10+ hours into Xenosaga. I forgot how much of the game is cut-scenes. They prompt the 'interactive movie' critique from some. I enjoy them because they effectively tell the story and develop the characters, and to me, that's useful and entertaining. These definitely take away from the 10 hours I've supposedly played. A big chunk of that has been watched time instead of played time. Another big chunk has been the Xenocard side game. I bet I've spent no more than 2 hours actually running around in missions and another 2 hours running around ships exploring, then probably 3 hours in the card game, which leaves another 3 in cut-scenes and menus. But like I said, I don't mind, because everything I'm doing is compelling.
The Xenosaga games didn't do as well commercially as the developers and producers hoped. That's why they cut off the series at a trilogy instead of the original six games it was supposed to span. I was playing last night and realized how odd it was that I was playing a female main character, Shion. And the second main character, KOS-MOS, is a (female) android. Games favor male characters. I imagine that creating a game (in most cases) with female leads would be considered "risky," although sci-fi RPGs might be a more flexible sub-genre than some. Imagine the newest Call of Duty game with a badass female sniper. I seriously doubt it would garner the same wild success as the macho male-driven CoD games. So I began thinking about Xenosaga in light of this risky decision to place two female characters as leads. What other really successful games have female characters? *crickets* Tomb Raider...ummm...uuuh...B..Barbie...uuuuh...successful games with female leads, successful games with female leads...my point exactly. I can think of some other really good or interesting games, but none terribly successful, like Beyond Good & Evil, Fatal Frame, Alice, Bayonetta...In fact, these are all the types of "best games you've never played" variety. Successful games with male leads? Ummm...all the rest! Hell, there are more successful games with animal leads than female leads. And most of those animals are male anyway.
My point? I think Xenosaga took a risk that ultimately did no good for the series. I'm not saying Xenosaga wasn't a massive success because it has female lead characters. I'm saying that I think it would have done better if it revolved around males. That would be an interesting question to study. You can also count off plenty of other variables that may or may not have contributed to the series' shortening, extensive cut-scenes, a weak second installment, or whatever else people have had problems with.
But since Xenosaga is a game revolving around two female characters and their supporting cast, that's a great step forward right? Well, I can't help but notice the sexy sexy outfits Shion and KOS-MOS are crammed into. Mini-skirts, tights, high heels, boob-enhancing body armor. Hey, it's a JRPG, what do you expect, right? Shion is the shy, sexy, smart librarian scientist type with glasses. KOS-MOS is the sexy badass battle robot that will kill you without thinking twice. And of course Shion has a guy on her crew who really likes her, but she's oblivious and he's a stammering, hopeless romantic about it. So, female leads, not quite Tomb Raider-style objectification, but still obvious.
Shion is also submissive, unless she's talking about KOS-MOS. She follows stereotypical gender roles. At one point a man calls her a "bimbo" for walking where she's not supposed to. Instead of getting mad or defending herself, she says "Sorry, sir." The guy was in no position of authority over her. She could have some attitude, some no-nonsense rebuttal for men who make comments about her. Another guy on a ship comes on to her, tells her that he's going to buy her dinner and then take her to his room, and it just goes over her head. She says "Uh, okay," because she's supposed to be shy and doesn't know that she's attractive and that men like her. It's sexy right?! She's so pretty she doesn't even know it! She doesn't know how to interact with guys who are being forward with her! Oh man, there must be tons of these clueless hotties in real life. Every guy's fantasy right?
The first day she is on this same ship with the guy who hits on her, she cooks the all-male crew dinner. They make comments about how they can finally have good food because she's on board now, and that they always eat crap because none of them can cook (because they're all men, it's implied, and they need a woman around because women can cook). They're eating, and the Captain, who is a pig (metaphorically while eating, not literally -- I know it's an RPG so he could actually be a pink pig) is stuffing his face and can only say "WATER" when he wants a drink. Shion pours him water. There are four people at the table and she pours him water two or three times after he says "WATER." I think it's supposed to be funny, but I was busy thinking about how the woman is serving the men. They finish dinner, and she and Allen (the guy who likes her) go into the kitchen to clean up. She's the only one seen washing the dishes as she and Allen talk. Allen is just leaning against the counter. Then and androgynous character named chaos (little "c") comes in and offers to help dry the dishes. Shion says okay, but he never does it. He leaves, and to me it is implied that Shion dries them. Then, Shion is concerned that the Commander didn't show up for dinner, so she takes food to him. This is the infamous food delivery quest in Xenosaga where you run around the ship looking for the guy to deliver his dinner. You find him, he eats, and then puts the tray, literally places the tray, in Shion's lap, for her to take away. Then in an instance of game magic, the tray disappears after the cut scene and you go off to do something else.
