I just played Xenogears for like 3-4 hours. I am 21 years old. I have been gaming for an awfully long time now but have not completed as many games as I would have liked. Overall difficulty is not a reason for me to stop playing. Getting stuck is. I am used to slowly chipping away at a game day by day(as I did after coming home from school). But sometime after I beat Final Fantasy 7 in 1999, I started feeling the drain and became less motivated to finish my games. Maybe it was because as I grew older, my brother and I were able to procure more videogames, or maybe it's because I grew tired... at age 12.

So here is the first segment in the series "Putting down the controller". Do any of you chumps remember Xenogears? I do. It was the third Playstation game I got. My brother and I played it and got through several quests, learning new skills, doing cool combos, beating the living crap out of Gebler with our badass gears(giant robots)... It's a long and very fulfilling game. After 10 years, I have yet to get to the second disc! Only recently have I learned the importance of abilities, accessories, and gear parts. Unlike other games, you can't just muscle your way through each battle. I found myself fiddling around with bart's setup several times today before I actually beat Shahkhan at the Ignas gate.

Sounds awesome, right? Yea well it is. Except for the long conversations. But like many rpgs, there are points where you will get stuck. Points where you cannot level your characters any further, buy equipment, or make any other such improvements and must face a boss. And sometimes, you can screw around with equipment and strategies in order to win. This is when I learned to create TWO save states. (well ok, there were several times I should have learned and done this but didn't-- FFtactics Balk fight anyone?)



One such fight was the somewhat infamous 'shevat generator battles'. Here you have to protect four generators from the gebler who have four different attacking teams. Two are rather easy, two are difficult as hell if you don't know what you're doing. The latter two involve gel and sonic attacks that can be quite damaging. And at the time I was rather careless and sold everything I did not already have equipped, not realizing the usefulness of 'response' in the gear stat screen. So in the past 10 years I tried again and again to get back to that spot in the game to get another chance. But I simply did not have the patience to sit through everything again. But I made minor progress here and there. Then, this past fall, I did make it. My response was high; I kept my old and resp circuits. I didn't sell anything. After failing to beat these battles again and again(but now at age 21 and not 13) I was forced to do something I did not think about-- fiddle around with my accessories. I have played several rpgs and all, many classics that were great in their own right, but none of them made me make full use of my accessories like Xenogears. Sure, I put the controller down again soon after, but I will cover that later.

Not only did I have to change equipment and players based on the battles, but I also had to choose the order of the fights. Different battles gave me different parts and these parts could help another player, so I had to choose carefully. And even if I had everything equipped properly, it all came down to chance and strategy. Because not only do you have to worry about making your hits count and avoiding your enemy-- you have to worry about running out of fuel if the battle lasts long enough. And it can all be quite nervewracking.


I can't tell you how many times I read that screen-- Xenogears suffered from having longass unskippable conversations and cutscenes, many of which where directly before a boss battle, AFTER the last save point, ARGHH!!!

While the game does not offer the greatest array of equipment or abilities, each decision you make is quite crucial to the outcome of the battle.

The Shevat Generator Battles. I did not use the same setup as this person, as I did not have many of the useful accessories he or she did.

This is the chief, signing out.(Guess what game that's from)


All pictures from RPGclassics.com's Xenogears Shrine