No, quite the opposite, it was very much of its time.
>fighting game mechanics at the peak popularity of fighting games
>esoteric biblical/kabbalistic story with jungian themes at a time where japs got super interested in this shit
>story heavy rpg at a time where jrpgs were rapidly moving towards that approach
>has mecha at the peak popularity of mecha
And so on and so forth

>>739617324
I can see why it became people's hyper fixation but it is quite over hyped.
If it actually got the time it needed though yeah it'd be a masterpiece

>>739617485
>>esoteric biblical/kabbalistic story with jungian themes at a time where japs got super interested in this shit
ah yes, Neon Genesis "i put it because it looks cool" Evangelion
>>739617873
>I can see why it became people's hyper fixation but it is quite over hyped.
When the story is literature who cares about unfinished gameplay or disc 2

>>739618503
>evangelion
Betterman, Ghost in the Shell, Lain, Angel's Egg, the entire Megami Tensei franchise, etc. It was THE 90's trend for japanese writers and dev nerds.

>>739617324
It was behind its time in it needed about another year of development to actually make everything they wanted to include.

>>739617485
Hit the nail on the head. That being said Xenogears was cool as fuck when it wasn't being a novel.

>>739620139
Kind of the plague of the Xeno series, really. Not sure if Blade fixed that, haven't played 'em. They just really needed to script down to like a 1/4th or something, then it would have been just right. Xenosaga did NOT need to be 3 games, I swear.

>>739617324
Don't know if I should finish this game or not.

>>739621256
It's only a brisk 100 hours bro :^)

>>739620438
supposedly from the start it was all supposed to be one big ambitious 9 part story but they kept bouncing around publishers so much
I only played like 3 of the games so I don't know but now we have 8 games total right?
Is it safe to assume that idea never fully materialized? That there was probably never really an overall plan all along to tie it all together?
Why do japanese devs start these ideas but never once follow through on them?

>>739621256
You beat disc 1 yet? Disc 2 is a book. Might be better to just watch or read it. Sure you get to still play. Sometimes.

>>739620438
They solved it by making each game kind of a stand alone and don't do any huge teases or builds for future events. XB3 main issue is the fact it's made to actually be a sequel to 1 and 2 it it ends up with a fuckton of lore and plot holes that don't add up to much

>>739618503
Xenogears was already in planning before Eva aired.

>>739621897
Xenogears (dev name Project Noah), started as the episode 5 of a 6 episode planned series, the other episodes were meant to be in other mediums, but they were never realized, they decided to make episode V first because they thought it was the one that best suited the structure of a JRPG. The story of episode 5 is self sufficient, and key moments of episode 3 and 4 are in the game, but the rest we know about them are notes in a 300 pages long book called Xenogears Perfect Works.
Then Takahashi left Square to make Monolith Soft and startet Xenosaga, this time as a 6 episode series of games as a completely new story, unrelated to Xenogears. At the end we only got 3 games (+ a few spin offs) that cover iirc like 1.5 of the originally planned episodes. After that, unfortunately, Takahashi, with Xenoblade, was forced to prioritize the gameplay, and the plot, even though it inherits the same themes, is decidedly less ambitious, especially in its tone and characters. Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade are all three different and unrelated series

>>739620139
It was more poetic when it was a novel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbsuFuVOq2o

>>739622271
Exactly, that's why the Evangelion comparison is superficial

So ahead it crashed and burned.

>>739622271
>>739622753
I really had Eva flashbacks while playing Xenogears to the point I had to know when both were originally released in Japan.
Guess it's all just repeated mecha anime tropes across media after all.
But the crucified Gears were the tipping point tbqh.
Also that gravity-themed blue-ish Gear that kid had totally reminded me of Granzon.

A masterpiece made can never be erased.

