#imageepoch

first of all, it's bad okay? just, not great lol. Possibly one of the worst JRPGs on the platform.

BUT

It's so close to being good lol

For those not in the know, it was made almost entirely by former Xeno devs, but Takahashi himself wasn't involved. But one of the other Xenogears writers/leads, Masato Kato, was, and it reads & plays as a spiritual sequel.

From a gameplay perspective - it has the same sort of setup; character sprites in a 3D world with rotatable camera, and semi-turn-based random battles. The battles use the same action points and combo system, but with way more customization options in your characters' abilities and such. As well as a neat new system, the "quips", which turns battle voice clips into a moddable system, where triggering them to play can cause various effects depending on what the quip is, from new attacks, to healing, to buffs, to other things.

All sounds very cool, right?

But it's not balanced at all. Fights are either laughably easy or punishingly difficult, and the quip system is woefully skewed towards a few really powerful ones that make you not ever want to take them off and experiment with anything else.

As for the story... well, it's a world that some time ago saw discrimination against beastfolk done away with, but in the ensuing generations, some vengeful beastfolk have risen up and become the dominant race in the world, treating the rest like cattle. In some cases literally, as early versions of the game script and the manga/anime tie-ins feature some beastfolk eating their human slaves after fattening them up.

The main characters start off trying to fight this system and bring some order to the world, and of course get caught up in wider and grander events, in true JRPG fashion.

The basic world setup could, if one didn't examine it too greatly, be read as the world of Xenogears a few generations later. But with important names changed for legal reasons, since this very much wasn't made at Square, natch.

But, notice how I mentioned "early versions of the script?" Yeah, it got revised late in the day, as higher ups decided they wanted to go for a younger target audience/lower rating for the game, and so they had to scrub a bunch of atrocities from the plot and massage some events, and not everything flows smoothly in the final edit. That and a lot of the budget & time that could have gone to polishing the game went instead to the aforementioned anime and manga adaptations and securing all the big names on the dev team. Oh and the game's full motion cutscenes. Had I not mentioned those?