Xenogears

There are JRPGs, and then there is Xenogears - a game that does not ask whether you will save the world, but why the world should even want to be saved. In 1998 Squaresoft released on the PlayStation a title so ambitious that its reach to this day extends beyond the boundaries of the genre. Gnosticism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, religious symbolism, collective consciousness, questions of identity and faith - all of it is woven here into a story about a pilot and his mech named Gear.

On the gameplay side it is a classic turn-based JRPG, but with its own piquant flavor. On-foot combat is built on the „Deathblows“ system, where you combine weak, medium and strong strikes into flashy combos. But once you climb into a Gear, the whole dynamic changes - you deal with fuel, the weight of attacks and an entirely different scale of damage. That contrast between the human and machine scale gives combat an unusual texture.

And then there is the notorious second disc. Due to a depleted budget and time, the second half of the game was cut down to a form in which the characters literally sit on a chair and narrate what happened, while the player merely watches a montage of scenes. For many it is a flaw on the beauty, for others paradoxically the strongest part - a concentrated dose of storytelling without filler. Either way, it became one of the most cited examples of „production hell“ in the history of the genre, one that arguably added to the game's cult status rather than diminished it.

Behind the scenario stood the team around Tetsuya Takahashi, who later founded the Monolith Soft studio and, in the spirit of Xenogears, developed the Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles series. The line of ideas and themes stretches across decades and makes Xenogears a kind of origin point for an entire family branch of Japanese RPGs.

Xenogears is not a relaxing evening game. It is dense, at times overloaded with theology and philosophy, at times frustrating in its unfinished state. But it is precisely in that imperfection that it is more honest and more daring than a lot of more polished titles - it is a work of art that was not afraid to reach higher than it could grasp.

Why play it: If you want a JRPG that will haunt you long after the closing credits and force you to think, Xenogears is one of the most daring ever made.