My beef with Xenosaga

 So it´s little past the wee hours of the morning(9:30 AM give or take) and I can´t sleep... Seeing how I have a blog, why not tire myself out from writing? And what´s more tiresome than Xenosaga? Nothing.
 Why do I hate it so much? Well... let´s start with the characters:

Shion Uzuki: In Xenosaga 1 she dresses just like Elly from Xenogears, albeit with different colors. She was a breath of fresh air, she was the main heroine, and she didn´t need to show any skin. She was nerdy, cute and a bit of a go getter, but then...

 Yup, in Xenosaga 2 she ditches the glasses, and now shows more skin, including the navel. Worst part? She is not even the main heroine, the obnoxious Jr. takes her place. Awesome. But Monolith wasn´t done, oh no, they just had to strip her further...

 This is ridiculuos. The outfit doesn´t even make any sense. When I found out that XS3´s designer is a known hentai artist, I wasn´t surprised at all. Still, appearance is the least of her problems. The most annoying part of her persona, is how Monolith played her relationship with KOS-MOS adding subtle lesbic undertones. Sex sells, but...

 I´m fine with lesbians. I love them. But this is exploitation in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Besides that, it´s quite dumb how she keeps treating KOS-MOS like a person, she is not, she is not even a realian, she doesn´t feel. "But she created it", yes, Shion did FINISH her after KOS-MOS killed Shion´s lover. Instead of despising the machine, Shion now loves her. Makes sense. Still, by XS3 she goes completely mental on how no one cares about her but spoiler, which is hilarious, since the whole game the party has been caring about her. Oh, and she finds out that her lover has been using her since even before the game started, so what does she do? Turn to his side. She is actually the penultimate boss of the game, alongside her lover. And even funnier? The big bad comments on her strong will. Yeah, such a strong will that she switched sides, to the boyfriend that used her, and it took her friends getting beat up for her to change her mind again. Strong will my ass. Shion, as a character, only gets worse with each installment.

 Rubedo(Jr.): The other lead, Jr is my most hated character EVER. EVER. I tend to overreact, but this time, I don´t, He is annoying. His voice is annoying. His personality is annoying. And he is the lead of Xenosaga 2. Xenosaga 2 is the worst game in the series for various reasons, and now you expect us to endure him as the focus? Please kill me. He is supposed to be quite older, but his body doesn´t grow up. Right... he still acts like a kid during all three games. Maybe it´s supposed to be funny, how he keeps saying he is not a kid, but acts like one, but it always came off as annoying. By Xenosaga 3 he is the character with the most lines, probably even more than Shion, and he is the de-facto leader of the group. Imamgine my vexation when, in his first appearance on XS3, he bosses everyone around... and they listen to him and follow him. Ziggy, 100 years old, way more mature than this ****, taking orders from him. Right.
 To add insult to the injury, his physical design is based on Billy, from Xenogears, but he takes Bart´s role. Instead of "Young master", everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, calls him "Little Master". Vexing, oh, so, vexing. However, unlike Bart, Jr. is not charming. Whenever Bart came off as impulsive and messed up, it was kind of endearing. When Jr. acts impulsively, it´s just annoying.

 chaos: chaos is, probably, the character I hate the least. His fighting style is partially inspired on Fei´s hand to hand combat, sharing a few similar moves. He is the most mysterious character of the cast. By mysterious it means that you don´t find anything about him ´till Xenosaga 3. Sure, you do know he has powers. You do know that he knows the big bad. You do know that he can see Nephilim, but you find nothing about him until Xenosaga 3. Yeah, there´s not much I can say about him, he is the least offensive character of the bunch.

 KOS-MOS: The mascot of the series. Someone at Monolith must like her a lot, since she keeps popping up in every crossover game they can put her in. For starters, her design makes no sense. She is supposed to be this one of a kind weapon, so she dresses in the least combat-friendly attires possible. Miniskirts? Sure. High heels? Why not. And in order to use her most powerful weapon? She must show even more cleaveage. Why? Why not, let´s have boobs. It makes no sense. KOS-MOS makes no sense. KOS-MOS was made with fanservice as the focus, there really isn´t much more to her than that. Oh yeah, and she houses some sort of soul of someone inside of her. This soul completely skips Xenosaga 2, but returns for part 3, where she eventually takes over KOS-MOS´s body. The worst part? Normal KOS-MOS has no personality at all. She is a robot. she is so uninteresting as a character, so she makes up with fanservice.

 Ziggurat 8(Ziggy): Ziggy is by far the most interesting character in the game. He used to be a soldier, ´till his family was murdered, and he commited suicide. He was so awesome, that he was revived as a Cyborg. Now he is a mercenary, doing missions, until eventually he can get his whole body to be robotic, as to forget his memories. He also develops a father-daughter relationship with MOMO which is quite cute. Except that he, alongside MOMO, gets shifted to the side during most of XS 3. Actually, you could argue that he loses his role to Jin during XS2. In XS1 he is the silent, mature guy, who advices the rest. Since XS 2 introduces Jin, he simply becomes the stoic, silent guy. He is probably the character with the least lines in XS 3, second only to MOMO.

