Walkthrough English Guide Ctrl+F WK05 to go directly to relevant part of guide. Nice ASCII maps, minimal spoilers. Boss names not hidden. Japanese Guide Multiple chapters on the same page, so beware of reading ahead. Good maps, minimal spoilers. Boss names not hidden.
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Spoiler Courtesy
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Discussion
What is the worst thing about this game and why is it platforming?
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When I was pulled the FMV scripts under the cuts, I found out that the script sometimes assigns names to characters before we learn them naturally! So that’s a thing. I took those out of my transcription, but not much we can do with the script as a whole.
By the way when my images have weird lights in the corner it’s from little lights we have in the nearby window Also this week they’re fine but I might have images smaller, from worse angles, etc because my cat likes to lay with me while I play and then I can’t move to get better photos.
They're calling him the world's fastest learner from his mistakes
Yeah, yeah, life or death situation, being back in the gear like instantly after wiping out everyone you ever cared for is wild, haha.
The negative out of the way: I think the forest is a little bland. Not that I didn’t have a good time all the same, but I’ve seen how nice they can make things look and this is a little one note. The highlight of the area for me is our former enemy… bird things coming back to show up nice places to climb and jump. It’s silly and very cute. Music’s nice too, and the rock rolling setpiece. I quite like the idea of breaking up our trip with multiple campfires to demonstrate that the trek through the forest is longer than shown, but maybe they’re leaving it a little TOO up to you to fill in when the segments are this short. Not a huge deal, just funny how they’re instantly running back to camp after just resting.
Thus far I don’t mind the platforming jumps, but we’ll see over time.
FMV listening was fine but I could not at all keep up with the speed of the auto advancing text during the part with Elly in her gear. In fairness I guess, while the slightly smudged PS1 font doesn’t cause me so many problems figuring it out, it definitely slows me more / makes me think at times. Long way to go to good reading speed
I also can’t recall having ever seen the word 卓絶, which doesn’t happen TOO often these days. Neat encounter. Reading and understanding outside that speedreading bit went fine, but like I think someone already said, I’m going to be having some trouble tracking the various katakana faction and country names for sure.
As for the actual events, I like how they’re juggling so many points of intrigue. Citan knows so much, there’s a group of people who view themselves as leaders of us and higher lifeforms, Fei and Elly both had more cool ominous visions, Fei knew Elly’s name before he heard it, the armies are fighting over new artifacts, Elly is immediately contextualized as being in a very interesting and morally complicated position in the narrative, great stuff. We also punched a dinosaur.
The glow smears too hard in a picture to look right but I loved the campfire glow. The light really flickers and it’s just a very pleasant scene to look at, and to listen to.
I liked the 樹海, I enjoyed the lower encounter rate and it was fun exploring. It’s really tiny though, it it weren’t for the story moments you’d be through in 5 minutes. So dark too… I had to lower the blinds. I hope we’ll get some meatier dungeons later. I do like that everything feels very organic though, not like the Trails dungeons that all feel procedurally generated on a square grid. It was weird getting two camp breaks over such a small area. I know it’s a common trick in RPGs to give a sense of time passing and that in-universe it took them an entire day to cross the forest, but here the dissonance with what we’re actually playing is a bit extreme.
The combat is very braindead for me still. I wonder if I’ll have to be a little more strategic as the enemies get harder.
The plot is getting denser and denser, there are so many moving parts…
Citan is still very suspicious but seemingly benevolent? Bringing the gear to Fei (did he know he needed it or would he have brought it regardless?) is a bit messed up but I guess it worked out. I’m fairly sure I could have beaten the T-Rex with my special combo and a few healing items though.
I don’t really get Fei’s drive though. Clearly Citan has ulterior motives, but at this point what’s Fei’s objective? Why go along? He just doesn’t have anything else to do so he follows Citan’s instructions without asking questions?
I didn’t expect Citan to become a party member. I also thought that Ellie would stick around a bit longer, I didn’t even get the opportunity to try her spells.
Going to buy spare parts in a desert village is very Star Wars Episode 1. I guess George Lucas must have been a fan.
I used the script to follow with the dialogue, although I could understand some of it without it. The dialogue in the gear was absurdly fast though, I tried to pause in the emulator and still managed to miss a line or two because I couldn’t press the pause button fast enough!
Yeah it’s top 95k according to my JPDB data, which is certainly not common.
I also had to lookup 身を挺する which I wasn’t familiar with.
I interpreted it as a PTSD flashback but given how muddied the timeline is at this point, who knows…
That’s my guess as well, just being vague since the game is.
