/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6513314
You seem to have a massive hate boner for FF7 but what you fail to realise is why it was so popular. In short, it was just made a lot better. It’s a smoother, more concise game. It’s consistent all the way through with little to no annoying or frustrating sections (Kislev, anyone?) and with characters while not massively deep are written decently enough to be relevant the entire story.

Xenogears has bigger ‘themes’ but shits the bed executing them. There are only two important main characters, maybe three, the rest have little arcs that, when resolved, are then dropped from the story all together. The battle system is far less interesting and just a bunch of button mashing. If the combos had different effects/uses then they would be really interesting, instead you’re just using one powered attack then the one more powerful than that and so on. Even something as simple as different elemental damage is left really far into the game, whilst it’s there in FF7 from the get go.

The minigames are the same as any other JRPG at the time, standard, boring and annoying. The way you describe the story as being ‘subversive’ makes it sound you’ve never played a game where the story is anything other than ‘good vs evil’. It’s very average, stuffed with irrelevant religious symbolism at the expense of true philosophical ideas, and using Jungian id types in the most basic and obvious ways.

Xenogears is a great game for someone who has never read a book, or finds the Marvel films engaging, i.e. 15 years old which was it’s target audience at the time, but for those with us with interests outside of vidya it’s laughably infantile in it’s execution and thoughts. FF7, while not a deep story, is much more intimate, concise, memorable and just loved more in general precisely because of that. There’s a reason The Old Man and the Sea is still more well regarded than Infinite Jest.

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