Neosmith's Xenosaga Retrospective Renewed

Folks from Godsibb (may she rest in peace) may have remembered @Neosmith 's Xenosaga Retrospective essay from before. It was never really saved off the forums when they went down, but Neo still had the text for it and I helped build a permanent home for it on XU here:

http://xeno-underground.net/neosmith/retrospective/

Due to the fact that this is a deconstruction of what Xenosaga was as a series, it can be read as somewhat negative, but the spirit of this article is one of archival review, from a person that has a lot of love and admiration for the series. Anyone who's gotten to know Neosmith is already aware of this, and it's for this reason that I've helped give this article a permanent place on XU. For those who needed that disclaimer, there you go.

Please feel free to use this thread as a means of responding to the article! Or there's also PMs, or his Twitter account, if you're so inclined - https://twitter.com/Zevtsev

Wow never see this before, thank you for the link katimus

Looks interesting. When I start to read this, I want to watch all the cutscenes again and say : "Oh my, come to think of it, that's totally true !"

Since I have a Touhou contest coming soon, I spend many time training myself on my computer. Therefore I will not read this right now, but I am very curious about this anyway !

Whenever you're able to, dude. :>

Thanks I'll read that I love it when people analyze the games' plots and stuff.

I liked it. It's so true. I remember that while playing Xenosaga I what bugged me a lot was how vague some things were. I couldn't understand why everybody was after the Zohar, it was left unexplained, or why the emulators were created, etc. And the way our party just left MOMO, even though they already knew the enemy was searching for her, that was a clear plot mistake. I didn't notice anything else, though. But the article author noticed a lot!

I think the "too vague" flaw is in all three games, really, it was never fixed. We only get to know something at the very end, instead of bit by bit like we should've. Instead of creating an air of mystery, such storytelling just makes everything feel pointless, as there are no answers to too many questions per game. I think each game should've provided enough answers in and of itself to feel satisfying.

As for the ending of the whole trilogy, even though it provides answers, it feels disconnected from all three games, like deux ex machina. Simply because we couldn't guess any of it. Yeah, there was foreshadowing, but it wasn't enough. The fact that KOS-MOS' eyes sometimes went blue or chaos could kill a Gnosis by touch or Shion could see Nephilim, etc... that just wasn't enough. I still think those three to be full-blown Deus Ex Machinas. It's almost like the writer didn't know how to connect "the truth" to the rest of the story, so instead of having us gradually discover it for ourselves, he just dumped the whole info on us at the very end.

I hope I don't sound too negative. I still love the games, regardless of all that. But it's certainly true that the storytelling could be done a lot better.

Hey, thanks for reading!

Yeah, the narrative of the game itself doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but that really becomes understandable when you consider how much forethought Takahashi put into the world-building, where, as a game designer, he had the most strength.

I hope to get my older articles together for Part II at some point, wherein I really focused on how the game's plot transformed over time and why.

I think that area produced much better work as a whole, with my personal favorite article being "The Mech Factor," which proved that the biggest change to the plot of Episode II came about as a result of everyone realizing the pointlessness of the AGWS system in the first game.