You’re not wrong. In quite a few JRPGs it’s true that the main character just kind of moves along because that’s what they do. Right now my assumption has been that since Fei is having mystery flashbacks, losing control of himself, and especially sort of unconsciously reacting with information he doesn’t realize he has (the leap to protect Elly where he said her name early), he might be proceeding with the plot for an actually well considered reason but one that he isn’t even conscious of as he does it.
Pretty natural that to me that he doesn’t want to let a girl die to a dinosaur. Especially after he let other people die shortly ago. And yes, he did call Eri by name before she told him her name.
I think he just knows a lot of stuff, he’s kind of the wise elder, like a Yoda. Could be a manipulating bad guy, but I don’t find him too suspicious yet.
Same, that’s why I’m glad I have a pausable emulator. I was also sometimes not fast enough to pause like Simias, so the script also helped. It was really insane speed, I don’t think all natives would have been able to read it this fast either, especially if they blinked.
Fast-forward emulator function was also helpful this week as I actually found the encounter rate quite high sometimes in the forest.
Haha, good find, eerie comparison. The first Star Wars film is from 1977 though, so if anything, Xenogears “took inspiration”
(I think there was also desert spare parts in the first film = episode 4)
I really liked how they explored all perspectives of assigning responsibility for the village’s destruction, both factually and emotionally. Fei realizing it was (partially) his fault, but also that if the gears hadn’t arrived, it wouldn’t have happened. Eri calling him a coward for leaning on that, but then later wanting to apologize for having said that. Nice character writing. I think Fei is starting to learn to accept and deal with what happened.
I get it but I also think there’s a little more space to think Fei probably could find some way to make better choices when considering it’s more accurate to say he caused other people to die… specifically by getting into a gear with the intent to save them.
(As for @simias 's point specifically I assumed they meant drive less about fighting the dinosaur specifically and more about following this whole plan afterwards to go to the next town and etc, but yeah)
I get what you mean, though I think the game handles that well by letting you fight the dino without a gear before. It seems pretty clear to me that he can’t beat the dino without a gear with his current skills, as you’re only doing 1 dmg even with your heaviest punch. At least it’s clear that’s what the game is trying to say.
Oh definitely no disagreeing from me at all that that’s the intent. I’m not even really saying this is bad writing. If it were up to me the mech return happens REALLY fast and right in the midst of Fei getting his most openly regretful about having done it so I’d have pushed it a little later somehow at least, but this is the second time I’ve already said something about the pace of stuff feeling overly condensed/fast in regards to the woods so maybe I need to adjust to how they’re doing things over time, we’ll see. But anyway yeah I’m moreso just saying I think he’s repeating his exact same mistake (though it worked out this time) which is fine to have a character do, but it’s kinda my feeling on how this unfolded. He does at least include the line asking Citan to shoot him if he gets out of control again, which I appreciate, though I’m not sure how he expects that to work.
Also, I’m open to the idea that just like what I said about Fei’s motivation, there’s clearly some stuff unknown to us and even him going on so it’s not impossible that the return to the gear is, like, intentionally fast. I’m trying to remind myself to reserve too much judgment on his character until we get further because it’s a bit of a mystery.
It’s Citan’s motive that I was questioning, why did he decide to bring the mecha to Fei? He couldn’t have known about the dinosaur attack that far in advance (surely it must have taken him a while to get his helicopter thing working, then grab the mecha, then bring it to some random place in the forest), and given what happened at the village it’s very odd that he would want to put Fei in this position again. That’s what suspicious about him, he clearly seems to know more about Fei than he lets out, and he seems to have a specific objective for him in mind.
And Citan drives Ellie away… because he wants to protect Fei, or maybe because she could interfere with his plans?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I don’t really see what’s Fei’s own objective at this point. He can’t really undo what he did, he doesn’t really seem to seek revenge since he blames himself etc… I can’t really make sense of his drive at this point. The dinosaur thing is him reacting to what’s happening around him, not something that he’s working towards.
I think that’s why he was just sitting in a corner and let Eli simply go away after their argument.
If she hadn’t cried out for help, he might have continued sitting in that corner sulking/pondering.
I don’t see the need for a drive to explain anything else so far.
