There are all kinds of gamers out there, with all kinds of game passions. There are many people who play videogames, who want more knowledge of games of the past; they want history, and review. So a series of articles was born: The Retro Review Series. The games covered in this series of articles are going to be gems; games that are beloved to some, which are not necessarily the best or most popular games. Last month, the series premiered with a retrospective on Final Fantasy VII. This month, in Episode 2, we are going to look at another beloved PlayStation 1 JRPG classic: Xenogears.
Xenogears is the subject of Episode 2 for two reasons; It is my second favorite game of all-time (behind FFVII), and Xenoblade Chronicles X, the Xeno franchise’s 6th installment, is being released this month on the Wii U. For those who may be (or are very likely to be) new to the series here’s a trailer for the first game in all it’s 240p glory!
When I first heard about Xenogears, it was amidst a wave of RPGs put out by Square-Enix (known as Squaresoft or Square at the time) in the late 90s. Look at how many games Square released between 1997 and 2000 for the PS1:
Final Fantasy VII, Bushido Blade, Final Fantasy Tactics, SaGa Frontier, Einhänder, Xenogears, Bushido Blade 2, Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi, Ehrgeiz, Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, Final Fantasy VIII, Chocobo Racing, SaGa Frontier 2, Legend Of Mana, Front Mission 3, Final Fantasy Anthology, Threads Of Fate, Chrono Cross, Parasite Eve II, Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy Chronicles, Final Fantasy Origins (last two came out later, but figured I’d include it for completion sake)
I had beaten and loved Final Fantasy VII, and was saving up all my allowance/babysitting money to buy games that were similar. I ended up playing everything Square put out, and eventually bought 18 out of the 24 games. Xenogears was one of many appealing, but similar looking games. I didn’t love it when I first rented it, so I moved on to the rest of the ocean of PS1 RPGs. A few months later I played it for about 10 hours in one day with a friend, and realized I had to know what was going to happen in the story. After beating the game it really stayed with me, and resonated deeply. It almost felt like I had been on vacation, and had come back with these amazing memories of the adventure I had been on.
As I wrote in Episode 1, a lot of my video game love comes from Super Nintendo and PlayStation RPGs. Final Fantasy VII was a blockbuster game in North America, but Xenogears had much more moderate success; it’s a bit more of a “hidden gem”. On this side of the Pacific, the game still sold around 200,000 copies, but it’s harder and harder to find folks that have played or beaten it in this day and age. The Retro Review Series is all about education and information, and Xenogears is a game deserving of as much exposure as it can get!
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“On this side of the Pacific, the game still sold around 200,000 copies, but it’s harder and harder to find folks that have played or beaten it in this day and age.”
This Series is going to build on itself. So hopefully if you’re reading this, you’ve also read Episode 1. This article will stand on its own, but there will be details about Squaresoft, and information about RPG mechanics, that I will not elaborate on in this article, because I covered them in Episode 1.
These articles will be released every month on COGconnected, and split up into 4 weekly parts: The Intro, The History, The Review, and The Verdict. So here ends The Intro. Next week: The History of arguably the most epic story in the history of videogames: Xenogears.