>>739622408
so all 3 were never supposed to be related, that's fair enough
but the point still stands he still couldn't finish his lunch 3 times in a row

>>739622408
I forgot one of the reasons why Sega got cut short was 2 bombing in both JP and NA. One major thing you can blame for that was them listening to western reviewers and applying the feed back in 2 development. The two major things complained about was the story was too long and they didn't like the anime style. So they made the story short as fuck and changed to a western style, 3 was them realizing they fucked up and tried to fix it

>>739623193
The fact that he got to try is amazing enough.
Matsuno did a couple of Ogre games, then moved on to FFT and never did anything else related, Square even owns the IP now.
IIRC both Knight of Lodis and OG64 were made without him.

>>739617324
Not really ahead of its time. It was just extremely ambitious for video game writing standards at the time.

>>739618503
Xenogears wasn't strongly influenced by Evangelion.
It's more accurate to say that Xenogears is like a mix of G Gundam, Xabungle, Childhood's End and Dune.

>>739623345
>Not really ahead of its time. It was just extremely ambitious for video game writing standards at the time.
writing standards in general, it's TBK tier
>>739623226
Yeah, Namco just killed it

>>739622408
The Xenoblade part of the Xeno "meta story" is really weird in the sense that Xenoblade 1 was never actually meant to be a Xeno game until the game was nearly completed. The focus and tone and style of RPG Xenoblade 1 is trying to be is completely different from Xenogears and Xenosaga for that purpose.

There's an interesting interview from the early 2010s (post-Xenoblade 1 but pre-Xenoblade X) where Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga talk about a change in their philosophies and what they learned from Xenosaga and how he applied that to Xenoblade. It's kind of sobering because while he doesn't outright say it, there's a negative undertone where it feels like he's admitting defeat and that Xenoblade 1 was him coming to terms wih the fact that the stories he wanted to make will never sell or go "mainstream" and that Xenoblade 1 was deliberately written to be a "classic shonen JRPG" because moral at Monolith Soft was at an all time low.

>>739623663
One of the most retarded moves by bandai back then. The two things western reviews hated the most back then was Japanese games so trying to make those retards happy wasn't ever going to work out

>>739623815
with how negative takahashi felt about xenoblade 1 despite its success it's really bizarre how he constantly glazed xenoblade 2, even going as far to call it everything he wanted to do in the past but couldn't

>>739623915
Yeah, it really made me dislike namco. I don't know the details, like how much it costed or the development time, but Xenosaga Episode 1 sold around 1 million copies, and i think that's pretty great for a relatively niche series, then one might say it was because people were expecting a sequel to Xenogears, but the ambition is similar, so idk.
The only thing I feel I can criticize Takahashi for is his inability to manage the budget, for example, for the music of Episode 1, he collaborated with the London Philharmonic Orchestra because he wanted to have the best. It feels strange to say "his flaw was wanting to do something too beautiful" but not knowing how to manage the resources at one's disposal is still a flaw.

>>739624110
Every old, "serious" Japanese writer has that really silly/light-hearted mid-late career story that they insist is their magnum opus when it clearly isn't.

>>739624336
kind of like Francis Ford Coppola going from the godfather and apocalypse now to twixt

https://letterboxd.com/film/twixt/

>>739624203
EP 1 was a success for Bandai back then and actually got them to give more support to the franchise since it was their answer to FF. But they also thought it was a good idea to change everything people actually liked about the first game to make a bunch of western reviewers happy which killed the franchise. It sucks because EP3 was them trying really hard to find the middle ground and it worked out well but it was too late

Very much so. It had its own issues but modern Xeno games and JRPG stories in general utterly pale in comparison and have for a long time.

>>739624110
I'm not the biggest fan of Xenoblade 2 but to be fair it's probably the most "freedom" Takahashi's had writing a Xeno game so that's probably why he feels that way.

Not that that statement should be confused with "It's what Takahashi always intended" since he's made it clear when the game was first announced it was a huge departure from what he's usually done, but he made it clear it was his nostalgic pet project and he didn't really have Nintendo breathing down his neck as heavily like they did Xenoblade 1 (I recall reading that Xenoblade 1 was actually supposed to have the zohar in it and more explicity "connections" to Gears/Saga, but he was told to revise it), and he didn't have Bamco and Square to shoot his idea in the back of the head like with Xenosaga and Xenogears.