I'll be reviewing on a ps1 game, Xenogears
I've been replaying it about 4-5 times already and i'm still playing it XD


Title of the Game - Xenogears

Platform of the Game - Playstation

Genre of Game - RPG

Developer - Squaresoft

Product Model Year: Japan (11 February 1998)
US (21 October 1998)

Game Requirements - PS1

Description of Game -

Xenogears begins with a well animated FMV scene that was considered very good quality during the time when it was released. However when the actual gameplay starts, players find that the opening movie at the start does not make any sense, however more is revealed as they carry on playing the game. The game begins showing the main character, Fei Fong Wong, in the village of Lacan. It turns out he was brought there a few years ago by a mystery man and he has lost all of his memory of incidents before he awoke in the village.

At that point of time, this game recieved much response from the public, due to the game containing much religious themes. However the game displays these in such a sense that people are able to accept it and not start an uproar. Overall the game has been well recieved al over the world and it has even been re-released as one of "Playstation's Greatest Hits" along with many other titles.

Gameplay - 10/10



The battle system was quite different from other RPGs at the time, they made use of the ATB(Active Time Bar) system, where a bar is filled up to determine a character's turn.
Each character also has AP(Action Points) which they can use different commands to come up with different, devasting combos to perfrom on the opponent.

The characters are displayed as 2D sprites on a 3D background, when in dialog with other major characters in the game, the would display a close-up view of the character's face and there are multiple images to present the character's expression.

There are battles where players have to pilot mechas, Gears, in the game or jus fight using the characters themselves. The battle system for both of them are relatively simillar but different, when battling in gears they would display other windows that makes you feel that you are in the pilot seat yourself.

Graphics - 9/10

When they announced the game, images of it were uploaded to their main website, and many people including me were stunned when we saw the characters. Although the anime fever around then was popular, but we rarely seen them being used in games, upon seeing this, I decided to buy the game and try it out when it is released.


Other than the human characters, they also released pictures of the Gears. CG then was not common to me therefore i had only seen them a few times. Xenogears is one of the few games that truly knocked me over for it's graphics. Though people might say nowadays there are games with better graphics, but during the period when the game was released, there were hardly any games with graphics that can match up to Xenogears.


The Gears are well rendered and in many scenes you can clearly see the details. Though they had to use sprites for the Gears in-game, you can still clearly tell the difference from one gear to the other.


The CG scenes in the game was done very well in my opinion as players would really feel as if the Gears are alive, the environment in the scenes looks realistic too.



This is an example of the in-game sprites and dialogs. As you can see, when a dialog is going on, they would display the speakers face at the side of it, they have multiple images of each character to show the situation they were in and what they feel when they are speaking.

They did a good job on animating the in-game sprites too, when you move about on the world map or in towns, the animation flows smoothly from one scene to another, be it running, walking or jumping. It applies to the battles to, when the character performs their unique combos, you would not see jerky animations. The effects used to accompany attacks in the game are nice, when you defeat monsters, there are some that will burst into a pool of liquid or others that are jus vaporised,


Generally there are 2 kind of FMV scenes in the game, the Gears where CG is used, and the storyline character sceneswhere they used animation. The drawing style of the artist is nice and you can really tell the emotion on each of the character's faces. When the FMV starts to play players would just put down their controllers and enjoy the scenes.


This is another example on Xenogears great graphics, they are able to make this look like a real painting, especially the parts at the bottom where it is unfinished. They are able to create it such that it looks as if the artist had placed down his brush halfway through the painting.

Sound - 9/10

The music used in the game are very well composed, they are fitting for the scenes when they are played and one can get more into the game. There are some scenes when accompanied with the music can even bring players to tears. While there are other music such as the battle theme which gets the player hyped up to engage in the fights ahead.

As voice-acting was not used often during that time, the developers only included it during some FMV scenes. The voice-acting was presented well and it really brings out the character's emotions at those points in the game.

But there were times where the music was too soft to hear or was non-existent in the game, perhaps it was a bug or they jus ran out of budget?

Conclusion -

In conclusion, Xenogears is a really good and fun game to play. Even though it was released a very long time ago, it is one of the few titles which i would replay often because I got drawned to it. From it's gameplay, battle system, FMVs, storyline, everything drew me into supporting this game. However the game is not the best it can be as during disc 2, the development team met with a budget shortage and had to finish the game within the left-over budget.
I hope that they would make a remake of Xenogears in the furute, but it would seem impossible as the people who worked on the game have already been scattered between multiple companies. I would strongly reccomend this game to anyone who likes to play RPG games or games with very deep storylines.

I am the Beginning and the End