>>729910605
All Xeno games are trash

I love Shion

>>729910605
I've always felt like this series had potential with some major rewrites to make it more coherent, but then people would hate it for not being faithful to the original (that they never played).

>>729910605
I wanted to replay this game but it ran like absolute dog shit on my steam deck. Anyone have success getting a consistent fps?

>>729910892
episode 2 changed a lot of things because of bamco

>>729910605
they already ruined it with the first one since they rushed it out before it was finished, and then told the devs to make the last 10% of the game left into the entire episode 2 so they had to add a bunch of filler.

>>729910605
The fact that ep 3 still managed to be 8/10 is amazing. What could have been if ep 2 wasn’t such a colossal abortion and we got the originally planned 6 episodes

>>729910892
They could probably get away with rewrites if they passed it off as the original 6 episode story they never got to tell.

>>729910903
Try using hardware rendering instead of software rendering. You will get a pretty big performance bump by changing that setting.

>>729912084
Noted, thanks. Will redownload and try

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MOMO

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>>729912284
BTW If you're using emudeck, there's a hot key so that you can change it without having to go into the menu.

episode had the skeleton of a good combat system, it just needed some balance adjustments to be a good game.

>>729912610
I am indeed, emudeck owns.
If for nothing else but for the custom skins you can put on it and make your games browser look all nice

Xenosaga fucking sucks lol

>>729912378
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg9OYyPIYNk
Still by far the best villain Monolith ever made

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>>729913083
Like your mom lmao

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>>729910903

I was able to get it to run perfectly on my Mac Mini M4 in AetherSX2 but it's mac only I believe. I wasn't able to run it in PCSX2 on my 2015 macbook air. I feel your pain, it took a literal 10 year upgrade on my hardware to finally run this game.

>>729910605
desu I would've lost a lot of good faith after playing that first game.

>>729910674
Xenogears: good
Xenosaga: good
Xenoblade: trash

>>729913242
Insane how ugly this game looks

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>>729913170
And excellent voicework for such an early PS1 title, too.

>>729913564
>PS1
2

>>729913513
Those games are all related? welp not playing this shitty series

>game 1 is behind schedule and over budget like usual for takahashi
>instead of turning the second half of the game into a slideshow this time they just ship the half that they have done
>turn the second half of game 1 into game 2
>turn what was supposed to be half of game 2 into a japan onry phone game
>cram the rest into an encyclopedia entry in game 3

am i the only person who mixes up xenosaga with that other ps2 jarpig .hack

>>729910605
this shit was my first jrpg that was full retard with gay anime shit and i started hating the genre and it got 1000x worse

>>729913986
No they're all unrelated series

>>729910605
>>first game sells relatively well for a niche title

Probably because of how they 'sold' the game to the masses... that it was prequel series to Xenogears, and it was going to tell the whole story that Xenogears couldn't tell.

>bandai goes full retard and ruins the whole thing

...then people noticed it's just another weeb game.

>>second game sells like shit

Well we did get a third.....

>>series is dead

yeah... kind of hard to pull a game like this off, the lore is too heavy with Nietzschean philosophy being taught through anime girls.

>>729910605
The first game was already a disaster development-wise. Takahashi once again shot for the moon and ended up as space junk like KOS-MOS in the ending har-har, which eventually led to Namco firing him from the project and only bringing him back as an advisor on XS3.

>>729914431
Xeno series is one of those series that's actually honest to the viewer instead of being vague and pretentious. It explains everything and if you read the database you can see that they knew what they were doing. To me that makes it a masterpiece

>>729914763
You mean the database where half the content is advertising for better Namco PS2 games you could've been playing instead?

>>729914681
But still it sold well for that kind of game. Even Xenogears sold very well for such a niche JRPG but even then Square didn't want to support a sequel. It just sucks that even when your game sells enough to not be a failure they still aren't satisfied with it

>>729914897
It's almost like the director was incompetent and was hard to work with or something.

