Started off fine, but slowed to a crawl.
"Episode I begins the trilogy that centers around the characters Shion and KOS-MOS. A young woman employed by Vector Industries, Shion aided in the creation of the battle android KOS-MOS and is present throughout much of the game. During this game, the U-TIC Organization attempts to steal one of the powerful Zohar Emulators, sources of energy used by humans." (Wikipedia)
The games story & characters can conger up a range of emotions from sad or angry to happy & confused, just as any good RPG should. While that's a good thing, the spacing of these moments is very few and far between. This is heavily due to the fact that a lot of the cut scenes are flooded with filler, especially at the start of the game. Oh, and did I mention there were a lot of cut scenes? One cut scene in particular was a whopping 36min, ONE CUT SCENE! While that'd be more acceptable if it were the ending, it was actually somewhere around half way through the game if I recall correctly. Since this is the first of three games in the Xeno"Saga" the entire story can't be spilled in this one game of course, but the story in this one doesn't do much more than introduce the characters, bringing along with them an underwhelming amount of surprises or truly interesting moments in my eyes.
Bottom Line: Not terrible, but generally lacking.
Score: 7.25/10
Weighted Score: 36.25/50
Graphics
The game features an anime esque graphics style, while it admittedly isn't my preferred style, that in itself doesn't totally kill it. Even for anime style graphics of the PS2's time these still seem at least a little dull to me, not bad though. This game commits the same crime Lost Odyssey did, though perhaps to a more extreme degree. The "crime" I speak of is the very repetitive scenery. The game has you shuttled between multiple space ships that all have the same general feel for pretty much the entire game. Personally I was hoping to see some land here and there throughout the game to change things up (which you do, if only for a couple hours of game play). Something that can really wear on you if you're not reading the captions during cut scenes is that the voice actors lines hardly ever match up with the mouth movements of the character talking, at one point in fact they animated the wrong characters mouth for the line being spoken. I read the captions 75% of the time so there could have been more instances of that I didn't notice.
Bottom line: If you like the anime style this should be fine, if not, you'll need to do some adjusting.
Score: 7.5/10
Weighted Score: 11.25/15
Game play
The game uses a turn based battle system (my favorite), with a few twists here and there. One thing that was added to this battle system was the use of a boost gauge. How this works is every time your characters attack an enemy their boost gauges will slowly fill up (it can be filled three consecutive times before it stops filling, until you use one of the boosts of course). Once the gauge has been filled at least once for a character, one of the other party members can "call" the character with the boost to automatically receive the next turn in battle no matter who is actually supposed to be next, not even another boost can come before your boosted character (so theoretically your party could go 9 straight turns or more without the enemy having a chance to attack if all party members had built up 3 boosts each). Enemies also have boost gauges that work in loosely the same manner as yours do, and due to this they commonly break your 9 turn "boost chain" if you so attempt it. You may be saying to yourself, but you just said "not even another boost can come before your boosted character", that's also why I said "theoretically". This is where the battle system gets a nice dose of cheap difficulty aka A.I. cheating. No matter what the game tries to make you believe in the battle system tutorial, the enemies can boost at whatever time they want, it doesn't matter if you've already boosted one of your characters, they can still boost and come before them. Most bosses in the game also possess the ability to boost every turn or two in contrast to your 3-4 turn average. Why they felt the need to add such cheap difficulty I just don't know.
Other aspects of the game play worth noting include the camera, interfaces, & out of battle controls. First up is the camera. The camera is for the most part just like any other camera in earlier PS2 titles, such as FFX. No 360 view, no tilt ability, but it also doesn't go wild and go away from your character or any other defective crap some games surely suffer from. The many interfaces in the game including the battle interfaces all suffer from somewhat poor layout/design. For example, the turn identifier in battle sometimes won't make it clear who has the next turn, which can really kill you in a boss fight where such a piece of information can be critical depending on the boss. As for the out of battle controls, I have nothing bad to say for once, they work just fine.
Bottom line: Things work like they should for the most part, but cheap difficulty dampens the experience.
Score: 8/10
Weighted Score: 20/25
Sound
When it comes to sound only three things affect the score, sound effects, music, & most important of all, voice acting. The sound effects are what we've come to expect from any game or movie, they seem accurate, no complaints here. The music wasn't all that impressive to me, its better than nothing easily, but I won't find myself on youtube trying to find a song from the game. Luckily the voice acting also receives a stamp of approval. Aside from the occasional awkward or out of place line, the majority of the voice actors did what they needed to do.
Bottom line: Sound effects, music, & voice acting are all good.
Score: 8.5/10
Weighted Score: 8.5/10
WEIGHTED FINAL SCORE: 76.00/100 (76.00% C)
*Weighted Score refers to the amount of weight that each section has on the overall possible score of 100 for the game.
Instead of letting sound be exactly as important to the overall score as the story or graphics for example they all have
a different amount of importance based on how important I believe they actually are to the game as a whole.