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Spoiler Courtesy
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Discussion
Would you have preferred if all Gears battles were real time?
What did you think of the obligatory sewer level?
Participation
Will you be playing with is this week?
I am playing along.
I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this part yet.
I am no longer playing.
I’m just here for the discussion
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Fun to have Rico joining the party and to explore a “new” dungeon. I managed to not get too lost, went out once to heal up a bit, but not too difficult otherwise, had a good time fighting and leveling up a bit.
What? a MAP has appeared in this game??
Week 13 is crazy. It’s only a paper map though, no GPS and real time location. A paper map and a compass, I sure have lost the habit of using those :x
Then the scene where we try to unlock the door, switch to seeing the view of the monster waiting for us, switch to being asked if we’re sure that we want to go in now, finally opening the door and… nothing! that was great xD
I used the English playthrough to understand the last scenes. Wow Citan is definitely not to trust. And a Purge incoming, poor Lambs hope that Elly will be able to do something about it.
It’s so funny how much the internet has told me the sewer part is awful and lo and behold it’s maybe the best part yet. We’re dangerously close to playing a videogame right now. People make the navigation sound like it’s an Escher nightmare, meanwhile the game gives you a map and tells you where you are all the time. @Akashelia Am I misunderstanding or did you miss the little white arrow? It doesn’t stand out super well but it does in fact show exactly where you are standing.
I’ve liked this whole area as a little side story that feels way more like a Final Fantasy digression or something, would’ve called last week good too but I got annoyed at Citan immediately appearing and being our handler giving us our mission marker again. This game has a thing about plot relevant people feeling like they just teleport to your location instantly, like how someone pointed out Fei appearing to help Bart was odd and never mentioned. Then they ended that week with floating screen heads babbling and I’m tired of how the game thinks the height of writing is to have characters we don’t know discuss something we have no context for almost every week.
BUT! This week the cut to Citan’s talk at the end tied into something immediately happening in a way that for once felt like we gained information instead of gesturing mysteriously, so credit for that. I liked navigating the sewer, I loved the monster vibes, the actual combat was mostly tedious but that’s just me having issues with the core systems, only so much you can do there. The boss was actually ok honestly, just the random fights, especially when they spawn like 3 more enemies, got to be too much in combination with the encounter rate. But I still like the sewer more than I don’t. Dodging little traps is fun and riding the cleaning bots is funny.
Real time gear combat is so janky and slippery that as more than a sideshow it’d suck but it’s amusing in short bursts and I like it as it’s used.
Really the worst part of this week is one time when I walked out of the prison area to the mini world map my game just went to a black screen and froze (on all original hardware). That hasn’t repeated so I hope it doesn’t anymore but it has me more paranoid on transitions, especially when we haven’t been able to save for a while…
I always find it strange when games decide to develop a completely different form of combat for a minigame instead of just investing the time to improve the normal one. I actually find those fights more interesting than the normal ones too…
You’re a bit green my dude, should get that checked out.
The sewers are annoying to navigate and feature tough enemies, fortunately the encounter rate is not too extreme in this game and we have a map.
I got annoyed when I reached the door and was told that I needed to search for a random key that was dropped somewhere in the sewers, I realized that it must have been linked to these cleaning robots but I couldn’t interact with those going around that one block nearby so I was stuck. I had to check the walkthrough to learn that I was supposed to inspect that broken one earlier… First time I have to use a guide in this game5, not too bad I guess.
That boss was no joke, especially after such a relatively long dungeon. I still find that the combat system is too simple and repetitive. I just kept using the same combos over and over again, using Citan to heal.
I was worried that the game would have us do like 5 days of arena battles in a row which would have gotten stale pretty quickly I think, I enjoyed the detour.
I only managed to catch the first kanji the first time it popped up! Fortunately I savestated after defeating the boss. This game is so mean with unpausable dialogue sometimes.
I was curious to see if they had changed some of the clunky English of the original in the translation. The “YOU WERE VICTORIOUS” is still here, can’t improve on perfection I guess. They did change this one however:
It makes sense I guess, although it does have a bit of a different feel than 兄貴 to me.
BRO!
replies
I didn’t know the sewers had this reputation. I didn’t mind it that much, as you said with the map it’s not too bad. My main complaint is that it looks pretty repetitive and boring. Some enemies were really annoying too, but eventually I just started fleeing.
Given that I had to backtrack to get the key, I was really annoyed when I discovered that it was all just for a dead-end. Well, ok, you needed the bell, but still!
I still resisted. Didn’t get 100% but got most of it. Citan and the guy in the Windows 95 screensaver are waiting for us to “remember” something. And there’s a purge coming, which sounds nice.
Yeah it’s this section and somewhere later because of jumping that just any time Xenogears comes up people quickly start airing grievances about. Thus far I really haven’t minded the platforming even slightly so I am probably going to end up having the contrarian opinion as always.