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>>729913431
Most likely it wasn't that your hardware wasn't up to speed. Xenosaga episode 1 was truly a fucked up game, programing wise. It was hailed as one of the most difficult PS2 games to emulate for nearly 20 years because the game was a buggy mess. I think all the pcsx2 devs really did was put band-aids over the emulator which responded to weather you're playing Xenosaga episode 1 just to keep it from crashing your GPU. The game was that unstable, and still is to some extent. I think I even remember Bandai saying its impossible for them to port or remaster the series and would need to be remade it from scratch. That's how bad the game was programed.

>>729910605
first game only sold well because anime was popping off in the west in the early 2000s. stuff like .hack was kusoge but flying off shelves.

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>>729914897
>Even Xenogears sold very well for such a niche JRPG but even then Square didn't want to support a sequel. It just sucks that even when your game sells enough to not be a failure they still aren't satisfied with it
Business realities often foil artistic ambitions. It's a tale as old as time. Squaresoft downsized its commitments to original IPs because it was growing too fast and project management was becoming a nightmare. Trying to maintain 2-year dev cycles with tons of staff moving between projects was unsustainable - as was trying to market a dozen new IPs within a single console generation. Hence, original IP projects were cancelled and developers were eventually consolidated into four major teams that would primarily work on Final Fantasy games.

As for Xenosaga, Episode I was a complete failure of scope management. Monolith Soft was supposed to be an 80-hour JRPG, but ended up way shorter. According to Takahashi himself, only about 20% of its intended content made it into the game:

https://xenogearsxenosagastudyguide.blogspot.com/p/the-history-of-xenosaga.html#history_xs_episode_1

>>729915558
yeah, Takahashi said that Xenogears was 30% of the original vision, those kind of things just make me even more grateful something actually came out at the end

>>729914978
But enough about Tetsuya Nomura

>>729910605

I hear a dude fucks his sister in this game.

Very based.

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>>729915732
People wonder why nobody tries to make these kinds of games anymore. It's because shit like that is unfeasible. Xenosaga in its "intended" state would've had the scope of a multi-season GC-animated series on top of a script the size of a book series on top of a console role-playing game with numerous mechanics to design and balance.

Old school Saga fans complain about Xenoblade's story being too simplistic, but that was a necessary compromise to make sure the game didn't suffer from yet another case of scope creep. And Xenoblade 1 STILL took four years to develop regardless.

tl;dr plot dumps don't make for good video games.

>>729910892
They did do a rewrite but it was Japan only and on the 3DS. Still no fan translations.

>>729916536
I wonder what would have been the best format for an ambition like this, because for an anime you’d need a ton of episodes, and for a novel you’d lose Mitsuda’s music and the vastness of the world.

>>729910605
Chrono Trigger : Chrono Cross :: Xenogears : Xenosaga

>>729910605
XS1 wasn't good either though
XS3 is still the only good Xeno game and it's probably entirely BECAUSE they were forced to cram in literally all the cool shit they planned since they had no time to drag shit out over several sequels

>>729916946
If the visual novel industry wasn't buried neck-deep in eroge schlock, that probably would've been the best option. Or something like a Telltale Games format, albeit with less player input.

>>729916972
all of these are good?

>>729917461
Chrono Trigger is the only non-divisively great game of the bunch.

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>>729916946
A VN is fine. Saga was mostly cutscenes and the story plays out like a VN styled space drama. With VN you get the option of having extra content like background lore and extras to go back to.

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>>729910605
Which one of these games has any kind of involvement by Masaato Kato? So I avoid them completely.

>>729917676
Pictured: An ancient Middle Eastern Jewish lady's desecrated corpse fitted scifi weapon systems fighting a gynoid with the remains of her soul trapped inside of it.

>>729917461
Chrono-Trigger
>an eternal classic
Chrono-Cross
>Not as good, but still enjoyable. For a PS1 game the graphics and music are top notch.

Xenogears
>Great game for what it could've been... it's notoriously known for being unfinished and rushed in the last disc, but still good.
Xenosaga
>Had potential to fix all that went wrong with 'Gears, but it was too ambitious.

