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Mirthless posted:Was the bar really all that high in 1998? It was actually the serially reincarnated OS of a haywire terraforming robot that came to be worshipped as God, plus Bishie Mengele.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:26
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 00:00 |
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wizard on a water slide posted:I'm willing to bet very few contemporary/pre-launch reviewers got to the 2nd disc of Xenogears before writing their review I remember Gamepro savaged it and got a lot of blowback even all the way back then. Half my early literary education came from those awful magazines. Memories~
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Nov 21, 2016 21:38
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Jokes and backbiting aside, Xenogears won a lot of accolades at release because that was Squaresoft's time to shine and most JRPG's that went on for more than one disc were greeted by wild applause anyway. Even disregarding that, it's still an interesting and ambitious mishmash of basically every high-profile anime/mecha trope of the nineties, and that plus the way it pushed Evangelion's incoherent Gnostic iconography to the hilt gave it a unique aesthetic that still stands out today. I still think it fell flat because it never really gelled any of those different examples of homage together. People are still divided on Eva's quality, but good or bad it's still pretty simplistic at heart - the robots and Christian symbols are just window dressing for a great big soap opera about depression and the pain of connecting with others. Xenogears has a little bit of that, but it also has fantasy animal-people racism, and pseudo-Buddhist ideas of reincarnation, and guns that shoot piloted robots as bullets, and whatever the hell ChuChu was, and fantasy Nazis, and critiques of the Church, etc, etc, etc, culminating in a boss fight against the actual Demiurge after which you chat with the actual God. It makes the story compellingly weird while it holds together, but it doesn't hold together for long, and I don't blame a lot of people who find it tedious (me included). It's 70+ hours of pointing at a plot element, going "this thing came from something else!" and then moving on without doing anything with it.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:13
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