Game  Platform  Rating Xenogear Playstation 8/10

    Xenogear is the merging of two things that the Japanese love the most; Anime and big robots. The story revolves around Fei, a young guy who wakes up in a strange village with no memory of his past. After living there for three years or so, he decides to go out and try to discover his roots; and in the process meets up with Princes, powerful enemies, StreetFighter 2-looking prisoners, and a whole host of other things. While the main plots parts are very similar to the other SquareSoft games, that's about where the story similarities end.

    For those of you who have had the pleasure of playing Final Fantasy VII, then you're in for a treat, since this game utilizes much of the same game engine, and inherits some of the feel as well. And although this game appears to lack the mini-adventures that FF7 did, it makes up for in better game flow in my opinion (as well as better cut sequences; the Anime stuff rips!). So let's start out with my complaints, there aren't many, and most are pretty minor. First off, the menu on this game takes a second or two to come up, and a second or two to go away; now while this might not normally be a problem, they assigned it to one of the 4 thumb keys, so I inadvertently hit it fairly often, and this gets annoying REALLY fast. Next, and for me this is a big one, you can't hold down a key to speed through the characters talking. Once again, this isn't too bad, but god forbid you have to restart before some big conversations... uuugghh! Those are my main problems, so if you think you can deal with them (I certainly could), then you're good to go. The game has several 'mini games' inside the main game, like a kind of Virtua Fighter thing, a card game, etc, which really adds to the feeling that there's some measure of depth to the world. The music is very nice as well; it's pretty much your standard RPG music, but it's high quality, so you aren't frantically searching for a no music options (come to think of it, I don't even think it has one!?!?). The content/subject matter is adult oriented, so if you're an older games, you're in for alot more fun than some sugar-coated Nintendo game can ever give. This game probably isn't a renter, unless you plan to rent it a couple of times, since it will take several full days (each day 8+ hours) of gaming to get through, although you might want to rent it first just to check it out.

    One more quick note; this game also get an honorable mention for having a load/save that actually lets you DELETE as well. This is relatively easy to implement, and just adds so much more to the game as far as total quality goes. I haven't seen that lately in games, so I wanted to point it out.