Xenogears opens with a spaceship called the Eldridge crashing on a nearby planet. The sole survivor is a young boy, the first incarnation of Fei. From that wreck, Square Product Development Division 3 built a role-playing game that swings between hand-drawn animation and polygonal robot combat, and it remains one of the strangest, most ambitious things the original PlayStation ever ran.
Deus, Zohar, and the Eldridge
The plot does not start small. An unknown spacefaring civilization creates Deus as a biological weapon, traps the Wave Existance inside its engine, Zohar, then tries to dispose of the whole thing by shipping it away. Deus finds out and attacks the ship in transit.
What follows spans civilizations. Fei and Elly are reincarnated again and again: as Abel and Elly, hunted by Cain; in the Zeboim civilization, where Kim builds an artificial human named Emeralda; and in the fourth incarnation, where Lacan, Sophia, Krelian and the Fatima brothers fight Solaris. Shevat, the Gurus, the Diabolos, the Limiter drug in the food supply — Xenogears keeps adding.
Gears, Combos, and a 360-Degree Map
The battle system is the reason to stay. A real-time combat system eliminates restrictive menus, using button commands to provide fast-paced, intuitive action. Players can wield dramatic magical spells or engage in real-time polygonal robot vs. robot battles, controlling mega-robots when the fight calls for it.
Outside combat, the 3D gameplay maps rotate a full 360 degrees, and players navigate by jumping and climbing. The camera work and lighting carry the robot fights further than the hardware should allow.
- Rotate the 3D gameplay maps 360 degrees
- Navigate by jumping and climbing
- Control mega-robots in battle
- Use button commands instead of menus
- Cast magical spells or fight robot vs. robot
A Story That Spoils Everything
The source material for this review lays out the full storyline and warns it spoils everything, which is fair. Xenogears front-loads its cosmology and never slows down to explain it twice. The game’s own summary promises an intricate storyline involving many human and non-human characters, and it delivers that in a way few RPGs of its era attempted.
In the beginning, Deus was created.
That line sets the tone. The game is less interested in a hero’s journey than in a cycle of reincarnation that keeps repeating across centuries, with Miang’s Ouroborous Gene passing down through every woman in the world, guaranteeing her immortality.
Where the Ambition Shows
The reach is the point, and the reach is also the problem. Xenogears wants to hold a war between Aveh and Kislev, a faux religion called Ethos, a Soylent System turning test subjects into food products, and a god-making scheme by Krelian in one disc. It mostly does. But the density is punishing, and the game trusts its own lore more than it trusts the player to keep up.
The combat and the 360-degree maps are the parts that hold up cleanest. The narrative is the part that will decide whether you finish. This is a game that treats science fiction and fantasy as the same shelf, and it earns that.
Xenogears is not a smooth experience. It is a demanding one, and the demands are largely worth meeting.
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