As the weeks go we should revisit this based on what happens, but the more I think about it, I start arriving at convincing myself Fei probably has no real internal drive right now and that might be better. From what we’ve seen all the people he cared about died, his actions at least somewhat if not totally led to that outcome, and it would be entirely natural for him to be in a state of shock. His first reaction to Elly is basically “yeah, shoot me, I’m worthless.” It makes total sense to me to explain his actions thus far as he’s pretty much moving forward in a daze, it was made clear he can’t stay in the village and someone he trusts told him to head out to somewhere so that’s what he’s doing. With any new videogame you kind of have to figure out where the writers want to seriously place the weight of lives but it seems like they’re pretty realistically meaningful here and, in that case, everything has been totally natural about what Fei is doing… outside arguably getting back in the gear, setting that aside. If I was writing it I think the trauma of the experience would make it VERY hard to get him back in, but on the other hand maybe he totally lacks the strength to resist anything Citan says at this stage. And my guess at his vague mysterious backstory is that one way or another he’s already piloted one or something? Which complicates things. Who knows, exciting stuff, I don’t remember one bit.
For me, it’s the slow slide down a wall when you don’t quite make a jump. Or maybe only being able to roughly guess where your 2d sprite will land in the 3d space. Or maybe not being able to see the edge of cliffs at certain angles because both upper and lower ground planes are textured the exact same way. Ahhh just imagine the xenogears experience without the janky jumping puzzles…
I’m delighted that I understand what Fei’s deathblow names mean— um, mostly. In the English version, they’re romanized without any context and without knowing any Japanese they just kind of blurred together in my mind. I’ve only got 2 on my learned/learning list at the moment but I can finally attribute ‘lightning fast’ to 雷迅 and ‘thousand fierce/fury’ to 千烈. I do wonder if they’re meant to call other, real words into your mind also, like 雷神 or 鮮烈?
Come to think of it, this is the first piece of media I’m reading/playing in Japanese that I’d previously read/played in English. Everything else I’ve read was a fresh experience in Japanese only. This is so fun, why didn’t I do this earlier!?
I’m in agreement here. Maybe it’s weak that Fei doesn’t add much of his own heroic driving force to the plot at the current moment, but it makes sense that he’s listening to his friend/mentor figure in a time of extreme emotional distress. His motivations before the battle revolved around the village, and now he’s lost that, lost everything that meant anything to him due to his own decisions. If he had some strong internal drive right after all that, it’d be weird.
As for getting into the gear… yeah it was kinda forced. I think the writers do a fairly good job of justifying the use of it for protecting Elly in the moment but later, when Fei says things like “やっぱり……ギアは好きじゃない”, but also accepts the idea of keeping it around so easily? Maybe they meant to show that, hey, he used it this time and nothing went wrong, so he should feel better about continuing to use it. I don’t know, though. I would’ve liked to see him reject this specific gear more forcefully, at the very least.
Very cool that so many people are playing and commenting
Week 3
樹海 was a nice word.
I like the anime parts, nice drawings.
I found the text this week rather tough and used the script but also an English playthrough video (inspired by simias in a previous thread).
Also it feels like we are still in the introduction, as we can only go one place and keep being interrupted by dialogs. Looking forward to having a bit more freedom to explore!
And for people complaining about two camp breaks in such a small area, if I were Elly and I’d been punched uncounscious twice in such a short amount of time, I think I would appreciate the breaks :x
I wonder how much HP he had. Everything was doing 1 damage, so even with my combo of 1-1-1-1, it would have taken a while.
He has nothing else to do? He doesn’t belong anywhere due to not having any memories. But now he knows he has some connections to Gears and Elly, so he can explore that.
Agreed.
Oh I abuse that one too :x
Abusing the emulator here again. Saving before I make any attempt at jumping.
The square-circle 雷迅 special attack did decent damage for me.
Yeah she got damsel-in-distressed twice in a row. I guess necessary to justify why she would come to trust Fei so quickly.
I really don’t mind the platforming so far, maybe because I’ve been playing so many JRPGs lately and it’s a pretty uncommon mechanic in those. It feels fresh. Yeah, it’s jank, but the levels are small and you don’t have to walk a long way to come back when you fall.
Haha, how did you survive until now? I chose my very first game to complete in Japanese because I already knew it very well (Grandia 2), so I knew the story and didn’t have to figure it out in addition to struggling with the language. It was a big help, as it was already hard enough going through a full game in Japanese, having to look up every 3rd word.
But yes, it’s also fun revisiting games in Japanese. A lot of translations are either bad or very free, so the original JP is very different. For example, FF7 Cloud is a pretty big edgy a**hole in English, he completely isn’t in JP.
Yes, I already knew it from another game though, even nicer to see it while already knowing it, haha.
