Xenosaga 3: PS2

I noticed people giving reviews on games that have come out recently. I also noticed there's one I picked up this winter that nobody either may have even heard of or tried out yet. Cuz DL and Vanin still didn't beat the second one (noobs). Here's my review on Xenosaga 3 for the PS2.

 

The, saldy, last game of the originally slated 6-part Xeno series picks up where the second leaves off. The Gnosis (big ugly alien thingies) have the Zohar (big stone of power or something, think the Monolith from 2001: A Space Oddysey), and there's a Civil War breaking out between two major political factions. The military (U-TIC), in coordination with Vector (some science company), have made a second KOS-MOS (bad ass robot) unit, far superior to the original. From here the game picks up.

 

The fighting style is a bit different from the two previous games. In the last two, you used button combinations to do attacks and charge up special attacks. Mostly it was "Block Block Attack" alot. Now it's just one button, one attack, which is a definite change. Spells (or ether abilities) are much more useful than they were in the previous two games, as now they actually do some real damage. Plus they added a different special attacks ability that makes specials a little harder to do, and not so frequent, adding a little more difficulty to the game. Once you get the hang of it, it's fairly simple. The cool thing is now the mechs get special attacks as well.

 

The storyline, if you haven't played the previous two, would be totally confusing, so they add an ability to read what happens in the last two games to lead to this point so far. Overall, it's not too bad. A bit over the top and way too sci-fi fantasy for my personal tastes, but it's not like FF10 bad so it gets some kudos.

 

Graphics are, like the previous two, pretty darn good. The FMV fight scenes look really cool, especially mech samurai fights and super battle robots duking it out Matrix-style.

 

It's a shame that they cut this thing so short, since the 5th game was slated to be a remake of Xenogears (which if it had been on the PS3 woulda been /drool), but it's a decent ending to an overall pretty decent game trilogy.

 

Overall rating: 8/10. Not probably a must-buy game, but worth at least checking out to see if it's your cup of tea.