Xenosagas Release Date Revealed!

[Overlord]

Article (http://www.allrpg.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=1021354944)

Allrpg:
Monolith Soft's Xenosaga: Der Wille Zur Macht is easily one of the most anticipated RPG titles this year. Taking players to the beginning of Square's Xenogears storyline, Xenosaga will be hitting U.S. shores come Oct. 22, 2002 according to GameStop.com.

Simply titled "Xenosaga," Monolith Soft's upcoming RPG is noted for a first quarter 2003 release on Namco's Xenosaga U.S. page. Although an Oct. 22, 2002 release date is more understandable seeing as Xenosaga was released earlier this year in Japan, a solid date is still up in the air.



Anyone eles anticipating this game?

[the|absolute]

I wouldn't believe what Gamestop says. I work for one of their stores and most of the dates that they put for games that are coming out more than 3 months ahead are usually not stable dates. For Xenosaga, they first had the date set for 3/1/03, and now it's in October of this year. They usually want to put dates and stuff fast for reservations. As for the game, I am pretty excited about it. I played the import a bit, and it seems like the game is going to be like 40% gameplay and 60% cutscenes. I don't know if it'll sell well in the U.S.

[typexig]

how was the graphics? is it better than FFX?

[Lynx]

I can't wait for XenoSaga. October is gonna come so slowly... :(

[Overlord]

The graphis are great. I don't think that there are any jaggies in the final version. And everything is in Hi-Res! Plus the game has a nice anime touch to it. But there is a down side to all this. The load times are supposed to be horrible. It's 5 seconds to go from menu to menu. And going to differant screen can take up to 29 seconds! They might try and fix it for the US version. The game is about 9.3 GB in size. It's on a dual layered disk, not two. But the game is also more than 4 GB of text. So theres a lot of reading. The game should take 35~40 hours to complete, not including Sidequests. This is a prequal to Xenogears. It's EP.1 where as Xenogears is EP.5. And they will be remaking Xenogears as part of the whole series. It will go up to 6 episodes.

...The music is done by the guy who did the music for CC, CT, and Xenogears. So expect some great music. And the game has voice overs, so thats why the game is taking so long to translate. 4 GB of text!

I'll try and get some screens later. If you guys have any, link them here.

[ATMA]

Hurraaaaaaaaay can't wait for XENOSAGA !!!
:D

[Seska]

I've played about 5 hours into it, and I can only confirm that a HUGE amount of this was indeed cutscenes. While I am not against cutscenes in general, I think so far Xenosaga does go a bit over the top. Of those 5 hours one was probably spent running aroudn the map taking to people, reading and replying emails,exploring a bit. Another hour was spent doing dungeons. adn the remainder of the time - yep. Cutscenes.

The game is fun, the plot so far is intriguing, but it does feel like the actual "playing" part is an excuse for the cutscenes. Might as well have made the whole game a long, big cutscene!

BEcause of this I strongly suspect people and in particular reviewers in the US will be somewhat displeased. They already complained about FFX being too linear - wait till they have to deal with (literally) an hour long cutscene!