So in the span of last night, I went from thinking how neat it was that this was a female-driven story, to thinking that might have helped the series abruptly end, to becoming defensive and thinking that this must be progressive or feminist in some way, to paying attention to how gender operates in the game and realizing that, in fact, it's not progressive at all. This makes me sad.
KOS-MOS and Shion do represent opposite ends of the spectrum in emotionality vs logic though. KOS-MOS, though not *really* a woman, is a being ruled by rationality. She's 100% machine and she calculates all her decisions, and behaves based on prime directives and probabilities. Shion (the real woman) is very emotional. She cries over death, berates KOS-MOS for being so rational, even when KOS-MOS's rationality saves Shion's life at the expense of another. But nevertheless, Shion is a great scientist, head of designing and testing the KOS-MOS project. It's an interesting juxtaposition between the rational scientist Shion and the emotional Shion, and between Shion and KOS-MOS. With Shion, her emotionality dominates even though she is a scientist. She's seen as trying to infuse KOS-MOS with human feelings and to struggle with what kind of a "person" KOS-MOS is for being so emotionless and calculating regarding life and death. I'll keep paying attention to this kind of thing. There is one other female so far, MOMO, but she's a Realian and a "child." I don't have too much of a sense of her role right now, except that she's a "100-series prototype" that her mad scientist "father" (creator) implanted with some codes or schematics or something that a bunch of different powerful people/organizations are trying to get. So basically she's a valuable commodity who needs the protection of (so far) a male cyborg named Ziggurat 8 (Ziggy, she insists on calling him).
And to switch topics and make this even longer, I noted some other things so far...
I don't see much Nietzsche yet. There's some talk about free will, and there are some "Uberhumans," who are just a side note in the encyclopaedia. Most philosophical topics so far are on what makes a human a human, and the treatment of human-like beings, namely Realians, who are actual biological humans who have been manufactured, generally as cannon fodder for military use. Do they have the same rights as normal humans? Is it right to treat them as commodities and to create them for the sole purpose of dying for normal humans? To what extent do they have free will? If they are "programmed" to be loyal to humans and fight for them, and they want nothing more than to fight for them, then are they exercising their free will? There is mention of Jung's unus mundus, which the name of Xenosaga's interstellar internet is taken from (UMN, Unus Mundus Network). Makes sense enough literally, one world, connected. I'm still not sure to what extent the game actually treats Nietzschean ideas, or Jungian psychology or any of that stuff, or if the writers just thought it was cool to name the games after Nietzsche's books, or that they had just enough to do with these old controversial dead guys' ideas, by mentioning them or superficially touching them, to name the games as such. Will figure it out as I play though.
Another interesting thing is the in-game encyclopaedia, or database. It's self-referential and intertextual within the series. It talks about the game in third-person and even references future episodes. I was reading some entries, and for one of them, don't remember what it was, some skill, it said "unfortunately this skill does not appear in this episode" and it will mention "the game" and talk about the characters as a narrator might: "In an early scene in the game, Shion and KOS-MOS..." It's an interesting choice of style. My gut feeling is that is takes me right out of the game world that I'm trying to immerse myself in by reading the database in the first place, the database which is integrated into the story and the gameplay a plug-in to the UMN system that I downloaded from an email in the game's neat email system. Even though it brings me out of the game world a bit, I can't say I dislike the narrative style of the encyclopaedia because it's clever for talking about itself.