 MOMO: During Xenosaga 1, she sucks. She´s used only for gratuitious panty shots. Because I want to be flashed panty shots of a little girl. By Xenosaga 2 they fixed her up, gave her a new, skirtless, wardrobe, and stopped exploiting camera angles. She actually has a couple of really badass moments in XS 2, one of the few, very, very few highlights of the game. Sadly, she is completely relegated to "look out!" line in XS 3. She has the least lines, and the least scenes. Heck, her lone, big scene serves only to develop a side character. Yeah, screw the few interesting characters you´ve got and focus on the most annoying ones. Well played Monolith, well played.

 Jin Uzuki: He looks just like Citan Uzuki from Xenogears, both in look, personality and fighting style. He is introduced in part 2 and takes Ziggy´s place as the mature, advicey guy of the party. He also gets some of the most amazing sword duels I´ve ever, ever seen. There´s really not much else to say about him.

 So yeah, I hate the main cast. I hate them so much, that the highlights of XS 3, for me, was seeing references to Xenogears. Oh! a character that looks just like Fei Fong Wong(epic name) from Xenogears! And he is named Abel!(Fei was one of Abel´s reincarnations, bonus points for details). Nephilim looks just like Elly. So seeing Abel and Nephilim holding hands at the end, just like Fei and Elly, the eternal lovers, was quite heartwarming. Or how they managed to add most of the Gears from Xenogears as bosses in Xenosaga 3, that was awesome.
 But then again, even the supporting cast sucks. I don´t remember too much of part 1 and 2, and I refuse to play them, but every new character introduced in part 3 is of the "Asshole with a soft side" variety. The first time they did it, it worked. It was cute. The second one was stretching it, an the third time was just annoying. All the characters were assholes, not a single, likeable one. Then there´s the fact that many of the character´s motivations made no sense. I thought Febronia and Virgil leaving together, with Febronia convincing him, was quite cute, but it didn´t make any sense. So Virgil chose to become a testament because he KNEW that he´d go back in time? And he was... rejecting himself? So that´s w... it made no sense. It really didn´t. Most of Xenosaga 3 didn´t make any sense anyways.
 Another reason why I hate the characters? After I started playing XS 3, after 4 years since finishing part 2, it was kind of nostalgic seeing all these characters again.... until I noticed that none of them had grown much. It´s been three games and almost no character developement. At least XS 3 gave closure to EVERYONE, even the villains, but it was too little, too late.
 One thing I love about Xenogears is how each character has his own mech, and it suits him. Xenosaga 1 gave you 3 or 4 generic mechs. They looked so boring, so lifeless... By XS 2, they gave you 4 unique mechs, which was nice, they looked good. Not as good as Xenogears´s, but it was a step in the right direction. In XS 3, each of those mechs has it´s default pilots, and the mechs had their weaponry match the pilot... which means that Ashur, the mech chaos piloted since before the games even began, was outfitted to match Jr´s style. Simply awesome؟(That´s the sarcasm punctation symbol).
 Still, my biggest dissapointment actually came from the combat itself. I loved... love, Xenogears combat. As a Fighting game lover, I love that by imputing certain button combinations you get special attacks. By the time I heard of Xenosaga, I expected the same system or an evolution. We got a watered down version. In Xenogears, you had up to 7 "points", which could be spent by mixing Triangle(Worth 1 point), Square(2 points) and X(3 points). There were loads of animations per characters, and loads of specials. Xenosaga´s battle system is more akin the mech combat in Xenogears, except only with Square and triangle. And you could only mix up to two buttons in order to use special attacks, if I remember correctly.
 Seems I wasn´t the only one who disliked the new combat system, so by Xenosaga 2 they... kept everything I didn´t like from 1, and made it worse. Now there are Float and Grounded status effects, which can only be applied by certain characters, and are vital to survive the random encounters. Also, there are no shops, so instead of equipping items with affinities, each character has a different affinity to it´s attacks. Even better, not everyone can attack "floating enemies". So you have to use a party taking into account all those things. Uneededly complicated, and uneededly annoying. I basically had to use Jr against my will. because I needed his guns to attack airborne enemies. The combat system was so flawed, that Random encounters could and would be harder than boss encounters. True story.
 By Xenosaga 3, they removed combinations, you only get a normal Attack. It´s more streamlined than before, but compared to 2, it´s faster, simpler, and way more engaging. I find it funny that the back of the box actually uses a bullet point to mention "The return of shops and equipment". You know your game was bad, when you have to mention the return of shops and equipment as a noteworthy feature.

 I dislike Xenosaga. Xenosaga 2 is everything that is wrong with JRPGS. Convoluted and nonsensical plot, impossibly complicated combat system and uneeded fanservice. To be fair, lots of JRPGs make no sense when you examine them hard enough, but the key to a good story, is to make it engaging. If you are invested in it, you will offer it your suspension of disbelief. Xenosaga´s story is not a good story. It´s too pretentious, and a lot of times it feels like it pulls stuff out of it´s ass.
 Look at Xenogears, supposedly, it was meant to be a 4 disc game. But funding and time run out, so it had to be shipped in 2 discs. The 2nd disc is so obviously rushed, but it still manages to make sense. It manages to sell you it´s world, it´s story. Xenosaga was planned as a 6 part game from the start, and they couldn´t manage to make a cohesive, entertaining story even though they had 2 more games than Xenogears.
 The moral of the story is: Thank god Xenosaga was cancelled after part 3. Part 5 was to be a reimagining of Xenogears. Thank god they didn´t get to rape one of my favorite games ever.