There are vendors and minigames here if you desire
Make sure you have 1000G on you if you want to setup for a shop to be available later
Unique Missables
H&S Badge/かくれんぼバッジ. This requires you play a hide & seek game multiple times until he coughs it up.
Prepwork to open a shop later in the game: There are two ways: 1)Talk to a street-dealer across from the guy who buys your monster parts, and see some kids steal from them. Follow them up the stairs that go to the H&S kid, chat, and then give them 1000G. 2) Find the kids directly near the H&S kid and pay them 1000G when they ask, without the shoplifting scene.
Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!
Spoiler Courtesy
Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.
Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
Avoid posting any information from later in the game than the current week’s reading. If it is necessary to doing so, it needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags
Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1”]).
Discussion
Did you play any minigames?
What name did you sign up under?
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
0voters
Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!
As I noted, I’m posting a day early since I’ll be on a plane and out of pocket most of tomorrow. No change to the normal posting time for next week however! This will be a pretty benign week in game. Happy holidays everyone!
A bit surprised that no one else has posted yet - though I think there was no reminder posted in the threads so maybe that’s why. Or maybe people are just busy with Christmas around the corner. Either way, I just finished this week’s content:
Week 8 Play Report
This section also has a lot of attention to detail placed into the NPC interactions and general world interactions that are really fun. Like for example in the market you can wait a few seconds and the merchants will offer to lower their prices (to an extent, you’ll have to start again if you try to push them too far). There’s also the little scene with the shoplifters running their con on the shopkeep. The person who introduces you to the hotel, but doesn’t give you their name is fun too. Then there’s the festival area - I love that you can pick up a balloon by talking to the guy outside the minigame tent, and then when you leave the area you can see it flying away on the city map screen:
Also a little world design detail that I don’t remember noticing the first time I played this game - there’s a window in the nun’s room that leads outside:
Had no idea until I just stumbled in to the room from outside when I was looking all over for the hiding kid (that first location is probably the cruellest of any of them).
Speaking of which, I did resort to a guide, which does make this quite funny:
I played at the start of the week and I dunno, I was still mentally worn out from the readathon so it was maybe slightly bad timing but something just snapped when it jumped to the little scene with these new characters arriving and I’m starting to feel like I need the game to give me something. With the combat being pretty much autobattle I need one thing to not just be a vague legend or reference to an unknown plan and actually tell me something, or for the characterization to not be super hands off and light. Citan is starting to feel like the chaperone to tell me what to do and ask questions to invite lore dumps more than a guy. I don’t feel like I often get this impatient but its style of storytelling is for some reason wearing on me and another town to explore directly after 2 enormous “towns” in Bart’s ship and hideout just isn’t it. And then Citan had the gall to not let me go in the fun looking tent. Blowing fire out of my mouth was cute though.
Kinda just didn’t post for a bit cause it’s not fun to be the downer and try to sift through what annoyed me right now but ehh, it’ll probably change sometime.
The direction (? not sure what’s a good term, thinking about the “filming” effects) of this game is impressive.
I really liked the part where they talked while walking in a corridor at the beginning, or the zoom out from the surveillance camera.
It’s a lot of fun, I’m used to things being way more static, I feel like they are being very creative and things are very lively in this game.
So a chiffon nisana is probably a banana chiffon cake but from Nisan!
Another French cake, but I can’t say I knew the name of this one. Looks yummy though.
Nice one, didn’t see that detail.
I had a less fun experience: I entered a house and gave him the old man living there a shock because he thought I was his lost son. Then I went to a shop and forgot I had visited that house already, went again and gave the poor old man the same shock sorry old man!
I have finished this week’s assignment technically but I think I might look at a guide because according to some conversations I missed out on something (something with a well with a secret passage in it)
Didn’t think very hard about it, went for 竜殺しの貴公子
Me too! I didn’t have any minigames, not sure if they were in the tent if you try to go there before you talk to the nun, or elsewhere. I feel like I talked to everyone, but with this game and no minimap, you never know.
Eating spicy and cold stuff or being drunk amused me too!
I spent a lot of time in the desert doing combat for grinding some money and then practicing my combo, so I didn’t mind a city again.
Also I wanted to sell my Gear parts and figured nobody will be selling Gear parts in Abe, so I went back into the ship (when you go to the place where you go to Nisan you can enter the ship again). Didn’t even get lost, found the Gear shop right away and sold my 100+ extra gear items. Thought I would be a billionaire after that but barely made 1000 G
And then I came back to Abe and there was a Gear shop there after all, great xD
Should I go looking for the key or is that for next week?
If people haven’t done the hide and seek quest yet and want to try without a guide but find it too difficult, here are some vague hints (that I wish I had…):
You have to enter inside a house or trigger some loading area to have the kid relocate between searches. The kid is always hidden in the outdoors area, never in houses/shops/etc.
The game uses the camera’s dead angles to make him harder to spot, so rotate a lot.
The first hiding spot is far to the North and arguably the most difficult to find because I didn’t even think that I could go there at first,
The 2nd hiding spot is to the South West,
The 3rd hiding spot in to the West, not very far from the previous one,
The 4th hiding spot is to the South East.
W8
I’m really impressed by the scale and level of details in Ave. Exploring the city was really enjoyable. Every area, every house has a lot of unique detail.
I entered the nun’s room the first time by jumping through her window which triggered a special dialogue. Sorry lady, didn’t mean to scare you, I just saw an open window and wondered if the game would let me do it.
A didn’t expect a random tournament arc. I don’t mind.
I picked 放浪の拳闘家 as well!
