Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Bose

I’ve heard a lot of people say to just skip over Xenosaga II, to just watch the cutscenes and move on to III, since it’s considered to not be as good as I or III. However, I own all three games and thus wanted to personally play all three games, so I gave it a shot.

The story of II focuses a lot more on Jr. and his backstory, and I really enjoyed that. The segment at the end of the game with Rubedo and Albedo was great in my opinion. It also had scenes that set up for a future payoff that I’m excited for. I almost wonder how things would have gone if the series wasn’t cut short, since I know III takes place after a timeskip whereas II essentially picks up where the previous left off.

One common criticism of II is the new character appearances and voice actors. I do miss the original voice actors that didn’t carry over, especially chaos’. As for the characters, overtime the new style II gave them grew on me, and I really liked the new outfits that everyone got. I’d say overall that the graphics were improved going from I to II, and some of the cutscenes had really good choreography, especially the fights between Jin and Margulis.

I’m definitely more mixed on the gameplay of II. Just for reference, the main party I used throughout the game was KOS-MOS, MOMO, and Jr., swapping out Jr. for Jin in disc 2.

I will say that it is a more complex and mechanically interesting system than the original, especially combined with bosses that also have more mechanical complexity. However, it’s really easy to just not engage with any of it, outside of the stock system, which ends up being super important to actually doing damage. However, it requires a lot of downtime during fights, just passing turns using stock and occasionally healing characters when needed until everyone is full on stock. Then you figure out the boss’s break pattern, air them, dump all your stocks using boosts to keep the combo going, and then repeat the process until their HP is depleted.

Don’t get me wrong, pulling off those combos is super fun, especially seeing the big damage numbers you can hit with element chains stacked up, it’s just that the downtime between that can feel like a slog. I think another issue is random enemy encounters. You could play them the same way as I just described above, but I never really wanted to. Instead I would just take advantage of the free stocks the game would sometimes give you when breaking an enemy and then use boost to pull off a small combo. This was fine for the most part, but towards the end of the game a lot of enemy encounters just feel damage sponge-y, especially when they throw three or four enemies at you at once.

Now, that could just be my fault, I could’ve just been missing or not taking proper advantage of some mechanic, but that was my experience with things. I did admittedly want to rush through the game, so I ended up ignoring the side quests, which might have given out good rewards. I did encounter some items that would unlock a new skill every now and then, maybe side quests gave out really good ones.

I did grind to level 40 at the start of disc 2 taking advantage of Shion’s solo dungeon encounters, but really all that noticeably did for me was reduce the damage I took from enemies, I didn’t feel like I had a massive boost to my attack power relative to their HP values.

I did kind of like the new skill system. I see how giving every character access to the same set of skills can make them all feel homogenous, but I liked it because it meant that everyone could have access to the ethers that I liked to use, meaning I could always use one of them regardless of who’s turn it actually was. However, this did create a problem with the dungeons. Since there wasn’t any equipment to be found, I didn’t really bother exploring them since all I would find are consumables that I never ended up using anyways. The E.S.s were the exception to that since you could find parts for them during their dungeon portions, but you don’t even get them until disc 2 anyways.

I have heard that Episode II actually has a decent amount of post game content, especially compared to Episode I that won’t even let you return to the game if you save the clear data, but I don’t think I’m interested enough to return to it.

I’ve been looking forward to playing Episode III for a long time, so I’m very eager to start it and see how the rest of Xenosaga’s story plays out.