I don’t really find the sewers too confusing to traverse since there is a map, and it’s basically just going to the end of each path. The real annoying thing were the enemies down there - lots of hard-hitting enemies that meant I had to leave halfway via the shortcut to stock up on aquasols and omegasols because I was getting through so many items. Those big guys that can cause your party to sleep were also annoying, especially because they have a move that triggers on a deathblow, so the strategy was basically to have シタン build up for a 連続 while having the heavier hitters use heavy attacks. The most annoying ones were the enemies that start in the water and can’t be hit except for by Fei’s ether blast until they hop out of the water. They hit like a truck. Also classic JRPG moment where the super strong guy you fought previously joins the party and is actually really weak
The platforming to get to the chest in the top of the room where you also find the bell was quite janky. Not even that hard, just annoying to do. At least you don’t get encounters in that room. Imagine. Finding the right pipe to summon the boss wasn’t too hard, you can get a hint from the old man.
Sidenote: was the old man meant to be green or is that a visual glitch? I can’t recall what it looked like last time I played
Anyway, the conversation with シタン and the emperor guy was a step-up difficulty-wise as usual. I also kind of skimmed the more technical bits in the briefing about the mission that Elly is doing, but I got the gist
Sidenote, but I don’t care for the realtime gear fighting minigame. I just don’t find it very engaging and it feels like I’m just mashing buttons
I think in at least some cases the equipment in this game might be making an enormous difference and we’re complaining about difficulty spikes in different places based on when we last got new upgrades? I went through most of my money outfitting people with the metal whatever accessories before this part and nothing really harmed us much, using spell heals (and the out of combat only drops from a few fights IIRC) kept us nowhere near danger of any problem. The numbers on those accessories are a really big jump too.
Though also you called out the underwater enemies and to be honest as soon as I saw that stuff wasn’t reaching them I just ran from every fight that featured them to wait for a less annoying encounter so I never saw a single one leave the water lol.
Had all of my characters wearing the metal jacket accessory which was the latest one. It’s less that the fights were themselves difficult, more that it was the total resource drain from the amount of fights over that extended period (even with those accessories it was still like 3 hits from some of the enemies before a character reached 0)
Huh, interesting. Yeah it was that and the metal helmets. I mean I don’t think I went to EVERY corner but I was reasonably thorough and it just felt like our spell heals were keeping us totally on top of it, maybe running from fish made a difference but the resource management felt so relaxed on my side I’m wondering what made that happen. Not like there’s a ton of strategic depth and I even mostly was using individual attacks to fish for deathblow leveling when I could’ve finished fights faster with deathblows. Shrug, oh well, we both made it.
Well, now I found the map really fast and didn’t have nearly as bad time. Did I even use the map when I was a child? Probably not.
I barely lasted the sewers with my magic resources. Hit incredibly bad RNG with the boss killing my characters outright basically three turns in a row… Then there was the miserable climb to get the item, which I used save states for.
Something I think I might have taken for granted last time, but now thought was really cool: those first-person camera shots from the monster PoV! What the hell, this was very early for that stuff. MGS1 is again probably one of the only contemporaries? I’m amazed at how much they did in this game with rookie staff.
I think the whole real time gear battling thing is some junior developer working on their own on a combat prototype that got turned into a minigame. I’m rather thankful that this is not how we fight on mechs, but as a small dose it kind of works. Again something you wouldn’t see in a modern game…
シタン talking with 天帝 really ups the difficulty, eh? Needed to read that slow with a dictionary open, just like with the ■ ■ ■ ■ in last chapter. Even though we don’t have the full details yet, these are the juicy bits for me personally, in great anticipation of what’s to come.
0xFFFF_FFFF is not a valid command for the PS1 GPU and is therefore handled like a NOP. Since games are not really supposed to use these dummy commands that do nothing, I had it as an unimplemented!() in my code.
Now why Xenogears decided to use this code here, you’ll tell me once you’ve decompiled that bit of the code.
The sewers weren’t that bad, except that the enemies took forever to kill. And we start getting status effects more often now, and only items to cure them (wonder if we’ll get skills?). I left before fighting the boss to rest up in the infirmary.
Gear battling…I suck at.
In order to catch up I decided not to have the script out as I played and to just press through. It was largely doable, except for the end. I think I’ll just look that one up in an english playthrough. I have one where the guy reads out the dialog so I can listen while doing other things.
Oh I save state scummed that one. I only managed to get it by clicking mid jump. I DID manage to actually land once, but I clipped through the chest and couldn’t get out without jumping away…which knocked me down.
I think so? I assumed he’s a demihuman.
I used Fei’s ether bullet skill (forget the name). It seemed to aggro them to jump out.
My highlight of this week as well! XG sometimes has these flashes of insight (e.g. text boxes overlapping to show people talking over each other without being voiced, crowded city have merchants text boxes pop up to give the sense of a busy market, etc) that really improve the overall experience
hope that Elly will be able to do something about it.
oh well