>>729917783
Xenogears is the only one, but it’s actually the best, even though Kato specifically used a Mitsuda track for a very weird scene without Mitsuda knowing

>>729917461
i never played Gears so i can't know for sure, but i wonder if Xenogears fans felt the same way after hearing the series is "coming back" and then being handed Saga, as Trigger fans felt when they were handed Cross.

>>729917961
Both Saga and Cross was a good game so I guess they were happy.

>>729917909
Cross gets boring, fast, battle system is kinda shitte. It's a game that relies completely on being the underdog.

>>729917961
I only discovered the series recently, so my opinion is relative, but even if we didn’t get a single great series, Takahashi still managed to create three distinct series that each built a lot of fans, even though I’m a bit disappointed, especially with Blade’s tone, in the end there are more enthusiasts than there would have been with just one series

I own the 3 games but I can't remember a single thing about the story

>>729918095
Cross is fine if you forget Trigger exists, and also ignore the part of the game where it shits all over the ending of Trigger.

>>729917961
Its not like jrpgs fans weren't used to their favorite franchises changing tone and gameplay with each director, sequel or, next installment. Final Fantasy had been the raining kings at doing this.

>>729918578
>raining kings
Hallelujah

I'm not even sure saga 2 is a game, i never managed to sit through the bazillion cutscenes with nothing happening for hours for a game to begin.

>>729918578
yeah but there was never a 4 year gap in between Final Fantasy releases back then.

>>729910605
Nah. I was a huge Xenogear mark, but even I thought Saga was shitty.

They are glorified movie series ; I will watch them occasionally as background noise. Also the OST is great cause Yoko etc but as a game they are dookie. Gears and X are the ONLY fun Xeno titles.

>>729919459
>Gears
>Not a movie game

>>729919562
I cant put Gears on in the background while characters talk for 40 hours.

>>729919562
A movie game doesn't have Alpha Weltall super boss.

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>>729915068
>I think I even remember Bandai saying its impossible for them to port or remaster the series and would need to be remade it from scratch
They didn't say that, they just said it failed marketing team tests (i.e., they don't think it would sell enough to justify itself). This was during what was pretty much the height of interest in a port/remaster as well, after Xenoblade 2 reintroduced KOS-MOS and the Zohar to a new generation. I think it's safe to assume they're never going to do it.

>tfw no Saga remaster trilogy or .hack IMOQ but here's 500 shovelware anime licensed slop

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>>729910605
Honestly the reception to Saga here baffles me because I remember KOS-MOS being one the most popular video game character on the internet at the time. No matter where you looked, if there was a video game/rpg website, KOS-MOS was sure to be plastered somewhere around the site. She was always going to be in a Bandai crossover. Magazines ads with nothing but KOS-MOS. She had tons of fanart. It felt like she was Bandai's Tifa how much you'd see her. She was pretty much the poster girl from the Xeno series before Blade because you never see any of the character from Gears getting this much attention.

One would think Saga was the more popular game. Hell I learned about Saga long before I learned about Gears. That's how hard she and Saga was pushed.

>>729920313
She was very popular back in the day; PSM front pages, commercials etc. Every dude I knew back in the day knew about KOS MOS even not playing the game.

>>729920041
Bamco can hardly even be assed to care about their premiere JRPG series Tales of any more. What makes you think they'd care to revive this series that performed below expectations even back when it was first released?

>>729920743
Oh shit I forgot Tales is evaporate now. Damn Scamco is mismanaging the fuck out of their IPs. Hell even SE was putting out AA titles like crazy

>>729920805
Vaporware****

>>729920313
>>729920587
>retards discover what advertising is

>Retard cant read or understand context

>>729910605
>Yume fujo shit flops
Good xenosaga is dogshit

>Retard pretends to be smart

>Retard thinks he isn't the retard in the thread

>>729910605
SEX WITH KOS MOS

>retard retards

>Says the retard

I like Xenoblade but just wish it had the depth of character writing and lore of Xenosaga then it would be perfect.

