Xenogears was a huge buzzkill of an RPG for me. I only played it once a lot of years ago, so more recent (https://anoverlookingview.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/a-brief-overlook-xenogears-disc-2/) reviews do a much better job of telling you how jarring it was, but I do remember the story being an unwelcome intrusion into what had been, throughout all of Disk 1, a pretty fun mix. I don’t bring this up to dump on a game that had been forced by the game studio, but more as a cautionary tale that when blending a story heavy game, one should not forget that games are meant to be played versus read in painfully limited video game screens.

I think the biggest issue the game had for me wasn’t that the story was dumb or badly told, but it really came out of nowhere and soured the experience of the pretty decent RPG experience that was building up. You had your basic combat outside of your mech as you walked around dungeons and fought bats or whatever, but you had a giant mecha you could throw down against other mecha with. And the mecha fights were really cool; so much so that I really was bored of chopping up bats in caves when I could be punching robots. Your robot took damage that was difficult to heal up, meaning that your performance in combat actually mattered, versus just eating a cheaply available potion and mowing through bad guys. Plus, the boss fights against mecha still had a story, as the combatants took breaks from punch-punch, pew-pew and spoke pithy lines like “grrr” and “I’ll get you with this next attack!”

And then, disk 2 happened. Long scripted dialogue happened. Very little breaks from yak-yak, exposition-exposition to savor, as the game just stopped being anything like what it was. So all the fun I was having with a nicely interlaced story in my action adventure just was me watching sprites sitting in chairs as big text dumps filled the screen. I can’t say if the story had a good resolution in the end because I just couldn’t. 20 minute dialogue splats interlaced with incredibly linear dungeon strolls earned me… another 20 minute dialogue splat. So as a story telling experience, it was a bust.

So the lesson I learned from this is that stories in games can work, but if you set up the user experience to not be one, then when the story hits, it is unwelcome. When designing the experience of “what would be a fun game to play in this part of the story,” I am trying to be mindful of making the two overlap. Or if not entirely overlap, then not be so lopsided that the fun turns off when the story rears its ugly head.