Xenosaga Episode II, Baten Kaitos Unveiled

Thanks to GameSpot for their article revealing the first details on Xenosaga Episode II, subtitled 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' ('Beyond Good And Evil'), and a follow-up to the popular, if long-winded PS2 sci-fi RPG from MonolithSoft/Namco. Screenshots reveal the major characters have returned, "..and some of them have been given a more-mature look for the new game." In related news, GamePro reported on new details and screenshots from MonolithSoft's GameCube-exclusive RPG, Baten Kaitos (named after a star in the Cetus constellation), which is "set in a collection of five floating continents in the sky", and surprisingly, has a "..fighting system [which] will involve the use of cards." Both are likely, but as yet unconfirmed for release outside Japan.

Comments

RPGs + Cards ??

[Gr33nNight]

Alright, I love RPGS, but whats with this new love for card based RPGs? Are they really selling that well? Or is it just a passing fad.

Enquiring minds want to know.

Re:RPGs + Cards ??

[Godeke]

A whole new generation of gamers were weaned on cards. I'm a second generation D&Der myself (AD&D first printings forward) but I got caught up in the Magic the Gathering thing for a while.

There *is* something about card games that makes sense in a game context: they provide a controlled randomness to the available powers a player has. Building a legal Magic deck is a skill far more subtle than twinking stats, and therefor somewhat more appealing. With a repeat limit on cards, I *can't* simply have my most powerful cards all the time, and so I have to be creative with my lesser cards. In RPGs, you often can build a stat powerhouse that is so unbalanced you need a tripod keep him upright.

I thought they were a fad after Magic started to fade, but I now think they are going to be around for a long time, with varying popularity (just as RPG popularity waxes and wanes). Magic is still fairly popular, Yugioh is obsenely so for how dumbed down it is, and there is a healthy number of alternatives to those two leaders.

Is Namco going to repeat the mistake...

[lightspawn]

of publishing the game in North America with a German title?

I have no idea why the Japanese do that ("Panzer Dragoon / Panzer Dragoon Zwei"? WT*?) - perhaps they're are completely language-agnostic - but American costomers are much less likely to buy a game if they can't understand the title ("Chu Chu Rocket", "Puyo Pop", etc). It at least has to sound like something. Now, who other than a violent audiophile would buy a game about guts and Bose?

Re:Is Namco going to repeat the mistake...

[devnull17]

I don't know where 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' came from, but the subtitle of Episode I, 'Der Wille zur Macht,' was pulled from the writings of Nietzsche. He spoke German. :)

The Xenosaga series is targeted toward the hardcore RPG fan demographic. People like that won't care if a game has a German title, and people who do care would most likely not enjoy the game's long-winded and extremely complex story.

Re:Is Namco going to repeat the mistake...

[Telastyn]

The japanese do that because the majority of people there enjoy having foreign languages interspersed throughout things, especially their music. Americans do too, but it's usually just french or spanish phrases. [the japanese do the same with english]

anyways... They did counteract the fact that the title was german and incomprehensible by putting a hot chick on the cover.

Re:Is Namco going to repeat the mistake...

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Well, actually, I can tell you that a) Der Wille zur Macht is better known to us as The Will to Power, a nice collection of some of Nietzsche's later writings, and published posthumously. The most important idea in this work is eternal recurrence -- interesting stuff.

and Jenseits von Gut und Boese is more commonly known as "Beyond Good and Evil," another important Nietzsche work that details why the set of morals of any superior man must be based not on good/evil but on strength and survival of his genes, i.e. the strong species. Also note that the translation loses something in "Jenseits" -- means more accurately, "something else outside of good and evil."

hope that clears everything up

Xenosaga ep. 1

[Mprx]

After all the hype, Xenosaga episode 1 was a major disappointment. The combat system was boring and repetitive, and non-interactive parts took up far too much time. There's nothing wrong with having non-interactive parts, but if you're going to rely on them as much as Xenosaga does the story must be exceptionally good. Unfortuantly, Xenosaga's story is bad fanfic quality. Characters were cliched and predictable, and all the "deep" philosophical stuff wasn't. Xenogears did this type of game much better, and Xenogears is overrated itself.

Here's a quote from the caltrops.com review of Xenosaga ep. 1:

"Here's something that Gamespot (and not me) said. Tell me if you think this seriously makes sense. They mention that the game, as it's been admitted by everyone who plays it, has extremely long cutscenes. Gamespot's 8.1 OMG GAME SO COOL ANIME RULEZ review says that they do occasionally get boring. So if the entire game is mostly cutscenes, and they get boring, wouldn't that just make the game plain old boring?"

Episode 1 was the biggest waste of money I spent on a PS2 game yet, I won't be making the same mistake with episode 2.

Re:Xenosaga ep. 1

[analog_line]

I paid under $30 for it, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Patience. The price will drop, either new or used, eventually. I waited a LONG time for .hack//Infection to drop in price and thought it wasn't ever going to. Now it's $30 new, and I'm going to be able to pick it up for less than that used.

Re:Xenosaga ep. 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Xenogears may very well be the best RPG of all time. Admittedly, the first episode of Xenosaga didn't live up to the quality of Xenogears, but Takahashi has earned himself a number of chances. The original was that good.

Re:Xenosaga ep. 1

[lidocaineus]

I dunno; while Xenosaga was really an interactive graphical novel, in all fairness, Namco/Monolith never purported the game to be anything but that, especially if you read any reviews prior, and especially if you played the "original", which, while I great RPG, was terribly unbalanced and had leanings towards graphic-novel-ness by the second disc. In fact, the gameplay format of disc 2 and on (in Xenogears) is basically what Xenosaga is.

