I’ve beaten Xenosaga Part 1 – and as of this writing I’ve also beaten Citizen Sleeper, putting the last of the main games on my New Years Resolution List to be beaten at Xenoblade Chronicles Remastered on the Switch. So, I might as well give my thoughts on the first third of this trilogy (that was intended to be something longer).

Xenosaga Part 1 does a tremendous job of feeling like the first season of an anime series that was clearly intending to tell a multi-part story, but which was not certain that it would be able to get renewed. It tells a story with a solid beginning, middle, and end, and one which sets up a lot about the world and with it a lot of questions, and leaves a lot of them un-answered, with the potential for those answers to come in the future, while also still satisfying the player with a sense of catharsis.

The play mechanics of the game generally work well also – with the mechanics being a bit like those from Xenogears – the players having attacks keyed to different face buttons, and using them in combinations allowing for certain more powerful final attacks – combined with an ability to upgrade different aspects of those attacks so you can fire them more often, do more damage, and act again more rapidly after you launched those attacks, with more special attacks coming as you level up your character.

Characters also have a spell skill tree or trees (depending on the character), with a certain number of available points in spells available in your load-out at any one time. You can also spend spell upgrade points to cross-train your characters in spells, so that you can make sure (for example), you always have a healer in your party, or everyone can steal items. Additionally, in addition to a number of equipment slots, characters can learn item abilities off of accessories, with three equipment slots available, meaning that if you’ve only got one of a particularly good accessory in your inventory, everyone has the opportunity to learn that ability.

That said, because of the ways in which character attacks work – it never feels like that the characters are interchangeable, you still have the need to bring certain characters for environments that have certain enemies (whether lots of humans, or the alien monster gnosis, or robots). Speaking of which – to help fight the Gnosis, some characters also have mechs that you can equip that will deal extra damage – the mechs can pack a lot of punishment and are often able to deal more damage to the monstrous gnosis than many of the characters can on their own, but characters can’t use their skills in the mech suits, and the mechs can’t be healed in combat.

As far as the actual meat of the story goes – when this game came out originally, I get the sense that some of the reason reviewers were mixed in their response because there were a lot of critics who were fundamentally opposed to (to borrow an expression used at the time) “Anime Bullshit”. To be clear, this game’s story does go in the more narratively complex directions of Xenogears before it, and with it that games’ contemporaries, like Evangelion and RahXephon. If you bounced right the hell off that game’s tonal elements in the story, never mind the anime series I mentioned, you’re gonna have a hard time here.

We have a female scientist with her gynoid combat robot she created that has some really heavy lesbian subtext (almost to the point of text). We have a gunslinging kid who appears to have had his aging if not frozen or slowed, then regressed. We have a robot little girl who also can power up into a Magical Girl for a couple turns. On top of of all this, we get some fairly dark sequences with the fully sentient androids getting massacred alongside humans by the Gnosis, plus bigotry against those androids, including an antagonist sitting on a throne surrounded by their corpses. It’s extra – not full Bubble Economy OVA extra – but it makes the game very much feel like it’s in dialog with an era of anime that, by 2002, hadn’t yet waned, but you could see the ending of that era coming.

I enjoyed the game and will continue to part 2, particularly since I own all 3 games, but it is weird to recommend – especially considering some of the availability issues of the series as whole, so it’s almost easier to recommend emulating it – unless the game at some point gets a remastered release.

Xenosaga Part 1 is available on eBay (Affiliate Link).

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