To top it all off, Xenogears even integrated occasional platform gaming mechanics into its traditional dungeon sequences.
There’s as much of Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion in Xenogears as there is Dragon Quest, a fact that came through with unmistakable clarity when players summoned their massive mech suits into battle. It also shrugged off the Final Fantasy-driven trend toward real-time battle systems with its turn-based combat system.īut musty as that framework may have looked at first, it played like no other RPG, thanks to the fixation on mecha anime that pervades Takahashi’s work. And where Square’s other RPGs for PS1 presented their worlds as static, pre-rendered scenes and background populated by polygonal characters, Xenogears inverted things: Its characters existed as hand-drawn sprites running around 3D worlds.
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It eschewed the pre-rendered, computer-graphic movie sequences that Final Fantasy 7 had made the industry standard, beginning instead with an old-fashioned anime mini-movie. There’s as much of Gundam and Evangelion in Xenogears as there is of Dragon Questįrom the word “go,” Xenogears set itself apart from Square’s other PlayStation creations. Xenogears’ plot, reworked from a pitch the company had rejected as the premise for Final Fantasy 7 (“too dark,” Square said) was by far the most ambitious component of a game defined by big ideas. With Xenogears, he took a lead creative role for the first time, conceiving and writing the game’s story. He cut his teeth creating art and graphics for pillars of the genre, including Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer franchise and Square’s 16-bit Final Fantasy and SaGa games. That Takahashi would use the RPG format as his canvas should come as no surprise. Yet they all undeniably constitute a body of interrelated work. The seven Xeno games Takahashi has overseen have come to us from three different publishers across multiple consoles, and they’ve involved two different fresh starts on telling the story in Takahashi’s mind. While Xenogears was the work of dozens of people, the last two decades have made it quite clear that Xenogears’ most memorable traits embody concepts and themes that Takahashi holds dear to his heart. Twenty years ago, another auteur appeared on the scene with the arrival of the first game based around his own obsessions: Tetsuya Takahashi, the author behind the dense tangle of story that powered Squaresoft’s Xenogears. And so forth: all games heavily driven by a singular vision, even when the pursuit of those passions works to the detriment of the end product. Fumito Ueda created Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, three games about the role that companionship plays in overcoming isolation. Akitoshi Kawazu’s abiding interest in tabletop games gave us SaGa, Square Enix’s most mechanically impenetrable role-playing franchise.
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Or Hideo Kojima’s obsession with Hollywood popcorn flicks has led to Metal Gear, a series of intricate action games with arcane storylines. Video games, as a medium, don’t have many auteur creators - designers who produce games for big publishers yet somehow manage for their personal obsessions and peculiarities to shine through.Ĭonsider Jeff Minter, a man whose catalog demonstrates an equal fascination with Atari’s Tempest and camelids.
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