini-drama with Alice, Timothy and (horrible) Dan sounds like the kind of relationship intrigue that happens in any real-life group of people. He likes her, but she likes this guy too, and there's someone nobody likes but he's okay I guess maybe and nothing amazing ever happens but life is still interesting. I feel  that Fei really fits in to this tiny community very nicely. Sure he was an orphan and thus, an outsider, but I get the feeling he's really made a good life in Lahan. Most of the townsfolk talk directly to/with Fei, rather than just spouting their set bit of exposition or tutorial with no explanation. They go about their business. They have jobs and plans and all that good stuff. Lahan isn't just a starting point on the world map, it's home.

Alice wants Fei to pick up a camera from Doctor Citan Uzuki so you'd better go get that.

Alpha and Omega

How marvelous! The game starts with an anime! 

This whole sequence is very important to the overall mythos of Xenogears but at the moment it's just a bit of pretty to get you excited. Things explode (spaceships!), there are cryptic messages ("you shall be as gods" gives me chills everytime!) a bunch of math and science happens really fast and there's a naked lady at the end! 

Remember that naked lady. She is very important later.

And then we hit the first reminder of why I HATE Xenogears. A text wall. I firmly believe they should have sold this game with a remote to fast forward through all the fucking text walls.

There is a good reason for those text walls. There is a LOT of stuff a person can learn about the world Takahashi created for Xenogears. There is a large book titled "Xenogears: Perfect Works" which outlines every-damn-thing about Xenogears. It has a timeline spanning MILLIONS of years. But there should be a big solid fire-door between what one CAN learn about a work of fiction and what one NEEDS to learn. So for now, maybe just skip through the text as fast as you can and take away these facts:

1. There is a war
2. Giant robots used in the war = "Gears"
3. Shit just got REAL in this tiny town