It seems that the third time isn’t a charm when it comes to the Xenosaga series. It seems as though they have trouble figuring out how to make a battle system that is actually fun… or at least not boring and slow. It’s really a shame, too, since that’s the only glaring flaw for the game. The plot is more or less what you would expect from a Xenosaga title, so there’s nothing really to talk about.

I’m not actually quite sure what exactly is wrong with Xenosaga’s battle system. The animations don’t last very long like some other RPGs. I think it actually has more to do with the sheer amount of HP the enemies seem to have compared to the amount of damage your characters are capable of doing. The battles seem more of a battle of attrition than anything else.

That flaw seems really weird, since the mech battles are actually somewhat fast paced. Although, the regular mech battles are usually pretty easy (I’d say, in the order of 30s to a minute compared to the 8 or so minutes it takes to finish a regular battle using the characters themselves.) The boss battles can be challenging, though. Some bosses have moves that can basically kill you in one hit unless you block.

Even though it was boring, I do have to admit it was somewhat challenging. Each character has something called a break limit. When a character takes damage, they get dealt a (undisclosed) amount of break damage. When the total number reaches the limit, the character enters into break and is incapacitated for a few turns. During break, attacks on that character have an increased chance of becoming critical hits. The break limits for most of the characters isn’t really that high, especially in light of some attacks that solely exist to cause break damage, which means that you have to heal break damage somewhat often sometimes (especially tedious since there are no ether spells that heals break damage for everyone.)

A nice thing about the battle system is the boost subsystem. Successful attacks fill your boost gauge. When the gauge is big enough, you can either make a character take an extra turn or if the gauge is at the 2nd level or more, you can execute super damaging special attacks. The enemies have their own boost gauge, as well, so they can also take extra turns, which can be very punishing, enough to kill of a character who had full health in some occasions.

The character development in the game is pretty good. Almost every loose end involving the characters is tied up. MOMO probably gets the short end of the stick, since most of her development was finished with Xenosaga II, which is too bad since she’s my second favorite character (next to Jr.) We do get some nice development with Professor Mizahri. Even the Testaments get some nice character development action, as well. My only problem is that sometimes the development is hard to understand. I had to look up some stuff about Wilhelm to fully understand him.

All in all, this is a pretty good game if you don’t hate the battle system. The plot brings a nice conclusion to the series (while leaving room for a sequel which will most likely never get made.) The game isn’t exceedingly long, either, clocking just about 40 or so hours. If you’ve played the previous two installments of the series, you might as well finish the story.

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