typenights

By the end of your 30 hour run with this game, you wonder why you didn’t pay attention to the reviews and just skip it.

The battle system can be best described as slow. Now I read some people would rather call this slow natured system as strategic, but I strongly disagree. Once you figure out the inner quirks and have a better understanding of what you are suppose to be doing, you quickly figure out the battle system just adds more steps into what would be a simple turned based game.

STOCKING pretty much ruins Xenosaga 2 as it creates monotonous and unsatisfying gameplay. Stocking allows you to save your attack for another turn. So when your turn comes around again, you can attack twice in a row. You are allowed to have a stock of three, thus attack three times in a row if you desire. What this ultimately ends up becoming is you sitting there smashing the stock button for two to three of your characters. This process takes quite a while to accomplish, as your enemies just beat the living crap out of you as you stock to full. Then you have to apply an elemental attribute on your weapon to further increase your damage when you unleash a 12 attack combo on your foes.

All in all, don’t be surprised as you are playing that it takes well over five minutes for you to finish a random encounter. You have to play how the game wants you to play; there is no way around it unless the sound of five minute battles entertain you.

The story overall was a huge disappointment. From pacing to execution I just felt bored out of my mind and felt cheated a bit for they held back so much. I think the major problem here is that the entire story shifted around Jr. For most people that’s not a problem but for me it was pretty huge. First of off, I have to get this out of my chest, I absolutely hate kids as main characters. And oh boy was my hatred justified in this game. I had to sit through long cut scenes of badly voiced kids with their whiny and screechy voices bitching and moaning till the sun set. Really the entire feud between Jr. and Albedo is a bad case of extreme brotherly love gone wrong.

As for the other characters they just took a back seat throughout the entire game. Most of them were just there to be, well, just be there. Shion did get some character development but nothing ground breaking. Let us not forget the ending to this game, it’s a cliffhanger of course and not even a good one.

The graphics are uninspiring. The dungeons look simple and bland. Even the outdoor scenes were just too constrained in size and scope. But what really irked me the most are these NPCs that have these repeating animations. So when you talk with them, you start to notice they are fucking humping air over and over and over again. It’s not like they are even making it look like they are talking to you, but rather they just keep humping air like you don’t exists while their speech bubble comes up. It’s not all the NPCs, but still it’s moments like these I think this game is absolute trash.

The character models are nice, but the game zooms out so much they become tiny little blurs most of the time. Only during in game cut-scenes does the game remotely look good.

The sound, oh boy, was a step back into SNES quality, forgettable at best.

All in all, I have no idea what happened to this game. The ending of the first left me wanting for more, but this game overall just failed to deliver.