Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra
The saga ends on a high note. A VERY high note.
Published: September 12, 2006
Both the E.S. and on-foot fighters can level up, obviously, but the increases in defense and attack are fairly minor. Instead, buying new equipment for both allows for the obvious weapons and armor accoutrements, but also opens the door to equipping special items that raise the max boost level (by default, it's just three), analyzing an enemy's weakness, halving or nullifying elemental attacks, raising the max hit or ether points, and raising the break resistance of characters.
It also means the return of running around and tapping the Square Button to blow stuff up to find these items or shortcuts, and here more than in the previous games, you're rewarded often with bonus items or finding Segment Addresses, doors that require a special key that you'll find later in the game. Players that take the time to blow up everything they can will often unlock goodies that can be accessed later on.
Unlike previous games, blowing stuff up rarely gives you a strategic advantage (I only ran into a single instance of it helping). Instead, you've given the ability to hold up to 10 traps. Traps can be placed just about anywhere, and detonating them will hold enemies in a suspended state that allows you to circle around and get a back attack or, at the very least, take them on with a guaranteed first act advantage and a random amount of extra boost added to your gauge. This can be a massive help during the long sprints between the save points that offer instant maxed-out HP and EP.
It's hard to describe just how significant all the little tweaks here and there are to making the game better. More importantly, it's key to note that none of them actually take away from the experience and particular flavor of RPG that the first game set out to deliver. It's still going to be an exercise in lengthy movie segments, but even that has been helped by the ability to automate text conversations (by pressing Select), and movies that are chopped up into smaller bits. I personally loved the lengthy cinematic sequences, since the series is trying to be a movie-like RPG experience, but at least people can't bitch about an hour long non-interactive segment anymore.
Perhaps most impressive of all is how damn good game looks, though. Many of the movies in the game are rendered in real-time (unless they recorded the scenes with framerate issues, which would make no sense). The only time the game relies on pre-rendered bits (which still use in-game assets), is when certain effects or the scale of things is too great for the PS2. The framerate is a bit of a problem during some of these scenes, but the lighting and animation here is so damned good that it doesn't really matter; there are some in-game scenes that look better than the pre-rendered stuff in the first game, the engine has come that far.
With perhaps one second-long exception, the in-game framerate is rock solid, and Monolith's artists went all out. The very first part of the game offers a view shortly before a boss fight that is absolutely breathtaking, with a machine in chunks that comes together so detailed I thought it was originally a flat texture. Subsequent vistas, like the observation point on Fifth Jerusalem with little cars and people zipping around far below, are just absolutely jaw-dropping. Few games have been able to deliver such a cohesive art design and feel, and it's a game that absolutely showcases the PS2's power.