The battle system is very fun. I remember enjoying it last time, and this time is no different. There is an "event wheel" or something that ticks every turn. It goes from blank (nothing special), to an increased critical hit rate, to an increased boost gauge, to an increased points reward if you kill an enemy on that tick, then back to blank and so on. So I attack on blank, right. Then the next character attacks on increased critical and has an increased crit chance and (?) damage. Then the next character who attacks gets an increase to his/her boost gauge. And so on. Anyway, the points are where it's at because that's how you upgrade skills, learn new ether attacks, upgrade stats and tech attacks. So I'm meticulously killing as many enemies as possible on the point multiplier (it's either x2, x4 or x10, and I think it's random, with x10 being extremely rare because I haven't seen it yet). So if you're fighting 2 enemies who each give 2 tech points, 2 skill points and 2 ether points, you kill them normally and get 4 of each point (2 points times 2 enemies for each point = 4 of each type of point). If you kill one of those enemies on a x2 point multiplier, then you get 6 of each type of point (2 points x2 multiplier = 4 points from one enemy, and the normal 2 points from the other). Say you get lucky and kill each enemy on a x4 multiplier. That's 16 points! 2 points x4 multiplier = 8 for each enemy. Bosses and bigger enemies give you like 50 points, so hitting a x4 is huuuuge. Although the last boss I completely killed him on accident too early and missed a multiplier, and I seriously thought about resetting it because, say 200 points from him, is like learning a new ether attack straight away. Huuuuge. I don't remember doing this last time, but this time I'm all about it. Speaking of ether attacks, you learn them from a skill tree, and you can't see the skills in the tree until you have enough ether points to upgrade the root in the tree. This is weird to me from playing World of Warcraft for so long because in that game I had all the skill trees pretty much memorized. In MMOs you plan your character. In single-player RPGs, I feel like half the fun is not planning your character. You just go with it! Like the first time I played a character in WoW, there was no planning. I just went with it. But it feels weird, kind of scary, like I could mess it up.
Finally, the game's difficulty is definitely there. I guess it's been a long time since I played a turn-based RPG like this one (the last one was Rogue Galaxy in July 2010 -- thanks GameLog, that's handy to be able to look up!) I've gotten a handful of game overs already. There are definitely some things the tutorial aspects and manual don't tell you that you just have to figure out, early lessons to learn. Some of these lessons are unforgiving. Learn now or die! The first was when Shion has to navigate the ship when the Gnosis attacked. You're supposed to go through it without being attacked by a Gnosis. Can be tricky, but did it on my third try I think. The thing is if you do enter combat with one, you can get away if and only if you've (a) bought escape packs, or (b) learned the Goodbye skill with Shion. I had done neither of these things, spent my first ether points on Analyze instead of Goodbye; therefore, I could not under any circumstances enter into battle with a Gnosis. Other optional and hidden things are extremely valuable. The first time you control Ziggy, there is a hidden Scope, an equippable item that lets you see the enemy's HP, always very handy. If you don't find it, you've no idea how much HP enemies have. Not necessary, but extremely useful. You also learn, in his segment, how poison works. The manual only tells you that it ticks away 20% of your total HP every tick. When and how often the tick occurs it doesn't say. Turns out poison can tick even after you kill the last enemy! I died once this way, killed the enemy, then poison ticked and I died. Personally, I think that's cheap and I should not have died, but hey, now I know not to try and finish off the enemy before the poison gets me. I should heal or remove it, then kill the enemy. The game also doesn't give you the abbreviations for enemy weaknesses. It'll say L, B, Sl, Pr and so on. Is L laser? Is is light? Line? I'm not sure, but I wish I knew! I'll probably go look this one up online because it's ambiguous. I have been figuring out enemy weaknesses by using Analyze with Shion, or if she's not in the party like in the Ziggy segment, just trial and error. But even when you analyze an enemy, its weakness doesn't display when you select it from then on. You've got to memorize it or keep checking the monster database between battles. Another thing I figured out is that some enemies will do painful attacks if you use an Ether attack on them. That's where the poison happened so far, mostly area and line attacks that hit multiple party members. Some of my characters use some Ether attacks and others don't, so I'm figuring out the situational strengths and weaknesses of my party members.
Aaaaand the best for last...card game! Yes, the beloved RPG-embedded card game. I thought you walked around and challenged NPCs in Xenosaga, but turns out (so far at least, and I hope it's only so far!) that you just play stock "players" at save points through the UMN terminal. There are 10 decks I can play against. I spent forever looking at my starter deck and buying a few booster packs, building and editing a deck, going through the tutorial, and then playing my first game, which I won without too much trouble. I will likely spend a lot of time trying to dominate the card game.
Fin.
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