I gave up on that discussion because the Japanese was complicated and they kept namedropping stuff I couldn’t understand. Fortunately after that we have the sequence in the bedroom with the girl and things become a bit more concrete.
I have complained about this type of “storytelling” in the Trails club so I get where you’re coming from, but at least here we have a fairly clear short-term goal of saving the girl so I’m latching onto that and we’ll see what all that Gebura stuff is about later…
I also think that the club format and the huge amount of text these past few weeks means that we’re progressing pretty slowly. I would never have stopped at this point if I was playing on my own for instance.
Really mad about that too. One more reason I think Citan has sinister motives.
Yeah it’s really really good for a game of that era. The zoom out of the room through the screen in particular was very cleverly made.
I am a bit in doubt. Technically next week we move on to chapter 14 to 16, and as I go along with the script on the side, I have seen dialog for the key in chapter 13. But I have also reached the “Ending Point” condition without getting the key. So maybe both are okay?
Thanks for the tip, I’ll try to find that quest now!
It doesn’t matter if you managed to get it this week (talking to Hide and Seek kid first, then to an old man, telling him you’d rescue Margie) or talk to the old man next week and tell him the same thing to get it.
Because I heard of the key before I played hide and seek, each time I was finding the kid, he would tell me where to find the key, a bit annoying
The third spot was really tough to find!
This entire sequence of ラムサス and ミァン arriving and talking while walking was so good. The way ラムサス talks in Japanese gives the character much more flavor – full of kanji, arrogant as all hell. It just doesn’t come across half as strongly in English.
ミァン was originally mistranslated as Miang. It should be Myyah Hawwa. Another Bible reference for those counting, but if you don’t already know it might be better to not look up the Hebrew quite yet… the game predates Wikipedia and definitely didn’t count on players being able to easily figure out where these are pulled from.
Yet another two big characters introduced; the game is working overtime to set things up. I personally love the in medias res bits of introduction we get. There’s enough paint here to form a picture of who these two are. Keep me guessing and forming theories, don’t just give me the facts…
Delightful to see that the people we are against (?) are not a united front by any means.
Haha, I remember both now and back then I entered through the window! When the game gives you a jump button and lets you go wild with it, that’s what you do. Much faster than navigating via the hotel lobby…
Absolute agreement here! I’d say for the time it’s beyond impressive. It’s using 3D and particularly the “camera” to its advantage in trailblazing ways I can’t recall any other game of this time doing to quite this degree – as you say, things were usually just static angles back then. I love the ingenuity.
“In-game cutscenes” took another 20 years to get completely normalized. It was pre-rendered FMVs all the way for another 10 years beyond this point… even in bigger and better funded sister series.
Just as in Trails, the previous game I played, a sudden tournament arc! It’s quite the point to stop for this week. I’ll be on time next week.
The only one that comes to mind is Metal Gear Solid (which released 7 months after Xenogears). And Metal Gear Solid basically pioneered the modern cinematic action game as we know it.
Was waiting on this til I was back at my computer. Yeah I immediately thought of what you said because I think that’s how I’m feeling here. Interestingly I know the sort of place you’re coming from in Trails but like I’ve said I don’t get those feelings at all. I think it’s just very bursting with character, for me, so I’m enjoying that and willing to go along with the ride because whatever the villains are up to is just going to be another thing for the characters I love to work off of.
Xenogears is great on the aesthetics and presentation for sure, in a vacuum I should be looking at this town impressed by everything going on, again. I just kinda got there and was like “wow you really put a lot of effort into so many towns, that’s cool but what about doing anything else to this level?” I mean the way everyone talks about this story this can’t last, whether I end up liking where it goes or not it absolutely sounds like it goes places. Just right now it feels like a game constantly gesturing at things. Like how I said the forest was so small it felt like they gave us the hint of being a dungeon and then it was over. There is just enough of a combat system there to suggest being a game with gameplay. That gameplay is just autolearning deathblows and then pressing the strongest one while meters go down so far, though. Like, this game has items in it, allegedly. I switch my equipment when I buy new gear parts but I think I used a healing item once or twice ever so far? Couldn’t tell you what items I have. There is the lightest hint of an item system but it doesn’t assert itself as something I’d ever go so far as to use.
And the story just keeps dumping in more people with more vague plots which, again, feels like giving the suggestion that things are happening and characters exist without ever stopping enough to make them real because it always wants to replace them with someone else right away. I was happy enough with how Fei getting in the gear ultimately went but as a character I don’t think I could tell you one single trait about him beyond that thing that happened to him. Citan is shady and that’s one trait but he, too, stops there and way too often feels like an easy stand in voice of the developer.
You could very much be right that club pacing isn’t doing this game favors though, different games definitely feel better played quicker or slower sometimes. It’s entirely possible on my own that I blow through all of this in a couple sessions and, before these sorts of feelings set in, I’m already into the hypothetical parts that make it all worth it.
I think another factor for me is that I know that this game is pretty infamous for being rushed and somewhat unfinished, so I don’t really invest too much into the overarching story because I’m bracing for some complete nonsense later on. But also I know that I’ve enjoyed many RPGs with nonsense endings as long as the journey was fun enough, so I’m hoping that the various setpieces (like the upcoming tournament and exfiltration mission for instance) will be entertaining enough to make up for whatever crazy writing is waiting around the corner.
I’m not too worried about the plot, we are going to be playing all the way to August, so for me that means we are still at the very beginning, lots of time to clear things up.
I have started the assignment but not finished yet. Spending some time learning how to fight properly too.
sorry old man!
