Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra Review - PS2

Xenosaga Episode III should conclude with a quiz on the plot of the series. Double or nothing says nobody would pass. This is a sprawling mess of an RPG, ending a story that arguably goes down as the most ambitious attempted narrative in gaming history. The frightening part is, it claims that title even after cutting its planned running length in half.

Yes, Monolith Soft originally meant to make three more of these. Real life intervened to keep that plan from fruition, and that's probably the best for all involved.

Episode III is not very good. It's a train wreck, to put a fine point on it. Like a literal trainwreck, it’s hard to look away sometimes, and gamers of a warped mind may enjoy the gory details, but most of us will probably just feel a little sick.

War, Peace, Sorrow, Pity

Xenosaga features a grand scale even by space opera standards – kind of like a Russian novel for nerds. The cast is enormous, the plot threads are a tangled cobweb. Three or four storylines often take turns progressing, and rarely does the player entirely understand what the hell is going on.

This makes for some ugly pacing, especially in the game’s early stages, where it has to keep lurching from plotline to plotline while the gears slowly grind into motion. As per the 'saga usual, there are painfully long stretches of gameplay-free gaming – just running back and forth watching cutscene after cutscene.

To even try making sense of it all, prior experience with the series is required. If you don't know your U-DO from your U-TIC, don't bother, and dedicated followers of the first two episodes might still have trouble. There's a sizable gap in the storyline between episodes II and III, filled by one short flashback and a recap in the database menu. It feels as if an entire Episode Two-and-a-Half wound up trashed on the cutting-room floor.

Boldly Gone

Once Episode III plows through three chapters of setup, it settles into a more tolerable rhythm. Cinematics and conversations still take up a lot of time, but at least they're balanced by comparably long stretches of gameplay. Namco's localization is impressively consistent, and the voice acting bats a solid average considering the number of speaking roles.

A competent translation and decent acting can't save the game from itself, though. It's poor form to drop specific details of the story, but...never mind. Nobody who hadn't played the game would believe them anyway.

Huge chunks of Episode III, especially as it builds to a climax, are completely bonkers, a nightmare of romance-novel cheese and sophomoric philosophical jiggery-pokery. The dialogue is often unlistenably bad – no amount of editing effort could save this kind of melodrama – and there's a hell of a lot of it to listen to. Since the original Xenogears, these games-beginning-with-Xeno¬ have been famous for their long-windedness and shameless abuse of religious symbolism, but Episode III takes the prize.

Here's a question for the take-home essay. What's the point of all the religious references anyway? This far removed from their original context, the various people and things they're attached to may as well have been called anything at all. Are they just there for shock value, as sacrilege usually is? Or maybe they're like the in-jokes in Kevin Smith movies, some secret geek handshake between the developers and their fans.

Either way, it'd be more impressive if Monolith Soft could lend gravitas to its games with themes and symbols of its own creation. Throwing Nietzsche, the New Testament, and some Japanese cartoons in a blender is a poor substitute for original ideas.

On the Upside

Ironically, in most respects besides the story's ghastly meltdown, Episode III is the best of the series. Its dungeons are far more interesting than Episode I's. It's a major improvement on the Episode II combat system. Battles in general are comfortably streamlined, both on foot and in the series' trademark big robots – they move quickly while retaining a respectable degree of depth.  A large crew of playable characters with customizable skill trees makes it easy to fight with a wide variety of tactics. The loading that bogged down combat in Episode II is a thing of the past.

This is easily the best-looking of the Xenosagas. Episode II took steps forward and steps back – while it cleaned up some of Episode I's weird excesses of character design, a weak 3D engine created some ugly spots of character and background modeling. Episode III has a largely decent-looking cast (except for chaos, who continues his crime-against-fashion spree) and its backgrounds are often flat-out gorgeous. Monolith's take on future civilization has a cool, restrained design aesthetic, and a few outdoor scenes have a surprising natural beauty, brought out by capable camera direction.

Game music enthusiasts may debate the point, but the new soundtrack is a respectable contender as well, putting many of Episode II's bargain-basement beats to shame. As a rule, the music is pretty restrained – whether a bit of light jazz or a melancholy piano, it accents a scene without overpowering it. Though there's no Yasunori Mitsuda and no London Philharmonic, sometimes less is more.

This is the End

"Less is more" is a philosophy that should have informed other aspects of the production. If they hadn't tried to tell such a grandiose story, the folks at Monolith Soft could have made a pretty good RPG.

Besides the fine graphics and well-balanced combat, Episode III does a lot of little things right, details in the interface like pop-up balloons for conversations (to make chatting in towns easier) and a thoroughly hyperlinked shop menu for quick and simple equipment updates. Whoever worked on the nuts and bolts of the game knows what they’re doing.

Sadly, they were working in the service of hacks and madmen. When a game’s story fills so much space with so much nonsense, that's a problem big enough that the little things can't solve it.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Michael Benson