kory
Woah, it’s the opposite for me! I don’t know how far or how much you know about Xenogears, but there’s a track that I listen to often, and it’s the theme for the land of Solaris! I feel like no one would really listen to that song without the context of the game.
Well, throughout the game you are introduced to this mystical land of “Solaris.” Like, what can you imagine thi splace to be? Throughout the game, the environments has been just a standard RPG setting, it’s like Chrono Trigger before entering the Kingdom of Zeal. So perhaps in your mind you would think SOLARIS is the Kingdom of Zeal! Is it a floating continent with majestic waterfalls, lush trees, sublime architecture, unfathomable futruistic technology? The protagonist’s love interest, the beautiful and mysterious Elehayym (or just Elly) is from Solaris, so it must be this kind of elysium! But nope! You enter Solaris and it’s just pretty much capitalistic America. There’s npcs in this town that is aware of these big issues but they just don’t care and go on about their day, and show off their newest toys. It reflects the absurdity of existence in this capitalistic society of high and low classmen and I especially listen to it when I am in the state of thinking that of “wow nothing really matters at all and everything in life is just so silly!”:
And then there’s the most underappreciated track in the whole game, and my personal favorite, “Shattering Egg of Dreams”. In this small little cutscene, there’s like fire everywhere, and you see Grahf, who is actually the main protagonist, watch ,Elly, and himself as Fei, but as a ghostly incarnation, and he’s just watching those two embracing each other as they escape for shelter. It’s just super convoluted to explain, but if you understand what’s going on it could be this very powerful moment about this kind of “transcendent romantic love”!
Ultimately I think Xenogears is this convoluted epic love story, though it overly romantices love and how it can transcend to different times, space, and incarnations! It’s just a bunch of crazy ideas just mashed into this one thing, with beautiful music.
I understand if you guys don’t want to play it though, it’s easy to get lost, there’s no mini map, they give you a compass! And there’s a lot of desert and just a bunch of sand everywhere. And even later on, there’s a sewer level that just keeps dragging on. And the platforming controls could be frustrating. But I liked this game a whole lot, and what kept me going was that I felt like I HAD to play it since I really liked the Xenosaga trilogy!