Instead you get ja-ja binks tier aliens who are obsessed with pizza, Tirkins who speak like babies, and protagonists whose entire backstory is something like "best friend is REYN, swings big sword"

Kind of crazy how dumbed down Xenoblade is compared to old Xeno games.

>>729922196
>Kind of crazy how dumbed down Xenoblade is compared to old Xeno games.
Xenoblade wasn't even meant to be a xeno game. Comparing it to Saga or even Gears was always going to end in failure.

>>729920313
she is like 2b except her source game sucks

>>729922256
yeah but that is true only for XB1, but i can see why they decided to make them more accessible than previous xeno games

>>729910605
>series is dead
Given that they released the third game on the same console (not to mention a I&II game on DS) and that the sequel series, Xenoblade, has become one of the best selling game on the Switch, I'd say the series did pretty well. Even when compared back in the day, .hack// fell off by its final game and Golden Sun only had two games.

>>729916536
>People wonder why nobody tries to make these kinds of games anymore
Episodic games are a huge risk. If you're requiring players to have played the previous games to be able to follow the story or transfer saves, then you're highly limited to just the people who played the first game or who are willing to buy two full-priced games at the same time. The first game needs to still be available and playable whenever the second, third, or fourth game comes out, since there's no entry point if the first game gets sold out. There's a huge amount of design involved if you're planning on making 3+ games from the beginning, and if the first game bombs, then that's not just the work on the first game but likely a huge amount of work on the second that is lost. It's also a terrible look if the whole project gets cancelled and the sequels just never appear.

This is less of a problem with digital storefronts, but is still a huge problem if the game series extends for longer than one console generation. Games like Suikoden were originally intended to allow you to transfer saves between games, but they couldn't figure out a good way to get it to work with Suikoden 2 (hence why it's just a character import feature) and completely dropped the idea with the PS1->PS2 transition to Suikoden 3.

There's a reason that the only examples of this today are extended series of independent games, which you can play individually but have an interconnected story. Legend of Heroes: Trails into various names and the Atelier series both have trilogies and tetralogies where the story is connected, but you can also pick up the middle game and just play that for a full independent game. The other option is to release "sequels" as DLC packs, to make sure people have played the base game. Both of these work, and it's pretty obvious why this is how it's typically done over trying to make three games you need to play in sequential order.

I just know for a fact Monolith's next RPG will be fucking incredible.

>>729922196
>and protagonists whose entire backstory is something like "best friend is REYN, swings big sword"
Filtered retard

>>729922601
Always loved the character outfits in Xenosaga. Memorable, colourful designs.

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>>729915558
>xenosaga 1 is the only JRPG I ever liked (besides Super Mario RPG)
>only played it once as a teenager and never played the sequels
I didn't realize how little of the story they actually managed to include
Time to replay it and finally play 2 at least
anyone know if it's better to play the US version or the undub version? I have both downloaded but was never sure what the difference was
going by >>729913170 the US version kinda looks better imo

>>729922196
And nopon, the biggest faggots in rpg history who single-handedly nearly ruin every game they are in

>>729922461
>completely dropped the idea with the PS1->PS2 transition to Suikoden 3
3 had support for loading data from 2, but it only unlocked a few additional scenes and imported the names of your previous countries. Support was dropped after that.

>>729921558
This

So, I'm really fucking dumb and don't remember anything but Shion, Cos Mos, and the WASTE MONEY card. What was the relationship between this game and xenogears? And why the fuck did things not make, well any fucking sense later? I mean I was expecting Evangelion kind of confusion, but I haven't been this confused since Kingdom Hearts.

>>729923009
Xenosaga is a spiritual successor but they are unrelated storywise, Xenosaga reuses some names from Xenogears but with a complete different meaning, like the Zohar.

>>729923009
>What was the relationship between this game and xenogears?

