MARREND'S PROFILE

I had a bunch of adventures in the streaming sphere, but, now it's time to get back to yea olde text. With this LP, I'm going to do as promised, and go with...


...Xenosaga Episode II - Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Again, I will refer to this game simply as Xenosaga Episode 2. The subtitle of this game translates from German to "beyond good and evil". Which might be another LP in the future, but, let's stay focused on the Xenosaga series.

If you haven't already read the LP of Xenosaga Episode 1, please do so. It was a pretty cool game, overall. I won't speak for everyone on this point, but, after finishing that game the first time, I was sure as hell pumped for what came next, and was really curious if Monolith could really stick to the 6-game plan they had. The development of Xenosaga Episode 2 took two years, with the development team rearraigned entirely. I honestly wasn't aware of this factoid until recently, so I will attempt to keep this in mind when making commentary on the game's content. Another note is that this game spans across two DVDs. Games that spanned multiple disks on the PS1 happened frequently enough, or maybe it just felt that way. In regards to the PS2, I looked this up. There were only 11 games made that were legit multi-disk games. However, with a game like this, one has to wonder how much of the game's content is cut-scenes versus actual gameplay? We'll see as the LP moves forward.

As with other LPs, I have a playlist that I will refer to if/when I want to call out music cues. When the need/desire arises, I will be using this playlist for various cut-scenes that occur in-game. The content in cut-scenes, regardless of whither or not I post a video, will be summarized as much as I can manage to.

I don't have a specific goal in mind, so, this LP will be about relaying what's in the game, and any shout-outs to Xenogears I can observe. Please keep in mind that I have zero compunctions in using CodeBreaker cheat codes, and in so doing, how I relay the game's difficulty might be a bit skewed. I will welcome any questions, or comments, of course.


Table of Contents

• Disk 1

Session 1 - 14 Years Ago, During the Militan Conflict
Session 2 - Downtime on Second Miltia
Session 3 - Summer Vacation
Session 4 - Winter Break

• Disk 2

Session 5 - Let's Steal a Top-Secret Vessel and Actually Get Away With it
Session 6 - Escaping the Abyss by the Skin of Our Teeth
Session 7 - Everything's Coming up Roses Miltia
Session 8 - I am the Alpha but Mostly, the Omega

This was certainly a game of all time.

More seriously, though, this is a pretty solid experience that's packed into a short time-frame. Working with the built-in face generator of Ace might not have been an ideal solution, however, given the context under which this game was made in (ie: a gammak event), I can understand the underlying reason why it was used.

I think what grammar errors that still exist were mostly in the skill/item descriptions. I honestly think it would be more effective, if you had the slimes strait-up drop Mana Tonics rather than having players go through the motions of using the alchemy skill through the menu, and calling a Common Event to transmute one item to another. Perhaps the same could be said of the mushrooms being Health Tonics, or what-have-you.

However, this is not to say that I don't understand the intention behind the decision to use an alchemy skill. In so saying, if alchemy is a system you want to continue to use, and you actually want to revise this game at some point, perhaps consider the one that is available within this script collection?

KrimsomKatt
Usually I have some sort of question, I post it here, but the next day I come up with some new solution.

This is kinda part of the problem that unity is observing, though. If you actually took time to think things over, you might not even have "needed" to post this topic in the first place. You'd come up with a solution yourself, if you bothered to give yourself the time to do so. Yet, either because of some kind of compulsion, or whatever, I dunno, you still felt it necessary to drop in, full-on stream of consciousness, giving this breakdown/backstory concerning the development of two games. The presentation of that stream-of-consciousness being a huge ass wall of text doesn't help either. Who would want to read all of that?

*Edit: This post might be something of a moot point now, but, next time, try aiming for better readability. Or, at least some brevity. Some background is fine, but, we don't need to know every single little damn thing about a game's development history. Leave that info for a blog.

Only if your username happens to be catchaserguns and even then, no.

*Edit: That post-search query only returns 20 pages of results? It feels it should return more pages than this post-search query.

Comb the desert! Do you hear me! Comb the desert!

*Proceeds to use gargantuan combs because of course*