Monolith Soft: A Xenoblade Prologue

 Xenoblade is so awesome, I'm making a Prologue article.

 Monolith Soft is a company I've very mixed feelings about. On one hand, they made one of my favorite RPGs ever, but on the other one, they made the worst games I've ever played. Ever. One of the things I hate the most about their games, but they seem to have toned it down(Thanks, Nintendo?), is the fanservice. These guys love it to a fault, and sometimes it detracts from the games themselves. Still, they have made at least two great games, and their new X game is looking mighty fine, and since I've finally returned to Xenoblade, after a long study-hiatus, I decided to speak my mind on how I feel about their games, and... here we are.

 Xenogears, while technically made by Squaresoft, it was made by programmers who later left and created Monolith Soft. Xenogears was, and is an amazing game, from it's highly complex story and characters, to it's fantastic Battle engine, which mixed Fighting Games with the turn based battles of RPGs, it worked perfectly and created a impossibly original, and never imitated(sadly) system. Xenogears downfall is it's 2nd CD. It feels rushed, specially in it's begining, doing away with cutscenes, and switching to character narration, alongside images of what they are talking about. Luckily, it doesn't take away from the whole experience, despite feeling a bit odd.

 Xenosaga Episode 1, their first game as Monolith Soft was... a letdown. It might be a decent game, maybe, but the problem I have with this game, is that I was expecting Xenogears 2, and all I got was Xenosaga. For starters, some of the characters motivations make no sense. Xenogears had a very complex plot, but it made sense, Xenosaga's does not. Another gripe I had was with the battle system. I expected an evolution of the Xenogears battle system, instead we got a watered down version of it. In Xenogears you had Triangle, Square and X as attack buttons, now you only get Square and Triangle. In Xenogears, mixing buttons(each button had a value, Square was 1, Triangle was 2 and X was 3, you could press buttons up to a value of 16) resulted in various special moves, but now you can only mix up to three buttons. It's a huge step back from Xenogears, but it doesn't stop there, Mechs were a huge part of Xenogears gameplay and story... not so anymore. Their importance is downplayed, their designs are generic at best and their usage limited. Oh, and to top it all, multiple pantyshots of the underaged Momo. Thanks Monolith Soft.

 I have played many bad games in my lifetime, but this ranks up there with the worst of them. Definitly the worst game I've played on PS2. It's SO bad I haven't played Xenosaga 3 yet(I finished this one in 2009), doomed forever to collect dust. Maybe. I could go on and on on what makes this game so awful, but I'll save it for another piece I'll write on sequels, so I'll just mention the biggest offender: The battle system. Y'see, for some reason, they decided to change it up, again, but... it's needlessly complex, in a bad way. The first thing you should know, is that the game doesn't want you to play with the characters you want to, oh no, 'cause you see, some characters can make the enemies float, and others can bury them, both features which you'll need to use if you want to stand a chance. Oh, and the enemies with Float status? Only certain characters can damage them. But it doesn't end there, oh no, characters have different attack types, and enemies are weak to certain types of attacks, so you are gonna have to be shuffling characters according to the zone and enemy type. It's not fun, specially when more than half of the cast are an annoying waste of RAM. And you know there's a problem with your battle system, if the boss of a Dungeon is easier than a random encounter.

 Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier was the next game I played from them, and... I've very mixed feelings about it. The Battle System is very fun(for a change), but during Boss Battles it becomes annoying. Each character character can attack up to 5 times on his turn, this 5 attacks are pre-defined before battle, you can have the same Attack 5 times, or different ones. The goal of the battles(Besides winning) is juggling the enemy, to deal the most damage possible. If the enemy falls out of the juggle, he will, probably, block your next attacks, so by carefully cancelling each attack into the next one, you can keep the enemy floating and recieving damage. All this is thrown out the window once you reach a boss. Bosses have the chance, completely random,(And this is a fact) of falling out of the juggle and completely block your following attacks, and later in the game, it becomes quite annoying. The game also suffers from grinding, bosses are damage sponges, so prepare to grind in order to stand a chance against some of them. SRTOGS:EF is a very ugly game, the character cut outs look very amateurish, and so do the sprites themselves, luckily they are mostly well animated. Another thing that sets this game back is the focus on fanservice, from the female character designs(which makes them look really stupid), to their animated cut-outs during their special moves( boobs jiggling), to the dialogue. The game is full of boob jokes, never amounting to anything serious, making it a very light-hearted romp. Somehow, the game got a sequel, but it never got out of Japan. Can't say I care.

 Their last DS game to be released on America was Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Sayians. It's a very standard JRPG, the battle system is the very traditional turn-based combat most JRPGs follow, with little nuances, like "Super Ki Attacks" and combined specials. It's a very entertaining game, and maybe due to it's source material, lacks any kind of fanservice. The game starts a little bit earlier than the Goku VS Piccolo fight on the Budokai Tenkaichi, and goes up to the battle with Vegeta on Earth. The game remains quite faithful to the source material, adapting the filler from the anime and creating a few original substories(Which were needed if you meant to make an RPG out of DBZ). Surprisingly, while the sprite-art is similar to the one they used on SRTOGS:EF, it looks very pretty now. Characters look big, detailed and animate really well. While the game's ending teased with an image of Frieza, it never got a sequel.

 And this brings us to Xenoblade. While I'm only(Yes, only, this game is massive) 52 hours into the game, it already made me a fan at barely 3 hours in. The Scope of the game is ginormous, if you can see it, you can reach it. And it feels like Sidequests never end, which is both good(Lots of content) and bad(Sometimes you just want to continue with the story, but OCD kicks in!). The characters are not too deep, but the story so far is great, filled with mysteries and interesting twists(But you can see most of them coming anyways). The game feels like an MMORPG, specially the battle system, which I'm not a fan of, but it still manages to put every other RPG on the Wii, and most(Like I played most of them, this is just an asumption, sue me.) of the RPGS on X360/PS3 to shame.

 

 Monolith Soft, hopes are high for your next Wii RPG, and after Xenoblade, I doubt they'll dissapoint.