I think it's a parallel universes thing as they share some characters (appearance-wise, they're not the exact same characters), mechs, and of course religion themes.

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>>729922910
Agreed

>>729923009
They didn’t get enough time to properly develop what was going on with Wilhelm or the Mary Magdalene and u do concepts. You had to thoroughly read all the encyclopedia lore entries to even have an inkling of what was up and it was still murky. They needed at least one other game. UTIC barely got explained by ep 3

>>729922910
They're cute faggots at least

>>729923273
The federations/corporations and worldbuilding in Xenosaga is something I always really liked.

>>729923275
The ganglion launched their crusade to exterminate nopon. They did nothing wrong

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>>729923009
>What was the relationship between this game and xenogears?
Besides having similar themes and references to each, not much

>And why the fuck did things not make, well any fucking sense later?
Basically long story short, they couldn't finish up Xenosaga the way they originally planned. So they tried to wrap it as much as they could...which still ended up being very very confusing even if you take the time to read everything

>>729923353
Xenosaga is the only example I know of japs doing space opera right. They still couldn’t resist putting in big mechs but at least they are presented as just regular weapons and aren’t the focus. Real shame it got cut short and ep2 was an entire waste of an episode after the first 6 hours

>>729923427
You send these guys to the Eastern Front. How does the war change?

>>729923502
Realians die in camps instead of Jews. Shion and Kevin fall in a failed coup attempt against fuhrer wilhelm. General mizrahi eventually grinds them all down with his operation bagration

How's the anime ? Asking for a faggot

>>729923750
Not even close to complete and not worth it

>>729923750
It's written by the Xenoblade writer. Don't think it did the games justice at all and heard they're kind of wack.

>>729923750
It only covers episode 1, which is a 45 hour game that is half cutscenes. It condenses the fuck out of the story and you miss a lot while nothing of value is added

>>729910605
Did I imagine this getting a remaster announcement like a year ago? Didn't the guy who made it confirm it or something?

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Episode I was passable because of the promise of what was to come and the confirmation of a faithfulness to the original material. It itself was just fine as a game but signified something far greater. I remember, in preparation, reading the ps2.ign.com article on Xenosaga inside and out. For Xeno- fans, I was not perfect but was acceptable. It should have, yeah, had way more content. XSII fucked up in every possible way. The story of the URTVs was supposed to be 2 out of 6 episodes, not 3. III is only good because literally Jesus fucking Christ is a character in a JRPG, which needs to happen more often. Overall, Xenosaga sucks. Xenogears is the only good Xeno- game.

>>729923750
I like the opening

>>729923965
People troll about it getting a remaster or rerelease as a compilation fairly frequently. Nothings been announced and nothing likely will happen since Bamco owns the rights but monolith soft works for Nintendo now. Some explicit saga references showing up in Xenoblade 2 and 3 has kept hopes alive but a full project seems very unlikely from a financial perspective

I hope Mitsuda is doing the music for their next RPG

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>>729923965
No, the only confirmation we got was from Harada explicitly saying it was NOT happening.

>>729923473
>They still couldn’t resist putting in big mechs but at least they are presented as just regular weapons and aren’t the focus.
Making the mechs get progressively more advanced as the series went on was an incredible mistake. It caused the AGWS (or AMWS, whichever) units to look and ultimately be so fucking boring. It was foolish of them to not heed the rule of cool.

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>>729924157
>No market for it despite developing a cult follow and fact that spiritual successor is doing better than ever.
>Push Baiten Kaitos instead that nobody gives a shit.

Sure

>>729922316
>she is like 2b except her source game sucks
So 2B?

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>>729923750
As someone who actually watched it. It was pretty bad, both animation and artstyle. It doesn't even follow episode 1 very much because it changed the plot early by letting certain characters who died in the game live and even join the party. I'm guessing it was leftover ideas from the game because they went into great details for this change.

>>729925368
I heard the XS1+2 game had some big changes like that, maybe they followed that version of the story

>>729910605
>literally just started the first game yesterday
>see this thread
spooky