Xenosaga has it’s flaws. Oh, flaws.

1. Too many cutscenes.
2. Too nerdy even for me.
3. Too slow of an interface. When you leave a battle, you have to wait for the engine to finish fading out before doing something, like getting into the menu to heal yourself.
4. You don’t actually need to tweak your dudes. It’s like a movie with fighting thrown in.
5. Makes me ashamed to play it. Who the hell plays/writes this anime fanboy shit! I WILL NOT JOIN YOU!
6. It’s not the artsy anime, it’s the lonely-drama type. Whatever.

Anyway, I burned through most of it with a walkthrough as fast as possible. Just want to get through it. I don’t care about uber-leveling and grinding on the same horseshit when I come home from work. And especially as the toy-characters developed I just wanted it to be over like a romantic-comedy wife-offering movie-date. Wah right?

Well I don’t know what I expected from NAMCO, a company I associate with plastic toys and shavers (oh Nor-el-co). But none of the people in this 80-hour story seem to be over the age of 11. And of course they have like massive dish-saucer eyes. It’s an embarrassing gameplay experience. When someone walks in the room, I throw a towel over my monitor as if burying my secret masturbating parrot.

“Gwak! Lame as shit! Lame as shit!”

So 68 hours later, I feel nothing but relief as I realize I’m on the proverbial last boss. It’s the final countdown, I prep, I read, I get ready to trade this thing in. And then I die.

More specifically on how I got my ass handed to me, this massive end-boss comes out in a typical scary fashion and the background art promptly changes to melting feathers and marshmellows instead of the techno-metal architecture. While the scenery is changing from metal and wires to heaven and sugar, the music changes to a floatly original piece that I’ve never heard before. Yep. This is definitely the last guy. Everytime the last guy comes out, you see new art and new music. Hell, I know this tune. This is the “omg positive jp epic climax ending” scene. And it’s somewhat relaxing with my 3 guys doing their thing with 900hp.

And then the boss hits all of my guys for 1100hp. “What in the flying fuck?” Some ability called like Dark Omen or something. Completely killed me. Game Over. It was 1am. What do I do? 1am, I gotta go to sleep. So I do. I curse Dark Omen, I flip, I curse and I sleep. Game Over, Day Over.

Next day, I read. I get some ideas from folks online. A lot of them involve running around and getting stronger (grinding), something I intentionally wanted to avoid. But apparently I was rushing too much. So I grabbed a book and pressed “triangle” while reading. That’s about all there is to it. After an hour, I put my book down and tried again.

This time it went much better and before I knew it I was watching the massively crappy ending. Jesus, it’s bad. It’s like Waterworld meets Battlefield Earth. The icing on the cake is crappy music mostly likely by someone who knew the producer. A swirling musical shit vortex with lightning igniting the fecal gas pockets. Does this abomination unto credits and cut-scenes help sooth my bitter hanging plot threads? No. It antagonizes them. And it’s so obvious that there will be a sequel.

Of course, I own II and III. Somehow I continue to think that consumerism forces quality and my bet is all-in many shrink-wrapped amazon delivery days ago.