I for one don't believe Xenogears is the best RPG out there, or even the best CRPG out there; perhaps it's a great story told in a somewhat interactive setting, but if you want what makes a great RPG superlative, ie addictive gameplay AND well written storyline, there are far greater games, such as Final Fantasy VI, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Phantasy Star 2 and 4, Lunar 1 and 2, etc etc. That, however, does not stop me from liking Xenogears/Xenosaga. Liking it a lot.

Re:Xenosaga ep. 1

[silentbobdp]

Xenogears IS, however, likely to be in the top 5 console RPGs, that top 5 being:

1) Chrono Trigger
2) Dragon Quest Series
3) Final Fantasy Series
4) Xenogears
5) Seiken Densetsu/Secret Of Mana

There's no denying the influence or greatness of any of these titles, or the supreme mastery that runs rampant throughout Chrono Trigger. You can even dispute the order of the titles, but its those 5 that make or break it.

On that note - Xenosaga is good, but not what I had wanted...but then it's hard to take something when you've played the first chapter and the fifth chapter and try to think of it as a whole.

I'm really interested to see how close to Xenogears Episode V will be.

(For those who don't know - in Japan, a book was published called "Xenogears: PERFECT WORKS". It was like a making-of book, inside was a timeline that showed the six episodes of the story and how they related to Xenogears - which was Episode V.)

Re:Xenosaga ep. 1

[lidocaineus]

Hey, where's Phantasy Star 1/2/4?? Or even PD Saga, despite being short.

stupid typo

[lightspawn]

That's what I get for thinking about the word "consumers" and changing it to "customers" while I type.

Anyway, I'd ask you to nominate your own dumbest-name-ever for a game, but I have no idea if your responses would be modded down as offtopic, so I won't bother.

Yes, I've a feeling they will have to.

[iainl]

Namco might have considered calling the game just plain "Beyond Good & Evil" in English, but then there is the small matter of that also being the title of the next platform game from the Rayman team. Using German is probably their only way round a long boring trademark argument.

Re:Yes, I've a feeling they will have to.

[lightspawn]

Namco might have considered calling the game just plain "Beyond Good & Evil" in English, but then there is the small matter of that also being the title of the next platform game from the Rayman team. Using German is probably their only way round a long boring trademark argument.

I wonder what that platform game's going to be named in Germany.

Probably just a matter of style.

[Kedyn's Crow]

Remember that the first game in this series was called "Der Wille zur Macht". (whatever that means) I would bet anything that the remaining sequels also will have a German subtitle as well.

This reminds me of a sig that I saw recently."Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. - Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound." They probably added the German subtitle to make the game seem more deep or mysterious or something.

Re:Probably just a matter of style.

[Psycho S. Illusion]

or, maybe the title has something to do with this book...

No, I'm sure you're right, they just picked a few random german-sounding words out of the air.

Re:Probably just a matter of style.

[Daetrin]

or, maybe the title has something to do with this book...

No, I'm sure you're right, they just picked a few random german-sounding words out of the air.

Beyond Good and Evil is a Nietzsche book as well. However the fact that they got the names from a specific source does not preclude the possibility that they decided to use German because it made the game sound cooler. They could have just translated the titles of the books to "The Will to Power" and "Beyond Good and Evil" if they choose the titles for thematic reasons and didn't care about the langauge.

Likewise if i decided i was going to make a Latin title because it would sound cool, i'd be sure to pick a Latin phrase that meant something interesting. I'd pick "Veni, Vidi, Vici" or "E Pluribus Unum" rather than "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur," because if i choose the former people would translate it and think the title meant something profound, whereas if they translated the later they'd think it was a joke or i was an idiot who just picked a latin phrase at random.

So either they picked titles off of Nietzsche and decided to leave them in German so they'd sound cool, or they decided to have a German subtitle first and then eventually setled on Nietzche's titles rather than some other German phrase because Nietzsche's stuff fit the best. In either case, the decision to have the title in a foreign langauge was independent of the decision to use Nietzche's titles.

And in case anyone wants to nitpick, it was not however independent of the choice of which langauge was used. Using Nietzche's titles and then choosing to translate them into Spanish or Latin would be pretty dumb, and if they'd originally decided to use Spanish or Latin they would have been examining a different set of stock quotes, and would have chosen something equally profound from that lanaguage set.

"Beyond Good and Evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Jenseits von Gut und Bose" is also Nietzsche. The will to power is one of the fundamentals of Nietzsche's philosophy, and Beyond Good and Evil is one of his major works. Worth reading, though Nietzsche tends to think that while self-sacrifice is evil (which it is), it's perfectly OK to sacrifice others to oneself.

You'll notice that there was a lot of that going in on Xenosaga's plot.

Bose?

[DeLabarre]

Bose is german for Evil? That explains why I'm strangely drawn, Boromir-like, to their overpriced audio equipment...my precious...

Baten Kaitos

[PurpleBob]

Wait a sec. We're supposed to get excited about this new RPG from Monolith? The ones who made Septerra Core?

Oh lovely, now there's five floating continents instead of seven. Maybe that means the game will only suck 5/7 as much.

Re:Baten Kaitos

[devnull17]

No, that was Valkyrie Studios.

All Nietzche all the time!

[Daetrin]

"Jenseits von Gut und Bose" is also Nietzsche.

So can we predict an upper limit to the number of Xenosaga games by how many Nietzche books there are to draw titles from? :)

Anyone happen to know offhand how many there are?

Re:All Nietzche all the time!

[PainKilleR-CE]

The upper limit of the number of Xenosaga games was determined around the time the designers decided to make a prequel series to Xenogears, at ~6.

The number of Nietzsche titles is around 2-3 times that (there was a time when I would know the number, but that time is not now, and I'm not at home to check my bookshelf).