Sorry to have hijacked your Xenosaga thread,
@Strangelove , but I've just completed my series playthrough
As hinted at the end of the last post, hot damn is 3 an improvement over 2
Shion and KOS-MOS got their original voice actors back, and very-flat Canaan got changed to Steve Blum, so that's great. But really it's in game design that just puts this on another level. The combat is snappy (which is a HUGE shift from 2), and the character ability system is super enjoyable. Each character has two (unique!) trees that you can send them down. By the end of hte game you'll be able to fill out both, but while you're making your way through, it greatly affects your playstyle. Also, everyone earns appreciable XP and SP even if they're not in your party, so rotating your active party around is very feasible, and I really enjoyed trying to mix and match everyone. Even if KOS-MOS, of course, remains a mainstay
The Boost mechanic remains, but now I hardly ever use it to jump in turn order, because it's more useful to spend for "Special Attacks," which are like Ep 1's tech attacks, but a little more basic. However, if you kill an enemy with special attack, you get 150% XP and AP from that enemy. So to run into a group of 4 or 5 enemies, try to weaken them all equally before wiping them all out with an AoE Special Attack is risky, but so satisfying, and equally rewarding.
Also, you can unlock accessories that increase your total pool of Boost. Which is necessary for some late game special attacks, but even just being able to rattle off multiple lesser Specials feels cool, too.
The mechs, while not as customizable as in 1, are much closer compared to 2. Their combat is still a little basic, but still enjoyable. The first of 2 superbosses is a mech fight (against a mech that's basically Weltall from Xenogears), which takes WAY too long, but it does give you this game's Knights of the Round, so I guess it's worthwhile.
There are also lots of little touches, I like how each character has different animations for destroying debris in the exploration map (2 did this as well, in fairness).
In short, it's just way more fun to play, all the way around.
The minigame in this one, HaKox (lul), is a Lemmings-like which is...fine. I even enjoyed it for a bit, but to actually beat it all was more than I could take, I threw in the towel, lol. The music, sound effects, and voice clips are annoying too, which doesn't help. Not finishing it means you miss out on Jr.'s ultimate weapon, but, oh well.
The story is also still very strong,
especially since on this playthrough I read the side content which I never did before. The Pied Piper cellphone game, and the Missing Year flash game. The latter is extremely helpful. Pied Piper is good specifically for Ziggy and Voyager's history, but outside of one scene it's not all that relevant. But if you continue your playthrough, hito, I definitely recommend Missing Year if you only do one.
The pacing is much better than in 2, with solid dungeons, and it's great to finally see what all went down on Old Miltia and all that stuff. However, you can't escape that they clearly had to rush the conclusion of the series in the back half of the game. The answers to all those hundreds of questions the series had thrown thus far start getting answered left and right and a lot of the answers are, of course, pretty out there. So the fact that they don't really get the time to breathe hurts it.
Also, though I always got a kick of all the Judeo-Christian and Jungian stuff, by the end the story becomes very mystical and I do find myself missing the more...Mysterious-but-hardish Science Fiction of the first game. Kind of unavoidable I suppose, both between the rush and the fact that mystery is almost always more compelling than the answer, especially when so teased out.
Which is why I still land where I said in the beginning. 3 is unquestionably the best
game in the trilogy. Indeed, I'll say it's one of the best RPGs on the PS2, period. However, I still personally like 1 the most. The story is so compelling, KOS-MOS is just a badass gnosis-killing android and not [redacted]. Also, the combat is much clunkier than 3, but it also has so much
impact. The tech attacks, even though you do see them many times over, just feel like they hit so hard with the emphatic way they're said and the explosions and sound effects. KOS-MOS' R-Cannon, for instance.
In 1 - she says "Charging" we see her arm morph into the cannon, "R-
CANNON!" *huge explosion*
In 3 - the move passes so fast you could be forgiven for missing it entirely:
This is objectively good for the pace of combat, and it's still cool that it flips her backwards, but I find myself missing the build-up and payoff.
Anyway, that whole playthrough took me 3 months (with a CC break in between), and about 100 hours of gameplay, plus the time spent reading Pied Piper and Missing Year. I enjoyed it immensely, there were a lot of story nuances I either didn't realize or didn't remember that I had a lot of fun putting together on this playthrough. Strong recommend for whoever has access to these very inaccessible games.
(on that note, I was messing around with a PS2 emulator on my PC while I was in the final dungeon - I was playing my original copies on my PS2 - and I used XS3 as a test. and holy
crap it looked and sounded SO MUCH BETTER. Immediately kicked myself for not playing it that way. Everything was so much brighter and sharper, and the sound had a lot more bass.) Oh well, next time
(also right at the beginning demonstrates what I'm saying about KOS-MOS' voice)