I prefer this kind of real platforming than the fake platforming I’ve seen in FFXV (I think), where you get next to a cliff, then you are asked to press △, and then the animation of climbing the cliff in a complex way starts…
Funny, it’s the opposite experience for me. So far I’ve only played games in Japanese that are games I play for the first time, but as we play more Final Fantasy, I will soon get to revisit those I’ve already played!
So, how does フェイ already know her name… apparently the quotes are used here to add emphasis to a word, a bit like the angle brackets were used for ふりがな with ラムズ.
That 確か is also pretty striking. I guess フェイ himself hasn’t quite registered how weird it is for him to know her name? It wasn’t lost on エリィ, who was all “??” afterwards…
A bit surprised the game just directly goes to 自殺志願者, which is an accurate description for フェイ’s behaviour but something games rarely seem to want to cast any light on.
I didn’t remember how angry エリィ got at フェイ while he was so vulnerable. Feels like strong projection based on her being the pilot who the キスレブ軍 chased to ラハン, but there is also the flashback…
At least I’ll remember 卑怯 from now on.
Of course in games we don’t get to hear the characters thoughts, so much has to be imagined from what we do get. I don’t yet feel like I have a good handle on who フェイ and エリィ are as characters, but that will develop with time.
It was also pretty striking how シタン really wanted to separate these two. He of course knows far more about the situation than he lets on… seemingly fully understanding who エリィ is, speaking her other language.
Gotta love the huge airship introduced right away from this perspective. This ship isn’t アヴェ, it’s 神聖ソラリス帝室特設外務庁 – or ゲブラー for short. It’s interesting to me how they throw the player into the middle of a pretty complex scenario right from the start.
This game seems to love to use kanji wherever it can, like in 何故 and 彼等. I don’t mind it, good practise!
So I decided to get this set up on my Steam Deck as well, and I have a 3-way save-sync between my PC, my Raspberry Pi, and my Steam Deck (the Pi is there as a middleman so that I don’t have to have the PC and the Deck on at the same time). Played this week’s content on the Deck.
Week 3 Play Report
The forest is a pretty light area, though I did get turned around near the start and ended up walking right out to the world map by mistake. Whoops. Anyway, I do wish there’d been a bonus or something for managing to do well in the dinosaur fight in the section where you’re not in the Gear - I’ve seen this done in a few RPGs (Trails games love to do ‘scripted loss where the story progresses if you lose but if you win anyway you get a bonus’). The Gear combat just has the issue that it’s not as interesting as the basic on-foot combat. I hope that later on the fuel management etc becomes more of a concern.
I’ll admit I kind of didn’t feel like doing lookups towards the end of the stuff this week, so I just let it wash over me. I didn’t really lose too much, just a few words here and there.
Caught up for this week’s content! Lots of stuff happened and I picked up a couple of new words.
Week 3
I definitely agree with other people mentioning that Fei intentionally feels pretty “lost” right now, because he’s pretty much “empty”.
He has no memories (except vague ptsd flashbacks), everyone he knew is either dead or hates his guts and never wants to see him again, the one place he lived in that he has memories in has been destroyed (by him)… feels very plausible to me that he would simply nod along to anything Citan says, the [1] remaining familiar (and friendly) figure in his life.
Speaking of Citan, I found it a bit hilarious how much foreshadowing that he’s hiding stuff the game dumps on you in this initial phase.
Let’s make a little list!
Citan:
Is “the village’s doctor” but has a giant freaking mechanical spider helicopter thing in his backyard that he likes to tinker with. You know, as an hobby.
Has a giant telescope pointed straight at the village… you know, as an hobby. Or possibly to keep an eye on Fei??
Makes vague allusions about Fei’s past when he mentions the song from the statue/music box being familiar
Speaking of, where did he even get that? Archeology another hobby of his?
He can pilot the helicopter spider.
He can speak Ellie’s language fluently.
Can totally fix Gears, so he must have worked with them in the past…
Can fight I suppose, since he becomes a party member.
All this paints a… pretty interesting picture of him. I’m intrigued.
Speaking of other things I noticed, the cutscene spoken parts were surprisingly easy to follow, I understood a lot more than I thought I would. In the flashback where Fei sees himself in the desert as a kid, I also noticed that kid-Ellie has that cross shaped pendant that also appeared both in the opening and in the cutscene when Fei first went berserk, which is… interesting.
Also man, do kids in this game have ominous creepy kids smiles.
Also this week they’re fine but I might have images smaller, from worse angles, etc because my cat likes to lay with me while I play and then I can’t move to get better photos.
