Xenogears

It's no secret that Xenogears was a huge inspiration for 2214. 2214 borrows a lot of themes from Xenogears, arguably to the point of being a rip-off in some aspects.

Xenogears is an RPG from 1998 for the original Sony PlayStation. It was produced by Squaresoft and the music was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. The soundtrack is quite good but what really stands out to me about the game is the incredibly deep plot and universe history of the game. It is DEEP.

It's by far my favorite RPG of all time, even despite its flaws (of which it has many). It's actually an unfinished game as most of the people who worked on it were pulled away from the project to work on Final Fantasy 8, which received priority at the time.

The graphics are certainly dated but reflect the capabilities of the original PlayStation. It uses pure 3D environments with sprite characters. The mecha, or "gears", in the game, are rendered using the 3D engine.

It has some thrilling anime cutscenes produced by studio I.G. - although they are fairly sparse throughout the game. Other cutscenes are 3D rendered animations.

The world of Xenogears is immersive. If you play, plan to invest up to 100 hours or more.

It's a challenging game, too. I had more game overs than any other game I've ever played. It's totally worth the trouble.

I've played through the game a few times myself, and it's pretty good. I thought part of it being unfinished was they didn't manage their project budget was well as they could have. Whatever the case, it's a solid game.

There are some amusing points to it at times, though. Like tents being generally worthless because you can buy enough single-target items that restore all HP/MP and can be used anywhere out of battle, not just at save points to do the same job as healing your active party to full with a tent for the same price.

Kind of a shame some of the gears were far better than others, because it kind of shut some characters out of things at times. On the other hand, some of them had other things to make up for it (Wild Smile, for instance). Also a shame the late-game super special attacks for omnigears tended to be extremely rare to see as attack level infinity was such a rare thing.

I always liked XG's battle system, too. There's something fun about chaining different attacks into combos and getting different special finisher options depending on the attacks you put together first. Also the slight trade-offs between damage and accuracy for the various attacks, and so-on. There was a lot to play with. Or abuse, as the case may be.

It sounds like a really good game, as far as the story goes, which I love about most JRPGs. I'm not sure I would want to invest the time to play it all the way through especially if it meant having to do a lot of leveling up and level grinding along the way.

Maybe someday I'll check out that fan dub you guys made years ago.